Premise Check on Human Nature

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Premise Check on Human Nature

Here's an article I got from my step-daughter, Tina.

It's a helluva good thing, in my opinion. I'm putting it here in epistemology, even though it seems to speak more to ethics, economics and politics.

But it's epistemology at root. It hits normative abstractions squarely in the gut.

In Objectivism, normative abstractions are the result of your cognitive thinking. Some will say this article disproves it, but that's not totally accurate. It does disprove the notion that cognitive thinking (even down to the level of the choice to think or not to think) is the sole major input in forming normative abstractions, but it does not prove that cognitive thinking is not a major input.

Once again, here we are at the scope issue I have with some of Rand's ideas. If taken as the whole shebang, they are wrong, but if taking within limitations, they are not only right, many of them are highly insightful.

Also, we are talking about a feedback loop that goes down to the the perceptual level here, not just the conceptual. (More below on this point.)

There's Such a Thing as "Human Nature," Right?
Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way human behavior and culture is understood.
February 26, 2013
alternet.org

Originally here on Feb, 25: We Aren't the World
Pacific Standard
by Ethan Watters

The article is written so that it's hard to extract quotes that are self-explanatory, so here are a few key points.

1. Many academic human nature studies are skewed because the samples are from our own Western society (or American). When some simple tests are run on different cultures, the results tend to vary greatly.

One example was the ultimatum game (a variation on the prisoner's dilemma) in the Machiguenga tribe in Peru, then later in several other cultures. (See the rules and cultures in the article.) The notion of fairness, which this game tests, is all over the map, depending on cultural habits.

Whereas Americans tend toward equal division of a sudden unearned bounty as fair, some cultures just saw bounty and took what they could get as fair, and others saw receiving a greater share coming with greater liability, so avoided the greater share as unfair.

Outside of epistemology, these differences directly affect how capitalism would work in each culture, at least until different cultural habits developed.

2. Culture strongly influences visual perception, even at the level of optical illusions. (I believe a strong case could be made to call these "optical integrations.") There are some fascinating examples in the article.

3. Americans come out pretty good on not conforming to group pressure in relation to other societies. (When I look around me, I think it's bad enough as it is. What if group pressure had more impact? Dayaamm!)

4. In typical fashion of folks who have been educated to believe the USA is screwed up by default and one shows great moral courage by bashing it, the main study framed American culture as WEIRD, which is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Later denials of derogatory by the authors ensued, of course. And I suppose it's possible they were just being smart-asses to get attention. But this seems ingenuous in light of the massive amount of America bashing among those in academia who study other cultures.

Here is the study in pdf (I have not yet read it as of this posting, but I intend to): The Weirdest People in the World?

I look at this framing conclusion from a different lens. Gong by Watters's article, which also complains about the insinuations of the "weird" designation, I think this study helps prove American exceptionalism.

I'm basing this on the premise that America is founded on reason-based ideas, not just tribal inheritance. Certain ideas tend to promote better brain development--literally. If not better a lot of times, at least in a fashion to be able to handle more complex information. Don't forget, the context of this comment is in relation to people from other cultures as shown in specific studies.

When you look at historical documents, you can see that lots of the reason-based ideas found within the American culture are explicitly presented by the Founding Fathers.

I can hear the Progressive soul groaning, but the rigidity of that particular core storyline is an example of the kind of thing this study looks at (although, from what I know so far, it does not specifically look at Progressive orientation). From what I have seen so far, I think the authors Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan, did an exemplary job of trying to be objective, even as they were caught up in the traditions they grew up with within that bash-America-first mindset.

(I suppose that criticism applies to me, too, from a different angle. )

5. The authors slip into dichotomy thinking, leading to false-dichotomy thinking, where they take different fundamental factors and rate them according to what is more important. In other words, one could ask what is more important to human universality, experience or genes? They conclude experience is.

To me that's like asking what is more universally important, the heart of the liver? It's a silly dichotomy when discussing the big picture because both have equal importance to maintaining the life of a person.

The fact is, in looking at the first study with the ultimatum game, neuroscience is now showing that subconscious parts of the brain constantly and automatically scan for fairness. That part is genes, i.e., the brain can't not scan for fairness as a person grows. The habits and standards of fairness, though, tend to come from the culture.

Both are fundamental and you can't have one without the other.

The study bears this out, even if the conclusion does not. Fairness is a human universal in all the cultures the researchers studied, the standards of fairness varied according to culture. I didn't see any reference to a culture where fairness was not a fundamental component of social organization and personal values.

The way to rationally grok this, in my opinion, and to act on it is to gage it in light of a reason-derived standard, like individual rights as opposed to, say, the structure of the civilization you are born into. If you do that, if you get your fundamentals well-defined, then you simply establish a new culture if you don't like what you've got. This is precisely what the Founding Fathers did here in America.

This turns into a feedback loop, and that loop--in turn--turns into the standard. During the set-up phase, reason spoke more loudly against culture, but during the maintenance stage, there is no contextless governing standard--on the contrary, that creates a false dichotomy when measured by observation. The actual feedback loop is made out of more than just genes and culture, though. It includes reasoned volition and probably some other things I have not thought about yet.

