Recent evidence has shown that a small percentage of human DNA is Neanderthal. This Neanderthal DNA entered the human gene pool between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago.

While human DNA may contain traces of Neanderthal ancestors, mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthals has not been found in humans. Mitochondrial DNA comes uniquely from your mother. Is it plausible that male Neanderthals were able to mate with female humans, but that the reciprocal cross was unable to occur?

Analyses of the Y chromosome suggest that we share a common male ancestor 59,000 years ago. Could this male ancestor have possibly been Neanderthal?

If our common male ancestor is neanderthal, and considering that the Y chromosome is transmitted uniquely through the paternal line, could it mean that men are more closely related to Neanderthals than women? Have men and women truly come from two different species?

Visit the full post on our PLoS website for the full explanation of this intriguing hypothesis.

The first is The Ecology of Human Development: Evolving Models for Cultural Psychology. Here is the abstract, part of a whole special issue in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology on the work of the husband-wife team John Whiting and Beatrice Whiting:

The Whiting model aimed to provide a blueprint for psychocultural research by generating testable hypotheses about the dynamic relationships of a culture with the psychology and behavior of its members. This analysis identifies reasons why the model was so effective at generating hypotheses borne out in empirical research, including its foundational insight that integrated nature and nurture, its reconceptualization of the significance of early environments, and its attention to biopsychocultural dynamics active in those environments.

Implications and the evolution of the ecological paradigm are tracked through presentations of three current models (developmental niche, ecocultural theory, bioecocultural microniche) and discussion of their related empirical literatures. Findings from these literatures converge to demonstrate the power of a developmental, cultural, ecological framework for explaining within- and between-population variation in cultural psychology.

The figure above is from this paper, and represents Carol’s own model for understanding human development. But the real point that Carol wants to make in emphasizing these three models goes as follows:

All of these models share a concern for how the cultural ecology of affect and affect regulation drive psychobehavioral development, competence, and well-being or health. Whoever has looked has found linkages among cultural practices, stress physiology, and emotion regulation. Note that each of these models foregrounds the development of emotion and emotion regulation and de-emphasizes classic knowledge acquisition. Although there are important reasons for this emphasis (Damasio, 2005), a reconsideration of what constitutes “knowledge” and more systematic investigation of the linkages between emotion and knowledge might prove valuable (588).

The second article is Habits of the Heart: Life History and the Developmental Neuroendocrinology of Emotion. This article was part of a special issue on Advances in Evolutionary Endocrinology in the American Journal of Human Biology. Here is Carol’s abstract:

The centrality of emotion in cognition and social intelligence as well as its impact on health has intensified investigation into the causes and consequences of individual variation in emotion regulation. Central processing of experience directly informs regulation of endocrine axes, essentially forming a neuro-endocrine continuum integrating information intake, processing, and physiological and behavioral response. Two major elements of life history—resource allocation and niche partitioning—are served by linking cognitive-affective with physiologic and behavioral processes. Scarce cognitive resources (attention, memory, and time) are allocated under guidance from affective co-processing. Affective-cognitive processing, in turn, regulates physiologic activity through neuro-endocrine outflow and thereby orchestrates energetic resource allocation and trade-offs, both acutely and through time. Reciprocally, peripheral activity (e.g., immunologic, metabolic, or energetic markers) influences affective-cognitive processing.

By guiding attention, memory, and behavior, affective-cognitive processing also informs individual stances toward, patterns of activity in, and relationships with the world. As such, it mediates processes of niche partitioning that adaptively exploit social and material resources. Developmental behavioral neurobiology has identified multiple factors that influence the ontogeny of emotion regulation to form affective and behavioral styles. Evidence is reviewed documenting roles for genetic, epigenetic, and experiential factors in the development of emotion regulation, social cognition, and behavior with important implications for understanding mechanisms that underlie life history construction and the sources of differential health. Overall, this dynamic arena for research promises to link the biological bases of life history theory with the psychobehavioral phenomena that figure so centrally in quotidian experience and adaptation, particularly, for humans.

In this second article, Carol is tying her work back into evolutionary theory. If the first took up more the cultural/psychological side, then here we are grounded in the mechanisms and ideas of biological anthropology. She writes here:

Given the evidence of gene-environment interactions and developmental effects discussed above, combinations of history and circumstance will condition the phenotypes generated from the genetic structure, and thus influence the impact of that structure on corresponding experience, welfare, behavior, and the balance of selective pressures upon genetic diversity. Such gene-environment interactions and their consequences for function and welfare deserve investigation across a wide range of human cultures and conditions. Such study bears exciting possibility for unlocking dynamics among culture, social conditions, the nature and distribution of social niches, and selection pressures operating on allelic variants (779).

Link to citation/abstract for Carol Worthman’s The Ecology of Human Development: Evolving Models for Cultural Psychology.

Link to citation/abstract for Carol Worthman’s Habits of the heart: Life history and the developmental neuroendocrinology of emotion.

Update: You can see Carol lecture on Habits of the heart: Life history and the developmental neuroendocrinology of emotion regulation here.

This phenomenon is not limited to developed/industrial countries. Nicholas Kristof writes:

If the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

And it’s not just premature deaths and worse education, these types of behaviors cost a lot. Just take the May headline, Governments’ Drug-Abuse Costs Hit $468 Billion, Study Says. Most of those costs were in health or law enforcement, with just 2 percent spent on prevention, treatment, and research.

This is where we need really innovative approaches to understanding consumption, human decision making, and how we regulate our behavior. Behavioral economics is not all that; we do WEIRD research, instead of MYOPICS studies; we say poverty poisons the brain, but forget about just how poverty comes to be; we blame bad behavior on bad hormones, rather than doing more substantive work to understand people’s behavior.

Neuroanthropology can offer novel approaches, from understanding the development of addiction in four steps to better grasping the integrated dimensions of post-traumatic stress disorder to examining different components of food, obesity and eating and understanding the complexities of video games and other modern obsessions.

These problems are not all caused by biological mechanisms or social construction, they are not all rooted in human psychology or deviations from rationality. They are human phenomena, requiring that we integrate ideas across multiple domains. To do that, anthropology needs psychology and neuroscience, just as they need anthropology. The impact of what we DO is enormous. And I’m betting that understanding what we do better will help us become more human – to find ways to deal with our own decisions and flaws, not just through technical fixes or imposed solutions, but also through finding ways to better promote our potential.

More controversially, the authors go on to argue that, where there is robust cross-cultural research, WEIRD subjects tend to be outliers on a range of measurable traits that do vary, including visual perception, sense of fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, and a host of other basic psychological traits. They don’t ignore universals – discussing them in several places – but they do highlight human variation and its implications for psychological theory.

As is the custom at BBS, the target article is accompanied by a large number of responses from scholars around the world, and then a synthetic reflection from the original target article authors to the many responses (in this case, 28). The total of the discussion weighs in at a hefty 75 pages, so it will take most readers (like me) a couple of days to digest the whole thing.

It’s my second time encountering the article as I read a pre-print version and contemplated proposing a response, but, sadly, there was just too much I wanted to say, and not enough time in the calendar (conference organizing and the like dominating my life) for me to be able to pull it together. I regret not writing a rejoinder, but I can do so here with no limit on my space and the added advantage of seeing how other scholars responded to the article.

My one word review of the collection of target article and responses: AMEN!

Or maybe that should be, AAAAAAAMEEEEEN! {Sung by angelic voices.}

There’s a short version of the argument in Nature as well, but the longer version is well worth the read.

Of course, I have tons of quibbles with wording or sub-arguments, ways of making points, choices of emblematic cases and the like in the longer BBS article (and I’ll get to a couple of those below the ‘fold’), but I don’t want to lose my over-arching sense that there is so much right in this piece. So before I get into the discussion, I just want to thank all of the authors, not just Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan, but also the authors of the responses, who pulled it together when I didn’t try. The collection is a really remarkable discussion, one that I find gratifying in such a prominent place, and I do hope that the target article has a significant impact on the behavioural sciences.

If you have one blockhead colleague who simply does not get that surveying his or her students in ‘Introduction to Psychology’ fails to provide instant access to ‘human nature,’ this is the article to pass along. If that colleague still doesn’t get it, please stop talking to them. Really. You. Are. Wasting. Your. Breath. If Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan don’t shake their confidence, I’m not sure what can.

Abstract

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

Article summary

If you absolutely don’t want to read the target article (you should), I’ll also provide a bit of summary discussion to supplement the abstract. Skip ahead to the next section if you just want my response.

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan first survey some of the evidence that Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic subjects – more specifically, University undergrads – are disproportionately the empirical foundation for claims being made, either explicitly or implicitly, about human nature. The evidence here is pretty staggering, even for someone like me who is suspicious of psychology for precisely this reason.

A recent survey by Arnett (2008) of the top journals in six sub-disciplines of psychology revealed that 68% of subjects were from the US and fully 96% from ‘Western’ industrialized nations (European, North American, Australian or Israeli). That works out to a 96% concentration on 12% of the world’s population (Henrich et al. 2010: 63). Or, to put it another way, you’re 4000 times more likely to be studied by a psychologist if you’re a university undergraduate at a Western university than a randomly selected individual strolling around outside the ivory tower.

Moreover, psychology is disproportionately American, and especially English-speaking, even compared to other scientific fields. 70% of all psych citations originate from US research institutions, compared with 37% in a field like chemistry, and the top four countries for psychology citations are all English speaking.

Despite the skewed sampling, psychologists seldom offer cautionary notes about the source of their data or its potential cultural boundedness, and likely would be testy if the cross-culturally critical among us suggested that they retitle their publications to reflect the source of their information: such as, the Journal of Experimental Psychology in High-Enrollment American Research Universities: Undergraduate Psychology Students’ Perception and Performance, a personal favourite. Henrich and colleagues do a good job of pointing out where there are exceptions to the pattern, and many of the authors of comments have been leaders in trying to implement broader, cross-cultural sampling, but the pattern is pretty pronounced in spite of noteworthy exceptions.

Henrich and colleagues then go on to use existing studies to contrast WEIRD subjects with other sorts of people on a series of increasingly close, ‘telescoping’ contrasts: first, they compare industrialized and ‘small-scale’ societies in areas such as visual perception, fairness, cooperation, folkbiology, and spatial cognition. The authors then highlight the contrast of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ populations on measures such as social behaviour, self-concepts, self-esteem, agency (a sense of having free choice), conformity, patterns of reasoning (holistic v. analytic), and morality.

The authors then examine how Americans specifically stand out from other subject pools in comparative research to highlight how the specific dominance of US subject pools in psychological research might skew our understanding. In particular, Henrich and colleagues survey the issue of individualism, choice, and other outlying US traits. This section is among the thinnest in the article, but it is still full of suggestive data, especially for those of us who are sensitized to the dissimilarities glossed over in the catch-all term, ‘Western’ (my Australian wife and I, a Yank, frequently find ourselves contending with Oz-Sepo contrasts in daily life, even though Australia and the US would typically be considered quite similar ‘Western’ cultures).

