I am reading Determined by Sapolsky. Here’s an interesting excerpt (translated into Russian) about cultural differences between Asians and Americans.
“… Americans usually use singular pronouns, define themselves through personal characteristics rather than relational ones (‘I am a lawyer’ instead of ‘I am a parent’), and structure their memory around events rather than social ties (‘This summer I learned to swim’ versus ‘This summer we became friends’). If asked to draw a sociogram—a diagram with circles symbolizing themselves and other important people in their lives—Americans typically place themselves inside the largest circle at the center. Meanwhile, an East Asian’s circle typically does not exceed the size of others’ circles and is not at the forefront. The goal for Americans is to stand out, to be better than others; the goal for East Asians is to maintain inconspicuousness. These differences generate variances in understandings of norm violations and in ways of responding to them.
Such differences reflect different brain and bodily operating mechanisms. On average, East Asians’ dopamine reward system (a neurotransmitter associated with the feeling of satisfaction) responds more actively to a calm facial expression as opposed to an excited one, while for Americans, it’s the opposite. That’s why the somewhat grim faces of Russians seem strange to Americans 🙂 When presented with a complex scene, East Asians usually perceive it as a whole, whereas Americans focus on the individual at the center. Forcing an American to talk about moments where they were influenced by others, they produce more glucocorticoids—’stress hormones’; contrary to that, an East Asian produces stress hormone when discussing influencing others.
Where do these differences come from? The conventional explanation for American individualism is
1) that America is a country of immigrants (as of 2017, about 37% are immigrants or their descendants). But not everyone decides to emigrate: immigration represents a selection process of people willing to leave their native world and culture for a long and complicated journey to a new country. Along the way to their destination, individuals face barriers that hinder their entry and work in the toughest jobs after obtaining permission;
2) that much of America’s history involved an expanding western frontier, settled by similarly resilient, individualistic pioneers. Meanwhile, the standard explanation for East Asian collectivism is the ecology dictating means of production—in China, for instance, ten thousand years of rice cultivation requiring massive amounts of collective labor to transform mountains into terraced rice fields, collective planting and harvesting each person’s turn, collective building and maintenance of massive and ancient irrigation systems. Collectivism has also been predominant among the Russian populace throughout many years of history.
An interesting exception to this rule are regions of northern China, where the ecosystem impedes rice farming, giving rise to millennia of individualistic wheat farming. Farmers from this region, and even their university student grandchildren, are as individualistic as Westerners.
According to one intriguing study, Chinese from rice regions navigate obstacles (in this case, by walking around two chairs experimentally placed to block a pathway into Starbucks), whereas people from wheat regions remove obstacles (i.e., by moving the chairs).
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Forests teem with a multitude of species, which tends to create a perception of multiple gods. Moreover, monotheistic desert dwellers are more warlike and effective in conquests than polytheists from tropical forests. This explains why about 55 percent of people adhere to religions created by Near Eastern shepherds.
Herding raises another cultural difference. Traditionally, people earn their living as agrarians, hunter-gatherers, or shepherds. The latter live in deserts, steppes, or tundra with their herds of goats, camels, sheep, cows, llamas, yaks, or deer. Such shepherds are vulnerable in a different way than arable farmers, for whom the main enemy is nature. It is difficult to stealthily sneak in at night and steal someone’s rice field or tropical forest. But you can be a crafty pest and steal someone’s livestock, milk, and meat, on which they survive. This vulnerability gave rise to ‘cultures of honor’ with the following features:
(a) extreme, yet temporary hospitality to a passing stranger—after all, most shepherds are nomads with their animals at some point;
(b) strict adherence to codes of behavior, where norm violations are usually interpreted as an insult to someone;
(c) such insults require retaliatory violence—a world of feuding and revenge that lasts generations;
(d) the existence of warrior classes and values where valor in battle brings high status and a glorious afterlife.
Much is said about the hospitality, conservatism (in the sense of strict adherence to cultural norms), and violence of the traditional honor culture of the American South. The American South typically has the highest murder rates in the country, not robberies, but killings of someone who seriously dishonored your honor (by insulting you, failing to fulfill a duty, etc.), especially so in the rural South.
Where does this culture of honor in the American South come from? A widely accepted theory among historians suggests that while colonial New England in the north was populated by pilgrims and the mid-Atlantic by merchants such as Quakers, the South disproportionately housed shepherds from northern England, Scotland, and Ireland.
By the way, the hotter the climate in which a person grew up, the more reactive their amygdala in stressful situations.
Another cultural comparison between ‘tough’ cultures (with many and strict behavior norms) and ‘soft’ ones. What are the main features of a ‘tough’ society? A history of many cultural crises, droughts, famines, earthquakes, and a high incidence of infectious diseases. And I mean ‘history’—one study of 33 countries showed that toughness is most often found in cultures with high population density starting from 1500.
Five hundred years ago? How can that be? Because generation after generation the influence of ancestors shaped how often a mother physically contacted her children; whether children were subject to rituals such as scarification, life-threatening initiation rites; whether there were myths and songs about revenge or forgiveness, etc.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 