HDE 103 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Chopsticks, Fundamental Attribution Error, Ultimatum Game
11 Jun 2018
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I. Lecture 11: Rethinking Culture (June 4, 2018)
A. 3 ways we can make predictions about behavioral variability:
1. Genetics
a. Different genetics and the ways they interact with the environment
2. Learning theory: B.F. Skinner and Watson
a. Focused on Individualist Learners
b. How you learn and adapt
c. You are individually adapting to your own environment
3. Cultural explanation
a. How does culture drive or influence people’s choices/decisions?
B. What is culture?
1. Culture – information that is acquired by an individual from other individuals via social transmission
mechanisms such as imitation, teaching, and language
2. Genetic information is stored in DNA
a. Cultural information is stored in people – and their brains and artifacts
i. Ex: memes, slang, idioms, etc.
C. Rethinking Culture: an example from Japan
1. Japanese norms and customs a child must acquire to be accepted, contribute, and maintain Japanese culture
a. The skill to use chopsticks is stored in every individual brain in Japan – is a skill acquired by children
through imitation and teaching and is expressed behaviorally as chopstick use
2. Cultural groups are not always homogenous, there is great regional variation to chopstick use and custom
across Japan
a. And chopstick use has diffused (i.e., spread from individual-to-individual like a pathogen or a cultural
meme) to other nations and people
i. Culture includes Hollywood gossip, such that Shakespeare and the Kardashians are both
considered cultural information
D. Rethinking Culture
1. Culture should be thought of as information not a behavior
a. i.e., ideational definition
anthropology jargon for those similar
2. This restriction does not mean that cultural information does not affect behavior
3. It’s important to distinguish between information and behavior for two reasons:
a. First, if you’re trying to explain or define something, using the definition of something to explain it, or
the explanation to define it, is circular and gets you nowhere
b. Second, there are other causes of behaviors besides cultures, so they are not tautologies or sufficient
E. Cultural Learning and Information
1. Perhaps easier, is defining what cultural information and learning is not
a. First, as noted, cultural information is not genetic information, stored in genes, passed on by parents,
expressed and phenotypes
b. Second, social learning is not individual learning through trial-and-error
2. The distinction between genetic, individual, and cultural because…
a. …if we observe a behavioral difference between groups of people, we cannot assume the explanation
is “cultural”
b. Some cultures drink less alcohol because they lack an allele that helps metabolize alcohol
i. Thus, the explanation of behavioral variation in this instance is “genetic” (not cultural)
F. How important is culture?
1. Civic Duty: From Europe to America
a. United States is a nation of immigrants (ignoring the several million native people who inhabited this
land prior to colonization from Europe)
2. Many people came from Europe, but although seemingly very similar, there is variation across European
countries that persists in American groups who identify as belonging to specific European countries
a. In other words, Americans who claim heritage from countries with high civic duty, tend to be more
civically involved (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Britain, Netherlands, Germany)
b. Those who claim heritage from countries with low civic duty (France, Ireland, Hungary, Italy, and
Spain) tend to be less civically involved
3. Is fairness universal? Or is selfishness universal?
a. People high in civic duty tend to prefer fairness, while people low in civic duty tend to be more selfish
4. Empirically tested in the “ultimatum game” – A game that people have an amount of money, say $100, and
they are to divide it with someone and see how they will accept or reject the money
a. Others fair or unfair proportion of money accepts or rejects offer
b. *Typically, in a US sample of college students, they zero in on 50:50 being the most fair…but this is
not the case I every culture
5. However, the 50:50 is not universal – WHY?
a. Lamalera of Indonesia and the Ache of Paraguay are 50:50
b. Machiguenga of Peru and the Hadza of Tanzania rarely offered anything above 35%
c. Quichua of Ecuador never rejected offers, even well below 50%
d. Au of Papua New Guinea rejected more than a quarter of all offers, even offers above 50%
6. Why? –
a. SES
b. The norms of how we see money is different
c. The morals of other people – to not be indebted to someone
7. Follow Families
a. In groups like Machiguenga, who never do business or cooperate with anyone outside their family,
they wouldn’t offer large values of money
b. However, more market integrated groups tend to act more like the US
i. And, cultures like the Lamalera who require cooperation to subsist (e.g., whale hunting) are also
more fair
ii. These cultural fairness norms evolved with the levels of cooperative behaviors with the rest of
the group
iii. Different requirements of life create different norms or regulations around behaviors
8. Eastern vs Western thinking?
a. You and other college studetns are not often a representative sample to draw universal conclusions
regarding human behavior
9. Classic example is the fundamental attribution error
a. To attribute to an explanation of an event to something that is obviously not the case in the face of
outstanding contrary evidence
b. Ex: Student does poorly on a test, what caused that?
