I just finished The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich.
I HIGHLY recommend this book, and it made me think - a LOT.
It is a great lesson in how our cultural psychology evolved in the Western World - and how different we are from the rest of humankind. It was the Catholic Church that brought it about - totally unbeknownst to the originators. Bottom Line - we have precious little understanding of the cultural psychology of nations, groups, or individuals. It's a great lesson for that - but gives precious little insight in what the heck we can do about it.
That is the major learning here. It might help to give a bit of a background on my personal journey to this point. If this is boring, go get the book - you will learn a lot and our world will be somewhat better for it.
Cultural Psychology
There is a whole new scientific field of cultural psychology. I first became aware of it when I visited Africa in 2000 with my son. We were stunned by how differently everyone seemed to operate. Their world model was completely different from our normal view of things. People did things that we simply could not understand.
Guns Germs and Steel
To help us a bit, some of the Europeans we met there recommended a book: Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. It was an eye opener. His thesis is that the European mastery of the planet came about more because of the accidents of climate, the available beasts of burden, and types of crops than any "superiority" of the humans that happened to inhabit the middle East and Europe. That gives really short shrift to an amazing book, so please read it. It will move your brain just a bit.
Cultures and Organizations
As I puzzled about that some more, I stumbled on another book that helped me understand it a bit better: Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, by Geert Hofstede. This one literally changed my view of human kind - what we are and how we operate. Across cultures or countries we are VERY different people in how we look at life and the planet. East Africans operate in an entirely different world model, and Asians do as well, and Norwegians are particularly "weird". I have written about this quite a bit in this blog - you can find references here. There are some great stories in there that you might enjoy.
World Views Differ
Bottom line, Hofstede discovered that we all have a very different mental model about how things operate. Most "westerners" seem to think they are in charge of life, and they can fix or repair anything. Most "East Africans" see life as something that happens TO them. They are not in charge. I happened to visit Nicaragua several times, and parts of Asia. I spent quite a few years reading about economic development and "culture" - how different thinking "patterns" would affect our level of civilization, use of technology, economic development, etc. I wrote quite a bit about this in the blog as well, and thought I was making some headway. Or NOT.
Poor Economics
Along the way, I got a set of readings in economics from a local econ professor. I went through the various "schools" of economics - more like religions than science - and finally found behavioral economics. They figured it out. Then I thought what we really need to do is apply the learnings from Kahneman and Thaler about behavioral economics to this problem of poverty and development. There are a couple of Nobel prize winning authors that did just that, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Their latest book is: Good Economics for Hard Times. I thought so highly of this insight into economics that I offered to buy the book for any of our local elected officials that would commit to read it. I wrote a bit about it here.
Behavioral Economics
If you are not familiar with "behavioral economics", it is the latest scientific branch of the dismal science that has discovered that humans do NOT make rational decisions very well. We can, but it is a lot of work, and we generally do not. We have a whole world of cultural models in our heads that have grown over thousands of years. Some of them seem to be innate in our genetics, but most of them seem acquired from our social world. They profoundly change how people function, how they think, the groups they form, etc. Aha, I thought, here's the answer. Now if we could just persuade our fearless leaders that this is the way to encourage development, we could eliminate world poverty. The head of the World Bank bet on that too - and put a lot of time and energy into making it happen. India's economic leaders have also opted for that path. I have written about it in this blog as well. Result - not much so far.
Political Divides
Of late, I have noticed that people often take sides of an argument for what appear to be totally irrational reasons. There is quite a bit of research on that phenomena. I think the best summary I have seen is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. I wrote a couple of blog entries on that one. Basically, Haidt theorizes that we have 5 basic moral foundations, which may be partially inheritable: Harm / Care; Fairness / Reciprocity; In Group Loyalty; Authority / Respect; Purity / Sanctity. The latter 3 of these incline us to be conservative, and the first 2 are generally more progressive. People are tuned to think one way or the other. And then we have all of these "irrational" "fast judgments" described by Kahneman's research. It is amazing that we can get anything done. Heuristics indeed!
