Feeling connected to nature is linked to more innovativeness

Feeling connected to nature is linked with more innovative and holistic thinking about problems. Carmen Leong, John McClure and myself just published a study in which tested this relationship in two studies with Singaporean students.

We measured two different thinking preferences. First, the KAI (shortened from the Kirton’s Adaption-Innovation Inventory) distinguishes two kinds of thinking style. Some of us are good at working efficiently and can apply learned rules fast, without much effort. This type of thinking is called an adaption thinking style but is not very innovative. The opposing end of this thinking style, on the other hand, is innovation focused: it emphasizes thinking outside the box, doing things differently and creating new solutions to problems. The second thinking style AHT (abbreviated from Analytic-Holistic Thinking) differentiates holistic from analytic thinking styles. When people are solving a problem, holistic thinkers consider the whole problem within an overall system. They think in terms of the big picture, considering how all parts of a problem are related and how a single issue connects to all the others. In contrast, analytical thinkers break problems down into smaller components and work through them carefully. They consider the details and work on them, but pay less attention to the overall puzzle and to how the various components interrelate. Both types of thinking – analytic and holistic – can be useful: while it is sometimes better to go through problems piece by piece, at other times it seems more appropriate to consider how everything fits together and to address issues with a helicopter view.

When we linked these two instruments to a feeling of connectedness to nature, we found that connectedness with nature is positively related to both innovative and holistic cognitive styles. Singaporean students who are more connected to nature prefer both innovative and holistic thinking. This means that the more people feel connected to nature, they are more likely to be better at coming up with novel solutions (thinking outside the box) and also consider the bigger picture when solving problems. This is a novel finding that shows how people who feel a stronger connection to nature are also more innovative and see the bigger picture.

The underlying mechanism that drives these correlations is not clear yet. Carmen's reason for proposing these relationships was linked to people’s inclination to develop close relationships with others as well as with the natural environment. While people in general have a strong motivation to connect with fellow human beings, some are more strongly motivated to do so than others. Those who feel strongly connected to others may broaden their own perspectives: they consider how other people think and feel and see problems from other points of view. This is a crucial element of innovative thinking styles – seeing problems from somebody else’s perspective. It may be possible that people can show this sense of connection in relation not only to other people but also to nature. Edward Wilson has written about this motivation at length in his Biophilia hypothesis (see here for a review for a review of his great autobiography, here is a summary of research on biophilia). We applied the idea and hypothesized that it could also help us to understand differences in thinking styles. We also believe that the way we think with a helicopter view is very similar to the way things work in nature. Holistic thinkers, for instance, place emphasis on the interconnectedness of ideas within a system; and our understanding of nature teaches us that everything in it (life cycles, ecosystems, etc.) is interrelated. Those who feel a greater connection with nature will also think in terms of the big picture. Our study is an important first step in this direction, however, we need more systematic work that explores the underlying mechanisms directly.

The study was based on a single time point in two separate samples, so we cannot draw any causal links from it. Yet, the pattern suggests that getting out into nature and appreciating nature's diversity and beauty may do you lots of good, not just improving your health and reducing stress, but also helping you to become more innovative and a big picture thinker.

Get off your chair and go for a walk now :D

If you want a copy of the paper, please get in touch via email or this blog. Happy to send interested people a copy.

Political correctness gone mad: The issue of the 'racist' survey in Auckland

Sad to say, but political correctness has gone mad and is undermining important social research that can help us to make society better. The issue centres around a recent survey sent out by Auckland City Council to members of the public in some suburbs that have high percentage of migrants.

The survey asked people to respond to various questions about how they feel about people from other ethnic and cultural groups. The issue is around the so-called feeling thermometer. It is a simple scale, typically ranging from 0 - 100, where people are asked how warm or cold they feel towards various social groups or targets. It has been a staple of social science research at least since the mid-1960s. The earlier use was in the context of forecasting election results (e.g., do people feel hotter or colder towards a party or candidate), but it worked so well that it has been used to evaluate attitudes towards all sorts of social groups in society. It is a cheap and efficient way to gauge public opinion about various social groups in a straightforward and reliable way. It is 'bang for bucks' if you want to find out about the levels of support for various social groups. 

Some members of the public and the council in Auckland are offended by these questions and label them racist. Some council members even want to prohibit similar kind of research in the future (see the remarks by George Wood, the North Shore councillor). 

