Definition of a "fair split" varies across cultures

[Maximus]

Maybe it's quibbling over terminology, but what I'm getting from what you're saying is that different cultures differently value different kinds of truth, or more accurately, different means of arriving at the truth.

There is logical truth, highly valued in western society for its contributions to science. It works very well with things that can be given mathematical values.

But there are other means: observation(seeing is believing), consensus(10 million people can't be wrong) and probably others. I have no trouble believing that some societies hold these other methods of more value than logic--hell, I come from such a society. To me that is different than saying that the logical syllogism aren't universal, however.

I think it is quibbling.  The article/book if I remember it properly, stated that the syllogism in the venn diagram way of looking at it is universal.  I believe every culture would agree that every cow is not a milk cow.  However, it is the problem of deduction that seems to be tripping us up here - many cultures do not seem to accept the given.  It is not the petulant third grader arguing, it is just that the variance of the set is enough to demand the logician to review the example in order to draw a conclusion.

Hopefully that might be a bit more clear.

I'd be interested in reading the paper if you can find it.

[PDH]

Maybe it's quibbling over terminology, but what I'm getting from what you're saying is that different cultures differently value different kinds of truth, or more accurately, different means of arriving at the truth.

There is logical truth, highly valued in western society for its contributions to science. It works very well with things that can be given mathematical values.

But there are other means: observation(seeing is believing), consensus(10 million people can't be wrong) and probably others. I have no trouble believing that some societies hold these other methods of more value than logic--hell, I come from such a society. To me that is different than saying that the logical syllogism aren't universal, however.

I think it is quibbling.  The article/book if I remember it properly, stated that the syllogism in the venn diagram way of looking at it is universal.  I believe every culture would agree that every cow is not a milk cow.  However, it is the problem of deduction that seems to be tripping us up here - many cultures do not seem to accept the given.  It is not the petulant third grader arguing, it is just that the variance of the set is enough to demand the logician to review the example in order to draw a conclusion.

Hopefully that might be a bit more clear.

I'd be interested in reading the paper if you can find it.

I will look.

[crazy canuck]

It suprises me that so many North Americans choose the screw both of you option if they view the offer as inequitable.

Why? I can very easily imagine someone saying "you're going to make me an unfair offer? Okay, because I will not walk out of here with *less* money than I had coming in, I'm going to use the opportunity to make sure you don't get the money either, *in the hope that next time, with another person, you make a fairer offer*."

Because such behaviour is irrational.  You are going to turn down found money just because you are not getting more found money.   In this experiment there is no next time.  Just as in life the chances are you are not going to meet the same person you were spiteful toward.  And if you do they are unlikely to be all that kindly disposed to you....

As mentioned to Viking this is not like the prisoners dilemma exercise where the tit for tat rule did best.   In that experiment the player was guarranteed to have future interactions and most importantly negative outcomes could actually help the score by denying points to an adversary.

This is just turning down free money because of some imagined slight.

[crazy canuck]

Of course this kind of irrational behaviour also contributes to my personal financial well being.  It would often be better for parties to give a bit and make a deal they both hate rather than litigate.  Thank goodness for whatever irrational impulse North Americans have to act in this way.

[DGuller]

I realized that IQ tests were useless when I found out that scored abnormally high one.

That's not vexing at all.  Your problem is maturity and sanity, not raw intelligence.

[fhdz]

Because such behaviour is irrational.

It is not of necessity irrational, no. You're refusing to see that there's more to the decision than the dollar values between the two participants and incorrectly proposing that there is no social dynamic to the outcome, even in this experiment.

[Razgovory]

I realized that IQ tests were useless when I found out that scored abnormally high one.

That's not vexing at all.  Your problem is maturity and sanity, not raw intelligence.

Maturity?

[fhdz]

Of course this kind of irrational behaviour also contributes to my personal financial well being.  It would often be better for parties to give a bit and make a deal they both hate rather than litigate.  Thank goodness for whatever irrational impulse North Americans have to act in this way.

[alfred russel]

Because such behaviour is irrational.

It is not of necessity irrational, no. You're refusing to see that there's more to the decision than the dollar values between the two participants and that there is no social dynamic to the outcome, even in this experiment.

You have to be patient with cc. He is from the North American cultural group, that struggles to see things beyond their narrow self interests. 

[jimmy olsen]

Reading more on this topic online, I found this bit of speculation particularly plausible.

http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/10/we-agree-its-weird-but-is-it-weird-enough/

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.

