We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough?

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it
WEIRD enough? via Neuroanthropology by gregdowney on 7/10/10

The most recent edition of Behavioral and Brain Sciences carries a
remarkable review article by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara
Norenzayan, ‘The weirdest people in the world?’ The article outlines
two central propositions; first, that most behavioural science theory
is built upon research that examines intensely a narrow sample of human
variation (disproportionately US university undergraduates who are, as
the authors write, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and
Democratic, or ‘WEIRD’).

More controversially, the authors go on to argue that, where there is
robust cross-cultural research, WEIRD subjects tend to be outliers on a
range of measurable traits that do vary, including visual perception,
sense of fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, and a host of other
basic psychological traits. They don’t ignore universals – discussing
them in several places – but they do highlight human variation and its
implications for psychological theory.

As is the custom at BBS, the target article is accompanied by a large
number of responses from scholars around the world, and then a
synthetic reflection from the original target article authors to the
many responses (in this case, 28). The total of the discussion weighs
in at a hefty 75 pages, so it will take most readers (like me) a couple
of days to digest the whole thing.

It’s my second time encountering the article as I read a pre-print
version and contemplated proposing a response, but, sadly, there was
just too much I wanted to say, and not enough time in the calendar
(conference organizing and the like dominating my life) for me to be
able to pull it together. I regret not writing a rejoinder, but I can
do so here with no limit on my space and the added advantage of seeing
how other scholars responded to the article.

My one word review of the collection of target article and responses:
AMEN!

Or maybe that should be, AAAAAAAMEEEEEN! {Sung by angelic voices.}

There’s a short version of the argument in Nature as well, but the
longer version is well worth the read.

Of course, I have tons of quibbles with wording or sub-arguments, ways
of making points, choices of emblematic cases and the like in the
longer BBS article (and I’ll get to a couple of those below the
‘fold’), but I don’t want to lose my over-arching sense that there is
so much right in this piece. So before I get into the discussion, I
just want to thank all of the authors, not just Henrich, Heine and
Norenzayan, but also the authors of the responses, who pulled it
together when I didn’t try. The collection is a really remarkable
discussion, one that I find gratifying in such a prominent place, and I
do hope that the target article has a significant impact on the
behavioural sciences.

If you have one blockhead colleague who simply does not get that
surveying his or her students in ‘Introduction to Psychology’ fails to
provide instant access to ‘human nature,’ this is the article to pass
along. If that colleague still doesn’t get it, please stop talking to
them. Really. You. Are. Wasting. Your. Breath. If Henrich, Heine and
Norenzayan don’t shake their confidence, I’m not sure what can.
The weirdest people in the world?
Joseph Henrich,Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan (2010).
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 33, Issue 2-3, June 2010 pp 61-83
http://journals.cambridge.org.simsrad.net.ocs.mq.edu.au/action/displayAbstract?aid=7825833


Abstract

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human
psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples
drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and
Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume
that either there is little variation across human populations, or that
these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any
other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of
the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests
both that there is substantial variability in experimental results
across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual
compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains
reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial
reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning,
reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the
heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD
societies, including young children, are among the least representative
populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these
findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects
of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a
priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is
universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these
empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in
addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from
this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close
by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences
to best tackle these challenges.

Article summary

If you absolutely don’t want to read the target article (you should),
I’ll also provide a bit of summary discussion to supplement the
abstract. Skip ahead to the next section if you just want my response.

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan first survey some of the evidence that
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic subjects – more
specifically, University undergrads – are disproportionately the
empirical foundation for claims being made, either explicitly or
implicitly, about human nature. The evidence here is pretty staggering,
even for someone like me who is suspicious of psychology for precisely
this reason.

A recent survey by Arnett (2008) of the top journals in six
sub-disciplines of psychology revealed that 68% of subjects were from
the US and fully 96% from ‘Western’ industrialized nations (European,
North American, Australian or Israeli). That works out to a 96%
concentration on 12% of the world’s population (Henrich et al. 2010:
63). Or, to put it another way, you’re 4000 times more likely to be
studied by a psychologist if you’re a university undergraduate at a
Western university than a randomly selected individual strolling around
outside the ivory tower.

