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

Here are three aims from their Welcome post:

-The discussion of contemporary dilemmas that stop us from learning more about each other across difference (religious, class difference, cultural, generational, etc): what can we actually ask each other about diversity and how to do it?

-The ideia that making anthropology a practise accessible to all can enhance inter-cultural relations and promote cooperation across difference

-The aim of passing direct knowledge of the practise of amateur anthropology across generations rather than relying on indirect educational means (e.g. internet). Adults trained in amateur anthropology can ideally pass the knowledge onto children and encourage them to pursue knowledge on questions of difference across diversity from a very early stage.

Chains of Differences is a project initiated by Pedro Oliveira, a Portuguese clinical psychologist
with a PhD in social anthropology recently completed at Brunel University.

Alongside Chains of Difference, Oliveira is starting a post-doctoral project focused on bring together clinical psychology and anthropology through “running multi-family groups and researching them simultaneously through an action-research ethnographic methodology.” He would love to get feedback on this project, so you can find the complete description of his proposed work here.

Link to Chains of Difference Facebook Group.

Link to Chains of Difference blog.

First, refresh your knowledge of Saint Augustine’s Confessions with this helpful rap video:

In the second book of Confessions, St. Augustine relates to us how he and his friends stole pears from a neighbor’s grove. What bothered Augustine was not the act of stealing, but the pleasure he derived from the act. In fact he and his companions had no practical use for the pears, for they were not hungry, and they threw most of them away. Frustrated, he writes,

But it was not the pears that my unhappy soul desired. I had plenty of my own, better than those, and I picked them so that I might steal. For no sooner had I picked them than I threw them away, and tasted nothing in them but my own sin, which I relished and enjoyed. (II.6)

For the rest of the second book, Augustine wrestles with the question of why he and his companions felt pleasure in stealing the pears. He makes two conjectures. The first is that he felt pride from the thrill of breaking the rules. He writes,

Since I had no real power to break [God’s] law, was it that I enjoyed at least the pretence of doing so, like a prisoner who creates for himself the illusion of liberty by doing something wrong, when he has no fear of punishment, under a feeble hallucination of power? (II.6)

By attempting to break God’s law, or more generally, the natural law, Augustine remarks that he was trying to imitate God, by showing that he was God’s equal and free from the jurisdiction of his law.

Augustine’s second conjecture is that his friends greatly influenced the pleasure he felt from stealing. He writes,

I must have got [pleasure] from the crime itself, from the thrill of having partners in sin…This was friendship of a most unfriendly sort, bewitching my mind in an inexplicable way. For the sake of a laugh, a little sport, I was glad to do harm and anxious to damage another…all because we are ashamed to hold back when other’s say “Come on! Let’s do it! (II. 8,9)

Had Augustine’s friends been absent, there is no doubt that he would not have thought of stealing the pears. However the presence of bad influences enkindled his desires. Together, these provoked him to action.

The Neurobiology of Stealing

Modern research in psychology, and the brain specifically, sheds some light on Augustine’s conjectures.

In general, thrill-inducing behavior is pleasurable because of the brain’s reward systems, which release neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine. When these systems are functioning normally, the “brain reward systems serve to direct the organism’s behavior toward goals that are normally beneficial and promote survival of the individual (e.g., food and water intake) or the species (e.g., reproductive behavior)” (Bozarth, 1994). These systems reward thrill-inducing behavior because this behavior is tied to evolutionary relevant gains, such as sex or getting food.

However, these systems can be abused. With regard to stealing, the most extreme example of this is kleptomania, wherein one compulsively steals, sometimes unknowingly. Like all addictions, the act is voluntary at first, until one begins to crave the pleasurable experience wrought by the neurotransmitters Dr. Jon Grant, a director of the Impulse Control Disorder clinic at the University of Minnesota Medical School, says, “Kleptomaniacs might have started stealing on a dare as kids, but it becomes so pleasurable that the addiction takes over their actions” (Labi, 2002).

Although we all have reward systems in our brains, different personalities will react differently to thrill-inducing behavior. That is, some will find it pleasurable, while others will dislike it, considering it an ordeal. The habitual roller coaster rider, ready for his next ride or even a bungee jump off the Sears Tower, characterizes the former. The latter, meanwhile, would watch safely from the ground.

