Tag: WEIRD

Impersonal Prosociality & the Found Family

Impersonal Prosociality & the Found Family

Posted on by jabittan
There is a current trend in pop-culture movies and TV shows to emphasize the idea of the “found family.” This idea shows up in the Harry Potter series as Harry’s only remaining blood relatives are awful, but his found family in the Wizarding World become a true force for love. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is a big story about the power of found family and the complexities and challenges of coming together to create a family out of people who previously didn’t have any family. Across a lot of current pop culture, stories feature the families we chose, not the families we are born into.
 
 
The idea of the found family could only exist in a world of impersonal prosociality which sets a baseline for how we behave and relate toward others. Impersonal prosociality is a WEIRD phenomenon. Through much of human history, tight knit clans and tribes based on immediate blood relations have been the driving force of human society. Marriages bridged gaps and brought families and people together. Survival and interaction beyond the family, tribe, or kin group was rare. Impersonal prosociality sets a foundation from which we can move beyond familial relations and create our own found families.
 
 
In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich describes impersonal prosociality by writing:
 
 
“Impersonal trust is part of a psychological package called impersonal prosociality, which is associated with a set of social norms, expectations, and motivations for impartial fairness, probity, and cooperation with strangers, anonymous others, or even abstract institutions like the police or government. Impersonal prosociality includes the inclinations we feel toward a person who is not tied into our social network at all. How should I treat this person? It’s like a baseline level of prosociality with anonymous others, or a default strategy.”
 
 
My argument is that you cannot have a concept of a found family in a non-WEIRD world that does not have a high level of impersonal prosociality. If everyone in society is generally distrustful of strangers, is unwilling to cooperate and do business with people that they don’t know personally, and will not interact with people outside their tribe and kin, then a found family cannot exist. Found families are only possible when people can survive on their own and can work with and cooperate with complete strangers. From there, people can leave families that are abusive, that do not support their goals and ideologies, and that may be harmful for them as individuals. If society does not have a sufficient level of impersonal prosociality, then you cannot strike out on your own and you cannot chose to walk away from your direct relatives.
 
 
But when society does foster trust, communication, trade, and fairness between strangers, then an individual can walk away from family and chart their own path. Harry was welcomed into a supportive Wizarding World with strangers who were eager to help him, even before they actually knew who he was. Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy and all of his companions were able to live as rogue semi-outlaws on their own before finding that they could come together as a found family and be happier than they were on their own. When society embraces impersonal prosociality, people have more options to branch out and find those people who can become their true family, even if they are not blood relatives. Our current pop-culture fascination with the found family can only exist in our WEIRD culture.
WEIRD People Don't Value Conformity

WEIRD People Don’t Value Conformity

Posted on by jabittan
When we teach kids in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries, we don’t teach them in the same way that people in other countries, or in other times, teach and have taught their kids. In WEIRD societies, we are less focused on conformity and tradition and more focused on helping kids express their own uniqueness and work through challenges and problems in their own way. A fun example of this is the parenting style of the Turtle Crush in the movie Finding Nemo. Crush’s son splashes out of a fast moving current of water, scaring the titular character’s father, but not worrying Crush. The turtle is patient and waits to see if his son can figure out how to get back into the current on his own and he praises his son when he makes it back. Rather than chastising his son for falling out of the current and giving him specific instructions and directions for remaining in the current and getting back to the current, he encourages his son to find his own path and figure things out on his own.
 
 
The movie presents this style of parenting as optimal and praiseworthy, but it likely doesn’t resonate in every part of the world, and certainly wouldn’t resonate for humans from the past. For much of human history people have lived in relatively small tribal groups where elders made decisions that younger people were expected to follow. Obedience to authority was much more important in these tribal groups. This is a key idea that Joseph Henrich writes about in his book The WEIRDest People in the World:
 
 
“The willingness of WEIRD people to ignore others’ opinions, preferences, views, and requests extends well beyond peers to include elders, grandfathers, and traditional authorities. … WEIRD people don’t value conformity or see obedience as a virtue that needs to be instilled in children. They also don’t venerate either traditions or ancient sages as much as most other societies have, and elders simply don’t carry the same weight that they do in many other places.”
 
