So in this lecture, I want to discuss three ways in which societies differ. And the first is the continuum of individualism versus collectivism. These are broads ways of thinking about how, how individuals think and reason about all sorts of things, including morality. So as a way to introduce this, this is, an, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and in this passage, he's going to describe one conception of a person. So he says, the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against each other, against other such wholes and against its social and natural background. Now to me, this is a perfectly reasonable and, and rational way to think about a person. But then he goes on, this is just part of the quote. He says, this is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures. And Geertz is saying, that view you have of this distinct individual, with its own goals and motivations, set apart from everybody else. If you share this view, that may well be because you've been raised in a culture like mine, which is brought up to be individualistic. More generally there's a, a, a contrast between societies of the individualistic sort and a collectivist sort. And a collectivist sort is, as the name tells you, there's more emphasis on the collective, on groups and relationships. So to unpack it a little bit, societies that are individualistic and the prototypical society for this would be United States of America, Western Europe, think in terms of individual goals and initiatives. People are thought of as independent, there's the identity you have of, of yourself, there's the importance of being creative, maybe an importance of being different, there's the value of autonomy, there's less need to conform to a society, and there's more emphasis on self reliance. So if you hear that and you're nodding, that's exactly right, you're probably an individualist person in an individualist society. Collectivism, on the other hand, motivates different ways of thinking about people and different values. So, in terms, they would think in terms of group goals and achievement. The idea of not independence, but interdependence, an identity not as an I, but as a we or an us. Conforming to a group or society is very important, and so, values, like being creative and being different matter less. There's more of a distinction probably because of the focus on groups. There's more of a distinction with your in group, the group you belong to, and out group, those who don't belong to your group. And working with others and cooperating is the norm. So to refuse to cooperate and, and wanting to be independent or stand out is seen, by people from within the society, as shameful. You know, everybody must rely on each other for support. Now, you know, this is a broad way of thinking and you might think its, sort of, it's a stereotype in, in, in a clear sense, which is, you're taking enormous numbers of people. Countries upon countries and continents and saying, you guys you're individualistic, you're collectivist. But, there's some truth to this. There's some to truth to this from people who analyze that, the how societies work, what people say about societies, that they live in, and also, from experimental studies. So, for instance, some of these studies typically contrast, the United States, again, a very individualist country, versus China or India, which are more collectivist. And you ask people to do simple things, you ask them to describe this image, this fish tank. And it turns out that American subjects, when when describing thif, this fish tank, would tend to start off by talking about the fish, the individual fish, they'll describe the fish. Individuals from collectivist societies are more likely to describe, not the, the specific individuals in the scene, but rather, the relationships that they fall into. We'll take another example. You give people a, a triad of some notepaper, a newspaper, and a pencil. And you say, there's three items here, which two go together? Well, there's been a lot of studies done, and people from a society like United States will tend to say, you know, the notepaper and the newspaper go together because they're both made of paper. They both fall into the same category. Well, individuals from more collectivist societies would tend, often, to say, well, say that the the pencil goes with the notepaper, because you could use the pencil to write on notepaper. It's now not the category that matters, but the relationship between the two things. Plainly, there's no right answer here. But there's different ways to think about the question, and those different ways will, sort of, tap what you think is important. And such studies find that categorization and individuality is important for people, from some parts of the world, but relationships and dependence, interaction, is important from other parts of the world. It shouldn't be hard to see how this could connect to moral issues. so, for instance, in one study, Morris and Peng, did series of experiments which, which contrasted people in China, collectivist, versus people in United States, individualistic. And, what they found was, that when it came to reporting, talking about moral actions or bad moral, bad moral acts, the Chinese would tend to focus on interactions, on situational causes, while the Americans would tend to focus on on internal causes. And this was found not only in, sort of, in how people would respond in the lab, also found in newspaper reports. So, you know, roughly, you pick up a Chinese newspaper, you hear about a murder, they'll tell you about where he was raised, who was around him, what were the forces shaping his life? An American, we're more like, there was this guy, and he, and this is, and, and these are his grievances and this is, this is his upbringing, and this is where he comes from. It's all about him, and a lot less about the context that surrounds him. So that's one quick way to, to divvy up societies. Here's another way. You could split up the world into societies that are tight versus societies that are loose. And this was actually explored in a lovely paper recently published in Journal of Science, of Science, with many authors. Where, what they did was, they took people from 33 nations, a nice, diverse, very large sample, and asked them, sort of, questions about how, how tight or how loose their society is. And, and here's what I mean by tight or loose. So for instance, they would ask them questions like there are many social norms that people are supposed to abide by, in this country. Do you strongly disagree, moderately disagree, slightly agree, strongly agree? And this isn't, so, so how much is there to this social norms? Social norms, if there's a lot of norms you're tight, if there's fewer, you're loose. To go back to the end in this country, if someone acts in an inappropriate way, others will strongly disapprove. Again, in a, in a tight place, you'd imagine people would say, yes, they would strongly disapprove, in a loose place, eh, people do what they want. They also ask them to rate the appropriateness of 12 behaviors across 15 situations. The behaviors included eating, laughing, kissing, reading a newspaper, flirting, bargaining. And the situations ranged from being at the bank, being at a restaurant, the city sidewalk, a workplace, a movie. So you have 180 combinations. And this is another way of measuring, how loose a society, how much can they get away with? How restr, and that would make them loose, how restricted are they in what they can do? And that would make them tight. Now it turns out, which is