L75 JINE 354 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Cultural Psychology, Natural Product, Coevolution

• School: WUSTL
• Department: Jewish, Islamic And Near Eastern Studies
• Course: L75 JINE 354
• Professor: Professor Nakissa

Document Summary

Section ii: muslims in a world of statistically. Week 4 (10/5-10/11) global cultural/psychological variation and its causes. Reading - the weirdest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. We need to examine the co-evolution of people"s minds with different institutions, technologies, and languages. Complex divisions of labor with substantial individual mobility. People"s psychology shifted through adaptive cultural and developmental processes but not substantially through natural selection acting on genes. Often, especially in formerly non-state societies, the newly transplanted institutions created a misfit with people"s cultural psychology, leading to poorly functioning governments, economies, and civil societies. This leads to rising poverty, corruption, and malnutrition as well as civil wars between clans, tribes, and ethnic groups. Psychologists treat ameircans and other weird people as a culture-free population; it"s culture that makes everyone else appear deviant. We generally see and understand the world through our own cultural models and local institutions.