As an aside, this experiment by the Founding Fathers is not the same thing as social engineering, where technocrats try to manipulate the development of minds based on persuasion techniques--where they are the puppet-masters and the individuals are the puppets. This is change on a cultural level and is spread by individuals communicating with each other by free association, not things like brainwashing kids in schools and other closed-off environments.

The closest thing you get to that in the Founding Fathers version is family life. And thank God for the rebellious adolescent spirit as a tonic for the stifling effect of that.

6. This study fits with my idea of a core storyline that runs throughout a culture informing ethics. I consider this just as important as chosen moral principles. Since I hold that religions are mainly collections of stories with morals and rituals added, the following quote about one of the researchers shows why I resonate with this 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.”

Ditto for philosophy.

But the conduit of it all throughout a culture is the core storyline and branch storylines.

* * *

There's more I could add, but this is a pretty good start to kick off a discussion. Even if nobody gets interested, I personally will do some more digging in this direction.

I think this is important, especially in light of my preferred epistemological method for purposely using my conceptual faculty: Identify correctly so I can evaluate correctly.

I highly recommend it.

Way to go, Tina!

Michael

[jts]

Human nature is a blank sheet of paper that human nurture writes on.

Humans have both a greater need and a greater capacity for nurture (education) than non-human animals have. Greater need because non-human animals have better developed instincts. Greater capacity because humans are more intelligent.

[BaalChatzaf]

Human beings have been f*cking each other over in pretty much the same ways, since G-D invented dirt.

[Dglgmut]

So American's have the luxury of being more individualistic and of turning down free money.

Interesting article.

[syrakusos]

Thanks, Michael! This is pretty sense. I will have to take it with me to read offline. Just going over it, of course, it is "informed by theory." In other words, the researchers knew what they wanted before they went looking for it. It is not a work of discovery. Moreover, anthropologists have known some (much? all?) of this for about 100 years. These people come from other departments. On the plus side, also, this is not actually a "study" but a metastudy, a collection of previous reports gathered into a semblance order according to a theory.

Just to take one case you mentioned. I know that among some people in Morocco, giving someone a kid goat is laying an obligation on them. They do not have a "something for nothihg" but another mouth to feed.

I also take deeply your point that in our culture, many of our core values were explicitly stated as they were being reasoned out. We did not get them from "on high" either from a God or from our nameless and timeless ancestors. So, in that, I point out, that we can and do argue them and deny them and change them without taboo.

Anyway, you and I both have enough reading ahead of us.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

... this is not actually a "study" but a metastudy, a collection of previous reports gathered into a semblance order according to a theory.

Michael,

Are you reading the same thing I posted?

From the article:

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.

. . .

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.

You call that a "a collection of previous reports gathered into a semblance order according to a theory"?

(Robot voice): That does not compute...

(Granted, the meta-study later grew out of that--and I got the impression from the article that the conclusion came after crunching the data, not before.)

Michael

[syrakusos]

Yes, MSK, I am reading the very same link you posted to:

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf

It is a metastudy, a summary of other studies. I am about halfway through with it now. I finished the first third last week. (I have other projects and I am taking my time with this, marking it up as I go.)

Overall, they found (repeatedly) that on many different psychological and sociological scales, that Americans especially and Western Industrialized people generally are different from most other kinds of people in the world, whether small-community, or Non-Western, horticulturalist, nomadic, pastoralist, etc., etc. Even industrialized Asians (Japanese) and even Asian-Americans are different from European-Americans.

Moreover, and the center of their target, most of these so-called psychological studies of "human nature" such as Ultimatum Game and Dictator Game were (and are still) carried out using psychology department undergraduates. Rather than calling it the Journal of Experimental Psychology, they say, just call it what it is: the Journal of the Psychology of Undergraduates in Psychology.

That's all fine.

However, as I read through this, I do find the salient features of our culture that have made us so successful. OK, so 90% of the world is not "individualistic." Well, that might explain why 90% of the world is poor. Every metric they roll out about how we Americans are not typical of everyone else just explains why we have what we do. Or, actually, it only explains that we do, not why. In other words, these are consequences of culture, not causes. That is much deeper and more complicated.

Also, problems seem to go with rewards. We have the highest standard of living and they highest rates of violent crime. I mentioned this on other Objectivist sites and was denounced, of course, for being an advocate of "equivalency." Sociologist Robert King Merton called much common crime an example of "innovation" as criminals pursue common goals (cars, clothes) by uncommon methods. Myself, my patron god is Mercury: god of merchants and thieves -- it can be so hard to tell them apart, sometimes... Of course, even making a joke like that gets you banned from an Objectivist website pretty darn quick!

Quote

Granted, the meta-study later grew out of that--and I got the impression from the article that the conclusion came after crunching the data, not before.)

Michael

And another way to get banned from an Objectivist website is to point out that the post-modernists do have a valid point: scientists have theories before they have facts - and sometimes even the right theory despite the apparent lack of facts. In other words, the inductive process (more banning) is that we perceive something interesting ... In order to perceive first and find it interesting first you must have some contextual understanding first.

