Episode 343: Culture and the Concept of a Person

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_01] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] [SPEAKER_09] Would you be a musician if nobody ever heard you? Sure.

[00:00:21] [SPEAKER_05] Why? Because I love music. It's in my head, I can't get it out.

[00:00:25] [SPEAKER_09] So you listen?

[00:00:26] Yeah.

[00:00:27] [SPEAKER_09] You're hearing it yourself?

[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_05] I hear it now.

[00:00:33] [SPEAKER_04] I'm waiting!

[00:01:18] [SPEAKER_03] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, in our most recent Patreon bonus episode, we announced the next bonus series we're going to embark upon. A deep dive into another prestige TV OG, David Simon and Ed Burns' The Wire. How are you feeling about that? Any second thoughts?

[00:01:40] [SPEAKER_02] No, because my fickle ass committed to one season. Yeah. Because if I don't like it after one season, I mean, we're going to like it. We're going to love it. Yeah. My fear is not that I won't like it. My fear is that I'll love it and doing four, maybe five, but four seasons of it will be just years. We're going to be like- Old.

[00:02:02] [SPEAKER_03] Older.

[00:02:03] Yeah.

[00:02:04] [SPEAKER_02] But I'm excited about it. I feel like, you know, we've done a couple of like, you know, Lucy's, but I like the regularity.

[00:02:11] [SPEAKER_03] Lucy's?

[00:02:11] [SPEAKER_02] You know Lucy, like a loose cigarette.

[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_03] Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. I was never a smoker.

[00:02:17] [SPEAKER_02] I wasn't either.

[00:02:18] [SPEAKER_03] You just like know what words mean. Yeah.

[00:02:20] [SPEAKER_02] I was going to say it's a black thing. Oh yeah.

[00:02:25] [SPEAKER_03] You're still so behind because of your slander of sinners.

[00:02:29] [SPEAKER_02] I'm looking forward to translating the wire for you.

[00:02:33] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:02:33] [SPEAKER_02] If you need that.

[00:02:34] [SPEAKER_03] White people writing black eye log, like Supreme example of that. But yeah, it's been a long time since I've rewatched it and I have rewatched it a few times and enjoyed it every time. But I remember the last time I was like, okay, I think I need to take a break. And so I'm excited to go back. Like there's some things I don't fully remember and I think it'll be fun.

[00:02:55] [SPEAKER_03] And then there's a ton to talk about too. Like, even though like the technology is not up to date, I think the politics of it are, you know, more salient than ever.

[00:03:05] [SPEAKER_02] So yeah, I'm excited, but I haven't watched it in years. So especially that first season, I'm really looking forward to seeing like what I think now.

[00:03:13] [SPEAKER_03] I think if we watch the first season, you're going to be wanting to do the next one, but you know, you've only committed to one. I've only committed to one for that matter. That's right. You know?

[00:03:22] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. But also I think listeners have been asking us to do The Wire for a long time.

[00:03:28] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. So we do it for you, our beloved Patreon supporters. But today this is for everybody, not just our beloved Patreon supporters. We are going to be talking about two papers. In the main segment, we're going to talk about a paper by Richard Schwader. Like basically this is a Richard Schweder podcast with occasional movie episodes in between.

[00:03:52] [SPEAKER_03] Richard Schwader and Edmund J. Bourne does the concept of the person very cross-culturally. Really good cultural psychology paper on the self and the concept of personal identity. And yeah, I'm excited to talk about that. In the first segment, we are going to talk about that paper's evil doc bullganger. It is.

[00:04:18] [SPEAKER_02] Like anti-matter version.

[00:04:20] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, it's like Bad Cooper. Twin Peaks. Bad Cooper is awesome. Yeah, he's going to kick ass. So that's a bad example of that. This paper is called The Killing Baby Hitler Dilemma, A Novel Paradigm for Studying Causal Temporal Distance in Moral Decision Making by Margarita Pucci and Lorenzo Gagliardi. Very good. Yeah.

[00:04:50] [SPEAKER_03] And we are going to talk about this in offensive Italian accents the whole time.

[00:04:55] [SPEAKER_02] It's a spicy meatball.

[00:04:59] [SPEAKER_03] It's a very bad man. Bambino Hitler è morto. Il morto. I kill him. I get my shoes wet. I put a nice suit and I go in and I kill him. I guess you keep your... Yeah, that's... I didn't. I got that wrong. Listen, it's a novel paradigm. It's a novel paradigm. We'll figure it out. But yeah, so this paper comes courtesy of a friend of the show, Vlad.

[00:05:29] [SPEAKER_03] How do you pronounce his last name? Chittac. Chittac.

[00:05:32] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. I mean, I don't know. It's like a Romanian. So you might know more than I, but that's how people say it. That's pretty good. Yeah.

[00:05:37] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. And yeah, he posted it. It was a vague tweet. It was like, I love moral psychology.

[00:05:45] [SPEAKER_02] I think he might not love it.

[00:05:47] [SPEAKER_03] Maybe not. Yeah. And if that's true, I also don't love it, which we can talk about. But let's first be charitable and give a presentation of it. You want to do that?

[00:05:58] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. So this is... I mean, they shoot themselves a little in the foot by calling it the Killing Baby Hitler Dilemma, colon, a novel paradigm for studying causal temporal distance in moral decision making. When all they've done is give a new moral dilemma that other people have thought of to a bunch of random Italians.

[00:06:16] [SPEAKER_03] A new ludicrous moral dilemma.

[00:06:18] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And so the dilemma is, everybody's familiar, I think, with the thought experiment of, if you have a time machine, you go back in time and you see Baby Hitler, do you kill him? To prevent, you know, almost certainly prevent the death of however 11 million people he killed during World War II and before. And what they do is they give people that version as well as two other versions. You go back in time and you see Hitler's father as a baby, huh?

[00:06:45] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Interesting.

[00:06:46] [SPEAKER_02] Or you go back even earlier and you see Hitler's grandfather as a baby. Do you kill them? Yeah. And so they gave a bunch of people this as well as a trolley dilemma, like the footbridge version of the dilemma, pushing a man off of a footbridge in order to save workers stuck on the track. The Oxford utilitarianism scale that has these two dimensions, like instrumental harm and beneficence. And I think that's it.

[00:07:15] [SPEAKER_02] And the goal of this is what? Is to see, I guess, whether or not there is a temporal... Causal temporal. Yeah. Whether like time is playing a role in people's intuitions about whether to be utilitarian in these dilemmas or deontological. And I mean, like the main finding is that people increasingly are more reluctant to not kill the baby if it's the father or the grandfather.

[00:07:44] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:07:44] [SPEAKER_02] Compared to if it's Hitler, which like makes sense. You know?

[00:07:49] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, yeah. Like, I mean, the whole thing, I don't know if you agree with this because you seem like you were a fan of this paper at first. But like, the whole thing is so absurd just in general. You go back in time and you are in the shoes of a man named Father Johann Kuehberger.

[00:08:11] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Apparently a real, like somebody who reportedly actually saved baby Hitler from drowning.

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. So it's like you travel back in time and then you become this person. And then the question is, like, are you going to be just as inclined to not save the grandfather or the father? And this is in aid of, as far as I can tell, what they say. Despite its theoretical contributions, the present study is not without its limitations.

[00:08:39] [SPEAKER_03] First, although the KBH paradigm, they've already called it a paradigm, the killing baby Hitler paradigm introduces the dimension of causal temporal distance. It remains a highly idealized and hypothesized scenario, much like the trolley and footbridge dilemmas.

[00:08:55] [SPEAKER_03] I would say even more so because you have to like do something that's like metaphysically impossible and like even just trying to think about like what it means to go back in time to be another person or like be wearing their clothes and have their name or something.

[00:09:10] [SPEAKER_02] You're so arrogant about your commitment to the laws of physics.

[00:09:13] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:09:13] [SPEAKER_02] The scientism that I hear. A little bit.

[00:09:17] [SPEAKER_03] However, they say the primary aim of this study was not to maximize ecological validity. Well, that's a good thing. Yeah. A few. But rather to demonstrate that moral preferences often treated as stable dispositional traits can be systematically influenced by contextual variables such as the causal temporal structure of a dilemma.