My simple question to George Wood and other people outraged by these questions is: 

How are you going to plan policies and make decisions about ethnic relations, if you have no understanding of the intergroup relations in your community? 

Let's face it - NZ  is one of the most diverse country in the world and has pretty positive race relations (and this is great and we should be proud of it), but at the same time the levels of discrimination against migrants has increased over the last decade. A recent study by Ricci Harris and others from Otago found that racial discrimination against Asians (as a broad summary category) has increased from 2002 to 2006. More importantly, these levels of discrimination increase mental health and physical problems. This is costs to the tax payer!

NZ is one of the most diverse countries in the world (UN International Migration Report, 2013)

I was involved in a government contract project with colleagues at Victoria University of Wellington and the Centre for Applied Cross-Cultural Research a few years ago, where we looked into the intergroup relations in New Zealand depending on the number of recent migrants in a neighbourhood. What we found was that there was a relatively complex relationship. New Zealanders view migrants relatively positively overall, but only up to a point. Once the number of migrants reached a certain threshold, the perceptions became more negative. These complex patterns can not gained in any other way, apart from asking straightforward questions in general population samples. These findings have significant policy implications: Where should you settle new migrants? What strategies can we implement to counter this deterioration of community feelings? How can we provide better support to groups affected by discrimination? 

Put simply: you cannot have sound policy and useful political decision-making without understanding the issues! 

The survey questions that are creating this debate are a sensible and efficient way of gauging trends in a larger population. We need MORE of this research, not less! We need more SERIOUS attention to this type of social science research by politicians and decision-makers! Councillors talking to their constituencies and getting opinions from self-selected individuals does not and cannot replace sound scientific research in general population samples. The recall and the ill-focused debate that this has created is a significant step backward for New Zealand. The costs for New Zealand will be much larger than the costs of re-calling these surveys. It is a sad moment because we are taking all the wrong steps that will not help us to address the real issues of racism in our society. 

Ed Wilson's Naturalist - a great biography of a fascinating environmentalist & scientist

I finished reading E.O. Wilson's biography 'Naturalist' yesterday. It took me a few pages to get into it, but it provided a fascinating glimpse into the life and philosophy of one of the most outstanding biologists and scientists still alive. He created some of the greatest controversies in science in modern times (the sociobiology debate), popularized the term 'evolutionary biology' and has made a huge impact on the environmental movement the world over (with helping to coin the term biodiversity and advancing the biophilia hypothesis - well, in the book he makes it clear that he did not invent the term biodiversity and initially even objected to it).

It is the self-portray of a highly introvert, but extremely ambitious individual, obsessed with understanding biological diversity (especially of ants), often plagued by insecurity and self-doubt, but also extreme boldness, political naivety and self-assurance that have landed him in a few hot spots.
I really appreciated his explanations of how he got to the intellectual positions that he was arguing for, his willingness to listen and change perspective if proven wrong and his very honest style of writing. The book provides quite a few back stories about the politics and history of a particular era of modern science and interesting perspectives on a number of major scientists. I was certainly not aware of the importance that Watson and the molecular revolution had on biology and the major debates (Wilson called them the molecular wars) that it created. But looking across the buildings to my biology colleagues, it explains a few of the ongoing debates and peculiarities.
I came across a reference to this autobiography in Sense and Nonsense, Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown's great summary of evolutionary approaches to human behaviour. Ed Wilson is a central and controversial figure in this whole approach and since I am going to teach a session on evolutionary approaches to culture, I thought I might as well have a look what Wilson had to say about his own life and work. It was a rewarding read and provided many insights to an important era of biology. Nearly every second page had quotes worth noting down, a true gem with good explanations and interesting advice to young and experienced scientists. I may not always agree with him, but he certainly has achieved a lot with his style, approach and determination. Since I may use some of them for my own writing and teaching, I am going to share some of these quotes as well as some longer summaries of key ideas here.

Over to Wilson himself....

