The breeding of an animal that can promise - is not this just that very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to Man? Is not this the very problem of man?
Friedrich Nietzche, The Genealogy of Morals
January 31, 2023
If there is one book you should read to get a sense of where the seemingly intractable problems in mental health, social dynamics, and even science come from, it is The WEIRDest people in the World, by Joe Henrich, Professor and Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. The book is mind-blowing but maybe a little hard to read so I will summarize the top lines here.
The key points that Henrich makes and backs up with serious data are:
Massively biased samples: Most of what is known experimentally about human psychology and behavior is based on studies with undergraduates from Western societies. Over 90% of experimental participants are drawn from northern Europe, North America, or Australia, and about 70 percent of these are American undergraduates.
Sample populations are outliers: Results obtained on a narrow slice of humanity are extrapolated to apply to most and describe human nature. However, when cross-cultural data are available from multiple populations,these people (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) typically anchor at the extreme end of the distribution. They are actually outliers (and undergraduates are extra so).
Biased study methodology: WEIRD researchers—who entirely dominate the relevant scientific disciplines—have unknowingly gravitated toward those aspects of psychology or behavior that are important to their populations, and created WEIRD-specific validation methods.
This is much worse that what he says when you combine it with the beliefs described below. The psychology/neuroscience/behavioral science obsession with finding individual knobs is very WEIRD. Examples are EF and attention, also iron homeostasis.
Culture can and does alter our brains, hormones, and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, emotions, and many other aspects of our minds.
It’s not just the questions that may be just adding color to what the experimenter has decided is there already. The experimental subjectsare neurologically different. Everyone I know who read the book was seriously taken aback by the examples Henrich gives in the opening of particular examples of differences in seemingly basic features of psychology and neuroscience, like memory, visual processing, and facial recognition.
Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code.
- Vision: Hemispheric bias in facial processing (the left hemisphere is more active) was assumed to be a basic feature of human neurocognitive functioning. However, it is a cultural by-product of deep literacy._ Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code. _
- Eye-tracking: what people pay attention to when shown a video varies widely among cultures, reflected in eye motions. East Asian populations are more likely to track the background information in a scene.
- Hormonal makeup: Variable among populations, correlated with kinship structures.
Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code.
- Vision: Hemispheric bias in facial processing (the left hemisphere is more active) was assumed to be a basic feature of human neurocognitive functioning. However, it is a cultural by-product of deep literacy._ Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code. _
- Eye-tracking: what people pay attention to when shown a video varies widely among cultures, reflected in eye motions. East Asian populations are more likely to track the background information in a scene.
- Hormonal makeup: Variable among populations, correlated with kinship structures.
Henrich tracks down the emergence of WEIRD societies to the breakdown of kinship structures through “innovations” introduced by the Church and its Family Program. This is fascinating but I will not discuss it here. Let’s just say that non-WEIRD come in many flavors, but a common feature is that kinship structures are deeply embedded in the society and in people’s behaviors, as one would expect is “normal”.
WEIRD, on the other hand, gives up the protection and oppression of kinship in favor of a rules-based system that puts strangers on theoretically equally footing with kin, as long as they follow the rules [And, originally, share the same religion. That was the church’s innovation, to break down the traditional allegiances in favor of allegiance to other church members - and therefore the church].
In non-WEIRD societies, people have to navigate a lot of context, it is part-and-parcel of kin-based systems:
Success and respect in [non-WEIRD societies] hinge on adroitly navigating the kin-based institutions. This often means (1) conforming to fellow in-group members, (2) deferring to authorities like elders or sages, (3) policing the behavior of those close to you (but not strangers), (4) sharply distinguishing your in-group from everyone else, and (5) promoting your network’s collective success whenever possible. Further, because of the numerous obligations, responsibilities, and constraints imposed by custom, people’s motivations tend not to be “approach-oriented,” aimed at starting new relationships or meeting strangers. Instead, people become “avoidance-oriented” to minimize their chances of appearing deviant, fomenting disharmony, or bringing shame on themselves or others.
