Richard Nisbett – The Geography of Thought

Richard Nisbett The Geography of Thought, How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . .and Why, (Free Press, 2003).

All citations in quotations. My comments and explanatory notes added.

“Westerns have a strong interest in categorization, which helps them to know what rules to apply to the objects in question, and formal logic plays a role in problem solving. East Asians, in contrast, attend to objects in their broad context. The world seems more complex to Asians than to Westerners, and understanding events always requires consideration of a host of factors that operate in relation to one another in no simple, deterministic way. Formal logic plays little role in problem solving.” p. xvi

“. . . Westerners’ [believe] that they can know the rules governing objects and therefore can control the object’s behavior.” p. xvii

“The Greeks, more than any other ancient peoples, . . . had a remarkable sense of personal agency—the sense that they were in charge of their own lives and free to act as they chose. One definition of happiness for the Greeks was that it consisted of being able to exercise their powers in pursuit of excellence in a life free from constraints.” p. 3

“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.” p. 5

The Greeks sought control of the environment. The Chinese sought self-control. The Greek concept of personal agency stands in opposition to the Chinese concept of collective agency. The Greeks saw Man as an isolated being and therefore embraced the idea of personal liberty. “There is no counterpart to the Greek sense of personal liberty [in Chinese thought]. Individual rights in China were one’s ‘share’ of the rights of the community as a whole, not a license to do as one pleased.” p. 6

The Greeks thought of the world as “fundamentally static and unchanging.” p. 10

For the Chinese, the world was constantly changing, a dynamic interactive environment where the verbs were more important than the nouns. “The world is constantly changing and it full of contradictions. . . . What seems to be true now may be the opposite of what it seems to be.” p. 13

“Confucianism, like Taoism, is less concerned with finding the truth than with finding the Tao—the Way—to live in the world.” p. 15

“ . . . every event is related to every other event. A key idea is the notion of resonance.” p. 17

“For the Chinese, the background scheme for the nature of the world was that it was a mass of substances rather than a collection of discrete objects.” p. 18

“Greeks were independent and engaged in verbal contention and debate in an effort to discover what people took to be the truth. They thought of themselves as individuals with distinctive properties, as units separate from others within the society, and in control of their own destinies. Similarly, Greek philosophy started from the individual object—the person, the atom, the house—as the unit of analysis and it dealt with properties of the object. The world is in principle simple and knowable: All one had to do was to understand what an object’s distinctive attributes were so as to identify its relevant categories and then apply the pertinent rule to the categories.

Chinese social life was interdependent and it was not liberty but harmony that was the watchword—the harmony of humans and nature for the Taoists and the harmony of humans with other humans for the Confucians. Similarly, the Way, and not the discovery of truth, was the goal of philosophy. Thought that gave no guidance to action was fruitless. The world was complicated, events were interrelated, and objects (and people) were connected ‘not as pieces of pie, but as ropes in a net.’” p. 19

Some implications for treating the world as discrete objects instead of interacting dynamics:

“The Greeks defined nature as the universe minus human beings and their culture. Although this seems to us to be the most obvious sort of distinction, no other civilization came upon it.” p. 20

This is the “discovery” (“invention”) of nature.

“But the Chinese saw the world as consisting or continuously interacting substances, so their attempts to understand it caused them to be oriented toward the complexities of the entire ‘field,’ that is, the context or environment as a whole.” p. 21

The Greeks strive to be rational, the Chinese strive to the reasonable. Cf. p. 27

“In the Chinese intellectual tradition there is no necessary incompatibility between the belief that A is the case and the belief that not-A is the case. On the contrary, in the spirit of the Tao or yin-yang principle, A can actually imply that not-A is also the case, or at any rate soon will be the case.” p. 27

“Events do not occur in isolation from other events, bur are always embedded in a meaningful whole in which the elements are constantly changing and rearranging themselves.” p. 27

“Some linguistic facts illustrate the social-psychological gap between East and West. In Chinese there is no word for ‘individualism.’ The closest one can come is the word for ‘selfishness.’” p. 51

“The relative degree of sensitivity to other’s emotions is reflected in tacit assumptions about the nature of communication. Westerners teach their children to communicate their ideas clearly and to adopt a ‘transmitter’ orientation, that is, the speaker is responsible for uttering sentences that can be clearly understood by the hearer—and understood, in fact, more or less independently of the context. It’s the speaker’s fault if there is a miscommunication. Asians, in contrast, teach their children a ‘receiver’ orientation, meaning that it is the hearer’s responsibility to understand what is being said.” pp. 60-61

Nisbett summarizes the differences:

“Insistence on freedom of individual actions vs. a preference for collective action

Desire for individual distinctiveness vs. a preference for blending harmoniously with the group

A preference for egalitarianism and achieved status vs. acceptance of hierarchy and ascribed status.

A belief that the rules governing proper behavior should be universal vs. a preference for particularistic approaches that take into account the context and nature of the relationships involved.” pp. 62-63

“Westerners prefer to live by abstract principles and like to believe these principles are applicable to everyone. To set aside universal rules in order to accommodate particular cases seems immoral to the Westerner.” pp. 64-65

“East Asians live in an interdependent world in which the self is part of a larger whole; Westerners live in a world in which the self is a unitary free agent. Easterners value success and achievement in good part because they reflect well on the groups they belong to; Westerners value these things because they are badges of personal merit. Easterners value filling in and engage in self-criticism to make sure that they do so, Westerners value individuality and strive to make themselves look good. Easterners are highly attuned to the feelings of others and strive to interpersonal harmony; Westerners are more concerned with knowing themselves and are prepared to sacrifice harmony for fairness. Easterners are accepting of hierarchy and group control; Westerners are more likely to prefer equality and scope of personal action. Asians avoid controversy and debate; Westerners have faith in the rhetoric of argumentation in arenas from the law to politics to science.” pp. 76-77