[00:09:39] [SPEAKER_03] This is what I mean where it's the evil doppelganger of the other paper because it's like, oh, but actually like context might matter. You know, like it might matter whether you're going back in time and killing Hitler or killing Hitler's father or Hitler's that that's context in this thing.

[00:09:57] [SPEAKER_03] But I guess like it seems like this is one of those papers where some people think this absolutely absurd thing, which is that I guess people are either straightforward, like in every case, deontologists or they're straightforward consequentialists. And we have shown that that's not true because sometimes there'll be more consequentialists if you're killing the actual person who's going to be killing a bunch of people later rather than their parents.

[00:10:26] [SPEAKER_03] First of all, who would think that like we're always deontologists or consequentialists? Like that's crazy.

[00:10:33] [SPEAKER_02] I know. But I mean, I know people think it, but like, I guess people like at some point might have, you know, like that, but this is like the reason that you and I met was because I was talking about that Chip and Tyrone paper that that I wrote, which was like trying to make that point among others that it doesn't make sense to think that people are one of these things. But here they're just like, no, no, like they are consequentialists or deontologists. Like we're just like kind of pushing them. We're manipulating them. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:03] [SPEAKER_02] Context matters. And it's like, yeah, like we've been doing studies showing how much context matters to the point that I don't think dilemmas are a valid way of studying anything. I don't think there's no there there.

[00:11:14] [SPEAKER_03] No. Right. What is this showing? Like I know they say they're very upfront of this isn't supposed to be an ecologically valid paper. But then it's like, but so then what are we actually doing? You've, there is this existing paradigm for some reason where we test people. And again, like I know you did it and I probably quoted these studies in my work too, but that was like, you know, 15 years ago.

[00:11:38] [SPEAKER_03] Like I, it's like, and even then you were saying, when did we start thinking that the best way to test whether people are consequentialists is whether they'll jerk off into a fucking chicken. And like, that was like an early thing that you said. I remember like probably, you know, like first year we were doing this and this one is even more absurd. Like the idea that this is even a deontological or consequentialist judgment is I think completely absurd. I know.

[00:12:03] [SPEAKER_02] So there, you know, I guess the, the charitable motivation for like combining these things is that like, okay, there's this trolleyology that's exists, but then there's this other work on judgment showing like temporal discounting and people haven't seemed to add temporal dimensions to their stuff. So we're going to do it, but it's not a very, like, again, to call it a paradigm within just one dilemma with these three different variables. And they say this in the paper too.

[00:12:30] [SPEAKER_02] Like it's, I mean, one of the reasons why I might be more reluctant to kill Hitler's father or his grandfather is probably if you're getting me in the mode of breaking metaphysical rules like this, I still am going to think it seems just so far from the action that's blameworthy that like it feels extra wrong or like the causality is diluted.

[00:12:50] [SPEAKER_02] Like how far back, like if you go back a hundred generations to kill somebody, like it just seems like, well, of course, of course, the farther away I'm from the actual person doing it, like the worse I'll feel about doing it.

[00:13:01] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. No. So there's that. Again, I feel like you're even conceding too much by like even saying that. No, no, no. I know. But I'm saying playing by their rules. Playing by their rules. It's so problematic. Right. You would think maybe, oh, that's their point, right? Yeah. No, that's not their point. Their point is simply just the amount of time between like when you're making the decision.

[00:13:22] [SPEAKER_03] Now, of course, we're making the decision now and we're just imagining ourselves either making the decision like 40 years before like the Holocaust or like 80 or 90 years before the Holocaust. But that's supposed to be the big difference. And like I have to read this last part of this paragraph.

[00:13:39] [SPEAKER_03] They say, in this sense, the KBH dilemma should be understood as a controlled experimental tool for studying how agents, actions, and consequences are distributed across time within a counterfactual moral scenario rather than as a direct simulation of real world ethical situation.

[00:14:27] [SPEAKER_02] Okay.

[00:14:28] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, if you gave me this, it really would depend on like the day, my mood, like what I would say about this.

[00:14:35] [SPEAKER_02] See, that's the point they're making. They say like, look, it's been assumed that there's stability and we're showing there's no stability. Even though, again, we've shown that there's no stability. Yeah. For quite some time.

[00:14:46] [SPEAKER_03] And also, like it was stupid to think there was stability. Like that was idiotic, you know?

[00:14:51] [SPEAKER_02] But, you know, I remember talking to Josh Green. I don't know if his views have changed. But when back then when I did the Chip Tyrone studies where what we did was manipulate the name of the person to be stereotypically black or white and show that people's intuitions flip, whether if they were conservative or liberal. I remember talking to him and saying like, don't you think that what that means is that like you're giving people these really abstract things. But as soon as you infuse like anything like that's meaningful to people, like their intuitions could totally flip.

[00:15:18] [SPEAKER_02] Like, and I was trying to say, don't you think that means that people aren't actually utilitarians or actually deontologists when they're answering these, but they're just answering a specific question. Yes. Which will get us to the next segment, I guess, like the concreteness of it. But like what they're answering is like that thing. And he was just like, he treated it as if it was noise.

[00:15:37] [SPEAKER_03] I know.

[00:15:37] [SPEAKER_02] Like, oh, that's a cute finding, but it's just like what you're doing is you're masking the signal, the thing that people actually are.

[00:15:44] [SPEAKER_03] We weren't in our right minds back then when we took this stuff seriously. That's kind of my point. Like I'm not blaming anyone then or if I do, I blame everybody, definitely including myself and you. No, don't blame me. I'm saying I never believed that. Do you understand what I'm saying? We took it seriously is my point. I didn't believe it either, but I took it seriously. I took the method seriously. Yeah. I didn't think it was showing what they said they were showing. Yes. That's what I mean. Yeah.

[00:16:08] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is disheartening to read such a fast. You know, it's not a great journal. It's one study. The person's out of academia. It's still depressing. Yeah.

[00:16:19] [SPEAKER_03] It's kind of like a philosophy psychology journal. Still though, you know, like, so there's going to be like the better version of it, like by Fiery Cushman or something. Or like, and I know, no, but like, I think like we have to take responsibility both for our role back then. But then also like we've sat back for too long and pretended that this is like normal. And it's like, yes, well, this is the kind of stuff we have to like, like, I think like this can't continue like this, you know?

[00:16:48] [SPEAKER_02] Like, yeah, I like to think that the field has moved on. Yeah. Like this is a particularly glaring exception. And maybe people are still using this stuff in some studies. But like, as far as I know, moral psychology doesn't think that that's the way to go.

[00:17:04] [SPEAKER_03] I'm sure people are still doing it. I mean, like we we've done like a bunch of like papers like this. Right.

[00:17:09] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Remember the big that big ass study that the MIT in collaboration did, like with the driving. Oh, God. Yeah. Like where they manipulate whether the person was old or young or like it was three people. It was like a priest.

[00:17:22] [SPEAKER_03] It was a robber with like a bag and a dollar sign on it.

[00:17:25] [SPEAKER_02] A hamburgler.

[00:17:27] [SPEAKER_03] And like, yeah, like a mask, like covering his eyes.

[00:17:30] [SPEAKER_02] I want to introduce a new paradigm though. Yeah. Okay. So it is the shallow pond.

[00:17:35] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:17:35] [SPEAKER_02] And you know, it's the shallow pond. Do you spoil your suit? And I don't remember what the monetary value singer puts on the suit originally. Yeah. But I think if you made it $10,000, maybe, you know, maybe $20,000.

[00:17:49] [SPEAKER_03] And I go in and I get it all wet.

[00:17:53] [SPEAKER_02] Nobody's investigated the fiscal dimension to see how that might influence your intuitions.

[00:17:59] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. I mean, like, you know, just the thought like also like, are you going to be born? You know, like if you don't save like all of those things. Like also, I mean, they say, I didn't have the heart to read how they ruled out butterfly effects considerations.

[00:18:15] [SPEAKER_02] I think they just say we stipulated that. Further research should investigate.

