And lately, we’re having to fight for ever increasingly limited resources, with STEM getting first dibs (not that STEM isn’t important, but all fields are important).
But we’re here, now. We live here. We can’t change those, we can change the here and now and figure out something better.
Absolutely agreed. Our responsibility, both personally and a society, is to be better than nature has created us.
My response was mostly rising to the suggestion that WIERD societies are uniquely “Racist; Imperialist; aggressive; colonialist; warlike; invasive”.
However, being uniquely successful in our “Racism; Imperialism; aggression; colonialism; war; and invasions” does give us the greater opportunity to do better, and the greater moral obligation to try.
Precisely. Which is where articles like this come in. Acknowledging historical and ongoing bias in various aspects of our culture can only help us to be better. I’m sure there are plenty of people who still think that
The entertaining thing here is that discussions on BBS also have a distinctly WEIRD outlook —on ethics in particular— and little insight into how that becomes an issue in exchanges with people who don’t.
I hadn’t commented on the original article, but I have to say that the WEIRD article was long overdue and quite interesting when it was first mentioned quite a number of months back.
However, there are far worse problems in sociology than just WEIRD. To be honest, studies like this are almost worthless for a scientific point of view, WEIRD or not. Even when accurate, they capture a sliver of incredibly complex human behaviour that might be worthy of publishing, but cannot be used to generalize anything interesting about humans.
Except, of course, we can’t help but build a narrative, especially if the authors choose to interpret their data (usually with weasel words like “this suggests that…”) and we’re pretty much back to our usual nest of “just so” stories masquerading as “scientific” justification for anything.
These make excellent web and listicle fodder that mostly exist to entertain us and confirm our cultural biases (“Did you read that women are inherently more jealous?” “See science proves that men can’t find anything!”) As for the science, that’s long lost to the desire by academics or their institutions to be today’s most shared newslet.
So to me, WEIRD isn’t in and of itself bad science any more than studying finches rather than birds everywhere is inherently wrong - you just have to be aware of what is being studied. (I’ll admit I found the cross-cultural studies of the ultimatum game to be fascinating.)
What is the bad science is the narrative that gets added: “science says people are like this”. That’s usually not added by the reputable scientists. But you can guarantee it’s been added by the people or the press if it’s become popular enough to hit my newsfeeds. (In fact, that’s why it’s become popular enough.)
Lastly, I’ll add one wrinkle. Cultures are inherently different, but publicizing or emphasizing those differences tends to exacerbate fear or distrust of those other cultures. I was rather dismayed to see how the results of the cross-cultural ultimatum game were spun in different areas of the Internet. For those of us interested in a healthy level of immigration from a variety of cultures, non-WEIRD studies are not likely to help, since the only narrative likely to get wide exposure will be “look, those people are too different to every integrate into our society”.
Using a wide variety of cultures in various sociological experiments might help science, but it might not help public perception of other cultures.
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I think that’s likely true, too. The truth is that it’s very hard to break out of your own outlook and try to see others. It’s a struggle, even for the most well-intentioned people, I think. The folks I’ve noticed who can do it most effectively are those who’ve immigrated to the the US/Western Europe or those who have lived abroad (but not always the latter).
I’d say that it’s not instinctive. Most educated middle class (my bubble) can and will put themselves into a mindset different from their own, but it requires conscious deliberate thought rather than instinct. My feeling is that a lot of damage gets done by stuff that we’d dismiss if we thought about it, but mostly we half-ignore it, and it ends up gradually accreting into “stuff we just know”.
And that can be a real struggle to logic through. I’ve been caught that way a number of times in my life (mostly because of arguments my wife made) in the distinctly uncomfortable position of stuff I “knew” was true that differed from stuff that observation and logic told me was true.
I also strongly agree that being part of a non-dominant culture, even for a short while, is highly, highly useful. As a straight, white male, I’ve never been in that position no matter where I’ve travelled, but I’ve gathered many insights from those who were.
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I think admitting that we can sometimes be blind to the struggles of others is a good first step… as long as we don’t just stop there and pat ourselves on the back for being so progressive. I think you’re right that even that is a struggle for many middle class people.
My point was that the progressive viewpoint itself is also WEIRD … 
If you are able to look at the Heinrich paper (I only have access to it via a university library, so it might not be that easy to get) there is discussion there around how WEIRD morality tends to follow Kohlberg’s framework. But that there are other ethical frameworks which aren’t represented in his scheme, notably ethics of community; ethics of divinity; and also the ethics of care, which Gilligan used to make a feminist critique.
Progressives (tend to) operate at a high level on Kohlberg’s scale (arguments based on social contracts and universal human rights) and so unconsciously see the moral choices made by people who reason in other systems as being lesser. But those ethics are actually just different and sophisticated in a manner that is barely or not at all represented in a progressive WEIRD world view …
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Agreed.
Again… I agree. Understanding that different cultures have a different, not necessarily lesser, world view is something progressives wrestle with as much as everyone else. Once an individual thinks they’re correct and that their world view should apply to all of humanity, that’s a problem.
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