Richard E. Nisbett - Böcker

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Recently there has been growing awareness and acceptance of the proposition that people do not exist in a world of physically defined forces and events, but in a world defined by their own perceptions, cognitions, conclusions, and imaginations. We respond and react not to some objectively defined set of stimuli, but to our own apperceptions of stimuli that we define subjectively. The original essays in this volume center on one aspect of this process of attribution: The extent to which the perception of events and causes results in the determination, modification, or alteration of emotions, feelings, and affective states.This book is divided into five sections, each of which elucidates and extends these theoretical conceptions. Part 1 provides a historical background and analytical framework for the rest of the book. Part 2 presents chapters dealing with the sorts of internal cues which may give rise to a feeling state. Part 3 presents a chapter discussing the evaluative needs aroused by the internal cues. Part 4 is concerned with the process of explanation triggered by the evaluative needs. Part 5 deals with various external cues and how they are used to label the internal feeling state. There is a concluding discussion of the cognitive alteration of feeling states.The authors deal with aggression, boredom, obesity, the control of pain, and delusional systems. This volume is of continuing importance to clinical and experimental psychologists as well as social psychologists. Each of the authors takes the theoretical concept of cognition and relates it to research in biofeedback, physiology, social psychology, altered states of consciousness, etc. Thus, the book bridges the gap between cognitive theory and the use of that theory in applied research.

In the United States, the homicide rate in the South is consistently higher than the rate in the North. In this brilliantly argued book, Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen use this fact as a starting point for an exploration of the underlying reasons for violence.According to Nisbett and Cohen, the increased tendency of white southerners to commit certa

Who are smarter, Asians or Westerners? Are there genetic explanations for group differences in test scores? From the damning research of The Bell Curve to the more recent controversy surrounding geneticist James Watson’s statements, one factor has been consistently left out of the equation: culture. In the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, world-class social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett takes on the idea of intelligence as biologically determined and impervious to culture with vast implications for the role of education as it relates to social and economic development. Intelligence and How to Get It asserts that intellect is not primarily genetic but is principally determined by societal influences.

This book examines two questions: Do people make use of abstract rules such as logical and statistical rules when making inferences in everyday life? Can such abstract rules be changed by training? Contrary to the spirit of reductionist theories from behaviorism to connectionism, there is ample evidence that people do make use of abstract rules of inference -- including rules of logic, statistics, causal deduction, and cost-benefit analysis. Such rules, moreover, are easily alterable by instruction as it occurs in classrooms and in brief laboratory training sessions. The fact that purely formal training can alter them and that those taught in one content domain can "escape" to a quite different domain for which they are also highly applicable shows that the rules are highly abstract. The major implication for cognitive science is that people are capable of operating with abstract rules even for concrete, mundane tasks; therefore, any realistic model of human inferential capacity must reflect this fact. The major implication for education is that people can be far more broadly influenced by training than is generally supposed. At high levels of formality and abstraction, relatively brief training can alter the nature of problem-solving for an infinite number of content domains.

This book examines two questions: Do people make use of abstract rules such as logical and statistical rules when making inferences in everyday life? Can such abstract rules be changed by training? Contrary to the spirit of reductionist theories from behaviorism to connectionism, there is ample evidence that people do make use of abstract rules of inference -- including rules of logic, statistics, causal deduction, and cost-benefit analysis. Such rules, moreover, are easily alterable by instruction as it occurs in classrooms and in brief laboratory training sessions. The fact that purely formal training can alter them and that those taught in one content domain can "escape" to a quite different domain for which they are also highly applicable shows that the rules are highly abstract. The major implication for cognitive science is that people are capable of operating with abstract rules even for concrete, mundane tasks; therefore, any realistic model of human inferential capacity must reflect this fact. The major implication for education is that people can be far more broadly influenced by training than is generally supposed. At high levels of formality and abstraction, relatively brief training can alter the nature of problem-solving for an infinite number of content domains.

This book focuses on a singular cause of male violence—the perpetrator's sense of threat to one of his most valued possessions, namely, his reputation for strength and toughness. The theme of this book is that the Southern United States had—and has—a type of culture of honor.

Recently there has been growing awareness and acceptance of the proposition that people do not exist in a world of physically defined forces and events, but in a world defined by their own perceptions, cognitions, conclusions, and imaginations. We respond and react not to some objectively defined set of stimuli, but to our own apperceptions of stimuli that we define subjectively. The original essays in this volume center on one aspect of this process of attribution: The extent to which the perception of events and causes results in the determination, modification, or alteration of emotions, feelings, and affective states.This book is divided into five sections, each of which elucidates and extends these theoretical conceptions. Part 1 provides a historical background and analytical framework for the rest of the book. Part 2 presents chapters dealing with the sorts of internal cues which may give rise to a feeling state. Part 3 presents a chapter discussing the evaluative needs aroused by the internal cues. Part 4 is concerned with the process of explanation triggered by the evaluative needs. Part 5 deals with various external cues and how they are used to label the internal feeling state. There is a concluding discussion of the cognitive alteration of feeling states.The authors deal with aggression, boredom, obesity, the control of pain, and delusional systems. This volume is of continuing importance to clinical and experimental psychologists as well as social psychologists. Each of the authors takes the theoretical concept of cognition and relates it to research in biofeedback, physiology, social psychology, altered states of consciousness, etc. Thus, the book bridges the gap between cognitive theory and the use of that theory in applied research.

'The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world.'-Malcolm Gladwell"One of the world's leading thinkers" Daily TelegraphWhen Richard Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment...and the different "seeings" are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. As Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought people actually think - 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 and events within that field. By comparison to Western modes of reasoning, East Asian thought 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 behaviour.