[00:18:21] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:18:22] [SPEAKER_02] Here's what I want to know, though. Why don't we do the kind version of this? Why don't we say like, suppose you could go back and let Hitler into the art school that he really wanted to get into? You know? Why are people wanting to kill the baby Hitler? Why don't they just give him a hug? Maybe Hitler needed a hug.

[00:18:36] [SPEAKER_03] Maybe he needed a hug. Yeah. No, but you know who doesn't need a hug is like people who are still doing this because I do think it's like it just perpetuates. And so like I think and I don't mean this in like a fascist way, but we need to get some unmarked vans and just round anybody up who's still doing this and passing it along to their students. And then we can send them like if we're consequentialists, we'll send them to one of those Bentham

[00:19:00] [SPEAKER_03] islands where they can just ram thought experiments together like drowning pond, Hitler, baby Hitler, kill, like let's put them together. And they can do models and logistical regression analyses to their heart's content in isolation. They have to be in isolation. Or if we're there, deontologists will send them to El Salvador either way.

[00:19:21] [SPEAKER_02] I have less strong feelings than you about those people, but I have those same exact feelings for the long termists. Like that brand of utilitarianism.

[00:19:30] [SPEAKER_03] That actually has effects on the world. Whereas this just has effects on a dying field.

[00:19:37] [SPEAKER_02] But you know what it does too? Like you're joking about like rounding up consequentialists. In unmarked vans. In unmarked vans. Also the deontologists. But like the people who really are, say like people who are real consequentialists, like real people who are like, no, yeah, I'm a utilitarian. They don't give a shit about these dilemmas. I wasn't talking about consequentialists. I was talking about people who do these kinds of... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just clarifying. Like one of the things that I think is a bad consequence of this is that people think of this as what utilitarianism is or consequentialism is.

[00:20:06] [SPEAKER_02] So like everything from psychology students to the people who read the New York Times science stuff about like they think that what it means to be a consequentialist is that you would push a fat guy onto the bridge. Like that's their take home.

[00:20:17] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, right. Instead of like, do you give a lot of money to...

[00:20:21] [SPEAKER_02] Exactly. Like do a little more, you know, charity work.

[00:20:24] [SPEAKER_03] Directly. Yeah. Yeah. No, I know. I think though that I don't know that this is more done by consequentialists than deontologists. Probably it is because they have that kind of rationalist data-driven mindset that would lead to these kinds of reductio ad absurdum studies. But like, I don't know. I just think they can't keep infecting others is my point. They need to be quarantined.

[00:20:50] [SPEAKER_02] You know what I'm going to do for our next episode? I'm actually going to, I'm curious like what the pattern of trolleyology studies has been over time.

[00:20:58] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:20:58] [SPEAKER_02] Because we might be winning. Like this is like a particularly bad example, but we might have been winning. Like all because of our conversation.

[00:21:04] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. I mean, but every once in a while we'll go in and we'll see like a paper. I don't know if this is the exact example of it, but do you remember the dehumanization?

[00:21:13] [SPEAKER_02] The insect dehumanization? That's the one.

[00:21:15] [SPEAKER_03] Of cyclists with the insect scale. Yeah. And you see those kinds of things. And, and I don't know if it was that one, but it was another equally absurd one where you're like, this was in like, uh, whatever journal, uh, you know.

[00:21:29] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. One battle at a time. The dehumanization literature, you know, I feel like we haven't rung that bell as strongly.

[00:21:36] [SPEAKER_03] Like, I mean, round them up too. Like, I think like, you know, we've erred on the side of not rounding up these people. So, and so I think like, it's not working, you know, first they came for the trial.

[00:21:47] [SPEAKER_02] Like the visual perception people are cowering in a corner with, for fear of like, when we'll get to them.

[00:21:56] [SPEAKER_03] I'll be like the new Hitler, you know, like, but this is my cause.

[00:22:00] [SPEAKER_02] Do you think that these authors felt some pressure to not use Mussolini as the example? Yeah, exactly. I feel like they've been compromised.

[00:22:09] [SPEAKER_03] It just doesn't work. There's something about Mussolini, maybe it's because of the clips you always see of him. And you know, the fact that, you know, the, the, the trains ran on time. I don't know. Like in Germany, it seemed like, it just seemed like if you were going to like hate a fascist thing, there was this other one that we've just decided that's the one that matters. Mussolini was just a funny guy that would like cross his arms and.

[00:22:35] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. He wasn't as like rabid, you know, he probably didn't do meth nearly with like the gusto that Hitler did.

[00:22:41] [SPEAKER_03] He just seems more like a Looney Tunes character. You know?

[00:22:47] [SPEAKER_02] I think he termed fascism. He coined the term fascism. Oh, nice. See? He'll be remembered.

[00:22:54] [SPEAKER_03] Now I'm sure he did terrible things. I don't really know what they are, but I'm sure they were terrible. Now let's talk about Japan. All right. Anything more to say about this? No, but KBH is ballsy.

[00:23:07] [SPEAKER_02] I admire their balls, you know, KBH paradigm. The KBH paradigm. Do you think it's going to take off? It's going to take off for me because I'm going to like go back every once in a while and I'll be like, but how would this work with the KBH paradigm? And then, and then you'll be like, what?

[00:23:22] [SPEAKER_03] I'm like, you know, you don't remember the paradigm shifting. You know what I think they like, this could totally branch off in so many fruitful directions. Like, you know, you compare this with some of the kin selection studies and then you start like looking at like Hitler's cousin, you know, and like, and see, or imagine you are Hitler's cousin, you know, like there's so many like evolutionary psychology variations.

[00:23:46] [SPEAKER_02] You can teleport into the body of a random, like, German. Sky's the limit.

[00:23:53] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. No, totally. That's why it's such a fruitful paradigm, new paradigm, because like it can connect with so many areas and we can really kind of crack the human mind. Variety 14B of the KBH paradigm variant. Did they do a validity thing? I feel like they did.

[00:24:11] [SPEAKER_02] I mean, they did like some construct validity because they gave people the utilitarianism scale and the footbridge dilemma. And it did not correlate with responses to the footbridge dilemma, which is kind of surprising.

[00:24:21] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. I mean, again, like, I feel like it's conceding too much to say that anything is surprising, but I guess. I don't know. I felt in a bad mood when I read this. So would you... I'm sorry.

[00:24:35] [SPEAKER_02] I'm sorry, Margarita.

[00:24:37] [SPEAKER_03] Oh, yeah. No. Yeah. Like, you've just been done what was taught to you and it's not your fault. It's not your fault.

[00:24:45] [SPEAKER_02] Were you going to ask me if I would kill him?

[00:24:47] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:24:47] [SPEAKER_02] Uh, no. Because, you know, Hitler wasn't that bad.

[00:24:54] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, he did. He kind of checked off one item on your agenda, I think, pretty well.

[00:24:59] [SPEAKER_02] No. I was going to go with the joke that Hitler isn't that bad. He killed Hitler.

[00:25:03] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. I just would worry that, like, you know, who knows what's going to happen, especially if you kill, like, Hitler's father.

[00:25:11] [SPEAKER_02] Somebody might have gone back in time and killed a guy who only killed three million Jews. And the result was Hitler.

[00:25:18] [SPEAKER_03] Right. I think it might have been way worse. Maybe Mussolini would have been the big dog and maybe he would have, like, killed way more people. We don't know. But he was always in the shadow of Hitler.

[00:25:27] [SPEAKER_02] Crossing his arms is funny.

[00:25:29] I did picture him.

[00:25:32] [SPEAKER_02] Just, like, saying something Italian and then just crossing his arms like a fucking rapper from the 80s. Like, yeah. What do you think about what I just said?

[00:25:39] [SPEAKER_03] Totally. That's what it is. That's my exact picture of him. Like, I feel like I've seen that video of him so many times and no other videos. Yeah. It's like a rapper that just finishes, like, the battle verse, like, and just like, fuck yeah. Sort of like side. Sort of like standing to the side. Got his hype man going crazy.

[00:26:02] [SPEAKER_05] All right.

