The Geography of Thought

Introduction

Have you ever wondered why western culture is so individualistic and why eastern culture in sharp contrast is so collectivist? I have and never got a compelling answer till I read this book.

Nisbett demonstrates 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. The book posits that human behavior is not “hard-wired” but a function of culture.

My top 30 points

1. There are so many major cultural differences between Westerners and East Asians as set out below.
2. Attention and Perception – Why are East Asians better able to see relationships among events than Westerners are? Why do East Asians find it relatively difficult to disentangle an object from its surroundings?
3. Causal Inference – Why are Westerners so likely to overlook the influence of context on the behavior of objects and even of people? Why are Easterners more susceptible to the “hindsight bias,” which allows them to believe that they “knew it all along”?
4. Organization of Knowledge – Why do Western infants learn nouns at a much more rapid rate than verbs, whereas Eastern infants learn verbs at a more rapid rate than nouns? Why do East Asians group objects and events based on how they relate to one another, whereas Westerners are more likely to rely on categories?
5. Reasoning – Why are Westerners more likely to apply formal logic when reasoning about everyday events, and why does their insistence on logic sometimes cause them to make errors? Why are Easterners so willing to entertain apparently contradictory propositions and how can this some- times be helpful in getting at the truth?
6. The answer for these differences is that, at a higher level of abstraction, what drives culture is a chain: ecology drives the economy and social structure; which drive attention, metaphysics and epistemology (organization of knowledge); which drive cognitive processes.
7. Start with ecology. In the democratic city states of Ancient Greece, decisions were debated by an assembly. Only one side could win so you needed rational arguments to convince others to vote with you. The mountainous terrain lent itself to herding and hunting where success, even survival, depended largely on individual skill and effort.
8. The ancient Greeks had a keen sense of individualism lacked by people in the autocracies of the ancient East, a difference most vividly shown in the conduct of the Greco-Persian Wars. The ancient Greeks embodied “personal agency—the sense that they were in charge of their own lives and free to act as they chose.
9. Greeks had city-states, maritime trading, and a geographic location at the crossroads of the world, leading to exposure to a great diversity of people and thoughts. China had an ethnic monoculture (Han), generally centralized political control, and no exposure to diversity.
10. Nisbett traces some of the east-west differences to the likelihood that the Greeks met more apparent contradiction than did Asians, via trade with other cultures. That led them to devote more attention to logical thought.
11. In China, the ecology was different. The fertile plains of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers led to the early development of agriculture. Village life centered on the rhythms of planting and harvesting which forced intensive cooperation and gave rise to the need for harmony and self-restraint. The aim of conflict resolution was to reduce hostility and animosity and maintain balance within the community.
12. Contemporaneous Chinese civilization, on the other hand, embodied “harmony,” where “every Chinese was first and foremost a member of a collective, or rather of several collectives—the clan, the village, and especially the family.”
13. Individualism was foreign to China; the individual was the totality of the roles he had in relation to specific other people. Not that people lacked agency—but they had collective agency, instead of individual agency, which deprioritized debate and curiosity (as well as individual rights), and elevated obligations. This did not (necessarily) mean conformity, but rather a harmonious society, as the goal. There’s no Chinese word for individualism – selfish seems to be the closest equivalent.
14. Westerners see the world as made up of discrete objects that can be grouped into categories according to their attributes. The individual-class relationship is a central organizing principle. They see themselves as distinct too, independent agents largely in control of their own lives.
15. Asians, by contrast, perceive the world as made up of continuous substances that are grouped according to their relationships to one and other. The part-whole dichotomy is key: the part cannot be understood without also considering the whole. They see themselves as parts of a whole too, members of a collective bound to each other by a web of obligations and responsibilities.
16. There are no Asians in Lake Wobegon. I.e. Asians are rather reluctant to rate themselves as above average.
17. Western thought is governed by logic and rhetoric. Westerners seek Truth through linear, reductionist reasoning and abhor contradiction; a statement and its opposite cannot both be true. They attempt to discern the underlying laws or principles that describe the world.
18. Asians have mostly rejected formal logic of the kind that is the absolute bedrock of Western thought in favor of contextual analysis without rigid boundaries. East Asians, then, are more likely to set logic aside in favor of typicality and plausibility of conclusions. They are also more likely to set logic aside in favor of the desirability of conclusions.
19. Asian thinking is less concerned with a competitive intellectual quest for truth than with seeking a Middle Way towards harmonious co-existence. They embrace contradictions as two aspects of a larger more complex and ever-changing whole.
20. Infants in the US are often forced to sleep in a separate bed, often in a separate room. That’s rather uncommon in Asia. Does this contribute to US individualism? Or is it just a symptom?
21. Westerners want contracts to be unconditionally binding, whereas Asians want contracts to change in response to unexpected contexts.
22. Asians are likely to consider justice in the abstract, by-the-book Western sense to be rigid and unfeeling.
23. Westerners make mistakes and one is the Fundamental Attribution Error, failing to account for situational factors when looking for explanations of events. E.g. when people say something like, “I’m successful because of my own hard work. Anyone else who’s less successful than me just doesn’t work as hard as I do.” This line of thinking doesn’t account for contextual factors that might have helped the successful person, or impeded the less successful one.
24. Conversely, the Asian preference for finding a middle way that can accommodate two contradictory positions may cause them to hold on to beliefs that are just plain wrong. Sometimes vigorous debate does shed light on the truth, or at least helps identify what is demonstrably not true.
25. Societal cues can influence behavior – you may be raised in an independent society, but live long enough in an interdependent society and your behavior may change. We can also be primed to act in independent or interdependent ways
26. Females of both East-Asian and Anglo-Western cultures tend to be more holistic in their orientation than males, but experiments conducted by social scientists find that “gender differences are always small than the cultural differences.”
27. Different languages influence the ways their speakers think. Note the prevalence, relative to Chinese, in Western languages of “generic” nouns, which allow categorization without relying on context, and the lack in Chinese of the English suffix “-ness,” which similarly allows easy abstraction of a concept. Western languages tend to focus on the agent and most sentences rely on a subject who is doing an act; Eastern languages much less so.
28. Another difference is the way the two cultures see change. Americans are far less likely to predict radical change and to assume that things will continue as they have been doing, while Asians are more likely to predict change in the opposite direction especially if there has been an acceleration. For instance, if the economy is experiencing mega growth, the Chinese are likely to expect a reversal in fortune, while the Americans expect more of the same.
29. Interesting details of the difference in child rearing also investigated. The Eastern mother introduces a toy to her child while teaching about its relationship to it and the impact of his/her actions on others while playing with it, while the Western mother teaches hers to name the toy and learn its use.
30. The Chinese failure to develop concepts of abstraction necessarily crippled Chinese scientific advancement. Similarly, Chinese rejection of formal logic in favor of the “middle way” of harmonious compromise, pushed by both Taoism and Confucianism, such that Chinese philosophers accept that “A” and “not-A” can sometimes both be true, produces travel down totally different avenues of thought than does abstraction, in both science and in many other areas.

Conclusion

These cultural differences provide hints about why science as we know it developed in the West, and not in Asia. The Western goal of finding really simple models likely helped generate the study of physics. His cultural analyses show why the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution could not have happened in East Asia.