In order to discover why these differences exist, psychologists Jane E. Joseph, Xun Liu, Yang Jiang and Thomas H. Kelly from the University of Kentucky, and with Donald Lyman of Purdue University, performed a study wherein they administered questionnaires regarding thrill seeking behavior to volunteers to gauge their personalities, and then they showed images of arousing or emotional scenes (such as erotic and violent ones) along with mundane ones, while performing MRI scans of the volunteers’ brains.

Results showed that in high sensation seekers (thrill-seekers) the insula, the seat of emotion, was most active when the arousing imagery was displayed. In low sensation seeking individuals, the frontal cortex, which reasons and regulates emotion, was most active.

Being more emotionally free and extraverted than their counterparts, high sensation seeking people often coerce low sensation seeking types to “release their inhibition” and follow through with whatever risky behavior they wish to engage in. This, mixed with peer pressure, forms a potent cocktail.

Augustine refers to these types when he says, “[W]e are ashamed to hold back when other’s say ‘Come on! Let’s do it!’ ” A more recent example can be seen in the film Friday, wherein Chris Tucker’s high sensation seeking character, tries to convince Ice Cube’s low sensation seeking character to smoke marijuana.

Susceptibility to Peer Pressure

But why are we so susceptible to peer pressure, or the mob mentality? William Bonner and Lila Rajiva cite five main reasons why we follow mob mentality. Of those reasons, two are universal. Humans prefer to stay with a group, no matter what they are doing, and we tend to allow ourselves to be bullied into following the mob.

We see both of these points in Augustine’s account. His statement, that he found thrill from having “partners in sin”, is related to the first point that we like to stick with the herd. Likewise, his description of those shamed into committing the deed, is related to the second point, in that these kids had no real reason to feel shame, except that they were bullied.

Overall, St. Augustine’s anecdote in which he finds a thrill in stealing pears without any real purpose is very similar to the type of thrill-seekers today who enjoy roller coasters and bungee jumping. These thrill-seekers are able to manipulate more conservative people into doing something risky just for the adrenaline rush that comes along with it. St. Augustine realizes the power of groups and how they can force members of the group to act similarly.

From Flow to Good

In light of all this evidence, how much control do we have over what we do in our everyday lives? For the most part, we have the final decision regarding what we do. However, we do tend to concede control under peer pressure. We go “with the flow.”

Knowing all these things, we can come to a better understanding of human behavior, allowing us to overcome negative external influence, and, like Augustine, become a force for good in the world. For as he said:

The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices (City of God IV, 3).

St. Augustine’s Confessions is considered to this day to be one of the most important and influential works of Christian, and specifically Catholic, writing. Augustine’s work is an autobiography on the surface but, upon deeper reflection, can be seen as both an indictment of mankind’s sinful ways and a calling to come to Christ for all of Christendom, and humanity for that matter. He grants further insight into the concepts of original sin, mankind’s motives for sinning and how man can go about escaping and rectifying a repetitive whirlwind of sin and self-destruction.

As members of Professor Daniel Lende’s Anthropology of Compulsion, a freshman seminar at the University of Notre Dame, our task was to read Augustine’s work and make a presentation to the class about some of the most important themes of St. Augustine’s Confessions. In this post, we will delve into the themes of original sin, motives for sin, and escaping the pattern of sin from the standpoint of our class’s opinions expressed during our discussion and come to a consensus interpretation of this work.

Original Sin

At the outset of the book Augustine describes his now famous life of sin in which he wallowed during his youth. He fancies himself no different than any other person in that he has a natural aptitude for sin and crime. He says “we are carried away by custom to our own undoing and it is hard to struggle against the stream.” (Augustine 36)

This description of original sin as a roaring stream is strikingly appropriate, as advocates of original sin paint it as an inescapable force that holds back the human race as a whole. For example, Alan Jacobs’ Original Sin: A Cultural History provides the following description: “peccatum originalis [original sin], the belief that we arrive in this world predisposed to wrongdoing — that this world is a vale of tears because we made it that and, somehow, couldn’t have made it anything else.”

Most readers (and the vast majority of our classmates) would take offense with this pessimistic notion of human nature. Upon viewing the clip below, depicting a minister who berates his constituents for their own disposition towards sin, the class was certainly taken aback.

Some may take the idea of original sin as an accusation directed towards humanity as a whole. Discussion was met with quite a bit of flustered and frustrated students’ explanations of, “I’m not evil. How can original sin be serious?”