 
In the United States, when we think about ourselves relative to other countries, and when we think about religious groups within the United States relative to non-religious groups or elderly people relative to younger people, we should remember that values around conformity, tradition, and respect for authority matter a lot. Much of the difference and friction we see in the world today, I believe, has to do with the destruction of traditions and the near iconoclasm that WEIRD societies and people are not afraid to inflict on things that are old. We encourage kids to find their own way, be their own person, and to solve problems themselves. Consequentially, this has meant that younger people today in WEIRD countries are willing to throw out traditional ideas around marriage, gender, and elderly authority. We don’t value conformity, but instead value individual expression and uniqueness, and that is a very weird WEIRD way to view the world.
WEIRD People Feel More Guilt

WEIRD People Feel More Guilt

Posted on by jabittan
A definition from a Google search for guilt is, “a feeling of having done wrong or failed in an obligation.” This definition is similar to, but slightly different from a Google search for the definition of shame, “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior,” or “a loss of respect or esteem; dishonor.”
 
 
These two emotional responses are similar, but manifest differently in WEIRD and non-WEIRD people. This is an idea that Joseph Henrich explores in his book The WEIRDest People in the World. Regarding guilt, Henrich writes, “the feeling of guilt emerges when one measures their own actions and feelings against a purely personal standard.” Guilt is very internal, and therefore very much an emotion that dominates individualistic cultures. To describe a guilty experience or situation, Henrich gives the example of a vegetarian, “as individuals cultivate their own unique attributes and talents, guilt is part of the affective machinery that motivates them to stick to their personal standards. Vegetarians, for example, might feel guilty for eating bacon even when they are traveling in distant cities surrounded by nonvegetarians.” People external from us likely don’t perceive our guilt and don’t judge us for the actions for which we are feeling guilty, much of the time at least. It’s likely that very few people care whether I blog each morning or go for a run each day. But I feel committed to these things, so when I don’t go for a run I feel guilty. I have felt guilty for not blogging consistently this year. These are internal standards and measures which really don’t mean much to anyone beyond myself. I’ve. created my own personal standards that I feel compelled to live up to, and if I don’t live up to those standards, I feel guilty.
 
 
Shame, on the other hand, still exists within individualistic societies, but is not as dominant of an emotion as guilt. “Shame is rooted in a genetically evolved psychological package that is associated with social devaluation in the eyes of others,” writes Henrich (emphasis his). Shame is more connected to social perceptions and values where guilt is more tied to internal values and opinions. There are likely secrets that we all have which we feel guilty about, and if those secrets get out we might be shamed for them. But unlike my blogging or non-running examples for which I feel guilty, shame involves people looking down on us, our families, or the groups to which we belong. Guilt is experienced by the individual, shame is perpetuated by the individual’s society. “If there is no public knowledge, there is no shame,” writes Henrich.
 
 
These two emotions are interesting to think about when we consider our own lives and the lives of other people across the globe. How we relate to each other, the pressures we feel, and the shame or guilt that we feel can differ to a great degree based on whether we live in an individualistic WEIRD society or in a different society. Guilt can be something that overwhelms us and causes incredible amounts of stress over relatively minor things in WEIRD societies. Shame can be a powerful tool used to punish those who don’t live up to social norms in cultures, even when those social norms are trivial or even harmful to overall societal well being. When we think about people who are different from us and who seem to have different cultural values and practices, we should try to understand the pressures people feel from a guilt versus shame standpoint. This will help us better understand ourselves and others, and better understand how we can work with and cooperate with more people on a global scale.
A WEIRD Way to View the Self

A WEIRD Way to View the Self

Posted on by jabittan
“Compared to much of the world,” writes Joseph Henrich in his book The WEIRDest People in the World, “WEIRD people report behaving in more consistent ways … across different types of relationships, such as with younger peers, friends, parents, professors, and strangers. By contrast, Koreans and Japanese report consistency only within relational contexts – that is how they behave separately toward their mothers, friends, or professors across time.”
 
 
In the United States, we care a lot about the idea of our true self. We want to be able to be our true self in all of our relationships and in all of the various situations and settings that we may find ourselves in. It is important for us to understand this one true self and to be that person wherever we are. To fail to do so is to be inauthentic in our relationships with others, possibly dishonest with ourselves, and at worst a hypocrite.
 
 
But this is not a universal way of thinking about the self that all humans share. As Henrich notes, this is a pretty WEIRD (as in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) way to think about the self. Many other cultures don’t focus on being a single true self across various relationships. In the United States we try to be the same person with our co-workers, family, social groups, and grocery store strangers. We frown on the idea of being nice and sociable with our friends but cold and hard to engage when talking to a mechanic or grocery store clerk. We would criticize someone who is endearing around their mother or grandmother, but then tries to be a gangster around their friends. Other countries and cultures, however, do not share these concerns.
 
