Gee’s Reviews > The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and Why > Status Update
Gee
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Westerners have a strong interest in categorization, which helps them to know what rules to apply to the objects in question, and formal logic plays a role in problem solving. East Asians, in contrast, attend to objects in their broad context. The world seems more complex to Asians than to Westerners, and understanding events always requires consideration of a host of factors that operate in relation to one another
— Nov 08, 2025 03:58PM
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Gee
is 77% done
As Huntington has observed, Westerners tend to confuse modernization—defined as industrialization, a more complex occupational structure, increased wealth and social mobility, greater literacy, and urbanization—with Westernization. But societies other than Japan have become modern without becoming very Western
— Nov 11, 2025 10:01AM
Gee
is 53% done
Relationships, on the other hand, involve, tacitly or explicitly, a verb. Learning the meaning of a transitive verb normally involves noticing two objects and some kind of action that connects them in some way
Because of their relative ambiguity, it’s harder to remember verbs; verbs are more likely to be altered in meaning than nouns when a speaker communicates to another person or when one person paraphrases
— Nov 11, 2025 09:09AM
Because of their relative ambiguity, it’s harder to remember verbs; verbs are more likely to be altered in meaning than nouns when a speaker communicates to another person or when one person paraphrases
Gee
is 53% done
How is it possible that Easterners today have relatively little interest in categories, find it hard to learn new categories by applying rules about properties, and make little spontaneous use of them for purposes of induction? Why are they so much more inclined to consider relationships in their organization of objects than Westerners are?
— Nov 11, 2025 09:08AM
Gee
is 51% done
The lack of interest in classes of objects sharing the same properties is consistent with the basic scheme that the ancient Chinese had for the world. For them, the world consisted of continuous substances. So it was a part-whole dichotomy that made sense to them. Finding the features shared by objects and placing objects in a class on that basis would not have seemed a very useful activity
— Nov 10, 2025 09:43AM
Gee
is 46% done
Why is it then that Westerners rely so much more heavily on personality traits in explaining behavior? The answer seems to be that Easterners are more likely to notice important situational factors and to realize that they play a role in producing behavior
— Nov 09, 2025 03:51PM
Gee
is 36% done
Westerners are the protagonists of their autobiographical novels; Asians are merely cast members in movies touching on their existences.
— Nov 09, 2025 03:26PM
Gee
is 32% done
The combative, rhetorical form is also absent from Asian law. In Asia the law does not consist, as it does in the West for the most part, of a contest between opponents. More typically, the disputants take their case to a middleman whose goal is not fairness but animosity reduction—by seeking a Middle Way through the claims of the opponents.
— Nov 09, 2025 03:18PM
Gee
is 31% done
Though both Chinese and Japanese are required to conform to move smoothly through their daily lives, the Chinese are said to chafe under the requirements and the Japanese actually to enjoy them. The Japanese are held to share with the Germans and the Dutch a need for order in all spheres of their lives; the Chinese share with Mediterraneans a more relaxed approach to life
— Nov 09, 2025 03:15PM
Gee
is 31% done
Though social constraints are in general greater on both Chinese and Japanese than on Westerners, the constraints come primarily from authorities in the case of the Chinese and chiefly from peers in the case of the Japanese. Control in Chinese classrooms, for example, is achieved by the teacher, but by classmates in Japan
— Nov 09, 2025 03:15PM
