When Richard Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese subjects, on the other h&, made observations about the background environment...and the different ”seeings” are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners & East Asians. As Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought people actually think
- & even see
- the world differently, because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, & educational systems that date back to ancient Greece & China, & that have survived into the modern world. As a result, East Asian thought is ”holistic”
- drawn to the perceptual field as a whole, & to relations among objects & events within that field. By comparison to Western modes of reasoning, East Asian thought relies far less on categories, or on formal logic; it is fundamentally dialectic, seeking a ”middle way” between opposing thoughts. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, & apply rules of formal logic to understand their behaviour.