10 ms·

We Aren’t the World

174 points by dchmiel 14y ago

tokenadult 14y ago
Full text of the paper that launched the investigation into whether psychological research relies too much on people from just one kind of cultural background: Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83. http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina...
- mcguire 14y ago
  "whether psychological research relies too much on people from just one kind of cultural background" Or, as someone years ago suggested, "Psychology is the study of the psychology of Psychology undergraduates."
- shalmanese 14y ago
  This paper, incidentally, has the greatest opening paragraph of all time: "In the tropical forests of New Guinea the Etoro believe that for a boy to achieve manhood he must ingest the semen of his elders. This is accomplished through ritualized rites of passage that require young male initiates to fellate a senior member. In contrast, the nearby Kaluli maintain that male initiation is only properly done by ritually delivering the semen through the initiate’s anus, not his mouth. The Etoro revile these Kaluli practices, finding them disgusting."
dchmiel 14y ago
You see this pattern of over generalizing in business when expanding internationally service or product offerings. 'It works here so lets just sell it there' has caused a few blunders. Cultural differences can mean colour has different interpretations and that alone can make or break your sales. Some form of product modification is necessary so that you don't get lost in the trap of generalizing.
smelendez 14y ago
> Among the Machiguenga, word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money. I get the sense they tested the game with (for the local economy) large amounts of money in small towns, where participants probably already knew each other. That's a very different scenario than most American iterations I've known of the game, with college students who probably don't know each other playing for relatively small amounts of money. Nickle-and-diming your random classmate out of 10 cents is very different from taking a week's pay that could have gone to your neighbor.
- reinhardt 14y ago
  My first thought as well. I for one would have no qualms with accepting a scandalously unfair 10% of a $10M amount in cash.
- learc83 14y ago
  According to the article the participates remain anonymous to each other.
  - marshray 14y ago
    Anonymous, but still within a relatively small group. There was also another party in the game whose identity was known well enough: word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money
  - noahth 14y ago
    I believe part of GP's point is that, for some sizes of village, there may not be any chance that your counterpart is a stranger. If your counterpart is not a stranger, even if you don't know their exact identity, you might choose to play more generously.
  - vacri 14y ago
    The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families. You're saying the family would never talk about this strange newcomer and his odd games and what he got me to do?
asimjalis 14y ago
The experiment is flawed. $100 means a lot more in Peru than in the US. If the experiment was conducted in Peru with $1 would the subjects there be more inclined to be fair? Another factor is that college students who are the usual subjects in the US are not as concerned about money as subsistence farmers.
- dchmiel 14y ago
  They did control for that by offering an incentive that was only a few days' wages. "The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies." EDIT $100 isn't necessarily a few days wages for those who are working in a well paying full time position but for a college student that could mean a few days of going out.
  - keiferski 14y ago
    I think the key word there is episodic; i.e., that the work wasn't consistent, and thus the "few days' wages" were possibly more valuable. But I haven't read the study, so I could be wrong.
    - dchmiel 14y ago
      That's a good insight of how the income is perceived. If I knew I received a few days income all year long my perceived value of receiving income in the experiment is lower than what the locals would perceive since it is more variable and the risk that a long time passes before gaining income again.
    - saalweachter 14y ago
      Or possibly less; the implication I took was that they the cash jobs they took were supplemental income. The point of studying these villages is that they're economically isolated. They probably grow their own food, build their own shelters. I'd imagine they trade with the outside world -- using money earned from cash crops or working a few days here and there for a logging company or oil company -- for a small number of luxuries like metal, salt, or western clothing. Money might be nice in such a situation, but if you're not going to starve to death or freeze to death and you don't have 300k$ in medical debt suffocating you, it might not be as valuable as a couple days extra pay is to a poverty-line worker in the US.
eshvk 14y ago
This article is amazing. I haven't finished reading it completely but as a person who spend significant parts of my childhood in multiple countries, there are parts of it which chime with me so well. E.g. > Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places. I remember living in India as a teenager and being confused by how rarely if ever kids in my school would display emotion on the spot when something happened. The response would come up later and it was as immature as teenagers everywhere but on the spot responses were polite.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
sukuriant 14y ago
