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.
In the Summer of 1995, a young graduate student in anthropology at UCLA named Joe Henrich
traveled to Peru to carry out some fieldwork among the Machiguenga, an
indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin.
The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in
single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of
clusters of extended families. For sustenance, they relied on local game
and produce from small-scale farming. They shared with their kin but
rarely traded with outside groups.
While the
setting was fairly typical for an anthropologist, Henrich’s research was
not. Rather than practice traditional ethnography, he decided to run a
behavioral experiment that had been developed by economists. Henrich
used a “game”—along the lines of the famous prisoner’s dilemma—to
see whether isolated cultures shared with the West the same basic
instinct for fairness. In doing so, Henrich expected to confirm one of
the foundational assumptions underlying such experiments, and indeed
underpinning the entire fields of economics and psychology: that humans
all share the same cognitive machinery—the same evolved rational and
psychological hardwiring.
The test that Henrich
introduced to the Machiguenga was called the ultimatum game. The rules
are simple: in each game there are two players who remain anonymous to
each other. The first player is given an amount of money, say $100, and
told that he has to offer some of the cash, in an amount of his
choosing, to the other subject. The second player can accept or refuse
the split. But there’s a hitch: players know that if the recipient
refuses the offer, both leave empty-handed. North Americans, who are the
most common subjects for such experiments, usually offer a 50-50 split
when on the giving end. When on the receiving end, they show an
eagerness to punish the other player for uneven splits at their own
expense. In short, Americans show the tendency to be equitable with
strangers—and to punish those who are not.
Among
the Machiguenga, word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor
from America giving away money. 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. So Henrich had no problem finding volunteers. What he
had great difficulty with, however, was explaining the rules, as the
game struck the Machiguenga as deeply odd.
When
he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan
behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North
American. To begin with, the offers from the first player were much
lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the
Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. "It just
seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of
free money," says Henrich. "They just didn’t understand why anyone would
sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to
play the other role in the game."
The potential implications of the unexpected
results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of
scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics
and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At
the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the
results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans,
never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the
industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results
stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other
populations, this assumption of universality would have to be
challenged.
Henrich
had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of
knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk. He began to
wonder: What other certainties about "human nature" in social science
research would need to be reconsidered when tested across diverse
populations?
Henrich soon landed a grant from
the MacArthur Foundation to take his fairness games on the road. With
the help of a dozen other colleagues he led a study of 14 other
small-scale societies, in locales from Tanzania to Indonesia.
Differences abounded in the behavior of both players in the ultimatum
game. In no society did he find people who were purely selfish (that is,
who always offered the lowest amount, and never refused a split), but
average offers from place to place varied widely and, in some
societies—ones where gift-giving is heavily used to curry favor or gain
allegiance—the first player would often make overly generous offers in
excess of 60 percent, and the second player would often reject them,
behaviors almost never observed among Americans.
The research established Henrich as an up-and-coming scholar. In 2004,
he was given the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for young
scientists at the White House. But his work also made him a
controversial figure. When he presented his research to the anthropology
department at the University of British Columbia during a job interview
a year later, he recalls a hostile reception. Anthropology is the
social science most interested in cultural differences, but the young
scholar’s methods of using games and statistics to test and compare
cultures with the West seemed heavy-handed and invasive to some.
"Professors from the anthropology department suggested it was a bad
thing that I was doing," Henrich remembers. "The word 'unethical' came
up."
So instead of toeing the line, he switched
teams. A few well-placed people at the University of British Columbia
saw great promise in Henrich’s work and created a position for him,
split between the economics department and the psychology department. It
was in the psychology department that he found two kindred spirits in Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan.
Together the three set about writing a paper that they hoped would
fundamentally challenge the way social scientists thought about human
behavior, cognition, and culture.
A modern liberal arts education gives lots of
lip service to the idea of cultural diversity. It’s generally agreed
that all of us see the world in ways that are sometimes socially and
culturally constructed, that pluralism is good, and that ethnocentrism
is bad. But beyond that the ideas get muddy. That we should welcome and
celebrate people of all backgrounds seems obvious, but the implied
corollary—that people from different ethno-cultural origins have
particular attributes that add spice to the body politic—becomes more
problematic. To avoid stereotyping, it is rarely stated bluntly just
exactly what those culturally derived qualities might be. Challenge
liberal arts graduates on their appreciation of cultural diversity and
you’ll often find them retreating to the anodyne notion that under the
skin everyone is really alike.
