I am enthusiastically positive about Henrich et al.'s target article. The message is central. Although the bottom line has been mentioned before in print by some of the authors and others (including myself), never has it been so thoroughly documented and elaborated into all the domains in which it is relevant. And never so convincingly.
For studies of humans in their social world, the North American undergraduate (NAU) does not serve as the fruit fly or E. coli has served for genetics. But at the level of basic psychological processes, such as learning, motor organization, or vision, the NAU is probably a pretty good fruit fly. Many basic psychological processes seem about the same in almost all humans, and great progress made by psychologists in areas such as vision can be attributed in large part to the appropriateness of NAU subjects, as well as animal models, of course. However, in the social world, in understanding humans as whole creatures negotiating the world, the NAU is a very unfortunate choice. Convenience, of course, is the justification, and this is very important; fruit flies and E. coli are very convenient ways to study genetics. North Americans constitute an atypical 5% of humanity, and North American freshmen and sophomores at research universities constitute an even more atypical 0.1 or 0.2% of humanity. But even for North Americans, the freshman or sophomore is very atypical, because this person is at a unique life transition, between family life and an entirely peer-centered life usually away from direct family influence. I have shown that on a number of beliefs about the social world, the grandparents of NAUs are as much like Asian Indian college students as they are like their American grandchildren (Rozin Reference Rozin2003).
A sample of 30-year-old Americans would give us a much better picture of American adulthood, because such individuals usually have a reasonably settled life course and family. It is ironic that the one special value of undergraduates for psychology has to do with how humans, in one important cultural setting, manage the transition to independence. Psychologists, at various points in time, have been interested in transition periods such as weaning, toilet training, entry into the school system, and adolescence. Here is another interesting transition point that receives surprisingly little study, for a population that is highly appropriate to examine human adaptation to change.
But the main point of my commentary is that although the NAU is truly anomalous, this subspecies of Homo sapiens is a vision of the future. With the Internet, ready availability of information of all sorts, computer fluency as key to success in the world, and ease in negotiating a world where text as opposed to face-to-face interactions are the meat of human relationships, the NAU is at the vanguard of what humans are going to be like. So study of them has some justification, not for understanding the human condition now or in history, but as to what it may become more like in the future. This is, as it were, a lucky break for academic psychology, a consequence of globalization and the computer/media revolution. Already, there has been a major change in an important area of socialization. It is now parents who are learning from their children how to navigate the Internet, order online, and navigate the modern electronic world. This is a real change in the direction of knowledge transmission. Insofar as the social world has transmuted to email, Facebook, and ordering online, it is the undergraduates who best illustrate how humans will function. Globalization, the growing availability of access to computers and the Internet, Internet dating services, the decline of face-to-face markets, automated telephone answering services, WalMart, and the like, are rapidly homogenizing the world, making more and more people like NAUs.
Because of globalization, it is especially important that we understand now the different worlds that humans have created – the physical worlds (e.g., cities, markets, architecture), the institutional worlds, the social alliances, and the mental maps of the world – before they become much more homogenized. So the prescient virtues of the NAUs make it more important that we fully explore human potential and human history at this time. We don't have much time, and the distinctive and elaborated different cultural worlds of interpersonal interactions, institutions, value systems, and the like, are a threatened species. The wide range of cultures in the world are wonderful and enlightening examples of the human condition and human potential, and we should cherish them and rush to understand them.
You have
Access
I am enthusiastically positive about Henrich et al.'s target article. The message is central. Although the bottom line has been mentioned before in print by some of the authors and others (including myself), never has it been so thoroughly documented and elaborated into all the domains in which it is relevant. And never so convincingly.
For studies of humans in their social world, the North American undergraduate (NAU) does not serve as the fruit fly or E. coli has served for genetics. But at the level of basic psychological processes, such as learning, motor organization, or vision, the NAU is probably a pretty good fruit fly. Many basic psychological processes seem about the same in almost all humans, and great progress made by psychologists in areas such as vision can be attributed in large part to the appropriateness of NAU subjects, as well as animal models, of course. However, in the social world, in understanding humans as whole creatures negotiating the world, the NAU is a very unfortunate choice. Convenience, of course, is the justification, and this is very important; fruit flies and E. coli are very convenient ways to study genetics. North Americans constitute an atypical 5% of humanity, and North American freshmen and sophomores at research universities constitute an even more atypical 0.1 or 0.2% of humanity. But even for North Americans, the freshman or sophomore is very atypical, because this person is at a unique life transition, between family life and an entirely peer-centered life usually away from direct family influence. I have shown that on a number of beliefs about the social world, the grandparents of NAUs are as much like Asian Indian college students as they are like their American grandchildren (Rozin Reference Rozin2003).
A sample of 30-year-old Americans would give us a much better picture of American adulthood, because such individuals usually have a reasonably settled life course and family. It is ironic that the one special value of undergraduates for psychology has to do with how humans, in one important cultural setting, manage the transition to independence. Psychologists, at various points in time, have been interested in transition periods such as weaning, toilet training, entry into the school system, and adolescence. Here is another interesting transition point that receives surprisingly little study, for a population that is highly appropriate to examine human adaptation to change.
But the main point of my commentary is that although the NAU is truly anomalous, this subspecies of Homo sapiens is a vision of the future. With the Internet, ready availability of information of all sorts, computer fluency as key to success in the world, and ease in negotiating a world where text as opposed to face-to-face interactions are the meat of human relationships, the NAU is at the vanguard of what humans are going to be like. So study of them has some justification, not for understanding the human condition now or in history, but as to what it may become more like in the future. This is, as it were, a lucky break for academic psychology, a consequence of globalization and the computer/media revolution. Already, there has been a major change in an important area of socialization. It is now parents who are learning from their children how to navigate the Internet, order online, and navigate the modern electronic world. This is a real change in the direction of knowledge transmission. Insofar as the social world has transmuted to email, Facebook, and ordering online, it is the undergraduates who best illustrate how humans will function. Globalization, the growing availability of access to computers and the Internet, Internet dating services, the decline of face-to-face markets, automated telephone answering services, WalMart, and the like, are rapidly homogenizing the world, making more and more people like NAUs.
Because of globalization, it is especially important that we understand now the different worlds that humans have created – the physical worlds (e.g., cities, markets, architecture), the institutional worlds, the social alliances, and the mental maps of the world – before they become much more homogenized. So the prescient virtues of the NAUs make it more important that we fully explore human potential and human history at this time. We don't have much time, and the distinctive and elaborated different cultural worlds of interpersonal interactions, institutions, value systems, and the like, are a threatened species. The wide range of cultures in the world are wonderful and enlightening examples of the human condition and human potential, and we should cherish them and rush to understand them.