 
Henrich continues, “while Americans sometimes see behavioral flexibility as two-faced or hypocritical, many other populations see personal adjustments to differing relationships as reflecting wisdom, maturity, and social adeptness.”
 
 
Is it two faced to be highly respectful of your boss and to change your propensity for cussing when around them? Is it a display of social adeptness to be goofy and funny around small children but reserved around professional colleagues?
 
 
To me, it is really interesting that something so central to American culture can be such an outlier across the various cultures of our planet. It feels obvious to me that we should strive to be one person and not someone who presents different faces or different personalities and general dispositions to different people. But it is also incredibly difficult to always be the same person we strive to be across different contexts. It is incredibly emotionally challenging to be friendly and bubbly all day long and to maintain that attitude when running in for last minute groceries at the end of the day. Perhaps we don’t need to try so hard to be the same person all the time, perhaps we can remember that it is a WEIRD pressure that we feel when we feel a need to unify ourself across all settings and relationships. Perhaps we can step back and look at these different cultural approaches to the idea of the self and sometimes ease up on our WEIRD worries. But then again, maybe this WEIRD focus of ours is helping us and our culture move in better directions. Maybe it helps us be more thoughtful and considerate of others, and maybe it helps us strive to be better people in all that we do. 
Identity Through Individual Traits

Identity Through Individual Traits

Posted on by jabittan
If you are WEIRD, you probably think about yourself in terms of your personal traits that make you unique and one of a kind. For example, when I complete the sentence from Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World, “I am _________,” I say things like, “a runner,” “active,” “a college graduate,” or “a pizza enthusiast.” The first things that come to my mind are not, “my wife’s husband,” “my parent’s son,” or even, “American.” If I go long enough, things like, “a Nevadan,” a “Reno Native,” or “a middle child,” will come to mind, but those relationship qualities are not the first things I think about and if I expanded on them I would probably use them as further markers of my individual uniqueness, not as something that connects me with most other people.
 
 
Discussing this phenomenon, Henrich writes, “this focus on personal attributes, achievements, and membership in abstract or idealized social groups over personal relationships, inherited social roles, and face-to-face communities is a robust feature of WEIRD psychology, but one that makes us rather peculiar from a global perspective.” Something I have heard that differentiates Americans from many other people’s of the globe is that the first question we are likely to ask someone we have just met is, “what do you do?” This tells us if they are in a high status job, if they are likely to make a lot of money, if they are an interesting person with an interesting career, and more. But what it doesn’t necessarily tell us about is their family history, religious beliefs, or where they were born. In other countries, it is more common to ask someone you have just met, “where are you from?” which does give us a better sense of the person’s family background or religious beliefs.
 
 
America is WEIRD, which is to say; Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. These features also make us weird, which is to say outliers throughout much of the glob and much of human history in terms of how we approach common questions and what behaviors we find typical. Our psychology is different because our culture shapes different ways of thinking. We answer a fill in the blank question such as, “I am” with individual and unique traits that we alone posses. Many other people in different countries would answer the question with words that relate to social and familial structures, not with individual traits. The question would be answered to help another person see how the individual fits in with society, not to demonstrate how the individual stands out. This is not a typical way that humans have looked at themselves throughout much of human history. Seeing our identity through individual traits is both WEIRD and weird.
Protestantism Raised Literacy

Protestantism Raised Literacy

Posted on by jabittan
One important way in which Protestantism differs from Catholicism is that Protestantism encourages reading Christian scripture directly where Catholicism encourages learning scripture from religious leaders. Consequentially, the spread of Protestantism correlates to a spread of literacy across Europe from the 1500’s through the 1800’s. Joseph Henrich writes about this phenomena and its importance in his book The WEIRDest People in the World.
 
 
“The wave of Protestantism created by the Reformation raised literacy and schooling rates in its wake,” Henrich writes. The increased literacy in a region, created by the spread of Protestantism, had long lasting effects on literacy. Henrich continues, “countries made up entirely of Protestants had literacy rates nearly 20 percentile points higher than those that were all Catholic.” And he writes, “regions with early Protestant missions are associated with literacy rates that are about 16 percentile points higher on average than those associated with catholic missions.” Higher literacy spread throughout these regions and changed the cultures, “Protestantism likely caused a rise in female literacy.”
 
