The Geography of Thought, by Richard Nisbett

tinkertailor wrote about this book in February this year, and it has been on my "to read" list ever since.

Richard Nisbett sets out in this book to show how Asians and Westerners think in completely different ways. For example, take this seemingly simple question: which two of the following three words should be grouped together?
panda, monkey, banana

If you're Asian, you'll probably chose monkey and banana; if you're Western, you'll probably choose panda and monkey. When I read this teaser on tinkertailor's blog, I was intrigued and so asked all of my Asian friends this question. All of them chose monkey and banana. Why?

Tinkertailor doesn't tell you, but I will. The reason why this is so is because Asians tend to see the world in terms of relationships (monkey eats banana), while Westerners tend to see the world in categories (pandas and monkeys are animals).

Westerners love to categorise. A dog is a mammal and so is warm blooded and produces milk. Asians are less curious about categories than in how things are related to one another. For example, the Chinese once thought that the movement of the stars affected important events on earth and so they studied the movement intently. Yet when they realised that the stars moved in predictable ways, they completely lost interest, and thus failed to produce a model. While the Westerners were the first to model the stars, the Chinese were the first to realise that the moon affected the tides on earth, a relationship that the Westerners overlooked.

How Asians and Westerners view the individual is different too. While the Westerner thinks that being distinctive and unique is very important, and that the personal agency of an individual is pivotal to happiness (take for example John F Kennedy's paraphrase of the Greek definition of happiness: “The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence”), Asians prefer the collective. An early primer in America starts with "See Dick. See Dick run. See Dick run and play.", while an early primer for the Chinese starts with "Little brother is sitting on big brother's shoulders. Big brother loves little brother."

Nisbett concludes that no one is completely Asian or completely Western. He does experiments where he manages to succesfully "prime" those from Hong Kong to a Asian or a Western view either by showing them pictures or by reading them passages. I suspect that this is true for me too. After a fairly long visit to the US, I come home frustrated about having to live at home, and with an itch to "grab hold of life by its horns". When I first step on US soil after living in Singapore, I get boiling mad when I perceive US officers being rude to my parents.

If you are dating someone from the other side of the world, or have friends, family, or business there, it would be good to read this book. It explains a lot of misunderstandings, and as tinkertailor says, I wish I had read this earlier.

Find it in the library here (Singapore) or here (the rest of the world).

(Why Europens sing at soccer matches and Americans don't, the individual vs. the collective. Link via daryl)