Final answer:
Nisbett's analysis indicates that Western cognitive patterns are characterized by an analytic thought process, focusing on object attributes and rule-based understanding, influenced by historical developments that favor individualism and objectivism.
Step-by-step explanation:
Richard Nisbett's analysis, based on the metaphor involving Confucius's worthy picture, suggests that Westerners tend to have an analytic thought process. In Western cognition, there is a focus on discovering the attributes of objects and sets of rules that govern behavior through abstraction, which is a substantial departure from the more holistic approach seen in other cultures.
This analytic perspective leads Westerners to pay attention to a focused area and to use rules to understand and predict the environment, often to the exclusion of context and relationships. Historically, there's a tendency in Western thought to prioritize the individual over the group and to favor scientific reasoning and categorization.
Lynn White attributes this dominant anthropocentric perspective in Western thinking to cultural and historical developments that emphasize individualism and a more object-focused view of the world.