Think101: Conversations

Many experiments have demonstrated differences between people who grew up in the Eastern vs Western cultures on a variety of perceptual and cognitive tasks. Is an “object-centric” perspective more useful than a “situation-centric” perspective? Logic and the scientific method grew out of this object-centric approach, and they're pretty useful. There's some real value in treating objects and events abstractly, so we can better appreciate how they operate. But in many of our everyday decisions, we don't need to generate a label to successfully navigate the world, and recognising the context of an argument is clearly important for opinion change. Is dialectical reasoning more like conscious or unconscious processing? How does the notion of “wisdom” relate to these two perspectives? Reading: Mindware by Richard Nisbett, “Logic” and “Dialectical Reasoning.” Guests: Jason Tangen, Rachel Searston, Ruben Laukkonen, Gianni Ribeiro, Jeremy Nash, and Ryan Metcalfe. Learn more at think101.org.