His three big truths (all page numbers refer to the 1994 Island Press edition):

First, humanity is ultimately the product of biological evolution; second, the diversity of life is the cradle and greatest natural heritage of the human species; and third, philosophy and religion make little sense without taking into account these first two conceptions (p.363)

On his ambitions as a young scientist and the social nature of science (p.210):

... I was still obsessed by an elemental self-image: hunter in the magical forest, searching not just for animals now but also for ideas to bring home as trophies. A naturalist, real and then more metaphorical, a civilized hunter. I was destined to be more of an opportunist than a problem solver. The boy inside me still made my career decisions: I just wanted to be the first to find something, anything, the more important the better, but something as often as possible, to own it a little while before relinquishing it to others. I confess that to the degree I was insecure, I was also ambitious. I hungered for the recognition and support that discovery in science brings. To make this admission does not embarrass me now as it would have when I was young. All the scientists I know share a desire for fair recognition of their work. Acknowledgements is their silver and gold, and why they are usually very careful to grant deserved authority priority to others while so jealously guarding their own. New knowledge is not science until it is made social. The scientific culture can be defined as new verifiable knowledge secured and distributed with fair credit meticulously given [note: I really like this phrase]. 

On the ideal conditions for developing as a scientist - or as a political revolutionary (I love the analogy) (p. 108):

Start with a circle of ambitious students who talk and work together and conspire against their elders in order to make their way into a particular discipline. They can be as few as two or as many as five; more than five makes the unit unstable. Given them an exciting new idea tha can transform the discipline and with which they can advance their ambitions: let them believe that they own a central truth shared by a few others and therefore a piece of the future. Add a distant authority figure, in this case a scientist who has written a revolutionary test, or at least a circle of older revolutionaries who have generated the accepted canon.... Bring on a local role model, an older man or woman who promotes The Idea and embodies in his character and working habits the ideals of the youthful discipline. 

Another quote that shows his ambition (p. 232):

By this time I had been radicalized in my views about the future of biology [here he refers to what was called the molecular wars, the discovery of the double helix by Watson - one of his colleagues and how this led to a major split in biology]. I wanted more than a sanctuary across the street, complete with green eyeshades, Cornell drawers of pinned specimens, and round-trip air tickets for field work in Panama. I wanted a revolution in the ranks of the young evolutionary biologists. I felt driven to go beyond the old guard of Modern Synthesizers and help start something new. That might be accomplished, I thought, by the best effort of men my age (men, I say, because women were still rare in the discipline) who were as capable and ambitious as the best molecular biologists. I did not know how such an enterprise might be started, but clearly the first requirement was a fresh vision from the young and ambitious. I began to pay close attention to those in other universities who seemed like-minded. 

On different types of scientists (p.210):

 Scientists, I believe, are divided into two categories: those who do science in order to be a success a life, and those who become a success in life in order to do science. It is the latter who stay active in research for a lifetime. 

On paradigm shifts in science (p. 220):

When one culture sets out to erase another, the first thing its rulers banish is the official use of the native tongue (referring to the bad meaning that 'ecology' had taken on after the molecular revolution). 

On the importance of enemies (p. 218):

Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. The made me suffer (after all, they were enemies), but I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions. We need such people in our creative lives. As John Stuart Mill once put it, both teachers and learners fall asleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field.  

An observation of G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a science guru who inspired large number of young scientists and how he managed to do this (p. 237):

He did nothing, except welcome into his office every graduate student who wished to see him, praise everything they did, and with insight and marginal scholarly disgressions, find at least some merit in the most inchoate of research proposals. He soared above us sometimes, and at others he wandered alone in a distant terrain, lover of the surprising metaphor and the esoteric example. He resisted successfully the indignity of being completely understood. He encouraged his acolytes to launch their own voyages. 

Wilson's advise for young scientists to develop their own field of research (p.123, after having discussed his failings to become a champion runner):

I have evolved a rule that has proved useful for myself and might be for others not born with championship potential: for every level of mathematical ability there exists a field of science poorly enough developed to support original theory. The advice I give to students in science is to move laterally and up and down and peer all around. If you have the will, there is a discipline in which you can succeed. Look for the ones still thinly populated, where fine differences in raw ability matter less. Be a hunter and explorer, not a problem solver. Perhaps the strategy can never work for track (running), with one distance and one clock. But it serves wonderfully well at the shifting frontiers of science. 

Scientific summaries and comments on sociobiology

On genetic determinism (p.332-333):

Genetic determinism, the central objection raised against book two (the chapter on humans), is the bugbear of the social sciences. So what I said that can be indeed called genetic determinism needs saying again here. My argument ran essentially as follows. Human being inherit a propensity to acquire behavior and social structure, a propensity that is shaped by enough people to be called human nature. The defining traits include division of labor between the sexes, bonding between parents and children, heightened altruism toward closest kin, incest avoidance, other forms of ethical behavior, suspicion of strangers, tribalism, dominance orders within groups, male dominance overall, and territorial aggression over limiting resources. Although people have free will and the choice to turn in many directions, the channels of their psychological development are nevertheless - however much we might wish otherwise - cut more deeply by the genes in certain directions than in others. So while cultures vary greatly, the inevitably converge toward these traits. The Manhattanite and the New Guinea highlander have been separated by 50,000 years of history but still understand each other, for the elementary reason that their common humanity is preserved in the genes they share from their common ancestry. 

