The Geography of Thought Quotes

“‎The Chinese believe in constant change, but with things always moving back to some prior state. They pay attention to a wide range of events; they search for relationships between things; and they think you can't understand the part without understanding the whole. Westerners live in a simpler, more deterministic world; they focus on salient objects or people instead of the larger picture; and they think they can control events because they know the rules that govern the behavior of objects.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and Why

“The cognitive orientations and skills of East Asians and people of European cultures are sufficiently different that it seems highly likely that they would complement and enrich one another in any given setting.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

“objectivity arose from subjectivity—the recognition that two minds could have different representations of the world and that the world has an existence independent of either representation. This”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought

“Zen Buddhist dictum that “the opposite of a great truth is also true.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought

“Chinese philosophers quite explicitly favored the most concrete sense impressions in understanding the world. In fact, the Chinese language itself is remarkably concrete. There is no word for “size,” for example. If you want to fit someone for shoes, you ask them for the “big-small” of their feet. There is no suffix equivalent to “ness” in Chinese. So there is no “whiteness”—only the white of the swan and the white of the snow. The Chinese are disinclined to use precisely defined terms or categories in any arena, but instead use expressive, metaphoric language.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

“More than a billion people in the world today claim intellectual inheritance from ancient Greece. More than two billion are the heirs of ancient Chinese traditions of thought.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

“Why is it then that Westerners rely so much more heavily on personality traits in explaining behavior? The answer seems to be that Easterners are more likely to notice important situational factors and to realize that they play a role in producing behavior. As a consequence, East Asians are less susceptible to what social psychologist Lee Ross labeled the “Fundamental Attribution Error” (or FAE for short).”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

“The ancient Chinese philosophers saw the world as consisting of continuous substances and the ancient Greek philosophers tended to see the world as being composed of discrete objects or separate atoms. A piece of wood to the Chinese would have been a seamless, uniform material; to the Greeks it would have been seen as composed of particles. A novel item, such as a seashell, might have been seen as a substance by the Chinese and as an object by the Greeks. Remarkably, there is evidence that modern Asians also tend to see the world as consisting of continuous substances, whereas modern Westerners are more prone to see objects.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

“The combative, rhetorical form is also absent from Asian law. In Asia the law does not consist, as it does in the West for the most part, of a contest between opponents. More typically, the disputants take their case to a middleman whose goal is not fairness but animosity reduction—by seeking a Middle Way through the claims of the opponents. There is no attempt to derive a resolution to a legal conflict from a universal principle. On the contrary, Asians are likely to consider justice in the abstract, by-the-book Western sense to be rigid and unfeeling.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

“Negotiation also has a different character in the high-context societies of the East than in the low-context societies of the West. Political scientist Mushakoji Kinhide characterizes the Western erabi (active, agentic) style as being grounded in the belief that “man can freely manipulate his environment for his own purposes. This view implies a behavioral sequence whereby a person sets his objective, develops a plan designed to reach that objective, and then acts to change the environment in accordance with that plan.” To a person having such a style, there’s not much point in concentrating on relationships. It’s the results that count.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

“The first Western play to be performed in Beijing since the revolution was mounted while I was there. It was Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The choice seemed very strange. I regarded the play as being not merely highly Western in character but distinctly American. Its central figure is a salesman, “a man way out there in the blue riding on a smile and a shoeshine.” To my astonishment, the play was a tremendous success. But Arthur Miller, who had come to China to collaborate on production of the play, provided a satisfactory reason for its reception. “The play is about family,” he said, “and the Chinese invented family.” He might have added that the play is also about face, or the need to have the respect of the community, and the Chinese also invented face.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

“Independence vs. interdependence is of course not an either/or matter. Every society—and every individual—is a blend of both. It turns out that it is remarkably easy to bring one or another orientation to the fore. Psychologists Wendi Gardner, Shira Gabriel, and Angela Lee “primed” American college students to think either independently or interdependently.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

“The Chinese counterpart to Greek agency was harmony. Every Chinese was first and foremost a member of a collective, or rather of several collectives—the clan, the village, and especially the family. The individual was not, as for the Greeks, an encapsulated unit who maintained a unique identity across social settings. Instead, as philosopher Henry Rosemont has written: “... For the early Confucians, there can be no me in isolation, to be considered abstractly: I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others ... Taken collectively, they weave, for each of us, a unique pattern of personal identity, such that if some of my roles change, the others will of necessity change also, literally making me a different person.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

“objects.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why