WEIRD people, on the other hand, have systems that allow them to cooperate with non-kin (“strangers”):
We stick to impartial rules and principles and can be trusting, honest and cooperative towards strangers. Favoritism towards friends and family is considered nepotism and prefer abstract principles to practicality, relationships and expediency.
Rather than sharing the glory or shame of their kin-circle, the focus is on the individual. They have become
highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical.
Individualism in this context means
Focus on the self’s attributes, accomplishments and aspirations over relationships and social roles.
The non-WEIRD distrust of strangers makes sense since it is generally harder to understand who to trust or not if you do not know where they are “coming from”. Think of the American businessman trying to do business in Japan and all the advice you get about when the Japanese counterpart might smile and nod but mean “no way”. How do you navigate such gaps before everyone around you is also WEIRD?
A reasonable strategy is to aim for “what you see is what you get” as much as you can. You make other people’s life easier and they make yours easier if everyone fits in an easily definable box. This box-construction process has several parts.
Consistency is essential if you want to put people in boxes. It wouldn't work if the content of the box changed depending on context. Consistency makes you predictable to strangers and psychologically pushes you towards respecting the rules, you try to become as consistent as possible.
Consistency is not only essential, it is enforced. It has been elevated into a moral value:
We aim to “be ourselves” across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility. Behavioral consistency is considered more “socially skilled” and “likeable”.
> […]
>While in Korea, consistency only matters within relational contexts, not across them. Across contexts you can vary widely and comfortably: personal adjustments reflect wisdom, maturity and social adeptness.
This is worth a pause because consistency as a virtue is very embedded in our way of thinking. Someone being "inconsistent" is an insult. Or at least you wouldn't want to marry an inconsistent person. Let's see with open eyes what that really means.
Since we’ve forced people into boxes, consistency leads to a set of biases (that plague psychology, behavioral science, and pretty much every one of us). It leads to
>_dispositionalism_: the tendency to see people’s behavior as anchored in personal traits that influence their actions across many contexts.
Mental states
>Also to _Cognitive Dissonance_ and the _Fundamental Attribution Error_.
If your goal is to put people into boxes, why stop at people? Why not put everything into boxes? For the boxes to be useful, it must be that the relationships between boxes are super simple. WEIRD people go ahead and just ignore those relationships.
When reasoning, we tend to look for universal categories and rules with which to organize the world, and mentally project straight lines to understand patterns and anticipate trends. Simplify complex phenomena by breaking them down into discrete constituents and assigning properties to them. Tend to miss relationships between the parts or similarities between phenomena that do not fit into our categories.
Obviously this was a boon for science when science got a lot of mileage studying systems that happen to fit well into boxes with simple relationships between them. Not so good for non-linear dynamical systems which might be why complex systems research tends to trip up the system.
If you think that everything and everyone is a box with properties consistent across time and place, you will conclude that you are the master of your own box. In this way of thinking there is not much room for unpredictability, chance, situation and context, or influence from the outside.
This translates into a very particular concept of control:
When acting, prefer a sense of control and the feeling of making our own choices.
We also love controlling ourselves:
Through potent self-regulation, we can defer gratification. (Can even find experience purifying.)
This is also worth pausing and understanding properly. It is easy to imagine that non-WEIRD people do not value control as much as we do, maybe they are fatalistic or resigned to an oppressive political and social system, as we often tend to imagine. That is not true. Non-WEIRD people care about control just as much. Their ideas of what they can control and how to go about it are different:
++ compare to ideas of control in Japan++
WEIRD societies do a massive shift of the locus of control on the individual and the rules of the system. There is no natural place for context, the unknown or unseen, and the uncontrollable. This has emotional consequences:
We are often racked by guilt as they fail to live up to their culturally inspired but largely self-imposed standards and aspirations. (For non-WEIRD people, shame rather than guilt dominates).
Relationships endure as long as they remain mutually beneficial.
There is little doubt that our minds will continue to adapt and change. We'll think, feel, perceive, and moralize differently in the future. - Joe Henrich
