Being WEIRD: How Culture Shapes the Mind – A Summary
In the essay, Being WEIRD: How Culture Shapes the Mind by Ethan Watters, the author discusses the importance of culture on human development along with the impact of psychology studies ignoring cultural difference.
This story begins with the studies of Joe Henrich, an anthropologist student who conducted an experiment on the indigenous Machiguenga people. The experiment, or game, involved splitting an amount of money between two people. A test most commonly completed on Americans had a vastly different outcome in Peru. Lower offers were given, and accepted than normally seen when conducting this experiment. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money” (493). As this test is traditionally completed in Western civilization, these results were unfounded.
Generally, psychologists do not use a wide variety of cultures to conduct studies, “96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the worlds population” (495). Another test involving an illusion of a line appearing to be two lengths was distributed to test perception and culture. It was found that where you grew up, and your culture affected how drastically the illusion was seen. Results reported Americans struggling the most to see identical lines.
It had previously been assumed that Western culture was a good basis for human similarities. According to the tests mentioned, and a great amount more, researchers were starting to realize the West was producing outlying data, “the very way we think…makes us distinct from other humans on the planet” (497). The lack of cross cultural research has lead to wide misunderstandings about human kind. Scientists must reevaluate the way they think about the human brain, because it is not as universal as it was once thought to be.