Finally, Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan contrast the Americans who typically wind up as psychology subjects with the whole population of the US, highlighting the diversity among adult Americans in such area as social behaviour, moral reasoning, cooperation, fairness, performance on IQ tests and analytical abilities. US undergraduates exhibit demonstrable differences, not only from non-university educated Americans, but even from previous generations of their own families.

Herich et al. are careful to point out that ‘difference’ is not the whole story, that there are underlying similarities among the diverse groups, and they are agnostic about the causes of various contrasting results. They suggest (2010: 79) that determining a set of criteria for traits likely to be universals would be helpful to psychology and behavioural science and offer a few examples.

But perhaps the main point is a cautionary one, arguing that the developmental environment for WEIRD children may be statistically unusual in a wide variety of ways from the typical environment of modern Homo sapiens throughout our species’ time on the planet:

The fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of the behavioral sciences may render them one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens…. WEIRD people, from this perspective, grow up in, and adapt to, a rather atypical environment vis-à-vis that of most of human history. It should not be surprising that their psychological world is unusual as well. (2010: 79-80)

As a counter-balance to the oddity of WEIRD subjects, and their overwhelming over-representation in psychological research to this date, Henrich and colleagues recommend an ambitious cross-cultural research agenda, changes to publication policy to redress the imbalance, and a range of other practical, albeit quite difficult, policies.

They highlight that adding subjects to our pools may not be sufficient to fix biases that are inherent in research questions, method, or theory, a point that several of the commentators also discuss, some with less optimism than Henrich and colleagues (for example, Gosling, Carson, John and Potter; Shweder; and Baumard and Sperber).

Overall, what most recommends this article is not that these arguments have never been made before, but rather the breadth and depth of the empirical sources that Henrich and colleagues draw into the discussion. For example, Paul Rozin, who arguably has made very similar arguments before, lauds Henrich and colleagues, writing about the message of cross-cultural variation, ‘never has it been so thoroughly documented and elaborated into all the domains in which it is relevant. And never so convincingly’ (2010: 108). High praise, indeed.

So what possible quibbles could I have with a piece that clearly has so much so right? Let the picking of nits begin!

Is being WEIRD really what makes them odd?

Henrich and colleagues use the acronym WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) to capture the distinctiveness of the typical subjects used in psychology experiments – university students in psychology classes – but I suspect that this acronym, however clever, fails to truly capture how odd these subjects are. One could add a host of other terms that would highlight other outlying characteristics of this population, especially differences that may not be so obvious to WEIRD researchers.

Although WEIRD is terribly catchy and quite manageable, it may not even focus us on the most important distinctions, nor may it reflect a good starting point for a truly trans-cultural psychology, carting our own self-conceptions and obsessions, surreptitiously, into the cross-cultural comparisons. Is WEIRD weird enough to constitute a break from typical ways of thinking among the WEIRD researchers? (God, this if fun. It’s one reason I think the article has legs: rhetorical catchiness.)

For example, when I brought one of my Brazilian subjects to an American university at which I previously taught, his characterization of the American students’ differences from young Brazilians with whom he had more contact focused on none of these traits (W. E. I. R. or D.). He was more struck by their large size (both height and BMI, to put it nicely), their frumpy androgynous clothing (anyone here not wearing a sweatshirt?), their materialism, their clumsiness and physical ineptitude, and their ethnic and personal homogeneity. If my Brazilian colleague were to characterize the oddness of the WEIRD, he wouldn’t focus on the traits Henrich and colleagues have chosen in their designation.

From the perspective of my admittedly non-academic Brazilian colleague, the truly outstanding characteristics of the US students were characteristics like their body types, the diminishing of gender markers, and the evidence of extraordinary peer-group conformity in bearing, expression and personal presentation. His observations are hardly scientific, but they suggest that focusing on ‘Western-ness’, education, economic system, wealth, and political system certainly doesn’t exhaust the parameters of difference and it might not even highlight the most salient, although it does correspond to patterns of the Big Variables in Western scholarship about difference (when I was in grad school, it was the Holy Trinity: gender, class and ethnicity).

I don’t think that my point is a fundamental disagreement with Henrich and colleagues, but a concern that the parameter of difference we choose to highlight, even in the simplest designation, might itself be a culturally-generated bias. Anthropologists are well acquainted with having our subjects point to traits that are invisible to the Western research as ‘the crucial’ characteristic for understanding the gap. For example, ‘rich’ may seem an obvious contrast to poverty, but we know that not all ‘poverty’ is the same, nor are all ‘rich’ people able to experience in the same way their material situation. Some economists have argued that inequality is more crucial for understanding the experience of deprivation, for example, than absolute wealth. And poor populations often fix, not on their material deprivation, but on other qualities to describe their difference from the wealthy (or the WEIRD). For example, religious differences, family dynamics, or caste might be salient to people from other cultural backgrounds.

In addition, I worry that some of our cultural ideology and self deception may be smuggled in under the terms themselves, especially ‘Western,’ ‘industrialized’ and ‘democratic.’ ‘Western’ has been too comprehensively discussed to really dwell on here, but I’m struck by both ‘democratic’ and ‘industrialized’ as forms of self description for Americans, especially. After all, isn’t ‘de-industrialization’ or post-industrialization a key economic transformation in the United States, and aren’t many American commentators worried about the hollowing out of ‘democracy’ in an age of voter apathy and corporate domination of media and political lobbying?

If WEIRD college students aren’t voting in large numbers, for example, and feel profoundly alienated from politics, isn’t it problematic to think of ‘democracy’ as shaping their attitudes? I’d be more inclined to say we should examine the landless farmers in Brazil I worked with while studying the Landless Movement to understand ‘democratic’ populations. They had long community meetings modeled on the labour movement or anarchist movement to come to decisions. I doubt my university students in the US had experienced anything nearly as ‘democratic.’

Again, I think that my critique is more than a bit unfair, as Henrich and colleagues are writing for an experimentalist academic community that needs to be made aware of the distortions introduced by accustomed research methods. They’re not writing for an audience of deconstructivist, left-leaning, post-colonial political economists, anthropologists, or cultural studies scholars. My ‘critiques’ are more about how we might shepherd the next stage of research if Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan are successful with their intervention. I worry that, even if psychologists, brain scientists, and evolutionary theorists decide that they need to take human variation seriously, anthropology isn’t going to be ready as a discipline to help (one more reason I appreciate the inter-disciplinary program that Henrich and his colleagues are sketching).

So, to sum up this post-Henrich, next stage concern: I worry that W.E.I.R.D. classification flatters the WEIRD, focusing on traits that Westerners typically highlight to describe themselves in ways that are, however inadvertently, pretty self-congratulatory. If we were to call the same group, Materialist, Young, self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking, Isolated, Consumerist, and Sedentary (MYOPICS)… you get the idea. (By the way, I’m not committed to this, only to getting my own acronym – You know the steps in the cheap acronym process: Set acronym. Find words to fit each letter.)

How the WEIRD get weird

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan are really good in the target article to refrain from too much speculation about the explanations for the peculiarity of the WEIRD. It’s one of the many things that I think they need to be congratulated on, and their openness invites a wide-ranging discussion of the many likely contributing facotrs. But many of the specific qualities highlighted in the Henrich et al. piece and in the responses likely do not stem directly from being either W., E., I., R. or D., so the classification itself can be misleading.

For example, one of the prime candidates for the cause of some of the measurable differences is variation in child-rearing techniques, especially forms of verbal interaction with infants and young children, their visual and sensory environments, and the manual forms of care given to children. WEIRDness doesn’t necessarily determine this childhood environment, even though many childcare practices that might help to create the psychological statistical anomalies we find in these populations do correlate with being WEIRD. If English is affecting how the WEIRD think in ways that make them unusual, for example, there’s no inherent reason why English speaking-ness necessarily leads to WEIRDness, although the WEIRD are disproportionately English-speaking (especially those surveyed for psychological research).

Again, this is not so much a critique of Henrich and colleagues but a consideration of where we go from here, how we get at human psychological variation. The point is just that it will not be enough to try to get populations who are different to Us (if You, the reader, are WEIRD) in ways that we recognize. For example, although poor populations within Western countries may demonstrate significant variation, they might not, and not because variation is not possible; they might share child caring practices with wealthier countrymen without sharing wealth or income profile. The choice of comparison should be motivated by the research question and hypotheses about relevant causal dynamics, not simply, like the broader reliance on WEIRD subjects, the result of convenience in sampling.

Who you callin’ ‘SMALL-scale’!?

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan use the term ‘small-scale,’ although they are very clear what the term means and that it is not a thin proxy for ‘primitive’ (see p. 123, fn#4). I’m more than a bit uncomfortable with the term ‘small-scale’ although it is arguably the most acceptable classification for the groups that are being clustered (and miles and miles and miles better than ‘primitive’ and other bare-facedly ethnocentric terms). The problem is, what’s the contrast with ‘small-scale’? If it’s ‘Western,’ than we have an asymmetrical binary distinction where some groups will arguably fall under both categories or under neither.

For example, ‘small-scale’ focuses on a cluster of traits that don’t NECESSARILY co-vary, although they might in until-recently foraging groups: small, geographically-bounded groups with slight division of labour, local organization through kinship, self-sufficient in food provisioning, and face-to-face interaction. The obvious ‘none of the above’ cases in the ‘small-scale v. Western’ contrast are non-Western groups who are not small-scale, such as city dwellers in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Pacific (outside Australia and New Zealand). This group would constitute a substantial part of the world’s population, if not the largest grouping.

And what about Western populations living in small-scale settings? For example, I live in a very wealthy town of around 2000 people where I frequently encounter people I know on the street. As members of a gentrified country town, we grow and eat a lot of local produce, more so every year for ideological reasons, and, given 5 or 10 minutes, most of the locals can find kin or age-cohort connections in a process that is as seemingly obligatory as it is tedious for a ‘blow in’ (local argot for an in-migrant) like myself to watch. I’m surrounded by people interested in green lifestyles, self-sufficiency, ‘slow food,’ reconnecting socially – many of them living on million-dollar properties. We’re obviously WEIRD – waaaaaay WEIRD – but also, in an admittedly tendentious argument, ‘small scale.’

I don’t think for one SECOND that Henrich and colleagues are not aware of this issue, but I think that the problem highlights a stumbling block for anthropologists doing cross-cultural comparisons more generally: the use of binary classifications is likely to be a nagging intellectual handicap. Much more useful is to really think through Henrich’s suggestion, in the same footnote (p. 123, fn#4), about an ‘n-dimensional’ comparative space for talking about cultural distinctions.

The contrast of ‘small-scale’ to ‘Western’ seems to me to be an artifact of more simplistic forms of cross-cultural comparison, more ‘primitive’ intellectual projects than the one Henrich and colleagues are proposing. So much of the discussion in the article, including the really intriguing graphs showing the wide range of variation WITHIN both WEIRD and ‘small-scale’ groups, runs counter to the dichotomy, highlighting the fact that human diversity can’t be too quickly recuperated with old-fashioned Us-Them thinking. I don’t think Henrich and colleagues fall victim to bipolar thinking as an intellectual short-cut, but I worry that there’s dead-falls lurking along the path of the terminology itself.