[jimmy olsen]

Also, this sort of addresses Berkut's issue.

http://www.economist.com/node/21555876

Most researchers used to think the punishment of freeloaders was a universal human instinct that had evolved to promote co-operation. Studies in the West supported this belief. They showed that people band together to reward co-operative behaviour and to punish those who refuse to contribute to the common good. These experiments, which employed what are known as public-goods games to test individual choices, gave players money they could either contribute to the group, raising the value of everyone's stake, or hold for themselves, ultimately harming everyone if others refuse to co-operate. But they were lacking in two ways. One was their WEIRD participants. The other was more subtle. It did not occur to the experimenters to allow participants to punish co-operators as well as freeloaders, even though those who had been freeloading might wish to do so in revenge for having been punished themselves, in previous rounds of the game.

But that did occur to Benedikt Herrmann of Nottingham university, in Britain. A few years ago Dr Herrmann ran a series of experiments designed to see how public-goods games would play out in 16 countries, not all of them rich and Western. This time, he allowed freeloaders to punish co-operators, a behaviour known as antisocial punishment. His results were striking. Most of the world, the experiments suggested, bears little resemblance to Harvard or, indeed, anywhere else in the West, where antisocial punishment is virtually absent. In places like South Korea, Greece, Russia and Saudi Arabia, antisocial punishment proved to be almost as common as collaboration.

Dr Rand is re-running Dr Herrmann's experiments on Mechanical Turk—at a tenth of the cost of the original work. The early results, published last year in Nature Communications, suggest Dr Herrmann was right. Punishment did not evolve, as conventional wisdom has it, as a positive behaviour intended to encourage co-operation. Instead, it evolved as a self-interested weapon to fend off competitors, even when that competition is, in fact, a strategy of collaboration. In places where rules and institutions do not protect co-operators, freeloaders consistently dominate.

I find S. Korea being on that list interesting since it has developed a relatively strong rule of law in the last twenty five years, stronger certainly then the other countries mentioned. I wonder how long it would take the cultural inclination on punishing/favoring freeloaders to adapt to that reality.

[Admiral Yi]

I realized that IQ tests were useless when I found out that scored abnormally high one.

That's not vexing at all.  Your problem is maturity and sanity, not raw intelligence.

Maturity?

Don't let me down Gulley.  I'm expecting *genius* form you.  Break down Raz as you see him and explain him to us.

[Pishtaco]

I remember an psychological anthropology paper from a few years ago that basically showed the Western system of syllogistic logic is not universal.  Different cultures have experience basic logic that does not accept "if A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C" type of reasoning, despite similar regions of the brain being activated.

All of Bob's friends wear hats.
Mike is one of Bob's friends.
Does Mike wear a hat?

That could not be answered in entire regions, the main way of responding was "I can't see Mike, I don't know."  Culture is quite a filter for our weak little brains.

I've taught undergraduate mathematical logic in Britain and the US, and think it's hard to explain even basic propositional logic to most people. It's something that requires you to learn a (simple) abstract mathematical system, and people have trouble with this.

The most obvious problem is with "if". It's meaning is simply different from the everyday English meaning, where "if A, then B" suggests some causal relationship.

One (Chinese) student had trouble with "and", although I don't remember what the problem was - probably something to do with negating it. My best student was also Chinese.

Almost everybody has trouble with quantifiers, and things like the difference between "for all x, for some y, y is bigger than x" and "for some y, for all x, y is bigger than x."

For a more contrived example: One of Mike's friends is wearing a hat. Is it true that if Mike has no friends, then you are wearing a hat? By the rules of formal logic, this is a perfectly good question, with the answer "yes". But by the usual (Western?) rules of human interaction, it would have the answer "no", with a strange look at the person asking. The assumptions are unnatural enough that the person being questioned applies the rules of "this guy is being a dick" rather than the rules of logic.

[Razgovory]

It suprises me that so many North Americans choose the screw both of you option if they view the offer as inequitable.

Why? I can very easily imagine someone saying "you're going to make me an unfair offer? Okay, because I will not walk out of here with *less* money than I had coming in, I'm going to use the opportunity to make sure you don't get the money either, *in the hope that next time, with another person, you make a fairer offer*."

Because such behaviour is irrational.  You are going to turn down found money just because you are not getting more found money.   In this experiment there is no next time.  Just as in life the chances are you are not going to meet the same person you were spiteful toward.  And if you do they are unlikely to be all that kindly disposed to you....

As mentioned to Viking this is not like the prisoners dilemma exercise where the tit for tat rule did best.   In that experiment the player was guarranteed to have future interactions and most importantly negative outcomes could actually help the score by denying points to an adversary.

This is just turning down free money because of some imagined slight.

It's not irrational.  You are enforcing a social mores (is that the singular for that word?).  You may not run into that person again, but you do it with the understanding that if enough people enact these sanctions on individuals who aren't behaving properly, bad behavior will be deterred.

[DGuller]

Don't let me down Gulley.  I'm expecting *genius* form you.  Break down Raz as you see him and explain him to us.

My IQ only puts me at "highly intelligent".  Sorry.