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: 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: 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: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Very good
Review: I never anticipated that the asian thought process and conception of the world and society was so fundamentally different from the West; even down to the roots of basic logical inference and perception. Nesbitt reveals that the possibilities of ethnocentric bias could be much larger than many thought.
I certainly believe I am better equipped to deal with my asian and half asian colleagues after reading this book. I had previously been under the assumption that the same path of logic would be followed and relational design patterns would be perceived similar to my own understanding - not so!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: Nisbett has written a fascinating and thought-provoking book about an important topic, which is the differing cognitive styles of people from the West and Asia. Using a large number of social psychological studies as evidence, he shows that there's lots of evidence that Asians (by which he primarily means Chinese and Japanese) have different habits of thoughts than Westerners (meaning basically Americans), differences that are visible in research looking at very basic cognitive processes. Asians are more attentive to context, while Americans are more atomistic and object-focussed; Asians are more willing to anticipate changes in the directions of trends, while Americans tend to think linearly and expect trends to continue. Asians seek compromises to conflicts, while Americans tend to polarize alternatives; more generally, Americans are very used to styles of thinking that are argumentative and syllogistic styles (those involving formal logic), while Asians tend to find them less congenial. Admittedly, there's a danger here of over-generalizations or slipping into stereotypes, but Nisbett's work appears to avoid these problems partly by being based on empirical studies, and by being carefully qualified. And though he can't prove his speculations about the causes of these differences, he offers plausible theories as to why the differing cultural contexts of the two kinds of societies might have favored the different styles of thought. If Nisbett is right and people would take these differences seriously, two very positive consequences could follow. One is that Americans would have to confront the fact that other cultures don't necessarily have to or want to be like us--or even think like us. Our thoughtless assumption that either everyone is just like us, or ought to be, needs to be shaken up and this book does that. The other useful result is that this book encourages us to realize that there are many ways of using the mind to respond to reality. Some people may impatiently ask; but what's the right way? But that misses one of the points of the book: each way of thinking, each cognitive style, works well within a certain cultural context. Nisbett doesn't tackle the big issue of whether Asians would benefit more from thinking in "American" ways or we would benefit from thinking in "Asian" ways. He seems to think that each culture might learn something from the other. This answer is perhaps too speculative and imprecise for some people, but it sounds about right to me. In any case, read the book with an open mind and being aware that it's just one small part of the vast and complex subject of cultural differences in mentalities, and I think you will find it highly rewarding.
Rating:
Summary: Caveat Emptor
Review: Nisbett's book is intended to illustrate the apparent differences in ways of thinking between Westerners and East Asians. While the experiments and their results as documented in the book are interesting and fascinating, in the early portions of the book he makes comparisons between the cultures of ancient Greece and China as an exploration of the historical origins of the mental inclinations of contemporary Westerners and Asians, and along the way he makes several claims about the two cultures which I would seriously question. (Indeed I would go further and ask why only Greece and China should be singled out for comparison, and not the Near East and India as well, considering the vast impact Christianity and Buddhism had on the West and East.) Nisbett -- somewhat typically of Western authors, be it said -- credits the ancient Greeks with such virtues as a recognition of the uniqueness of the individual, a sense of curiosity, a desire to plumb the underlying reasons and principles of things, and so on, all qualities which he claims are absent or largely absent in China (if not indeed everywhere else in the past). I really don't think these claims stand up to the facts at all. (Don't know if I'm being paranoid, but frankly I seem to pick up faint racist odors coming from this book. And I really do think Nisbett is selecting from the facts.) A reading of the Analects shows that Confucius was highly sensitive to the differences in personality among his students and tailored his teachings to suit them accordingly. He also demanded a lot of independent thinking from them and got upset when all they did was parrot his words. Contrariwise, scholars like Paul Feyerabend and Bruno Snell have argued that the 'heroes' of Homer's ILIAD cannot be understood as integrated individuals, only as 'systems of loosely connected parts'. Also, the Greeks practised slavery, but the Chinese mostly didn't, according to sinologists Joseph Needham and Derk Bodde. So much for the claim that the Greeks valued the individual and the Chinese didn't. Nisbett also claims that there was little debate and argumentation between different views in the Chinese tradition. But there have been disagreements aplenty in the history of Chinese thought. Letters of discussion went back and forth between the Sung Dynasty thinkers Chu Hsi and Lu Hsiang-shan. Maurizio Scarpari also spoke of 'a lively and productive debate' on human nature in China 'that has almost lasted twenty-five centuries'. Chu Hsi, China's most influential thinker for seven centuries, also advocated 'the investigation of things' to uncover their LI (often translated as 'principle') -- what makes them what they are. Who says the Greeks were the only people to search for principles and to be curious to know, and not the Chinese? Not surprisingly, there is no reference to Chu Hsi in Nisbett's book. Finally, I want to look at what Nisbett said about the ancient remains of a group of people found somewhere in China, being identified as being of Caucasian stock and showing signs of being operated on surgically. Alongside this he muses on the absence of the practice of surgery in the Chinese tradition. What's the intended point? That if those were the remains of Asians, then marks of surgical operation would have been impossible? Apparently Nisbett didn't know that the world's first book on forensic medicine was Chinese. And surely it is a very long way from the unusual features found on a few corpses to sweeping generalisations about differences between races and cultures. All in all, the book is interesting, but it makes certain claims that warrant a little suspicion.
Rating:
Summary: Essential for intercultural understanding
Review: Nisbett's book is the popular presentation of a decade-long (at least) revolution occuring in cultural psychology and anthropology. Essentially he tries to explain that the way that people think isn't just a standard "thought process" with different cultural definitions provided depending on where you grow up but that the process of growing up and absorbing the meanings and values provided by the cultural environment critcally and fundamentally shape how one thinks. People literally SEE the world differently. It isn't just language or concepts or values or customs. I've been doing research as an anthropologist and studying cultural psychology here in Japan for the last 5 years. This change in conception of how culture creates cultured people (and then cultured people create culture in turn) is truly wonderful, as it provides a systematic way of understanding the human condition. We all know that we are social, cultural creatures (see Tomasello's Cultural Origins of Cognition for a great treatment of this issue as well) but many researchers tend to treat culture as a "thing," an approach that has been recognizably problematic for decades. I found this new understanding of culture and self (it is referred to as "mutual constitution" as in they mutually contribute to the formation of the other) to be slippery though. At times, it makes so much sense and is so powerful for understanding culture that it feels like I'm looking through a microscope at the fundamental human cultural process, but then at other times the seemingly tautological aspect of it spins me around and spits me out like a carousel at high speed. Either it seems to make so much sense that it hardly feels worth mentioning or it makes very little sense. But don't give up on it, as it is the way our cultural species operates. I've been talking generalities thus far, but this book also provides interesting specific information about Eastern and Western cultures, going back to early philosophical foundations and following them forward to see how the thoughts (cultural patterns) formed. Once these patterns form, when they are transmited to a new generation of babies, they become part of the mental substrate of cognition and fundamentally shape how the babies view the world and the elements within it. This is NOT about cognitive science, nor is it incompatible with cognitive science findings. Nisbett and colleagues' research is well founded (check the bibliography) and published widely in peer reviewed journals. This books is intended to present this information without statistical analysis of the performance of different people from different cultures on particular tests or in particualr scenarios. Okay, I've blathered on long enough. Good book, great thesis, essential to understand cultural differences or the nature of cultural animals such as ourselves. Enjoy!
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