Korean Job Discussion Forums

[kermo]

I picked up this book last year at Kyobo, and it blew me away. It's a penetrating bit of cultural psychological analysis, but quite readable. The details started to fade from memory a bit, so I am in the midst of reading it again.

In this book, Nisbett demonstrates through convincing rhetoric and concrete cross-cultural tests that there are fundamentally different ways of reasoning and even *noticing* between East and West. He tests Americans, Japanese, Chinese, British, Australians, Germans, Swedish, Dutch, and Korean groups, and even groups that straddle cultures, like first generation Asian-Americans. His results are startling, and occasionally revelatory for those of us who find Korean culture to be continually inscrutible and surprising.

Read it! Then tell me what you think! If very few of you have read it already, I'll try to be more specific about Nisbett's findings.

[RACETRAITOR]

That sounds pretty interesting.

[Woland]

I just picked it up on the recommendation of a friend now in DC who lived in Korea for many years. It's next on my list after I finish Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice.

The psychologist Michael Cole has also done a lot of great cross cultural stuff, with fieldwork in Africa. See his book (with a co-author whose name I've forgotten), Comparative Studies of How People Think.

[VanIslander]

It didn't seem like a summer reading list choice so I panned it then. Thanks for reminding me to make it onto my winter reading list.

[flotsam]

Read it.

Wouldn't say it blew me away, but it is a freshly written expression of what a lot of other people have said before in more detail but with less coherence.

Here's a trick: Take the exercises in the book and do them with some Koreans from Seoul and some from outside of Seoul. It'll blow your mind and make you think hard about westernization.