Rating: 
Summary: Confusing cultural differences for cognitive ones
Review: "The geography of thought" was written to demonstrate that there are fundamental cognitive differences between people brought up in "Western" and "Eastern" cultures. The book never distinguishes between fundamental cognitive abilities, which are presumably inborn thinking patterns, and culturally acquired styles of thinking. Nobody would argue against the proposition that how you are brought up and what you encounter in your culture affects how you approach problem solving and what you believe. By leaving the distinction unclear, Nisbett can make claims about cognitive processes and defend them with examples of cultural learning. Nisbett appeals to cultural stereotypes and ignores contrary evidence. For example, he says, "most Americans are confident that the following generalizations apply to pretty much everyone: Each individual has a set of characteristic, distinctive attributes. Moreover, people _want_ to be distinctive--different from other individuals in important ways." I can see readers nodding in agreement at first, but then stopping and realizing that he could equally well and convincingly have written "most Americans are confident that the following generalizations apply to pretty much everyone: Each individual often tries to conceal their characteristic, distinctive attributes. Moreover, people _do not want_ to be distinctive--different from other individuals in important ways. Many studies and our common experiences have shown that people strive to belong to groups. Teens have been known to commit suicide when they are not accepted into their peer group. The fad, current as I write, of body piercings with rings in noses, lips, tongues, and more intimate places is not the result of individuals having an inspiration some morning to be distinctive. It is an attempt to belong to and to exhibit belonging to a particular group. There is considerable disincentive to have a body piercing, there is pain and lingering discomfort; the rings can interfere with various activities and there are risks of infection and injury. In spite of all this, tens of thousands of people have submitted to piercings in order to signal a form of group solidarity." Putting group association ahead of personal aggrandizement is not, as he claims, a marker more typical of "Eastern" than "Western" culture. Another problem with this book is that it never reports quantitative results, not even giving the number of subjects in the experiments mentioned. Readers of daily newspapers can understand basic statistics, there is no excuse to omit them all. But we are given not so much as a footnote's worth of data to build some confidence in the results cited and in his interpretation of them. Nisbett is also uncritical in his acceptance of Oriental lore. Here is one example: "Buildings in China.." he writes with evident approval, "are built only after an exhaustive survey by feng shui experts who examine every conceivable ecological, topological, climatologic, and geometric feature of landscape and proposed building simultaneously and in relation to one another." I think he meant "topographical" rather than "topological" and we note the impossibility of examining "every conceivable" attribute of anything. He seems not to know that when several feng shui experts are asked for their readings, without being informed that other experts have been consulted, it is often the case that their recommendations are wildly different, and even at odds with one another. One expert might say that red is the ideal color for the walls, the other might say that the one color that should not be used for them is red. Stage magicians Penn and Teller arranged such an experiment and videotaped it, the results are very funny, except to believers. Feng shui is, like psychic predictions and divining rods, demonstrably absurd. I do not deny that being brought up in different cultures will lead to having different knowledge bases, assumptions, and methods of problem solving. And I agree that knowing about these differences is of value. But I do not trust this book's characterization of the differences in what seem more like pop psychology's shallow stereotypes rather than serious science. And the case for cognitive differences beyond those learned from the culture -- the main thesis of the book -- is not made at all.
-- from the reviewer's web site
Rating: 
Summary: Very good
Review: A very good book. Only marred slightly by politics. On age 217 he writes that "The Bell Curve - Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life" claims that intelligence tests based on spatial ability indicate racial IQ differences. It doesn't. The author also suggests that the future will see a blending of world views (eastern and western) and that this may involve "the best of both worlds." This is unlikely. The authors indicate that there are already societies that are "half western/ half eastern" in their psychology (like Hong Kong), and it seems most likely that blended world would simply consist of a half way house like this, not "the best of both" (e.g. think like an American when it comes to revolutionary science; think like an Asian when it comes to predicting human behaviour). The book makes it clear that these are total world views, with implications in cognitive focus across a very broad range of areas. Interestingly, he writes that hunter/gatherer peoples think more like westerners (linear, analytic, reductionist, etc), while almost all agricultural people think like Asians (holistic, social, dialectic, etc). Draw a line from the fertile crescent (the starting point of agriculture) north west, terminating in the UK, and you get a gradual increase in individualist/ linear thinking. Might this reflect the settlement patterns of middle eastern farmers in thepaleolithic? He also writes that their is no peer review in Japanese science, which might help explain the lack of Nobel Prize winners from that country. Criticism is seen as rude. Excellent minus the PC.