Yet upon further reflection, our classmates were able to recognize their own faults and come to the understanding that Augustine and certainly Jacobs are not portraying humans as hedonistic demons roaming the earth in search of sex and thievery, but rather as people who must fight temptation toward sin. If we as humans are naturally inclined to sin, we must do what is unnatural in being a pious and socially acceptable individual.

Augustine’s Motives for Sinning

In Augustine’s Confessions he offers a few different potential motives for why people sin. At least one of these motives can be applied to any given sin and each pose interesting questions. In brief, his three motives presented are peer pressure, sinning for the purpose of gain, and sinning for the sake of sinning. The first of these motives is the temptation of peer pressure of which he writes:

“It was not the takings that attracted me but the raid itself, and yet to do it by myself would have been no fun and I should not have done it. This was friendship of a most unfriendly sort, bewitching my mind in an inexplicable way. For the sake of a laugh, a little sport, I was glad to do harm and anxious to damage another; and that without the thought of profit for myself or retaliation for injuries received! And all because we are ashamed to hold back when others say ‘Come on! Let’s do it!’” (2.9).

In this passage, Augustine tells the reader that the reason he stole the pears was because his friends’ excitement was overwhelming him and so he gave in. He even points out that he was not influenced by selfish intentions or any other reason but for the fun of doing it with his friends. This act is innocent enough but it still reflects a serious motive for sinning and Augustine includes this passage so we can thoroughly discuss the temptation of peer pressure. During our class discussion, we related this motive to a riot killing thousands of people to mere high school peer pressure.

Augustine’s second reason is sinning for the sake of sinning. In other words, one might sin just for the feeling of breaking the rules or for the experience. Augustine writes, “Perhaps we ate some of them, but our real pleasure consisted in doing something that was forbidden” (2.9) Here, he claims that his true motives were to sin for the sake of it. Augustine also points out that they may have eaten some of the pears that they stole but this was not the pleasure they were after when committing the act.

Finally, Augustine’s last reason for sinning:

“And in the games I played with them I often in order to come off the better, simply because a vain desire to win had got the better of me. And yet there was nothing I could less easily endure, nothing that made me quarrel more bitterly, than to find others cheated them. All the same, if they found me out more and blamed me for it, I would lose my temper rather than give in” (1.19).

In this, Augustine tells that he cheated in a small game in order to win, in order to better himself. This seems to be the most common motive for sinning and during a discussion in class, the majority of people tended to agree with this motive over the others. Once again, his sin is displayed in a minor context but still portrays the underlying reasoning in his actions.

The class was inclined to think most sins consisted of a combination of two of the three or even all three at once. The example of the Nazi culture came up throughout our discussions of sin and is a great instance in which all three motives can be seen. The Nazis obviously gave into peer pressure and were caught up in the culture of the Hitler, which represents the first motive listed. The class also pointed out that many of the Nazis and Hitler were just sinning because they were purely evil and wanted to break the rules and kill people for the sake of it. Lastly, the Nazis would often steal from their victims and would kill people simply in order to move up in the rankings of the Nazi army. And the paragon of this last motive was Hitler as he was power hungry and wanted to rule the world, which obviously fits under this rule. As the discussion grew, Augustine’s words of wisdom seemed to resurface over and over again in many of the modern examples that were brought to light.

When asked, “Why do people sin?” the class responded with almost identical reasons as presented in Confessions. Even after discussion, these ideas of original sin and motivations for sinning followed us and we began to realize how the words of Augustine and Jacobs described the modern world and rang true all around us.

How Should Humanity Respond to Original Sin?

So now that we’ve come to an agreement that original sin is a plausible description for human nature, an obvious question to follow is: how do we escape it?

Luckily for some, Augustine and the church have a ready-made answer: God. As Augustine reflects on his youth, he was in search of this answer as well, asking “will this torrent never dry up? How much longer will it sweep the sons of Adam down to that vast and terrible sea which cannot easily be passed?” (Augustine 36)

Later in his journey towards piety, however, he seems to have, through scripture, come to the conclusion that only through seeking higher truth in God can humanity overcome the rushing river of original sin. Augustine’s idea was met with some resistance by our class.