My own candidate for one source of the oddity

Although Henrich and colleagues are laudably restrained in speculating about the sources of differences between WEIRD populations and other groups, I want to put another candidate on the table that’s discussed by Lana B. Karasik, Karen E. Adolph, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, and Marc. H. Bornstein in one of the responses that I enjoyed a lot. They talk about ‘WEIRD walking,’ the way that WEIRD populations are also outliers in terms of motor development in ways that many people in the field overlook.

Karasik and colleagues describe how WEIRD children’s patterns of motor development became enshrined in psychology through testing procedures, test items and norms into an understanding of universal ‘stages’ of motor development (see 2010: 95). Even when cross-cultural research was conducted, these culturally-specific criteria, derived from examining WEIRD developmental pathways, meant that researchers were often carrying with them tools that were ill-suited to study other sorts of children. Or these psychologists were simply comparing diverse children to WEIRD ones on standards set by the WEIRD children.

One example of this that I have discussed is overhand throwing, a task that has been used in some tests of motor coordination in spite of the fact that different cultural groups demonstrate enormous variability in the activity because it is a skill, not a universally-acquired entailment of being human. Some children learn to throw in environments that support, model and reward the activity; others never really learn to throw particularly well because their activity patterns simply do not include the opportunity to learn (I’ve written in a book chapter that will soon appear about ‘throwing like a Brazilian,’ an analogue to ‘throwing like a girl’).

Karasik and colleagues point out that even such ‘basic’ motor abilities at crawling are susceptible to manipulation: the trend to put newborn children on their backs to sleep in the West, for example, has retarded the development of crawling in a population where children formerly would routinely sleep on their bellies. In some groups, normal development may not even include crawling, children skipping the stage entirely or using some other intermittent form of locomotion, like ‘bum-shuffling’ or scooting about while seated.

In my own research, the physical abilities of WEIRD university students stand out more clearly as strikingly odd than many of their other traits, and I’m convinced that the extraordinary inactivity of this population, coupled with their high calorie diets, has more diverse and wide-ranging effects than simply leading to an epidemic of obesity, Type-II diabetes, and other diet-related health problems. For example, capoeira instruction, a subject close to my heart, has to start at a much different place for American youth than it does with Brazilian kids in Salvador where I did my field research. Even teaching salsa lessons at a Midwestern US university drove home the profoundly different motor starting point, prior to the lessons, of young adults in the US compared to Brazilians (and I suspect, to many populations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere).

The point is not just to rehearse the typical alarmist discussion of the ‘obesity epidemic,’ but also to point out the profound potential implications of radical differences in activity environments for children during their development. I don’t think most WEIRD theorists realize just how powerful an influence sedentary living is on our psychological, physiological, metabolic, endocrine, and neural development because most of us, subjects and researchers alike, are SO sedentary. WEIRD bodies have so much unused energy from their diets, especially with their levels of activity plummeting, that I find it hard to believe we understand metabolic patterns that would have dominated much of human prehistory.

To argue that WEIRD subjects are a good window in on ‘human nature’ is difficult when, from the perspective of metabolic energy and expenditure, the WEIRD are such outliers in the whole history of our species. We know that this radically unusual metabolic situation — massive energy surplus with less and less expenditure — is profoundly affecting mortality patterns: in WEIRD societies, most of the leading causes of death are, arguably, directly linked to the human body’s difficulty of coping with this situation, and that’s even after generations of sedentary life in which to adapt. But the psychological and neurological consequences of sedentarism are less well understood in part, in my opinion, because most WEIRD researchers have a hard time even imagining how arduous life would have been. Throughout human existence, most humans likely have been phenomenally active, and athletic, compared to WEIRD populations, out of necessity.

I’m going to have to write something more in depth on this, but I just feel the need to flag it. If I had written a response, I probably would have focused on this trait because it runs against WEIRD researchers’ self understanding. The WEIRD tend to think of themselves as unusually healthy, and by measures of things like infectious disease rates, death from accident, and infant mortality, they certainly are. But from a broad, cross-cultural view, the extraordinary inactivity of the WEIRD, coupled with their access to very energy dense, highly processed food sources, makes them outliers in ways that I’m not sure we fully comprehend.

Taking issue with some of the responses

A number of the commentators bring really interesting points to the discussion. A few that I have to single out for special praise are Majid and Levinson on WEIRD languages; Leavens, Bard and Hopkins on BIZARRE chimpanzees (the acronym thing is apparently contagious); Karasik and colleagues on motor development; Chiao and Cheon on brain imaging; Ceci and colleagues on hiccups in research design; Fessler on unknown unknowns in shame research; Lancy on ethnocentrism in child development research… There’s really a lot of great discussion, most of it building upon what Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan have laid out in the target article. Again, I can only really recommend that you read the original.

That said, there are a couple of responses that I have to take issue with, including a couple that Henrich and colleagues handle far more diplomatically than I would have.

‘Difference is really uniformity if you just ignore difference’

Lowell Gaertner, Constantine Sedikides, Huajian Cai and Jonathan D. Brown basically write a piece that says, ‘yeah, yeah, differences, differences, yada yada…. But the over-arching human universals, the kind that we label with vague generalities that could be applied to anything, are really the point, and they’re GENETIC!’ Frequent readers of our weblog will know that this kind of argument gets me as hopped up and raving as a post-Halloween kindergarten class. (And don’t even get me started on errant use of the word, ‘reify’…) Danks and Rose offer a similar, but less objectionable use of this argument strategy, suggesting that universality is in the learning process, not in what is learned.

Henrich and colleagues do an excellent job of shredding the specific empirical case made by Gaertner and colleagues about the universality of ‘positive self-views’ (see esp. pp. 119-121), so I won’t dwell on the nuts and bolts. Flogging a dead horse and all. What I just want to highlight is that the idea that there is something ‘essential,’ an obdurate and universal ‘human nature,’ is NOT evolutionary thinking. To argue against ‘human nature’ is not to be anti-evolutionary.

For some reason, some (though not ALL) theorists try to make the argument for human variation appear to be against evolution, which is something I can NOT understand, except in the narrow confines of the history of feuding within anthropology. Even in my freshman human evolution course, one of the key arguments from Week Two is that even Darwin’s classical perspective on natural selection says that species change and that variation is a fundamental precondition for natural selection even if stabilizing selection produces patterns of continuity over time.

But the bigger problem with Gaertner et al. is the common assumption that, although there’s diversity in ‘behaviour’ or ‘phenotype,’ on some other higher level of abstraction, there’s unity, even if that unity has to be stated in such vague terms that it’s essentially meaningless. Likewise, I’m not convinced that Danks and Rose are on solid ground, or making much progress by trying to separate out learning processes from what is learned, and then to argue that the processes are universal. As an empirical statement, the argument for universal learning processes is obviously false. Some societies, like WEIRD ones, have extensive, explicit, segregated systems for formal learning; others have virtually no separate contexts for learning or have very different sorts of institutions than classrooms.

I just don’t think I get why some theorists must, as soon as confronted by evidence of diversity, immediately declare that there’s ‘uniformity,’ at some ‘higher level’ of abstraction. The act can often sound like a vague rearguard defense, as if there is some underlying need to demand uniformity in spite of evidence to the contrary. For example, confronted by the empirical reality of profound dietary variation in humans, of survival for multiple generations at near starvation levels, of culturally-induced dietary restrictions, of eating patterns that are unhealthy and self-destructive, even voluntary self-starvation or gross over-consumptions, some defenders of universalism, like Gaertner and colleagues say, ‘the diverse diets are connected and assimilated by a universal need for sustenance’ (2010: 93).

The point is not that there are no universals; it’s that the ‘assimilation’ of diversity into a meaningless ‘universal’ is a hollow exercise that seeks to escape from the very point that Henrich et al. are marking. Gaertner and colleagues argue that apparent, empirically-verifiable diversity is actually unity at an ‘abstract process and function’ level, a retreat to an unfalsifiable and ineffable assertion, especially when coupled with allusions to ‘genotype’ that also can’t be shown to be empirically founded. Even absolute, empirically demonstrated universality is NOT proof that something is ‘human nature’; everywhere on Earth, humans deal with gravity, but this is not due to ‘human nature,’ except that to be a human is, like all other matter, to have mass affected by gravity.

It would be alright, logically, to retreat to universal declarations about human universals of process or function ONLY IF the psychologists who made this retreat would then refrain from making any statement or implying any characterization of humans more specific than that abstract universalism. In other words, if you’re going to argue that the universal trait is the need for sustenance, than you have to stop yourself from making pseudo-evolutionary arguments about food preferences for salt-and-vinegar potato chips, fizzy soft drinks, and ‘death by chocolate’ cake, or anything else. That is, you can’t strategically retreat to abstract high ground as soon as you’re challenged empirically on sloppy universalisms only to boldly foray forth into the land of blanket statements about more detailed characteristics of ‘human nature’ as soon as you think no one is watching.

What I don’t get, I guess, is the defensiveness. Are the knee-jerk universalists worried that, if we concede that there might be fundamental variation in humans, we inevitably move toward racism? If so, we’re in trouble. Do they think that the existence of human genes means that we must necessarily be a species of genetic clones? Are they worried that science can’t be conducted on a topic where one cannot make blanket universalizing declarations? If so, someone should tell biologists because they’re in trouble. Is it just intellectual laziness? Or is it a fear of some previous intellectual error, like the denial of science itself, committed by some intellectuals in the name of diversity? I suspect that it might be the last, but, unfortunately, it often sounds like one of the earlier objections.

I don’t have a problem with saying there are some universals; I just have a problem with someone, when confronted with evidence that a particular trait is NOT universal, immediately trying to declare that it really, really is uniform if we just squint our eyes, blur our understanding, and step back further from the object of study. What’s the point?

You say WEIRD, I say nuh-uh!

I’d also take issue with Paul Rozin’s commentary, although I think he makes some excellent points (and I very much respect his work). My main problem is the assumption that technologically-driven human development will necessarily lead the world to become, well, WEIRDer:

But the main point of my commentary is that although the NAU [North American undergraduate] is truly anomalous, this subspecies of Homo sapiens is a vision of the future. With the Internet, ready availability of information of all sorts, computer fluency as key to success in the world, and ease in negotiating a world where text as opposed to face-to-face interactions are the meat of human relationships, the NAU is at the vanguard of what humans are going to be like. (Rozin 2010: 109)

Perhaps I just don’t share Rozin’s techno-optimistic ‘vision of the future’ online as a species, but Rozin seems to assume that the wealthiest, most well educated, most privileged and greediest resource-consuming sliver of the world’s population is just a bit out in front temporarily from where everyone will eventually arrive. Someday, when we grow up as societies, we’ll all be like college students. God save us if that’s the case, because the environmental footprint is going to be catastrophic unless a lot changes in the next few years.

