Jonathan Pawlowicz
English 250
27 January 2017
In Ethan Watters “Being WEIRD: How Culture Shapes the Mind”, Watters explains why many social science theories are skewed because westerners approach the world with different thought processes. Watters covers the story of a scientist named Joe Henrich who, while studying the Machiguenga people, ran an experiment that came up with unexpected results. Watter wrote, “Henrich used a ‘game’ — along the lines of the famous prisoner’s dilemma… the first player is given an amount of money, say, $100, and told that he has to offer some of the cash, in an amount of his choosing, to the second player can accept or refuse the split. But there’s a hitch: players know that if the recipient refuses the off, both leave empty-handed.” Watters proceeds to tell the story that Henrich later does the same “game” in 14 other small-scale societies. Watters continues with Henrich’s story, how he earned a position next to two other people who continue these experiments but with different approaches. Watters then proceeds to emphasize the work that they Henrich and his co-workers were doing using many examples, including a visual illusion where two lines appear to be different sizes but are the same. The illusion is illustrated in the book and is called the Muller-Lyer illusion. The more and more they traveled and studied different people, the more they found a group that were the outliers of the outliers, the western culture. Watters writes that western culture focuses more on each individual versus all in a group. Watters uses another example to prove the point. Another visual illusion is a single vertical line inside a skewed frame. Watters writes that westerners were less susceptible to getting this illusion wrong because they see the vertical line apart from the frame just like they see themselves as a separate piece in a bigger picture.