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I think this is an important topic yet horrendously treated by people who really should work harder at it, given their tenure and wide readership. You always need to be careful with a premise like Nisbett investigates in this book. One litmus test: “what does the author mean by Asian and Western?”

For Nisbett, “Asian” appears to mean Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. “Chinese”, in turn, means Han. All other nationalities and ethnicities within each modern nation state are ignored.

Likewise, “Western” primarily means Anglophone. Nisbett starts with a tepid discussion of “Greek thought” — better described as Athenian and Aristotelian thought as received through the Italian Renaissance and English Premoderns, again ignoring hundreds of distinct ideological lineages — and jumps to the Italian merchant states and then again into the late 20th century.

So, it seems Nisbett means, by the words “Asian” and “Western”, those stereotypes that already have a prevalent hold on armchair psychology. There’s nothing revealing here, all bias reinforcement, and literally billions of other peoples cultural and psychological experiences are completely ignored.

I do NOT mean to indict Nisbett for being insufficiently woke. He had a good opportunity in this book to highlight some important cultural differences and compare them with a common human description of psychology— but he went pretty hard down the boring old, meaningless road of “Westerners are individualist and Asians are collectivists” instead