Moreover, psychology is disproportionately American, and especially
English-speaking, even compared to other scientific fields. 70% of all
psych citations originate from US research institutions, compared with
37% in a field like chemistry, and the top four countries for
psychology citations are all English speaking.

Despite the skewed sampling, psychologists seldom offer cautionary
notes about the source of their data or its potential cultural
boundedness, and likely would be testy if the cross-culturally critical
among us suggested that they retitle their publications to reflect the
source of their information: such as, the Journal of Experimental
Psychology in High-Enrollment American Research Universities:
Undergraduate Psychology Students’ Perception and Performance, a
personal favourite. Henrich and colleagues do a good job of pointing
out where there are exceptions to the pattern, and many of the authors
of comments have been leaders in trying to implement broader,
cross-cultural sampling, but the pattern is pretty pronounced in spite
of noteworthy exceptions.

Henrich and colleagues then go on to use existing studies to contrast
WEIRD subjects with other sorts of people on a series of increasingly
close, ‘telescoping’ contrasts: first, they compare industrialized and
‘small-scale’ societies in areas such as visual perception, fairness,
cooperation, folkbiology, and spatial cognition. The authors then
highlight the contrast of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ populations on
measures such as social behaviour, self-concepts, self-esteem, agency
(a sense of having free choice), conformity, patterns of reasoning
(holistic v. analytic), and morality.

The authors then examine how Americans specifically stand out from
other subject pools in comparative research to highlight how the
specific dominance of US subject pools in psychological research might
skew our understanding. In particular, Henrich and colleagues survey
the issue of individualism, choice, and other outlying US traits. This
section is among the thinnest in the article, but it is still full of
suggestive data, especially for those of us who are sensitized to the
dissimilarities glossed over in the catch-all term, ‘Western’ (my
Australian wife and I, a Yank, frequently find ourselves contending
with Oz-Sepo contrasts in daily life, even though Australia and the US
would typically be considered quite similar ‘Western’ cultures).

Finally, Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan contrast the Americans who
typically wind up as psychology subjects with the whole population of
the US, highlighting the diversity among adult Americans in such area
as social behaviour, moral reasoning, cooperation, fairness,
performance on IQ tests and analytical abilities. US undergraduates
exhibit demonstrable differences, not only from non-university educated
Americans, but even from previous generations of their own families.

Herich et al. are careful to point out that ‘difference’ is not the
whole story, that there are underlying similarities among the diverse
groups, and they are agnostic about the causes of various contrasting
results. They suggest (2010: 79) that determining a set of criteria for
traits likely to be universals would be helpful to psychology and
behavioural science and offer a few examples.

But perhaps the main point is a cautionary one, arguing that the
developmental environment for WEIRD children may be statistically
unusual in a wide variety of ways from the typical environment of
modern Homo sapiens throughout our species’ time on the planet:

The fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of
the behavioral sciences may render them one of the worst subpopulations
one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens…. WEIRD people,
from this perspective, grow up in, and adapt to, a rather atypical
environment vis-à-vis that of most of human history. It should not be
surprising that their psychological world is unusual as well. (2010:
79-80)

As a counter-balance to the oddity of WEIRD subjects, and their
overwhelming over-representation in psychological research to this
date, Henrich and colleagues recommend an ambitious cross-cultural
research agenda, changes to publication policy to redress the
imbalance, and a range of other practical, albeit quite difficult,
policies.

They highlight that adding subjects to our pools may not be sufficient
to fix biases that are inherent in research questions, method, or
theory, a point that several of the commentators also discuss, some
with less optimism than Henrich and colleagues (for example, Gosling,
Carson, John and Potter; Shweder; and Baumard and Sperber).

Overall, what most recommends this article is not that these arguments
have never been made before, but rather the breadth and depth of the
empirical sources that Henrich and colleagues draw into the discussion.
For example, Paul Rozin, who arguably has made very similar arguments
before, lauds Henrich and colleagues, writing about the message of
cross-cultural variation, ‘never has it been so thoroughly documented
and elaborated into all the domains in which it is relevant. And never
so convincingly’ (2010: 108). High praise, indeed.

So what possible quibbles could I have with a piece that clearly has so
much so right? Let the picking of nits begin!

Is being WEIRD really what makes them odd?

