In addition to my two previous posts on Richard Nisbett’s The Geography Of Thought (2003) that you can read here (part 1) and here (part 2), I would like to list more experiments from the book that reflect the differences in thinking between East-Asians and Westerners. These experiments show that in general:
| Easterners | Easterners |
|---|---|
| View the world in holistic terms. | View the world in analytic, atomistic terms. |
| View the world through a wide-angle lens – see a great deal of the field, especially background events. | View the world through a narrower lens – see objects as discrete and separate from their environments. |
| Are skilled in observing relationships between events and explaining them in relation to one another. | Are more focused and skilled in explaining events in terms of properties of objects. |
| Regard the world as complex and highly changeable and its components as interrelated. | Regard the world as stable and linear. |
| See events as moving in cycles between extremes. | See events as moving in linear fashion when they move at all. |
| Feel that control over events requires coordination with others. | Feel themselves to be personally in control of events even when they are not. |
| Believe that changes in personal happiness are unpredictable and more likely to undergo reversals. | Have a more linear thought while predicting personal happiness – from bad to good or good to bad. |
| Are more likely to believe that someone’s personality is more subject to change. | Are more likely to believe that someone’s personality is something about them that they cannot change very much. |
| Are considered to have a good ability to think historically when they show empathy with historical figures, including those who were enemies. “How” questions are raised more often. | Are considered to have good ability to reason historically when they are capable of adducing evidence to fit their causal model of outcome. “Why” questions are raised more often. |