Reading notes_5 Nov

A few years back, a brilliant student from China began to work with me on questions of social psychology and reasoning. One day early in our acquaintance, he said, " You know, the difference between you and me is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it's a line." Unfazed by what must have been a startled expression on my face, he expounded on that theme. "The Chinese believe in constant change, but with things always moving back to some prior state. They pay attention to a wide range of events; they search for relationship between things; and they think you can't understand the part without understanding the whole. Westerners live in a simpler, more deterministic world; they focus on salient objects or people instead of the larger picture; and they think they can control events because they know the rules that govern the behavior of objects. (Nisbett, 2003: xiii)

------ Nisbett, RE (2003) The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and Why NewYork: The Free Press