Rating:
Summary: Very good
Review: A very good book. Only marred slightly by politics. On age 217 he writes that "The Bell Curve - Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life" claims that intelligence tests based on spatial ability indicate racial IQ differences. It doesn't. The author also suggests that the future will see a blending of world views (eastern and western) and that this may involve "the best of both worlds." This is unlikely. The authors indicate that there are already societies that are "half western/ half eastern" in their psychology (like Hong Kong), and it seems most likely that blended world would simply consist of a half way house like this, not "the best of both" (e.g. think like an American when it comes to revolutionary science; think like an Asian when it comes to predicting human behaviour). The book makes it clear that these are total world views, with implications in cognitive focus across a very broad range of areas. Interestingly, he writes that hunter/gatherer peoples think more like westerners (linear, analytic, reductionist, etc), while almost all agricultural people think like Asians (holistic, social, dialectic, etc). Draw a line from the fertile crescent (the starting point of agriculture) north west, terminating in the UK, and you get a gradual increase in individualist/ linear thinking. Might this reflect the settlement patterns of middle eastern farmers in thepaleolithic? He also writes that their is no peer review in Japanese science, which might help explain the lack of Nobel Prize winners from that country. Criticism is seen as rude. Excellent minus the PC.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Explanatory Power for American doing Business in China
Review: As a Chinese-American who was born and educated in the USA now negotiating multi-million dollar deals in China, as well as a 20 year observer and 'student' on the question of 'why Westerns find it so difficult dealing with the Chinese', I found this book to be valuable in providing the answers and frameworks for understanding my Chinese counterparts. When the Chinese government unilaterally reset the terms and thus the investment returns for foreign investors in China's new telecom poster child, China Netcom (and that was after they invested!), as a Westerner you may incredulously ask, how could the Chinese think they could do that? Don't they have respect for a contract or an agreement? Don't they realize the repercussions? Or you may ask why didn't the word 'freedom' have an equivalent in the Chinese language until recent history? After reading this book you should have a much clearer understanding of these and many other otherwise puzzling findings and encounters with the Chinese. I've read many books and articles of practicing and academic China experts - Harvard Professors & consultants, Asian Studies political scientists and historians, McKinsey consultants, corporate laywers, accountants with the Big4 firms, etc. - and they all have various theories that have good explanatory and predictive capabilities; however, I have found some of Nisbett's postulations to provide a better and more encompassing level of explanatory power. In fact, it seems his ideas give me a single, more flexible tool to apply to my business and daily life than the box of application specific tools I have gathered from my other readings. It gives me the confidence (I hope it's not false confidence though!) that I can deal with the Chinese better. I have been constantly on the look-out for solid fact-based theories to complement my in-the-trenches experiences, and while my 'studying' of the practices of the often frustrating Chinese ways of business is far from complete, I believe I have found a very good tool to help in this endeavor. Sure there may be some weakneses in the book's underlying scientific approach as other Amazon reviewers have noted, but if you are a business person looking for practical frameworks underpinned by very interesting research experiments, this book delivers. Even if the methodology and thesis are wrong as others claim, the findings seem to fill gaps in my understanding of how the Chinese think and behave. Hopefully Nisbett and other researchers will extend his work into the business world. I'll be awaiting his next book.
Rating:
Summary: Lacking in Numerical Breakdowns and Full of Subjectivity
Review: As an American living in Japan, I found this this book to be interesting and helpful in terms of understanding the different ways that the Japanese and I may approach particular situations. However what I think the book and the reader might have benefitted from would have been some actual numbers as regards to the experiments rather than vague, subjective quantifiers such as "a lot of Koreans" or "many Americans". Also, in what I assume was his attempt to avoid being too critical of Asian culture, he tended to go the opposite way when critiquing American thought processes, once again using such subjective phrases as "simple-mined" and "childish". He talked extensively about the Asian goal of seeking harmony or the middle-way, neglecting to mention that Confusianism was begun during a very turbulant time in China's history, one when people were acting in a very non-harmonious manner and thus upsetting the heirarchy and social order. He writes about Westerners seeking to control things but omitted anything in regards to Japanese arts such as ikkebana, tea-ceremony or karate, which are all about control of one's environment and self. And while he was able to find adages which represented the middle-way of the Asian thought process there was a complete absense of any Western adages that attest to the acknowledgement a lack of control over one's environment (the only thing you can be sure of is death and taxes) or seeking harmony in one's life (don't rock the boat). The book had the potential to be great but lost it for me, with its lack of numerical evidence, subjective and somewhat negative judgements and its (too politically correct) effort to find the good in one way of thinking and not another. While a breakdown of the pros and cons came, it was far too late in the book and seemed more like an afterthought. While neither a scientist nor a psychologist, I enjoy reading books on both subjects but found this one to be lacking in terms of both its writing style and its scientific objectivity.
