The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why [A Book Report]

Dominic Timothy

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14 min read

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Jun 6

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Written by Richard E. Nisbett. Puublished in 2003.

Introduction

In the integrated, interconnected and inter-dependent state of the modern world order, when it comes to subjects like human nature and human thinking, we tend to conceptualise as universalists. The writer of The Geography of Thought, Professor Richard E. Nisbett, was himself a self-proclaimed universalist in the domain of cognition, in line with the traditions of Hume, Locke and Mill. However, after embarking on a careful study, across a number of related but varied fields, from sociology to neuroscience, including his own research with his students and colleagues, he came to a set of conclusions that will probably be more contentious today than they would have been at the time of the publication of this work in 2003: that there are subtle, measurable, functionally meaningful differences between the peoples of the East (Nisbett narrows this to China, Korea and Japan) and the West (Common Wealth Countries, USA and Western Europe), especially in terms of cognition. These differences are in fact apparent in the social ordering, culture, customs, perception tendencies and even language of the two disparate cultural blocks. It is his assertion that there are two rather different systems of thought and perception, and that they originate in the distant origins of each civilisation.

Confucius VS Aristotle

These two profound, unique, immeasurably influential thinkers were, to one degree or another, expressing and/or re-asserting and/or refining some or most of the perceptual and cognitive habits or inclinations of their culture. They were products as well as producers of philosophy and human thought, most of which was congruent with and stemming form the zeitgeist of their time-place. Why, for Nisbett, is this important to note? Because he uses these to characters as synechoches, and as paragons, as well as direct source material for referencing the original ideas that shaped the later civilizational epochs and people. He begins by outlining the Greek origins of western thought.

Aristotle, Ancient Greece, the Atom and Western Thought

The Greeks, to varying applications and degrees, were concerned with discovering and codifying the fundamental nature of the world. And they did so with presuppositions of individualism (which might not look like what we think of it as today, it should be noted) and a static, predictable world. Atypical of the time, the ancient Greeks — even their peasants — held and prided themselves in a sense of individual indentity and personal agency. Furthermore, unique to the ancient Greeks, important matters of state were often decided by public referendum rather than top-down, authoritarian will. Another feature of the Greek mind was their inquisitiveness — particularly in terms of objects in the world. These factors — an unprecedented propensity for personal agency, a cultural preference (again, relative to the time) for rhetoric over violence, and a natural curiosity for the physical world — perhaps explain the enormous contributions Greek civilization made to the fields of physics, astronomy, rational philosophy and axiomatic geometry, to name but a few. While several other great ancient civilizations, such as the Mesopotamian and Egyptians made impressive discoveries in these and other fields, only the Greeks aimed to explain through the underlying or first principles, the findings of their observations in the natural world. Suffice to say, one of the cornerstone civilizations of the western world was a fascinating, unique, widely influential place.

For the ancient Greeks, the world was static and predictable, populated by objects whose essences could be studied and understood — like the atom! And indeed, for the people of that time-place, they would have said it ought to have been done. Consider, for example, a thought from Aristotle: the attributes of forms have a reality distinct from the forms themselves. A desk is a hard object. There is an abstraction or attribute from that: hardness. This ‘hardness’ is an attribute in the abstract, shared by various forms: sword, rock, horn. Which properties of an object could change without the object changing? Interesting, useful thought experiment, right? It might be surprising to note here that for the ancient Chinese philosopher, this entire line of inquiry would be deemed foolish. Nisbett might suggest this to be a good time to turn to the East’s version of Greece: ancient China. What were their foundational beliefs, orientations and philosophical predispostions?

