WEIRD societies

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I’m still thinking about the book Wayfinding, and there’s really no better mark of a great book than thinking about it months after you’ve read it. Some of the concepts in Esoteric Theravada, which I also just finished up, tie in.

O’Connor mentioned the concept of WEIRD countries: Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic. I think you could go further and say westernized, as once a country has a westernized elite that controls the education system, a western construct itself, there are only a few generations left until a country is westernized.

The curious thing is that people from WEIRD societies think differently because they have dramatically different values and assumptions about the world, without realizing that their culture is not universal. This means that a lot of sociological and psychological research that purports to look at human absolutes is deeply flawed as all of the research subjects are WEIRD.

Here’s an interesting academic paper on the ramifications thereof, I’ll quote from the long abstract:

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology, cognition, and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from highly educated segments of Western 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. 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 standard 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 comparative findings suggest that members of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. [emphasis added] Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, or 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.

I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time in places that are either completely non-western or only partially westernized.

The places that I’d say are almost entirely non-Westernized:

I’m hesitant to include Saudi Arabia on this list as it’s more in a transitional state. Much of the old ways and traditional knowledge of the bedouins has been lost and will be completely gone within a generation. I’d argue that Salafism is very much a result of colonialism and is in the process of wiping out more indigenous forms of Islam, but that’s a much much longer post.

Of the partially westernized:

Even though I’ve spent less time in Thailand, there’s a distinctly non-westernized ethos once you get off the beaten path, especially around certain monasteries.

It’s not that any of these different places or cultures are better or worse than WEIRD countries. Instead, I see the value in preserving the various living cultures of the world rather than westernizing the entire planet and calling that diversity.