If you take a
broad look at the social science curriculum of the last few decades, it
becomes a little more clear why modern graduates are so unmoored. The
last generation or two of undergraduates have largely been taught by a
cohort of social scientists busily doing penance for the racism and
Eurocentrism of their predecessors, albeit in different ways. Many
anthropologists took to the navel gazing of postmodernism and swore off
attempts at rationality and science, which were disparaged as weapons of
cultural imperialism.
Economists and
psychologists, for their part, did an end run around the issue with the
convenient assumption that their job was to study the human mind
stripped of culture. The human brain is genetically comparable around
the globe, it was agreed, so human hardwiring for much behavior,
perception, and cognition should be similarly universal. No need, in
that case, to look beyond the convenient population of undergraduates
for test subjects. 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.
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. His new colleagues in the psychology department, Heine and
Norenzayan, were also part of this trend. Heine focused on the different
ways people in Western and Eastern cultures perceived the world,
reasoned, and understood themselves in relationship to others.
Norenzayan’s research focused on the ways religious belief influenced
bonding and behavior. The three began to compile examples of
cross-cultural research that, like Henrich’s work with the Machiguenga,
challenged long-held assumptions of human psychological universality.
Some of that research went back a generation. It was in the 1960s, for
instance, that researchers discovered that aspects of visual perception
were different from place to place. One of the classics of the
literature, the Müller-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:
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.
More recently psychologists had challenged the universality of research done in the 1950s by pioneering social psychologist Solomon Asch.
Asch had discovered that test subjects were often willing to make
incorrect judgments on simple perception tests to conform with group
pressure. When the test was performed across 17 societies, however, it
turned out that group pressure had a range of influence. Americans were
again at the far end of the scale, in this case showing the least
tendency to conform to group belief.
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.
The growing body of
cross-cultural research that the three researchers were compiling
suggested that the mind’s capacity to mold itself to cultural and
environmental settings was far greater than had been assumed. The most
interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things
they do—the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the
like—but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and
unconscious thinking and perception.
For
instance, the different ways people perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion
likely reflects lifetimes spent in different physical environments.
American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of
varying dimensions. Surrounded by carpentered corners, visual perception
adapts to this strange new environment (strange and new in terms of
human history, that is) by learning to perceive converging lines in
three dimensions.
When unconsciously translated
in three dimensions, the line with the outward-feathered ends (C)
appears farther away and the brain therefore judges it to be longer. The
more time one spends in natural environments, where there are no
carpentered corners, the less one sees the illusion.
As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was
remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be
particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with
perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding
down one end of the human bell curve.
In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf)
By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated,
Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits
and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world,
it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even
the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the
planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among
Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual,
leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are
exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers
among outliers.”
Given the data, they concluded
that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population
from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing
the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were
learning insights applicable to all birds.
Not long ago I met Henrich, Heine, and
Norenzayan for dinner at a small French restaurant in Vancouver, British
Columbia, to hear about the reception of their weird paper, which was
published in the prestigious journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences
in 2010. The trio of researchers are young—as professors
go—good-humored family men. They recalled that they were nervous as the
publication time approached. The paper basically suggested that much of
what social scientists thought they knew about fundamental aspects of
human cognition was likely only true of one small slice of humanity.
They were making such a broadside challenge to whole libraries of
research that they steeled themselves to the possibility of becoming
outcasts in their own fields.
“We were scared,” admitted Henrich. “We were warned that a lot of people were going to be upset.”
“We were told we were going to get spit on,” interjected Norenzayan.
“Yes,” Henrich said. “That we’d go to conferences and no one was going to sit next to us at lunchtime.”
Interestingly, they seemed much less concerned that they had used the
pejorative acronym WEIRD to describe a significant slice of humanity,
although they did admit that they could only have done so to describe
their own group. “Really,” said Henrich, “the only people we could have
called weird are represented right here at this table.”
Still, I had to wonder whether describing the Western mind, and the
American mind in particular, as weird suggested that our cognition is
not just different but somehow malformed or twisted. In their paper the
trio pointed out cross-cultural studies that suggest that the “weird”
Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the
planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus
advancing as a group. WEIRD minds are also more analytic, possessing the
tendency to telescope in on an object of interest rather than
understanding that object in the context of what is around it.
The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to
understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that
Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments
that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural
world. While studying children from the U.S., researchers have
suggested a developmental timeline for what is called “folkbiological
reasoning.” These studies posit that it is not until children are around
7 years old that they stop projecting human qualities onto animals and
begin to understand that humans are one animal among many. Compared to
Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children
appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow
up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to
anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.
