We Aren’t the World (2013)

http://www.psmag.com/magazines/magazine-feature-story-magazines/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/

by tshepang • 12 years ago

145 81 12 years ago

psmag.com

Htsthbjig• 12 years ago

The problem is that you can't compare $100 purchasing power in USA with $100 in a remote village in Peru.

Imagine that instead of $100, they give you $10.000 and things change. Would you refuse $1.000 free money even if someone earns $9.000?. Hardly.

But this is exactly what is happening. With 1000 euros/month I live like a king in some parts of South America,like Argentina, but I live badly in Europe, the cost of living is way higher.

ginko• 12 years ago

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.

I don't think he offered $100. It was probably a much smaller amount.

nmrm2• 12 years ago

the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies.

$100 is way less than "a few days' wages" for most people in the US/EU, right?

anon4• 12 years ago

Still, I read his findings as having to do more about differences in attitude to money in particular, than about differences in core human psychology.

orting2• 12 years ago

So the idea that scientific studies should include people that are not upper middle-class westerns, is wrong because of the purchasing power of $100?

There is a link to the published paper in the article[1]. I have only skimmed it, but there are many different studies and findings. One I think is really interesting is this:

"Research on IQ using analytical tools from behavioral genetics has long shown that IQ is highly heritable, and not particularly influenced by shared family environment (Dickens & Flynn 2001, Flynn 2007). However, recent work using 7‐year old twins drawn from a wide range of socioeconomic statuses, shows that contributions of genetic variation and shared environment varies dramatically from low to high SES children (Turkheimer et al. 2003). For high SES children, where environmental variability is negligible, genetic differences account for 70‐80% of the variation, with shared environment contributing less than 10%. For low SES children, where there is far more variability in environmental contributions to intelligence, genetic differences account for 0‐10% of the variance, with shared environment contributing about 60%. This raises the specter that much of what we think we have learned from behavioral genetics may be misleading, as the data are disproportionately influenced by WEIRD people, and their children (Nisbett 2009)."

What they are arguing is that we have conducted science in a way where we have consistently sampled from a specific sub-population and used the results to generalise about the remaining sub-population. To me it sounds like they are on to something that could change many of the "givens" that are "known to be true". I recently saw a TED talk with Paul Johnson[2] where she discusses the problem that the sex of subjects in medical trials is often ignored leading to results that only holds for men or women.

[1] http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina...

[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/paula_johnson_his_and_hers_healthc...

vacri7• 12 years ago

Htsthbjig's point is that if the money doesn't mean much to you anyway, you're more likely to be punishing because you're not losing much. But if it means a lot to you, why punish a stranger when you're getting a significant amount of free money.

To properly compare the cultural differences in the test, it would have to be done with the same level of purchasing power. That's not really stated one way or the other in the article. $100 goes a lot further in a developing country than a developed country, so if they were using the same dollar amount (I doubt they were), then it isn't a directly comparable study.

For example: Make it $10. The stranger gives me a 1:9 split in their favour. Fuck 'em, I'm not going to lose any sleep over a dollar, and it's not worth my time to even collect the dollar. Now make it $10k. Hey, I could actually do something nice with $1k, even if the other person is being 'unfair'. The relative purchasing power of the money in the test is significant within cultures, let alone across cultures.

ryanjshaw• 12 years ago

For me the problem is:

* paragraphs 1-5 describe an experiment which makes makes no sense because it appears to ignore purchasing power parity (PPP)

* paragraphs 6-12+ completely ignore the rather obvious PPP objection and go off on a tangent about the lone genius rebelling against authority blah blah blah - a style of writing which makes me increasingly more irritated and skeptical that the author is going to say anything convincing or interesting because he couldn't foresee and address my (and apparently others') immediate objections, which makes me wonder if this was even proofread

I stopped reading at that point because it felt like a waste of my lunch time. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious? I may read further this evening to see if the other 1000s of words have more substance.

danielweber• 12 years ago

One of the reasons for trying the Ultimatum Game in poor villages is that you can see if the theory holds for high rewards, without spending $1,000 a pop to try it out in San Francisco.

desmondmonster• 12 years ago

The article doesn't mention that when this game is played with American children (using pieces of candy instead of money) they usually offer the least amount of candy and accept whatever's offered, say, a 9-1 split. This is seen as "rational" by both sides, because the giver should give as little as possible and the receiver should be happy to have something rather than nothing.