The class discussion on this idea was perhaps reflective of how the youth of the world are becoming more and more secular in thought, as everyone was in agreement that recognizing the Christian God and Jesus cannot be the only way to escape a life of sin. An example brought up time and again was of a man who has lived his life in isolation, say in the middle of a desert, and has never had the opportunity to learn about God and the Christian traditions of sin and morality. Is this man evil and damned to eternal suffering? He most certainly is not. The class was able to recognize that there is a difference between being a “good” person and being a “religious” person, and that the former is much more important than the latter.

Ronald Wintrob, chair of the World Psychiatric Association–Transcultural Psychiatry Section, writes the Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychiatry for this special report. He notes how migration has increased over the past 20 years, and that 12.86% of the US population are immigrants. Psychiatrists have put increasing effort into engaging these populations.

One of the most practical applications of cultural psychiatry to clinical practice in all fields of medicine is the open-ended questioning of patients and their families about their personal and family background characteristics. This includes identifying features of race, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic class, relevant immigration history, experiences of acculturative stress, and personal and family aspirations. A discussion of these background characteristics can lead naturally to the clinician’s exploration of the presenting clinical symptoms and history. Knowledge of the patient’s background will increase rapport with patients and families and aid the process of collecting a more reliable history. In addition, it will improve the likelihood of treatment adherence. This process has been described as “cultural case formulation.”

Three main articles comprise the special issue:

Religion, Spirituality, and Mental Health by Simon Dein, senior lecturer of anthropology and medicine at University College London. This piece provides an in-depth examination of what is currently known about the relationships between religion and mental health, and also includes a handy set of four check points that summarize the main themes of the article.

Cultural Considerations in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, by Toby Measham, Jaswant Guzder, Cécile Rousseau, and Lucie Nadeau, all in the department of psychiatry at McGill, which presents a series of guidelines and suggestions for how to handle cross-cultural issues in practice with children and adolescents

Cultural and Ethnic Issues in Psychopharmacology, by Keh-Ming Lin, professor emeritus in psychiatry at UCLA. This piece goes from the placebo effect to genetic variation, and argues that “cultural and ethnic influences… should be regarded as central in determining the success of treatment interventions.”

Under the whole category of cross-cultural psychiatry at Psychiatric Times, you can also find other articles, including this one by J. David Kinzie on A Model for Treating Refugees Traumatized by Violence.

Link to the Introduction to the Special Report on Cross-Cultural Psychiatry.

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.

by Drew Matott and Drew Cameron

Jake was fond of saying that even though he had become dumber, he wasn’t quite dumb enough. He knew that the improvised explosive device (IED) in Iraq had mangled his body, brain and self.

Jake (a pseudonym) lost 30 IQ points due to Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) from that IED blast. According to the military, he was still smart enough to function and hold down a job, so they didn’t plan to include TBI in his disability rating.

He fought them on this, just as he fought them on the decision not to amputate his leg. After countless surgeries and rehabilitation techniques, his leg was almost useless, allowing him maybe 30 minutes of use before it started rebelling against its reconstructed form. The pain that caused was excruciating; he simply couldn’t use it more.

Eventually Jake won his battle to lose his leg. It was the best thing that happened to him during the year I got to know him while doing my dissertation fieldwork at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. (yes, that Walter Reed).

Dealing with, or writing about, TBI is rarely as clear as an amputation. The same is true of TBI’s nearly constant companion, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). TBI and PTSD are not injuries that you can see, unlike a lost leg. Despite the high numbers of TBI and PTSD cases from Iraq and Afghanistan, the relationship of these conditions to more obvious forms of combat trauma remains a fraught one: Witness the debate about PTSD and the Purple Heart.

Most people think that the Purple Heart, that most iconic of military honors, is awarded to American military members injured in combat. As with most issues military, it is not quite that simple.

In 2008, after months of consultation, the decision was made not to award the Purple Heart to those suffering from PTSD because, in part, the medal “recognizes those individuals wounded to a degree that requires treatment by a medical officer, in action with the enemy or as the result of enemy action where the intended effect of a specific enemy action is to kill or injure the service member.” PTSD doesn’t count.

Though the decision was officially framed in rather bureaucratic terms, the debate which surrounded it raises much deeper issues about the nature of trauma. Thinking through these issues has led me to think about the Cartesian split between the (internal) mind and the (external) body and the nature of trauma inside and out.

From one perspective, TBI is trauma itself. It is the physical result of the brain being banged around inside the skull or otherwise damaged. But its symptoms – being ‘dumb’, acting out, short term memory loss – are the kinds of things we normally associate with an interior self.

