Human Universals and Culture

• There are typically trade-offs in the usefulness of cultural practices
• Culture


  Ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society
• Culture as signalling


  Engaging in "culture" can improve mating prospects, especially for males
• The structure of personality is stable across culture
• The five-factor model of personality can be found in factor analyses across cultures
• WEIRD


  Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic
• HEXACO model


  Rearrangement of Big 5 factors, and the addition of a 6th factor: Honesty-Humility
• Honesty-Humility factor


  Tendency towards pro-social behaviour, non-exploitation vs Agreeableness: low anger
• Low levels of Honesty-Humility factor


  Link to Dark Triad Traits: Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, Narcissism
• Perceptions of national character are not generalizations about personality traits based on accumulated observations, but social constructions
• National character stereotypes tend to be unfounded
• Culture can affect how personality traits manifest themselves
• There are cultural differences in self-concept: how people define and talk about themselves
• There is debate over whether there is an innate human nature or everything is just learned culture
• Underestimating cultural influences can lead to thinking specific cultural conditions/norms are universal and mandatory
• Underestimating the role of learning and cultural factors in psychology might lead to pessimism and an unwillingness to fight to change the status quo
• Steven Pinker and the Blank Slate (2002)


  • Argued against the "Standard Social Science Modelˮ
  • Cultural norms may vary but underlying motives and drives exist in all cultures
  • Argued many social scientists are politically motivated to emphasise primacy
  • Argued many anthropologists downplayed the existence of a universal human nature
• The Savage Savage vs the Noble Savage vs the Human Savage


  • What is the 'naturalʼ state of humans? Are humans corrupted or civilised by cultural influences?
  • Hobbes (in a state of nature, nasty brutish, need civilisation to improve our lives and noble us) vs Rousseau (a man is born free but forever in chains)
• Early racist accounts of inferior 'savageʼ people led to a radical swing in the opposite direction: the 'noble savageʼ
• Middle ground: All cultures have what we might call positive and negative elements from our cultural viewpoint. (E.g., mostly male violence can be found in the vast majority of cultures)
• Violence isn't inevitable; simply is a feature of human psychology that seems to be pretty easily activated by ecological and cultural conditions
• Keelyʼs "War Before Civilisationˮ


  • Looks at archaeological evidence for prehistoric violence: murder, massacre, war
  • Significant evidence of warfare and geneocide
• Human Universals (Donald Brown)


  • There are many universals across societies
  • These universals represent our shared evolutionary history
• The assumption humans are infinitely malleable could lead to social conditions and pressures that go against 'human natureʼ
• Assuming that negative behaviours are learnt can lead to naive optimism about the malleability of human behaviour
• People can act in opposition to cultural norms (e.g., psychopaths)
• If we assume cultural norms are what drive behaviours that we think are ethically problematic, we might take the wrong approach to addressing these behaviours
• We might forever try to fix some behaviours at a cultural level when they might be 'insideʼ the individual
• Frequency-dependent selection


  An evolutionary process where the fitness of a trait depends on its frequency within a population
• Dark traits can be advantageous when rare, leading to success in social manipulation and competition: Too common, and the community adapts, reducing their effectiveness
• Fitness of trait also different across environments/trade-offs between high and low level of traits
• Standard Social Science Model


  Humans are born a blank slate

  The brain is a 'general-purpose' computer

  Culture/socialisation programs behaviour

  Culture is free to vary any trait in any direction

  Biology is relatively unimportant in understanding behaviour