"Compared to Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood." I didn't find the word "anthropomorphize" in the other document; and the section I found in the original document didn't seem to go into what was said in the associated article. It's a rather long article, and I'll need to read it when I get home; however, the above section doesn't connect with me. What does "anthropomorphize" mean in this context? I understand the term to mean "to give perceptually human characteristics to". There are only two routes I can follow with this: 1) they mean a human thinking that a smiling animal is a happy animal. And that animals laugh, and grin; and have all the same facial expressions as humans, like one would see in Disney movies. 2) they're suggesting that people in the United States believe that animals continue to have emotions that they can express and other sentient thought, have a sense of desire for certain outcomes to be had, and for genuine fear and happiness. The second possibility isn't something that only people from the US do, at all. Long before the United States was the apparent urban environment with lost connection with nature (alluded to in the article in some places), Native Americans ascribed many emotions and intentions and ideas to the animals around them, even calling coyotes tricksters; and in Biblical times, calling someone a "fox" had a particular meaning. In short, where is this article getting the idea that humans don't anthropomorphize animals at all stages of life? That word is VERY confusing to me in this sentence; and to claim that they're using a very limited definition of anthropomorphize, where it's just human facial expressions is to be unfair to the word itself.
- _delirium 14y ago
  In the original article, it's discussed in section 2.3, starting on page 13: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina... The claim seems to be, more or less, that western urban kids interpret animals by projection or analogization of human traits rather than forming categories for the animals, more than kids in (some) other societies do. I have no idea how true that is myself (have not read anything on the subject beyond this article).
asimjalis 14y ago
As a thought experiment, if this was done in the US with $10k, and the other subject offered me $3000 I would take it. I would not walk away from $3000 to punish him for being unfair. If he offered me $100 I would probably walk away. So I would be more tolerant of unfairness if I was getting a large enough payout. This is precisely how contracting shops work in the IT industry in the US. They keep the bulk of the money and pay the contractor just enough that he does not walk away from the deal.
- JoshTriplett 14y ago
  > If he offered me $100 I would probably walk away. Why? Do you really consider it worth $100 to you just to prevent someone else from getting $9900, or do you just value $100 so little that you are willing to round it down to $0? I can imagine real-world scenarios in which I might spend $100 worth of my time to try to address a problem, especially if I think that problem might affect others. (Scenarios involving an actual $100 seem even less likely, but plausible for a sufficiently egregious wrong.) However, as a game, I'd call it free money no matter the amount; neither player did anything in particular to earn the money other than taking their time to play the game, and I don't see it as even slightly unfair of the first player to offer less money to the second, so I don't see any value in "punishing" the first player. The first player happened to get the better opportunity, and the second player gets to choose between having something or having nothing. In the game version, I'd place zero value on how much the first player gets. Now, if I thought I could bluff the first player via advance communication into believing that I'd reject the offer if less than a certain amount, I'd certainly do it; however, if they called the bluff, I'll take what I can get.
  - dchmiel 14y ago
    Both players are aware that the opportunity comes from just being lucky enough to be chosen to dictate the terms. I know you didn't earn the 10,000 so by you offering 100 dollars and you keeping 9,900 is insulting to some people and they do want to punish the 'lucky' player. It's not that they don't value the money they value punishing them to teach them a lesson at $100. Would your answer be the same if I said I'd keep 9,999,999.99 and gave you only a penny. Would the value of punishing me be so low that now you'd consider to do so, or is it still free money and the absolute value doesn't affect you personally?
filvdg 14y ago
I wonder in A/B testing you might see different results for landing page conversions with different nationalities ... it is said for example that the dutch are more price conscious and the french more relations/support minded ...
- GuiA 14y ago
  That's actually a great insight. If anyone has links to anything further exploring this, please post them!
_quasimodo 14y ago
I find it weird that nobody questions the use of the word 'american' in the article. Would the Machiguenga not also be (at least South-) Americans?
- robinh 14y ago
  Also, American and Western culture are used practically interchangeably. I find this quite ironic.
  - vacri 14y ago
    Sorry, slipped on the mod. It is pretty funny myopia.
  - Volpe 14y ago
    Why is that ironic? (Sorry if I'm being really stupid here... :\ )
  - hexagonc 14y ago
    They aren't used interchangeably in the linked article. In the article, Americans are singled out as being particularly "weird" even compared to other "Western" nations.
- intopieces 14y ago
  The use of "American" as a stand-alone term, for better or for worse, means a person from the United States. It persists largely because of the difficulty in producing an ajectival (demonym) from the term United States. Questioning it now, when there is clearly no real confusion (like, for example, Indian/American Indian/Native American/Indian American) is prescriptivist and hair-splitting.
  - _quasimodo 14y ago
    > Questioning it now, when there is clearly no real confusion [...] is prescriptivist and hair-splitting. Probably. But it was the first thing that sprang to my mind while reading the article. In an article titled "We Aren't The World" i would have expected a bit more caution.
guylhem 14y ago
