Michele Gelfand: evaluation

Transcript context

…You mentioned Joe Henrich before. He has this idea of what he calls WEIRD psychology. WEIRD is an acronym for Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic. As I understand his view, people who are WEIRD are just fundamentally different in terms of their norms. There’s not some kind of spectrum or continuum. There’s simply a fundamental break in human civilization. Do you agree with that? Or what’s your perspective? No, I don’t. I would say this idea of WEIRD predates years and years of psychology. The reason why cross-cultural psychology developed in the first place is because people were really concerned that American psychology was based on very strange samples, ignoring 70 percent of the world. This WEIRD idea has been with us for a long time. I would say that, no, there’s not this discontinuous nature where there’s one society that’s so unusual. The difference in the United States from other cultures is in the type of individualism that we endorse. We’re not just focused on privacy and on independence. We’re focused on what I call vertical individualism. That’s competitive individualism. That is different than other Western cultures like Scandinavia, Australia, that are much more horizontal in their individualism. So the WEIRDness of the United States, in many ways, is its form of individualism. I think that there’s a lot of ways we can examine cultural constructs and find variation around the world. We don’t, in this country, actually seem all that rational to me in the way that WEIRD might predict. General question about what we can never know about culture. As you know, a lot of people who work in areas with large numbers of data points and well-specified models — they’re very critical of cross-cultural papers, because they think we don’t really know the true model; we can’t write it down. There are all these big interaction effects at the macro level. We’re not sure how to trace them. Maybe the tests have low statistical power, or it’s hard to come up with causal tests at all. What’s your response to this kind of criticisms? Is your view, “Well, they’re misunderstanding the econometrics; this is actually as good as a lot of other empirical work”? Or is your view, “We know culture is important. It’s either this or the anthropologists, and this is telling us something”? How do you place yourself in this debate on cross-cultural econometrics?…

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