Book review: The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why, by Richard E. Nisbett.
It is often said that travel is a good way to improve one’s understanding of other cultures.
The Geography of Thought discredits that saying, by being full of examples of cultural differences that 99.9% of travelers will overlook.
Here are a few of the insights I got from the book, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gotten from visiting Asia frequently:
There’s no Chinese word for individualism—selfish seems to be the closest equivalent.
Infants in the US are often forced to sleep in a separate bed, often in a separate room. That’s rather uncommon in Asia. Does this contribute to US individualism? Or is it just a symptom?
There are no Asians in Lake Wobegon. I.e. Asians are rather reluctant to rate themselves as above average.
Westerners want contracts to be unconditionally binding, whereas Asians want contracts to change in response to unexpected contexts.
Asians are likely to consider justice in the abstract, by-the-book Western sense to be rigid and unfeeling.
Chinese justice is an art, not a science.
Origins of Western Culture
Those cultural differences provide hints about why science as we know it developed in the West, and not in Asia.
I read Geography of Thought in order to expand my understanding of some ideas in Henrich’s WEIRDest People.
Nisbett disagrees somewhat with Henrich about when WEIRD culture arose, writing a fair amount about the Western features of ancient Greek culture.
Nisbett traces some of the east-west differences to the likelihood that the Greeks met more apparent contradiction than did Asians, via trade with other cultures. That led them to devote more attention to logical thought. (Here’s an odd claim from Nisbett: ancient Greeks were unwilling to adopt the concept of zero, because “it represented a contradiction”).
Nisbett agrees with Henrich that there was some sort of gap between ancient Greek culture and the Reformation, but believes the gap came later than Henrich does. These two quotes are about all that Nisbett has to say about the gap:
As the West became primarily agricultural in the Middle Ages, it became less individualistic.
The Romans brought a gift for rational organization and something resembling the Chinese genius for technological achievement, and - after a trough lasting almost a millennium—their successors, the Italians, rediscovered these values … The Reformation also brought a weakened commitment to the family and other in-groups coupled with a greater willingness to trust out-groups
Neither Nisbett nor Henrich convinced me that they know much about any such period of reduced individualism—they don’t seem to consider it important.
Reductionism and Categorization
I used to interpret attacks on reductionism as attacks on a valuable aspect of science. I now see an alternate understanding: a clash of two cognitive styles, reflecting differing priors about how much we can usefully simplify our models of the world.
The Western goal of finding really simple models likely helped generate the study of physics. I’m guessing it also contributed a bit to the West’s role in eradicating infectious diseases.
However, it may have been counter-productive at dealing with age-related diseases. Let’s look at the example of Alzheimer’s.
Western researchers have been obsessed with the simple model of beta amyloid being the sole cause of the disease. Drugs targeting beta amyloid have been failing at a rate that is worse than what we should expect due to random chance if they were placebos. Yet some researchers still pursue drugs that target beta amyloid.
Some of that focus on single causes is due to the way that medical research depends on patents, but don’t forget that patent law is a product of Western culture.
Meanwhile, outside of the mainstream, there are some signs of progress at treating Alzheimer’s using approaches that follow a more holistic cognitive style. They posit multiple, overlapping factors that contribute to dementia, and entertain doubts about how to classify various versions of dementia.
I also see some hints that traditional Asian medicine has done better than mainstream Western medicine at treating Alzheimer’s. The results still seem poor, but the risk/reward ratio seems good enough that I’m trying a few of them.
High modernism, combined with excessive reification of categories, may have led the medical establishment on some dead-end paths.
In addition, Western medicine has been much more eager to adopt surgery than China - presumably due to an expectation that cutting out “the cause” of a disease will cure it. I’m moderately confident that Western medicine does too much surgery. I don’t have any guess about whether Asian cultures do too little.
Chuang Tzu is quoted as saying, “Classifying or limiting knowledge fractures the greater knowledge.”
it’s been suggested that the distinction between “human” and “animal” insisted upon by Westerners made it particularly hard to accept the concept of evolution. … Evolution was never controversial in the East because there was never an assumption that humans sat atop a chain of being and had somehow lost their animality.
Westerners needed to overcome the habit of classifying humans and animals as categories with different essences. Asians are much less comfortable with attaching importance to categories and essences, so evolution required less change in their worldviews.
Doesn’t the Western lead in reductionist science conflict with the evidence of Asian students doing well at math and science? Nisbett says that’s partly explained by Asians working harder:
due at least in part to the greater Western tendency to believe that behavior is the result of fixed traits. Americans are inclined to believe that skills are qualities you do or don’t have, so there’s not much point in trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Asians tend to believe that everyone, under the right circumstances and with enough hard work, can learn to do math.