i. Individualistic causes are given for Western thinking – Ex: “I didn’t study”
ii. Eastern thinking: “The test was on things I couldn’t have prepared or studied for”
G. Classic Example
1. Students were told to evaluate essays written about Castro’s Regime in Cuba
a. Half the students were told their collection of essays were written by students who were explicitly
instructed to write either pro or con Castro, regardless of their personal beliefs
b. Half were told their collection of essays were written by students who were given free choice
2. Not only did students who read the forced pro papers attribute positive Castro believed that they were pro
Castro and vice versa for con students
H. Fundamental or Universal?
1. Other “sacred cows” rethought: Cognitive dissonance, perception, attention, etc….fundamental aspects
of psychology – all show great variation
2. Memory –
a. Chinese students show better memory for objects in relation to other objects while Western students
show better memory for individual objects
3. Holistic (East Asian) style of reasoning compared to Individual (Western) reasoning style
4. Some type of learning mechanism
I. Nontrivial Differences
1. The differences, briefly described, are not trivial, they are foundational to many aspects of human behavior
a. As such, we need to be clear that other explanations are not actually at play, or better
2. Recall, individual learning and genetic inheritance are two separate explanations of behavioral variation
J. Learning
1. B.F. Skinner and J.B. Watson Behavioral Learning Theories – stress learning, but rarely admit that
learning ever happens in the context of a relationship or social interaction
2. Rational Thinking model of Economics: suggests individuals make cost/benefit “rational” “optimizing”
decisions individually ignoring cultural norms
3. Cultural Ecology: suggests individual variation is explained by adaptation to local conditions, that are
somehow not culturally acquired (i.e., mimic, teaching, copying)
K. Genetic
1. Evolutionary psychology: Attribute all behavioral variation to genetically evolved adaptations
a. Instead they call it “evoked culture” where the variation in culture and behavior observed is explained
by variance in which genes (think a mixed grab bag) that each individual inherits
b. The JukeBox analogy: Despite all of us having identical makeups of songs in our jukebox (genes in
our DNA) each individual has different combinations of genes turned on because of epigenetic
impacts and these differences explain behavioral variation and culture
2. This makes sense, but if true, then culture wouldn’t matter, so if we want to leave here with a framework
where culture matters then we need to show how either of the previous theories are not adequate
L. Individual learning can’t explain variation
1. If individual learning were responsible for variation in human behavior, then we would expect to see a
close match between a person’s behavior and the nonsocial ecological conditions in which that person
lives, such as: climate, terrain, or local animal and plant species
2. Different ecological conditions then, would cause people to independently invest similar solutions to the
problems posed by those ecological conditions
3. Many anthropologists agree:
a. Pimbwe and Sukuma live in the same ecology but have very different behaviors (farming vs
pastoralists)
b. Amish Mennonite religious groups live in the same ecological conditions in Pennsylvania as non-
Amish Pennsylvanians, and yet they behave very, very differently
c. Conversely, Britain and Australia have very different ecologies, and yet Australians maintain many
British norms
M. Genes alone cannot explain behavioral variation
1. Fairness, civic duty, the use of chopsticks, memory and analytic behaviors have been passed down through
cultural transmission for generation
a. Many practices across the African continent correlate with family lineage
b. Such a pattern could be explained by genetic inheritance then…
2. The mechanisms that explain psychological processes that allow us to learn are indeed made up of proteins
coded by genes
a. However, IQ, personality, psychopathology, have been studied by behavioral geneticists and found to
at most be 40-50% explained by genetic variation within societies, leaving 50-60% explained by
culture
3. 93-95% of genetic variation is within-cultures, while 5-7% are between cultures
a. This means that if genetic variation does not explain individual behavioral variation within cultures, it
cannot explain the variation between cultures
4. Immigration studies are also a strong argument against genetic inheritance
a. Anyone out there come from a family who was raised in a different culture than your own?
i. If it was all genetic, then you would not act in a capacity that resembled the culture you grew up
in here.
ii. Substantial genetic change does not happen quickly
N. Children are cultural sponges
1. Homo cultural or Filia cultura / Filius cultura
2. We now see that individuals acquire knowledge, customs, attitudes, values, and more from other members
of society
3. Children are born to copy, can’t help copying , and become equipped with the mechanisms to attend and
copy those around them, usually their parents, but also their peers
O. Culture is genetically adaptive
1. When environments change relatively rapidly, copying others is the most adaptive learning strategy
a. Your genes would have been out-dated
b. Individual learning, may benefit you greatly, but could also cost you ultimately
2. Once you receive genes from parents, you’re stuck with them
a. Individual learning is a way to expose oneself to different environments to encourage epigenetic
effects on behavior, but could be costly
