Authors: Richard Nisbett
ISBN-13: 9780743255356, ISBN-10: 0743255356
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
Date Published: April 2004
Edition: Reprint
Richard E. Nisbett has taught psychology at Yale University and the University of Michigan, where he is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor. He has received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the William James Fellow Award of the American Psychological Society, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2002, he became the first social psychologist in a generation to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The coauthor of Culture of Honor and numerous other books and articles, he lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
When psychologist Richard E. Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese observers instead commented on the background environment and the different "seeings" are a clue to profound cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. As Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought, people think about and even see the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China. The Geography of Thought documents Professor Nisbett's groundbreaking research in cultural psychology, addressing questions such as:
At a moment in history when the need for cross-cultural understanding and collaboration have never been more important, The Geography of Thought offers both a map to that gulf and a blueprint for a bridge that might be able to span it.
The book is written in a chatty and reader-friendly style. The experiments are sometimes ingenious, and the results are sometimes provocative. If one can enter into the logic of the book, one might agree that the experiments demonstrate that Asians and Westerners think very differently. — Sherry Ortner
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction | ||
1 | The Syllogism and the Tao: Philosophy, Science, and Society in Ancient Greece and China | 1 |
2 | The Social Origins of Mind: Economics, Social Practices, and Thought | 29 |
3 | Living Together vs. Going It Alone: Social Life and Sense of Self in the Modern East and West | 47 |
4 | "Eyes in Back of Your Head" or "Keep Your Eye on the Ball"?: Envisioning the World | 79 |
5 | "The Bad Seed" or "The Other Boys Made Him Do It"?: Causal Attribution and Causal Modeling East and West | 111 |
6 | Is the World Made Up of Nouns or Verbs?: Categories and Rules vs. Relationships and Similarities | 137 |
7 | "Ce N'est Pas Logique" or "You've Got a Point There"?: Logic and the Law of Noncontradiction vs. Dialectics and the Middle Way | 165 |
8 | And If the Nature of Thought Is Not Everywhere the Same?: Implications for Psychology, Philosophy, Education, and Everyday Life | 191 |
Epilogue: The End of Psychology or the Clash of Mentalities?: The Longevity of Differences | 219 | |
Notes | 231 | |
References | 241 | |
Index | 253 |