Richard Nisbett

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Psychology

This collection of first-person accounts from legendary social psychologists tells the stories behind the science and offers unique insight into the development of the field from the 1950s to the present. One pillar, the grandson of a slave, was inspired by Kenneth Clark. Yet when he entered his PhD program in the 1960s, he was told that race was n...

We test the proposition that both social orientation and cognitive style are constructs consisting of loosely related attributes. Thus, measures of each construct should weakly correlate among themselves, forming intra-individually stable profiles across measures over time. Study 1 tested diverse samples of Americans (N = 233) and Japanese (N = 433...

Objective: We test the proposition that both social orientation and cognitive style are constructs consisting of loosely related attributes. Thus, measures of each construct should weakly correlate among themselves, forming intra-individually stable profiles across measures over time. Method: Study 1 tested diverse samples of Americans (N = 233)...

Previous work showed that East-Asians tend to be more holistic in cognitive style and more interdependent in social orientation than Westerners. It is not clear, however, whether these differences generalize beyond the young, well-educated, financially well-off samples that have been tested in the past. We administered 16 previously studied psychol...

More conservatives would provide advantages, and social psychologists may not be as opposed to increasing the number of conservatives as Duarte et al. think. Recruitment problems concern primarily self-selection and biases in undergraduate instruction. Social psychologists should welcome having conservatives in the field to serve as a conduit for o...

Laypeople and many social scientists assume that superior reasoning abilities lead to greater well-being. However, previous research has been inconclusive. This may be because prior investigators used operationalizations of reasoning that favored analytic as opposed to wise thinking. We assessed wisdom in terms of the degree to which people use var...

Responds to the comments by J. P. Rushton (see record 2012-24333-012); M. A. Woodley and G. Meisenberg (see record 2012-24333-013); and J. D. Mayer, D. R. Caruso, A. T. Panter, and P. Salovey (see record 2012-24333-014) on the present authors' original article, "Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments" (see record 2011-30298-001). H...

People from different cultures vary in the ways they approach social conflicts, with Japanese being more motivated to maintain interpersonal harmony and avoid conflicts than Americans are. Such cultural differences have developmental consequences for reasoning about social conflict. In the study reported here, we interviewed random samples of Ameri...

Laypeople and many social scientists assume that superior reasoning abilities lead to greater well-being. However, previous research has been inconclusive. This may be because prior investigators used operationalizations of reasoning that favored analytic as opposed to wise thinking. We assessed wisdom in terms of the degree to which people use var...

People's liking of other people after 16 weeks of acquaintance was not predicted very well by their initial liking of the others after 1 week's acquaintance. People's ultimate liking of others was as well predicted by initial popularity, i.e., by the consensual rankings, as by the individual's own initial rankings. And people's ultimate liking was...

Reports an error in "Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments" by Richard E. Nisbett, Joshua Aronson, Clancy Blair, William Dickens, James Flynn, Diane F. Halpern and Eric Turkheimer (American Psychologist, Advanced Online Publication, Jan 2, 2012, np). In the article, two correlational values are incorrect in the 10th line on p. 134...

We review new findings and new theoretical developments in the field of intelligence. New findings include the following: (a) Heritability of IQ varies significantly by social class. (b) Almost no genetic polymorphisms have been discovered that are consistently associated with variation in IQ in the normal range. (c) Much has been learned about the...

The achievement gap between blacks and whites owes nothing to genetics. It is not solely due to discrimination or social-class differences between blacks and whites. It is due in good part to environmental differences between blacks and whites stemming from family, neighborhood, and school socialization factors that are present even for middle-clas...

Theoretical model disclosing the occurrence of different systems of thought due to different cultural practices and explaining essential distinctions between East Asians and Westerners is presented in the article. The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use o...

It is well documented that aging is associated with cognitive declines in many domains. Yet it is a common lay belief that some aspects of thinking improve into old age. Specifically, older people are believed to show better competencies for reasoning about social dilemmas and conflicts. Moreover, the idea of aging-related gains in wisdom is consis...

A large body of research documents cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. Westerners tend to be more analytic and East Asians tend to be more holistic. These findings have often been explained as being due to corresponding differences in social orientation. Westerners are more independent and Easterners are more interdependent. H...

We show that differences in social orientation and in cognition that exist between cultures and social classes do not necessarily have counterparts in individual differences within those groups. Evidence comes from a large-scale study conducted with 10 measures of independent vs. interdependent social orientation and 10 measures of analytic vs. hol...

One important principle of social psychology, writes Nisbett, is that some big-seeming interventions have little or no effect. This article discusses a number of cases from the field of education that confirm this principle. For example, Head Start seems like a big intervention, but research has indicated that its effects on academic achievement ga...

Although U.S. culture strongly sanctions the ideal of independence, the specific ways in which independence is realized may be variable depending, among other factors, on social class. Characterized by relative scarcity of social and material resources, working-class (WC) Americans were expected to strongly value self-reliance. In contrast, with ch...

Previous research has shown that when processing visual scenes, Westerners attend to salient objects and East Asians attend to the relationships between focal objects and background elements. It is possible that cross-cultural differences in attentional allocation contribute to these earlier findings. In this article, the authors investigate cultur...

Compared to truthful answers, deceptive responses to queries are expected to take longer to initiate. Yet attempts to detect lies through reaction time (RT) have met with limited success. We describe a new procedure that seems to increase the RT difference between truth-telling and lies. It relies on a Stroop-like procedure in which responses to th...

Prior research indicates that East Asians are more sensitive to contextual information than Westerners. This article explored aesthetics to examine whether cultural variations were observable in art and photography. Study 1 analyzed traditional artistic styles using archival data in representative museums. Study 2 investigated how contemporary East...

Central and East Europeans have a great deal in common, both historically and culturally, with West Europeans and North Americans, but tend to be more interdependent. Interdependence has been shown to be linked to holistic cognition. East Asians are more interdependent than Americans and are more holistic. If interdependence causes holism, we would...

It has been hypothesized that interdependent (versus independent) social orientations breed more holistic (versus analytic) cognitions. If so, farming and small-scale fishing, which require more cooperation (and represent a more interdependent mode of being) than does herding, may encourage a more holistic mode of cognition. To test this hypothesis...

It has been proposed that social interdependence fosters holistic cognition, that is, a tendency to attend to the broad perceptual and cognitive field, rather than to a focal object and its properties, and a tendency to reason in terms of relationships and similarities, rather than rules and categories. This hypothesis has been supported mostly by...

This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates...

East Asians have been found to reason in relatively holistic fashion and Americans in relatively analytic fashion. It has been proposed that these cognitive differences are the result of social practices that encourage interdependence for Asians and independence for Americans. If so, cognitive differences might be found even across regions that are...

East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways. Westerners are inclined to attend to some focal object, analyzing its attributes and categorizing it in an effort to find out what rules govern its behavior. Rules used include formal logic. Causal attributions tend to focus exclusively on the object and are th...

This paper describes the development of a theory-based cross-cultural training intervention we call relational ideology training, and reports a field experiment testing its effectiveness in facilitating intercultural collaborations. The intervention was based on Protestant relational ideology (PRI) theory (Sanchez-Burks, 2002) and cross-cultural em...

Recent findings from research on judgment and attribution processes indicate that people regard base rate data, i.e., statistical summaries of populations, as if they were uninformative. It is suggested that base rate information lacks impact because of its abstract, pallid nature. In a demonstration of the inefficacy of abstract information, under...

We conducted a phone survey of the rural South and Midwest examining fatalism and riskiness of health practices. Contrary to the contentions of some historians, ethnographers, writers, and social scientists, we found no evidence that Southerners were more fatalistic than Midwesterners. Southerners were not more likely to express the view that God o...

Research on perception and cognition suggests that whereas East Asians view the world holistically, attending to the entire field and relations among objects, Westerners view the world analytically, focusing on the attributes of salient objects. These propositions were examined in the change-blindness paradigm. Research in that paradigm finds Ameri...

Westerners' perceptions tend to focus on salient foreground objects, whereas Asians are more inclined to focus on contexts. We hypothesized that such culturally specific patterns of attention may be afforded by the perceptual environment of each culture. In order to test this hypothesis, we randomly sampled pictures of scenes from small, medium, an...

Cross-cultural differences in cognition suggest that Westerners use categories more than Easterners, but these differences have only been investigated in young adults. The contributions of cognitive resource and the extent of cultural exposure are explored for free recall by investigating cross-cultural differences in categorical organization in yo...

There is recent evidence that perceptual processes are influenced by culture. Westerners tend to engage in context-independent and analytic perceptual processes by focusing on a salient object independently of its context, whereas Asians tend to engage in context-dependent and holistic perceptual processes by attending to the relationship between t...

In the past decade, cultural differences in perceptual judgment and memory have been observed: Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information. However, the underlying mechanisms for the apparent differences in cognitive processing styles have not been known. In the present study, we examined the p...

The authors compared East Asians' and Americans' views of everyday social events. Research suggests that Americans tend to focus more on the self and to have a greater sense of personal agency than East Asians. The authors assessed whether, compared to East Asians, Americans emphasize main characters even when events do not involve the self and whe...

J. P. Rushton and A. R. Jensen (2005) ignore or misinterpret most of the evidence of greatest relevance to the question of heritability of the Black-White IQ gap. A dispassionate reading of the evidence on the association of IQ with degree of European ancestry for members of Black populations, convergence of Black and White IQ in recent years, alte...