... the important point is that heredity interacts with environment to create a gravitational pull toward a fixed mean. It gathers people in all societies into the narrow statistical circle that we define as human nature.

Page 335-336:

What made Sociobiology notorious then was its hybrid nature. Had the two parts of the book been published separately, the biological core would have been well received by specialists in animal behavior and ecology, while the writings on human behavior might easily have been dismissed or ignored. Placed between the same two covers, however, the whole was greater than the sum of its part. The human chapters were rendered creditable by the massive animal documentation, while the biology gained added significance from the human implications. The conjunction created a  syllogism that proved unpalatable to many: Sociobiology is part of biology, biology is reliable; therefore human sociobiology is reliable.

In fact, I would love to quote large sections of chapters 16 and 17, because they contain so much rich material on the history and dynamics of the debate and how Wilson saw himself in the middle of this political mix.

Here is another important development, one that is often ignored. Having being challenged extensively for his application of sociobiology to humans, in particular the challenge of ignoring culture, he developed the concept of gene-culture-coevolution together with Charles Lumsden. Here is a longer quote with a summary of the basic premises (p.350-352).

We reasoned as follows. Everyone knows that human social behavior is transmitted by culture, but culture is a product of the brain. The brain in turn is a highly structure organ and a product of genetic evolution. It possesses a host of biases programmed through sensory reception and the propensity to learn certain things and not others. These biases guide culture to a still unknown degree. In the reverse direction, the genetic evolution of the most distinctive properties of the brain occurred in an environment dominated by culture. Changes in culture therefore must have affected those properties. So the problem can be more clearly cast in these terms: how have genetic evolution and cultural evolution interacted to created the development of the human mind? ... We were looking for the basic process that directed the evolution of the human mind. We concluded that it is a particular form of interaction of genes and culture. This "gene-culture coevolution", as we called it, is an eternal cycle of change in heredity and culture. Over the course of a lifetime, the mind of the individual person creates itself by picking among countless fragments of information, value judgement, and available courses of action within the context of a particular culture. More concretely, the individual comes to select certain marital customs, creation myths, ethical precepts, modes of analysis, and so forth, from those available. We called these competing behaviours and mental abstractions "culturgens". They are close to what our fellow reductionist Richard Dawkins conceived as "memes". ... Each time an individual modifies his memories or makes decisions, he entrains intricate sequences of physiological events that run frist from the perception of visual images, sounds, and other stimuli, then to the storage and recall of information from long-term memory, and finally to the emotional assessment of perceived objects and ideas. Not all culturgenes are treated equally; cognition has not evolved as a wholly neutral filter. The mind incorporates and uses some far more readily than others. ... All are diagnostic of the human species, all part of what must reasonably be called human nature. Such physiologically based preferences, called "epigenetic rules", channel cultural transmission in one direction instead of another. By this means they influence the outcome of cultural evolution. It is here, through the physical events of cognition, that the genes act to shape mental development and culture. The full cycle of gene-culture coevolution as we conceived it is the following. Some choices confer greater survival and reproductive rate. As a consequence, certain epigenetic rules, those that predispose the mmind toward the selection of successful culturgens, are favored during the course of genetic evolution. Over many generations, the human population as a whole has moved toward one particular "human nature" out of a vast number of natures possible. It has fashioned certain patterns of cultural diversity from an even greater number of patterns possible.  

 This book has helped me appreciate and re-evaluate his work on a different level. I hope this is reflected in my teaching ;)

How to do a pancultural factor analysis - a simple option

I am going to demonstrate a simple way of doing what is often called a pan-cultural or culture-free factor analysis in the cross-cultural literature (even though I do not like those terms) in SPSS. In the methods literature, this is also sometimes called a pooled-within analysis.

The basic problem is: How can you analyze the data from a large number of samples in an efficient way without giving priority to any data set? This is particularly interesting when you deal with data from lots of different cultures and you would like to find a solution that is averaged across all samples or 'culture-free' - capturing the average human being.