Confucius, the Collective and Asian Thought

For the great philosophers of the East, the world was in an unerring state of flux, replete with paradox. Taoism, along with Confucianism and, from a much later date, Buddhism, form the bedrock of this civilizational antithesis to Greek thought. Firstly, Taosim offers a kind of mystical metaphysics: you break your leg this morning, but the consription just arrived — was it good to break your leg? What if the army won a grand, heroic battle without you? Still a lucky break? There is no certainty, for the Taoist; all the natural world is in chaotic, non-controllable flux. For Confucianists, a prime directive would be maintaining the ‘Golden Mean,’ to be excessive in nothing, to follow the ‘Middle-Way.’ Toaism and Confucianism both hold intriguing conceptions of reality, ethical precepts and insights into what makes a good human life. One aspect that they have firmly in common is that they are both less concerned with finding the truth than with finding the ‘Tao’ or the way to live in the world.

In ancient China, every person was first and foremost a member of a collective, of a larger group of fellow people. Unlike the Greeks, the individual was not a complete, self-sufficient unit, which carried its identity and meaning across time and settings; the family was closer to that kind of a construct; the clan, closer still. Harmony and peaceful relations with familial relatives was the good life, was to be memorialised and celebrated. Chinese music was monophonic; all musicians and singers would play the same melody at the same time. They disdained debate and particularly public discourse or rhetoric. To them, the individual agency that the Greeks so relished was best realised collectively, as a familial, congruent group. In terms of their relationship with the natural world, the Chinese were technologically more advanced than the Greeks: irrigation, deep drilling, the magnetic compass, quantitative cartography and more. Here, unlike the Greeks, who had a tendency towards abstraction in their inquiry with the natural world, we see a supreme principle of pragmatisim underpinning the Confucian, ancient Chinese world.

It is not contentious to say that much of the West owes its philosophical underpinings to ancient Greek thought. This is similarly the case of the East, rooted in ancient China. Both these disparate geopolitical regions have enjoyed an inheritance and tradition that is thousands of years old. It is also not contentious to say that these philosophical achievements had major, multifarious impacts, across generations, in various social structures, laws, customs and the belief architecture of the inheritors of these ancient philosophies. What might be contentious, however, is that these two almost equally ancient, roughly equally influential traditions hold to this day, in the modern twenty first century, an effect in social characteristics which render the most modern inheritors of each tradition — West and East — to be quite different from one another.

Persistent Differences

We live in a globalised, highly integrated, somewhat borderless world, within which cultures and peoples from various backgrounds intermingle, befriend one another, perform commercial and other funtions — and even marry! This has become especially true since the publication of The Geograhy of Thought, which predates the advent of social media as we know it now. The current state of the world, in 2023, is saliently interconnected. Despite this, though, Nisbett argues that there are these persistent, subtle but powerful differences in the nature and tendencies of thought between the East and the West. Again, for Nisbett, the focus here specifically is on the East as China, Japan and Korea, while the west would be US, UK and Western Europe.

Modern human societies are more diverse and interconnected than they gave ever been

Nisbett argues that the heritage of ancient Greece, of Aristotle and Plato, of the philosophical tendences and cultural assumptions of those people of that great civilization, has left, in the least, an indelible mark, or, at the most, defined the West. The same is true for the East, and their current cultural values, assumption and social preferences. These are all, according to Nisbett, the result of the work of their ancient forebears, codifying and enshrining and then mandating their own distinct philosophical precepts. Take a look at the net array of differences as they stand today.

Take for instance, law. In the US, compared to Japan, there are forty times more lawyers. Furthermore, the means by and protocol under which these lawyers practice their trade differ considerably. US lawyers aim to resolve conflict in terms of clear winners and losers, under the rule of the law, a system-based application of the idea of justice, theoretically applied equally to all individuals. In Japan, not unlike other east asian countries, this is not the case. Lawyers here are seen and function more as mediators, or negotiators, designated and directed to mitigate conflict and create harmony between the disputing parties. Sometimes, these disputes cross boundaries of what westerners would call human rights infringements. Surely, East and West treat human rights the same?

In the West, broadly speaking, it is generally accepted that our societies our composed of self-contained, free individuals. These individuals then, enter into in social contracts with other individuals, and with states and/or coporations. Theoretically, each single individual operating within this society is afforded equal rights. When an individual, state or corporate entity contravenes the rights of any one indivdual, according to the western social game, so to speak, the rules have been broken. In the east, however, a radically different conception of the individual has, for thousands of years, been more commonplace. In fact, the greater society, more than the individual, seems to bear the set of qualities of individuality, of wholeness.

