A former colleague of mine posted a really interesting read on
Facebook recently titled 'We Aren't the World'. The tagline reads: Joe
Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and
economics—and hoping to change the way social scientists think about human
behavior and culture.
First off, I would like you to consider this (scary
fact…) while reading my little excerpt:
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.
Some of the highlight of the article include:
The Muller-Lyer
Illusion showed that where you grew up
would determine to what degree you would fall prey to the illusion that these
two lines are different in length:
The
Muller-Lyer Illusion
Researchers found that Americans perceive the line
with the ends feathered outward (B) as being longer than the line with the
arrow tips (A). San foragers of the Kalahari, on the other hand, were more
likely to see the lines as they are: equal in length. Subjects from more than a
dozen cultures were tested, and Americans were at the far end of the
distribution—seeing the illusion more dramatically than all others.
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.
Here is the link to the article.
Enjoy!
Happy thoughts,
Miss Scott