Such a solution could be interesting in its own right. It can also be useful as a reference structure for further Procrustean analyses (see my earlier blog post here).

Let's work with an example. I took the 1995 World Value Survey scores for Morally Debatable Behaviour (see a published analysis of the data here).

You will need to create the average correlation matrix first. The simplest way in SPSS is via Discriminant Function Analysis. Go to Classify (under 'Analyze') and select 'Discriminant'. Transfer the variables that you want to analyze into the Variables box. Then transfer your cluster or independent variable (your samples from different countries or cultures) into the 'Grouping Variable' box. You need to tell SPSS what the range of your country/sample codes is. In this case, the first sample is 1 (France) and the last sample in the data base is 101 (Bosnian Serb sample).

To request the average correlation, click on statistics. There you need to click on 'Pooled-Within Correlation'. Not much else that we need right now, so click 'Continue' and 'Ok'. In the output, you will see the table with the pooled-within correlation matrix right after the lengthy group statistics.

There are two options now. Either way, you need to get the correlation matrix.
One option is to open a syntax file in SPSS and to type this command and include the proper correlation matrix from your output as well as the overall N:

MATRIX DATA VARIABLES=benefits publictransport  tax stolengoods bribe homosexual prostitution abortion divorce euthanasia suicide
/contents=corr
/N=84887.
BEGIN DATA.
1.000
.434 1.000
.422 .516 1.000
.329 .429 .427 1.000
.338 .410 .428 .482 1.000
.232 .232 .244 .239 .267 1.000
.216 .249 .247 .274 .282 .544 1.000
.218 .238 .248 .266 .256 .334 .424 1.000
.204 .259 .252 .268 .273 .286 .355 .492 1.000
.220 .216 .235 .220 .233 .308 .295 .315 .327 1.000
.180 .210 .213 .239 .231 .275 .323 .315 .314 .430 1.000
END DATA.
EXECUTE.

Once you have it all typed out (or copied from SPSS), highlight it all and press the Play button (or 'Ctrl' + 'R').
A new SPSS window will open (probably best to safe this new data file with a proper name). As you can see in this picture, this looks a bit different from your average SPSS data spreadsheet.

 The first two columns are system variables (Rowtype_ and Varname_). The first line contains the sample size. If you don't want to use the syntax, this is the other option. You need to create this SPSS data file directly. The first variable in the SPSS matrix file is called ROWTYPE_ (specify it as string variable) and identifies the content in each row of the file (CORR, for correlations, in this example). The second variable is called VARNAME_ (again, specify as a string variable) and contains the variable name corresponding to each row of the matrix. The FACTOR procedure also includes a row of sample size (N) values to precede the correlation matrix rows. Then type or copy the full correlation matrix.


We are nearly ready for the analysis. Unfortunately, SPSS does not support factor analysis of matrices directly via the graphical interface. In order to run the analysis, you need to use syntax (again). 

Type the following command into the same syntax window (it will run a standard PCA, with Varimax rotation, print the scree test, sort the factor loadings and suppress loadings smaller than .3):

FACTOR MATRIX=IN(COR=*)
  /PRINT INITIAL EXTRACTION ROTATION
  /FORMAT SORT BLANK(.3)
  /PLOT EIGEN
  /CRITERIA MINEIGEN(1) ITERATE(25)
  /EXTRACTION PC
  /ROTATION VARIMAX
  /METHOD=CORRELATION.


Again, highlight the whole Factor command bit and hit play (or 'ctrl' + 'R'). You should see the output of the factor analysis based on the average correlation matrix. As you can see in the output, there are two factors that correspond to the 'socio-sexual' and the 'dishonest-illegal' factors. The scree test and Bartlett's EV > 1  also both support that there are only 2 factors. 

Now you can either interpet this factor structure in your report or use as reference for further comparisons against each of the samples.

Voila!

Stereotypes, policy making and the lack of value research in the Pacific

I have been working on some policy related research work. The first stage of the project is a literature review of available research on values in the Pacific. The review generated is supposed to inform policy making in the Pacific. It is a fascinating project and topic. Yet, I am struck by two very peculiar observations as I am trying to locate relevant material.