I don’t think I’d be alone in my suspicion that this view of digital ‘modernization’ is reminiscent of many declarations that some new technology was going to change us fundamentally as a species; so far, I think the evidentiary ball is in the court of the techno-optimists to write a plausible account of how that will happen. Just as some might argue the world is getting WEIRDer, others might argue that the Western nations are less uniformly WEIRD.

I’d also take issue with Alexandra Maryanski’s commentary, but I’m just not really sure I get where she’s coming from, so I don’t know where to start (Henrich and colleagues don’t respond at length to this piece). On the one hand, Maryanski seems to be aware of cross-cultural research; on the other, I’m not sure she’s really read it the same way that I would. The piece is so shot full of rhetorical questions that it’s hard to follow the logic, but she seems to be saying that, because ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers says that they have ‘high individualism, reciprocity, and low levels of inequality,’ then WEIRD societies are sort of just like the societies in which humans first evolved…

For, despite all the multiple ills of industrialized societies, WEIRD societies may be more compatible with our human nature than the high-density kinship constraints of horticultural societies or the “peasant” constraints of agrarian societies with their privileged few

So, people in industrial societies are JUST LIKE hunter-gatherers, except for the gigantic scale, anonymous interaction, replacement of reciprocity-based relationships with market transactions, and the unprecedented-in-human-history levels of material inequality. (For the slow readers, yes, that’s irony.) Oh, and the domestication of plants and animals, sedentary settlements, high technology, extended classroom education, mass media imagery, enormous social institutions, changes in family structure, decrease parent-infant contact, radically new built environment, completely different, dense social structure…

That’s why I say that, although there’s evidence that she’s aware of the Human Relations Area Files, I’m just not sure how Maryanski read them to come away with the impression that the WEIRD are just like the foraging peoples in the ethnographic record. Maybe the train just left the station without me on this argument, but I do not get it.

The argument she MIGHT make is that, with the enormous proliferation of technology and division of labour, WEIRD humans, especially in the extended adolescent period created by the system of tertiary education that delivers them as subjects to psychology researchers, demonstrate what humans might be like if they were utterly REMOVED from most normal selective pressures. If anything, university students might be demonstrating the utter nihilism and lack of restraint when normal external scaffolding on human behaviour and decision making are relaxed and replaced with fermented motivation, collective peer effervescence, and complete discounting of any future outcomes…

Might make that argument.

I’m not sure I’m persuaded by it, but maybe slavish obedience to peer pressure, high levels of inebriation and pizza consumption, cluttered living spaces, transitory sexual relationships, intermittent high-stress all-nighters punctuating months-long periods of sloth-like inactivity except for feeding, drinking and playing video games – maybe this is in fact what humans choose to do when divested of all responsibility for themselves with virtually no immediate pressures except for self-created social ones. Or maybe I’m just describing my own time in college.

Concluding thoughts

I apologize for this overly long discussion, especially in a blog format, but I just feel terribly inspired by this piece by Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan. I can’t thank the authors enough, and I am going to learn how to use a citation tracker specifically so that I can follow the subsequent impact of this article.

My reservations notwithstanding, I think it’s a remarkable piece, one that really needed to be written, and I congratulate the authors on it. It’s a thorough, well-thought piece, but with the added advantage of having some especially well-chosen examples and that colossal, infectious, acronymic hook, the glossy term that captures such a key idea well. I think the piece will travel well and might actually have a terribly salutary effect on the WEIRD populations it is targeting.

Stumble It!

References discussed:

Arnett, J. 2008. The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to become less American. American Psychologist 63(7): 602-14.

Danks, David, and David Rose. 2010. Diversity in representations; uniformity in learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 90-91. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000075

Gaertner, Lowell, Constantine Sedikides, Huajian Cai, and Jonathon D. Brown. 2010. It’s not WEIRD, it’s WRONG: When Researchers Overlook uNderlying Genotypes, they will not detect universal processes. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 93-94. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000105

Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. Most people are not WEIRD. Nature 466(1): 29.

Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 61-135 (with commentary). doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X Check Joseph Henrich’s homepage for a pdf of the article and related audio files.

Karasik, Lana B., Karen E. Adolph, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, and Marc H. Bornstein. 2010. WEIRD walking: Cross-cultural research on motor development. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 95-96. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000117

Maryanski, Alexandra. 2010. WEIRD societies may be more compatible with human nature. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 103-104. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000191

Rozin, Paul. 2010. The weirdest people in the world are a harbinger of the future of the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 108-109. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000312

I didn’t get to stay for the whole conference because I was running around doing preparation things for the Australian Anthropological Society Conference that we held in December. Nevertheless, I saw some really good papers, and some of the others are especially interesting for those of us interested in neuroanthropology. Please peruse the whole list, but for a discussion of cultural variation in cognition, of special interest might be: Nian Liu’s Tuesday, Threesday, Foursday: Chinese names for the days of the week facilitate Chinese children’s temporal reasoning, Zhengdao Ye’s Eating and drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A lexical-conceptual analysis, Collaborative remembering: When can remembering with others be beneficial? by Celia B. Harris, Paul G. Keil, John Sutton and Amanda J. Barnier, and Expanding expertise: Investigating a musician’s experience of music performance by Andrew Geeves, Doris McIlwain, and John Sutton.

I also like the look of Evaluation of a model of expert decision making in air traffic control, by Stefan Lehmann and colleagues, but I haven’t had the time to really read it (and won’t get time for a few days). Ben Jeffares’ paper was excellent in presentation, but I haven’t yet checked out the written version yet: The evolution of technical competence: strategic and economic thinking.

My paper from the conference, Cultural variation in elite athletes: Does elite cognitive-perceptual skill always converge?, is available as a pdf. I have to admit, it’s a shallower paper than I usually like to present, but I had to cover a LOT of turf, and it’s primarily a proposal for a research program, reviewing the neurological and behavioural places where I expect we might find the clearest evidence of cultural difference in neural dynamics. I’ll take the liberty of reposting the abstract:

Anthropologists have not participated extensively in the cognitive science synthesis for a host of reasons, including internal conflicts in the discipline and profound reservations about the ways that cultural differences have been modeled in psychology, neuroscience, and other contributors to cognitive science. This paper proposes a skills-based model for culture that overcomes some of the problems inherent in the treatment of culture as shared information. Athletes offer excellent cases studies for how skill acquisition, like enculturation, affects the human nervous system. In addition, cultural differences in playing styles of the same sport, such as distinctive ways of playing rugby, demonstrate how varying solution strategies to similar athletic problems produce distinctive skill profiles.

I’d love to hear any responses to the piece. I don’t usually present in cognitive science, as I’m more comfortable in my home discipline of anthropology, working from a pretty solid base of anthropology into the border of brain-culture research, so I’d be interested to learn what scholars situated more confidently in cognitive science think of the piece.

Gatorade, the popular sports drink, uses its slogan “Is it in you?” to describe the competitive drive in athletes, which is presumably enhanced by drinking their product. Just like the Gatorade slogan suggests about athletes, is pyschopathy a condition simply found in some and not in others? Or are there other factors that go into this serious mental condition? This post will explore the mental condition behind psychopathic behavior, how it differs from the normal human condition, and how it relates to the treatment of crime in society.

Psychopathy: What Is It?

While not always associated with crime, psychopathic behavior often comes up as a reason for and a cause of both small and horrendous crimes. A recent review indicates psychopathy is an accurate indicator of a person’s susceptibility to criminal behavior and violence.

“Although psychopaths make up only 4% of the total population, they represent about 50% of serial rapists, as well as a significant proportion of persistent wife batterers. Overall, psychopaths are twice as likely to reoffend as other criminals, and three times as likely to commit violent acts again after being convicted.” (Copley 2008)

Psychopathic behavior also involves someone who in a sense has no conscience. These individuals do not feel any remorse or take moral considerations into their actions, whether violent or non-violent. Thus the sense of guilt or internal punishment that normal people experience on a daily basis is important to dealing with and understanding psychopathic behavior in society.

Guilty Conscience

Guilt is a feeling that most people will experience as an emotional reaction to committing some action which our conscience or culture has told us is wrong. From pick pocketing a candy bar in a grocery store to murdering another individual, guilt creeps into our conscience after committing such an act. This common human emotion can be termed as internal punishment. In the case of small thefts or major crime, this sense of internal punishment can often be more damaging to an individual than any physical punishment. Internal punishment and its effects can be an important link to understanding the relationship between crime and society.

While the feeling of guilt is normal for most, it may not be the same for everyone. Based on our background, moral upbringing, or political and religious views, some people experience a different or heightened sense of guilt. Take one’s childhood. When you were little you probably didn’t know not to beat up your brother, break things that weren’t yours, or steal things from others or maybe even a small grocery store. Yet whenever you did these actions, someone, usually one of your parents, was there to scold you and tell you not to do it again. As a child grows up, this often is the background for his or her moral conscience. In this way the society or environment one lives in helps shape his or her choices, and hopefully in the long run helps prevent crime.

Likewise with punishment, societal expectations often guilt people into admitting their mistakes or show them how to be remorseful and shameful. Without feeling proper internal punishment or remorse, criminals will often not be accepted back into society. In almost any prison one of the main criteria for prisoners to be released on parole is if they can show they are remorseful for what they did.

One good example is the recent scandal surrounding Tiger Woods. While not criminal, the public discovery of his actions has forced him to be remorseful and apologetic to the public. Whether you believe him or not, societal norms tell us that he will be more easily accepted back into good public opinion if he appears shamed at what he did.

Mind of a Killer?

All of this relates back to the problem of individuals who do not experience any regret for what they did, or take little account of morality when carrying out actions. Normal social practices do not shape their mindsets because of this mental condition of psychopathy. So, why don’t certain people feel this guilt or experience their own internal punishment? And how can society prevent crime from occurring or punish such crimes when dealing with psychopathic behavior?

These questions are not easily answered, but are especially important since a significant part of most societal approaches to deterring crime and dolling out punishment rely on ideas about guilt, confession and public shame. However, not all psychopaths are necessarily violent. Rather, psychopathy appears to be a mental disorder characterized by an unusual lack of moral feeling and usually amoral actions. Studies have shown that psychopathic individuals have a large capacity to act like normal people and fit into society. The same article by Jennifer Copley on personality disorders indicates that “Only 20-25% of those in prison are psychopaths.” This supports the theory that many people who exhibit psychopathic behavior are not hardened criminals, cold-stone killers, or some sort of amoral deviants – despite popular depictions.

Yet the fact that psychopaths can fit in with society contrasts with other mental disorders, which often hinder people from fitting into common society, and makes the psychopathic condition unique. An experiment by Professor Declan Murphy elaborates on one theory about the condition, that psychopaths show different responses in their brains to emotional pictures than normal people. He and his colleagues showed six psychopaths and nine healthy volunteers pictures of faces showing different emotions. When they were showed happy faces, the psychopaths experienced slightly smaller brain activity than the normal people. On the other hand, when showed fearful faces, “the healthy volunteers showed increased activation and the psychopaths decreased activation in these brain regions.” (BBC 2006) This further suggests that psychopaths lack empathy or conscience, and thus can fit in with society yet also use people like objects, manipulate people, commit violent crime, and feel no guilt or remorse.