Matters concering gender:

“Western males and females differ from one another more than Eastern males and females do.” p. 99

“. . . females of both cultures tend to be more holistic in their orientation than males, but we find this only about half the time, and the gender differences are always smaller than the cultural differences.” p. 100

“Ancient Greek philosophers were powerfully inclined to believe that things don’t change much or, if they really are changing, future change will continue in the same direction, and at the same rate, as current change. And the same is true for ordinary modern Westerners. But like ancient Taoists and Confucian philosophers, ordinary modern Asians believe that things are constantly changing; and movement in a particular direction, far from indicating future change in the same direction, may be a sign that events are about to reverse direction.” p. 103

Utopia:

“In Western Utopias:

there is steady, more or less linear progress toward them;

once attained, they become a permanent state;

they are reached through human effort rather than Fate or divine intervention;

they are usually egalitarian; and

they are usually based on a few extreme assumptions about human nature.

These attributes are in many ways the very antithesis of the future as it might be conceived by the Eastern mind,” p. 107

“It is worth noting here that the ancient Hebrews were in these respects closer to the Chinese than to the Greeks.” p. 107

“It should not be surprising that American regard personalities as relatively fixed and Asians regard them as more malleable. This is consistent with the long Western tradition of regarding the world as being largely static and the long Eastern tradition of viewing the world as constantly changing.” p. 120

“Westerners attend primarily to the focal object or person and Asians attend more broadly to the field and to the relations between the object and the field. Westerners tend to assume that events are caused by the object and Asians are inclined to assign greater importance to the context.” p. 127

Westerners (particularly Americans) follow “backward reasoning” because they view events in a cause-and-effect model. This is “goal-oriented reasoning: define the goal to be achieved and develop a model that will allow you to attain it.” p. 128   This assumes a high view of personal agency, modeling events backwards from the intended goal.

“Consistent with the lesser complexity of the world they live in, Westerners see fewer factors as being relevant to an understanding of the world than Easterners do.” p. 129

The Eastern view is summarized as:

“Everything in the universe is somehow related to everything else.

It’s not possible to understand the pieces without considering the whole picture.” p. 129

There are two significant errors with the Western model of causality:

“(1) believing that, at least in retrospect, it can be seen that events could not have turned out other than they did; and (2) even thinking that in fact one easily could have predicted in advance that events would have turned out as they did.” p. 130

This is called the “hindsight fallacy” p. 131

“Westerners’ success in science and their tendency to make certain mistakes in causal analysis derive from the same source. Freedom to pursue individual goals prompts people to model the situation so as to achieve those goals, which in turn encourages modeling events by working backward from effects to possible causes. When there is systematic testing of the model, as in science, the model can be corrected. But Westerners’ models tend to be limited too sharply to the goal object and its properties, slighting the possible role of context. When it is everyday life—all too often a buzzing confusion—that is being modeled, recognition of error is more difficult. A mistaken model will be difficult to correct. So despite their history of scientific-mindedness, Westerners are particularly susceptible to the Fundamental Attribution Error [attributing behavior to a presumed disposition of the person rather than to an important situational factor] and to overestimating the predictability of human behavior.” pp. 134-135

Nouns describe categories. They are often taught by ostensive definition. Verbs describe relationships. As a result, they are far more ambiguous and “the meaning of verbs, and other terms that describe relations, differ more across different languages than simply nouns do.” p. 149

“In the Eastern tradition, objects have concrete properties that interact with environmental circumstances to produce behavior. There was never any interest in discussing abstract properties as if they had a reality other than being a characteristic of a particular object.” p. 153

“Throughout Western intellectual history, there has been a conviction that it is possible to find the necessary and sufficient conditions for any category.” p. 154

“The pronouncement that complex categories cannot always be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions would scarcely have been met with surprise [in the East].” Cf. Wittgenstein on language games p. 155

“English is a ‘subject-prominent’ language. There must be a subject even in the sentence ‘It is raining.’ Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, in contrast, are ‘topic-prominent’ languages. Sentences have a position, typically the first position, that should be filled by the current topic: ‘This place, skiing is good.’” p. 157

“For Westerners, it is the self who does the acting; for Easterners, action is something that is undertaken in concert with others or that is the consequence of the self operating in a field of forces.” p. 158

“The Eastern tradition of thought emphasizes the constantly changing nature of reality. The world is not static but dynamic and changeable.” p. 174

“Because the world is constantly changing, oppositions, paradoxes, and anomalies are continuously being created.” p. 175

“As a result of change and opposition, nothing exists in an isolated and independent way, but is connected to a multitude of different things. To really know a things, we have to know all its relations, like individual musical notes embedded in a melody.” p. 175

“Change produces contradiction and contradiction causes change; constant change and contradiction imply that it is meaningless to discuss the individual part without considering its relationships with other parts and prior states.” p. 175

“But most peoples, including East Asians, view societies not as aggregates of individuals but as molecules or organisms. As a consequence, there is little or no conception of rights that inhere in the individual.” p. 198

“Christianity is the only religion that finds it necessary to have a theology specifying essential aspects of God and that this insistence on categorization and abstraction is traceable to the Greeks.”   p. 200

“Analytic thought, which dissects the world into a limited number of discrete objects have particular attributes that can be categorized in clear ways, lends itself to being captured in language. Holistic thought, which responds to a much wider array of objects and their relations, and which makes fewer sharp distinctions among attributes or categories, is less well suited to linguistic representation.” p. 211

The Westernization of the world is bringing about a homogenization of thought. (Cf. p 217)