Anthro-Vision

A good passage

To understand why Big Data alone cannot explain consumer culture it pays to look at a set of ideas about the ‘weird’ nature of Westerners developed by Joseph Henrich, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Henrich started his career as an aeronautical engineer before moving into anthropology, where he studied the interaction between culture, human biology, and the environment (or a blend of physical and cultural anthropology.) As part of that, he did extensive fieldwork among the Mapuche people in Chile. However Henrich’s findings ended up revealing less about the Mapuche per se – and more about the nature of the Western psychology profession.⁷ This profession has flourished in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by offering useful insights about how human brains function (or do not). But there is a catch, Henrich notes: psychologists have created many of their theories by studying the subjects they have closest to hand – student volunteers, who are typically Western, highly educated, and in their late teens or early twenties. Thus while psychology research purports to present universal findings, what it actually shows is how Western-educated brains work. When Henrich did the same experiments on the Mapuche, he got different results.

These differences fall into several broad buckets. One is the degree to which a brain solves problems and absorbs information through sequential reasoning (A leads to B leads to C) and highly selective observation, instead of looking at an entire situation in a holistic way. The former is associated with Western Enlightenment-era thought and reinforced by the pervasive habit of reading with an alphabet – or what Western students (hopefully) do all day. Thus when Henrich showed American students pictures of situations and asked them to interpret these, the students tended to ‘zero in on and track the centre of attention [in a picture] while ignoring the context and background.’⁸ Logical analysis – and tunnel vision – ruled. However the second, holistic approach is often found in cultures without writing, like the Mapuche: they used ‘contextually appropriate holistic relationships to support their choices.’ When Henrich did similar experiments elsewhere, he noticed that the populations of other countries fell into two buckets, albeit on a spectrum (and with differences inside countries, as well as between them). Analytical thinking was more dominant in the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, New Zealand, Germany, the United States, and the UK. Holistic thought was more widespread in Serbia, Bolivia, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Romania, and Thailand.

A second realm of difference was identity. When Henrich asked people ‘Who am I?’ he found that Americans and Europeans tended to answer with personal attributes (like job), while non-Western people such as the Samburu, Kenyans, or Cook Islanders defined themselves in relation to family and talked about kinship and community roles. ‘Focusing on one’s attributes and achievements over one’s roles and relationships is a key element in a psychological package that I’ll clump together as the individualism complex,’ he wrote.⁹ A third point was morality: when Henrich asked whether it would be acceptable to lie or cheat for a family member, in Western societies people usually said no, since they assumed that morals and rules should be universally applied; however. non-Western groups tended to say yes, since it was presumed that rules could change according to context.¹⁰ Henrich cited a startling natural experiment that occurred with New York parking tickets. Until 2002, diplomats to the United Nations enjoyed immunity if they received a city parking ticket. Despite there being no penalty for parking in the wrong place, ‘diplomats from the UK, Sweden, Canada, Australia and a few other countries got a total of zero tickets’ in this period since they obeyed the rules even if there was no cost to breaking them. But ‘diplomats from Egypt, Chad, [and] Bulgaria accumulat[ed] over 100’ tickets for each person; for them, morality was more context-dependent.

Westerners might react to this by criticising non-Western cultures as ‘strange’. But Henrich argues that it is actually the attitudes of American and European societies that are ‘strange’ since ‘throughout most of human history, people grew up enmeshed in dense family networks . . . In these regulated relational worlds, people’s survival, identity, security, marriages and success depended on the health and prosperity of kin-based networks.’ Western societies are outliers since ‘people tend to be highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-orientated, nonconformist and analytical... and see ourselves as unique beings . . . and prefer a sense of control and making our own choices.¹¹ He describes these traits as WEIRD – Western, Educated, Individualistic, Rich, and Democratic.

This distinction matters if you want to understand consumer culture. WEIRD cultures tend to assume that the individual is at the centre of their world; society is the derivative of the individual, not the other way around, and individuals are presumed to have choice about their destiny and identity. Indeed, in the twenty-first century that concept has been extended to a once-unimaginable degree since digital technologies foster the idea that consumers can fashion the world around them to their desires, customising music choices, food, coffee, media, or almost anything. We all live in our version of the movie The Matrix. Or, if you prefer, in the era of ‘Gen C’ – or Generation Customisation.

That creates the impression that Western consumers are driven by individual choice, hence the frequent employment of the insights of psychology and Big Data to show (respectively) how human brains function and what individuals are doing online. But there is a catch: although consumers think their decisions are driven by entirely rational, independent choices – in line with WEIRD ideals – this is rarely true. Consumers define their identity using symbols and rituals inherited from their surroundings. They are shaped by group loyalties and social relations. They operate in spatial patterns partly created by others. The ideas they absorb from their environment can be deeply contradictory and multilayered. However, they may not admit this – either to themselves or others – precisely because they have a WEIRD presumption that problems can or should be solved with logical, sequential thought – and tunnel vision. Thus while modern consumer culture arose out of WEIRD values, it cannot be understood just by using a WEIRD mode of thought. Western consumers are more complex and contradictory than they realise.