Little research and lots of recommendations

The first thing that is really noteworthy is the absence of much high quality empirical work, but the abundance of policy recommendations, guidelines and advise based on a complete lack of information. For example, government departments in NZ provide information to employers about  how to deal with Pacific Island staff, but I was unable to locate any first hand research that supports these recommendations. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but seems to be part of a larger picture of wild guessing, stereotyping and random observations being turned into potentially ill-informed and inappropriate guidelines, policies and interventions. This is outright problematic in my opinion.

Old School Anthropology and lack of insider voices

The second striking fact is that there are quite a few books by American/European/Western anthropologists describing the exotic features of island life and isolated topics of interest to these foreign outsiders, but relatively few ethnographic or anthropological accounts (beyond artists responding to journalists questions) by local people. In some cases, the diverging view points by outsiders (as in the famous Mead vs Freeman exchange) are heavily debated by other anthropologists from overseas, but there is little voice in that debate that came from Samoans (as far as I can tell based on my initial search). Outsiders determine how one of the most diverse regions in the world is portrayed and described.

Island themed performance and stereotypical accounts from age-old ethnographic studies shape our vision of the Pacific

Basically it seems that our understanding of issues in the Pacific are shaped by Western anthropologists doing research with more traditional communities from the 1920s-1970s mainly and there is a relatively lack of research on how modern day general populations in the Pacific feel, think and believe about all sorts of issues of societal relevance. Advise to business, clinicians, and even governmental policies are built on the absence of reliable data.

Pain increases happiness... or why watching other people suffer can be more painful than suffering yourself

Why do people voluntarily engage in pain? We conducted a study a few years ago and the articles and a media release by our university are just out this.

We were interested in individuals who participate in objectively painful religious rituals. Western theories and observers would argue that people engaging in these activities risk infection, experience negative emotions and should feel less happy after the ritual, compared to others who do not engage in these behaviours. There is quite a bit of research in medical areas that talk about the negative effects of large scale religious events, especially if they involve painful activities (just think of jumping into ice cold water, walking over burning hot coals, piercing yourself with unsterilised metal rods, etc.).

We studied a festival on the small island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, just off the coast of Africa. The festival involves 10 days of fasting and prayers, and culminates in a long procession and fire-walking ritual. What was particularly interesting for us was to study the effects that active participation in the firewalk as the focal element of the ritual had on people, compared to others who participated, but did not do the firewalk or merely watched from the sidelines.

We invited fire-walkers (‘high-ordeal’ participants); people participating in the ritual without engaging in the high-intensity activities (‘low-ordeal’ participants); and spectators to be part of our study. The fire-walkers and ‘low-ordeal’ participants were members of the same families. The support from the local temple and community was actually phenomenal. We had to turn people away, because we did not have enough resources to study everyone. Here, the hard work by Dimitris Xygalatas in setting up the field site and establishing the connections with the local community really paid off!

Participants walked barefoot in the midday sun without eating or drinking while carrying pots of sacrificial offerings. The fire-walkers were pierced with needles or skewers and finished the procession by walking over knives and burning coals.

Our design was super-ambitious though. We asked individuals a few questions before the whole festival started, measuring their initial states of happiness and fatigue and we also strapped them up with mobile heart rate monitors. This allowed us to track their physiological arousal during the festival. We then asked people again after the end of the ceremony.

To examine the effects of participation, we compared the levels of happiness, fatigue and heart rate of low- and high-ordeal participants, and found that fire-walkers had experienced the highest increase in heart rate and reported greater happiness and less fatigue post-ritual.

Even more interesting was the experience of ‘low-ordeal’ participants because of their relationship to the fire-walkers. Fire-walkers experienced the emotional ‘high’ upon finishing the ritual, whereas ‘low-ordeal’ participants did not, while simultaneously worrying about the well-being of their friends and family. These people, even though they did not physically experience the pain, felt more exhausted than the fire-walkers. Sometimes, perceiving other people suffer can be more exhausting than actually experiencing the pain yourself.

The Team of Investigators - after the ritual ordeal is over

In the paper, we provide some speculations about potential biological mechanisms, especially opioid systems and pain-offset mechanisms to guide future research. The study of voluntary pain is highly fascinating and there is so much that we don't yet understand (see also my earlier posts about extreme rituals in this blog).

For those interested, the paper can be found here (it is open access, so no fees) and the media release is here.

