Chapter 3 - Living Together vs. Going It Alone

I founded quite easy to read this chapter compared to chapter 1&2 because Nisbett provides many examples, stories and pictures that are easy to understand.

When Nisbett mentioned in page 49 that Asians tend to emphasize maintaining harmonious social relation than achieving personal goals, I immediately remembered popular Japanese phrase "KY" which is the short of "空気　読めない" This means that people who are called KY are not cooperative or harmonious with others. Even if that person was right to say or do such thing, they would be criticized by others only because they had broken the good mood. (btw, I'm super KY so be careful)

Nisbett said that there are no Japanese word for "self esteem", and he said we use "serufu esutiimu" in page 54, but he's totally wrong. None of us had heard of such phrase. Instead, there's "jisonshin 自尊心" which has the same meaning.
But what he argues here is correct. It is obvious that Americans concern and like to think good of themselves than Japanese, and if Japanese speak something good of themselves, others often criticize that the person is a narcissist. Moreover, I found interesting to know that there no indigenous word that has exactly the same meaning for Japanese word"自慢する". In English, people say "speak proudly", "have a good opinion of oneself". I think this means that Japanese
think it is not a polite thing to boast of oneself, whereas for westerners especially Americans, it is very natural and normal thing to say good of themselves.

I think his argument is getting interesting. He understands that he has not been making a biased judgment, but what he says about westerners and easterners is really true and convincing.