Henrich and colleagues use the acronym WEIRD (Western, Educated,
Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) to capture the distinctiveness of
the typical subjects used in psychology experiments – university
students in psychology classes – but I suspect that this acronym,
however clever, fails to truly capture how odd these subjects are. One
could add a host of other terms that would highlight other outlying
characteristics of this population, especially differences that may not
be so obvious to WEIRD researchers.

Although WEIRD is terribly catchy and quite manageable, it may not even
focus us on the most important distinctions, nor may it reflect a good
starting point for a truly trans-cultural psychology, carting our own
self-conceptions and obsessions, surreptitiously, into the
cross-cultural comparisons. Is WEIRD weird enough to constitute a break
from typical ways of thinking among the WEIRD researchers? (God, this
if fun. It’s one reason I think the article has legs: rhetorical
catchiness.)

For example, when I brought one of my Brazilian subjects to an American
university at which I previously taught, his characterization of the
American students’ differences from young Brazilians with whom he had
more contact focused on none of these traits (W. E. I. R. or D.). He
was more struck by their large size (both height and BMI, to put it
nicely), their frumpy androgynous clothing (anyone here not wearing a
sweatshirt?), their materialism, their clumsiness and physical
ineptitude, and their ethnic and personal homogeneity. If my Brazilian
colleague were to characterize the oddness of the WEIRD, he wouldn’t
focus on the traits Henrich and colleagues have chosen in their
designation.

From the perspective of my admittedly non-academic Brazilian colleague,
the truly outstanding characteristics of the US students were
characteristics like their body types, the diminishing of gender
markers, and the evidence of extraordinary peer-group conformity in
bearing, expression and personal presentation. His observations are
hardly scientific, but they suggest that focusing on ‘Western-ness’,
education, economic system, wealth, and political system certainly
doesn’t exhaust the parameters of difference and it might not even
highlight the most salient, although it does correspond to patterns of
the Big Variables in Western scholarship about difference (when I was
in grad school, it was the Holy Trinity: gender, class and ethnicity).

I don’t think that my point is a fundamental disagreement with Henrich
and colleagues, but a concern that the parameter of difference we
choose to highlight, even in the simplest designation, might itself be
a culturally-generated bias. Anthropologists are well acquainted with
having our subjects point to traits that are invisible to the Western
research as ‘the crucial’ characteristic for understanding the gap. For
example, ‘rich’ may seem an obvious contrast to poverty, but we know
that not all ‘poverty’ is the same, nor are all ‘rich’ people able to
experience in the same way their material situation. Some economists
have argued that inequality is more crucial for understanding the
experience of deprivation, for example, than absolute wealth. And poor
populations often fix, not on their material deprivation, but on other
qualities to describe their difference from the wealthy (or the WEIRD).
For example, religious differences, family dynamics, or caste might be
salient to people from other cultural backgrounds.

In addition, I worry that some of our cultural ideology and self
deception may be smuggled in under the terms themselves, especially
‘Western,’ ‘industrialized’ and ‘democratic.’ ‘Western’ has been too
comprehensively discussed to really dwell on here, but I’m struck by
both ‘democratic’ and ‘industrialized’ as forms of self description for
Americans, especially. After all, isn’t ‘de-industrialization’ or
post-industrialization a key economic transformation in the United
States, and aren’t many American commentators worried about the
hollowing out of ‘democracy’ in an age of voter apathy and corporate
domination of media and political lobbying?

If WEIRD college students aren’t voting in large numbers, for example,
and feel profoundly alienated from politics, isn’t it problematic to
think of ‘democracy’ as shaping their attitudes? I’d be more inclined
to say we should examine the landless farmers in Brazil I worked with
while studying the Landless Movement to understand ‘democratic’
populations. They had long community meetings modeled on the labour
movement or anarchist movement to come to decisions. I doubt my
university students in the US had experienced anything nearly as
‘democratic.’

Again, I think that my critique is more than a bit unfair, as Henrich
and colleagues are writing for an experimentalist academic community
that needs to be made aware of the distortions introduced by accustomed
research methods. They’re not writing for an audience of
deconstructivist, left-leaning, post-colonial political economists,
anthropologists, or cultural studies scholars. My ‘critiques’ are more
about how we might shepherd the next stage of research if Henrich,
Heine and Norenzayan are successful with their intervention. I worry
that, even if psychologists, brain scientists, and evolutionary
theorists decide that they need to take human variation seriously,
anthropology isn’t going to be ready as a discipline to help (one more
reason I appreciate the inter-disciplinary program that Henrich and his
colleagues are sketching).