Indigenous or not indigenous.... that is the question

Today I listened to a really interesting talk by Peter Smith from Sussex Uni. He was presenting his work on social influence, including some of the new stuff on different indigenous social influence strategies such as the Chinese guanxi, Brazilian jeitinho, Middle Eastern wasta and Russian svasy. These are all local behaviours that individuals may adopt to solve problems in their environment, typically by relying on social relationships or their power (e.g., for a great example from the news this morning - the son of the Iraqi transportation minister forcing a plane to return to Beirut). Peter and his colleagues asked students and managers to come up with good examples of each local cultural strategy in their local culture. They then took the most representative scenarios from each culture, removed any identifying content and gave it to managers in other cultures. What they found was that the supposedly indigenous influence strategies were generally seen as typical even in other cultures. In other words, British 'pulling strings' was often as likely to be seen as applicable and typical in China and Saudi Arabia as in the original British context.
This clearly challenges notions that indigenous influence strategies are unique and distinct to a specific local context. Of course, he immediately got challenged by some people in the audience defending the indigenous approach, claiming that these wimpy scenarios miss the rich context and the social relationships that go with each style.
I think that there are subtle differences in how these influence strategies work and are employed (see for example our qualitative ethnographic work on Brazilian jeitinho here and a set of empirical studies where we also make some theoretical claims about jeitinho vs guanxi here). Yet, there are three major issues that I think the indigenous people are missing.

First, there are limited behavioural options for humans. We are live in social settings with a core family, extended family and a relatively stable set of limited contacts in an extended social network. All these networks are more or less hierarchically structured. We all need to negotiate these networks and there is only a limited set of behavioural strategies for any of us (e.g., ingratiation, calling in favors, returning favors, making compliments, breaking some rules, paying a bribe, giving some gifts... you name it). See work by David Ralston. We can not just come up with something completely different. It is all there. We are humans. Therefore, people in most contexts will be able to recognize and distinguish particular types of behaviours. Hence, people can call a spade a spade... even if it looks a bit funny shaped.

Second, the functions of all these behaviours are to solve problems. It is the functionality of these behaviors, even if not socially approved and even considered illegal (think of corruption or nepotism), it still gets things done. This is why they are so widespread and so similar in form. We made this argument and showed some data supporting this claim here.  Peter Smith and his colleagues also found similar results in their cross-national study. Think behaviours - think functions. And think power corrupts... probably as universal a function of human behaviour as there can be.

Third, many of these behaviours are locally embellished, discussed, criticized, analyzed, debated. By doing this, these behavioural strategies take a life on their own in the minds of concerned members of a community. Go to Brazil and talk to them about jeitinho - you will be listening to complaints for hours - hopefully while having some good cool caipirinhas. Go to Lebanon and ask somebody about wasta - and better have a good shisha or coffee next to you, because you are not going to move for a while. These behaviours are often recognized as problematic, but they are so damn useful and this is why they continue. At the same time, discussing and gossiping about them becomes a reinforcer of the social norm and therefore serves as an identity marker. The behaviour is not just a behaviour anymore, but has taken a cultural life of its own. Therefore, it has to be unique - you can't say that another place has also something that really seems to be jeitinho... or wasta... or guanxi. It is what makes us who we are as people... So dare you say that somebody else may have come up with something similar.

So how does my claim that there are subtle differences fit in with that? I think the first and second point are the answer to that. There are a number of limited behaviours and strategies that people can use to solve problems. The nature and type of problems will differ slightly by context. Therefore, some behaviours will be more common or be expressed with greater force or variety than others. Hence, there is a matrix of behaviours which is latently present in all contexts, but then is expressed to slightly different degrees. Some patterns of the behavioural matrix may be missing or be expressed very weakly in some places. Others may take a particular form due to the different social relations- compare the loose social relations in Brazil which allows more flexibility in social norm bending with the still relatively strong family networks in China that may be less flexible. So what differentiates the various styles is how the matrix is filled with specific behaviours in a specific context. Jeitinho may be a bit more norm breaking, wasta a bit more relying on social hierarchy, guanxi a bit more social relationship harmony focused. But the matrix is there. It is recognizable. It has blends of the same ingredients. It is this matrix that makes us human and helps us to interact with anyone in the world. It is what makes us humans.

A Brazilian will recognize Chinese guanxi and know what it is all about. A Russian will painfully remember some personal experiences when hearing an example of wasta in Lebanon. We all can understand what happened in Beirut this morning - even though we may not want to do or can not do it ourselves (even though I have to admit it would be bloody awesome sometimes to force that damn train or bus to come back when I just missed it... Just saying... :).