The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why by Free Press

	Title: The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why Purchase Item Manufacturer: Free Press List Price: $15.00 Our Price: $8.36
Customer Reviews:
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why by Free Press Interesting but turns too academic
The topic is fascinating and the author is obviously a subject matter expert. I commend him for it, but the book gets a bit too academic after about the 3rd chapter and becomes too dry for the lay person to continue reading with great interest. I found myself skimming most of it after chapter 3.
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why by Free Press Disappointed
I am disappointed in the author's historical assessment of the ancient world. Many authors intentionally exclude the significant role of the Persians and their influences on the human development and thought process through literature, poetry, mathematics, architect, science, democratic government, the bill of rights, ...etc. Persians were in power far beyond 2500 years ago and the only ruling empire expanding from borders of China to Morocco. Today, whatever we see in any of these geographical areas we can find the path leading us to the ancient Persian Empire. China and Greece gained enormous knowledge from Persians. The entire middle east, southern Europe and northern Africa have their civilization rooted in Persian culture. Read more about the unbiased history and report it in your future books and give the credit to those who truly deserve it, The PERSIANS.
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why by Free Press Buy everything in Amazon
This is the first I bought book from Amazon, I am in China, but it still very convenient for me, and very fast. Thank you for Amazon, you are the best.
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why by Free Press Great for Cultural Understanding
This book over-generalizes a bit and is a little outdated compared to how things are now, but it does promote a lot of cultural understanding. As someone who lives in China, this book has a been great help to see the origins of how a lot of things work here. I would recommend it to any westerner living in Asia.
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why by Free Press Shuttling in the mental Star Ferry
Once I got my degree in philosophy, I never thought I would read another book about epistemology. I was wrong. Despite being a review of largely psychological research on the functioning of the mind, Richard Nesbett's The Geography of Thought is hard to put down. If you have been brutalized by jargon laden tomes in which it seems that interculturalists are trying to make a profession of themselves by inventing words, here is a straightforward account of experimental evidence from another discipline leading to the conclusion that indeed Westerners and Asians actually do seek, understand, and process information differently. So, you might ask what value is there in spending over 200 pages to tell us something that we intuitively knew all along and which our intercutlural models already seem to have pointed to? Well, Nesbett is not simply out to prove an assertion but to show us in transparent language how our minds work on different continents and what the relative strengths and weaknesses can be found in how we and others see and understand the world, and, as a footnote what implications this might have on our now and future coexistence on the planet. Does this explain some of the dynamics of individualism and collectivism, universalism and particularism and other intercultural categories of classification? Yes. But not necessarily in the way we attribute these things to different cultures. Nisbett starts with the dominance of Greek philosophy in Western thinking patterns and discusses the transmission in education and society of the values that tie thinking to language to politics. We get insights in to the nature of rational debate and in particular into our propensity for attribution and dichotomous thinking and behavior. On one hand Westerners are addicted to a view of the world in which things and even personalities are fixed and events are linear, while our Eastern counterparts think of humans as much more malleable and suspect that lines of progress are not linear but invite interruption and contradiction. The author shows how patterns of early childhood education and language itself both support and are supported by these difference in thinking. As human beings we have the same operating system, but the operating systems are diverse so it is not surprising that the applications programs of our mind bring forth different results. But, I risk betraying the author by my own classification of the topics he proposes. Let's let him speak for himself in a couple of paragraphs that will illustrate both the lucidity and the pertinence of the discussions he enters into on the basis of what research indicates about our differences: "The number we get when we divide the lawyer-preference ratio of the United States by the lawyer preference ratio of Japan is forty-one. "Those lawyers in the U.S. are put to good use. Conflict between individuals in Western countries is handled to a substantial degree by legal confrontations, whereas it is much more likely to be handled in the East by intermediaries. In the West, the goal is satisfaction of a principle of justice and the presumption going into the arena of conflict resolution is typically that there is a right and a wrong and there will be a winner and a loser. The goal in Eastern conflict resolution is more likely to be hostility reduction and compromise is assumed to be the likely result. Westerners call on universal principles of justice to push their goals and judges and juries feel obligated to make decisions that they believe would hold for everyone in approximately similar circumstances. In contrast, in the East, flexibility and broad attention to particular circumstances of the case are the earmarks of wise conflict resolution. As a citizen of prerevolutionary China put it: `A Chinese judge cannot think of law as an abstract entity, but as a flexible quantity as it should be personally applied to Colonel Huang or Major Li. Accordingly, any law which is not personal enough to respond to the personality of Colonel Huang or Major Li is inhuman and therefore no law at all. Chinese justice is an art, not a science.'" Who's crazy? Who is unethical? Who is smarter? For Nisbett there is not a dichotomous answer to these questions as each system of thinking has its plusses and minuses depending on what the task of the moment may be. Each produces certain things that the other cannot and cannot do some of the things that the other can. While we are most likely to be dealing with these differences on the micro level of interpersonal interctions, there seem to be significant economic and geopolitical issues at stake as well. The ebb and flow of contemporary events sometimes push us in the direction of Francis Fukuyama's vision of a world where ultimately nothing significantly new will happen and Samuel Huntington's Armageddon of radical divergeance, Nisbett opts for a blended solution resulting from mutual enrichment of our mental styles in conversation with each other. We can only hope that he is right and that the evidence leads Westerners in that direction and the Eastern perceptions of contexts will remain inclusive as we shuttle back and forth on on a mental Star Ferry in a global Hong Kong.
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why by Free Press Book Description
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: Why did the ancient Chinese excel at algebra and arithmetic, but not geometry, the brilliant achievement of such Greeks as Euclid? Why do East Asians find it so difficult to disentangle an object from its surroundings? Why do Western infants learn nouns more rapidly than verbs, when it is the other way around in East Asia? 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.