[LINK] Westerners may be terrible experimental psychology subjects

I realized I was a bad test subject when they had me play the Ultimatum Game and I thought, "Naively I'd want to offer $1 out of $10, but I read about a study that says most people won't accept less than $3. OK, I'll offer $3."

Psych students and habitual test subjects (I lived on psych studies for about a year) are even worse than Westerners in general.

The piece from that article that I found most disturbing was that, for the Asch Conformity Experiment, we Americans fail the least. Google suggests we fail pretty hard. (~70%) If the rest of the world fails worse....yeah, that's bad.

One interesting thing about the Machiguenga is the explanation that they give for their allocations -- it's not that they don't care about fairness; it's that they think that since the players' roles were selected at random, the game is already fair. Schelling makes a related point: it matters what we call the roles in games, because that affects how people will play. If we called the game "lottery" instead of "ultimatum", then WEIRD subjects might well be inclined to share less.

Has the ultimatum game been repeated with westerners with the western equivalent of "several days wages" between people who know each other well rather than randoms?

You should probably spell out the acronym "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) at the start. I thought it was just a capitalize-the-first-word-in-an-article formatting until I read gwern's link.

Anthropology is a mindkiller.

I suspect that what many people say about other cultures reflects their own political opinions. Someone should do a research on that -- ask people about their political opinions, and then ask them about whether they consider some descriptions of foreign cultures likely or unlikely.

Seems to me that these are the attractors of describing foreigners:

1) They are exactly like us. All differences are just superficial details, analogies of what we do or think. When the difference is undeniable, it is only because they are forced or brainwashed to be different, but deep inside they would really prefer to be like us. Their different state is so unstable that any change (like sending them missionaires, or overthrowing their government) will start the inevitable process of them becoming exactly like us.

2) They are worse than us. Every difference without exception shows their intellectual or moral deficiency. Any negative description of them is credible; even if it does not make much sense (it's because they are idiots). They would do best by trying to copy us as much as possible, but it is a goal they can never achieve alone. Our mastery over them would be a blessing for them.

3) They are noble savages, infinitely morally and spiritually superior to us. If something about them seems imperfect, it is just our blindness to the higher truth. They live in perfect harmony with nature and other people, and if you have an evidence against that, you are just brainwashed by our evil culture. (Maybe they sometimes murder and torture people horribly, but... well, you simply don't understand it in the proper context. Also, did I tell you that you are brainwashed by our evil culture?) We are probably not worthy enough to copy them, but the least we can do is admire them and use some of their words, proverbs, or traditional clothing.

4) They are as different as different species or someone from a different planet would be. There is no hope of ever understanding each other. Protect our borders. Trade with them, if convenient, but don't care about anything else they do. (If their part of the trade with you involves slave labor, torture or murder of their people, well, it's their people and maybe in their morality it is okay, and you are not responsible for any of that. Just treat it as a black box and focus on your business.)

These descriptions can probably be mapped onto our political or other opinions. Each description suggests that we should do something, so probably each of them will sound credible to people who already think that we should do that.

Meta: Do other cultures also have similar attractors? Seems to me that I should include at least two to the list:

5) They are evil spirits who cause us harm. (Of course we, the good people, must kill them!)

6) They are strong but stupid. (We, the clever people, are allowed by our gods to steal from them and otherwise exploit them, but we must be careful to never confront them openly.)

Note: The common assumption in all descriptions is that all people from the foreign country are the same. (Maybe except the first one, which assumes an evil powerful minority preventing the rest of the population from becoming like us.)

People have been doing the ultimatum game in a wide variety of cultures for a while, and what this article calls the 'western' behavior isn't exactly restricted to westerners.

We were talking about WEIRD before it was cool.

Westerners are only terrible subjects if you are primarily interested in results from these "isolated cultures." If you live in a western culture, you probably are interested in the implications of research for your own society.

Nothing of that is exactly news.

This reminds me a bit of Dan Ariely's Amazon gift card experiment. He said people were irrational to take the $10 card for free rather than the $20 card for $7. I thought this was completely wrong because he wasn't factoring in the overhead of keeping track of and actually using gift cards, which I am personally really bad at. (I emailed him about this and he actually replied but I don't think he understood what I was talking about.) It seems like these other cultures have other factors associated with giving or accepting gifts (or money) that researchers initially didn't take into account. I'm also pretty confident that if the researchers asked the people to explain their decision, they'd have a reasonable, articulate explanation. It seems like that article is leaning toward, "loook, a mysterious difference in braaain fuuunction.~"

On the positive side, running tests on WEIRD subjects does at least tell you about the psychology of WEIRD people, and there are enough of them around to make the knowledge worthwhile even if it doesn't generalize to other populations.

Is there something in the article that's new and worth reading if you are already with the discussion from a few years ago?