Republican Politics
A whole lot more went on in my reading and brain in the interim, but then the election of 2016 happened. I and about half of the U.S. population said, what the hell just happened? About one third voted for the more progressive candidate, and one third did not vote. But about one third of the country elected a narcissistic man child as the leader of the free world. How is that even possible? A great deal more reading and some posts in my blog. What in the world is going on? Hillbilly Elegy, Identity Politics, Irrational Politics, etc. Lots of words, some research, but barely a glimmer of what gave rise to this, or how we can change it. I got some insight from the documentary film, Behind the Curve about the Flat Earth Society. It's on Netflix - you might enjoy it. These people are NOT crazy - they are committed, faith filled, and they MUST hold to this belief. Trust me, you are doing the same thing with a few of your beliefs. Where did the idea that human life is valuable ever come from? Why do you think that freedom is important? For that matter, why are grandchildren so priceless?
Cultural Psychology
Along comes professor Henrich with his remarkable 20 years of research on our western cultural psychology. You have to read the book - at a minimum, read some good reviews. There are lots of them. Here is a brief excerpt from the one posted at Amazon:
Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves―their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations―over their relationships and social roles.
That is his primary insight, and the understanding that this came about over centuries because of the way the Catholic Church viewed marriage and kinship. We moved from small, close knit family groups, to larger, voluntary associations. To see the change today, you have only to look at the difference between northern Italy and Sicily. The mafia is not called "the family" for nothing. The church had a much smaller impact on southern Italy because of all of the other powers controlling things there. And the church had no clue what it was about. The church's preoccupation with sexual morality and marriage led it down this "weird" path, and the result was that Europe broke down the whole idea of kinship and family groupings. It made people much more individualist, more open to strangers, more trusting of a larger circle, more analytical, with less nepotism, more long range thinkers. It opened the doors to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. This is why Europe dominated the world at that time.
AND . . . the rest of the planet is very, very different from the West. Our cultural psychology is so different that we cannot make rational sense out of how others make fundamental decisions about life and groups and government and economics.
Bottom Line
This is already way too long. Read the book. My fundamental takeaways:
- We are barely rational.
People operate with a fundamental worldview that colors our entire psychology and thinking patterns. It is very difficult for any individual to get out of their model. That model guides the decisions we make to marry, to seek work, to study, to invest, to think about how life and the planet works. - Culture develops very slowly.
These psychological patterns are formed over hundreds and thousands of years, by small changes and events, that gradually alter the way people think. - Europe / the West is Unique - WEIRD.
It is true that every culture is unique, but Europe's psychological change led to the industrial revolution and amazing economic advances. It also enhanced our individualism, weakened oru sense of collective belonging. Where this history is absent, economic development seems to be extremely difficult. It can be done, but it is uphill all the way. Development depends on group adherence, trust, and interest rates, and cooperation, and analytical thinking, and other implicit values that are not automatic in human kind, to say nothing of hard work, and ethical values. The latter apparently being gifts of the Reformation in one guise or other. Solving world poverty is going to take a while, unless we come up with some genius ideas. - Democracy is rare.
The whole idea of human rights and cooperative government came from this shift in world view. Where the history of a people lacks this foundation, there is precious little hope that democracy will be a success. Kings and dictators are better than failed states. My suggestions: stop trying to meddle from outside with what people are about. - Cultural Psychology is not well understood.
We have barely grasped how we got to where we are - barely. The book has 800 pages of research, and hundreds of studies noted - but we are just beginning to understand this. We have absolutely no idea how to move this whole assemblage forward. Hell, most people in the fields of psychology and economics and sociology and anthropology have not even heard of this yet. - There has to be a path forward. We can do this. Somehow, someway we need to study the past, and do the research on how human groups operate, to try and persuade our fearless leaders that we need a revolution in thinking, in education, in our institutions, so that we can better shape our cultural psychology to further advance human kind - rather than having us descend into wars and squabbles about wearing masks - for God's sake! This is way beyond "Nudge" - this is shape "human psychology".
HELP
If you run into anyone, anything that seems to understand this and sees a way forward, please let me know. Post a note here - I will eventually see it. Thanks.
Stay Safe.
No comments:
Post a Comment