Perceiving Reality

Nisbett cites research by the developmental psychologists Jessica Han, Michelle Leichtman and Qi Wang, in which American and Chinese children were asked to report on daily events, what they did before bedtime and how they spent their last birthday. There were a few salient differences noted between Chinese and American children, including: (1) American children made self-references at a rate three times higher than their Chinese counterparts; (2) Chinese Children described many small, seemingly innocuous events in a ‘brief, matter-of-fact’ manner, whereas the American children spoke with less structure and direction; and (3) American children made twice as many references to their own internal states. This notion that Asians tend to have a more holistic perception of events is demonstrated in more studies.

The social psychologists Dev Cohen and Alex Gunz showed that Asian students tend to take into perspective the orientation of other people, even when they are the centre of attention. The researchers took two groups, one was consisted mostly of Canadians, and the other Asian students predominently from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and South Korea. They then asked the participants to recall specific situations in which they were at the center of attention in a social setting. The results were clear to the researchers: the North American students tended to report the scene from their original point of view, looking at it from their own remembered perception; while the Asian students reported it from the perspective of bystanders to the scene, looking at themselves the way an observer might have. These results have been discovered by Western and Eastern researchers both.

‘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.’

A Japanese student of Nisbett, Taka Masuda, felt compelled to investigate this phenomenon further after he had a strong case of culture shock at a college football game when his fellow students kept standing up in front of him, blocking his view of the game. He found this to be incredibly rude behaviour. Because, in Japanese culture, from a very early age, they are taught to have ‘eyes in the back of your head’. That is, not to be preoccupied with sneak attacks; but to be cognizant of and prepared for accomodating to the wishes and concerns of those around oneself. He took a group of Japanese students from Kyoto University and a group from the University of Michigan, and showed each group a series of vignettes involving the movement of fish inside a tank. After that, he asked these two groups of students to recall what they had seen in the short scenes. This study yielded interesting results. Japanese students made 60 percent more references to background elements, such as bubbles, rocks and water, than American students. Perhaps most saliently, Japanese students almost always began their description by saying something like ‘it looked like a pond’, speaking to the context or environment or frame within which they perceived the scene, whereas the American students were three times more likely to focus on references to the different fish that they saw: ‘there was a big fish, maybe a trout, moving off to the left’. In a follow-up study, Professor Nisbett teamed up with his student to take this further.

This intrigued both researchers such that they pursued a follow up study. Masuda and Nisbett showed various kinds of animals to Americans and Japanese students, in varying contexts. They measured the speed of precessing the information and also the accuracy of recognitition of the participants. So, they tested the participants’s ability to recognise these animals against different backgrounds, at various speeds. They found that the Japanese students were more affected by the manipulation of the backgrounds of these images; they made more errors and were slower to respond when an item appeared against a novel background. With the American students however, neither their speed nor accuracy of recognition were impaired by the changing of the background.

These studies are just a few among very many, almost all of which demonstrate positive evidence for the thesis posited by Nisbett. Asians tend to pay more attention to the environment than Westerners. They tend to see things through a wide-angle lens, compared to the Westerners narrower, object-oriented vision. When navigating a problem, Westerners are less affected by background orientation and stimulus; Asians tend to be affeted in perception if the context or background changes. Westerners orient their perception of reality from within their own self-persepctive; for Asians, even when they are the center of attention, it is from the outside, from the persepctive of onlookers, back onto themselves.

Ordering Reality

Imagine three images:(x) a cow, (y) a chicken and (z) patch of grass. Now, focus on the cow. Which goes with it — y or z? Well, if you are a Westerner, probably you would associate or categorise x with y, the cow with the chicken. Categories are salient to the Western mind, and so it is natural for them to order objects accordingly. Chickens, cows, pigs, ducks and so on — they are grouped together naturally, reflexively, and logically by the western mind. When Easterners, however, are posed with this set of items, they tend to group x with z. Why? For East Asians, categories are less salient; the relationship between things, and the background context within which they exist — these dynamics are salient. Cows eat grass. Therefore, x goes with z.