"If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine" For the moment. The situation in Europe is very interesting. There is a strong atheist movement, yet catholics seem to be on a comeback lately, and the mostly muslim immigrant population growing too - and at an even faster pace. If religion says "go forth and populate the earth", and if atheist have less than 2.1 children, how long until they get outnumber and forced to chance their allegiance by the religous - at gunpoint if necessary? [nobody expects the spanish inquisition :-)] So I would not base any conclusion on a punctual observation when you have partial derivative pointing to different conclusion in a longer timeframe. Counter example : if large-scale societies survive fine without religion, how come there are so few of them ? Why do they have a tendency disappear in history, and be replaced by religious societies? Also, the method of the prisoner game is questionable. The article says the amount was not insubstantial - around several days of work, but does not explain how it was chosen or how it was tested. I would be very interested to know about the price elasticity of the acceptance rate and the price elascticity of the percentage offered. I mean, do people in this group have a constant acceptance (fully inelastic - they always accept) or can you get to a point where they refuse because they think it's unfair? Here's a quick example - go to any fast food join, eat normally, then when you have to leave, prepare the exact amount of cash in one side, and the tip in the other side of the table, and say to server the food was not to your taste, therefore you are leaving only a one cent tip (or a dime) See if they take the free money, or if they feel so insulted that they refuse. Rince and repeat until you figure the amount they will accept without feeling insulted. So I really wonder if there could be a cash amount where the remote people from this tribe would react just the same as all of us - which would just point to a calibration problem.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  I just submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5282707 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5282707 one of Norenzayan's articles for a general readership about the issue of influence of religion on societies. I invite you to join the discussion there too.
- RivieraKid 14y ago
Macsenour 14y ago
I think my basic problem with this is economics. I'd be happy with a days pay, even if it meant the other guy got a weeks pay. But I might squabble about 10 cents when the guy got 90 cents. I say squabble because I don't mean fight or be offended. I might argue for the fun of the argument, not the actual value of the money. I wouldn't accept the 10 cents, knowing that we both then got nothing because $1 doesn't mean that much to me.
gavanwoolery 14y ago
It is an interesting experiment but I don't think that it necessarily implies there is a huge difference in human psychology - if you did the experiment with a poor (i.e. homeless) American, I am pretty sure they would accept any amount of money. To add to this, I think there was probably some confusion when explaining the rules of the game to the subjects.
- thyrsus 14y ago
  The R in WEIRD is "Rich".
- lilsunnybee 14y ago
  Just because someone's homeless doesn't mean they've given up all dignity, and aren't offended by unfair treatment. I think you might be surprised what a lot of indigent folks would refuse because it was an inequitable transaction.
intopieces 14y ago
>"People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home" This conclusion comes a decade or more too late, I suppose, to affect U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for the better. After doing my undergradate work in Near Eastern Culture (or, rather, about 3 credits in) it became apparent that the 'Western ideal' of justice does not translate whole-sale; that certain adaptations are necesssary to improve the human rights situation, as is a great deal of 'soul searching' to determine precisely what would constitute 'improvement.'
- enraged_camel 14y ago
  >>This conclusion comes a decade or more too late, I suppose, to affect U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for the better. I don't want to politicize the discussion too much, but I feel compelled to ask: do you really believe Bush et al. would actually care even if they had access to this research's findings?
  - intopieces 14y ago
    >>I don't want to politicize the discussion too much, but I feel compelled to ask: do you really believe Bush et al. would actually care even if they had access to this research's findings? I do believe they would. It is in the best interest of the United States to form stable, like-minded governments abroad. If this cannot be reasonably accomplished because of cultural differences, it would be beneficial to at least marginally adapt the strategy to achieve something close to it. Judging from the US installation of the Shah in Iran, the US is not above installing dictators to enrich its own interests.
- vacri 14y ago
  Meh, it's rare that those self-same western countries got their current governments without some form of conflict. No regime change is 'plug-and-play', and it's naive to think so from the outset.
markdown 14y ago
Slightly OT, but the second image in that article is bogus. It's a photo of Fijian women on a Fijian mat (woven pandanus leaves). It's not Peruvian as claimed by the caption.
confluence 14y ago
If testing psych students was smelly - this experiment is smellier. Large amounts of cash = take whatever is offered. Repeat experiment with a billion dollars. I offer you say 50 million, leaving 950 million to myself. Your move. You honestly going to reject 50 million? It's actually quite rational that they took the money. Now, what would actually be interesting is that if they rejected the large amounts of cash.
- bingobangobongo 14y ago
  First, let's do the experiment with a billion dollars and see if you really just offer me 50 million.
  - confluence 14y ago
    That was just an example clearly illustrating my point. I'd probably offer you a lot less if it were real - say 10-15 million.
    - bingobangobongo 14y ago
      This isn't really something we can try, but I suspect you'd get turned down some reasonable percentage of the time (2%-10%, say) with such an offer, by people who have "all the money they need." Since to me the utility of the first few million is vastly larger than the last 500 million, I'd offer 50% just to avoid that rare case.