Ask the Expert

One of the leaders in the field of criminal psychology is Robert Hare, a 71-year old professor at the University of British Columbia. Hare was one of the leaders in suggesting that psychopathy relates to brain activity in a study he published in 1991. In an article from the Canadian Encyclopedia, Hare indicates that the term psychopath is often misused in the media.

The article uses the famous movie Silence of the Lambs as a comparison by saying, “In the film Silence of the Lambs…a prison psychiatrist calls serial killer Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter a ‘pure psychopath.’ In fact, experts like Hare say that Lecter does not really qualify as a psychopath at all. ‘He’s just insane,’ deadpans the professor.”

This might be just one example from the media, but many movies or stories about psychopathic behavior aren’t necessarily completely factual. Often psychopaths are portrayed as psychotic serial killers or delusional criminals, when in fact they are more prone to be average people who simply don’t feel empathy and are screwed up emotionally.

Hare gave an interesting talk in 2002 about psychopathy and who it affects. Yet unlike normally suggesting that this condition was related to typical serious criminals, Hare suggested that major businessmen and CEO’s may be psychopaths. While this seems radical, Hare supports this claim in view of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, and the actual definition of a psychopath.

Compulsion

Another facet of the psychopathic condition that has been studied is its relation to compulsive and obsessive behavior. Studies show that psychopaths often commit crime or manipulate others because they feel they can dominate others or use others for their own personal gain. Often this feeling can be predicated by a sense of compulsion. At times, psychopathic behavior can be part of a game to manipulate others. Psychopaths also seek out crime or violent actions simply to get a thrill, which can be heightened because they do not experience any moral guilt or hesitation toward these actions. In a sense, crime for them can be looked at as continually trying to find new ways to manipulate or deceive others and get away with it.

Obsessive behavior also factors into this idea of compulsion. Although not quite synonymous, obsession can result from compulsive behavior. This also applies to psychopathic behavior. The compulsive nature of psychopaths leads them to obsess over committing certain types of crime. One example of this is found in an article examining the relationship between psychopathy and stalking. This research suggests that psychopathic traits are associated with stalkers and what the article calls “stalking risk factors.” The article says, “people with psychopathic traits tended to show escalation in the frequency, severity and/or diversity of their stalking, [and] they were noticeably unrepentant regarding their actions”

Psychopathic Solution?

In conclusion, psychopathy is a condition that may only affect from 1 or 4% percent of the population depending on the research. The main characteristics of this disorder are lack of empathy or conscience, no feelings of remorse or guilt after committing crime, and a general view of others as objects that can be manipulated or used.

So why has so much research and concern been put into understanding the condition and how to treat it? This is likely due to the assumed connection between serious crime and this disorder, as well as the fear that psychopaths might be living among us even as they excel at fitting in.

A final question remains: can psychopathic behavior be treated? A recent article puts it simply, “According to the psychiatrists, No. Shock treatment doesn’t work; drugs have not proven successful in treatment; and psychotherapy, which involves trust and a relationship with the therapist, is out of the question, because psychopaths are incapable of opening up to others. They don’t want to change.” One thing is certain – more research on the problem and how to deal with it is urgently needed.

In the meantime, both individuals and society are left with that Gatorade question: Is psychopathy in you?

graphic by Alex Trochut, NYTimes

The ethnographic record is full of conditions that didn’t make it into the most recent edition of the DSM — amok, nervios, koro, zar — you can check out Wikipedia or some other source on ‘culture bound syndromes,’ such as Introduction to Culture-Bound Syndromes in Psychiatric Times, to get a fuller discussion of some of these conditions. The Psychiatric Times piece suggests that there are at least 200 culture-bound syndromes.

One thing I really liked about the New York Times Magazine article, however (and by extension, Watters’ book, I suspect), is that the discussion of ‘culture-bound syndromes’ usually tends to treat other people’s syndromes as ‘culture-bound,’ Western psychological illnesses as not ‘culture-bound.’ Watters’ work points out that Western mental illness is both itself culture-bound and that persuading people to believe in Western-style mental illness can affect the way that psychic disorders manifest.

In fact, even Western history is littered with examples of truly odd and intriguing psychic illnesses that we seem to be vulnerable to for short periods of time. If you’re starved for more examples of culturally induced psychological conditions that include both Western and non-Western versions, you could check out Outbreak: The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behaviour, also discussed at Mind Hacks. Sounds like a brilliant read, with material like the following cited by Vaughan:

The Fortean Times article has some great excerpts covering an outbreak of feinting in a marching band in 1973 Alabama (a classic case of mass hysteria), an outbreak of cat-like meowing in India in 2004, the 1958 hula-hoop craze, a goblin scare that affect Zimbabwe in 2002, a ‘culture bound syndrome’ with the unusual name of the jumping Frenchmen of Maine from the 18th and 19th centuries, various outbreaks of fears about chemtrails, a giant earthworm hoax that panicked a Texas town in 1993, and a version of Orson Well’s War of the Worlds that caused widespread rioting in Ecuador in 1949.

But I digress simply because the examples themselves are so fascinating…

To return to the New York Times Magazine piece, Watters discusses how a group of psychological anthropologists and cross-cultural psychologists have argued that, just as humans are psychologically and socially diverse, they are diverse, too, when it comes to psychic ailments:

Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places.

Between the lines, the article suggests two slightly different, competing explanations for this diversity in psychological illness. On the one hand, the variety might arise because the language of somatization of distress varies from place to place. As one source for Watters’ article argues:

“We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire’ — a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict,” Edward Shorter, a medical historian at the University of Toronto, wrote in his book “Paralysis: The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom.” “In some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.”

In Shorter’s explanation, symptoms are a kind of social communication of ‘psychological conflict,’ varying because different eras and areas offer different ‘symptom repertoires,’ different palettes in which to paint one’s distress. In this model, because the community or specialists respond to particular sorts of patient presentation, believing that certai symptoms are especially salient, the disorders quickly conform to the expectations of therapists, whether they wear white coats, tweed coats with arm patches, or ritual body paint.

While this is certainly possible, and maybe even probable in some cases, some psychological disorders seem to be less labile, less liable to renegotiation of the symptoms, although the symptoms do vary slightly across cultures or occur at different rates, have varied rates of recovery, or the like. Some disorders have neurological or neurochemical dynamics that are susceptible, at least in part, to treatment with drugs, so all symptoms may not be so culturally negotiable, although they might still vary in frequency, severity, and trajectory as I’ll discuss. That is, the ‘symptom repertoire’ explanation — which I concede likely explains some of the variation, but not all — demands that psychic illness be a kind of unconscious performance of internal, psychic conflict. The assumption seems to be that universal psychic dilemma — conflict — gets expressed in locally variable argot — symptom.

The second explanation which I find more compelling is implicit in the article, and not fully developed. A more holistic model of variation in psychological illness would concede that, in some cases, symptoms are very malleable, and some symptoms of a disorder may be susceptible to this type of modification-by-expectation, but there might be more intransigent organic dimensions of disorders that still might vary culturally, but not due only to therapists’ expectation. The domain of the ‘cultural’ might be broader and less inherently conscious than just ‘beliefs.’

The case of anorexia nervosa in Hong Kong

Let’s take the case of anorexia nervosa in Hong Kong that Watters discusses. According to Watters, Dr. Sing Lee documented occurrences of a rare form of anorexia in Hong Kong throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Lee’s patients ‘did not intentionally diet nor did they express a fear of becoming fat,’ instead complaining that they felt ‘bloated.’ Then in 1994, a very public case of a girl who had starved herself hit the press, and Dr. Lee noticed a shift in anorexia: the number of cases climbed, and the sufferers began to diet and express fear of becoming fat, just like the American version of the disorder: ‘As the general public and the region’s mental-health professionals came to understand the American diagnosis of anorexia, the presentation of the illness in Lee’s patient population appeared to transform into the more virulent American standard.’

Lee explains how generalized psychological disorder leads to a specific eating disorder: ‘When there is a cultural atmosphere in which professionals, the media, schools, doctors, psychologists all recognize and endorse and talk about and publicize eating disorders, then people can be triggered to consciously or unconsciously pick eating-disorder pathology as a way to express that conflict.’

But is that really all that happened, people talking about anorexia? Was it simply a matter of mental-health professionals inadvertently causing the more benign strain of anorexia in Hong Kong to mutate into the American version? The increase in fat phobia among anorexic sufferers did not occur in a vacuum, I would argue, affected only by mental health specialists. I suspect other Western influences likely also contributed to the shift, including ‘diet’ discourse, maybe even changes in actual diet, media imagery of idealized bodies, and the fitness industry. And what about shifts within this population in anxiety levels, sexuality-related expectations, fashion, socializing, male-female relations, and other more indigenous, though certainly not isolated dynamics? And was there an incursion of the material culture of Western dieting, such as diet drinks, calorie counting techniques or food labelling, or even high-fat foods to both affect body type and to provide a medium in which to express control over oneself. Just as the changing prevalence of anorexia nervosa in the West can’t simply be chalked up to a single cause such as patients’ suggestibility, I doubt we could do the same in Hong Kong. Sure, the anorexia outbreak may be ignited by ‘psychic conflict,’ but why does it take this specific form, and why does the form change in prevalence?

That is, the simple story that therapists gave their patients anorexia is possible, but there are other potential candidate explanations, and we’re quite likely to have an accumulation of cultural shifts that helps to explain the change in Hong Kong. After all, not every Western disorder grows at the same rate simply because therapists talk about them; they intersect with local anxieties, changing lifestyles, even physiological traits.

Western ‘culture’ is not just a set of ideas but a whole constellation of ideas, concepts, images, practices, customs, material culture, technology, and other everyday factors that feed into these disorders, even when they are ‘expressions of of psychological conflict.’ Certainly in terms of global diet and bodily culture, Western ideas are not the only factors affecting global change: technological, commercial, economic, agronomical, demographic, educational, and even mechanical (in terms of access to transport) changes are also influencing how bodies are changing internationally. We shouldn’t be too surprised that disorder, hypervigilant eating becomes more prevalent when food ways are in such a state of upheaval, body images are raining down on these populations, activity patterns are shifting, and so many of the new choices are unhealthy, fattening, and alien.

Without doubt, Western ideas about mental illness are directly affecting expectations of psychic distress around the world; see, for example, Vaughan at Mind Hacks discussing Did Antidepressants Depress Japan?. Here Vaughan highlights another force, one touched on by Watters but not explored; pure mercenary impulses, as drug companies try to persuade new markets that the individuals ‘need’ their products, suffering as they do from disorders of which they were previously unaware. Here, the idea that it’s just the ‘beliefs’ about illness held by therapists and authorities obscures the naked greed that goes into public relations campaigns designed to produced disorder.