[00:26:03] [SPEAKER_03] We'll be right back to talk about Psychology Done Well.

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[00:27:22] [SPEAKER_02] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the episode where we'd like to thank everybody for all of your support. We really appreciate it. Your messages. You're listening. Your ratings and reviews. You're telling other people to listen to us. Because everything counts and it matters to us. If you want to reach out to us, you can always email us. Verybadwizards at gmail.com. You can find us on Twitter. At Tamler. At Pease. Or at VeryBadWizards. You can join our active subreddit. Reddit.com. Slash r slash VeryBadWizards.

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[00:30:45] [SPEAKER_02] Our discussion of Schweder and Bourne's 1982 article, Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally? This was published in an edited volume called Cultural Conceptions of Mental Health and Therapy, weirdly. Then it got reprinted somewhere else. But this is an article, a very influential article, that challenges the idea of this sort of Western conception of what a person is.

[00:31:11] [SPEAKER_02] Like an autonomous individual that has these enduring dispositions and that is separable from their social roles. And it looks, using anthropological observations and data and discussing some previous anthropology, it looks at the difference in the conception of person across other cultures. So in this specific case, a population of Indians from Odia, which is where Schweder was doing a lot of his data collection.

[00:31:36] [SPEAKER_02] And he argues that whereas Americans describe people by their personality traits, like this person is generous or aggressive, the subjects in India are more likely to describe actual actions, behaviors, the social circumstances in the behavior, the relations. And what they argue is that these differences are fundamental to their conception of what a person is. And that they're not about like what some people have argued, like a deficit, like they're dumber.

[00:32:06] [SPEAKER_02] I feel like people would actually argue that. But rather this is just baked into like the metaphors that are guiding what it means to be a person.

[00:32:13] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:32:13] [SPEAKER_02] And this actually ended up being a real huge influence on cultural psychology. It spawned like a huge literature. I think one of the most influential papers in cultural psychology is a paper by Hazel Marcus and Shinobu Kitayama. Oh yeah, Marcus. In the early 90s. Yeah, Marcus and Kitayama that builds explicitly on this foundation and these concepts.

[00:32:39] [SPEAKER_03] And this paper is part of an already existing, if very young, anthropological tradition. Exactly. Clifford Geertz. That's what I like about Schweder though.

[00:32:49] [SPEAKER_02] Schweder is so good at bringing that stuff to like a language and like maybe not methods, but just bringing that research to psychologists. It's kind of handing it over to us in a way that we could understand. Because I don't think like we as psychologists go out of our way to read too much anthropology.

[00:33:06] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, like I associate this kind of view with Clifford Geertz. And, you know, I talked about this a lot in the Relative Justice book that I did. A lot of these studies, not this paper because I don't think I knew about it, but Marcus, Kitayama and Geertz. And there's a few others that is very much about like the different conceptions of the self. And it's really fascinating.

[00:33:30] [SPEAKER_03] What I like about Schrader, because now we really have done like, what is this, our third or fourth? Our third Schrader. In the last year, right?

[00:33:38] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah.

[00:33:38] [SPEAKER_03] So, you know, because of where the dialectic is, he's always arguing against either the idea that, oh, well, that's because these cultures are primitive and they don't know how to abstract and generalize because they've had so little schooling. And, you know, like some horrible view like that that I'm sure was around.

[00:33:59] [SPEAKER_02] Oh, I have a specific that I want to talk about.

[00:34:01] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. And also against the view that actually these are just surface differences and we all think the same. Like, I think he thinks these are real differences and we shouldn't necessarily conclude that just because they're different than the Western conception that they're inferior. That's a view. It's kind of a relativist view, but with some qualifications. But you can tell in every one of these papers, I think, that he thinks the other cultures are way better than us and more accurate than us.

[00:34:28] [SPEAKER_03] And like he has a lot of contempt for the like sort of Western individualist, like atomist view. And I think, you know, like he doesn't hide it. Like, you know, when he starts talking, when he starts digging into the Western idea of the self, he thinks it's like a product of our imagination. Like it can't be right that we think that people have traits independent of any context. That's who they are.

[00:34:52] [SPEAKER_03] The other thing I like about this paper that I'm excited to talk about is the kind of explanation that he offers that involves like how we're socialized when we're very young to value privacy. And like people knock on the door before they come into their three-year-old's room.

[00:35:08] [SPEAKER_02] Dude, I love that. That's what I was like texting me. I was like, it ends well, like with this discussion.

[00:35:12] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, it's so cool. Like I love stuff like that. I mean, I don't know if it's right, but like it strikes me as plausible. It's going to be something like that. Just a combination of all those things that just lead us to have a totally different understanding of like the boundaries between like the person and the world.

[00:35:31] [SPEAKER_02] And so it actually starts out with a lengthy discussion of the modes of explanation that you actually summarized pretty well in what you were just saying. What he calls the evolutionist view that the differences across cultures can be explained by them being primitive or uneducated. The universalist view that actually everybody's the same. We're just like, this is just surface data that's hiding the deep truth about the universality.

[00:35:55] [SPEAKER_02] But I do like how he starts off by granting that like, look, for the last hundred years, anthropologists have been telling us some crazy shit about other cultures. Right. And so he says, for over a hundred years, anthropologists have tried to make sense of alien idea systems. For over a hundred years, anthropologists have been confronted with all sorts of incredible and often unbelievable beliefs, as well as all sorts of incredible and often unbelievable accounts of other people's beliefs.

[00:36:17] [SPEAKER_02] A review of the history of the anthropological attempt to translate the meaning of oracles and witchcraft, wandering and reincarnated souls, magical therapies, unusual ideas about procreation and all the other exotic ideational formations that have come their way would reveal, we believe, a tendency to rely on one of three interpretive models for rendering intelligible the apparent diversity of human understandings. So he's like, like if somebody comes and says, hey, do you know, this culture really, truly believes his example that there's sorcerers are actually bush cats.

[00:36:45] [SPEAKER_02] And you're just like, well, but do they really? Like what are they speaking metaphorically? Like, is there something or are they fucking with you? Like Margaret Mead's informants, you know? Yeah.

[00:36:55] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, and I guess this is a way of trying to sift the wheat from the chaff in some way through studies, which, you know, I don't know. I mean, he pre-registered this, I'm sure. Right. No, but I mean, you know, like you have for the American one, like 17 people or something. And then in the follow-up study, because it's not even the same exact experimental paradigm that they used on the Indians and on the Americans.

[00:37:22] [SPEAKER_02] Yes. Which could account for some of these differences.

[00:37:25] [SPEAKER_03] Which, which, yeah, it might. Although I, you know, like, it's funny, like I'm on board with the view and the, you know, the empirical stuff is not like hugely meaningful to me in terms of how much I believe it. But it did, the results are pretty strong.

[00:37:43] [SPEAKER_03] And I feel like there's a lot of other studies out there to show that we're about Americans, you know, that Americans have this more like autonomous conception of the person. I mean, we've talked about this.

[00:37:57] [SPEAKER_02] I'm almost positive at some point.

[00:37:59] [SPEAKER_03] Multiple times.

[00:38:00] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And even just the notion that you can go find yourself and for, for like a Westerner, the thought that you can find yourself is like accompanied by like, let me go travel on my own. And it's like, where do you think yourself is? Like, what do you think you're going to find like a Indiana Jones warehouse where they keep all the selves?

[00:38:20] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. We talked about this when I was doing the honor book and it, you know, like, I think we did an episode on that and we did an episode on, you know, cultures of dignity versus culture of honor. And this was the exact same thing is like cultures of honor and collectivist cultures. They think of the self more in terms of your role and your relations with other people in the community. You know, the sociology of this has been around for a long time. And I think it's broadly right.

[00:38:47] [SPEAKER_03] You know, it's probably less right now than it was then because. Our Western ideas have. Infected like the other cultures. That's what Schwader thinks anyway. Yeah. So Schwader quotes Geertz saying, the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated, motivational and cognitive universe,

[00:39:10] [SPEAKER_03] a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively, both against other holes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.