So, to sum up this post-Henrich, next stage concern: I worry that
W.E.I.R.D. classification flatters the WEIRD, focusing on traits that
Westerners typically highlight to describe themselves in ways that are,
however inadvertently, pretty self-congratulatory. If we were to call
the same group, Materialist, Young, self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking,
Isolated, Consumerist, and Sedentary (MYOPICS)… you get the idea. (By
the way, I’m not committed to this, only to getting my own acronym –
You know the steps in the cheap acronym process: Set acronym. Find
words to fit each letter.)

How the WEIRD get weird

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan are really good in the target article to
refrain from too much speculation about the explanations for the
peculiarity of the WEIRD. It’s one of the many things that I think they
need to be congratulated on, and their openness invites a wide-ranging
discussion of the many likely contributing facotrs. But many of the
specific qualities highlighted in the Henrich et al. piece and in the
responses likely do not stem directly from being either W., E., I., R.
or D., so the classification itself can be misleading.

For example, one of the prime candidates for the cause of some of the
measurable differences is variation in child-rearing techniques,
especially forms of verbal interaction with infants and young children,
their visual and sensory environments, and the manual forms of care
given to children. WEIRDness doesn’t necessarily determine this
childhood environment, even though many childcare practices that might
help to create the psychological statistical anomalies we find in these
populations do correlate with being WEIRD. If English is affecting how
the WEIRD think in ways that make them unusual, for example, there’s no
inherent reason why English speaking-ness necessarily leads to
WEIRDness, although the WEIRD are disproportionately English-speaking
(especially those surveyed for psychological research).

Again, this is not so much a critique of Henrich and colleagues but a
consideration of where we go from here, how we get at human
psychological variation. The point is just that it will not be enough
to try to get populations who are different to Us (if You, the reader,
are WEIRD) in ways that we recognize. For example, although poor
populations within Western countries may demonstrate significant
variation, they might not, and not because variation is not possible;
they might share child caring practices with wealthier countrymen
without sharing wealth or income profile. The choice of comparison
should be motivated by the research question and hypotheses about
relevant causal dynamics, not simply, like the broader reliance on
WEIRD subjects, the result of convenience in sampling.

Who you callin’ ‘SMALL-scale’!?

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan use the term ‘small-scale,’ although they
are very clear what the term means and that it is not a thin proxy for
‘primitive’ (see p. 123, fn#4). I’m more than a bit uncomfortable with
the term ‘small-scale’ although it is arguably the most acceptable
classification for the groups that are being clustered (and miles and
miles and miles better than ‘primitive’ and other bare-facedly
ethnocentric terms). The problem is, what’s the contrast with
‘small-scale’? If it’s ‘Western,’ than we have an asymmetrical binary
distinction where some groups will arguably fall under both categories
or under neither.

For example, ‘small-scale’ focuses on a cluster of traits that don’t
NECESSARILY co-vary, although they might in until-recently foraging
groups: small, geographically-bounded groups with slight division of
labour, local organization through kinship, self-sufficient in food
provisioning, and face-to-face interaction. The obvious ‘none of the
above’ cases in the ‘small-scale v. Western’ contrast are non-Western
groups who are not small-scale, such as city dwellers in Asia, Latin
America, Africa and the Pacific (outside Australia and New Zealand).
This group would constitute a substantial part of the world’s
population, if not the largest grouping.

And what about Western populations living in small-scale settings? For
example, I live in a very wealthy town of around 2000 people where I
frequently encounter people I know on the street. As members of a
gentrified country town, we grow and eat a lot of local produce, more
so every year for ideological reasons, and, given 5 or 10 minutes, most
of the locals can find kin or age-cohort connections in a process that
is as seemingly obligatory as it is tedious for a ‘blow in’ (local
argot for an in-migrant) like myself to watch. I’m surrounded by people
interested in green lifestyles, self-sufficiency, ‘slow food,’
reconnecting socially – many of them living on million-dollar
properties. We’re obviously WEIRD – waaaaaay WEIRD – but also, in an
admittedly tendentious argument, ‘small scale.’