My argument is not so much that Watters is wrong, as that culture is not just in the ideas people have about disease; these changes in mental illness are also provoked by the social, technological, and material world, for example, how the export of Western-style education affects childhood elsewhere (and thus illuminates ‘disorders’). When Watters writes the following, I whole-heartedly agree:

In the end, what cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists have to tell us is that all mental illnesses, including depression, P.T.S.D. and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness. This does not mean that these illnesses and the pain associated with them are not real, or that sufferers deliberately shape their symptoms to fit a certain cultural niche. It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host.

Although I’m a little uncomfortable with the word ‘mind’ in the last sentence, I especially like the end of the passage. Yes, it’s true, you can’t understand a mental illness without understanding a bit about the… well, okay, ‘mind’ of the person suffering. It’s just that it’s not that narrow: you have to understand a bit about the developmental influences on their brain, about the social network that supports or stigmatizes them, the behavioural reserves for unusual behaviour or thoughts… It’s not just about the conscious stories and understandings, but also about the harder-to-pin-down social, behavioural, and developmental factors that affect disease expression.

Watters actually provides a great example of these non-belief cultural factors when he discusses one of the more interesting dilemmas in cross-cultural psychiatry:

The research showed that patients outside the United States and Europe had significantly lower relapse rates — as much as two-thirds lower in one follow-up study. These findings have been widely discussed and debated in part because of their obvious incongruity: the regions of the world with the most resources to devote to the illness — the best technology, the cutting-edge medicines and the best-financed academic and private-research institutions — had the most troubled and socially marginalized patients.

Watters seeks to explain this unexpected gap in treatment by discussing the work of anthropologist Juli McGruder (University of Puget Sound) on families of schizophrenics in Zanzibar. In Zanzibar, schizophrenics are believed to be suffering from intermittent bouts of spirit possession. To cut to the chase, this belief affects those around them, especially family members, which affects how they treat the individual with the condition: ‘With schizophrenia… symptoms are inevitably entangled in a person’s complex interactions with those around him or her. In fact, researchers have long documented how certain emotional reactions from family members correlate with higher relapse rates for people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia.’ It turns out that interaction patterns with a person possessed by spirits are actually healthier than those of family members in the West who believe the individual has a ‘mental illness.’ In fact, with US families, the more they try to ‘care’ for the schizophrenic family member, the more they fall into an unproductive interaction pattern with the individual with the illness. The issue is not just the belief, but the emotional quality of family interaction with a suffering individual; treat them one way, and it’s not just that you believe they’re different — the individual actually becomes different.

The discussion of trauma and trauma recovery is quite short, but Watters does highlight nicely some of the problems of exporting Western-style treatment to deal with trauma that we expect others to feel.

Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lie a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature. Westerners share, for instance, evolving beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We’ve come to agree that the human mind is rather fragile and that it is best to consider many emotional experiences and mental states as illnesses that require professional intervention. (The National Institute of Mental Health reports that a quarter of Americans have diagnosable mental illnesses each year.) The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for “psychologizing” daily existence.

Even dealing with Australians, I find that this is a huge difference, that the need for hyperintrospection, for obsessive re-tracing of distressing events or conflict, the need for a ‘talking out’ to resolution of issues is simply not shared. And Australian are widely considered to be some of the most culturally similar people to Americans. Certainly, the gap I felt in Brazil was even greater.

I found the conclusion to the article even more surprising, a kind of reverse-diagosis of Americans to suggest that the exportation of American psychiatric health may not be in the interest of the globe:

If our rising need for mental-health services does indeed spring from a breakdown of meaning, our insistence that the rest of the world think like us may be all the more problematic. Offering the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress.

I’ll just leave it at this, as I don’t have anything else to add to the conclusion. I heartily recommend the original article, and was genuinely surprised to read something I felt was both engaging (well written) and yet still very thorough (well thought).

By Greg Downey and Daniel Lende

Neuroanthropology places the brain and nervous system at the center of discussions about human nature, recognizing that much of what makes us distinctive inheres in the size, specialization, and dynamic openness of the human nervous system. By starting with neural physiology and its variability, neuroanthropology situates itself from the beginning in the interaction of nature and culture, the inextricable interweaving of developmental unfolding and evolutionary endowment.

Our brain and nervous system are our cultural organs. While virtually all parts of the human body—skeleton, muscles, joints, guts—bear the stamp of our behavioral variety, our nervous system is especially immature at birth, our brain disproportionately small in relation to its adult size and disproportionately susceptible to cultural sculpting. Compared to other mammals, our first year of life finds our brain developing as if in utero, immersed in language, social interaction, and the material world when other species are still shielded by their mother’s body from this outside world. This immersion means that our ideas about ourselves and how we want to raise our children affect the environmental niche in which our nervous system unfolds, influencing gene expression and developmental processes to the cellular level.

Increasingly, neuroscientists are finding evidence of functional differences in brain activity and architecture between cultural groups, occupations, and individuals with different skill sets. The implication for neuroanthropology is obvious: forms of enculturation, social norms, training regimens, ritual, and patterns of experience shape how our brains work and are structured. But the predominant reason that culture becomes embodied, even though many anthropologists overlook it, is that neuroanatomy inherently makes experience material. Without material change in the brain, learning, memory, maturation, and even trauma could not happen. Neural systems adapt through long-term refinement and remodeling, which leads to deep enculturation. Through systematic change in the nervous system, the human body learns to orchestrate itself as well as it eventually does. Cultural concepts and meanings become anatomy.

Although every animal’s nervous system is open to the world, the human nervous system is especially adept at projecting mental constructs onto the world, transforming the environment into a sociocognitive niche that scaffolds and extends the brain’s abilities. This niche is constructed through social relationships, physical environments, ritual patterns, and symbolic constructs that shape behavior and ideas, create divisions, and pattern lives. Thus, our brains become encultured through reciprocal processes of externalization and internalization, where we use the material world to think and act even as that world shapes our cognitive capacities, sensory systems, and response patterns.

Our ability to learn and remember, our sophisticated skills, our facility with symbolic systems, and our robust self control all mean that the capacity for culture is, in large part, bought with neurological coin. This dynamic infolding of an encultured nervous system happens over developmental time, through the capacity of individuals to internalize both experience and community-generated tools, and then to share thoughts, meanings and accomplishments. Thus, a central principle of neuroanthropology is that it is a mistake to designate a single cause or to apportion credit for specialized skills (individual or species-wide) to one factor for what is actually a complex set of processes.

Most academic research implicitly or explicitly utilizes a reductive cause-effect approach; in popular understandings of the brain, the tendency to single out causal factors is even more prevalent. Rather than one set of genes or an overarching system of meaning, humans’ capacity for abstract thought emerges equally from social and individual sources, built of public symbol, evolutionary endowment, social scaffolding, and private neurological achievements. In neuroanthropology, the goal is not simply to juxtapose a simplistic critique against a one-side initial account, but to attempt a much more holistic, synthetic exploration of how various elements in these dynamic relations interact to produce cognitive functions.

Neuroanthropology: Areas of Application

Neuroanthropology has four clear roles: (1) understanding the interaction of brain and culture and its implication for our understanding of mind, behavior, and self; (2) examining the role of the nervous system in the creation of social structures; (3) providing empirical and critical inquiry into the interplay of neuroscience and ideologies about the brain; and (4) using neuroanthropology to provide novel syntheses and advances in human science theory.

The interaction of brain and culture is neuroanthropology’s core dynamic, exploring the synthesis of nature and nurture and cutting through idealized views of biological mechanisms and cultural symbols. Using social and cultural neuroscience in combination with psychological anthropology and cultural psychology, neuroanthropology builds in-depth analyses of mind, behavior and self based on an understanding of both neurological function and ethnographic reality. This research creates robust analyses of specific neural-cultural phenomena, recognizing that each may demonstrate a distinctive dynamic; for example, neuroanthropological investigation reworks our understanding of human capacities like balance (often assumed to be something innate), studies how practices like meditation shape and piggyback upon neural functioning, and examines the interactive nature of pathologies like addiction and autism.

Neuroanthropology has profound implications for our understanding of how societies become socially structured. Inequality works through the brain and body, involving mechanisms like stress, learning environments, the loss of neuroplasticity, the impact of toxins, educational opportunities (or their absence) and other factors that negatively shape development. Neuroanthropology can play a fundamental role in documenting these effects and in linking them to the social, political and cultural factors that negatively impact on the brain. At the same time, technological and pharmacological interventions are playing an increasing role in managing behavioral disorders, often with great profit for companies, while cognitive enhancement drugs, brain-computer interfaces, and neuro-engineering will surely be used in ways that create new separations between haves and have-nots. Finally, societal appeals to “hard-wired” differences remain a standard approach by people in positions of power to maintain racial, gender, sexual and other inequalities; a deeper understanding of the complex origins and unfolding of key neural and physiological differences undermines accounts that assume these distinctions are inescapable. At the same time, neuroanthropology points to new ways to think about how people become talented and ways to understand intelligence, resiliency, social relations and other factors that shape success in life.

In societies across the globe, the brain now acts as a central metaphor, a substitute for self, a way to explain mental health, a short-hand for why people are different. In reaction, critical approaches have looked at the interpretation and use of brain imagery, psychoactive pharmaceuticals, public presentations of neuroscience research, and related social phenomena. Meanwhile, the pace of neuroscience research, and innovations in associated technologies, has been breathtaking. One aim for neuroanthropology is to make sense of these three related but often conflicting factors in ways that provide grounded research and critical insight into what the realities of brain and self actually are. Neuroanthropology will play a central role in mediating between the claims of different sides with the expertise gained from empiricism as well as the theoretical and critical framework gained from the combination of neuroscience and anthropology. This aspect of neuroanthropology is an absolute necessity given the convergence of these three recent historical phenomena – accelerating research, social reworkings, and intellectual interrogation of both.

Neuroanthropology makes direct contributions to theory development. At the most basic level, it provides a broad umbrella to integrate concepts across academic fields. Embodiment, for example, is an idea explored from basic neuroscience, psychology and cognitive linguistics to anthropology and philosophy. Neuroanthropology provides the conceptual and methodological tools to work through what we mean by such a broad-ranging idea.

Neuroanthropology also has direct implications for anthropology and neuroscience. It demonstrates the necessity of theorizing culture and human experience in ways that are not ignorant of or wholly inconsistent with discoveries about human cognition from brain sciences. Rather than broad-based concepts like habitus or cognitive structure, neuroanthropology focuses on how social and cultural phenomena actually achieve the impact they have on people in material terms. Rather than assuming structural inequality is basic to all societies, neuroanthropologists ask how inequality differentiates people and what we might do about that.

Similarly, on the neurological side, the principal theories of brain development, neural architecture and function remain tied to a biological view of proximate mechanisms and evolutionary origins. Yet it is abundantly clear that many neurological capacities, such as language or skills, do not appear without immersion in culture. Neuroanthropology highlights how that immersion matters to the brain’s construction and function. For example, neuroanthropology can take a basic idea like Hebbian learning — “what fires together, wires together” — and examine how social and cultural processes shape the timing, exposure, and strength of activity, such that the coordinated action of brain systems emerges through cultural dynamics. Neuroanthropology opens up a vibrant new space for thinking about how and why brains work the ways they do.