      - vacri 14y ago
        If someone is turning down $50M because they have "all the money they need", why would they then accept $500M?
        overcyn 14y ago
        The same reason, a normal person might decline $5 but accept $50 out of a pool of $100. 5% seems more unfair than 50%.
contingencies 14y ago
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. More on this from an English anthropologist in Debt: The First 5000 Years, a history of money and currency that is exceedingly timely given the current emergence of Bitcoin and Ripple, and the strange survival of the Swiss WIR.
ecmendenhall 14y ago
Here's another ungated Henrich paper on ultimatum games across societies, if you're interested in the research: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/InSearchHomoEconomicus2001.pdf http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/InSearchHomoEconomicus2001... His book "Why Humans Cooperate" is worth a trip to the library, too. It combines some formal models, experiments, and an interesting study on the Chaldean community in Detroit (a less-WEIRD ethnic group in the middle of our WEIRD society). The implications of this research are even more radical (and controversial) than the article suggests. The idea that culture shapes the way we think and act is interesting enough, but then the big question becomes "where does culture come from?" Henrich (and others[1]) suggest that culture evolves through Darwinian processes of transmission and replication, and that biological and cultural evolution are coupled. Social Darwinism and sociobiology gave this idea a bad reputation, and the idea that our social norms have evolved from kin selection all the way up to impersonal market exchange is still a hard sell for economists and anthropologists alike. But it's a fascinating idea, and it's completely changed the way I think about economic behavior and human cooperation. [1] "Not By Genes Alone" by Boyd and Richerson is another great book on this subject: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3615170.html http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo361...
smsm42 14y ago
Why these results are described as something shockingly unexpected? It is a natural outcome of short-term outlook on the game. Of course, most Americans, having been raised in Western culture with specific set of values and behaviors, have more long-term outlooks on interactions with fellow members of the society, since they know they'd have to live in this society for their whole life and our culture encourages such way of thinking. On the other hand, Machiguenga saw Henrich and the game for the first and probably last time in their lives, no wonder they took short-term approach to it. It is a long known idea that one-time game and many-time game have different strategies with such games.
contingencies 14y ago
As a western-born programmer who has spent much time in East Asia, I found the linked paper Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic vs. Analytic Cognition even more interesting. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nisbett/images/cultureThought.pdf http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nisbett/images/cultureThought...
hakaaaaak 14y ago
If we look at the history of science, most things that we held as fact many years ago are now considered either totally false or at least marred by misunderstanding or lack of data. Extrapolated that means that almost all of our current scientific beliefs will be "proven" false or at least considered marred by misunderstanding or lack of data at some point in the future. Humans can not understand everything, and they never will.
- anonymoushn 14y ago
  Please read this: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
  - hakaaaaak 14y ago
    Unfortunately, rationalism is needed to prove rationalism, and once science is "accepted fact" and we all accept things like "round", "sphere", and "Earth" then we assume we have made progress. But, there is not a single fact that could not be disproved by more evidence. Even "the Earth is round" could be proven to be wrong and we consider it part amorphous-hyperconical-hypertubular in the future, or perhaps we prove scientifically that we live in a simulation/a game and the universe, shapes, Earth, etc. is a simple allusion, comparable to the blocky pixel graphics in old Atari 2600 games. Please read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis While it is certainly possible that we understand one or more eternal truths that span all that exists in every dimension and every universe, considering the age, maturity, and abilities of the human race, it is extremely doubtful that we have made much progress or that we ever will. Science is great when approached from the standpoint of wonder and discovery, but it is terrible when it comes to "truth". Don't believe me? There is a whole religion devoted to the belief system that many are infected or affected by aliens (Scientology); many accept that this faith is based on a science fiction novel a.k.a. fiction, but many believe it is true. In the same way, many are convinced that science has elucidated truths, even though we don't know that it has or ever will. Yet, you accept science as truth in part. That is an irrational belief because the only way to accept it as rational is to have faith that it is rational. Rationalism is nothing without faith, but faith exists without rationalism.
nnq 14y ago
> urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood. I can tell this is true from personal experience. I spent my early childhood (before starting school at 6) mostly in the countryside, interacting a lot with animals and nature and when I used to interact with other children who've spent all their life so far in the urban environment I experienced a lot the "are they retard or what?!" feeling about their anthropomorphizing interactions with animals, dolls and even plastic toys, that I distinctively remember even now. I imagine that they probably felt the corollary about my competitive-social skills because, as I child, I was never good at "playing for winning" and using winning at a game to establish a higher social status.