Given that people living in WEIRD societies don’t routinely encounter
or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising
that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural
world. “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive
development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent
of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”
During our dinner, I admitted to Heine, Henrich, and Norenzayan that
the idea that I can only perceive reality through a distorted cultural
lens was unnerving. For me the notion raised all sorts of metaphysical
questions: 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?
Henrich reacted with mild concern that I was taking this research so
personally. He had not intended, he told me, for his work to be read as
postmodern self-help advice. “I think we’re really interested in these
questions for the questions’ sake,” he said.
The
three insisted that their goal was not to say that one culturally
shaped psychology was better or worse than another—only that we’ll never
truly understand human behavior and cognition until we expand the
sample pool beyond its current small slice of humanity. Despite these
assurances, however, I found it hard not to read a message between the
lines of their research. When they write, for example, that weird
children develop their understanding of the natural world in a
“culturally and experientially impoverished environment” and that they
are in this way the equivalent of “malnourished children,” it’s
difficult to see this as a good thing.
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. Cultures
are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds,
religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing
versus urban or suburban—there are hundreds of cultural differences that
individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of
fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision
making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among
other aspects of our psychological makeup.
We
are just at the beginning of learning how these fine-grained cultural
differences affect our thinking. Recent research has shown that people
in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for
deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher
impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other
places. Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been
shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults
than do Northerners. Research published late last year suggested
psychological differences at the city level too. Compared to San
Franciscans, Bostonians’ internal sense of self-worth is more dependent
on community status and financial and educational achievement. “A
cultural difference doesn’t have to be big to be important,” Norenzayan
said. “We’re not just talking about comparing New York yuppies to the
Dani tribesmen of Papua New Guinea.”
As
Norenzayan sees it, the last few generations of psychologists have
suffered from “physics envy,” and they need to get over it. The job,
experimental psychologists often assumed, was to push past the content
of people’s thoughts and see the underlying universal hardware at work.
“This is a deeply flawed way of studying human nature,” Norenzayan told
me, “because the content of our thoughts and their process are
intertwined.” In other words, if human cognition is shaped by cultural
ideas and behavior, it can’t be studied without taking into account what
those ideas and behaviors are and how they are different from place to
place.
This new approach suggests the
possibility of reverse-engineering psychological research: look at
cultural content first; cognition and behavior second. Norenzayan’s recent work on religious belief
is perhaps the best example of the intellectual landscape that is now
open for study. When Norenzayan became a student of psychology in 1994,
four years after his family had moved from Lebanon to America, he was
excited to study the effect of religion on human psychology. “I remember
opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking
for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word
wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the
science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I
grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of
religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”
Norenzayan became interested in how certain religious beliefs, handed
down through generations, may have shaped human psychology to make
possible the creation of large-scale societies. He has suggested that
there may be a connection between the growth of religions that believe
in “morally concerned deities”—that is, a god or gods who care if people
are good or bad—and the evolution of large cities and nations. To be
cooperative in large groups of relative strangers, in other words, might
have required the shared belief that an all-powerful being was forever
watching over your shoulder.
If religion was
necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale
societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of
Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine.
They may have climbed the ladder of religion and effectively kicked it
away. Or perhaps, after a thousand years of religious belief, the idea
of an unseen entity always watching your behavior remains in our
culturally shaped thinking even after the belief in God dissipates or
disappears.
Why, I asked Norenzayan, if religion
might have been so central to human psychology, have researchers not
delved into the topic? “Experimental psychologists are the weirdest of
the weird,” said Norenzayan. “They are almost the least religious
academics, next to biologists. And because academics mostly talk amongst
themselves, they could look around and say, ‘No one who is important to
me is religious, so this must not be very important.’” Indeed, almost
every major theorist on human behavior in the last 100 years predicted
that it was just a matter of time before religion was a vestige of the
past. But the world persists in being a very religious place.
Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan's fear of
being ostracized after the publication of the WEIRD paper turned out to
be misplaced. Response to the paper, both published and otherwise, has
been nearly universally positive, with more than a few of their
colleagues suggesting that the work will spark fundamental changes. “I
have no doubt that this paper is going to change the social sciences,”
said Richard Nisbett, an eminent psychologist at the University of Michigan. “It just puts it all in one place and makes such a bold statement.”
More remarkable still, after reading the paper, academics from other
disciplines began to come forward with their own mea culpas. Commenting
on the paper, two brain researchers from Northwestern University argued
(pdf) that the nascent field of neuroimaging had made the same mistake
as psychologists, noting that 90 percent of neuroimaging studies were
performed in Western countries. Researchers in motor development similarly suggested
that their discipline’s body of research ignored how different
child-rearing practices around the world can dramatically influence
states of development. Two psycholinguistics professors suggested that their colleagues had also made the same mistake: blithely assuming human homogeneity while focusing their research primarily on one rather small slice of humanity.
