A review by jonsploder
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why by Richard Nisbett

1.0

Complete garbage, author is excited by their idea that westerners and the ancient Chinese think differently (individually vs collectively), and tries to find facts to support this idea. Shallow, repetitive, bloated, and worse illogical and factually wrong. A perfect example of how poor the authors thinking is his random fact insertion to make himself seem well read. E.g. stating that “that the moon caused the tides eluded even Galileo, unlike the Chinese” and of course this is because the Chinese think of the system as a whole rather than individual objects. Well it didn’t elude Galileo, he disagreed with it because there was no reason to believe it as far as he was aware - this was a well known and believed suspicion, and one of the reasons astrology was regarded as a science for a while. So the fact that the moons orbit DOES cause the tides is not at all important… what’s important is the reasoning for why it causes the tides if you want to argue it. The fact some random Chinese “knew it” (as well as some random superstitious Europeans too!), is stretched as a throwaway to support his argument.

Too many poorly thought pieces of evidence were put in, so it was hard to trust any of the material that seemed more interesting.