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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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 Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 7:06 am Post subject: We are the WEIRD ones |
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The Ultimatum Game works like this: You are given $100 and asked to share it with someone else. You can offer that person any amount and if he accepts the offer, you each get to keep your share. If he rejects your offer, you both walk away empty-handed.
How much would you offer? If it's close to half the loot, you're a typical North American. Studies show educated Americans will make an average offer of $48, whether in the interest of fairness or in the knowledge that too low an offer to their counterpart could be rejected as unfair. If you're on the other side of the table, you're likely to reject offers right up to $40.
It seems most of humanity would play the game differently. Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia took the Ultimatum Game into the Peruvian Amazon as part of his work on understanding human co-operation in the mid-1990s and found that the Machiguenga considered the idea of offering half your money downright weird � and rejecting an insultingly low offer even weirder.
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It turns out the Machiguenga � whose number system goes: one, two, three, many � are not alone in their thinking. Most people from non-Western cultures introduced to the Ultimatum Game play differently than Westerners. And that is one clue that the Western mind differs in fundamental ways from the rest of humanity, according to Dr. Henrich. He and two other UBC researchers authored a paper shaking up the fields of psychology, cognitive science and behavioural economics by questioning whether we can know anything about humanity in general if we only study a "truly unusual group of people" � the privileged products of Western industrial societies, who just happen to make up the vast majority of behavioural science test subjects.
The article, titled "The weirdest people in the world?", appears in the current issue of the journal Brain and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Henrich and co-authors Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that life-long members of societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic � people who are WEIRD � see the world in ways that are alien from the rest of the human family. The UBC trio have come to the controversial conclusion that, say, the Machiguenga are not psychological outliers among humanity. We are.
"If you're a Westerner, your intuitions about human psychology are probably wrong or at least there's good reason to believe they're wrong," Dr. Henrich says.
After analyzing reams of data from earlier studies, the UBC team found that WEIRD people reacted differently from others in experiment after experiment involving measures of fairness, anti-social punishment and co-operation, as well as visual illusions and questions of individualism and conformity.
Others punish participants perceived as too altruistic in co-operation games, but very few in the English-speaking West would ever dream of penalizing the generous. Westerners tend to group objects based on resemblance (notebooks and magazines go together, for example) while Chinese test subjects prefer function (grouping, say, a notebook with a pencil). Privileged Westerners, uniquely, define themselves by their personal characteristics as opposed to their roles in society.
Moreover, WEIRD people do not simply react to the world differently, according to the paper, they perceive it differently to begin with. Take the well-known Muller-Lyer optical illusion, which uses arrows to trick the viewer into thinking one line is longer than another, even if both are the same length. (See the diagram on this page.)
"No matter how many times you measure those lines, you can't cause yourself to see them as the same length," Dr. Henrich says. At least that's true for a Westerner. For some hunter-gatherers, the Muller-Lyer lines do not cause an illusion. "You do this with foragers in the Kalahari [Desert] and they just see the lines as the same length."
WEIRD people, the UBC researchers argue, have unusual ideas of fairness, are more individualistic and less conformist than other people. In many of these respects, Americans are the most "extreme" Westerners, especially young ones. And educated Americans are even more extremely WEIRD than uneducated ones.
"The fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of the behavioral sciences may render them one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens," the authors conclude. "If the goal of the research program is to shed light on the human condition, then this narrow, unrepresentative sample may lead to an uneven and incomplete understanding."
In other words, we do not know what we thought we knew about the human mind. We only know about the mind of a particular, unusual slice of humanity.
The UBC researchers also found that 96% of behavioural science experiment subjects are from Western industrialized countries, which account for just 12% of the world's population. Sixty-eight percent were Americans. The United States is dominant in the field of psychology, accounting for 70% of all journal citations, compared with 37% in chemistry. Undergraduate students are often used to stand in for the entire species.
"This is a serious problem because psychology varies across cultures and chemistry doesn't," says Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia.
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If WEIRD people are indeed weird, it is the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that have made them so. In the example of the Muller-Lyer illusion, the UBC team hypothesizes that growing up in an industrial-era environment with plenty of 90-degree lines and carpentered edges led to WEIRD people's sense of vision being susceptible to the deception.
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The UBC researchers acknowledge the limits of what is known about WEIRD versus non-WEIRD populations. Because data comparing how people from different populations think is relatively hard to come by, the authors write, "we cannot accurately evaluate the full extent of how unusual WEIRD people are."
"This is, however, precisely the point. We hope research teams will be inspired to span the globe and prove our claims of non-representativeness wrong." |
http://www.nationalpost.com/Westerners+World+weird+ones/3427126/story.html#ixzz0y76YTbb4
Western universalism has shaped our societies in many ways. When we hold up our way of political/economic organization and try to push it on the world, we are trying to impose a foreign way of living. I read this article as supporting a strongly non-interventionist disposition. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 7:26 am Post subject: |
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Interesting article.
I would change one word: twice the writer says 'mind'. I would change that to 'culture'.