I don’t think for one SECOND that Henrich and colleagues are not aware
of this issue, but I think that the problem highlights a stumbling
block for anthropologists doing cross-cultural comparisons more
generally: the use of binary classifications is likely to be a nagging
intellectual handicap. Much more useful is to really think through
Henrich’s suggestion, in the same footnote (p. 123, fn#4), about an
‘n-dimensional’ comparative space for talking about cultural
distinctions.

The contrast of ‘small-scale’ to ‘Western’ seems to me to be an
artifact of more simplistic forms of cross-cultural comparison, more
‘primitive’ intellectual projects than the one Henrich and colleagues
are proposing. So much of the discussion in the article, including the
really intriguing graphs showing the wide range of variation WITHIN
both WEIRD and ‘small-scale’ groups, runs counter to the dichotomy,
highlighting the fact that human diversity can’t be too quickly
recuperated with old-fashioned Us-Them thinking. I don’t think Henrich
and colleagues fall victim to bipolar thinking as an intellectual
short-cut, but I worry that there’s dead-falls lurking along the path
of the terminology itself.

My own candidate for one source of the oddity

Although Henrich and colleagues are laudably restrained in speculating
about the sources of differences between WEIRD populations and other
groups, I want to put another candidate on the table that’s discussed
by Lana B. Karasik, Karen E. Adolph, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, and
Marc. H. Bornstein in one of the responses that I enjoyed a lot. They
talk about ‘WEIRD walking,’ the way that WEIRD populations are also
outliers in terms of motor development in ways that many people in the
field overlook.

Karasik and colleagues describe how WEIRD children’s patterns of motor
development became enshrined in psychology through testing procedures,
test items and norms into an understanding of universal ‘stages’ of
motor development (see 2010: 95). Even when cross-cultural research was
conducted, these culturally-specific criteria, derived from examining
WEIRD developmental pathways, meant that researchers were often
carrying with them tools that were ill-suited to study other sorts of
children. Or these psychologists were simply comparing diverse children
to WEIRD ones on standards set by the WEIRD children.

One example of this that I have discussed is overhand throwing, a task
that has been used in some tests of motor coordination in spite of the
fact that different cultural groups demonstrate enormous variability in
the activity because it is a skill, not a universally-acquired
entailment of being human. Some children learn to throw in environments
that support, model and reward the activity; others never really learn
to throw particularly well because their activity patterns simply do
not include the opportunity to learn (I’ve written in a book chapter
that will soon appear about ‘throwing like a Brazilian,’ an analogue to
‘throwing like a girl’).

Karasik and colleagues point out that even such ‘basic’ motor abilities
at crawling are susceptible to manipulation: the trend to put newborn
children on their backs to sleep in the West, for example, has retarded
the development of crawling in a population where children formerly
would routinely sleep on their bellies. In some groups, normal
development may not even include crawling, children skipping the stage
entirely or using some other intermittent form of locomotion, like
‘bum-shuffling’ or scooting about while seated.

In my own research, the physical abilities of WEIRD university students
stand out more clearly as strikingly odd than many of their other
traits, and I’m convinced that the extraordinary inactivity of this
population, coupled with their high calorie diets, has more diverse and
wide-ranging effects than simply leading to an epidemic of obesity,
Type-II diabetes, and other diet-related health problems. For example,
capoeira instruction, a subject close to my heart, has to start at a
much different place for American youth than it does with Brazilian
kids in Salvador where I did my field research. Even teaching salsa
lessons at a Midwestern US university drove home the profoundly
different motor starting point, prior to the lessons, of young adults
in the US compared to Brazilians (and I suspect, to many populations in
Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere).

The point is not just to rehearse the typical alarmist discussion of
the ‘obesity epidemic,’ but also to point out the profound potential
implications of radical differences in activity environments for
children during their development. I don’t think most WEIRD theorists
realize just how powerful an influence sedentary living is on our
psychological, physiological, metabolic, endocrine, and neural
development because most of us, subjects and researchers alike, are SO
sedentary. WEIRD bodies have so much unused energy from their diets,
especially with their levels of activity plummeting, that I find it
hard to believe we understand metabolic patterns that would have
dominated much of human prehistory.