really cool, that the ratings cohere. And this goes back to the question of whether or not there's systematicity in differences. So you could've imagined it's all random. What a country thinks about how you act on a beach had nothing to do with what a country thinks about how you act on a city sidewalk. What we think about whether or not people disapprove of, of certain social acts has nothing to do with, with behavior in different contexts. But of course, this isn't how it worked. The questions would cohere. People would, countries would show a certain co, consistency, such that, it made sense to put them on a continuum from very tight to very loose. And then, some interesting findings come out from this. So, if you factor out GDP, roughly factor how rich a country is, it turns out tight countries have more autocratic rule, less open media, fewer rights and liberties, more police, less crime, and more religion. Now, none of these things are the things that, that people were asked. But it turned out their answers, on how loose and how tight their country was, predicted these facts about a country. If you're interested, you can go online, see where your very own country ranks on the tightness and looseness scale. And then they found something interesting. They asked, why are some countries tight and other countries loose? And, the theory they came up with was, that tightness is a response to threat. So, if things, if things are going badly, for internal reasons or external reasons,, the country will tighten up behavior as a part of a way to respond to it. And, exactly, how that works and exactly why that works is an interesting topic in itself. But, what they find is, that the countries that are tight have a higher population density, fewer natural resources, less available food, more natural disasters, more war, and more disease. And this is extremely interesting work because it takes the, these fundamentally fascinating questions such as, why are people like that? Why are the Japanese this way, and the Canadians that way, and, and Argentinians that way? You know, we could explain it. We could categorize it. And to some extent, we could explain the forces that made them what they are. The third way to divvy up countries brings us back to a person we've discussed before, the anthropologist Richard Shweder. Shweder speculates that there are three, moral foundations, there are three types of ethics, that we can draw upon. There's an ethics of community, which involves how you think of yourself relative to other people of a community. Notions like hierarchy, notions like your in-group versus your out-group. There's an ethics of autonomy, or individual rights. And there's an ethics of divinity involving issues of purity and sanctity. And Shweder argues that some countries emphasize some of these virtues over others. And, you know, he said, he pointed out that in America, in most of America, we strongly emphasize autonomy, individual rights. We have a language of rights a language of fairness and care, but not so much in terms of notions like community, not so much in terms of notions of divinity. These notions he pointed are not absent, and we're going to see them later on. But they're not, they don't tend to be enmeshed in law or enmeshed in custom the same way. And they also don't tend to be as enmeshed in everyday moral intuitions. So he did some field work here. He did some field work in the United States and I, in a specific, I, I think it may well have been Chicago, and somewhere in India, a small village in India. And to illustrate these differences, he gave people moral scenarios. Said here's a scenario, you think this is right or you think it's wrong? And he found that there was systematic differences, in how people responded to the scenarios. So, here's some of his examples. I'm going to give you some cases that everybody thought was wrong, the Americans thought were wrong and the Indians thought were wrong. Case one, while walking, a man saw a dog sleeping in the road. He walked up to it and kicked it. Everybody finds that wrong. Or here's another one, a father said to his son, if you do well on the exam, I will buy you a pen. The son did well on the exam, but the father did not give him anything. Wrong. And, and I would think that finding these sorts of things wrong may well be human universals. To intentionally harm something that may be beloved, to to lie, to break a promise for no reason at all. A large part, what I think it is to be human is to be bothered by that. But Shweder was more interested, as we are here, in the differences. So here are some examples of of, of cases were people differed. A young married woman went alone to see a movie without informing her husband. When she returned home, her husband said, if you do it again, I will beat you black and blue. She did it again. He beat her black and blue. What do you think of the husband? Americans thought the husband was terrible. The Indians did not. The Indians thought he did nothing wrong. A man that had a married son and a married daughter. After his death, his son claimed most of the property. His daughter got little. Judge the son. Americans thought the son was doing something wrong, it was not equitable. The Indians thought it was fine. This is how we do things. This is, there's differences between how you treat men and women. And these differences are morally okay. In these examples, the Americans found these things wrong, the Indians did not. But other examples are sort of flipped. In a family, a 25 year old son addresses his father by his first name. Americans say, huh, that's fine. Indians said, it's disrespectful. A woman cooked rice and went to eat with her brother, husband, and elder brother, then she ate with them. Americans say, what could be wrong with that? Indians say, you're violating rules for how you should be socializing. A woman in your community eats fish two or three times a week. Americans say huh, what's wrong with that? Turns out, that in Indian culture, that, that, that Sweder studied, fish is thought to have aphrodisiac-ical properties can encourage lust, and so, it's very wrong. After defecation, a woman did not change her clothes before cooking. Again, Americans go, huh? The Indian population Shweder studies said, this is wrong. There are certain rules about purity and cleanliness, and this women is vi, intentionally violating them. Shweder suggested that each of these three moral foundations, that express themselves in different ways across different countries, has a corresponding emotion. And this is known as the CAD triad or CAD triad. If this works out this way, it's a beautiful miracle of English that, that the names of the emotions correspond, in first letters, to the name of the type of morality. So violations of community elicits emotions of contempt. Somebody who turns his back on this country, I feel contempt towards him. Violations of autonomy elicit emotions of anger. Someone slaps a child for no reason, cheats somebody else, anger. While violations of divinity someone has sex with a sheep, someone someone eats the wrong thing, does the wrong thing in some way that's disgusting, elicits emotion of disgust. Well, this brings our quick survey of different theories as to how societies differ, it brings it to an end. But we're going to see the CAD triad again, because we're going to start to revisit the same sorts of issues, some of the same theories, when we move away from societal differences and then move to explore differences within societies, within countries. And that will the topic of the next lecture. [MUSIC]