There’s some important tension between this and the message of The Cult of Smart. Nisbett tells us that American math-teaching isn’t as good as the Asian version. But that can’t be the full answer—Cult of Smart indicates that schools rejected key elements of Western culture in the past few decades. Key parts of that trend happened just before Geography of Thought was published.
So the US seems to be adopting parts of Asian culture that make schools more cruel, and more effective at producing excellent graduates. But that trend seems unstable, due to the delusion that it’s promoting the Western ideal of equality.
IQ
For a long time, I believed that the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test was culture-neutral.
Nisbett compares an example from a CFIT test (like Raven’s, but with “culture fair” in the name) with an example from an IQ-like Chinese test. The Chinese test is more focused on relationships between parts. It was easy for me to see that the two tests were optimized for mildly different notions of intelligence, so I was unsurprised when Nisbett reported that Chinese subjects showed higher scores on the Chinese test, and Americans showed higher scores on CFIT.
I’m a bit frustrated that Nisbett is vague about the magnitude of the differences, and that he cites only an unpublished manuscript that he co-authored. Publish it now, Nisbett!
Both notions of intelligence seem quite compatible with common notions of smartness, differing only in which skill subsets ought to be emphasized most. So this isn’t like the usual commentary on bias in IQ tests that’s looking for an excuse to reject intelligence testing.
Intentions
I’m surprised to find large differences in how much various cultures care about distinguishing intentional and accidental harm, with WEIRD people caring the most, and a few cultures barely distinguishing them at all.
Nisbett hints that some of that is due to the WEIRD expectation that actions have a single cause, and can’t result from a combination of intentional and accidental factors. Some of it might also be due to Westerners doing more causal attribution in general.
Virtue Ethics
I wonder how cultural differences affect attitudes toward ethics?
In particular, I wonder whether Asian cultures care less about virtue ethics, due to less influence from Fundamental Attribution Error?
Some hasty research suggests that the answers are controversial.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:
What makes the characterization of Confucianism as a virtue ethic controversial are more specific, narrower senses of “virtue” employed in Western philosophical theories. Tiwald (2018) distinguishes between something like the broad sense of virtue and a philosophical usage that confers on qualities or traits of character explanatory priority over right action and promoting good consequences. Virtue ethics in this sense is a competitor to rule deontological and consequentialist theories. There simply is not enough discussion in the Confucian texts, especially in the classical period, that is addressed to the kind of questions these Western theories seek to answer.
There are other narrower senses of “virtue” that are clearly mischaracterizations when applied to Confucian ethics. Virtues might be supposed to be qualities that people have or can have in isolation from others with whom they interact or from their communities, societies, or culture. Such atomistic virtues could make up ideals of the person that in turn can be specified or realized in social isolation. … influential critics of the “virtue” characterization of Confucian ethics … seem to be supposing that the term is loaded with such controversial presuppositions.
Conclusion
Geography of Thought is a great choice if you want to understand the cultural differences between the US and China. It complements WEIRDest People fairly well.
Geography of Thought is mostly about two sets of cultures, with little attention to cultures other than those of eastern Asia and the West.
Nisbett seems a bit more rigorous than Henrich, but Henrich’s cultural knowledge seems much broader. Geography of Thought doesn’t quite satisfy the “and Why” part of it’s subtitle, whereas Henrich makes an impressive attempt at answering that question.
This review does a marvelous job of navigating a minefield.
Yep.
The Chinese word for individualism 个人主义 is an import from France. I usually say “small families” or “weak family ties” instead.
This is very true. My two closest Taiwanese friends suffer from this problem and don’t even realize it. I realize I suffer from this error and I still fail to appropriately compensate.
Some East Asian ideas are easy to express. Sinocentrism is easy to explain. So are tyrannical schools and extended families. But the aspect of East Asian culture I have the hardest time explaining to Westerners is the flexibility of abstract concepts. This flexibility of thinking is deeply connected to business, religion and political theory. It is foundational to at least one entire intellectual system.
Orwellian (dualist) double-think is a trap. But non-dualist (Daoist) double-think is critical.
What I like about the above quote is its grounding in economic reality. It’s easy to get lost in the clouds generalizing about cultures’ philosophical ideas. It’s much harder when discussing business standards.
Part of why Chinese people want contracts to change in response to unexpected contexts is they live in a laissez-faire economic system compared to the Free World. Flexible contracts are natural law. Inflexible contracts arise from the unnatural rule of law.
Western philosophy confused me in high school and college. It still does. To this day I do not understand how “justice” can be a fundamental value (in the most general value-criterion sense of the word).
Well stated. Obviously yes, but I’m not comfortable stating my precise views on a public forum.
