This week on Standard Deviations with Dr. Daniel Crosby, Dr. Crosby speaks with Richard Nisbett. Richard Nisbett is a social psychologist and the author of Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. He is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his advisor was Stanley Schachter, whose other students at that time included Lee Ross and Judith Rodin. His research interests focus on culture and reasoning. He studies basic cognitive processes, especially induction, statistical reasoning, causal attribution, cost-benefit analysis and logical vs. dialectical approaches to problem-solving. He has studied the degree to which cognitive processes can be trained and the differences in East Asian and Western reasoning styles.
