The Geography of Thought - by Richard Nisbett (Paperback)

About the Book

An eminent psychologist boldly takes on the presumptions of evolutionary psychology in an engaging exploration of the divergent ways Eastern and Western societies see and understand the world.

Book Synopsis

A "landmark book" (Robert J. Sternberg, president of the American Psychological Association) by one of the world's preeminent psychologists that proves human behavior is not "hard-wired" but a function of culture.

Everyone knows that while different cultures think about the world differently, they use the same equipment for doing their thinking. But what if everyone is wrong?

The Geography of Thought documents Richard Nisbett's groundbreaking international research in cultural psychology and shows that people actually 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. As a result, East Asian thought is "holistic"--drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and events within that field. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior.

From feng shui to metaphysics, from comparative linguistics to economic history, a gulf separates the children of Aristotle from the descendants of Confucius. 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 will span it.

Review Quotes

Philadelphia Inquirer
Nisbett's findings pose provocative challenges to universalist assumptions about human thought and inference.

Providence Journal-Bulletin
Understanding the thought processes of other cultures may very well turn out to be critical to the survival of Western civilization....The Geography of Thought is a wake-up call.

Publishers Weekly
The Geography of Thought may mark the beginning of a new front in the science wars.

About the Author

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.