Michele Gelfand: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? It’s a great question. Every method that any of us use is very limited in what we can say about any particular study. I’ve always been a big fan of theory, testing theory with as many methods as humanly possible. That’s how I think about cross-cultural psychology. We can’t take one paper that has 35 nations and come to any massive conclusion about that or strong conclusion about that. We have to then try to replicate that theory with other methods, whether it’s using computational models, using neuroscience, looking to traditional societies with totally different methods. We just spent a couple years coding over a hundred samples in terms of the strength of norms in various different domains with ethnographies. I’m really curious to see, with my work, can I see the theory replicating with different types of methods? My group at Maryland is really fiercely interdisciplinary because we want to bring in methods that can help us replicate theory. That’s my approach to these issues, given that any particular study is going to be flawed in many ways. Your own work aside, what would be a few generalizations about culture that you think we’ve learned empirically and follow from theory that you more or less agree with or believe in?…

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