This behavior changes as people grow up. As teenagers, people generally won't accept a split worse than 70/30, which implies that it's worth it to lose out on the 30 in order to send a message to the stingy giver. Also, men are more likely to engage in this sort of justice-driven behavior than women, which is all considered economically irrational. But when the stakes get very high they tend to outweigh people's ethical notions of fairness.

BugBrother3• 12 years ago

Ok, afaik we're evolved to be programmed by culture -- we're more optimized to get respect from others than to earn money.

But... I wonder how much of this is an effect of an inability to see some things about other cultures, because of political correctness?

Some differences are just shocking to modern westerners.

If you have read a bit of mideaval history, you realize there are some similarity between traditional clan cultures and modern organized crime families; e.g. the lack of humanity assigned to outsiders. This is not possible to discuss, since some places on the planet still have similar societies.

Another example is that tolerated pederasm (greek/roman style) is not gone from the planet. It is hard to know, since it isn't really discussed even by e.g. NY Times.

(All these are obvious examples from my own media, yours might be different.)

watwut• 12 years ago

Why do you think that "the lack of humanity assigned to outsiders" is some kind of taboo? I have seen that discussed in relation to world war II or even current politics. You do not need to go medieval to encounter it.

BugBrother3• 12 years ago

I was noting that it was present today. It is just not discussed where I live regarding e.g. immigrants from those areas . You might have a higher media roof.

tshepang• 12 years ago

What is the meaning of 'pederasm'?

BugBrother3• 12 years ago

Swenglish (Swedish English) mangling of the word pederasty.

Renaud• 12 years ago

I believe the parent meant "paederasty".

From Wikipedia:

Pederasty or paederasty (US /ˈpɛdəræsti/ or UK /ˈpiːdəræsti/) is a (usually erotic) homosexual relationship between an adult male and a pubescent or adolescent male. The word pederasty derives from Greek (paiderastia) "love of boys",[1] a compound derived from παῖς (pais) "child, boy" and ἐραστής (erastēs) "lover".

oneandoneis2• 12 years ago

The fact that they thought their research would get a negative reception clearly shows they're not cynical enough: They were providing a cast-iron case for everyone in the field to say "We need more funding to do new research" :)

gottasayit4• 12 years ago

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.

It's so sad that academics in the social sciences fields are terrified to ask honest questions that they might not like the answers to.

I guess that's the reason that social sciences get disrespected so heavily.

The funny thing is that the REAL question that these people don't want to face is "Are these differences more than just cultural? Are they genetic?"

They'd as soon ask that question as a Baptist congregation would seriously ponder Occam's Razor and a need to posit a deity.

seacious• 12 years ago

To be fair, social scientists are not the first to find this prospect troubling.

I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

--Blaise Pascal

pessimizer• 12 years ago

The funny thing is that the REAL question that these people don't want to face is "Are these differences more than just cultural? Are they genetic?"

Only if you consider American to describe a particular set of genetics does this question even make sense.

edit: Western and American are not descriptions of genes. Unless Westerners or Americans cluster in their responses to a test based on how closely related they are, this "question that these people don't want to face" is code rather than honest question.

gottasayit4• 12 years ago

Only if you consider American to describe a particular set of genetics does this question even make sense.

It's not about having the exact same genetics.

For example, it might be about sets of genes or functionally equivalent sets of genes that function in a similar manner despite appearing in members of ostensibly different "races".

The article mentioned that students are chosen for these experiments. Maybe students self-select for having particular genetic sets so you end up with homogenous-enough results that are going to differ radically from the results obtained from genetically isolated groups in other parts of the world.

You start talking about genes, and people panic and worry that you're talking about race. Genes are more complex than that.

vacri7• 12 years ago

Please drop the stereotype of the social sciences. And yes, there's been plenty of studies on genetics in the social sciences.

I always find the hostility some HN members have towards the social sciences to be rather weird. Half of what HN is here for is firmly in the bailiwick of the social sciences. A/B testing? Better marketing? Understanding your employees better? Taking care of yourself so you don't burn out? All of this stuff is the much-maligned social sciences.

Some people have this stereotype that all psychologists are touchy-feely hippies, and they're really not.

gottasayit4• 12 years ago

Please drop the stereotype of the social sciences.

Did you read the article? These researchers were legitimately frightened at how their work would be received and in my opinion it's only heretical in a minor way... AND THEY'RE SOCIAL SCIENTISTS!