To argue that WEIRD subjects are a good window in on ‘human nature’ is
difficult when, from the perspective of metabolic energy and
expenditure, the WEIRD are such outliers in the whole history of our
species. We know that this radically unusual metabolic situation —
massive energy surplus with less and less expenditure — is profoundly
affecting mortality patterns: in WEIRD societies, most of the leading
causes of death are, arguably, directly linked to the human body’s
difficulty of coping with this situation, and that’s even after
generations of sedentary life in which to adapt. But the psychological
and neurological consequences of sedentarism are less well understood
in part, in my opinion, because most WEIRD researchers have a hard time
even imagining how arduous life would have been. Throughout human
existence, most humans likely have been phenomenally active, and
athletic, compared to WEIRD populations, out of necessity.

I’m going to have to write something more in depth on this, but I just
feel the need to flag it. If I had written a response, I probably would
have focused on this trait because it runs against WEIRD researchers’
self understanding. The WEIRD tend to think of themselves as unusually
healthy, and by measures of things like infectious disease rates, death
from accident, and infant mortality, they certainly are. But from a
broad, cross-cultural view, the extraordinary inactivity of the WEIRD,
coupled with their access to very energy dense, highly processed food
sources, makes them outliers in ways that I’m not sure we fully
comprehend.

Taking issue with some of the responses

A number of the commentators bring really interesting points to the
discussion. A few that I have to single out for special praise are
Majid and Levinson on WEIRD languages; Leavens, Bard and Hopkins on
BIZARRE chimpanzees (the acronym thing is apparently contagious);
Karasik and colleagues on motor development; Chiao and Cheon on brain
imaging; Ceci and colleagues on hiccups in research design; Fessler on
unknown unknowns in shame research; Lancy on ethnocentrism in child
development research… There’s really a lot of great discussion, most of
it building upon what Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan have laid out in
the target article. Again, I can only really recommend that you read
the original.

That said, there are a couple of responses that I have to take issue
with, including a couple that Henrich and colleagues handle far more
diplomatically than I would have.

‘Difference is really uniformity if you just ignore difference’

Lowell Gaertner, Constantine Sedikides, Huajian Cai and Jonathan D.
Brown basically write a piece that says, ‘yeah, yeah, differences,
differences, yada yada…. But the over-arching human universals, the
kind that we label with vague generalities that could be applied to
anything, are really the point, and they’re GENETIC!’ Frequent readers
of our weblog will know that this kind of argument gets me as hopped up
and raving as a post-Halloween kindergarten class. (And don’t even get
me started on errant use of the word, ‘reify’…) Danks and Rose offer a
similar, but less objectionable use of this argument strategy,
suggesting that universality is in the learning process, not in what is
learned.

Henrich and colleagues do an excellent job of shredding the specific
empirical case made by Gaertner and colleagues about the universality
of ‘positive self-views’ (see esp. pp. 119-121), so I won’t dwell on
the nuts and bolts. Flogging a dead horse and all. What I just want to
highlight is that the idea that there is something ‘essential,’ an
obdurate and universal ‘human nature,’ is NOT evolutionary thinking. To
argue against ‘human nature’ is not to be anti-evolutionary.

For some reason, some (though not ALL) theorists try to make the
argument for human variation appear to be against evolution, which is
something I can NOT understand, except in the narrow confines of the
history of feuding within anthropology. Even in my freshman human
evolution course, one of the key arguments from Week Two is that even
Darwin’s classical perspective on natural selection says that species
change and that variation is a fundamental precondition for natural
selection even if stabilizing selection produces patterns of continuity
over time.

But the bigger problem with Gaertner et al. is the common assumption
that, although there’s diversity in ‘behaviour’ or ‘phenotype,’ on some
other higher level of abstraction, there’s unity, even if that unity
has to be stated in such vague terms that it’s essentially meaningless.
Likewise, I’m not convinced that Danks and Rose are on solid ground, or
making much progress by trying to separate out learning processes from
what is learned, and then to argue that the processes are universal. As
an empirical statement, the argument for universal learning processes
is obviously false. Some societies, like WEIRD ones, have extensive,
explicit, segregated systems for formal learning; others have virtually
no separate contexts for learning or have very different sorts of
institutions than classrooms.