Rating: 
Summary: seriously flawed
Review: Broad generalizations flaw this book to the point of making it useless. His understanding of east asian culture reads like a potpourri of stereotypes. Trying to paint a single sociological portrait of the west is similarly flawed,and he goes even further by lumping the west in with europeans. Do you seriously think the thought processes of someone raised in Compton is even remotely connected to someone brought up in the Hamptons? The book ends up being a comparison of stereotypes, and in many cases, even those are wrong.
Rating: 
Summary: The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Review: First the good. Several experiments on human subjects have shown that Asians and Westerners at a very basic level have biases in perception and categorization. Some experiments on human subjects even show that these differences are, surprise, a bit situational. I have lived in Japan for nine years, and I have noticed several of these things myself. So it was rather refreshing to see experimental data that actually objectifies a lot of these differences. I do think people are often unaware of just how different even a simple picture might look to someone from a different culture. As descriptions of these experiments take up a large part of the book, it certainly might be worthwhile to purchase the book merely to read about them. However, one caution I must add is that Nisbett preludes every experiment's reported result with an "as expected" or an "as anticipated." Nisbett seems content to try and find tests that support his views, but one is forced to wonder how hard he tried to falsify them. A subtle but important difference. Now, for the bad. If Nisbett had stuck to his interesting and fascinating experiments on human subjects, this book might have made for some interesting reading. Instead, his aims are much larger. He wants to show that, "Each of these orientations -- the Western and the Eastern -- is a self-reinforcing, homeostatic system. The social practices promote the worldviews: the worldviews dictate the appropriate thought processes; and the thought processes both justify the world views and support the social practices. Understanding these homeostatic systems has implications for grasping the fundamental nature of the mind, for beliefs about how we ought ideally to reason, and for appropriate education strategies for different peoples." There is so much philosophical absurdity packed into this phrase it's hard to unpack it all, but it spills out all over the book making it disconnected and confused at times. What would it mean to understand how we "ideally ought to reason." If we "ideally" knew how to reason we could shut off all debate. Where is Karl Popper when you need him? Think about it. If there is an ideal way to reason, then all future debate is shut off immediately. There's no reason to argue or debate about anything, merely turn the levers and use the "ideal" reasoning principles. Where's Kurt Godel when you need him? Another thing Nisbett might want to ask himself is this, how does he escape his own homeostatic system? After all, if the system determined his beliefs about the system then how do we know they are true at all, and not just products of the system itself? Given this fundamentally flawed thesis, and his attempt to take some very narrow experiments on human subjects and basically roam sloppily over virtually any area he chooses, ranging from philosophy to history to culture, we get a phantasmagoria of stereotypes and confusions. Nisbett's biases are clear, he favors the Western system, after all, the entire approach of the book is mostly logical and argumentative. Yet, Nisbett wants to alternate between putting on his homeostatic-system-hat-for-Asians and his homeostatic-system-hat-for-Westerners as he compares the two with complete relativistic glee. He states: "Medicine in the West retains the analytic, object-oriented, and interventionist approaches that were common thousands of years ago: Find the offending part or humour and remove or alter it. Medicine in the East is far more holistic and has never until modern times been in the least inclined towards surgery or other heroic interventions." What's he got against Western medicine? He thinks that removing the offending humour is the same as modern surgery? He claims he isn't a relativist, and that's right. He's just confused. There's a lot going on in Japan, where I live, worthy of interest and study. There is a serious problem, though, with critical thinking in Japan. After all, there is a lot of authoritarianism in Japan, just as there is throughout Asia. People in Japan need to learn to express their opinion and they aren't learning how to do that enough. (For that matter they could do a better job in America as well!). The former Japanese ambassador to the UN Yoshio Hatano once said, "Study should not be memorizing what our teachers teach us but learning how to think on our own. And what many Japanese need is to be able to clearly express and advocate their own opinions, even if these might be "minority opinions."" He said this in reference to the fact that many Japanese can't argue their opinions. Nisbet reduces issues like this to : "Is it a form of "colonialism" to demand that they [Asians] perform verbally and share their thoughts with their classmates?" Give me a break! With Nisbett's confused homeostatic-system-causes-beliefs model he just muddles his way through a host of important ethical issues spreading more confusion than enlightenment. All in all, I would say Nisbett's problem is too much looking for ideal methods of reasoning and too little Karl Popper. In _Objective Knowledge_ Popper states, "An observation always presupposes the existence of some system of expectations." Basically Nisbett's whole program revolves around giving Asians and Westerners vague commands like "observe" or "choose" and then seeing how their expectations or preconceptions influenced them. This is interesting, but it doesn't tell us much we didn't already know. People from different cultures have different preconceptions. According to Popper we all have preconceptions and it's trying to improve them and get a little closer to the truth that is important. Is this a Western approach? Is this an Eastern approach? Is that all that matters? I do recommend people interested in Asia check out some of these experiments on human subjects, they are interesting and worth reading about. Nevertheless, I can hardly recommend this book in clean and clear conscience. It's just too ugly.