I always find the hostility some HN members have towards the social sciences

Yeah, that's why my original post (that in a computer analysis context wouldn't have raised an eyebrow) is being moderated into the dirt.

gottasayit4• 12 years ago

And BAM, there goes the moderation hammer for uncomfortable thoughts.

If we were talking about whether flaws in a computer system were because of the data fed in, the software running it, the hardware, or impurities in the silicon -- we'd all be very clinical and think about it rationally (minus a few Linux/Windows/Mac flames).

But when talking about analyzing basic differences in people, there are elements in the community that can't even hear the blasphemy.

Sadly, this is why the social sciences will never make progress. A fear of really looking in and doing the Science is why the social sciences will always resemble a cargo cult in its lack of real value.

Go ahead, mod me down until this text is one with the background. It won't improve or validate your religious-like belief system because it just isn't good Science.

vacri7• 12 years ago

I find this article very weird. I completed a psychology/neurobiology degree in '94 at a second-tier Australian university. Half the stuff in this article was obvious then. The idea of physical differences being different between cultures wasn't (like the neuroimagers mention in the article), but so much of the rest of the content was.

Visual lines, as quickly glossed over in the article, are different for westerners used to square corners... but this is hardly news. The idea that your environment shapes your perceptions goes back at least as far as 1970, when Blakemoore & Cooper did their vertical/horizontal line experiment on kittens: kittens raised in an environment where they only ever see vertical lines cannot later perceive horizontal lines and vice versa.

And the idea that moral reasoning is somehow genetic? What kind of craziness is this? Throw a brick and you'll hit a family whose children have quite different moral reasoning to their parents. Or between neighbours. Same for the other features of socialisation that they mentioned.

At one stage the author even mentioned that Westerners are the product of "thousands of generations in ever more complex market economies". A thousand generations ago, we hadn't even reached the Neolithic period, let alone 'thousands'. This part of our history isn't particularly well known for its trading culture.

It just seems strange that these guys are painted as anthropologists, yet find it surprising that social aspects of the human are different in different cultures.

THE TURN THAT HENRICH, Heine, and Norenzayan are asking social scientists to make is not an easy one: accounting for the influence of culture on cognition will be a herculean task.

Here is the nub that annoys me about the article. Accounting for the influence of culture is a difficult one - doing a study in your home city is considerably easier than doing it against a representative slice of world cultures. However, recognising the influence of culture on social actions (like the 'fair money divide' or moral reasoning (particularly moral reasoning... I'm still gobsmacked the author even suggested it was genetic)) is something we've known for a very long time, yet the article paints it as 'astonished everyone'.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good point to make, that studies done on any aspect of the human condition can vary between cultures and that that's often overlooked, but it really isn't as astonishing as the article makes out.

chippy3• 12 years ago

It's astonishing and not obvious to others - those outside of the small group of people in the know. It has applications far exceeding social science.

vacri7• 12 years ago

For the layperson, sure. But the article is saying that researchers in the field are astonished.

And even the layperson should be able to tell that moral reasoning isn't genetic.

wil4213• 12 years ago

How does this have to do with "Americans"? I think the comparison was more towards indegionus native people verses civilized ones?

Where is the comparison to other more civilized people like Europeans, Asian countries, Africans, or even Russians.

chippy3• 12 years ago

The article mentioned in a few places why North Americans were more weird than other Westerners in particular.

wil4213• 12 years ago

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.

And I didnt see any data from what happens when they did the "money game" with Europeans, Asians, Africans, even developed South Americans.

RogerL• 12 years ago

From the research paper: "It’s about another exotic group: people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. In particular, it’s about the Western, and more specifically American, undergraduates who form the bulk of the database"

The article seemed to blur the lines quite a bit; I thought the original question was justified and not worthy of downvotes. (why are we downvoting people that ask questions, or maybe, just maybe, misunderstood something?)

_red2• 12 years ago

The answer mostly appears in the setup:

The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families.

Their living situation is one where they are all essentially family. There would be big social impacts on costing your family money, because of some perceived issue with an unequal split.

They are likely all going to spend 'together' anyway. They are probably bewildered why this weird foreigner doesn't grasp this basic fact, and is forcing them to go through some bizarre ceremony to get the money.

ZoFreX• 12 years ago

The answer to what? The first 1/4 of the article?