I just don’t think I get why some theorists must, as soon as confronted
by evidence of diversity, immediately declare that there’s
‘uniformity,’ at some ‘higher level’ of abstraction. The act can often
sound like a vague rearguard defense, as if there is some underlying
need to demand uniformity in spite of evidence to the contrary. For
example, confronted by the empirical reality of profound dietary
variation in humans, of survival for multiple generations at near
starvation levels, of culturally-induced dietary restrictions, of
eating patterns that are unhealthy and self-destructive, even voluntary
self-starvation or gross over-consumptions, some defenders of
universalism, like Gaertner and colleagues say, ‘the diverse diets are
connected and assimilated by a universal need for sustenance’ (2010:
93).

The point is not that there are no universals; it’s that the
‘assimilation’ of diversity into a meaningless ‘universal’ is a hollow
exercise that seeks to escape from the very point that Henrich et al.
are marking. Gaertner and colleagues argue that apparent,
empirically-verifiable diversity is actually unity at an ‘abstract
process and function’ level, a retreat to an unfalsifiable and
ineffable assertion, especially when coupled with allusions to
‘genotype’ that also can’t be shown to be empirically founded. Even
absolute, empirically demonstrated universality is NOT proof that
something is ‘human nature’; everywhere on Earth, humans deal with
gravity, but this is not due to ‘human nature,’ except that to be a
human is, like all other matter, to have mass affected by gravity.

It would be alright, logically, to retreat to universal declarations
about human universals of process or function ONLY IF the psychologists
who made this retreat would then refrain from making any statement or
implying any characterization of humans more specific than that
abstract universalism. In other words, if you’re going to argue that
the universal trait is the need for sustenance, than you have to stop
yourself from making pseudo-evolutionary arguments about food
preferences for salt-and-vinegar potato chips, fizzy soft drinks, and
‘death by chocolate’ cake, or anything else. That is, you can’t
strategically retreat to abstract high ground as soon as you’re
challenged empirically on sloppy universalisms only to boldly foray
forth into the land of blanket statements about more detailed
characteristics of ‘human nature’ as soon as you think no one is
watching.

What I don’t get, I guess, is the defensiveness. Are the knee-jerk
universalists worried that, if we concede that there might be
fundamental variation in humans, we inevitably move toward racism? If
so, we’re in trouble. Do they think that the existence of human genes
means that we must necessarily be a species of genetic clones? Are they
worried that science can’t be conducted on a topic where one cannot
make blanket universalizing declarations? If so, someone should tell
biologists because they’re in trouble. Is it just intellectual
laziness? Or is it a fear of some previous intellectual error, like the
denial of science itself, committed by some intellectuals in the name
of diversity? I suspect that it might be the last, but, unfortunately,
it often sounds like one of the earlier objections.

I don’t have a problem with saying there are some universals; I just
have a problem with someone, when confronted with evidence that a
particular trait is NOT universal, immediately trying to declare that
it really, really is uniform if we just squint our eyes, blur our
understanding, and step back further from the object of study. What’s
the point?

You say WEIRD, I say nuh-uh!

I’d also take issue with Paul Rozin’s commentary, although I think he
makes some excellent points (and I very much respect his work). My main
problem is the assumption that technologically-driven human development
will necessarily lead the world to become, well, WEIRDer:

But the main point of my commentary is that although the NAU [North
American undergraduate] is truly anomalous, this subspecies of Homo
sapiens is a vision of the future. With the Internet, ready
availability of information of all sorts, computer fluency as key to
success in the world, and ease in negotiating a world where text as
opposed to face-to-face interactions are the meat of human
relationships, the NAU is at the vanguard of what humans are going to
be like. (Rozin 2010: 109)

Perhaps I just don’t share Rozin’s techno-optimistic ‘vision of the
future’ online as a species, but Rozin seems to assume that the
wealthiest, most well educated, most privileged and greediest
resource-consuming sliver of the world’s population is just a bit out
in front temporarily from where everyone will eventually arrive.
Someday, when we grow up as societies, we’ll all be like college
students. God save us if that’s the case, because the environmental
footprint is going to be catastrophic unless a lot changes in the next
few years.

I don’t think I’d be alone in my suspicion that this view of digital
‘modernization’ is reminiscent of many declarations that some new
technology was going to change us fundamentally as a species; so far, I
think the evidentiary ball is in the court of the techno-optimists to
write a plausible account of how that will happen. Just as some might
argue the world is getting WEIRDer, others might argue that the Western
nations are less uniformly WEIRD.

