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The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett.
By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behaviour..
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.
As a result, East Asian Thought is "holistic" - drawn to the perceptual field as a whole, and to relations among objects and events within that field.
As Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought people actually think - and even see - the world differently, because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China, and that have survived into the modern world.
Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment...and the different "seeings" are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians.
He basically gave me my view of the world.' -Malcolm Gladwell "
One of the world's leading thinkers"
Daily Telegraph When Richard Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. '
The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett
