Preeminent authority on how culture affects
thinking and behavior.


Highlights

Dr. Richard Nisbett is one of the world’s foremost authorities on how culture and social context affect thinking, perception and behavior and how businesses can use this understanding to improve performance.

Cultural differences have a profound effect on management and decision making styles, how people respond to advertising images and messages, and how people conduct relationships of all kinds. Dr. Nisbett’s insights into these differences provide invaluable context for effective action across cultural boundaries.

In his new book, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, Dr. Nisbett challenges the prevailing idea that biology and especially genetics determine intelligence. Instead, he emphasizes the role of culture in determining intelligence and he gives us new tools for understanding and fostering the kind of success for which we use 'intelligence' as an indicator.

In his previous book, The Geography of Thought, Professor Nisbett looks at how Asians and Westerners think differently and why. This research makes his presentations invaluable for organizations doing business in China, Japan or Korea, especially.

Dr. Nisbett is Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan and is the first psychologist in his field in a generation to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

He conducts 3-hour long programs at the University of Michigan for MBA students who are en route to Asia that have dramatically increased their performance in developing strategies and building effective relationships while abroad.

A Research Professor at the Research Center for Group Dynamics, Dr. Nisbett also studies group decision making, conformity and independence, and social factors affecting school performance, among other subjects.

Intelligence and How to Get It

Many interventions can raise intelligence and achievement—schools and culture are the key.

What determines intelligence? For decades discussion of this question has left out the most important factor in determining intelligence—culture. In his new book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, world-class social psychologist Richard Nisbett takes on the idea of intelligence as something that is biologically determined and impervious to culture and this has vast implications for the role of education in social and economic development.

Dr. Nisbett asserts that intelligence is not primarily genetic but is largely a matter of environment. The fact that intelligence is partially heritable places no limits on potential intelligence. Families are crucial to intellectual development and so are schools, and schools can be greatly improved. The social classes are not growing more different in intelligence and the population as a whole is actually getting smarter. The difference in IQ between blacks and whites is shrinking and the remaining difference owes nothing to genetics. Many interventions at every age level can raise the intelligence and academic achievement of the poor and minorities. And Asians are no smarter than whites—they just work (a lot) harder.

Dr. Nisbett's exciting new ideas give us new and effective tools for understanding and fostering success.

The Value

Are you or your organization working in human resources or undertaking major culture change initiatives, mergers or acquisitions? Implementing global strategies, expanding into new markets or developing partnerships abroad? Trying to reach customers in cultures other than their own through global marketing, advertising or customer relationships? Or developing important relationships with managers and leaders in other business cultures? In particular, are you doing business in China, Japan or Korea?

The success of Dr. Richard Nisbett’s cultural orientation program for MBA students shows that familiarity with his work can help to ensure that your enterprise goes as you want it to.

The Geography of Thought

The Geography of Thought documents Professor Nisbett's groundbreaking international research in cultural psychology that comes to a startling conclusion: people actually think about—and even see—the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China and that have survived into the modern world. As a result, East Asian thought is "holistic"—drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects within that field and it relies far less on categories or on formal logic; it is fundamentally dialectic, seeking a "middle way" between opposing thoughts. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior.

From feng shui to metaphysics, from comparative linguistics to economic history, a gulf separates the children of Aristotle from the descendants of Confucius. At a moment in history when the need for cross-cultural understanding and collaboration have never been more important, The Geography of Thought offers both a map for that gulf and a blueprint for a bridge that might be able to span it.

Credentials

• Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan
• Co-Director of the UM Culture and Cognition Program
• Research Professor at the Research Center for Group Dynamics of UM's Institute for Social Research
• First social psychologist in a generation to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences
• Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association
• William James Fellow Award, American Psychological Society
• Guggenheim Fellowship