[00:39:30] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. I mean, I think that it's just so fascinating how difficult it is to think that other people can believe something so different. Yeah. When it feels so foundational, like what our intuitions about what a self is. Yeah.

[00:40:14] [SPEAKER_03] And that's just like a good lesson in general. Yeah. I also like I'm an audience in a different way. Like I'm with Schwader where I always find myself siding with the, you know, non-Western views, especially when it comes to something like the self, but in terms of how I conceive of myself and how I talk about people. And like, I am a hundred percent in that paradigm, you know, like even if I might bemoan it in theory,

[00:40:41] [SPEAKER_03] like I would probably maybe more than you even in spite of your, your universalist.

[00:40:46] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I have a foot in both worlds. So like this, the talk of the self is a little easier for me.

[00:40:51] [SPEAKER_03] Like a contextual or collectivist self.

[00:40:54] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, exactly. And so this is where he starts talking about the concept of a person and what the alternative view to the Western view is. And he reviews some work from anthropologists looking at people in Tahiti and Bali in New Guinea, and then his work in India.

[00:41:10] [SPEAKER_02] And across all of these, what he seems to be saying, like people find is that the West is this interestingly sort of unique form of thinking about the person as this abstract context-free thing that exists. Because in all of these other cultures, there is a level of concreteness and context dependence in the way that people even talk about a friend. So like in Tahiti, when they ask people, what does a friend mean?

[00:41:38] [SPEAKER_02] They'll describe like the actions that a friend does. And like they'll describe situations in which a friend would act this way and that way. And they talk about particular episodes and relationships. Whereas Westerners, again, just talk about traits.

[00:41:53] [SPEAKER_03] And it's a really nice, I think, way of getting at it. They just ask them to describe somebody that they know or describe a bunch of people that they know without like telling them how to. And that's such a key part of the study. Just say, yeah, tell us about this person and then just see how they do it. And like you said, like the Americans were more likely to give these abstract descriptions of people by traits, like they're stubborn or they're aggressive.

[00:42:22] [SPEAKER_03] Whereas the Indian population was more likely to say, like, she brings cakes to my family's on festival days.

[00:42:31] [SPEAKER_02] So like I want to talk a little bit about the methods. You were talking about how like this does have these quantitative, you know, statistical tests like high squares, which is weird. I mean, it sounds like these were two different data collections with sort of different purposes they're comparing.

[00:42:45] [SPEAKER_03] I was trying to figure out, like, did they ever describe why they did it like that? Is it just that they already had the study? I think they just already had.

[00:42:52] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. So 17 informants in the American sample came from three separate groups. Counseling psychologists, a college fraternity, nursery school teachers all around Chicago. And then 70 Indians. And I just think this was just like completely two different things that they realized happened to ask kind of the same thing. And so the Indian sample was asked to describe up to three friends, neighbors or workmates.

[00:43:17] [SPEAKER_02] Tell me in depth about this person's character, their personality, their nature and their behavior. Whereas Americans were asked, how would you characterize so-and-so's personality? And they just got like thousands of data points, like thousands of descriptions. And, you know, I could kind of tell that they're doing the statistics because that's what's expected to do. But you really can just eyeball the percentages. And that's the finding. Like that's the key to this stuff.

[00:43:47] [SPEAKER_02] Like this is a rich data set. And so they got people to actually categorize and code these. And you have to do stuff like figure out how much agreement there was between the people. You know, the coders are trained to say, was this a description of a behavior? Was there a context in this description? Or is this an abstract? Like was this a trait? And you get enough agreement. And so you could say, okay, like this is the percentage of people in this sample.

[00:44:15] [SPEAKER_02] For instance, context-dependent phrases. Americans gave like 28% of their descriptions were context-dependent. Whereas the Aurea sample was like 50%. Context-free phrases was like 70% Americans, 50% Aureas. Descriptions of action. This is the one where I think the instructions matter. So it's like, okay, people describe behaviors more in India when they're talking about like,

[00:44:43] [SPEAKER_02] if somebody says, describe Tamler, and I say he likes to whatever, have parties at his house with his colleagues. That's a behavior whereas an American might say he's a gregarious guy. Like he's a social guy. But it is the case that they asked the Indians specifically about behaviors. So like that's-

[00:45:01] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, when you said that, I was going to follow up. Like really? Like they asked them that?

[00:45:06] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And they have a little disclaimer. Like they note that this was an issue. But they say that they did a follow-up study with 10 Americans where they actually had-

[00:45:17] [SPEAKER_03] They gave them that same prompt.

[00:45:19] [SPEAKER_02] Do two different- Exactly. And they say that there was no difference. But- That's 10. It's 10 people. And there's a lot of observations, but still, yeah, it is 10 people.

[00:45:28] [SPEAKER_03] I was wondering if that was like, not that this probably got peer-reviewed if it's in the- No, no, it was in the- But like, it does seem like this stuff, you know, like maybe just do this one as an anthropology paper. Or like an interview study where you just report kind of like the stuff that people say. But like, yeah, that's kind of bad actually if you ask them about behavior and then you make a big deal about the fact that they're referencing behavior more.

[00:45:55] [SPEAKER_02] I think that that's why like that particular finding is the strongest one, like 65% to 25%. So I think like we have to take that one with a grain of salt. The other stuff still, I think, is still fine. And of course, like I think in the end, this is a difference. Yeah. You know? Yeah, it is. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:46:12] [SPEAKER_03] No, I mean, in that sense, the data is kind of window dressing for the actual finding. But yeah, the study part of this was a little disappointing in that like, and I didn't even note that they asked them specifically about behavior. I knew that the prompts were slightly different than that. The follow-up study was meant to try to deal with that, but it didn't seem compelling that it did.

[00:46:35] [SPEAKER_02] You know, it's not the most interesting part, but I think it's important to at least get a bunch of real people actually describing people. Oh, yeah, definitely. Some good examples, even just to get the concepts that they're talking about. Like it is a foreign enough concept sometimes where I'm like, wait, what do you mean that they're talking about like relations or specifics? Like, and so, you know, they give a bunch of like, he gets irritable if provoked. Yeah. Referencing groups, like he makes fun of his family. Yeah.

[00:47:13] [SPEAKER_02] It gets pissy with David.

[00:47:14] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, right. No, totally. Because that is how it is. Like I'm much nicer to people in depending on who they are and also depending on the context. Yeah.

[00:47:24] [SPEAKER_02] That's why taking a personality test is so frustrating sometimes because like, are you prone to like get angry? I'm like, well, with who?

[00:47:30] [SPEAKER_03] That just assumes the, you know, the Western view, I guess, is the right view. But like, you know, he doesn't really talk about this, but wasn't this paper around the same time as some peak situationist stuff where they talk about the fundamentalist attribution error? Yes.

[00:47:48] [SPEAKER_02] He's not engaging with it as much. Marcus and Kitayama do specifically engage with that where they say in their big review paper, that super influential one, that the fundamental attribution error, like you can't make too much sense of it. Like it might not be so fundamental given the way that people even describe like moral failings in these context specific, like they just naturally go that way.

[00:48:10] [SPEAKER_03] So the fundamentalist attribution error for people who don't know, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this is my impression of what it is, is to assume that a person's character trait explains way more than it actually does.

[00:48:23] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. So attributing dispositional causes to behavior in others.

[00:48:28] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It just kind of seems like they less, they're less prone to even think in those terms. Whereas we are prone to think in those terms that if you want to explain a behavior, go to their personality trait. And, you know, the context or the relation of the person that he interacted with, that doesn't matter as much as is he generous or is he irritable? Yeah.

[00:48:55] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. There's a great, you know, like I love this paper from the early nineties, Morris and Peng, Michael Morris, Kaiping Peng, on the attribution in Chinese versus American samples where like the individualist cultures like the U.S. use these dispositional explanations for the behavior of other people.

[00:49:13] [SPEAKER_02] But in China, like even when it's like, you know, some terrible thing that a person did, they're way more likely to make reference to the context, like the community that they were in, the situational reasons for what they did spontaneously. Yeah. Whereas for us, it just doesn't come out that way.