I wonder to what extent this is connected to Asians’ reluctance to rate one’s self above average.
Math and science as handed down for most students is sufficiently mechanical to perform unthinkingly without comprehending reductionist science. Newton’s Laws of Motion are true because the book, the test, the teacher, the government and your future boss all say so.
This is an impressively concise sentence. The idea is important and complex enough to deserve its own post.
I don’t know about “error” but East Asian cultures do perform less “fundamental attribution”.
One more thing
Another difference the review doesn’t address is “cultural appropriation”. Offence at cultural appropriation is not a thing in East Asia—at least among the major ethnic groups. Rather, the opposite is true.
Offense at cultural appropriation is a pretty new thing in the West, too, rather than being a deep and long-standing tradition.
Given China’s history of communism, I found this confusing. However, I know very little about China and you seem to know more. Can you elaborate?
The paragraph in question uses wordplay to poke fun at John Locke, the Chinese Communist Party and American-style capitalism. It requires historical context to understand.
“Communism” describes an economic system, a political party, a political theory, an ideology and so on. China is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is a political party. China is “Communist” in the sense it is ruled by the “Communists” [political party]. China was communist [economic system] in the decades after the CCP took power in 1949. However, in recent decades, the CCP has dismantled the communist economic system in favor of a capitalist economic system. Nixon’s 1972 visit to China is a useful landmark for when the communist Chinese Community Party began turning itself into the capitalist Chinese Communist Party.
Today’s China is hands-off when it comes to small-scale business matters. Compared to the United States, there is less government regulation in China of everything except speech, guns and politics. Ironically, China is now more capitalist [economic system] than the United States and the European Union.
That’s the joke poking fun at American-style capitalism and the CCP. What about John Locke?
John Locke is famous for his idea of “natural law”. His idea of “natural law” is not based in science and is therefore not based in nature. It is based on a particular artificial political philosophy. “Natural law” is relevant to the capitalism-communism joke because the capitalist ideology is philosophically entangled with the Enlightenment myth of natural law. I poke fun at John Locke by comparing his idea of “natural law” to what really happens in the absence of intervention by Leviathan (government).
Isn’t there more regulation of internal movement? People from the country being blocked from moving to the cities, etc.?
Also, while there may be less regulation, it also seems that the government is in general more powerful in China. It has more license to arrest people, shut down businesses, install political operatives in businesses, surveil people, order lockdowns, etc. than western governments, which struggle to cut through their own red tape when they do those things. Or is this a wrong impression?
You’re not wrong. I forgot about the hukou system. It’s also true that China’s government is more involved with large-scale businesses. You have to play more politics to build a business empire in China than in the USA.
Otherwise, especially when it comes down to small fry (which are the majority of businesses), national politics is just one aspect of the business environment. Also important to small businesses is things like paperwork, regulation and—perhaps most importantly—the chance of getting sued. The United States is a very litigious society where you (usually) have to pay high legal fees even if you win. China is less litigious because it is rare for anyone in their right mind to willingly call down attention from the government.
China is not known for its worker protections and environmental regulations. There are far fewer zoning laws in China than the United States. I reckon mundane annoyances are more likely to kill a small business than is a visit from the secret police. (This is not necessarily a bad thing. I like living in a city with breathable air.)
I also suspect organized crime plays a bigger role in China than in the United States for small businesses. This isn’t a good thing, but it does technically fall under “low government involvement”.
[Edit: Fixed typo.]
According to the World Economic Forum website:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/why-chinas-state-owned-companies-still-have-a-key-role-to-play/
Some excerpts that I found interesting enough to make note of when I read the book
This is so funny. It reminds me of a period of time when Mao Zedong ordered the whole country to self-criticize. You had to say something embarrassing in order to to not be a traitor but it also had to be harmless enough to not get anyone into real trouble.
Wow. This is is an idea that, to me, falls under “extraordinary, if true”. And…I can’t think of any evidence against it. I look forward to discussing this with my East Asian friends. It probably affects only Asians who grew up in Asia. The Asian-Americans who dominated my high school debate club seem to be unaffected.
I feel this perspective has had an outsized impact on the field of AI safety.
This surprised me when I entered the world of Silicon Valley.
This reminds me of a colleague who was invited to sit on a panel at a conference in South Korea a few years ago. He (being American) had no idea how much of a faux pas it would be to ask an actual unscripted question. It’s still hard for me to understand, but this post helped.
Live in a different culture for long enough, and you can’t help but to have it influence your thinking:
Independent-minded Western culture, versus interdependence-minded East Asian culture:
Western thought that emphasizes individuals detached of context, versus East Asian thought that emphasizes relationships and contexts:
The idea of a contextual personality is probably connected to collectivism, and vice-versa. The words “individualism” and “collectivism” bother me for reasons I have trouble pinning down. “Context-dependent personality” and “context-independent personality” do not bother me in the same way.