174 points by dchmiel 14y ago

Full text of the paper that launched the investigation into whether psychological research relies too much on people from just one kind of cultural background: Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83. http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina...

mcguire 14y ago
"whether psychological research relies too much on people from just one kind of cultural background" Or, as someone years ago suggested, "Psychology is the study of the psychology of Psychology undergraduates."
shalmanese 14y ago
This paper, incidentally, has the greatest opening paragraph of all time: "In the tropical forests of New Guinea the Etoro believe that for a boy to achieve manhood he must ingest the semen of his elders. This is accomplished through ritualized rites of passage that require young male initiates to fellate a senior member. In contrast, the nearby Kaluli maintain that male initiation is only properly done by ritually delivering the semen through the initiate’s anus, not his mouth. The Etoro revile these Kaluli practices, finding them disgusting."

dchmiel 14y ago

You see this pattern of over generalizing in business when expanding internationally service or product offerings. 'It works here so lets just sell it there' has caused a few blunders. Cultural differences can mean colour has different interpretations and that alone can make or break your sales. Some form of product modification is necessary so that you don't get lost in the trap of generalizing.

smelendez 14y ago

> Among the Machiguenga, word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money. I get the sense they tested the game with (for the local economy) large amounts of money in small towns, where participants probably already knew each other. That's a very different scenario than most American iterations I've known of the game, with college students who probably don't know each other playing for relatively small amounts of money. Nickle-and-diming your random classmate out of 10 cents is very different from taking a week's pay that could have gone to your neighbor.

reinhardt 14y ago
My first thought as well. I for one would have no qualms with accepting a scandalously unfair 10% of a $10M amount in cash.
learc83 14y ago
According to the article the participates remain anonymous to each other.
- marshray 14y ago
  Anonymous, but still within a relatively small group. There was also another party in the game whose identity was known well enough: word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money
- noahth 14y ago
  I believe part of GP's point is that, for some sizes of village, there may not be any chance that your counterpart is a stranger. If your counterpart is not a stranger, even if you don't know their exact identity, you might choose to play more generously.
- vacri 14y ago
  The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families. You're saying the family would never talk about this strange newcomer and his odd games and what he got me to do?

asimjalis 14y ago

The experiment is flawed. $100 means a lot more in Peru than in the US. If the experiment was conducted in Peru with $1 would the subjects there be more inclined to be fair? Another factor is that college students who are the usual subjects in the US are not as concerned about money as subsistence farmers.

dchmiel 14y ago
They did control for that by offering an incentive that was only a few days' wages. "The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies." EDIT $100 isn't necessarily a few days wages for those who are working in a well paying full time position but for a college student that could mean a few days of going out.
- keiferski 14y ago
  I think the key word there is episodic; i.e., that the work wasn't consistent, and thus the "few days' wages" were possibly more valuable. But I haven't read the study, so I could be wrong.
  - dchmiel 14y ago
    That's a good insight of how the income is perceived. If I knew I received a few days income all year long my perceived value of receiving income in the experiment is lower than what the locals would perceive since it is more variable and the risk that a long time passes before gaining income again.
  - saalweachter 14y ago
    Or possibly less; the implication I took was that they the cash jobs they took were supplemental income. The point of studying these villages is that they're economically isolated. They probably grow their own food, build their own shelters. I'd imagine they trade with the outside world -- using money earned from cash crops or working a few days here and there for a logging company or oil company -- for a small number of luxuries like metal, salt, or western clothing. Money might be nice in such a situation, but if you're not going to starve to death or freeze to death and you don't have 300k$ in medical debt suffocating you, it might not be as valuable as a couple days extra pay is to a poverty-line worker in the US.

eshvk 14y ago

This article is amazing. I haven't finished reading it completely but as a person who spend significant parts of my childhood in multiple countries, there are parts of it which chime with me so well. E.g. > Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places. I remember living in India as a teenager and being confused by how rarely if ever kids in my school would display emotion on the spot when something happened. The response would come up later and it was as immature as teenagers everywhere but on the spot responses were polite.

