- Nisbett, Richard E.
The Geography of Thought.
New York: Free Press, 2003. ISBN 0-7432-5535-6.
-
It's a safe bet that the vast majority of Westerners who have
done business in East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea), and
Asians who've done business in the West have come to the same
conclusion: “Asians and Westerners think differently.” They
may not say as much, at least not to the general
public, for fear of being thought intolerant, but they believe
it on the evidence of their own experience nonetheless.
Psychologist Richard E. Nisbett and his colleagues in China and
Korea have been experimentally investigating the differences in
Asian and Western thought processes, and their results are
summarised in this enlightening book (with citations of the
original research). Their work confirms the conventional
wisdom—Westerners view the world through a telephoto lens,
applying logic and reductionism to find the “one best way”,
while Asians see a wide-angle view, taking into account the
context of events and seeking a middle way between extremes and
apparent contradictions—with experimental effect sizes which
are large, robust, and reliable.
Present-day differences in Asian and Western thought are shown to be
entirely consistent with those of ancient Greek and Chinese
philosophy, implying that whatever the cause, it is stable over long
spans of history. Although experiments with infants provide some
evidence for genetic predisposition, Nisbett suspects that a
self-reinforcing homeostatic feedback loop between culture, language,
and society is responsible for most of the difference in thought
processes. The fact that Asian-Americans and Westernised Asians in
Hong Kong and Singapore test between Asian and Western extremes
provides evidence for this. (The fact that Asians excel at
quintessentially Western intellectual endeavours such as abstract
mathematics and theoretical science would, it seems to me, exclude most
simple-minded explanations based on inherited differences in
brain wiring.)
This work casts doubt upon Utopian notions of an
End of History in which
Western-style free markets and democracy are adopted by all nations
and cultures around the globe. To a large extent, such a scenario
assumes all people think like Westerners and share the same values,
an assumption to which Nisbett's research offers persuasive counter
examples. This may be for the best; both Western and Asian styles of
thought are shown as predisposing those applying them to distinct,
yet equally dangerous, fallacies. Perhaps a synthesis of these (and
other) ways of thinking is a sounder foundation for a global society
than the Western model alone.
December 2004 