Humans are social animals and it strikes me as maladaptive to engineer an 'individualistic' culture. Anything can work for a time, but at some point, something built on a fallacy must come crashing down.
A couple of years ago there was mention of a book called 'Geography of Thought'. Discussion of it didn't go very far because the book didn't support the Dave's Conventional View that Koreans are utterly stupid and warped.
Ah well, freedom is bowing down to our corporate masters and bemoaning their loss of freedom when they can't dump their trash in our water supply. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 7:32 am Post subject: |
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| Interesting article, thanks for posting it. Food for thought. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 8:09 am Post subject: |
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| Back in my liberal arts days I was required to be on the 'nature' side. Since then my opinion has changed. Genetics and genetic family are far more powerful than I had been led to believe. |
Mises:
Going by the overall context, I think you meant to say "nurture" there. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 8:12 am Post subject: |
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| On the other hand wrote: |
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| Back in my liberal arts days I was required to be on the 'nature' side. Since then my opinion has changed. Genetics and genetic family are far more powerful than I had been led to believe. |
Mises:
Going by the overall context, I think you meant to say "nurture" there. |
You're right. Anyways, I deleted the comment. Not relevant. |
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The Happy Warrior
Joined: 10 Feb 2010
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 12:49 pm Post subject: Re: We are the WEIRD ones |
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| mises wrote: |
| When we hold up our way of political/economic organization and try to push it on the world, we are trying to impose a foreign way of living. I read this article as supporting a strongly non-interventionist disposition. |
I would be very careful with generalizing too broadly from a sample of several of these kinds of studies.
I'm recalling when David Brooks got ripped apart by the China Hand blogosphere for this piece of cultural psychology. Taking a few studies and employing it to come to sweeping conclusions about entire swaths of people, with great differences between each other, it just seems WEIRD.
Then again, I'd like to see the argument redone in long-form. I think its impossible to plausibly assert this idea in article format.
Anyway, thanks OP, a fun read. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 4:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Thank God Americans turn out not to be the world standard! |
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Louis VI
Joined: 05 Jul 2010
Location: In my Kingdom
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 5:10 pm Post subject: |
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| "The fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of the behavioral sciences may render them one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens," the authors conclude. "If the goal of the research program is to shed light on the human condition, then this narrow, unrepresentative sample may lead to an uneven and incomplete understanding." |
This chunk says it all, and it's a contemporary thought, the idea of the center-margin distinction turned on its head. I've recently read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and the concept of outlier has itself become central in the thinking of many academics.
| bacasper wrote: |
| Thank God Americans turn out not to be the world standard! |
But are they the gold standard? That is the question they'll be asking. They see themselves as leaders and the best country in the world. |
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Summer Wine
Joined: 20 Mar 2005
Location: Next to a River
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| Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2010 12:04 am Post subject: |
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| Evolution is not just biological it is also cultural. |
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rollo
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: China
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| Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2010 8:26 pm Post subject: |
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| Please give an example of cultural evolution and what is the mechanism that drives it? The idea that Europeans may have developed a physically different brain is interesting but I believe the author is writing about cultural conditioning not cultural evolution. Just being a nit picker!! |
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PigeonFart
Joined: 27 Apr 2006
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| Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2010 10:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Interesting article. |
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Man on Street
Joined: 28 Aug 2010
Location: In the Seoul
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| Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2010 5:56 am Post subject: |
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| It's amazing how diverse the different ethnic families are after separating from the Ark all those thousands of years ago. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2010 8:54 pm Post subject: Re: We are the WEIRD ones |
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| The Ultimatum Game works like this: You are given $100 and asked to share it with someone else. You can offer that person any amount and if he accepts the offer, you each get to keep your share. If he rejects your offer, you both walk away empty-handed. |
I think you are leaving something out here. Why would a potential recipient refuse ANY amount? |
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geldedgoat
Joined: 05 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2010 9:04 pm Post subject: Re: We are the WEIRD ones |
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| bacasper wrote: |
| Quote: |
| The Ultimatum Game works like this: You are given $100 and asked to share it with someone else. You can offer that person any amount and if he accepts the offer, you each get to keep your share. If he rejects your offer, you both walk away empty-handed. |
I think you are leaving something out here. Why would a potential recipient refuse ANY amount? |
Spite. That's what the article was getting at with that point; apparently other cultures aren't willing to cut their noses off. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2010 9:08 pm Post subject: Re: We are the WEIRD ones |
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| geldedgoat wrote: |
| bacasper wrote: |
| Quote: |
| The Ultimatum Game works like this: You are given $100 and asked to share it with someone else. You can offer that person any amount and if he accepts the offer, you each get to keep your share. If he rejects your offer, you both walk away empty-handed. |
I think you are leaving something out here. Why would a potential recipient refuse ANY amount? |
Spite. That's what the article was getting at with that point; apparently other cultures aren't willing to cut their noses off. |
OK, so the recipient knows that if he refuses, the giver gets nothing. That is what was left out. Thanks. |
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