Differences in reasoning styles between Chinese and European Americans held even when controlling for the language of testing. Bilingual Chinese organized objects in a more relational and less categorical way than European Americans, whether tested in English or in Chinese. Thus, culture affects categorization independent of the testing language. N...

East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways. Westerners are inclined to attend to some focal object, analyzing its attributes and categorizing it in an effort to find out what rules govern its behavior. Rules used include formal logic. Causal attributions tend to focus exclusively on the object and are th...

Four experiments provided evidence that East–West differences in attention to indirect meaning are more pronounced in work settings compared with nonwork settings as suggested by prior research on Protestant relational ideology. Study 1 compared errors in interpreting indirect messages in work and nonwork contexts across three cultures. Studies 2 a...

conditioning, etc.). Piaget spelled out a list of "formal operations," such as modus ponens, the probability schema, etc., which he regarded as the fundamental deductive and inductive rule schemas necessary to understand the world. The cognitive revolution, from its earliest incarnation in the work of such theorists as George Miller and Herbert Sim...

Two studies provide evidence that, in work situations, Latins (Mexicans & Mexican-Americans) are guided by a concern with socioemotional aspects of workplace relations to a far greater degree than are Anglo-Americans. The focus on socioemotional considerations results in Latins having a relatively greater preference for workgroups having a strong i...

Chinese ways of dealing with seeming contradictions result in a dialectical or compromise approach---retaining basic elements of opposing perspectives by seeking a "middle way." European-American ways, on the other hand, deriving from a lay version of Aristotelian logic, result in a differentiation model that polarizes contradictory perspectives in...

We investigated social inference practices of Koreans and Americans in two novel domains: behavioral predictions and folk theories of behavior. When dispositional and situational inferences were disentangled, Koreans showed dispositional thinking to the same extent as Americans. This was the case for behavioral predictions based on individual diffe...

We propose a theory of how systems of thought arise on the basis of differing cultural practices and argue that the theory accounts for substantial differences in East Asian and Western thought processes. We find East Asians to be more holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories...

The authors examined cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning among East Asian (Chinese and Korean), Asian American, and European American university students. We investigated categorization (Studies 1 and 2), conceptual structure (Study 3), and deductive reasoning (Studies 3 and 4). In each study a cognitive conflict was activate...

conditioning, etc.). Piaget spelled out a list of "formal operations," such as modus ponens, the probability schema, etc., which he regarded as the fundamental deductive and inductive rule schemas necessary to understand the world. The cognitive revolution, from its earliest incarnation in the work of such theorists as George Miller and Herbert Sim...

Established culture-invariant measures are needed for cross-cultural assessment of verbal and visuospatial speed of processing and working memory across the life span. In this study, 32 younger and 32 older adults from China and from the United States were administered numerically based and spatially based measures of speed of processing and workin...

Established culture-invariant measures are needed for cross-cultural assessment of verbal and visuospatial speed of processing and working memory across the life span. In this study, 32 younger and 32 older adults from China and from the United States were administered numerically based and spatially based measures of speed of processing and workin...

Five studies studies that Chinese and Americans perceive change differently. Chinese anticipated more changes from an initial state than Americans did. When events were changing in a particular direction. Chinese were more likely than Americans to predict change in the direction of change. Moreover, for patterns with changing slopes, Chinese predic...

Much research indicates that East Asians, more than Americans, explain events with reference to the context. The authors examined whether East Asians also attend to the context more than Americans do. In Study 1, Japanese and Americans watched animated vignettes of underwater scenes and reported the contents. In a subsequent recognition test, they...

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, includin...

The authors find East Asians to be holistic , attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic , paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, inclu...

The authors tested the hypothesis that East Asians, because of their holistic reasoning, take contradiction and inconsistency for granted and consequently are less likely than Americans to experience surprise. Studies 1 and 2 showed that Korean participants displayed less surprise and greater hindsight bias than American participants did when a tar...

Presents an obituary for Stanley Schachter, who died on June 7, 1997, in East Hampton, New York. It is doubtful that any social psychologist ever produced so many distinguished students. Stanley Schachter's contributions to psychology were extraordinarily broad. They included research and theory on group processes, communication, social influences...

Responds to comments by S. F. Chan (see record 2000-05933-017), D. Y. F. Ho (see record 2000-05933-018), and Y.-T. Lee (see record 2000-05933-019) on the article by K. Peng and R. E. Nisbett (see record 1999-11125-001) that made a number of assertions that reveal problems in logic and argumentation. In their studies, Peng and Nisbett found that Chi...

Two studies provide evidence that Latins (i.e., Mexicans and Mexican Americans) are guided by a concern with socioemotional aspects of workplace relations to a far greater degree than are Anglo-Americans. The focus on socioemotional considerations results in Latins having a relatively greater preference for workgroups having a strong interpersonal...