 
Henrich has shown that reading changes our brains and our psychologies. When a region is becoming more literate, more people’s brains and psychologies are changing, especially if literacy is expanding to women and other marginalized groups within a region. These changes help us understand why things like representative government and the industrial revolution took hold in Europe. By chance, a religion which encouraged direct reading and interpretation of religious texts spread through Europe. That religion increased literacy rates and eventually changed the way people’s brains were structured which changed how they thought and behaved. This created long lasting cultural differences that still shape how people from various regions think, behave, and are perceived. Protestantism raised literacy, started to create WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) people, and changed the world.
7 Consequences of Learning to Read

7 Consequences of Learning to Read

Posted on by jabittan
In The WEIRDest People in the World Joseph Henrich writes about the mental ability that you are engaged with right now if you are ingesting this information without the help of an auditory tool, reading. “Acquiring this mental ability involves wiring in specialized neurological circuitry in various parts of the brain,” Henrich writes. What that means is that reading changes our brain, and consequentially, it rewires parts of our brains that have historically done different things for us. Here is a quick shorthand of the seven ways that reading changes our brain according to Henrich:
 
 
 
  1. Developed a new specialized area of the brain, the left ventral occipito-temporal region
  2. Thickened the corpus callosum which bridges the hemispheres in your brain
  3. Altered areas of the brain involved in language production and other neurological tasks like speech processing and thinking about what other people are thinking
  4. Improved verbal memory and expanded what parts of your brain are active when processing speech
  5. Moved facial recognition predominantly to a region in the right hemisphere of the brain rather than sharing that ability among both hemispheres
  6. To directly quote Henrich, “Diminished your ability to identify faces, probably because while jury-rigging your left ventral occipito-temporal region, you impinged on an area that usually specializes in facial recognition.”
  7. Shifted your tendency to be more analytical in your processing of visual information so that you consider component pieces rather than the whole to which pieces belong
 
 
These brain changes are fascinating, and are the result of something we rarely think about as having the ability to restructure and reshape the brain and how it operates. We have repurposed brain processes and structures so that our eyes can recognize text and so that we can associate that text with language and meaning. It is fascinating that the brain can do this at all, and fascinating to think of the changes that take place across the brain when we do this.
 
 
Reading, and the changes it makes in our brains, are weird. Not all humans today have the ability to read, and throughout human history, most humans have had no need for reading. But if you are WEIRD, that is western educated in an industrialized, rich, and democratic country, then you can probably read well. You probably have these rare brain changes that most humans have not had. You think about and perceive the world differently than many humans before you as a result of learning to read. What you understand, spend your time thinking about, and what makes sense to you may not make sense to many of your ancestors, precisely because they couldn’t read and didn’t have the same brain structures performing the same brain processes that you do.
 
 
This is the starting point for Henrich’s book and the premise that we are the WEIRDest people to ever live. We are different for many reasons from our ancestors, and much of that difference lies in how our brains operate based on the WEIRD settings in which we find ourselves and WEIRD behaviors we engage in.
Self Determination & Ethnocultural Nation States

Self Determination & Ethnocultural Nation States

Posted on by jabittan
Modern people living in WEIRD cultures value consistency in the thoughts, behaviors, and actions of individuals. Joseph Henrich argues this is a strange phenomenon of WEIRD societies and that it hasn’t been a central feature of many cultures throughout history. One of the challenges of living in a society that deems you a hypocrite if you are not internally consistent on all issues is that we frequently run into paradoxical situations where we simultaneously uphold values that directly contradict. In the United States the most clear example is the contradiction between liberty and democratic governance. Democratic governance entails the creation of laws which reduce some personal liberties in order to defend other liberties.
 
 
Another example of paradoxes where our desires run into each other, as Steven Pinker notes in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, is between self-determination and the idea of an ethnocultural nation state. The challenges created when these two ideas bump into each other are fueling heated debates and worsening refugee crises across the globe.
 
 
In the Untied States, and many Western European countries, we believe in ideas of self-determination. We believe that individuals have the power to improve their own lives by working hard, making smart decisions, and – if necessary – by moving to a new place to start over. The history of the United States is exactly that, a history of people packing up and starting over somewhere new. Whether it was the pilgrims on the East Coast or the countless people who successively moved west, the United States is defined by the idea of self-determination and moving to areas of opportunity.
 
 
But what happens when the people who exercise this self-determination and move to areas of opportunity are culturally distinct from the areas to which they move? That is the question that Pinker explores in his book. Regarding the differences of the people and the landscape in a nation, Pinker writes, “unlike features of a landscape like trees and mountains, people have feet. They move to places where the opportunities are best, and soon invite their friends and relatives to join. This demographic mixing turns the landscape into a fractal, with minorities inside minorities inside minorities.”
 