deleted 14y ago

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sukuriant 14y ago

"Compared to Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood." I didn't find the word "anthropomorphize" in the other document; and the section I found in the original document didn't seem to go into what was said in the associated article. It's a rather long article, and I'll need to read it when I get home; however, the above section doesn't connect with me. What does "anthropomorphize" mean in this context? I understand the term to mean "to give perceptually human characteristics to". There are only two routes I can follow with this: 1) they mean a human thinking that a smiling animal is a happy animal. And that animals laugh, and grin; and have all the same facial expressions as humans, like one would see in Disney movies. 2) they're suggesting that people in the United States believe that animals continue to have emotions that they can express and other sentient thought, have a sense of desire for certain outcomes to be had, and for genuine fear and happiness. The second possibility isn't something that only people from the US do, at all. Long before the United States was the apparent urban environment with lost connection with nature (alluded to in the article in some places), Native Americans ascribed many emotions and intentions and ideas to the animals around them, even calling coyotes tricksters; and in Biblical times, calling someone a "fox" had a particular meaning. In short, where is this article getting the idea that humans don't anthropomorphize animals at all stages of life? That word is VERY confusing to me in this sentence; and to claim that they're using a very limited definition of anthropomorphize, where it's just human facial expressions is to be unfair to the word itself.

_delirium 14y ago
In the original article, it's discussed in section 2.3, starting on page 13: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina... The claim seems to be, more or less, that western urban kids interpret animals by projection or analogization of human traits rather than forming categories for the animals, more than kids in (some) other societies do. I have no idea how true that is myself (have not read anything on the subject beyond this article).

asimjalis 14y ago

As a thought experiment, if this was done in the US with $10k, and the other subject offered me $3000 I would take it. I would not walk away from $3000 to punish him for being unfair. If he offered me $100 I would probably walk away. So I would be more tolerant of unfairness if I was getting a large enough payout. This is precisely how contracting shops work in the IT industry in the US. They keep the bulk of the money and pay the contractor just enough that he does not walk away from the deal.

JoshTriplett 14y ago
> If he offered me $100 I would probably walk away. Why? Do you really consider it worth $100 to you just to prevent someone else from getting $9900, or do you just value $100 so little that you are willing to round it down to $0? I can imagine real-world scenarios in which I might spend $100 worth of my time to try to address a problem, especially if I think that problem might affect others. (Scenarios involving an actual $100 seem even less likely, but plausible for a sufficiently egregious wrong.) However, as a game, I'd call it free money no matter the amount; neither player did anything in particular to earn the money other than taking their time to play the game, and I don't see it as even slightly unfair of the first player to offer less money to the second, so I don't see any value in "punishing" the first player. The first player happened to get the better opportunity, and the second player gets to choose between having something or having nothing. In the game version, I'd place zero value on how much the first player gets. Now, if I thought I could bluff the first player via advance communication into believing that I'd reject the offer if less than a certain amount, I'd certainly do it; however, if they called the bluff, I'll take what I can get.
- dchmiel 14y ago
  Both players are aware that the opportunity comes from just being lucky enough to be chosen to dictate the terms. I know you didn't earn the 10,000 so by you offering 100 dollars and you keeping 9,900 is insulting to some people and they do want to punish the 'lucky' player. It's not that they don't value the money they value punishing them to teach them a lesson at $100. Would your answer be the same if I said I'd keep 9,999,999.99 and gave you only a penny. Would the value of punishing me be so low that now you'd consider to do so, or is it still free money and the absolute value doesn't affect you personally?

filvdg 14y ago

I wonder in A/B testing you might see different results for landing page conversions with different nationalities ... it is said for example that the dutch are more price conscious and the french more relations/support minded ...

GuiA 14y ago
That's actually a great insight. If anyone has links to anything further exploring this, please post them!

_quasimodo 14y ago

I find it weird that nobody questions the use of the word 'american' in the article. Would the Machiguenga not also be (at least South-) Americans?

robinh 14y ago
Also, American and Western culture are used practically interchangeably. I find this quite ironic.
- vacri 14y ago
  Sorry, slipped on the mod. It is pretty funny myopia.
- Volpe 14y ago
  Why is that ironic? (Sorry if I'm being really stupid here... :\ )
- hexagonc 14y ago
  They aren't used interchangeably in the linked article. In the article, Americans are singled out as being particularly "weird" even compared to other "Western" nations.
intopieces 14y ago
The use of "American" as a stand-alone term, for better or for worse, means a person from the United States. It persists largely because of the difficulty in producing an ajectival (demonym) from the term United States. Questioning it now, when there is clearly no real confusion (like, for example, Indian/American Indian/Native American/Indian American) is prescriptivist and hair-splitting.
- _quasimodo 14y ago
  > Questioning it now, when there is clearly no real confusion [...] is prescriptivist and hair-splitting. Probably. But it was the first thing that sprang to my mind while reading the article. In an article titled "We Aren't The World" i would have expected a bit more caution.

