By: Natalie Angier, New York Times
Tuesday, February 25, 2003


Professor Richard Nisbett quoted in the February 23, 2003 New York Times Science section article:

...The tendency to ape the group as no ape can do may even shift the contours of our brains as we move from tribe to tribe. Dr. Richard E. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has found that Asians and Westerners think differently from each other in significant and measurable ways, as he describes in his new book, "The Geography of Thought."

"Westerners focus on some kind of central object," he said in an interview. "They attend to its attributes and try to find out what rules apply to its behavior, with the goal of categorizing it."

By contrast, he said, Asians tend to see an object in a much broader field. "They're not as interested in categorizing objects," Dr. Nisbett said, "and they don't have as many linear deterministic rules of behavior."

These differences are revealed even in tests of perceptual and visual skills: Westerners score higher on the ability to remember the absolute size of an object; Easterners do better with recalling its dimensions relative to something else.

Significantly, the cognitive styles are not fixed, but shift after a person has spent only a few months living on the other side of the globe. Whether it must tilt holistic or dualistic, defend nature, nurture or neither, the human brain will find a way to fit in with the crowd.

Copyright 2003, The New York Times Company