I’d also take issue with Alexandra Maryanski’s commentary, but I’m just
not really sure I get where she’s coming from, so I don’t know where to
start (Henrich and colleagues don’t respond at length to this piece).
On the one hand, Maryanski seems to be aware of cross-cultural
research; on the other, I’m not sure she’s really read it the same way
that I would. The piece is so shot full of rhetorical questions that
it’s hard to follow the logic, but she seems to be saying that, because
ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers says that they have ‘high
individualism, reciprocity, and low levels of inequality,’ then WEIRD
societies are sort of just like the societies in which humans first
evolved…

For, despite all the multiple ills of industrialized societies, WEIRD
societies may be more compatible with our human nature than the
high-density kinship constraints of horticultural societies or the
“peasant” constraints of agrarian societies with their privileged few

So, people in industrial societies are JUST LIKE hunter-gatherers,
except for the gigantic scale, anonymous interaction, replacement of
reciprocity-based relationships with market transactions, and the
unprecedented-in-human-history levels of material inequality. (For the
slow readers, yes, that’s irony.) Oh, and the domestication of plants
and animals, sedentary settlements, high technology, extended classroom
education, mass media imagery, enormous social institutions, changes in
family structure, decrease parent-infant contact, radically new built
environment, completely different, dense social structure…

That’s why I say that, although there’s evidence that she’s aware of
the Human Relations Area Files, I’m just not sure how Maryanski read
them to come away with the impression that the WEIRD are just like the
foraging peoples in the ethnographic record. Maybe the train just left
the station without me on this argument, but I do not get it.

The argument she MIGHT make is that, with the enormous proliferation of
technology and division of labour, WEIRD humans, especially in the
extended adolescent period created by the system of tertiary education
that delivers them as subjects to psychology researchers, demonstrate
what humans might be like if they were utterly REMOVED from most normal
selective pressures. If anything, university students might be
demonstrating the utter nihilism and lack of restraint when normal
external scaffolding on human behaviour and decision making are relaxed
and replaced with fermented motivation, collective peer effervescence,
and complete discounting of any future outcomes…

Might make that argument.

I’m not sure I’m persuaded by it, but maybe slavish obedience to peer
pressure, high levels of inebriation and pizza consumption, cluttered
living spaces, transitory sexual relationships, intermittent
high-stress all-nighters punctuating months-long periods of sloth-like
inactivity except for feeding, drinking and playing video games – maybe
this is in fact what humans choose to do when divested of all
responsibility for themselves with virtually no immediate pressures
except for self-created social ones. Or maybe I’m just describing my
own time in college.

Concluding thoughts

I apologize for this overly long discussion, especially in a blog
format, but I just feel terribly inspired by this piece by Henrich,
Heine and Norenzayan. I can’t thank the authors enough, and I am going
to learn how to use a citation tracker specifically so that I can
follow the subsequent impact of this article.

My reservations notwithstanding, I think it’s a remarkable piece, one
that really needed to be written, and I congratulate the authors on it.
It’s a thorough, well-thought piece, but with the added advantage of
having some especially well-chosen examples and that colossal,
infectious, acronymic hook, the glossy term that captures such a key
idea well. I think the piece will travel well and might actually have a
terribly salutary effect on the WEIRD populations it is targeting.

References discussed:

Arnett, J. 2008. The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to
become less American. American Psychologist 63(7): 602-14.

Danks, David, and David Rose. 2010. Diversity in representations;
uniformity in learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 90-91.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000075

Gaertner, Lowell, Constantine Sedikides, Huajian Cai, and Jonathon D.
Brown. 2010. It’s not WEIRD, it’s WRONG: When Researchers Overlook
uNderlying Genotypes, they will not detect universal processes.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 93-94. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000105

Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. Most people
are not WEIRD. Nature 466(1): 29.

Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. The weirdest
people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 61-135 (with
commentary). doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X Check Joseph Henrich’s
homepage for a pdf of the article and related audio files.

Karasik, Lana B., Karen E. Adolph, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, and Marc
H. Bornstein. 2010. WEIRD walking: Cross-cultural research on motor
development. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 95-96.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000117

Maryanski, Alexandra. 2010. WEIRD societies may be more compatible with
human nature. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 103-104.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000191

Rozin, Paul. 2010. The weirdest people in the world are a harbinger of
the future of the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 108-109.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000312


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