That display seems to illustrate my point — that the West/East distinction is a bit odd and rather outdated — well!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.
That display seems to illustrate my point — that the West/East distinction is a bit odd and rather outdated — well!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.