The thrust of the article is not "this one tribe is an anomaly in how we think and judge", but rather "it turns out that the biggest anomaly is the people in the USA". Up until now the model formed from looking at 'Westerners' has been assumed to be 'the norm' or even how we are physically wired, and unchangeable. Any observed deviations from the model are anomalies and interesting. The novelty here is that actually, things may be the other way around.

_red2• 12 years ago

I think you missed what my point was. They are all family.

Most such experiments carried out in 'the west' are done with strangers. This is a non-trivial difference.

Go to the Ozark mountains in Arkansas and find a small cluster of cabins in the hills where the inhabitants are all family and rarely venture away. Offer the uncle and his nephew the same deal, suddenly the same 'anomaly' will show.

pradocchia• 12 years ago

Moreover, if a researcher shows up in a village offering cash, on the condition that player two doesn't refuse the split:

a) the villagers know each other.

b) the researcher is the stranger.

those are the teams, researcher vs players, not player one vs player two. when would it make sense to refuse the split, punish a neighbor, and let the stranger keep his money? never.

ep103• 12 years ago

Agreed. The average American will see the game, and immediately understand that it is a metaphor for an employee - employer relationship, and act accordingly. This tribe has no such social construct, so they assume that both the "employee" and "employer" are family. In this light, both sets of responses become logical and rational again.

Guvante• 12 years ago

I think your response lines up with what the article is saying, but the person responding wasn't talking metaphorically.

He was saying that if you aren't careful you won't create the same standards when you go to a community. If 30 of us live together and you come in to do a study that is completely different from sampling from a population of tens or hundreds of thousands (as would occur in most Western studies).

chippy3• 12 years ago

Let's discuss the implications for our field, technology.

It appears to me that it's calling out the particular pitfalls of the Silicon Valley mindset being rubber stamped on the rest of the world in terms of design and engineering. But this isn't that new - it's been commented upon before at length (e.g. logical optimistic young engineer's view of the society via building a social network).

But it's probably wider than this. I think it's actually speaking out how we collect samples, data. We expect that 10000 people in one area to think the same as 10000 people in another area, even if they are in the same administrative country and the same geodeomographic characteristics. What matters for some behaviour is culture. Games and experiments could be looked at culturally rather than just geographically.

What should we take home for this? I think probably two things, that we are different from the rest of the world, and that the world has variation within it. To take this into account could be a new form of responsiveness.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

But isn't tech is a change agent in itself? Most tech by it's very nature emphasizes the individual by making them less dependent on their immediate social context. This applies to everything from the internet to the washing machine.

Basically, most technology stimulates people to think and act more like Westerners.

Also, taking this into account is raising the bar very high for SV, where most companies already have problems recognizing the minor differences between them and fellow Westerners.

I'm still waiting for the first major American service to understand the differences between language, nationality and geography...

prawks• 12 years ago

I wonder how strong of a connection the emphasis on "the individual" has with the decreased anonymity in such technology.

It seems that platforms like 4chan provide the capability for more of a "group-think" than platforms like Facebook, even though platforms like Facebook propose that they assist in connecting large swaths of diverse people.

totalrobe• 12 years ago

These indigenous people probably split earnings among one another afterwards... this test among a small isolated group with compared with random Americans could not possibly work

jerf2• 12 years ago

As I write this, the HN title is "Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World"... it's not justified because this article is more that Americans are the "weirdest", why is still very speculative at this point. Considering we just came to grip with it, in academic terms, and still have only the fuzziest pictures as to the details, "why" is a bit premature.

I also find it intriguing that even as we finally identify that cultures may in fact be profoundly different and not merely superficially different, which calls the entire liberal idea of fundamental American evil into question by cutting away the most foundational assumptions it is based on, the author still can't resist leaping to the assumption that Americans are somehow wrong. It's most clear in this bit: Is my thinking so strange that I have little hope of understanding people from other cultures? Can I mold my own psyche or the psyches of my children to be less WEIRD and more able to think like the rest of the world? If I did, would I be happier?

I'll accept the last question as at least a bit of humility, but, well, before one goes socially engineering one's own child, shouldn't we first explore this matter more deeply and ask whether it's even a good idea? And the idea casually underlies several other bits of prose, too. It will take long to purge this poisonous idea from academia, but perhaps now we can finally start.