East Asian and American causal reasoning differs significantly. East Asians understand behavior in terms of complex interactions between dispositions of the person or other object and contextual factors, whereas Americans often view social behavior primarily as the direct unfolding of dispositions. These culturally differing causal theories seem to...

Two studies provide evidence that, in work situations, Latins (Mexicans & Mexican-Americans) are guided by a concern with socioemotional aspects of workplace relations to a far greater degree than are Anglo-Americans. The focus on socioemotional considerations results in Latins having a relatively greater preference for workgroups having a strong i...

East Asian cognition has been held to be relatively holistic; that is, attention is paid to the field as a whole. Western cognition, in contrast, has been held to be object focused and control oriented. In this study East Asians (mostly Chinese) and Americans were compared on detection of covariation and field dependence. The results showed the fol...

Chinese and American respondents were equally likely to rely on response scales as a frame of reference in estimating the frequencies of unobservable behaviors, for which people have little episodic knowledge. Moreover, both drew on information extracted from the scales in making comparative judgments involving the self. Chinese respondents, howeve...

Chinese and American respondents were equally likely to rely on response scales as a frame of reference in estimating the frequencies of unobservable behaviors, for which people have little episodic knowledge. Moreover, both drew on information extracted from the scales in making comparative judgments involving the self. Chinese respondents, howeve...

Chinese ways of dealing with seeming contradictions result in a dialectical or compromise approach—retaining basic elements of opposing perspectives by seeking a "middle way." On the other hand, European–American ways, deriving from a lay version of Aristotelian logic, result in a differentiation model that polarized contradictory perspectives in a...

There is evidence that East Asians are biased to process information in a holistic, contextual fashion, whereas Western Europeans process information in an analytic, feature-based style. We argue that these cultural differences in information-processing styles are so pervasive that they affect cognitive function at the most basic levels, including...

Growing cross cultural evidence suggests that East Asians are less likely to show the correspondence bias, or a preference for explanations of behavior in terms of traits, dispositions, or other internal attributes of the target. The scope of this evidence spans several research paradigms and diverse methodologies. The cultural difference, however,...

Two studies examined the correspondence bias in attitude attributions of Koreans and Americans. Study I employed the classic attitude attribution paradigm of Jones and Harris and found that both Korean and American participants displayed the correspondence bias in the no-choice condition. This lack of difference might have been due to weak salience...

The role of category salience in category-based induction was demonstrated in two ways: (i) temporarily increasing category salience facilitated category-based induction, and (ii) this effect was moderated by cultural differences that we predicted would be related to chronic category salience. Subjects for whom categories were presumed to be more a...

The authors argue that commonly used ranking and rating methods of value surveys may have low validity in cross-cultural value comparisons because participants' reports about values can be affected by factors such as cultural differences in the meaning of particular value terms as well as the possibility that some value judgments are based on socia...

Two field experiments illustrate how institutions of the U.S. South and West can help perpetuate violence related to a culture of honor. In Study 1, employers across the United States were sent letters from job applicants who had allegedly killed someone in an honor-related conflict. Southern and western companies were more likely than their northe...

The authors examined whether the negative behavior of 1 Black male would influence White participants' perceptions of Black Americans and behavior toward another Black person. In Study 1, it was found that participants in the Black–negative condition tended to stereotype Blacks more than participants in the Black–control condition did. It was also...

review proposals about attributional patterns and mechanisms from various disciplines with attention to questions of generality / attribution research can be divided into studies of verbal explanation of causality . . . and of visual perception of causality / review attribution theory in social psychology and examine evidence from ethnographic and...

Three experiments examined how norms characteristic of a "culture of honor" manifest themselves in the cognitions, emotions, behaviors, and physiological reactions of southern White males. Participants were University of Michigan students who grew up in the North or South. In 3 experiments they were insulted by a confederate who bumped into the par...

Nisbett et al. (1973) set out to demonstrate the differing explanations that actors and observers have concerning the perceived causes of people’s behaviour. They suggested that when we explain our own behaviour we make different attributions than when we explain the behaviour of someone else. In this context the term ‘actor’ refers to the person ‘...

The southern United States has long been known to be more violent than the northern United States. The authors argue that this may be due in part to an ideology justifying violence for self-protection and for maintaining "honor " or a reputation for toughness. Analysis of data from three surveys shows that southern White males do not endorse violen...

We find three factors to be associated with use of cost-benefit rules in everyday decisions. These are effectiveness in achieving desirable life outcomes, intelligence, and training in economics. We argue that these empirical findings support the claim that cost-benefit reasoning is normative. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2...

This collection of readings shows how cognitive science can influence most of the primary branches of philosophy, as well as how philosophy critically examines the foundations of cognitive science. Its broad coverage extends beyond current texts that focus mainly on the impact of cognitive science on philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology,...