 
This is where our paradox arises. We want people to be free. We want to uphold ideas of self-determination. We want people to be able to move to areas of opportunity and start new lives. We don’t want people to be stuck in one place, dependent on government assistance and charity. But, historically the United States and Western European nations have demonstrated that we don’t want ethnographic minorities to be the ones who are self-determinant in this way. We want our countries, our states, and our cities to remain ethnoculturally cohesive groups (I don’t support this view, but some modern political groups certainly do).
 
 
Not all people share this mindset, but many do, and it is a large component of populist movements in the United States and Europe. The choice that many people seem to advocate for is limiting self-determination of people who do not belong to the ethnocultural majority. A choice that is easily pointed at as racist and hypocritical. The other option for the people who dislike the ethnocultural change is to uphold self-determination, but to give up the idea of an ethnocultural state. To me this seems to be the more reasonable choice, but for many, the fear of losing their group identity is powerful.
 
 
Ultimately, what we should recognize is that our modern nation states, the political units we generally view as ethnocultural groups, conflict with ideas of self-determination. If we want to uphold self-determination and make it easier for people to shape their own lives, then we may end up losing ethnocultural nation states.
Theory of Mind is Underrated

Theory of Mind is Underrated

Posted on by jabittan
Sometime when infants are around three years old they begin to recognize that the other human beings in their lives are similar to themselves. Whether it is their parents, care takers, or other kinds that they interact with, typically developing children around three will begin to understand that others have the same feelings and emotions that they have. Infants begin to develop what we call theory of mind. It is a momentous and underrated step in human development.
 
 
I seem to be experiencing the world. To me, it feels like there is a conscious individual inside my head who has thoughts, feelings, desires, emotions, joys, pleasures, fears, and experiences of physical phenomena (as an aside, the idea of a single conscious self is up for debate). But I can’t prove that any other person has conscious experiences of the world in the way that I feel as though I do. I can see other people who appear to be virtually exactly like me. I see other people who react in ways I would expect myself to react if I was in a similar happy, scary, or boring experience. I can create a reasonable and testable theory which suggests that other people do indeed have conscious experiences of the world even though I can never fully prove it. This is theory of mind, and this is what three year old toddlers do when they start to realize that other people don’t like being hit, don’t like when someone takes their stuff, or would be happy if someone shared a piece of cake with them.
 
 
This is a phenomenal super power and without realizing it, we apply this power in most of the ways we think about the social world. In WEIRD countries it underlies our moral and social contracts. As Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, “I experience pleasures and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same.” This humanist philosophy develops from our earliest ages and influences how we understand the world. If we were not able to think about others and infer that they have a mind and have the same experiences as we do, our social interactions would be dramatically different, and peaceable democracies might not be possible.
Idea Plugging

Idea Plugging

Posted on by jabittan
“No one is smart enough to figure out anything worthwhile from scratch,” writes Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker argues in the book that one reason why humans in Western European Nations became less violent during the Enlightenment was because humans started writing, sharing information at greater speeds, and recombining important and interesting ideas in new ways. A greater sharing and combination of ideas spread anti-torture and anti-violence messages. The human ability to take existing ideas and build on them is what fueled this process, and it is interesting to think about on its own.
 
 
Pinker writes, “the human mind is adept at packaging a complicated idea into a chunk, combining it with other ideas into a more complex assembly, packaging that assembly into a still bigger contrivance, combining it with still other ideas, and so on.” This process occurred in Western European Nations with great thinkers sharing ideas, writing about the ideas of others, and taking one idea from one context and applying it within another context in a new permutation. Through this process people became more democratic, reconsidered the role of the state, and reduced the role of violence in organized society.
 
 
We see these same processes take place all the time. We may be worried about being original today, but the truth is that almost all of our ideas and thoughts come from another context. What is original is how we take the various ideas and thoughts that we interact with and repackage them. I can think about Pinker’s thoughts of idea sharing and combine them with ideas of marriage and family policies from Joseph Henrich to reconsider the ways that changing marriage and family policies expanded social circles and fueled the sharing of ideas in the Enlightenment. None of these pieces may be new and original on their own, but I can take them in chunks and plug pieces of ideas into different situations and settings. This idea plugging creates novelty and new thoughts and ideas. We don’t figure it all out from scratch, we take existing building blocks and pieces and work them together in new ways.