guylhem 14y ago

"If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine" For the moment. The situation in Europe is very interesting. There is a strong atheist movement, yet catholics seem to be on a comeback lately, and the mostly muslim immigrant population growing too - and at an even faster pace. If religion says "go forth and populate the earth", and if atheist have less than 2.1 children, how long until they get outnumber and forced to chance their allegiance by the religous - at gunpoint if necessary? [nobody expects the spanish inquisition :-)] So I would not base any conclusion on a punctual observation when you have partial derivative pointing to different conclusion in a longer timeframe. Counter example : if large-scale societies survive fine without religion, how come there are so few of them ? Why do they have a tendency disappear in history, and be replaced by religious societies? Also, the method of the prisoner game is questionable. The article says the amount was not insubstantial - around several days of work, but does not explain how it was chosen or how it was tested. I would be very interested to know about the price elasticity of the acceptance rate and the price elascticity of the percentage offered. I mean, do people in this group have a constant acceptance (fully inelastic - they always accept) or can you get to a point where they refuse because they think it's unfair? Here's a quick example - go to any fast food join, eat normally, then when you have to leave, prepare the exact amount of cash in one side, and the tip in the other side of the table, and say to server the food was not to your taste, therefore you are leaving only a one cent tip (or a dime) See if they take the free money, or if they feel so insulted that they refuse. Rince and repeat until you figure the amount they will accept without feeling insulted. So I really wonder if there could be a cash amount where the remote people from this tribe would react just the same as all of us - which would just point to a calibration problem.

tokenadult 14y ago
I just submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5282707 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5282707 one of Norenzayan's articles for a general readership about the issue of influence of religion on societies. I invite you to join the discussion there too.
RivieraKid 14y ago

Macsenour 14y ago

I think my basic problem with this is economics. I'd be happy with a days pay, even if it meant the other guy got a weeks pay. But I might squabble about 10 cents when the guy got 90 cents. I say squabble because I don't mean fight or be offended. I might argue for the fun of the argument, not the actual value of the money. I wouldn't accept the 10 cents, knowing that we both then got nothing because $1 doesn't mean that much to me.

gavanwoolery 14y ago

It is an interesting experiment but I don't think that it necessarily implies there is a huge difference in human psychology - if you did the experiment with a poor (i.e. homeless) American, I am pretty sure they would accept any amount of money. To add to this, I think there was probably some confusion when explaining the rules of the game to the subjects.

thyrsus 14y ago
The R in WEIRD is "Rich".
lilsunnybee 14y ago
Just because someone's homeless doesn't mean they've given up all dignity, and aren't offended by unfair treatment. I think you might be surprised what a lot of indigent folks would refuse because it was an inequitable transaction.

intopieces 14y ago

>"People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home" This conclusion comes a decade or more too late, I suppose, to affect U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for the better. After doing my undergradate work in Near Eastern Culture (or, rather, about 3 credits in) it became apparent that the 'Western ideal' of justice does not translate whole-sale; that certain adaptations are necesssary to improve the human rights situation, as is a great deal of 'soul searching' to determine precisely what would constitute 'improvement.'

enraged_camel 14y ago
>>This conclusion comes a decade or more too late, I suppose, to affect U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for the better. I don't want to politicize the discussion too much, but I feel compelled to ask: do you really believe Bush et al. would actually care even if they had access to this research's findings?
- intopieces 14y ago
  >>I don't want to politicize the discussion too much, but I feel compelled to ask: do you really believe Bush et al. would actually care even if they had access to this research's findings? I do believe they would. It is in the best interest of the United States to form stable, like-minded governments abroad. If this cannot be reasonably accomplished because of cultural differences, it would be beneficial to at least marginally adapt the strategy to achieve something close to it. Judging from the US installation of the Shah in Iran, the US is not above installing dictators to enrich its own interests.
vacri 14y ago
Meh, it's rare that those self-same western countries got their current governments without some form of conflict. No regime change is 'plug-and-play', and it's naive to think so from the outset.

markdown 14y ago

Slightly OT, but the second image in that article is bogus. It's a photo of Fijian women on a Fijian mat (woven pandanus leaves). It's not Peruvian as claimed by the caption.

confluence 14y ago

If testing psych students was smelly - this experiment is smellier. Large amounts of cash = take whatever is offered. Repeat experiment with a billion dollars. I offer you say 50 million, leaving 950 million to myself. Your move. You honestly going to reject 50 million? It's actually quite rational that they took the money. Now, what would actually be interesting is that if they rejected the large amounts of cash.