This is deeply revolutionary stuff if academia actually comes to accept this (to the point that I would not be surprised this becomes one of those "the old guard must die before this can be accepted" sorts of things), and even as the article sort of brushes on this topic, I don't think it really captures just how foundational the assumptions this destroys are. It's not merely a sort of accepted doctrine of modern academic liberalism, the fundamental lack of diversity in human cognition is one of the most foundational foundations, sunk so deep that you can't even notice it unless you go looking.

One of the worries I think would come up is the fear that this might turn into a new judgment of which cultures are "better", but this article does, thankfully, already get into the right of thinking about that question, which is, better for what? Dropping a comfortable western person into a primitive, tribal environment and watching their maladaptive behaviors has long been a topic for movies, for instance (even if it is usually followed up by Mighty Whitey storyline [1]... follow that link if the phrasing concerns you, the racist overtones of that phrase are quite deliberate and derogatory of what it is describing). Cultures are different for reasons, and "better" requires context... but, correspondingly, so therefore does "worse".

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyWhitey

ddebernardy• 12 years ago

Actually, the idea that Americans are very different from others is fairly old.

To wit, the variations of this quote attributed to many authors since the 19th century:

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/07/barbarism-decadence/

In truth, social scientists (bar the usual suspects, aka economists) have long observed that Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, think and behave quite differently from people from other cultures.

You can trace the observation, for instance, all the way back to the beginnings of sociology, psychology, social psychology and anthropology in the late 19th/early 20th -- and you could certainly trace it to colonial times if you accept vague and annecdotical observations from people living at the time as further evidence.

There's also a steady stream of comparatitive studies on the topic since the 1970s, as highlighted by another poster.

brazzy• 12 years ago

Actually, exceptionalism is a mainstay of the self-perception of a great many (if not all) cultures.

mkaziz• 12 years ago

Considering the world is usually divided into the West and the Rest, that's not unsurprising.

jerf2• 12 years ago

Liberalism in its modern guise only took hold in the American academic circles in the 1960s, although it's a very fuzzy event of course. Prior to that the idea that there were fundamental differences wasn't toxic, but I fully agree that it was also often taken too far. I consider the current stance a massive overreaction, but there was something to react to. I don't think the facts have ever justified current academic orthodoxy and rather fully expect it to be looked back on as something as bizarre as pholistigon, but as we sit here in the middle of it, it's much harder to see how bizarre it is.

So to me, the revolutionary bit has nothing to do with "new facts"... the revolutionary bit is if it established to the point where current orthodoxy can no longer resist it.

And in the meantime, as someone who truly enjoys science in its real form as a permanent, ongoing intellectual revolution rather than a servant of the orthodoxy, the staggering vista of quantitative research this opens up into the diversity (the real diversity, not the political kind) of the human experience is incredibly exciting. There's rich veins of knowledge to be mined here with modern technology and techniques.

And I'd make that meta-reply in general to a lot of the other comments... yes, frankly the general gist of this has long been obvious to anyone with an independent mind who takes a look out at the world around us, but if it's so obvious, why has the scientific orthodoxy not matched that? The surprise expressed in this article is real. And I mean that as a true question for thought and examination, not mere snark. It's a rich question, about science, about how science works, about history, all sorts of things. Books could be written on it, and probably will be.

3pt14159• 12 years ago

I've been on this site for over 5 years and I'm getting pretty sick of the lack of very basic design.

Look at this image:

http://i.imgur.com/kR94sqv.jpg

Not only does it blow by the character limit, it goes right off the end of my screen. These problems are fixable. I'm not advocating a complete overhaul, but how many times have you mistapped / misclicked on a vote button and not been able to reverse it? How come there is still no way to collapse threads? Very basic things.

kordless• 12 years ago

I'm not sure what's causing it, but while looking through the HTML I noticed each comment line gets different markup. The first line gets a font tag and the subsequent lines get a p tag. Very strange.

nokcha• 12 years ago

it goes right off the end of my screen.

It's caused by the non-breaking spaces (Unicode character U+00A0) in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7685599

A CSS workaround to read this page:

  .comment {
      display: block;
      max-width: 800px;
  }

tim333• 12 years ago

It doesn't do it on mine http://i.imgur.com/N87UGE5.png - mac with Chrome or Safari. Some sort of browser issue maybe?

gbog• 12 years ago

Better or worse cultures: this is sensitive in the west but I do not see why it should be taboo. First it can be disconnected from racism, because one can equally respect all human beings while still having a preference for some cultural values that we cannot honestly declare equally present in all cultures. An example coming to mind is the place of women.