I will wager that is because individualism and collectivism are intended to be context-independent category words.
Westerners classify things according to the how much individual members of a class resemble each other, and East Asians according to the relationships between the classes:
My girlfriend, who’s into homesteading, thought the cow goes with the grass without knowing the context of the question.
China is 45% rural, while the US is 14% rural. Maybe the fact that the US appears to be much more urbanized leads more of its people to lean on abstract groupings? What would the results be if restricted to rural vs. rural or urban vs. urban samples of the population of each country? Even then, I would have to assume the average Chinese college student tends to have more connections with rural lifestyles than the average American college student.
This study reminds me of a similar association-based intelligence test given to rural inhabitants of Soviet Siberia before the Industrial Revolution hit them. They, like the rural Chinese, classified objects together by use instead of taxonomy. The Soviet study is supplemental evidence that the difference comes from urban vs rural distinction rather than one based on philosophical lineage.
Another reason the average Chinese person has more connections with rural lifestyles is how hometown villages work. An enduring theme in Chinese culture is that the city is a place you work but your ancestral village is “home”.
I’m Dutch, and not into homesteading or anything like that at all, but I also chose the cow going with the grass. Maybe it’s because I’m not a native speaker of English? Do you interpret ‘goes with’ as ‘is more like’? I’d have thought it means ‘belongs together’. (Of course the cow and the chicken also belong together, in the sense that both live on a farm, but ‘one eats the other’ seems like a more direct relationship.)
“X goes with Y” is vague in English. Even “belongs together” could mean that the two things belong together in a category, rather than belonging together physically.
My intuition is that American kids are pretty used to exercises where you’re supposed to sort things by classifications like “animal vs. non-animal”, so they’re to some extent expecting that when you show them this kind of picture.
To be more explicit: I think in a visual test like this in English, “What goes with this?” would almost never mean “physically belongs in the same place” or “causally relate”—except as special cases of “belongs in the same category”. An exception would be something like clothing/fashion, where “does X go with Y?” is used idiomatically to mean “do X and Y look nice if you wear them together?”
Right, I think it’s just hard to interpret the results of this test.
When you put it like that I feel like the homesteading answer is more correct and results from increased knowledge absent from the urban population.
Woah! These examples are wild.
Curated. I found this a helpful window into “how does culture affect cognition”. I also appreciated Isur and Kaj’s comments for adding a lot of additional details.
This is a fascinating article about how the concept of originality differs in some Eastern cultures https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just-as-good-as-an-original
That might have some interesting implications for where mind uploading will initially become popular.
Just happened to notice an interesting paper on another cultural difference: in the US, children who have better self-control tend to believe more strongly in free will; in China, Singapore and Peru, self-control and belief in free will are not correlated.
The authors hypothesize that this is because of different cultural models about the nature of behavior: US culture explains self-control as a property of the individual, whereas the culture in the other countries explains it as a property of the social context the individual is in. As a result, when US children successfully practice self-control, they see it as affirming the existence of free will, whereas when children in other countries practice self-control, they see it as affirming the effect of their context on their behavior.
Great review, and very interesting. I’m now really curious about the implications for Hanson and Simler’s The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Would an analysis of hidden motives in East Asian subjects require an entirely new book? For that matter, I wonder what kind of things would show up on Hanson’s blog if he lived over there for a while.
I’m really not convinced by this review, the excerpts linked from the books, or the theory-crafting in the comment section.
I’m reading a lot of just-so stories, but not a lot of evidence, and the evidence there is seems like exactly the kind of papers that would fall prey to the replication crisis.
I’m surprised by this, because those seem like the kind of insights I would expect to get by traveling.
I would, though, expect to make mistakes on what to generalize—e.g. not knowing whether my hosts sleep with their baby as an individual quirk or a cultural norm.
What does “Asia” refer to here? As far as I can see your excerpts mention only one country in Asia, namely China. Do these findings about “Asia” apply only to China (and countries culturally related to China, such as Japan)? Or do some of them also apply to other countries in Asia such as India?
Similarly, does “the West” mean specifically “the United States of America”, or were any other Western countries considered?
When talking at a high level, the author refers to cultures that were heavily influenced by China, versus European cultures. But many specific research results or anecdotes are only available for one Eastern and one Western nation. For those, he mostly refers to the specific nations, and leaves it to the reader to make inferences about how well those apply to similar nations.
They use the term Western but talk about people from the US.
And they use the term “Asia” but talk about people from China.
What test does this refer to? I’d love to see a side by side comparison of a western IQ test vs one of these tests.