At its heart, the challenge of the WEIRD paper is not simply to the
field of experimental human research (do more cross-cultural studies!);
it is a challenge to our Western conception of human nature. For some
time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans,
among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across
the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn,
improvise, and problem-solve.
Henrich has
challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche”
hypothesis. He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far
greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out
on their own. He suggests that individuals tap that cultural storehouse
of knowledge simply by mimicking (often unconsciously) the behavior and
ways of thinking of those around them. We shape a tool in a certain
manner, adhere to a food taboo, or think about fairness in a particular
way, not because we individually have figured out that behavior’s
adaptive value, but because we instinctively trust our culture to show
us the way. When Henrich asked Fijian women why they avoided certain
potentially toxic fish during pregnancy and breastfeeding, he found that
many didn’t know or had fanciful reasons. Regardless of their personal
understanding, by mimicking this culturally adaptive behavior they were
protecting their offspring. The unique trick of human psychology, these
researchers suggest, might be this: our big brains are evolved to let
local culture lead us in life’s dance.
The
applications of this new way of looking at the human mind are still in
the offing. Henrich suggests that his research about fairness might
first be applied to anyone working in international relations or
development. People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you
cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into
another culture and expect it to work as it does back home. Those trying
to use economic incentives to encourage sustainable land use will
similarly need to understand local notions of fairness to have any
chance of influencing behavior in predictable ways.
Because of our peculiarly Western way of thinking of ourselves as
independent of others, this idea of the culturally shaped mind doesn’t
go down very easily. Perhaps the richest and most established vein of
cultural psychology—that which compares Western and Eastern concepts of
the self—goes to the heart of this problem. Heine has spent much of his
career following the lead of a seminal paper published in 1991
by Hazel Rose Markus, of Stanford University, and Shinobu Kitayama, who
is now at the University of Michigan. Markus and Kitayama suggested
that different cultures foster strikingly different views of the self,
particularly along one axis: some cultures regard the self as
independent from others; others see the self as interdependent. The
interdependent self—which is more the norm in East Asian countries,
including Japan and China—connects itself with others in a social group
and favors social harmony over self-expression. The independent
self—which is most prominent in America—focuses on individual attributes
and preferences and thinks of the self as existing apart from the
group.
The classic "rod and frame" task: Is the line in the center vertical?
That we in the West develop brains that are
wired to see ourselves as separate from others may also be connected to
differences in how we reason, Heine argues. Unlike the vast majority of
the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason
analytically as opposed to holistically. That is, the American mind
strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its
pieces. Show a Japanese and an American the same cartoon of an aquarium,
and the American will remember details mostly about the moving fish
while the Japanese observer will likely later be able to describe the
seaweed, the bubbles, and other objects in the background. Shown another
way, in a different test analytic Americans will do better on something
called the “rod and frame” task, where one has to judge whether a line
is vertical even though the frame around it is skewed. Americans see the
line as apart from the frame, just as they see themselves as apart from
the group.
Heine and others suggest that such
differences may be the echoes of cultural activities and trends going
back thousands of years. Whether you think of yourself as interdependent
or independent may depend on whether your distant ancestors farmed rice
(which required a great deal of shared labor and group cooperation) or
herded animals (which rewarded individualism and aggression). Heine
points to Nisbett at Michigan, who has argued (pdf)
that the analytic/holistic dichotomy in reasoning styles can be clearly
seen, respectively, in Greek and Chinese philosophical writing dating
back 2,500 years. These psychological trends and tendencies may echo
down generations, hundreds of years after the activity or situation that
brought them into existence has disappeared or fundamentally changed.
And here is the rub: the culturally shaped analytic/individualistic
mind-sets may partly explain why Western researchers have so
dramatically failed to take into account the interplay between culture
and cognition. In the end, the goal of boiling down human psychology to
hardwiring is not surprising given the type of mind that has been
designing the studies. Taking an object (in this case the human mind)
out of its context is, after all, what distinguishes the analytic
reasoning style prevalent in the West. Similarly, we may have
underestimated the impact of culture because the very ideas of being
subject to the will of larger historical currents and of unconsciously
mimicking the cognition of those around us challenges our Western
conception of the self as independent and self-determined. The
historical missteps of Western researchers, in other words, have been
the predictable consequences of the WEIRD mind doing the thinking.
