Quotes from Richard E. Nisbett

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 relationships 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.

objectivity arose from subjectivity—the recognition that two minds could have different representations of the world and that the world has an existence independent of either representation. This

Whether you're heroic or heartless may depend on a contextual factor whose impact is far greater than we would tend to assume.

The cognitive orientations and skills of East Asians and people of European cultures are sufficiently different that it seems highly likely that they would complement and enrich one another in any given setting.

What nature hath joined together, multiple regression analysis cannot put asunder.

Behind many a successful person lies a string of lucky breaks that we have no inkling about.

we see patterns in the world where there are none because we don't understand just how un-random-looking random sequences can be.

Zen Buddhist dictum that "the opposite of a great truth is also true.

Important influences can be hidden, but even when powerful situational determinants of behavior are staring us in the face, we can be oblivious to their impact.

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. As a consequence, East Asians are less susceptible to what social psychologist Lee Ross labeled the "Fundamental Attribution Error" (or FAE for short).

More than a billion people in the world today claim intellectual inheritance from ancient Greece. More than two billion are the heirs of ancient Chinese traditions of thought.

Independence vs. interdependence is of course not an either/or matter. Every society—and every individual—is a blend of both. It turns out that it is remarkably easy to bring one or another orientation to the fore. Psychologists Wendi Gardner, Shira Gabriel, and Angela Lee "primed" American college students to think either independently or interdependently.

14. Song and Schwarz, "If It's Hard to Read, It's Hard to Do.

But social class is only one of an unlimited number of potential confounds present in MRA studies. Almost anything that's correlated with both the predictor variable and the outcome variable in such studies becomes a candidate for explaining the correlation between the two.

Every belief about every aspect of the world is based on countless inferences we make via mental processes we can't observe.

Aristotle got tired of hearing lousy arguments in the marketplace and the assembly. So he decided to develop reasoning templates to apply to arguments in order to analyze them for validity.