To complicate matters further, in the soldiers I worked with, TBI was accompanied by visible injuries, sometimes to the head, sustained during the same event. Jake, for example, had nearly his whole scalp peeled from his skull along with his helmet. But this actually had nothing to do with his TBI, which was caused by the force of the IED blast itself.

This gives TBI a slightly strange status on the physical-mental continuum that you can see in things like the RAND study on Invisible Wounds which consistently pairs mental health issues and TBI, thus linking them together while still setting TBI apart. So does all of this make TBI any more or less bodily? Any more or less interior?

PTSD, on the other hand, is the reaction to trauma. It is linked to the memory of, and psychological response to, a physical event or threatened physical event. This would seem to put it squarely on the mental end of the continuum. Yet most recent innovations in the treatment of PTSD have focused on the bio-chemistry and physicality of the brain.

Such a ‘physical’ approach has its benefits. For example, most of the soldiers I worked with were highly resistant to talk and other ‘interior’ kinds of therapy while they relished the idea of treatments which work on the mind through the body. Medication does that, but so do things like Virtual Reality Exposure therapy. (For more background on the causes and treatments for PTSD in soldiers, see Erin Finley’s terrific posts here and here).

And while we tend to think of PTSD as a psychological reaction to a particular traumatic event, in my fieldwork it was more often the result of a whole slew of experiences which had very much to do with the body, sights, sounds, smells, and corporeal feelings of discomfort, pain, heat, exhaustion, sleeplessness. These same bodily sensations constitute in part the experience of PTSD, meaning that while diagnoses or theorizations of PTSD may focus on the mind, the subjective experience of it is very much in the body.

Even when we recognize that the mind and the body are connected, as we do in the realms of psychopharmacology, most people generally subordinate one to the other and deny their unity. We do that by relying on Cartesian dualism, by splitting the self into body and mind and then mapping the two parts onto the outside and inside. By marking the bodily self as the province of medicine and the mind as the province of psychiatry, we deny a more complete understanding of the subjective experience of trauma.

Jake’s amputated leg, his short term memory loss, his insomnia, his problems with linear thought, his 30 missing IQ points, his headaches, these are all part of his transformed self and way of being in the world. Though it may be required, in certain clinical settings, to typologize these pieces of him, to call them symptoms and assign them to various qualitative and quantitative categories, as anthropologists we are relatively free of these paradigmatic constraints. Our discipline is essentially an empathetic one and when working with people who have endured certain kinds of trauma, we ought to do our best to maintain the integrity of their experience. After all, haven’t they been ripped apart enough?

Zoë H. Wool is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Toronto. You can reach her at zoe.wool@utoronto.ca

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.

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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?

“Dance is created by the embodied brain, influenced by culture and shaped and inspired by our relationship to and our perception of the environment” (Mason, 2009:28).

Some readers may already be familiar with a diagram that was posted on the neuroanthropology blog Paul Mason:  Slides on Neuroanthropology at the beginning of 2008. I also included a black and white version of this diagram on page 109 of an article that I published in Bahasa Indonesia:
Mason, P.H. (2007) Alam, Otak dan Kebudayaan: Perkembangan Baru Tentang Pengetahuan Musik dan Tari. Gema Seni: Jurnal Komunikasi, Informasi, dan Dokumentasi Seni, Vol 2, no. 4, pp. 108-119.

More recently, I incorporated the image in an article for Brolga: An Australian Journal About Dance; Jun2009 Issue 30, p27-34, which discusses the evolutionary properties of collaborative choreography (Mason 2009). I hypothesize that collaborative choreography is characterised by evolutionary processes at multiple levels of complexity. An ethnography of choreographic methods in contemporary dance practices, I believe, can provide insight into intersubjective interactions, reveal the development of shared perceptions and elucidate the cultural processes of creativity, meaning construction and distributed cognition.

In Australian Contemporary Dance, it is common for a new dance work to commence with the exploration of a choreographic intention through guided improvisation tasks. From this raw movement material, the choreographic ensemble will select sequences and phrases that are then memorised and organised until a choreographic product is prepared for performance.

“Improvisation is represented as the downwards pointing triangle that narrows as the triangle of choreography expands. In theory, an infinite amount of movement possibilities generated through improvisation are degenerated into the finite world of a choreographed performance” (Mason, 2009:29).

