novellearningblog

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Impersonal Prosociality & the Found Family

Impersonal Prosociality & the Found Family

There is a current trend in pop-culture movies and TV shows to emphasize the idea of the “found family.” This idea shows up in the Harry Potter series as Harry’s only remaining blood relatives are awful, but his found family in the Wizarding World become a true force for love. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is a big story about the power of found family and the complexities and challenges of…

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WEIRD People Don't Value Conformity

WEIRD People Don’t Value Conformity

When we teach kids in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries, we don’t teach them in the same way that people in other countries, or in other times, teach and have taught their kids. In WEIRD societies, we are less focused on conformity and tradition and more focused on helping kids express their own uniqueness and work through challenges and problems in their…

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WEIRD People Feel More Guilt

WEIRD People Feel More Guilt

A definition from a Google search for guilt is, “a feeling of having done wrong or failed in an obligation.” This definition is similar to, but slightly different from a Google search for the definition of shame, “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior,” or “a loss of respect or esteem; dishonor.”     These two emotional responses…

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Fundamental Attribution Error - Judging People in a WEIRD Way

Fundamental Attribution Error – Judging People in a WEIRD Way

In his recent conversation with Indian TV journalis, Barkha Dutt, Tyler Cowen and and Dutt had the following exchange:     “Cowen: Plenty of Whites in the United States have resources, education, but is it possible the Brahmins of India who come to America — they’re better at cracking foreign cultural codes, they’re more used to diversity, they’re more used to strange environments?…

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A WEIRD Way to View the Self

A WEIRD Way to View the Self

“Compared to much of the world,” writes Joseph Henrich in his book The WEIRDest People in the World, “WEIRD people report behaving in more consistent ways … across different types of relationships, such as with younger peers, friends, parents, professors, and strangers. By contrast, Koreans and Japanese report consistency only within relational contexts – that is how they behave separately toward…

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Identity Through Individual Traits

Identity Through Individual Traits

If you are WEIRD, you probably think about yourself in terms of your personal traits that make you unique and one of a kind. For example, when I complete the sentence from Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World, “I am _________,” I say things like, “a runner,” “active,” “a college graduate,” or “a pizza enthusiast.” The first things that come to my mind are not, “my wife’s…

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A Key Theme from The WEIRDest People in the World

A Key Theme from The WEIRDest People in the World

A key theme from The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich is the idea that cultural evolution can have real biological and psychological impacts on humans. Culture is often thought of as something that sits on top of our biology, influenced by the biological changes that evolution favors. But Henrich argues that culture can also shift our biology, by changing our brains.     In the…

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Protestantism Raised Literacy

One important way in which Protestantism differs from Catholicism is that Protestantism encourages reading Christian scripture directly where Catholicism encourages learning scripture from religious leaders. Consequentially, the spread of Protestantism correlates to a spread of literacy across Europe from the 1500’s through the 1800’s. Joseph Henrich writes about this phenomena and its importance…

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The Importance of Cultural Evolution & History

The Importance of Cultural Evolution & History

A little while back I wrote about conflicts surrounding accurate historical representations of modern societies. The way we tell and frame our histories is often a justification for modern inequalities and inequities. Casting other peoples as violent savages, as historical invading marauders, or as people given a spot in a land out of pure altruism can excuse historical genocide, dismiss current…

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Cultural Evolution Changes Humans

Cultural Evolution Changes Humans

I have long thought that biological evolution and cultural evolution were distinctly separate phenomenon. I thought that biological evolution changed the actual individual creatures where cultural evolution only changed behaviors and institutions, largely as a downstream consequence of biological evolution. My view was similar, and possibly influenced by, modern computer technology. We don’t…

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7 Consequences of Learning to Read

7 Consequences of Learning to Read

In The WEIRDest People in the World Joseph Henrich writes about the mental ability that you are engaged with right now if you are ingesting this information without the help of an auditory tool, reading. “Acquiring this mental ability involves wiring in specialized neurological circuitry in various parts of the brain,” Henrich writes. What that means is that reading changes our brain, and…

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Weaponry & Violence

Weaponry & Violence

I think gun control legislation is important and I think there is evidence to suggest that fewer people would die if we restricted and limited access to guns. Bad guys would still get their hands on them, but making that process harder should help prevent some of the mass shootings we see. People could still use cars, axes, and other weapons to go on violent sprees, but if guns were harder to…

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Integrative Complexity

We all know the world is a complex place and that one-size-fits-all rules and laws rarely work in practice. We are seeing this right now as some states move to ban all abortions, without consideration of challenging edge cases such as child rapes or the destruction of embryos during the regular course of IVF treatment. Current abortion law highlights a strange phenomena that has been building in…

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The Flynn Effect & Expanded Perspectives

The Flynn Effect & Expanded Perspectives

The Flynn Effect is the phenomenon of people improving on IQ tests over time. There has been a steady improvement in performance on IQ tests throughout human history, suggesting that people are getting smarter over time.     In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argues that this is also making us less violent as a species. Pinker writes, “The cognitive skill that is most…

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Revisionist Histories and How We Remember Ourselves

Revisionist Histories and How We Remember Ourselves

“The declines of patriotism, tribalism, and trust in hierarchies are in part a legacy of the new historiography,” writes Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Across the globe more accurate histories of the universe, of mankind, and of specific regions has made it clear that many belief systems are little more than myth. Stories of great heroes and gods are little more than…

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Liberal Moral Concerns Relative to Conservative Moral Concerns

Liberal Moral Concerns Relative to Conservative Moral Concerns

Social liberals in the United States and social conservatives have very different values. In terms of political views, they are not really that far from each other. However, in terms of what they would like to see reflected in our culture and how they think about people generally, social liberals and social conservatives are very different. The result, as I understand it, is a lot of anger at…

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The Potential & Danger of Taboos

The Potential & Danger of Taboos

In the United States, there are many things that have been taboo throughout our country’s history. Today, saying that something is retarded is taboo, a positive development to reduce the stigma around cognitive disabilities by preventing people from using the word as an insult. However, in our not too distant past interracial marriages were taboo. Black men could be jailed and worse for entering…