Then we can find some lines along which cultures might differ and be said better or worse. For example adaptability is likely an important feature. The physical health of people is also different, and there I think American have much to improve.

I don't know why I feel I need to stop here. It reminds me about pg's essay about things that can't be said. Sadly I'm not bold enough to walk through this minefield.

Scienz• 12 years ago

Great - the HN title is no longer the above one, but now "We Aren't the World (2013)"... a non-descriptive one giving no idea of what the article is about, and furthermore assuming that "we" are all Americans, or at least one of the W.E.I.R.D. cultures described in the article.

I hate to complain, especially when I really do love this site and the community, but if someone is going to edit a headline, at least make it an improvement.

lettergram• 12 years ago

I think the difference the author fails to take into account is (a) religious beliefs, (b) purchasing power, (c) economic class.

Respectively,

(a) Religious beliefs differ between countries and if someone believes that "sharing" is better than "self-interest" that will effect the outcome of this "game." This could help to explain why this country is relatively poor.

(b) $100 in the U.S. is equivalent to significantly more in this country...

(c) If everyone is very poor and you are very poor you're in the same boat, if your neighbors would be angry that you took $100 and left them out to dry this could be pretty bad for you. Even if this is not the case, you feel bound to these people and you likely don't want to "screw them over"

sbd• 12 years ago

Just to provide some counter-points and discussion:

(a) Not everyone in the US is religious; and of those that are, not all religious people think of sharing in the same way. I think it would be difficult to say religion in the US is what causes people to split more equitably. Also we do not know the beliefs of the foreign populations in the article.

(b) In both cases it was a meaningful amount of money. The article stated it was worth a few days pay in one of the countries, $100 is about 2 days pay at minimum wage in the US.

(c)I think your point here speaks to the psyche of American's that the author writes about. It would be interesting to perform the game within "only poor" sample groups and "only wealthy" sample groups inside the US.

dfc• 12 years ago

Maybe I missed it but I could not find a link to actual paper. Actual paper:

PDF: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X

NB: The paper is not free from the publisher, pdf is hosted on author's website. DOI merely provided for the benefit of folks using citation managers. How I long for bibdesk on linux.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

Partly because this item has two alternate titles, it has been submitted lots of times before (sometimes without many comments) without people noticing the duplicate submissions. One of the earliest submissions (430 days ago)[1] had well over 100 comments. My comment at the time linked to the full paper[2] by the original authors, which was one of many papers I discussed with professors of psychology (most of whom do their research in the framework of behavioral genetics)[3] that school year in the journal club I attend at my alma mater university.

Plainly, basing psychological research on subjects who are mostly undergraduates at United States universities is not a good idea, and there are now increasing efforts to broaden the samples of human beings used to investigate general human characteristics. Cross-cultural validation was considered very important in studies of personality psychology even before this paper was published,[4] for example.

Anyway, this perspective comes easily for me, as an American who has lived in a non-Western country for six years of my life (with knowledge of the language, the classical literature, and the traditional culture). Definitely the United States is not the center of the Universe. The study authors referred to people from Western cultures, who were Educated, and who live in Industrialized, Rich, Democracies as "WEIRD" people, and of course that acronym marks out a minority of the world population. I am part of that minority, but I have seen how non-Western, (then) less educated people lived as their country made a transition from being agricultural, poor, and dictatorial to being industrialized, rich, and democratic, and along the way the local culture changed as local conditions changed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5282343

[2] 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_fina...

[3] http://www.psych.umn.edu/research/areas/pib/

[4] http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=103...

chillingeffect• 12 years ago

Definitely the United States is not the center of the Universe.

Yes, this became especially clear to me personally while working in Asia during the Second Gulf War. In the U.S., people (mainly hand-wringing liberals like my circle it must be said) shrilly intoned "What is the rest of the world going to think of us?!"

Meanwhile, in Taiwan, they simply weren't thinking about us. Yes, we came up in the news sometimes, with respect to specific political issues. However, that invasion ("war") on the whole had no direct bearing on Taiwan.

What's weird about American culture includes how convinced we are that everyone is looking at us as if we were the sun and the rest of them planets. I'm convinced it's leftover pride from the so-called world wars and it's been vented as a means of social control for the industrial military complex. ("We're the cops of the world, boys.")