If you’re looking to read the article (or cite the diagrams), it is available through EBSCOhost:
MASON, Paul Howard (2009) Brain, Dance and Culture: The choreographer, the dancing scientist and interdisciplinary collaboration., Brolga: An Australian Journal About Dance; Jun2009 Issue 30, p27-34, 8p, 1 diagram, 1 bw

I would also recommend Janice Fournier’s article How a creative “system” learns: the distributed activity of choreography (2004), John Sutton’s Moving and Thinking together in Dance, and Thinking in Four Dimensions edited by Robin Grove, Catherine Stevens and Shirley McKechnie

Over the last century, anthropologists have often chosen to study exotic symbolic systems — rituals, myth, art — and frequently managed to illuminate the cultural logic underlying what seem initially to be “irrational” practices.

So why haven’t anthropologists leapt to study one of the most exotic and powerful symbolic systems in human history? I’m talking about the Western (and predominantly American) system of “entertainment”. Not only is this system central to contemporary Western culture, it has arguably played a major role in the breakdown of the cultures of many indigenous communities.

Entertainment should be a significant focus of anthropological inquiry. Alas, it is not.

Admittedly, some interest in the topic has emerged in the last couple of decades. Much of this material is promising; often authors pursue the insight that in some ways entertainment activities are similar to rituals. This is not only an accurate observation, but it points to the possibility of beginning to map how entertainment works to establish some of the central meanings of contemporary life.

I have usually been disappointed, however, by the level of insight provided by such studies. Much of this work turns out not to have a lot to say when it comes to explaining the specifics of how these entertainment rituals undergird our social order. This is one of the reasons I have urged an alternative approach, namely, considering entertainment activities as forms of play. Another reason is that for the most part those who participate in entertainment regard it not as ritual but as play.

Students of play have often pointed to the importance of the experience of becoming deeply immersed in play. We can become so caught up in a game or a narrative or an episode of pretending that we become entirely focused on the activity and to some extent lose track of our everyday co-ordinates.

In my new book Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You (2009,Stanford), I argue that such experiences are akin to Durkheimian episodes of collective effervescence, they are moments of ecstasy wherein the importance of key cultural powers and values is palpably felt.

What has this to do with neuroanthropology? Plenty, it turns out. These ecstatic experiences, which seem to be especially likely to occur in play, ritual, and intense social interaction, are built (at least in part) from automatic neural processes such as imitation, emotional contagion, and attentional absorption.

To take a single example: Increasingly, neuroscientists argue that a mirror neuron system in humans is implicated in our enormous capacity for imitation and “mind-reading,” the ability to grasp what our conspecifics are up to. And this ability to adopt the perspective of another is evident not only in social interaction, it also underlies our imaginative play and by extension our understanding of narratives. In other words, recent findings on imitation and mirroring help us to begin to understand why we should be so easily and powerfully “carried away” into imaginative situations.

There is still much to be learned here. However, it is now clear that the play of entertainment is not a sociological triviality. Rather, entertainment is a privileged site through which some of the key values of consumption are fused with emotional power through experiences that seem to transcend the everyday. Neuroanthropology can play a vital role in building a theory of the culture of entertainment, a symbolic system that is at the very foundation of the contemporary political and economic order.

Let me end with one example – Michael Jackson. He shows how powerful modern entertainment is as a symbolic system that catches us up in play, absorption and mimicry. Thriller became popular through MTV, a music video that caught us up in a playful story and dance moves many tried to match. It has even been acted out on large scale by Philippine prison inmates!

Drawing on the enormous wealth built through his music, Jackson built a theme park for a home, but when his actions crossed from play to something more threatening and damaging for children, his legal troubles started at Neverland Ranch. The changes in his appearance were discussed endlessly for their symbolic value about modern identity, race, and more. With his recent death, right before a London comeback concert tour (already 50 sold-out dates), entertainers of all sorts have moonwalked, sung, danced, and worn a sequined glove for all of us to watch. This is modern entertainment.

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Peter Stromberg is professor of anthropology at the University of Tulsa. If you want to read more, you can see our coverage of his new book Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You.

You can also access his 2008 article (pdf), Symbolic Valorization in the Culture of Entertainment: The Example of Legal Drug Use, which uses the examples of smoking and drinking to discuss how modern entertainment works as a symbolic and emotional system through transformative experience and play as a social practice.