[00:49:32] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. We might like, if you kind of explain the situation, make it vivid, we might recognize, oh yeah, I guess the circumstances played a big role in this particular case. But our instinct isn't to do that. I wanted to say that I liked how he tries to rule out an evolutionary explanation of this or the evolutionist explanation. It's not like an, it has nothing to do with like evolution. Yeah.

[00:49:58] [SPEAKER_02] It's not natural selection. Yeah.

[00:49:59] [SPEAKER_03] So one thing that they might say is, oh, well, these people are so uneducated and poor and primitive that they don't know how to abstract. They don't know how to generalize. Right.

[00:50:11] [SPEAKER_02] Because abstraction is intelligence, right?

[00:50:13] [SPEAKER_03] Like for us. Exactly. Like abstraction is intelligence. They lack the cognitive skills to be able to do that. So of course they're going to say, oh, he takes too much potato salad.

[00:50:26] [SPEAKER_02] They're like small minded. We're not saying they're dumb.

[00:50:29] [SPEAKER_03] We're saying their culture is dumb. They put too much curry in there. Soup or whatever. You cannot have too much curry. So what they do to rule that out is give them sorting tasks that explicitly ask them to abstract. And they are able to do it just fine. And so like what they conclude from that, it's not that they can't do it. It's just that's not their first instinct when it comes to describing a person.

[00:50:58] [SPEAKER_03] And for us, that might seem so obvious and self-evident that you would do it if you had the skill to do it, like the cognitive advancement to be able to do that. But they can do it if they're asked to, but they just do it less when asked to describe an individual.

[00:51:16] [SPEAKER_02] Exactly. And they also look at the, because like their sample has people of various casts and levels of education. And when they look at the amount of concrete descriptions for persons in the highest, like most educated people and the least educated people, it's the same. Like there's no difference there. This is where like I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole because there is this literature. I don't remember if it's mentioned here.

[00:51:42] [SPEAKER_02] Maybe you can tell me about counterfactual thinking where like there was this work sort of claiming that Chinese participants were bad at counterfactual reasoning. Compared to whatever, you know, Westerners, where they would give these statements like Tamler could have been influential in philosophy if he hadn't done very bad answers.

[00:52:07] [SPEAKER_03] So you- Are you suggesting that I haven't been influential in philosophy?

[00:52:12] [SPEAKER_02] Well, that's a, there's an interesting logical problem with the way that the original researchers asked it anyway. Like I don't remember what exactly the measure was. It was like some measure of whether people could respond to those and like think about those counterfactual situations. Like what if Tamler hadn't done very bad wizards? Like what would have happened? And the Chinese respondents were like, but, but he did be very bad. They just like, they just malfunction. They just go to sleep.

[00:52:42] [SPEAKER_02] Like, what do you mean? Like, why are you asking me? That didn't happen. It's like that whole like counterfactual reason is like a meme for dumb people. Like, what if you had had this for breakfast? And they're like, but I didn't have that for breakfast. That's like what people use.

[00:52:55] [SPEAKER_03] What would they do in the baby Hitler case? They wouldn't even know what to do.

[00:52:58] [SPEAKER_02] They'd be like, wait, but, but Hitler, Hitler did it. But, but it turns out, and like, there was like a back and forth. So this is very much an evolutionist on, on Schweder's terminology view where like, they're just like a little dumber. Their language with, I think the argument was linguistically their, their language didn't allow them to do this kind of counterfactual. Right. Yeah. Not them. But then like a native Chinese speaker went in and they're like, you guys are just fucking up the way you're asking. It doesn't make sense the way you're asking. Like, and they ask it right.

[00:53:27] [SPEAKER_02] And it turns out unsurprisingly Chinese people can reason counterfactually. Yeah.

[00:53:32] [SPEAKER_03] It really does seem like there was this group of people who were just like, yeah, they had this view of like Western supremacy and like all the levels of thinking and cognitive skill. And, you know, it's just funny. Like, I feel like that you would be embarrassed to say things like that now. I think like.

[00:53:52] [SPEAKER_02] Well, there's a little bit of a resurgence. I guess. It's the corners.

[00:53:56] [SPEAKER_03] Maybe this is a bad time to say that.

[00:54:00] [SPEAKER_02] You have to do this stuff right. Like, you know, and this is why I think like we've, we've said this many times, but, but really taking the time to, for instance, get a native speaker. Like work with people long enough that you understand what it is they're trying to say and why.

[00:54:17] [SPEAKER_03] And to be clear, when I was objecting to the studies here, I wasn't saying you shouldn't ask real people. You should just like go and take notes, like, and edit with, like, I wasn't saying that. I was more saying like, just if you're using two different studies that like were done independently of each other. And like, then what's the point of doing like all the stats and all that. Yeah, I'm with you. Just say, just tell us. Yeah. Because that's the thing that's so interesting is looking.

[00:54:46] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, I know it's also obviously like you can cherry pick your, which quotes you use, but that's the stuff that I think is really interesting. And I think also, you know, I do think this stuff is supported in maybe methodologically sounder experiments.

[00:55:02] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And I do think that like reporting these percentages, I'm with you. Like I was feeling the same thing. Like, do you really need it? But I do think that like if this were done now and like all of those statements were, you know, like shared publicly, like that's a good data set that might constrain your cherry picking. Somebody could go along and say like, hey.

[00:55:22] [SPEAKER_03] No, if they just actually did the study instead of it seems like taking two different studies and then putting them together, I think I would be totally fine with this. I like the way they code it. I think that seems kind of interesting. And I agree. It just gives you guardrails in terms of how to talk about it. And it also is eye-catching when you get such strong differences. It's just hard to know in this particular case how much you should.

[00:55:48] [SPEAKER_03] I think if this was, if like these were different results, we might be going harder on the methodology. Right. Exactly. Turns out we're all the same. Yeah. We all just like the things we like.

[00:55:59] [SPEAKER_02] You know what? What I liked was the discussion of like, if you're going to say, as some people say, like, oh, this is just this evolutionist account where like these people just haven't gotten to the sophistication and thinking that Westerners have gotten. They have a discussion about the casts. Like, and I just didn't know this. But they're talking about the complexity with which everybody can think socially about their relation to other casts.

[00:56:26] [SPEAKER_02] And so they say, I'm quoting, there are 24 Aurea casts, including five major Brahmin subcastes represented in the residential wards and quarters of the old town of Bubaneswar. Sorry if I'm butchering that. There's considerable consensus concerning the relative status position of these casts, a judgment that takes into account the relative purity of the customs and behavior of a cast community.

[00:56:47] [SPEAKER_02] And so they talk about what it means to like reason about these casts and think about these, like the awareness of like all of them and all of like the things that they do. Like, do they eat meat? Like, do they let their widows marry? Do they cut their own hair? And how absurd it would seem to say that this is people who are lacking the ability to reason well about like the social world. Yeah.

[00:57:09] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. So let's get to where they, where he tries to give explanations for these results. And here's where he gets into the holistic view of the self. And there's some Lakoff stuff. It's relation to kind of dominant metaphors.

[00:57:29] [SPEAKER_03] So where the Oryas view individuals, what we would call individuals, as parts of the same body, whereas we view them as cut off from like the rest of society. And we view it as this insulated and autonomous self that moves within this larger body. And that you can see this in the metaphors.

[00:57:56] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. I have a quote that I wanted to read where they discuss this. It says, why are Oryas more prone than Americans to describe their intimates by references to cases and contexts? Relativists answer this question by drawing a sharp distinction between intellectual process and ideational product. The relativists hypothesize that cultures differ less in their basic cognitive skills, like generalization, abstraction, reversibility, than in the metaphors by which they live. Marie quotes Lakoff and Johnson, 1980.

[00:58:22] [SPEAKER_02] The world hypothesis to which they subscribe and the ideas underlying their social action. Thus, according to a relativist account, the Oryas, Balinese, and Gahuku Gama are perfectly competent information processors, not unskilled at differentiating, generalizing, and taking the perspective of others, etc. What really distinguishes them from us is that they place so little value on differentiating, for instance, person from role. Generalizing, like treat outsiders like insiders, or abstracting, like the concept of humanity.