“There is the whiteness of the horse or the whiteness of the snow in ancient Chinese philosophy, but not whiteness in the abstract, detachable concept that can be applied to almost anything.”

Again, from ancient Greece to ancient China, we see the through lines of a heritage of thought prescriptions and predilections, leading to the modern set of cognitive dispositions separating the East from the West. For the ancient Chinese, and their philosophic descendants, the Greek notion of ordering by categorisation and rule-definition of the state of the natural world would have seemed irrational. That is so because for them the natural world was constantly in chaotic, unpredictable change. Why bother seeking out the fundamental, permanent states or atomic structures of a universe that is totally impermanent? These two antithetical paradigms persist today, albeit in a diluted, intermingled sort of form. We might ask — what does this bode for the future? Nisbett suggests that the answer has already begun to present itself.

The Future: Francis Fukuyama vs Samuel Huntington

Broadly speaking, there are two general camps into which the predictions of the geopolitical future of the world order could be divided. The first is that aligned with Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist who famously claimed that history is over, and that capitalism and democracy had won, and that gradually we would converge into an increasingly cohesive, mutually inclusive world, within which Western free market neoliberal capitalism would reign as the default setting; the other is Samuel Huntington’s, who holds that the future is divergent, that while capitalism has taken over the default setting in terms of economic policy and geopolitical thinking, a people like the modern Japanese, say, are still about as different from modern Americans, in the core of their social principles and aspirations, than they were 100 years or so ago — an no amount of denim jeans, Netflix and Pepsi-drinking is about to change that. Huntington points out that Western minds tend to conflate industrialisation, increased wealth and social mobility, greater literacy and urbanzation, with westernization. But, in places like China, Japan, even South Korea, it is not clear at all that the values of the populations of these obviously developed places mirrors that of western minds. Therefore, Huntington argues, the trend, globally, in the future, will be towards divergence, rather than convergence, as Fukuyama sees it.

Nisbett posits a third conception of the future global order. He argues that both the West and the East will take on the values and become more like the other. Take for instance the increasing popularity and proliferation of Buddhist temples across the West; or the increasing open-mindedness Western doctors have towards Eastern conceptions of health and wellbeing as a holistic paradigm; physicists, such as Niels Bor, place great emphasis on the influence of Eastern ideas on their theories and scientific discoveries. In recent socio-psychological studies in the East, younger generations are becoming increasingly western, in at least a few different domains, such as their personal aspirations and their self-appraisal. The idea here is that East and West may integrate into a ‘blended world where social and cognitive aspects of both regions are represented but transformed,’ but whilst still maintaining a degree of separation and uniqueness. Since the publication of this book, under the sway of international forces like social media and the decline of traditional values, maybe this is even more true today, twenty years later.

Conclusion

The crux of what Professor Nisbett is arguing here is not that there are genetic differences in cognition, or value, or quality, between the peoples of the East and the West. He takes an admittedly broad conception of the most prominent, dominant philosophical structures of North East Asian cultures — which, to be fair, is probably more diverse in 2023 than it was in 2003 — and that of the West — which, again, is probably quite a bit more diverse and multicultural than 20 years ago — and argues that the social structures, themselves heirlooms of the preoccupations, philosophies and tenets of their precursor civilisations, arguing that the cognition of the people within these structures were and are still profoundly affected by them. As was stated above, this should not be taken with too much surprise; social structures, customs and traditions do nothing if they do not curb, influence and motivate the cognitive processes of those who populate and employ it. Nisbett’s work serves as a useful contrasting and in-depth description of the East and West sociocultural divide: to demonstrate the various subtle and obvious differences in perception, interpersonal prioritisation tendencies and cognition in general.