bingobangobongo 14y ago
First, let's do the experiment with a billion dollars and see if you really just offer me 50 million.
- confluence 14y ago
  That was just an example clearly illustrating my point. I'd probably offer you a lot less if it were real - say 10-15 million.
  - bingobangobongo 14y ago
    This isn't really something we can try, but I suspect you'd get turned down some reasonable percentage of the time (2%-10%, say) with such an offer, by people who have "all the money they need." Since to me the utility of the first few million is vastly larger than the last 500 million, I'd offer 50% just to avoid that rare case.
    - vacri 14y ago
      If someone is turning down $50M because they have "all the money they need", why would they then accept $500M?
      - overcyn 14y ago
        The same reason, a normal person might decline $5 but accept $50 out of a pool of $100. 5% seems more unfair than 50%.

contingencies 14y ago

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. More on this from an English anthropologist in Debt: The First 5000 Years, a history of money and currency that is exceedingly timely given the current emergence of Bitcoin and Ripple, and the strange survival of the Swiss WIR.

ecmendenhall 14y ago

Here's another ungated Henrich paper on ultimatum games across societies, if you're interested in the research: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/InSearchHomoEconomicus2001.pdf http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/InSearchHomoEconomicus2001... His book "Why Humans Cooperate" is worth a trip to the library, too. It combines some formal models, experiments, and an interesting study on the Chaldean community in Detroit (a less-WEIRD ethnic group in the middle of our WEIRD society). The implications of this research are even more radical (and controversial) than the article suggests. The idea that culture shapes the way we think and act is interesting enough, but then the big question becomes "where does culture come from?" Henrich (and others[1]) suggest that culture evolves through Darwinian processes of transmission and replication, and that biological and cultural evolution are coupled. Social Darwinism and sociobiology gave this idea a bad reputation, and the idea that our social norms have evolved from kin selection all the way up to impersonal market exchange is still a hard sell for economists and anthropologists alike. But it's a fascinating idea, and it's completely changed the way I think about economic behavior and human cooperation. [1] "Not By Genes Alone" by Boyd and Richerson is another great book on this subject: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3615170.html http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo361...

smsm42 14y ago

Why these results are described as something shockingly unexpected? It is a natural outcome of short-term outlook on the game. Of course, most Americans, having been raised in Western culture with specific set of values and behaviors, have more long-term outlooks on interactions with fellow members of the society, since they know they'd have to live in this society for their whole life and our culture encourages such way of thinking. On the other hand, Machiguenga saw Henrich and the game for the first and probably last time in their lives, no wonder they took short-term approach to it. It is a long known idea that one-time game and many-time game have different strategies with such games.

contingencies 14y ago

As a western-born programmer who has spent much time in East Asia, I found the linked paper Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic vs. Analytic Cognition even more interesting. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nisbett/images/cultureThought.pdf http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nisbett/images/cultureThought...

hakaaaaak 14y ago

If we look at the history of science, most things that we held as fact many years ago are now considered either totally false or at least marred by misunderstanding or lack of data. Extrapolated that means that almost all of our current scientific beliefs will be "proven" false or at least considered marred by misunderstanding or lack of data at some point in the future. Humans can not understand everything, and they never will.

anonymoushn 14y ago
Please read this: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
- hakaaaaak 14y ago
  Unfortunately, rationalism is needed to prove rationalism, and once science is "accepted fact" and we all accept things like "round", "sphere", and "Earth" then we assume we have made progress. But, there is not a single fact that could not be disproved by more evidence. Even "the Earth is round" could be proven to be wrong and we consider it part amorphous-hyperconical-hypertubular in the future, or perhaps we prove scientifically that we live in a simulation/a game and the universe, shapes, Earth, etc. is a simple allusion, comparable to the blocky pixel graphics in old Atari 2600 games. Please read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis While it is certainly possible that we understand one or more eternal truths that span all that exists in every dimension and every universe, considering the age, maturity, and abilities of the human race, it is extremely doubtful that we have made much progress or that we ever will. Science is great when approached from the standpoint of wonder and discovery, but it is terrible when it comes to "truth". Don't believe me? There is a whole religion devoted to the belief system that many are infected or affected by aliens (Scientology); many accept that this faith is based on a science fiction novel a.k.a. fiction, but many believe it is true. In the same way, many are convinced that science has elucidated truths, even though we don't know that it has or ever will. Yet, you accept science as truth in part. That is an irrational belief because the only way to accept it as rational is to have faith that it is rational. Rationalism is nothing without faith, but faith exists without rationalism.

nnq 14y ago

> urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood. I can tell this is true from personal experience. I spent my early childhood (before starting school at 6) mostly in the countryside, interacting a lot with animals and nature and when I used to interact with other children who've spent all their life so far in the urban environment I experienced a lot the "are they retard or what?!" feeling about their anthropomorphizing interactions with animals, dolls and even plastic toys, that I distinctively remember even now. I imagine that they probably felt the corollary about my competitive-social skills because, as I child, I was never good at "playing for winning" and using winning at a game to establish a higher social status.