The Geography of Thought-Ch.4

This chapter was easier to read than the other chapters. There were more experiments than explanations and it was facilier to catch the main points.
A thing that I thought was good about Nisebett's style of writing is that he writes a brief summary of all the things he talked about at the end of each chapter. It makes it easier for me to check if I haven't missed any of the importants facts he wanted to tell.

I couldn't understand the two jokes he told in the chapter. One was about two Older American ladies asking a hotel doorman whether if they were in Geneva Sheraton or Brussels Sheraton. I know both are famous hotels and I knew what kind of thing Nisebett wanted to tell from the context of the paragraph, but I couldn't understand what was funny about it. The other one was about a boy telling his mother that he won a Pontiac in the raffle and that she replied that the tax would make them poor. I didn't even get to know what Pontiac was.. :(

By saying this I would be denying most of Nisebetts's experiments and the things he found out from them, but I thought he was too confident on what his experiment indicated. For example, on page 89 to 90, he does an experiment on the students of Kyoto University and the University of Mishigan, but he concludes that there are difference in the way "Asians" and "Westerners" react to the experiment. It is true that students of Kyoto University are Asians and that those of University of Mishigan are Westerners, but the way he concludes are as if he was reffering to all Asians and all Westerners. Is is a wonder why he chose students in Kyoto University as representatives of Asian and why he chose students in the University of Mishigan as representatives of Westerners, but anyway he should be careful in the way he explains the results of the experiment. If he wanted to be as confident in his statistics as he is now, he should have enough evidence to speak generally about all Asians and Westerners.