I suspect that utilitarianism (or similar not focused on the self and social connections ideas) are even less popular in China than in the USA & the United Kingdom. As a single data point, this is an excerpt of text I saved several years ago regarding charitable giving and volunteering in China.
For the 2016 World Giving Index, the foundation polled an average of 1,000 people in 140 different countries or regions, asking them if in the last month they had helped a stranger, donated money to charity or volunteered their time. While donating time and money to charitable causes is becoming more and more popular around the world, the situation is still not pretty in China, which ranked 140th out of 140 in the poll...
Meanwhile, just 6% of Chinese said they had donated to charity, placing China at 138th in the world, behind only Yemen and Morocco. Finally, only 6% of Chinese said they had volunteered their time, once again ranking China 138th.
I’m also reminded of a display from the Exploratorium, showing how willing people in different countries are to help strangers. This isn’t an area I’ve read much about, but I suspect that the cultures we grow up with affect behavior more than more people acknowledge.
That display seems to illustrate my point — that the West/East distinction is a bit odd and rather outdated — well! People in cities in Brazil, Costa Rica, Malawi, India and China were more helpful than people in the United States, the Netherlands, Italy and Israel. But also, people in Vienna, Madrid and Copenhagen were more helpful than people in other parts of Europe, while people in Shanghai were more helpful than people in Taipei, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.
Why many EAs are so eager to make broad, hasty generalisations about entire continents and hemispheres is something I’ve never understood.
I agree that people often make overly-broad generalizations too easily. There are a lot of variables that affect behavior, and “west” and “east” are categories so broad as to be of very little use. But I would resist anyone suggesting that this means there are no broad, generalizable differences between people’s behaviors between cultures.
I’ll have a look, thanks! I do tend to be quite sceptical of this research due to the replication crisis and I’m not sure how useful it is. The same was true with Heinrich’s questionable “WEIRD” book. The common factor linking people whose parents/families object to them becoming vegetarian isn’t being Eastern/Western or Asian/Western, but “having families who object to vegetarianism”. This post uses a personal anecdote and those of two other people raised in East Asian households to speak on behalf of every single Asian on the planet — “those of us brought up in Asian households” apparently find these issues “particularly challenging”.
On a population scale, there are of course behavioural and ideological differences on average. And this can inform population-level policies and strategies, to some extent. Farmed animal welfare charities might use this information to tailor their messages to audiences in different countries, for example. But applying population averages to individuals is not good practice.
While it is true that Mohism originated in China, it isn’t very popular. Indeed, people cared for it so little that it was almost lost to history: “Mozi and his school fell into neglect and obscurity, their texts largely unread. Centuries later, the bulk of the Mozi was nearly lost to history, surviving only because it had been copied into a massive collection of Daoist scripture.”
I suspect that utilitarianism (or similar not focused on the self and social connections ideas) are even less popular in China than in the USA & the United Kingdom. As a single data point, this is an excerpt of text I saved several years ago regarding charitable giving and volunteering in China.
I’m also reminded of a display from the Exploratorium, showing how willing people in different countries are to help strangers. This isn’t an area I’ve read much about, but I suspect that the cultures we grow up with affect behavior more than more people acknowledge.
That display seems to illustrate my point — that the West/East distinction is a bit odd and rather outdated — well! People in cities in Brazil, Costa Rica, Malawi, India and China were more helpful than people in the United States, the Netherlands, Italy and Israel. But also, people in Vienna, Madrid and Copenhagen were more helpful than people in other parts of Europe, while people in Shanghai were more helpful than people in Taipei, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.
Why many EAs are so eager to make broad, hasty generalisations about entire continents and hemispheres is something I’ve never understood.
I agree that people often make overly-broad generalizations too easily. There are a lot of variables that affect behavior, and “west” and “east” are categories so broad as to be of very little use. But I would resist anyone suggesting that this means there are no broad, generalizable differences between people’s behaviors between cultures.
You might be interested in the book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why. It describes some of the ways that the cultures we grow up in affect how we think, and it had a pretty big influence on opening my mind to cultural differences. Or for a more specific example of within-country difference, Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture is nice, and has created a whole “subgenre” of papers exploring within country behavioral differences.
I’ll have a look, thanks! I do tend to be quite sceptical of this research due to the replication crisis and I’m not sure how useful it is. The same was true with Heinrich’s questionable “WEIRD” book. The common factor linking people whose parents/families object to them becoming vegetarian isn’t being Eastern/Western or Asian/Western, but “having families who object to vegetarianism”. This post uses a personal anecdote and those of two other people raised in East Asian households to speak on behalf of every single Asian on the planet — “those of us brought up in Asian households” apparently find these issues “particularly challenging”.
On a population scale, there are of course behavioural and ideological differences on average. And this can inform population-level policies and strategies, to some extent. Farmed animal welfare charities might use this information to tailor their messages to audiences in different countries, for example. But applying population averages to individuals is not good practice.