It also includes the fact that we go around the world measuring everyone else. When was the last time a bushman from New Guinea wandered into your office park and administered a psychological test to you and your co-workers?

Going deeper, what's truly unusual about us is that we expect to discover or create a system that explains everyone else. E.g. we expect to find atomic-level principles that direct the behavior of every other culture out there as if our investigations into natural science should be a template for social values the world over.

poulsbohemian• 12 years ago

While I don't disagree with your conclusions, my own personal experiences abroad were quite different. When I was a student in Germany, US news showed up on the nightly news and in the newspaper every day. I was regularly engaged in debate about US politics by neighbors - most of whom were better informed than the average American.

shanusmagnus• 12 years ago

I want to add some nuance to this.

Plainly, basing psychological research on subjects who are mostly undergraduates at United States universities is not a good idea

Good for what, or whom? The original BBS article shows that a slew of psychological results, even those from the most robust subfields like perceptual processing, are not so universally constant as they were previously assumed to be. From the point of view of a particular paper on the processing of visual illusions, for instance, this is bad news insofar as it violates the data from that paper; and bad insofar as models based on that data will now require an asterisk.

I maintain that this isn't a bad thing. In the grand scheme, it would obviously be better if models of cognition that grew out of psych research were 'correct' and took into account all relevant issues from the very start, so that (for instance) we knew that environmental geometry would give rise to perceptual foreshortening and lengthening effects in one case and not another.

But this isn't the way the logistics of the field works; and the 'increasing efforts to broaden the samples' you mention is still an infinitesimal drop in the bucket in 99% of the cases. I work in the psych department of a major research university and I'll tell you that screwing down the demographic requirements of our investigations would not lead to fuller and more apt models, it would lead to an utter absence of the experiment to begin with, as we lack the money to ship in enough !Kong tribesmen and Mongolian sheepherders to round out our sample. And even if we could somehow get all those folks, it would lead to the utter absence of most experimental effecss: the results of such disparate effects, for reasonable sample sizes, would look like noise.

Fine, you might say; you shouldn't be doing science anyway, that's the whole point -- it's not science if you're skewing your investigation so heavily. But considering the logistical realities, and the cultural and institutional history that led to the emergence of an infrastructure for the pursuit of the scientific enterprise in the first place, it doesn't seem so bad to have a body of 'rigorous' knowledge that can then be amended, and indeed that is rigorous enough for its practitioners to realize, in response to surprises, that it ought to be amended.

To come back to the article, we have years of research on the ultimatum game where subject behavior under various manipulations has been carefully mapped out; and the existence of these precise results on this admittedly WEIRD dataset are why we can see departures from those results and take note of them; and think about how different cultural constructs might account for the violations of the model; and think about how we might adapt the model in response.

Put more briefly, having a lot of data on a small and unrepresentative population is a useful tool in the quest for building good models, so long as we realize, from time to time, the ways in which the models are inadequate.

peterjmag• 12 years ago

One of the comments in this thread blew up the page layout: http://i.imgur.com/G3edwiY.png (in Chrome too). Not sure which one though. Any ideas?

nsenifty• 12 years ago

It is the comment that starts with "From the research paper:". It has non-breaking spaces instead of regular spaces, perhaps due to copy paste.

roberthahn• 12 years ago

I learned about this study through Daniel Solis's blog[1]. He's a game designer.

His article discusses the fact that American and European boardgames reflect the cultural differences they were designed in. If you know the terms "Ameritrash" and "Euro game" you know what I'm talking about.

As a board game hobbyist, I'm glad that people are looking at and talking about this research. I'm curious to see if there's a brave soul who can design an awesome, fun game that provides players with a distinctly different set of difficult choices that's neither Euro nor Ameritrash.

[1] http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.ca/2014/04/game-design-outsi...

jeffdavis• 12 years ago

It seems like the game is flawed in at least two ways:

1. Are there two players, or three? If the offer is refused, the researcher keeps the money. The researcher almost certainly doesn't care, but how the other participants perceive the role of the researcher is likely to influence their idea of fairness.

2. Is the money a gift from one participant to another, or are they dividing up a gift from the researcher? This difference will also trigger different responses, some of which may be related to fairness and some not.

Of course, any experiment might tell you something interesting. But trying to say this is a test for fairness is an oversimplification.

We Aren’t the World (2013)

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