Analysis Of Richard E. Nisbett's The Geography Of Thought
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Richard E. Nisbett's book 'The Geography of Thought' is an excellent work in trying to understand the brain from the various versions of humanities and social science unlike its conventional biological context. The book offers a valuable insight into how Asians and Westerners think differently and the ways in which their culture and perspective to understand the world differ. Through this book, Prof. Nisbett challenges and rejects the phenomenon of universal cognitive processes by, making a successfully case in which not all cultures reason the same way nor do they promote the same principals of reasoning. But, the book doesn’t stress on showing all the ways in which cognition differs across these cultures. The book has some great account of the major differences between ancient -…show more content… The author gives credit to one of his Chinese student which made him interested in researching and examining the psychological and cultural differences among Europeans and Westerners. Thus, his studies repeatedly showed how Chinese see everything as interrelated whereas Westerners are more likely to think within the scope of individual objects or people.
The book highlights an interesting point, which is often raised by Linguistic Anthropologist regarding the influence of cultural difference found in American and Chinese children's books. It shows how Americans describe actions by an individual; while Chinese describes information regarding relationships between people. Later in the book, the author describes the way children are raised by parents from different cultures as in Asia, Europe and America. An example from a study which they conducted on children from both the cultures - when given a series of pictures (monkey, cow and banana) to pair together, an Asian child was more likely to group a monkey with banana because monkey eats banana