The Geography of Thought

Zusatztext Philadelphia Inquirer Nisbett´s findings pose provocative challenges to universalist assumptions about human thought and inference. Informationen zum Autor Richard E. Nisbett, PhD, has taught psychology at Yale and currently teaches at the University of Michigan, where he is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor. He has received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the William James Fellow Award of the American Psychological Society, and, in 2002, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He is the author and editor of several university press titles. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Klappentext An eminent psychologist boldly takes on the presumptions of evolutionary psychology in an engaging exploration of the divergent ways Eastern and Western societies see and understand the world. Chapter One: The Syllogism and the Tao More than a billion people in the world today claim intellectual inheritance from ancient Greece. More than two billion are the heirs of ancient Chinese traditions of thought. The philosophies and achievements of the Greeks and Chinese of 2,500 years ago were remarkably different, as were the social structures and conceptions of themselves. And, as I hope to show in this chapter, the intellectual aspects of each society make sense in light of their social characteristics. The Ancient Greeks and Agency There is an ancient theater at Epidaurus in Greece that holds fourteen thousand people. Built into a hillside, the theater has a spectacular view of mountains and pine trees. Its acoustics are such that it is possible to hear a piece of paper being crumpled on the stage from any location in the theater. Greeks of the classical period, from the sixth to the third century B.C., traveled for long periods under difficult conditions to attend plays and poetry readings at Epidaurus from dawn till dusk for several days in a row. To us today, people´s love of the theater and their willingness to endure some hardship to indulge it may not seem terribly odd. But among the great civilizations of the day, including Persia, India, and the Middle East, as well as China, it is possible to imagine only the Greeks feeling free enough, being confident enough in their ability to control their own lives, to go on a long journey for the sole purpose of aesthetic enjoyment. The Greeks´ contemporaries lived in more or less autocratic societies in which the king´s will was law and to defy it was to court death. It would not have been in a ruler´s interest to allow his subjects to wander about the countryside even if his subjects´ ties to the land and the routines of agriculture had allowed them to imagine going on a long journey for purposes of recreation. Equally astonishing, even to us today, is that the entire Greek nation laid down its tools -- including its arms if city-states were at war with one another -- to participate in the Olympics as athletes or audience. The Greeks, more than any other ancient peoples, and in fact more than most people on the planet today, had a remarkable sense of personal agency -- the sense that they were in charge of their own lives and free to act as they chose. One definition of happiness for the Greeks was that it consisted of being able to exercise their powers in pursuit of excellence in a life free from constraints. A strong sense of individual identity accompanied the Greek sense of personal agency. Whether it is the Greeks or the Hebrews who invented individualism is a matter of some controversy, but there is no doubt that the Greeks viewed themselves as unique individuals, with distinctive attributes and goals. This would have been true at least by the time of Homer in the eighth or ninth century B.C. Both gods and humans in the Odyssey and the Iliad have personalities that are...

Philadelphia Inquirer
Nisbett´s findings pose provocative challenges to universalist assumptions about human thought and inference.

Autorentext

Richard E. Nisbett, PhD, has taught psychology at Yale and currently teaches at the University of Michigan, where he is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor. He has received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the William James Fellow Award of the American Psychological Society, and, in 2002, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He is the author and editor of several university press titles. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Klappentext

An eminent psychologist boldly takes on the presumptions of evolutionary psychology in an engaging exploration of the divergent ways Eastern and Western societies see and understand the world.

Zusammenfassung
A “landmark book” (Robert J. Sternberg, president of the American Psychological Association) by one of the world's preeminent psychologists that proves human behavior is not “hard-wired” but a function of culture.

Everyone knows that while different cultures think about the world differently, they use the same equipment for doing their thinking. But what if everyone is wrong?

The Geography of Thought documents Richard Nisbett's groundbreaking international research in cultural psychology and shows 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. As a result, East Asian thought is “holistic”—drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and events within that field. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior.

From feng shui to metaphysics, from comparative linguistics to economic history, a gulf separates the children of Aristotle from the descendants of Confucius. At a moment in history when the need for cross-cultural understanding and collaboration have never been more important, The Geography of Thought offers both a map to that gulf and a blueprint for a bridge that will span it.

Leseprobe
Chapter One: The Syllogism and the Tao

More than a billion people in the world today claim intellectual inheritance from ancient Greece. More than two billion are the heirs of ancient Chinese traditions of thought. The philosophies and achievements of the Greeks and Chinese of 2,500 years ago were remarkably different, as were the social structures and conceptions of themselves. And, as I hope to show in this chapter, the intellectual aspects of each society make sense in light of their social characteristics.

The Ancient Greeks and Agency

There is an ancient theater at Epidaurus in Greece that holds fourteen thousand people. Built into a hillside, the theater has a spectacular view of mountains and pine trees. Its acoustics are such that it is possible to hear a piece of paper being crumpled on the stage from any location in the theater. Greeks of the classical period, from the sixth to the third century B.C., traveled for long periods under difficult conditions to attend plays and poetry readings at Epidaurus from dawn till dusk for several days in a row.

To us today, people´s love of the theater and their willingness to endure some hardship to indulge it may not seem terribly odd. But among the great civilizations of the day, including Persia, India, and the Middle East, as well as China, it is possible to imagine only the Greeks feeling free enough, being confident enough in their ability to control their own lives, to go on a long journey for the sole purpose of aesthetic enjoyment. The Greeks´ contemporaries lived in more or less autocratic societies in which the king´s will was law and to defy it was to court death. It would not have be…