The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why is a book by social psychologist Richard Nisbett that was published by Free Press in 2003.[1] By analyzing the differences between Asia and the West, it argues that cultural differences affect people's thought processes more significantly than believed.[2]
In the 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”.[3] At its core, the book assumes that human behavior is not “hard-wired” but a function of culture.
The book proposes that the passion for strong ontology and scientific rationality based on forward chaining from axioms is essentially a "Western" phenomenon.
Ancient Greece's passion for abstract categories into which the entire world can be taxonomically arranged, he claims, is prototypically Western, as is the notion of causality.
In the Chinese intellectual tradition there is no necessary incompatibility between the belief that A is the case and the belief that not-A is the case.
On the contrary, in the spirit of the Tao or yin-yang principle, A can actually imply that not-A is also the case, or at any rate soon will be the case...Events do not occur in isolation from other events, but are always embedded in a meaningful whole in which the elements are constantly changing and rearranging themselves. [In the Chinese approach to reasoning], to think about an object or event in isolation and apply abstract rules to it is to invite extreme and mistaken conclusions.
It is the Middle Way that is the goal of reasoning.
In other words, he claims that the law of the excluded middle is not applied in Chinese thought, and that a different standard applies.
This has been described by other thinkers as being hermeneutic reasonableness.
In chapter 3, we saw that the social organization and practices of modern Asians resemble those of the ancient Chinese and the social organization and practices of modern Europeans resemble those of the ancient Greeks.
In this chapter we’ve seen that modern Asians, like the ancient Chinese, view the world in holistic terms: They see a great deal of the field, especially background events; they are skilled in observing relationships between events; they regard the world as complex and highly changeable and its components as interrelated; they see events as moving in cycles between extremes; and they feel that control over events requires coordination with others.
Modern Westerners, like the ancient Greeks, see the world in analytic, atomistic terms; they see objects as discrete and separate from their environments; they see events as moving in linear fashion when they move at all; and they feel themselves to be personally in control of events even when they are not.
Not only are worldviews different in a conceptual way, but also the world is literally viewed in different ways.
Asians see the big picture and they see objects in relation to their environments—so much so that it can be difficult for them to visually separate objects from their environments.
Westerners focus on objects while slighting the field and they literally see fewer objects and relationships in the environment than do Asians.
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous is a 2020 book by Harvard professor Joseph Henrich that aims to explain history and psychological variation using approaches from cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology.
In the book, Henrich explores how institutions and psychology jointly influence each other over time.
More specifically, he argues that a series of Catholic Church edicts on marriage that began in the 4th century undermined the foundations of kin-based society and created the more analytical, individualistic thinking prevalent in western societies.
The WEIRDest People in the World has been described as a work of Big History and compared with works such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016). [1]
The first part, “The Evolution of Societies and Psychologies”, describes WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) populations “in broad strokes”, according to reviewer Pauline Grosjean.[2] Henrich discusses the research of Richard Nisbett suggesting that people in WEIRD cultures think reductively with a focus on personal attributes and intentions, while Asians think holistically with a focus on relationships and situations.
Non-Westerners will emphasize family connections and allegiances.
Henrich also presents a large body of evidence that WEIRD people are more trusting of strangers and more likely to give blood than most humans.
Westerners, according to reviewer Judith Shulevitz, “identify more as members of voluntary social groups — dentists, artists, Republicans, Democrats, supporters of a Green Party — than of extended clans.”[3]
The second part of the book, “The Origins of WEIRD People”, provides a comparative political account of how societies have used religion to scale up from families to states.[4] More specifically, the author draws on an array of qualitative and quantitative evidence to argue that religious beliefs, impersonal markets, urbanization and competition among voluntary associations like guilds, charter towns, universities and religious orders shifted people's psychology and social lives.
Uniquely, the author both discusses how present-day institutions shape psychology and seats these processes in an account of the past.
The third section, “New Institutions, New Psychologies”, is about how the Catholic Church and its offshoot, Protestantism, shaped early institutions and psychology, paving the way (in the view of the author) for modern institutions.
While accounts of modern history frequently argue that the Protestant Reformation created individualism and a belief in rule of law, Henrich argues that edicts by the Church that he calls the “Marriage and Family Program” (MFP) reduced clannishness, making Western Europeans more analytic and individualistic, leading to various intermediating institutions and trust in abstract rules; thus, as Henrich argues in the fourth section, “Birthing the Modern World”, the Marriage and Family Program opened the doors for the Reformation,[4] with Protestantism being simply a “booster shot” (in the author's words) for a process the Catholic Church set in motion.[3]
