Sublime

Richard Nisbett articulates the essence of the paradoxical Middle Way of language and thought in his book The Geography of Thought:

The Geography of Thought: How Westerners and Asians Think Differently—and Why (2003).

To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do? Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases—two nice people who had not helped

In 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published a famous but back then controversial paper “Telling more than we can know.” Their main argument was that we have no introspective access to the cognitive processes that produce our judgments. We are, of course, aware of the products of these judgments but

WEIRD people are particularly biased to attribute actions or behavioral patterns to what’s “inside” others, relying on inferences about dispositional traits (e.g., he’s “lazy” or “untrustworthy”), personalities (she’s “introverted” or “conscientious”), and underlying beliefs or intentions (“what did he know and when did he know it?”). Other populat

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

idea, Diener and his students also found a less-is-more effect, a strong indication that an average (prototype) has been substituted for a sum.