Maybe these professors were just neo-Kantian pseudo-Marxist whimworshippers who hated America... and maybe... myself, I can see walking past one of the many ad hoc posters asking for psychology department volunteers and later that night about bedtime-thirty, you say to yourself, ".... you know, it just seems funny...."

Either way, they knew what they wanted to prove and found the facts for it. Maybe, if they had gathered all their studies and found just the opposite, that we are typical and like everyone else who all share the same beliefs and norms, they might have published that instead. But they did not because we are very different peoples, all of us. (They do nod to the commonalities across cultures. Those similarities are also not to be ignored.)

I mentioned this to my wife about science fiction and Star Trek in particular and it came out the other night in an Enterprise episode. Vulcans are this way, and Romulans are that way. Klingons to this and Andorians do that. But humans do all of those and more. One of the aliens complains that humans are unpredictable.

[BaalChatzaf]

Human nature is a blank sheet of paper that human nurture writes on.

Humans have both a greater need and a greater capacity for nurture (education) than non-human animals have. Greater need because non-human animals have better developed instincts. Greater capacity because humans are more intelligent.

Not so. We have a lot of genetically conditioned traits. The resemblance between primordial chimp behavior and human behavior is not coinicidence since chimps and humans are 96 percent genetically identical.

We are a lot smarter than our furry cousins though.

[syrakusos]

I finished the article last night, marking it up as I went. I have a lot of notes, if anyone else actually read this and wants to discuss this. The upshot, as noted above, is that claims about "human nature" come largely from tests run on university undergraduates in or near the psychology department. They are the ones who answer the calls to get paid to take these tests. They are WEIRD - Western Educated Ondustrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The thesis is that they are unlike most of the other people on Earth who come from small, agricultural or foraging cultures whose expectations from life come from traditional experiences. Even children learn culture early, so they are not necessarily good subjects for studying human nature. A significant point is that the children in these studies come from the university community itself or from the larger neighborhood near it: they, too, are middle class Americans.

Again, the Ultimatum game and the Dictator game about sharing supposedly show some basic assumption about what most people regard as fair. In fact, for many people, keeping all of a unearned largess to yourself is regarded as expected. Also, getting even a small portion that would be rejected by WEIRD people is regarded (logically enough) as better than nothing. It is the truly self-interested and rationally selfish response. Negating an "unfair" distribution is (as the saying has it) "cutting off your nose to spite your face." You gain nothing when you could have had something.

Moreover, interesting also for what it shows about international politics, Turks, Russians, and Saudis often willingly engage in "altruistic punishment" where they would pay out from their own share without recompense to takeaway from an unfair distributor. To me, this sayus that,gratefully, the communist party rulers of the USSR were more westernized than their compatriots, else MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) would not have prevented nuclear war -- if that is indeed what actually happened. If the Russian decision-makers were after all like typical Russians, and if MAD worked, then it was by some other mechanism in their social psychology.

As MSK noted above, and I agree, the attributes of the WEIRD people seem to define or at least delineate the secrets to our success. Individualism, surely, but also an interesting and unusual sense of fairness (uncommon for humans), significantly influenced our material success. We would not be discussing this via computers if we held the values of most other humans. Whether and to what extent chimpanzees (or dogs, who are also social animals with some intelligence) behave this way or that only begs these very questions without answering them. In other words, if chimps seem to act like WEIRD people, then when, why, and how did most of humanity find other solutions -- and keep to them for a thousand generations?

[BaalChatzaf]

Originally here on Feb, 25: We Aren't the World

Pacific Standard

by Ethan Watters

Michael

When I got to the opening paragraph on the Etoro people and the ingestion of semen, I went into extreme Yucccchhhh! mode and could not continue reading.

[Dglgmut]

Human nature is a blank sheet of paper that human nurture writes on.

Humans have both a greater need and a greater capacity for nurture (education) than non-human animals have. Greater need because non-human animals have better developed instincts. Greater capacity because humans are more intelligent.

Not so. We have a lot of genetically conditioned traits. The resemblance between primordial chimp behavior and human behavior is not coinicidence since chimps and humans are 96 percent genetically identical.

We are a lot smarter than our furry cousins though.

The claim is that we are 98% genetically identical, but that isn't exactly true: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive//ldn/2008/aug/08081308

[BaalChatzaf]

Human nature is a blank sheet of paper that human nurture writes on.

Humans have both a greater need and a greater capacity for nurture (education) than non-human animals have. Greater need because non-human animals have better developed instincts. Greater capacity because humans are more intelligent.

Not so. We have a lot of genetically conditioned traits. The resemblance between primordial chimp behavior and human behavior is not coinicidence since chimps and humans are 96 percent genetically identical.

We are a lot smarter than our furry cousins though.

The claim is that we are 98% genetically identical, but that isn't exactly true: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive//ldn/2008/aug/08081308

close enough for government work. My guess is there are significant epigenetic differences between chimps and humans. Even so some similarities in observed behavior between our hairy cousins and us have been made.

Ba'al Chatzaf