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Oct 19, 2020 · Culture 1 is used when the purpose of enquiry is to find out how social learning influences evolutionary dynamics across the animal kingdom; when asking how social learning contributes to behavioural adaptation, interacts with genetic processes, and semi-detaches animals from ecological constraints.
Dec 27, 2022 · WEIRD societies are characterized by high levels of impersonal trust towards strangers and institutions. The behavioural orientation of WEIRD societies is also largely individualistic, with lower adherence to group norms.
- Sujoy Chakravarty
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The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures Antonio Damasio Pantheon: 2018.
In attempts to define what makes us uniquely human, emotions and feelings are often marginalized. These deeply ingrained, often irrational aspects of our behaviour seem destined to be the poor cousins of the rational cognitive functions that enable the formulation of mathematical theorems or operatic scores. In his bold and important book The Strange Order of Things, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that in underestimating the contributions of such ‘lower-level’ brain phenomena to ‘higher-level’ cognitive functions, science might have been missing out on some important biology. Similarly, neuroscience’s emphasis on the origins of language as a shaper of culture might have eclipsed the role of feelings.
Damasio suggests that our hard-wired drives, urges, compulsions, impulses and automatic responses, such as hunger, desire and pain, originate from “subjective experiences of the momentary state of homeostasis” — that is, the body’s routine, humdrum regulation of its visceral function. He argues that there is an organic dialogue between this biological process and the feelings that arise from our continuous scrutiny of it. That diverse penumbra of feelings and impulses, in turn, continuously infuses conscious thought and, ultimately, drives human behaviour.
Human nature is thus distilled from a delicate and protracted negotiation between the beating drums of instinct, shaped by core biological functions, and the attempts of conscious minds to negotiate culturally appropriate outcomes of its mandates. These negotiations are prone to failure, causing dissonance. Damasio theorizes that this generates the profusion of contradictions that both define humans as a species and emerge in our cultural artefacts — from the first stone tools to the Taj Mahal.
Damasio, by unseating the mind from its elevated throne within the brain, delivers an onslaught on one of the core dogmas of conventional neuroscience. In his view, mind is distributed — for instance, to distant anatomical regions such as the peripheral neural networks that control organ function. Thus, different tissues in the body contribute incrementally to the mind’s function. Damasio’s vision offers a new and specific incarnation of the thesis of unified body and mind.
- Adrian Woolfson
- 2018
- Why the acronym WEIRD? The acronym WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic—aims to raise people’s consciousness about psychological differences and to emphasize that WEIRD people are but one unusual slice of humanity’s cultural diversity.
- And yet you caution readers not to set up a WEIRD vs. non-WEIRD dichotomy as they read your book. Can you expand on that? That’s right. While WEIRD should raise people’s consciousness about psychological differences, it’s not meant to suggest a simplistic dichotomy or binary worldview.
- What are the big questions this book aims to answer? I’d say there are three, and they are interrelated. First, how can we explain the psychological diversity that has now been documented around the world?
- What’s the connection between culture and psychology? Our minds are frequently understood using a misleading digital computer metaphor, with our brains and psychological processes as the hardware and our cultures—our values, customs and know-how—as the software.
Sep 16, 2020 · In it, he lays out how people from these societies differ psychologically from most other people throughout human history. The Gazette interviewed Henrich, who is a professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and its chair, on what being WEIRD is all about.
Apr 2, 2021 · Recent and accumulating evidence has shown that, to the contrary, culture permeates the lives of a great diversity of animals, with far-reaching implications for evolutionary biology, anthropology, and conservation.
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Jul 24, 2017 · Articles in the Sackler Colloquium on the Extension of Biology Through Culture explore social learning and cultural transmission in humans and nonhuman animals as well as the interplay between cultural and genetic evolution.