[00:58:50] [SPEAKER_02] And the relativists is quick to point out they show so little interest in such intellectual moves because Oryas, Balinese, and other such folk live by a metaphor and subscribe to a world premise that directs their attention and passions to particular systems relationally conceived and contextually appraised. Indeed, a central tenet of a relativist interpretation of context-dependent person perception is that the metaphors by which people live and the worldviews to which they subscribe mediate the relationship between what one thinks about and how one thinks. Which is great.

[00:59:20] [SPEAKER_02] Like, that's the payoff for me. Like you were talking, then they go on to describe the body as the metaphor that people live by, where you are part of this group and like there is no existing outside of them.

[00:59:30] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, again, I think he thinks that they are right about that. Yeah.

[00:59:39] [SPEAKER_02] It's interesting. Like, he doesn't ever say that. Like, he very, I think, is trying to not say it. But I, like you, think that he genuinely thinks that we're, at the very least, missing an important way of viewing the self.

[00:59:57] [SPEAKER_03] He says, it's sobering to reflect on the psychic costs, the existential penalties of our egocentrism, our autonomous individualism. There are costs to having no larger framework within which to locate the self. Many in our culture lack a meaningful orientation to the past. We come from nowhere, the product of a random genetic accident. Many lack a meaningful orientation to the future. They might have purpose anxiety.

[01:00:25] [SPEAKER_02] I was going to say that when I was reading the end of this, I was like, man, maybe we should make that the opening.

[01:00:30] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, that would have been good. Yeah, we were, we came across something on how Americans feel purpose anxiety. And, of course, like if you think of that.

[01:00:39] [SPEAKER_02] I think that is the cost. That is exactly why.

[01:00:40] [SPEAKER_03] Exactly the cost of this is because if you don't see yourself as part of like this larger group where if it's not immediately obvious, like that you are thriving in some imagined sense, then your life has no meaning. Then, yeah, that's going to be hard because that. Yeah. But I also think that he says like that same question that you asked.

[01:01:04] [SPEAKER_03] Why did we start thinking that human beings are kind of like exempt from the web of causes that encompasses everything and that our own science agrees is all interconnected? You know, like it's certainly not empirically grounded that we have this view. The empirically grounded thing is to think that, you know, every single thing is always connected and that no cause happens like cause a sui.

[01:01:33] [SPEAKER_03] It happens within a larger web of causes and within a larger context. So how did this happen?

[01:01:41] [SPEAKER_02] Okay. So here, as I was reading this, I was like, oh, Tamler's going to fucking jerk off to this right now. So he's talking about the concrete thinking and like interpreting this way of thinking. He says, or they say, it is far-fetched to imagine that holism, the socio-centric conception of the individual social relationship and the organic metaphor have a generalized influence on cognition, perhaps. But one should not overlook the following fact about the cultural organization of knowledge.

[01:02:09] [SPEAKER_02] Although in our culture, it is the natural sciences that have an elevated position, in many non-Western cultures, much of the intellectual action is in the arena of social thought. For us, it is the organization of knowledge and physics and chemistry that is adopted wholesale as the idea for social understanding. More than a few social scientists are busy at work searching for a quote-unquote periodic table of social elements. Many more have been enamored of physical metaphors, forces, energy, mechanisms, etc.

[01:02:36] [SPEAKER_02] In the West, the physical world has become the model of the social world. Why should not a reverse extension take place in other cultures? The social order is the model of nature. Metaphors deliberately selected to guide our thinking often have generalized effects on how we think.

[01:02:50] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. I mean, I think you're right, though, that he's not saying one is superior or the abstracting view of the person is necessarily inferior. But he's just saying, why shouldn't we think that both views are just the product of our culture, our language, and our metaphors in particular?

[01:03:10] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And what he calls our social imagination. He says, we've tried to identify two major alternative conceptualizations of the individual social relationship, the egocentric contractual and the sociocentric organic. It is crucial to recognize that neither of these conceptualizations of the relationship of the individual to society has the epistemological status of a scientific category. They are not inductive generalizations. They're not the discoveries of individual perception. Quite the contrary, the egocentric and sociocentric views of man are creations of the collective imagination.

[01:03:39] [SPEAKER_02] They're ideas, premises by which people guide their lives. And only to the extent that a people lives by them do they have force. And that's what I think is like, it's at least critical to understand that we should not be naive realists about the way that we conceptualize these things. And, you know, I do think, and we've had these discussions, I think that there are real downsides to collectivism that, you know, rear their ugly side sometimes. Absolutely, yeah.

[01:04:07] [SPEAKER_02] So it's not as if like, this is like the panacea, like be more collectivistic. But I do think it really does for the specific purpose of like finding yourself lost in this sea of enemy and meaninglessness. The answer can just be like, you're not this like, as you said, kaza sui, floating, independent thing that is disconnected from everybody. Connect yourself.

[01:04:35] [SPEAKER_02] Think about how you exist because of your relationships, because of other people.

[01:04:39] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, exactly. And I think like, you know, some of the interesting stuff at the end then tries to explain why.

[01:04:48] [SPEAKER_02] The privacy. Do you want to talk about the privacy stuff?

[01:04:50] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, let's talk about the privacy stuff, because I think that's where this seems so possibly right to me. Yeah.

[01:04:59] [SPEAKER_02] Do you want to read it? It's on page 131.

[01:05:01] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. So they say, yes, the concept of a person does vary cross-culturally. And so then trying to explain Western individualism, which is an outlier in most of these cultures, they say, we find it tempting to argue that Western individualism has its origins in the institution of privacy. That privacy promotes a passion or need for autonomy, which, for the sake of our sense of personal integrity, requires privacy.

[01:05:31] [SPEAKER_03] Socialization is terroristic. The young are subject to all sorts of invasions, intrusions, manipulations of their personhood, autonomy, and privacy. Where they go, when they sleep, when they eat, how they look. All the intimacies of the self are managed for them, typically without consent. Heteronomy is the universal starting point for socialization. It may or may not be the end point.

[01:05:55] [SPEAKER_03] And then talking about work by George Simmel, who also focused on the right for privacy, is what asserts the sacredness of the person. So, like, when you ask a three-year-old, what do you want to eat for dinner, that already just plants a little seed in the three-year-old. Oh, I'm different than other people. And so I have taste and that's what I want. Or when we knock on the door.

[01:06:16] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, knocking on the door before entering.

[01:06:18] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, knocking on the door before entering their room. Something that you would think, oh, well, that's just politeness. That's just like, no, you're just, again, building this thing. Oh, we're our sanctuary. People have no right to infringe upon our autonomy, even if they're our parents. And just all these things build up.

[01:06:36] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Reading this made very salient to me the struggles that I've had as kind of being bicultural. Because, like, it becomes really clear when you're raising kids that, like, what I want to do is different, I have to say. I'm not saying it's better or worse, but it's different than from what my wife wants to do when it comes to this stuff.

[01:07:01] [SPEAKER_03] She's primitive.

[01:07:02] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. She can barely categorize things. No, she's a philosopher. She can categorize things all too well. That's all she does. For instance, I remember taking my older daughter to Argentina and she was tired, like, after a trip. And we're at this, like, family wedding and there's literally a hundred people, like, in this room that are all related in some way or another.

[01:07:28] [SPEAKER_02] And I'm telling her, yeah, I know you're tired, but it doesn't fucking matter. You have to put a smile on your face and you have to kiss everybody. Like, you're going to give, like, a hundred kisses before the day is out, but you have to do it. Like, you being tired and wanting to go in the corner is just not something that you can do.

[01:07:44] [SPEAKER_02] And now, like, as I'm raising kids, like, the boundaries thing where some people just really want to say, like, no, if she doesn't want to give you a hug, which my wife says, like, if my daughter doesn't feel like giving me a hug, I shouldn't force them to because this is, like, their body. It's there. And I'm like, fuck that. Like, this is, like, I am your father. You kiss me and you hug me before you go to bed. Like, that's just what you do. Like, I really feel like, but I don't want to fight about it.

