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A review by lpm100
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why by Richard Nisbett
2.0
2.0 out of 5 stars So what?
Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2018
Verified Purchase
The first question I have is: how does the author know any of this?
Does he speak Chinese? Did he live there?
The second question is with his competence in the subject of study. (Let's remember that he is a social psychologist, and not a historian.) One glaring error is that he leaves out Legalism entirely. Legalism has a very long history in China, and almost as long as that of Confucianism. How he missed that is beyond me.
The third question is with the intellectual Foundation of treating civilizations that were in Chinese orbit as offshoots of China.
Japan took a lot of ideas from China, but they also had no problem with adapting to different ways. (Korea is a similar example that happened much later).
Vietnam was a Chinese Colony for a thousand years, but they aren't quite the same thing as China nor the same thing as Japan and Korea.
I wonder if a better way to take this could have been to describe the thought process in terms of geographic factors, (a la "Guns, Gems, and Steel" by Jared Diamond). To wit: China was a huge, self contained hegemon and it was fairly homogeneous, and so there was no conflict of ideas because no one would ever meet someone with different ideas. And therefore no reason to develop these thought processes.
Japan and Korea were both smaller places, and so they had to develop the techniques of dealing with new ideas.
Greece was composed of a number of small city-states, and so is there any mystery that they were used to working with and evaluating new ideas?
Even then, to treat it in that way would need some qualifications. People in coastal places like Guangdong and Fujian have been merchants and seafaring people from hundreds of years, and some new ideas are something to which they have become accustomed.
I also have questions with this type of reasoning in general. If you have an idea of the principles of Darwinian evolution (such as it is), it doesn't mean that you can go forward and predict the existence of when antibiotic resistance will occur or what new species will exist thousands of years before the event.
And if you can go backwards and create ex post facto explanations, then so what?
And then the explanations that a person wants depends on which questions they ask. (I lived in China for many years. 11, by my count.) And I noticed that Chinese people had the most difficult time using processes that had already been developed.
So, there would be an International Baccalaureate curriculum that was already developed, but they could not maintain the program because they just could not follow the instructions in the way that they were detailed.
If that happens to have been my slice of reality, would I have predicted it from this book? Or, is it just a trivial empirical observation about something that I should take as read for future reference?
There's also discussion of a number of "big picture" theories. Marxism. Sociology. These theories are huge, broad and expansive, but they are extremely useless for limited, specific, REAL LIFE predictions.
So, it happens that Continental Europeans make bigger theories. So now what?
It feels like this author is trying to develop the intellectual Foundation to explain something whose existence he could never have predicted anyway.
And so the (fourth) question comes again..... "So what?"
If your time to read books is limited, I recommend that you give this one a miss. And read the Jared Diamond book in preference to it.
Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2018
Verified Purchase
The first question I have is: how does the author know any of this?
Does he speak Chinese? Did he live there?
The second question is with his competence in the subject of study. (Let's remember that he is a social psychologist, and not a historian.) One glaring error is that he leaves out Legalism entirely. Legalism has a very long history in China, and almost as long as that of Confucianism. How he missed that is beyond me.
The third question is with the intellectual Foundation of treating civilizations that were in Chinese orbit as offshoots of China.
Japan took a lot of ideas from China, but they also had no problem with adapting to different ways. (Korea is a similar example that happened much later).
Vietnam was a Chinese Colony for a thousand years, but they aren't quite the same thing as China nor the same thing as Japan and Korea.
I wonder if a better way to take this could have been to describe the thought process in terms of geographic factors, (a la "Guns, Gems, and Steel" by Jared Diamond). To wit: China was a huge, self contained hegemon and it was fairly homogeneous, and so there was no conflict of ideas because no one would ever meet someone with different ideas. And therefore no reason to develop these thought processes.
Japan and Korea were both smaller places, and so they had to develop the techniques of dealing with new ideas.
Greece was composed of a number of small city-states, and so is there any mystery that they were used to working with and evaluating new ideas?
Even then, to treat it in that way would need some qualifications. People in coastal places like Guangdong and Fujian have been merchants and seafaring people from hundreds of years, and some new ideas are something to which they have become accustomed.
I also have questions with this type of reasoning in general. If you have an idea of the principles of Darwinian evolution (such as it is), it doesn't mean that you can go forward and predict the existence of when antibiotic resistance will occur or what new species will exist thousands of years before the event.
And if you can go backwards and create ex post facto explanations, then so what?
And then the explanations that a person wants depends on which questions they ask. (I lived in China for many years. 11, by my count.) And I noticed that Chinese people had the most difficult time using processes that had already been developed.
So, there would be an International Baccalaureate curriculum that was already developed, but they could not maintain the program because they just could not follow the instructions in the way that they were detailed.
If that happens to have been my slice of reality, would I have predicted it from this book? Or, is it just a trivial empirical observation about something that I should take as read for future reference?
There's also discussion of a number of "big picture" theories. Marxism. Sociology. These theories are huge, broad and expansive, but they are extremely useless for limited, specific, REAL LIFE predictions.
So, it happens that Continental Europeans make bigger theories. So now what?
It feels like this author is trying to develop the intellectual Foundation to explain something whose existence he could never have predicted anyway.
And so the (fourth) question comes again..... "So what?"
If your time to read books is limited, I recommend that you give this one a miss. And read the Jared Diamond book in preference to it.