Neuroscientists and Anthropologists as Partners

By placing the focus on the individual’s nervous system and its relation to the world, neuroanthropology asks challenging questions of scale and depth for both neuroscientists and anthropologists, demanding both groups stretch beyond accustomed frames. For neuroscientists, seriously considering human diversity may require changes in research methods, in such basic processes as averaging and amalgamating imaging data, removing outlying data points (some of the most interesting individuals), and in finding test subjects. It can help cultural neuroimaging researchers to develop a much more sophisticated understanding about what results of comparative brain scan of Asians and Western Europeans might mean and why seeing doesn’t always translate into cultural believing. Thus, neuroanthropology offers to neuroscientists more sophisticated ways of thinking about neural environment, based upon over a century of debate about the nature of cultural variation and how to conceptualize patterns of behavior.

The same thought and subtlety that goes into understanding the relations among parts of the brain and body can be extended to consider how elements of the cultural and social environment are tied into specific brain functions, illuminating some of the specific ways that mind can become extended through cultural leveraging. That is, simply adding ‘culture’ as a single population variable fails to really illuminate the dynamic, inconsistent processes through which neurological potential is channeled by specific cultural institutions or practices. Because the nervous system is embedded within the world, shot through with the environment down to its cellular structure, integrative models of its development must include interacting elements from both inside and outside of the skin.

Although brain scientists have reached out to other interlocutors, we believe that anthropology is an especially strong potential partner. The influence of culture, social interaction and behavior patterns are immediate and susceptible to direct research, often more so than evolutionary theories about brain architecture origin. In addition, ethnographic research offers concrete evidence of how social and cultural dimensions of the environment might affect cognitive function, and illustrates the range of neuroplasticity in developmental outcomes well beyond what most experimental protocols consider. Anthropologists explore naturally-occurring experiments in which the nervous system is developed over a lifetime in diverging directions.

For anthropologists, neuroanthropology entails a return to integrative research after decades in which many biological and cultural anthropologists have seen each other as the primary opposition. The anthropological study of the nervous system calls on anthropologists to make good on our promises of holism. Psychological anthropologists have called for a greater focus on elements of neuroanthropology — affect, memory, neural-based models of cognition, biocultural integration — but a wholesale shift requires anthropologists to maintain a simultaneous consideration of what may have previously been apportioned to different specialties in the field. The nervous system inherently spans boundaries between specialized knowledge of such areas as evolution, child development, physiology, perception, phenomenology, behavioral research, biology and culture. Although some researchers might pull back from considering biology out of a fear of reductionism, the nervous system resists obstinately any simplistic explanation, throwing up counter-examples such as varying degrees of mental modularity, cognitive heterogeneity, and complex mixtures of neuroplasticity and innate endowments shaped by evolution.

With rare exceptions, anthropologists have not participated extensively in the growing movement toward cultural neuroscience. The time is ripe for this engagement: brain scientists are no longer content to just treat cultural difference as a demographic variable, and anthropologists are no longer so afraid of ‘universalizing’ or ‘psychologizing’ that they cannot get involved in this expanding area of research. Anthropologists offer to brain scientists more robust accounts of enculturation to explain observable differences in brain function, a range of resources for extending neurological accounts beyond the individual human organism. Neuroscience research offers to anthropology a more nuanced way of linking universal human tendencies and cultural particularity, and in grounding one foot of the holistic study of human subjects firmly in biology.

Neuroanthropology is a sustained effort, not to mine brain sciences opportunistically, but to engage continually in interrogating the brain sciences to enrich holistic anthropology, while also contributing to the unfolding of cultural neuroscience. Neuroanthropologists will have to keep abreast of new research techniques and findings, and to be willing to modify, expand, or shed outright our theories if they are unsupported by data. Anthropology has tended to be a theoretically heterodox field, producing more than its fair share of paradigms for understanding human social life, so neuroanthropologists should have abundant resources on which to draw, as long as we are willing to range far and wide for our intellectual frameworks, including into the past paradigms of relevant fields.

Unlike some people working in this area, the organizers of this conference do not believe that only one research method will contribute to neuroanthropology, nor that this emerging field of thought will become dominated by a single account of how the brain functions. The brain itself is baroque, fashioned over evolutionary time out of a host of modules and functional units that are still incompletely integrated. Every type of neurological activity does not obey the same rules, nor are they equally susceptible (or immune) to self-reflection and conscious thought. Some cognitive capacities are characterized by deeply-ingrained stereotypical species-general responses; other functions are remarkably plastic, even susceptible to substantial revision and conscious redirection. No one simple theory can explain how every system works so we should recognize that enculturation will vary even among the regions and networks within the brain. If an account of one system remains consistent with its functioning while defying expectations arising from other systems, this is as likely to be a product of the brain’s heterogeneity as it is a reflection of differences in research methods or approaches.

Enough over-arching theories have foundered on human neural heterogeneity to offer ample warning: neuroanthropological theory will have to be partial and incremental rather than overly generalizing and prematurely sweeping. That is, no single enculturation process affects all brain areas equally, so no single account of the relation between brain and culture is likely to prove compelling in all cases. We propose an evidence-based theoretical eclecticism, recognizing that some of our disagreements are likely to arise from the fact that we theorize from different case studies in neural acculturation.

We also see neuroanthropology’s role as a constructive contributor to integrative brain science, not just policing its borders or offering constant critical scrutiny. Certainly, critique has its place, but without helping to produce better paradigms or suggestions for improvement, critique simply leaves conscientious researchers without positive alternatives to the practices that warrant criticism. Full engagement must include constructive proposals for improving both brain science and anthropological research.

Thinking through Human Problems

Neuroanthropology stakes out a new space for research. In examining the interaction of biology and culture, neuroanthropology considers how activities, contexts, and experiences are crucial to forming what it means to be human and how humans are similar and different around the world. Rather than conceiving of subjectivity as a text to be interpreted and the brain as composed of hard-wired circuits or innate modules beholden to selfish genes and evolutionary algorithms, neuroanthropology posits that subjectivity and the brain meet in the things that people do and say and the ways we interact with one another and the environment. Thus, it does not limit itself to psychology, which has a predominant focus on internal states, often separate from the body, physical activity, and the specifics of interaction with cultural environments. Moreover, neuroanthropology does not limit itself to Western notions of mind, self or consciousness, which can dominate discussions in some academic settings.

The inherent variety among different brain systems means that conscious reflection and experience-based accounts have a crucial relation to many of the phenomena we study. Experience-based ethnographic descriptions can offer valuable insights into brain functioning. At times these descriptions can help illuminate the influence of context and experience; at other times, neuroanthropological accounts may highlight the limits of conscious awareness and demonstrate the self-deceptions inherent in some kinds of neurological functioning. For this reason, neuroanthropology brings an ethnographic sensibility to brain research, including a willingness to take into consideration native theories of thought and individuals’ accounts of their own experience. Thus, careful ethnographic research, in-depth interviews, and the analysis of indigenous worldviews will always be central to the neuroanthropological synthesis

At the same, researchers must explore automization, endocrinology, emotion, perception, and other neural systems that contribute to patterns of variation but are not entirely susceptible to reflection. For example, practices of child rearing and early formative experiences are clearly influenced by cultural ideologies about how children should be nurtured, but many of the organic mechanisms through which these ideologies take hold of individuals and affect their long-term development may be unknown, even invisible to the participants.

For a long time, anthropologists have focused on culture as a system of symbolic associations, public signs, or shared meanings. But from the perspective of the nervous system, patterns of variation among different groups may include significant non-conscious, non-symbolic traits, such as patterns of behavior, automatized response, skills, and perceptual biases. This neuroanthropological framing opens more space for considering why all types of cognition may not operate in identical fashion, and how non-cognitive forms of neural enculturation might influence thought and action. Given this type of functioning, neuroanthropologists will have to return to an older notion of ‘culture,’ one that considers capabilities, habits and other forms of collective action (and not just meaning). While it can prove useful to speak principally of ‘culture’ as shared representations, we also must recognize that ‘cultural variation’ will include other sorts of patterned, shared conditionings of the nervous system.

For this reason subjects’-eye-view accounts are critical to neuroanthropology in a way that they might not be to other cognitive theorists. First, we recognize that theories about how the mind works or what it needs are themselves part of the developmental environment in which the brain is formed. Even if these ideas don’t accurately represent actual neural function, they do influence the brain-culture system, and can have an impact on the way the brain works even if that is in a way utterly unintended by those who hold the ideas. That is, whether indigenous theories of thought are accurate, they are part of the ecology of brain conditioning.

Second, consciousness itself is part of complex neural systems, adding degrees of self-regulation, restraint, learning, monitoring, cuing, and a host of other capacities. How people understand and experience their own thought is part and parcel of neural activities, although not necessarily an all-encompassing awareness or even the most important part of that function. Yet most of our cultural and neural functioning is submerged, only accessible to consciousness with extraordinary effort and special techniques, if it is accessible at all. Thus, research techniques should focus on capturing both our conscious awareness of why we do what we do and the inherent processes that shape the flow and outcome of that doing.

Third, we would point out that cognitive science itself is a hybrid, composed of researchers working in a range of fields from philosophy and psychology to neurophysiology, artificial intelligence and robotics. Different types of neurological functioning are susceptible to different types of research and demand varying degrees of analytical flexibility, including modeling and simulation. Although neuroimaging has made remarkable strides in recent decades, even its practitioners recognize that it must combine with other sorts of fields and data in order to draw robust conclusions beyond the narrow confines of experimental protocols.

Fourth, cultural resources like subtle differences in language may support distinctive phenomenological insights into the human nervous system. That is, other cultures may notice things about the human nervous system that our own communities have not observed, thematized, or codified. For example, the cognitive neuroscience of highly skilled communities or specialists who refine certain brain functions, such as meditation, perceptual skills, or high performance cognitive abilities in areas like mental calculation, recall or spatial navigation, have demonstrated marked empirical differences in brain function in imaging studies. But something similar might happen as well in indigenous folk theories of thinking or other neural functions, and we lose a vital resource if we do not ask ourselves how ethnographic communities come to their own ideas about the mind and experience.

When anthropologists and other ethnographers have engaged with cognitive science, they have made remarkable contributions. Neuroscientists with anthropological inclinations have made similar important advances. But overall the traffic has been too little in both directions, and the contributions made have been piece-meal rather than systemic or sustained. The brain sciences need the research and insights that anthropologists have developed in order to seriously explore the wide variation in human cognitive and neural functioning. Anthropology must move beyond critique and engage with these fields in a constructive mode in order to answer basic questions about culture, inequality, and human difference. Together, we can help construct the frameworks that allow the best of diverse research on the brain and human nature to be shared across disciplinary lines.

The potential gains are enormous: a robust account of brains in the wild, an understanding of how we come to possess our distinctive capacities and the degree to which these might be malleable across our entire species. The applications of this sort of research are myriad in diverse areas such as education, cross-cultural communication, developmental psychology, design, therapy, and information technology, to name just a few. But the first step is the one taken here – by coming together, we can achieve significant advances in understanding how our very humanity relies on the intricate interplay of brain and culture.

