Near the end of the last essay ever written by the great psychologist Donald T. Campbell, one reads:
I would like to close … with a focus on the most ubiquitous source of error in efforts to know the other. This is to interpret as a cultural difference what is in reality a failure of communication. … I personally am convinced that many of the cultural differences reported by psychologists and others using questionnaires or tests come from failures of communication misreported as differences. (Campbell Reference Campbell, Jessor, Colby and Shweder1996, p. 165)
I hope the present target article by Henrich et al. has an impact on the way research is designed and reported in psychology: that there will be more specification of the boundary conditions for generalizations about human behavior, a greater reluctance to rush to claims about fundamental processes, and far less reliance on collecting data from college undergraduates. Here I focus on Don Campbell's doubt. I suggest that the objection, rightfully noted but then dismissed by Henrich et al., that “the observed variation across populations may be due to various methodological artifacts that arise from translating experiments across contexts” (sect. 7.2, para. 2) is a theoretically profound and potentially constructive criticism.
Evaluating claims to universality of psychological theories in the light of cross- cultural evidence is of course not a new enterprise. An early example is Margaret Mead's (Reference Mead1932) critique of Jean Piaget's claims in his book The Child's Conception of the World (Piaget Reference Piaget1929). Piaget described young Swiss children as animistic and proposed a universal ontogenetic sequence in which animism waned over time. Mead produced evidence from a small-scale society in the Admiralty Islands suggesting that among the Manus, the young children were dreary literalists and only learned to be animists later in life. Henrich et al. write: “As children already show large population-level differences, it is not obvious that developmental work can substitute for research across diverse human populations” (sect. 3.1, para. 5). Margaret Mead would not be surprised.
An even earlier example is the 1895 Cambridge University Torres Straits expedition headed by the anthropologist A. C. Haddon, which set up an experimental psychological laboratory in New Guinea (see Cole Reference Cole1996). William McDougall ran experimental tests of sensation concerning the limen of dual impression upon the skin, using a small pair of carpenter's dividers with blunt metal points. Native subjects were asked to perform an apparently straightforward task following an apparently easy-to-translate instruction: to say “one” or “two” as they judged whether one or two points touched the skin. McDougall reported that “Murray Islanders have a threshold of tactile discrimination of which the value, in terms of distance of two points touched, is just about one half that of Englishmen, or we may say in other words, that their power of tactile discrimination is about double that of Englishmen” (quoted in Titchener Reference Titchener1916, p. 206).
The claim was challenged by E. B. Titchener, whose 1916 essay defending the proposition that “human nature is much the same the world over” should be read by every anthropologist and cultural psychologist who believes otherwise (and I am one of them; see Shweder Reference Shweder, Stigler, Shweder and Herdt1990; Reference Shweder1991; Reference Shweder2003). Titchener raised a series of methodological objections, including the way subjects interpreted the purpose of the task. He argued that the subjects in New Guinea, when deciding whether to report “one” or “two,” were looking for “a sensation perceptively different from that yielded by a single point,” which is not exactly the same as looking for two distinct points of sensation. Educated Englishmen, Titchener suggested, simply interpreted the notion of duality of impression in a stricter sense. He judged that the evidence from New Guinea did not show that the Murray Islanders' powers of tactile discrimination were substantially different from those of subjects in his own WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic) society.
The relevant methodological point can be expressed this way: Evidence of psychological differences between cultural groups may simply (although significantly) demonstrate that different stimulus situations produce different responses. The identity of a stimulus situation (e.g., an experimental task) does not exist independent of the subject's interpretation of its meaning. Hence, the more different the culture studied from the culture where the stimulus situation was invented, the more likely the meanings of the task will be harder to communicate with the requisite exactitude in distant field contexts.
A revealing illustration can be found in cross-cultural research on the Ultimatum Game (see Henrich et al. 2005). Were cross-cultural researchers working across 15 cultures in fact able to standardize the practice and subjective meaning of “playing a game with an anonymous other”? Consider, for example, the behavior of the Au and Gnau peoples of Papua New Guinea. Many “proposers” offer more than 50% of the available currency. Many of these offers are turned down by the “responder,” leaving both “players” with nothing. The “WEIRD” populations of the world don't play that (apparently strange) way.
What description of goals, values, and pictures of the world can help us understand what the stimulus situation actually meant to those New Guinea subjects? Henrich et al. (2005) offer an explanation: “The rejection of seemingly generous offers, of more than half, may have a parallel in the culture of status-seeking through gift-giving found in Au and Gnau villages, and throughout Melanesia. In these societies, accepting gifts, even unsolicited ones, implies a strong obligation to reciprocate at some future time” (p. 811). Is that not prima facie evidence that the very idea of playing with an anonymous other did not compute or translate well in the mind or language of those non-WEIRD subjects, and that in effect they were not playing the same game as the one played by a typical “weird” American college student?
Indeed, the very idea of cultural difference might well be described as not playing the same game. Hence, we learn much about the culture-specific mentality of Melanesian peoples by trying to give a “thick description” of their local goals, values, and pictures of the world, so as to understand how and why the Ultimatum Game becomes a different stimulus situation (a different affordance, if you prefer that concept) as it crosses borders and travels around the world. I suspect Don Campbell would have been pleased to see the field of cultural psychology built on the basis of his methodological doubts.