Rating:
Summary: Stellar Contribution to Better Understanding Between People
Review: First, don't pay any attention to the book review of "Rob from Princeton," whoever he is. Richard Nisbett's reserch (which Rob totally ignores)is solid and his conclusions solid. As a person who has traveled frequently to Japan and hosted a number of meetsings with Japanese in this country I can tell anyone from my own personal experience that Nisbett is on solid grown. I wonder how Rob would react if, as I experienced on my first trip to Japan, he was trying to give a lecture on personal development and learned that crucial words like self, identity, self-esteem have no lexical counterparts in the Japanese language. The lack of such equivelents surely alters (as I found out) how the Japanese mentally process matters pertaining to the individual. Rather than this book being useless as Rob claims it to be, Nisbett's work should be required reading for anyone in a political science curriculum -- for starters! I actually believe that every entering freshman in every college should be exposed to your thinking, for what better heuristic foundation for higher learning in the humanities could there be than to learn at the outset that not everyone sees the same thing when they look at the same thing. There would be fewer problems between people worldwide if our government, business and educational leaders came to realize how differently people process information so that though they may ostensibly see the same thing that others see, they in fact often do not. Iterestingly, I might advise Rob, there is a neurological foundation for the cognitive differences that Nisbett has found between Easterners and Westerners. The ideographic languages of the East are memorized and processed in the right hemisphere of the brain while the phonetic languages of the West are memorized and proicessed in the left hemisphere. The significance in these differences is that the "right brain" tolerates subtlties and deals in relationships while the "left brain" demands absolutes and deals in categories -- just what Nisbett's research has found. Buy this book. It will give you not only a better understanding of people of different cultures, but perhaps help you understand yourself a bit better.
Rating:
Summary: Decent book about thought processes
Review: groups perceive and reason in the same way" (xiii-xiv).
"East is East and West is West" (Kipling); the quote is emphasized in Richard Nisbett's book The Geography of Thought. He challenges the assumption that all people think the same. He has analyzed a large number of psychology experiments, including his own, to come to the conclusion that there have been major differences between the modes of thought of "Asian (China, Korea, Japan)" and "Western (US, British Commonwealth)" people. The Western style of thought is valuing individual distinctiveness and independence while the Eastern style embodies the value of harmonious social relations and interdependence. The book builds on this core argument to attempt to resolve contradictions pertaining to reasoning, perception, and knowledge organization between Easterners and Westerners.
I would say this is a great book for closet psyologists and marketing people.
Rating:
Summary: A good trip through the mind of cultures
Review: I liked this book it was quite interesting in its approach to the differences in Eastern and Western thought. It's premiss is that Easterners' are more contextual and less object oriented in their thought processes. Nisbet shows how the West tends to value conflict of ideas over harmony and the east focuses on harmony and relationship. Nisbet uses history, geography and traditions to explain his findings which are backed up by many interesting studies. I like the emphisis that these studies outline tendencies which peolpe can be trained to change or adopt to there advanatages.
Nissbet also is willing to critize both the east and west for certain errors that there thought patterns lead them to. Nissbet also discusses how the source of how confontrations between the west and east occur due to differences. As well he discusses why the west and east have different view of human rights. His most interesting arguement and most well founded is that Westernization is a commercial phenomenon and not necessarily a cultural one, Coke and Mc Donald's invasion of the world does not mean that eastern culture is disappearing or weakening only that the Big mac and Coke taste good to almost anyone. I like Nissibet hope that western and eastern cultures will influnece each others way of thinking. And that understanding one anothers way of thinking is important. Through my travels around the world the attempt to understand others has lead to much more happiness than strife. My new wife is Chinese and this book helped me to understand why some simple questions that I asked her are not so simple because we have a different starting point in the way we understand the world, this does not stop us from understanding the world together. I hope Nissbett is right for the world would be a better place.
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