Greg Downey is senior lecturer in anthropology at Macquarie University. Daniel Lende is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame.

This essay on Why Neuroanthropology? Why Now? is the conference statement for The Encultured Brain: Building Interdisciplinary Collaborations for the Future of Neuroanthropology.

Christakis & Fowler Obesity Network

“Is Happiness Catching?” is the feature article in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Clive Thompson writes about the Framingham Heart Study, which has followed 15,000 people starting back in 1948. Originally framed as a study of physical disease, the data are now being turned to social ends.

Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist and doctor at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, have taken this data set to examine a question that dates back to Durkheim and his ideas about collective effervescence, anomie, and suicide – how do our social relationships affect what we experience and do? As Thompson frames it:

By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people.

Their research shows that common explanations for problem behavior, such as individual being at fault or peer pressure, are inadequate. What we experience and how we act spreads further than we think. Take a major illness affecting a mother late in life, and the strain and stress her daughter experiences caring for her mother. That strain can affect the daughter’s husband, who in turn shapes his friend’s life.

Christakis saw this through his clinical experience, and with Fowler, decided to study the impact of social networks. One of their main findings is that in the Framinghamn study, “drinking spread socially, as did happiness and even loneliness. And in each case one’s individual influence stretched out three degrees before it faded out. They termed this the ‘three degrees of influence’ rule about human behavior: We are tied not just to those around us, but to others in a web that stretches farther than we know.”

When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Even more astonishing to Christakis and Fowler was the fact that the effect didn’t stop there. In fact, it appeared to skip links. A Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese — even if the connecting friend didn’t put on a single pound. Indeed, a person’s risk of obesity went up about 10 percent even if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.

Christakis and Fowler’s work provides an in-depth description of the functioning of social networks – not a examination of why loneliness spreads so much as an examination of how it does. In other words, there is not a theory of social contagion of behaviors, but an examination of the role of social networks in loneliness. As they write in an in-press paper co-authored with John Cacioppo:

Results indicated that loneliness occurs in clusters within social networks, extends up to three degrees of separation, and is disproportionately represented at the periphery of social networks. In addition, loneliness appears to spread through a contagious process even though lonely individuals are moved closer to the edge of social networks over time. The spread of loneliness was found to be stronger than the spread of perceived social connections, stronger for friends than family members, and stronger for women than for men.

For why social contagion works, for this “more than peer pressure” effect (that third degree of influence – a friend of a friend of yours), Christakis and Fowler throw out a range of neuropsychological ideas such as “subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior” and “the spread of good or bad feelings, they say, might be driven partly by “mirror neurons” in the brain that automatically mimic what we see in the faces of those around us — which is why looking at photographs of smiling people can itself often lift your mood.”

But there are also intriguing signs of everyday dynamics that help or hinder the spread of behaviors (in other words, don’t blame it all on the brain):

The Framingham findings also suggest that different contagious behaviors spread in different ways. For example, co-workers did not seem to transmit happiness to one another, while personal friends did. But co-workers did transmit smoking habits; if a person at a small firm stopped smoking, his or her colleagues had a 34 percent better chance of quitting themselves. The difference is based in the nature of workplace relationships, Fowler contends. Smokers at work tend to cluster together outside the building; if one of them stops smoking, it reduces the conviviality of the experience. (If you’re the last smoker outside on a freezing afternoon, your behavior can seem completely ridiculous even to yourself.) But when it comes to happiness, Fowler said, “people are both cooperative and competitive at work. So when one person gets a raise, it might make him happy, but it’ll make other people jealous.”

Other explanations include homophily, or like people gravitating towards each other, and shared environment, for example, a McDonalds opening which people then visit. Jason Fletcher, for example, has shown that using the social contagion methodological approach, one can show that very implausible things appear contagious according to the Christakis/Fowler analysis – such as tallness (hmm, maybe they play basketball together?).

A more significant limitation is that the Framingham data is good on family but not so much on friends – respondents were required to only list one significant friend over time. Thus, what might appear as contagion could be due to missing data.

With drug use, it is clear that when adolescents take drugs, two effects happen: they start to proactively seek out friends who also use drugs (largely because they approve of their behavior) and those friends can reinforce the initial behavior itself (often leading to a rise in substance use). In other words, our social networks have reciprocal effects, us on out, and others on in.

Christakis and Folwer demonstrate that the directionality of these reciprocal effects matter. If I consider you a good friend, but you don’t consider me a good friend, your behavior is more likely to influence me than vice versa. “According to their data, if Steven becomes obese, it has no effect on Peter at all, because he doesn’t think of Steven as a close friend. In contrast, if Peter gains weight, then Steven’s risk of obesity rises by almost 100 percent. And if the two men regard each other as mutual friends, the effect is huge — either one gaining weight almost triples the other’s risk.”

The article then goes into some very interesting public health considerations, with a focus on smoking and obesity. But I’ll leave you to read those yourself, and end with a more basic piece of advice. The Christakis/Fowler research suggests an addition to an old motto. Don’t worry, be happy… by getting connected.

Their findings show that the gamble of increased sociability pays off, for a surprising reason: Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness. According to their statistical analysis, each additional happy friend boosts your good cheer by 9 percent, while each additional unhappy friend drags you down by only 7 percent.

-//-

Christakis and Fowler have a book coming out later this month, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. It comes complete with a fancy website, Connected the Book, complete with a 3 minute view, discussion boards, reviews, and more.

Here’s their 2007 New England Journal of Medicine article, The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years.

You can also read an in-press article written with John Cacioppo, entitled Alone in the Crowd: The Structure and Spread of Loneliness in a Large Social Network (pdf), if you want to get more at the science side.

And here’s the NY Times Clive Thompson article, Is Happiness Catching?

The role of race in human genetics and biomedical research is among the most contested issues in science. Much debate centers on the relative importance of genetic versus sociocultural factors in explaining racial inequalities in health. However, few studies integrate genetic and sociocultural data to test competing explanations directly.

Note how that fits so well into the points just made in Nature/Nurture: Slash to the Rescue. But Gravlee, Non and Mulligan don’t just say we need to overcome the nature vs. nurture dichotomy, they do research that bridges it and even better, test ideas on both sides: “We draw on ethnographic, epidemiologic, and genetic data collected in southeastern Puerto Rico to isolate two distinct variables for which race is often used as a proxy: genetic ancestry versus social classification.”

This type of collaborative research can be crucial to getting the data to answer complicated questions. Connie Mulligan and Lance Gravlee deserve credit for taking the time to discuss how to bring together their respective approaches before going out to do research. In this case, the data come down more on the nurture (or social) side. As they write:

Our preliminary results provide the most direct evidence to date that previously reported associations between genetic ancestry and health may be attributable to sociocultural factors related to race and racism, rather than to functional genetic differences between racially defined groups.

Before someone gets all hot and bothered, Lance has also shown how to bring nurture back to nature. In Gravlee’s recent paper, How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality (pdf), he gives us following: “Drawing on recent developments in neighboring disciplines, I present a model for explaining how racial inequality becomes embodied – literally – in the biological well-being of racialized groups and individuals. This model requires a shift in the way we articulate the critique of race as bad biology.”

In the PLoS paper, Lance, Amy and Connie are aiming squarely at the use of race in medicine, where it has become common in some circles to use racial classification as a proxy for genetics. Basically this research destroys the proxy notion, since social classification turns out to be a better predictor of blood pressure than genetic ancestry.

Yet the research also highlights that genetics does play a role, just not in the broad way we normally think (nature as cause). Specifically the data revealed an association between systolic blood pressure and a specific polymorphism, α2C adrenergic receptor deletion, only when social classification and socioeconomic status were included in the analysis.

This research also reveals social complexity. As the figure from the PLoS paper above indicates, there are interactions between racial classification, socioeconomic status, and systolic blood pressure in Puerto Rico. The basic conclusion is the opposite of what many of us might expect – those perceived as darker (negro) have higher blood pressure when in a higher social class. Conversely, those with lighter skin have higher blood pressure with lower SES. These results can be related to complex social dynamics. Darker colored individuals likely face more racial discrimination when in a higher SES because Puerto Rico is still a racially divided country, with wealth and status running lighter to darker. Here is the PLoS paper:

The pattern we observe is consistent with the hypothesis that social classification based on color entails differential exposure to social stressors related to blood pressure. In particular, there is ethnographic evidence that Puerto Ricans perceived as negro, as compared to trigueño or blanco, may encounter more frequent frustrating interactions in high-SES settings due to institutional and interpersonal discrimination.

Put in a broader sense, this paper points to the need to actively consider social inequality and discrimination as causes of health problem, something the “race as genetics” idea completely fails to do. Along with colleagues, Gravlee has made this point forcefully in a previous paper, Race and Ethnicity in Public Health Research: Models to Explain Health Disparities.

At the end of the PLoS paper Lance, Amy and Connie highlight an important direction for future research: “Although our measure of social classification improves on existing approaches, further research is needed to assess how well it approximates the ascription of color in everyday social interaction. Future research could build on our measurement approach by testing whether non-biological markers of social status (e.g., hair style, dress, speech) influence social classification.”

I’d also encourage Lance and his colleagues to look more closely at perceived discrimination, that this is also a crucial mediator of how race ends up driving biology. It’s not just consensus about racial classification, but how an individual person reacts to that. This point is made broadly by Robert Sampson when he discusses perceptions of disorder as an important force behind disparity. Building an ethnographically informed measure of subjective discrimination could add an important link in the pathway from social inequality to changes in blood pressure.

But this paper also challenged me. What is particularly good is that Lance builds on previous research that established how social classification according to “color” trumps actual skin pigmentation in establishing race and in impacting health. Now he and Connie have taken that a step further to get the data and test both biological and cultural ideas.

So this morning I am thinking more seriously how I could better examine the nature/nurture debate around addiction (quite similar in form to the race and health debate – biology does it; no, it’s inequality). How can studying sin become a closer look at how people get engaged in destructive behaviors, and which factors (working together, I’d say) are most important? Because right now the biologists are going to say, well it’s dopamine (or glutamate or whatever neurotransmitter is the flavor of the day) and the anthropologists are going to say, well it’s meaning. I’m still stuck at saying “holistic interactionism” (as Pinker would put it) rather than showing more concretely how the two come together and then relating both to genetics and to symbolism.

Lance Gravlee, Amy Non and Connie Mulligan have already taken that next concrete step. Kudos!

For more on Lance Gravlee’s work, please visit his website. For more on Connie Mulligan’s work, here’s her UF website.

For those looking for coverage of some of the paper’s highlights, you can check out the University of Florida’s press release, Socio-cultural, genetic data work together to reveal health disparities.

Gene Expression also provides a useful summary with Hypertension, Race, Class and Puerto Rico, including a comment by Lance clarifying a couple points.

And here’s the link for the PLoS full text of Genetic Ancestry, Social Classification, and Racial Inequalities in Blood Pressure in Southeastern Puerto Rico.