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Near the end of the last essay ever written by the great psychologist Donald T. Campbell, one reads:
I would like to close … with a focus on the most ubiquitous source of error in efforts to know the other. This is to interpret as a cultural difference what is in reality a failure of communication. … I personally am convinced that many of the cultural differences reported by psychologists and others using questionnaires or tests come from failures of communication misreported as differences. (Campbell Reference Campbell, Jessor, Colby and Shweder1996, p. 165)
I hope the present target article by Henrich et al. has an impact on the way research is designed and reported in psychology: that there will be more specification of the boundary conditions for generalizations about human behavior, a greater reluctance to rush to claims about fundamental processes, and far less reliance on collecting data from college undergraduates. Here I focus on Don Campbell's doubt. I suggest that the objection, rightfully noted but then dismissed by Henrich et al., that “the observed variation across populations may be due to various methodological artifacts that arise from translating experiments across contexts” (sect. 7.2, para. 2) is a theoretically profound and potentially constructive criticism.
Evaluating claims to universality of psychological theories in the light of cross- cultural evidence is of course not a new enterprise. An early example is Margaret Mead's (Reference Mead1932) critique of Jean Piaget's claims in his book The Child's Conception of the World (Piaget Reference Piaget1929). Piaget described young Swiss children as animistic and proposed a universal ontogenetic sequence in which animism waned over time. Mead produced evidence from a small-scale society in the Admiralty Islands suggesting that among the Manus, the young children were dreary literalists and only learned to be animists later in life. Henrich et al. write: “As children already show large population-level differences, it is not obvious that developmental work can substitute for research across diverse human populations” (sect. 3.1, para. 5). Margaret Mead would not be surprised.
An even earlier example is the 1895 Cambridge University Torres Straits expedition headed by the anthropologist A. C. Haddon, which set up an experimental psychological laboratory in New Guinea (see Cole Reference Cole1996). William McDougall ran experimental tests of sensation concerning the limen of dual impression upon the skin, using a small pair of carpenter's dividers with blunt metal points. Native subjects were asked to perform an apparently straightforward task following an apparently easy-to-translate instruction: to say “one” or “two” as they judged whether one or two points touched the skin. McDougall reported that “Murray Islanders have a threshold of tactile discrimination of which the value, in terms of distance of two points touched, is just about one half that of Englishmen, or we may say in other words, that their power of tactile discrimination is about double that of Englishmen” (quoted in Titchener Reference Titchener1916, p. 206).
The claim was challenged by E. B. Titchener, whose 1916 essay defending the proposition that “human nature is much the same the world over” should be read by every anthropologist and cultural psychologist who believes otherwise (and I am one of them; see Shweder Reference Shweder, Stigler, Shweder and Herdt1990; Reference Shweder1991; Reference Shweder2003). Titchener raised a series of methodological objections, including the way subjects interpreted the purpose of the task. He argued that the subjects in New Guinea, when deciding whether to report “one” or “two,” were looking for “a sensation perceptively different from that yielded by a single point,” which is not exactly the same as looking for two distinct points of sensation. Educated Englishmen, Titchener suggested, simply interpreted the notion of duality of impression in a stricter sense. He judged that the evidence from New Guinea did not show that the Murray Islanders' powers of tactile discrimination were substantially different from those of subjects in his own WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic) society.
The relevant methodological point can be expressed this way: Evidence of psychological differences between cultural groups may simply (although significantly) demonstrate that different stimulus situations produce different responses. The identity of a stimulus situation (e.g., an experimental task) does not exist independent of the subject's interpretation of its meaning. Hence, the more different the culture studied from the culture where the stimulus situation was invented, the more likely the meanings of the task will be harder to communicate with the requisite exactitude in distant field contexts.
A revealing illustration can be found in cross-cultural research on the Ultimatum Game (see Henrich et al. 2005). Were cross-cultural researchers working across 15 cultures in fact able to standardize the practice and subjective meaning of “playing a game with an anonymous other”? Consider, for example, the behavior of the Au and Gnau peoples of Papua New Guinea. Many “proposers” offer more than 50% of the available currency. Many of these offers are turned down by the “responder,” leaving both “players” with nothing. The “WEIRD” populations of the world don't play that (apparently strange) way.
What description of goals, values, and pictures of the world can help us understand what the stimulus situation actually meant to those New Guinea subjects? Henrich et al. (2005) offer an explanation: “The rejection of seemingly generous offers, of more than half, may have a parallel in the culture of status-seeking through gift-giving found in Au and Gnau villages, and throughout Melanesia. In these societies, accepting gifts, even unsolicited ones, implies a strong obligation to reciprocate at some future time” (p. 811). Is that not prima facie evidence that the very idea of playing with an anonymous other did not compute or translate well in the mind or language of those non-WEIRD subjects, and that in effect they were not playing the same game as the one played by a typical “weird” American college student?
Indeed, the very idea of cultural difference might well be described as not playing the same game. Hence, we learn much about the culture-specific mentality of Melanesian peoples by trying to give a “thick description” of their local goals, values, and pictures of the world, so as to understand how and why the Ultimatum Game becomes a different stimulus situation (a different affordance, if you prefer that concept) as it crosses borders and travels around the world. I suspect Don Campbell would have been pleased to see the field of cultural psychology built on the basis of his methodological doubts.