Richard E. Nisbett has spent his career studying how people think. He is an emeritus professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, and his research has influenced how psychologists think about reasoning, introspection, culture, and intelligence. He has written several important books over his career, including The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why and Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.

His newest book is Thinking: A Memoir.

In this episode, Nisbett shares samples of his work relating to our inability to know the inner workings of our own minds, whether we can call various cognitive biases “errors” in reasoning, and how culture shapes the way we interact with the world.

Some things that come up in this episode:

• Nisbett’s favorite study: Norman R. F. Maier’s finding that people fail to understand where their insights come from (Maier, 1931)
• The classic set of studies by Richard Nisbett and Tim Wilson on our failure to introspect on cognitive processes (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977)
• The study where a goat entered a classroom (but that was really about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973)
• Nisbett’s work on errors in reasoning (Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Nisbett, 1992)
• Early work by Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama on the effects of culture on how we think about ourselves (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; also see Markus’ book Clash!)
• The “Culture of Honor” (Nisbett, 1996)
• Cross-cultural differences in analytic versus holistic thinking (see Nibsett’s Geography of Thought for a summary)

For a transcript of this episode, visit: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/thinking-with-richard-nisbett/

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