Our Culture is WEIRD - and how it affects cognition

[bayonetbrant]

I found this article to be pretty fascinating
http://www.psmag.com/magazines/magazine-feature-story-magazines/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/

If you take a broad look at the social science curriculum of the last few decades, it becomes a little more clear why modern graduates are so unmoored. The last generation or two of undergraduates have largely been taught by a cohort of social scientists busily doing penance for the racism and Eurocentrism of their predecessors, albeit in different ways. Many anthropologists took to the navel gazing of postmodernism and swore off attempts at rationality and science, which were disparaged as weapons of cultural imperialism.

Economists and psychologists, for their part, did an end run around the issue with the convenient assumption that their job was to study the human mind stripped of culture. The human brain is genetically comparable around the globe, it was agreed, so human hardwiring for much behavior, perception, and cognition should be similarly universal. No need, in that case, to look beyond the convenient population of undergraduates for test subjects. A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world's population.

Henrich's work with the ultimatum game was an example of a small but growing countertrend in the social sciences, one in which researchers look straight at the question of how deeply culture shapes human cognition. His new colleagues in the psychology department, Heine and Norenzayan, were also part of this trend. Heine focused on the different ways people in Western and Eastern cultures perceived the world, reasoned, and understood themselves in relationship to others. Norenzayan's research focused on the ways religious belief influenced bonding and behavior. The three began to compile examples of cross-cultural research that, like Henrich's work with the Machiguenga, challenged long-held assumptions of human psychological universality.

As Heine, Norenzayan, and Henrich furthered their search, they began to find research suggesting wide cultural differences almost everywhere they looked: in spatial reasoning, the way we infer the motivations of others, categorization, moral reasoning, the boundaries between the self and others, and other arenas. These differences, they believed, were not genetic. The distinct ways Americans and Machiguengans played the ultimatum game, for instance, wasn't because they had differently evolved brains. Rather, Americans, without fully realizing it, were manifesting a psychological tendency shared with people in other industrialized countries that had been refined and handed down through thousands of generations in ever more complex market economies. When people are constantly doing business with strangers, it helps when they have the desire to go out of their way (with a lawsuit, a call to the Better Business Bureau, or a bad Yelp review) when they feel cheated. Because Machiguengan culture had a different history, their gut feeling about what was fair was distinctly their own. In the small-scale societies with a strong culture of gift-giving, yet another conception of fairness prevailed. There, generous financial offers were turned down because people's minds had been shaped by a cultural norm that taught them that the acceptance of generous gifts brought burdensome obligations. Our economies hadn't been shaped by our sense of fairness; it was the other way around.

In the end they titled their paper "The Weirdest People in the World?" (pdf) By "weird" they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that "American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers."

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.

[bayonetbrant]

interesting follow-up here...
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/trust-in-the-share-economy/

I wonder whether these sorts of start-ups would be considered wacky in other cultures, or just ours.
Conversely, I wonder whether these sorts of start-ups would even exist in other cultures than ours.

[Centurion40]

interesting follow-up here...
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/trust-in-the-share-economy/

I wonder whether these sorts of start-ups would be considered wacky in other cultures, or just ours.
Conversely, I wonder whether these sorts of start-ups would even exist in other cultures than ours.

I would say only in cultures where people don't trust/know their neighbours and/or isolate themselves in urban environments.

[eyebiter]

.

[skeptical.platypus]

"The unique trick of human psychology, these researchers suggest, might be this: our big brains are evolved to let local culture lead us in life's dance."

Nietzsche would be impressed with their research, I strongly suspect.

I personally believe far more in nuture than nature, although this is based on incredibly unscientific observations. I guess what I am saying is that these guys are preaching to the converted in my case (although they have the advantage of actual data), and a lot of what they are researching could be summarized by "our big brains are evolved to let local culture lead us in life's dance."

That, of course, in unsatisfying, because human culture is by definition unique. If we are discussing human culture as an expression of evolution, we're talking about the evolution away from instinct, aren't we? For example, can the cultural norms that the researchers talk about as guiding forces be compared to the instinctual behavior of herd animals, who clearly also let their culture lead them in life's dance?

If so, then to me it is not so much that our big brains are evolved to let local culture lead us in life's dance -- instincts do that for everyone else and did it for our ancestors for millions of years, but rather that our big brains somehow evolved to a point where we can adapt a culture to our surroundings. Which sounds an awful like the reason why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is because we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve.

[skeptical.platypus]

It would be interesting to see how Machiguengans might respond to games that do not require a component of filthy westernized lucre to determine how much of our thinking is changed by filthy westernized lucre. For example, would they respond to "I cut, you pick" in the same way I ensured little sis would never get a bigger piece of marionberry pie?

Also, what are the chances Maciguengans are the source material for the Gungans and therefore Jar Jar Binks?  :o