[01:08:13] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. No, right. You know, I think that gets broadened further. And, like, if you don't want to kiss people or you don't want to talk to people, maybe that's because you're an introvert or you have social anxiety. So you start coming up with these traits to explain that. And, again, those things also work to make it so that you don't have to have these interactions that you don't want to because you have this trait which keeps people away.

[01:08:39] [SPEAKER_03] So that's a slightly separate thing than what Nikki is saying where if she doesn't want to. But it's, like, I think it's a consequence of that view that now you start to think, okay, well, you have these conditions. This reminded me of the myth of mental illness a little bit where you forget to what extent even just deciding to call certain things a disorder is so culturally influenced and constructed. But we tend to think that these things are just their own categories.

[01:09:09] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. I think we've had this discussion before, and you were with me on this. I don't even know if it was on the air or off the air about, like, when you cook and your kid doesn't want to eat what you made. Oh, yeah. And I'm just like, well, you fucking eat what I made.

[01:09:22] [SPEAKER_03] Oh, God, it drives me crazy when, like, you go to someone's house and, like, the kid is eating hot dogs and, like, frozen chicken nuggets or something like that when the parents have made this really good dinner. And it's like, but, you know, again, like, I talk a big game, but, you know, I also have a lot of these, like, autonomy needs, and I don't like being fucked with. Totally. You know, like, the idea that someone was going to just go to my Outlook calendar and just say, oh, I have a meeting. Oh, my God. I was like, fuck, no, I'm not doing that.

[01:09:51] [SPEAKER_05] No, I know.

[01:09:53] [SPEAKER_02] I know. I'm with you. I literally am, like, I'm bisexual about this. You're bicultural, bisexual. You're just bi. I'm just bi. But I remember, like, when I would go to South America, my mom would be like, okay, here are the people that you have to see. And I'm like, no, I just want to go fucking hang out and, like, you know, do what I want. And that would be an ugly thing for you to do. But when I do it, dude, when I connect, it is the happiest I ever am. Yeah.

[01:10:21] [SPEAKER_02] Like, it's literally the happiest. I'm the happiest when I go, like, I'm in South America and everybody's just connected. And, like, I remember just going and meeting all these people that I didn't know when I was in high school. My sister was studying there. And everybody's just like, let's just go to this fucking little cafe, put our money together, buy, like, a bottle of Coke and just hang out. And I was like, wow, this is the most fun I've had in years.

[01:10:45] [SPEAKER_03] We were talking earlier off air about, like, how sports is really good at getting us to talk to strangers, connect with strangers, identify. Like, that's the one way in which, yeah, I'm a Patriots fan. I'm a Celtics fan. I'm a Boston sports person, you know, like, and you see other people. And all of a sudden, you're talking to people from completely different, you know, socioeconomic, educate. Like, it doesn't matter. Like, as long as you guys are rooting for the same team, you have interesting things to say about it.

[01:11:14] [SPEAKER_03] And you can make fun of the other teams. And you feel great when you do that.

[01:11:19] [SPEAKER_02] Totally. Like, the metaphor of the, like, for me, it makes sense. Like, fandom, we are a body. We are, like, a group of people that are in the role, performing a service, connected to each other. Like, it is. I'm working with a different metaphor there. Like, I see somebody who's part of, like, the team that I'm rooting for. And it's like, boom, you're my guy. Like, we're together. Like, yeah.

[01:11:42] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. And I also, even just separate of just how good it can sometimes feel to have a foot in that world. I also think it's interesting just so much stuff that we take for granted. Like, in one of these sorting things. Or no, this was an experiment from Luria from 1976. An informant is presented with four objects. Hammer, saw, log, hatchet. He's asked, which of these things could you call by one word?

[01:12:10] [SPEAKER_03] He is told, one fellow picked three things. Hammer, saw, and hatchet. And said they were all alike. The informant response is, a saw, hammer, and hatchet all have to work together. But the log has to be there, too. You have to split something. If you have to split something, you need a hatchet. And so, like, again, that's just this holistic frame that, you know, it's not something you would think. You would think the saw, hammer, and the hatchet are all tools. Tools you use to, like, cut things.

[01:12:38] [SPEAKER_03] You wouldn't think to include the log. But, of course, you wouldn't need any of those things if there wasn't the log. And so, it just shows this interdependence.

[01:12:47] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. I love those examples because they go to show how deep the intuition is. So much so that, like, we make IQ tests with shit like that. And we mark people as wrong when they don't say the right. And it's like, wait, you just didn't get that, like, they are pointing to a relation. Like, this is a relational answer. And they don't grok what we're, like, you know. They don't.

[01:13:07] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, they have the platonic, like, you missed the platonic category of tools here.

[01:13:12] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, of tool. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know what? You already brought this up. You are right at how much they put their cards on the table normatively. You already quoted part of this psychic cost stuff. But I'm going to finish the quote because they are pretty strong here. We are going nowhere. At best, we view ourselves as machines that will one day run down. The social order we view as the product of our making, an association based on contract and individual consent.

[01:13:39] [SPEAKER_02] In our view, society is dependent on us. And what are our gods? Personal success and wealth. Quote, they're quoting,

[01:14:04] [SPEAKER_03] What does he mean by that at the end?

[01:14:05] [SPEAKER_02] The view, the invisible hand view that if we're all acting in our own self-interest, the invisible hand is going to, like, make it. But it's like what we're banking on is sleight of hand, not like, yeah. Yeah.

[01:14:17] [SPEAKER_03] This is the thing, and I don't remember what the last article by him, but it also ended with a kind of screed against, like, a money-obsessed, shallow Westerner that hasn't figured out that there's more to life than just making a lot of money.

[01:14:36] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, that's true. You know, I used to mock people that went to India to find themselves, but maybe there is something to, like, spending 10 years in India and realizing that, like, this worldview is different. That's where it actually is.

[01:14:47] [SPEAKER_03] The last thing I wanted to say is they do talk about in India, they have one conception of a man abstracted from his community, but it's the man who— The holy man. —who goes away and tries to become enlightened.

[01:15:04] [SPEAKER_03] But even then, what Schweder points out, they are trying to reach a point where they're even more integrated with the whole, with everything, that they recognize the kind of fundamental oneness of the world. Whereas now they only think of their fundamental oneness with their tribe or their community or their family or whatever.

[01:15:26] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. He says, Yet even here, his goal is not to find one's distinctive identity, but rather to merge one's soul with the soul of others. When Indians peer into one another's hearts and minds, they are more likely than most people to look for the ultimate universal, the ground of all things, God.

[01:15:41] [SPEAKER_03] Yep. Yeah.

[01:15:42] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, that's right.

[01:15:42] [SPEAKER_03] All right. Should we end on that note?

[01:15:45] [SPEAKER_02] I'll peer into your heart and find God.

[01:15:47] [SPEAKER_03] Find the ground. All right. Good paper.

[01:15:57] [SPEAKER_02] Goffman gets quoted here, but there's just sociology and anthropology. I feel like I'm learning. This feels like a lifelong education.

[01:16:03] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, it brings me back to the relative justice stuff that I was looking at, which he quotes a bunch of. And, you know, I feel like I should have taken that further. I kind of dropped it all after the honor book. But, yeah. You needed a refractory period. I needed to just retreat into my autonomous shell, like antisocial self.

[01:16:26] [SPEAKER_02] God. And we think we're making happy decisions when we do that. Yeah, I know. You know? We're like, I need my fucking privacy. I need my autonomy. I don't want to talk. And then I end up like just a little tear in my eye because nobody texts me on Saturday night or whatever. So, listeners, please be a community to us. Please continue supporting us. Reach out to us. We're hungry. We're desperate.

[01:16:47] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Be part of our body. Be part of our body. We want to merge bodies with you. Especially the ladies. But not exclusively necessarily. You know? Depending on the Patreon tier. You need to be relativistic. It's the context of what Patreon tier they are. The metaphor we live by is really concrete. All right.

[01:17:16] [SPEAKER_03] Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:17:19] [SPEAKER_10] Just a very bad.