Thanks for the informal post! I really liked it, and probably wouldn’t have read the whole paper.
I have a few thoughts that I’d be curious for your take on.
I’m a bit unsure how generally the papers you’re looking at apply to the broad question of changing values. A few intuitions:
These papers look at measurable and relatively narrow features of the past, and how far they explain features of the present which are again measurable and relatively narrow. My intuition would be that most of what matters in terms of values is pretty hard to measure, and might not show up in very concrete slices of reality. But maybe this is confused: if there were big fuzzy effects, they would show up in narrow concretisations?
Naively I’d say that past values and culture have had a huge impact on current values and culture. Many religions have persisted for a long time, there are differences in values between cultures that seem to have been relatively persistent, everyone inherits a bunch of assumptions from their society many of which have been around for a long time… (Below, Lumpyproletariat makes a similar point I think.) If all of my ancestors were Chinese, I expect I would see the world quite differently to how I actually do, with European ancestors. I don’t really understand how intuitions like this relate to your findings. Do you have any ideas?
To progress, we’d need to study the cultural legacy of intentional movements. This is a much harder topic, where quantitative proxies will be hard to come by.
Do you have any ideas about how to make progress on this? E.g. examples of intentional movements that seem worth looking into, proxies that might work...?
Thank you Rose! You make interesting points, let me try to reason through them:
These papers look at measurable and relatively narrow features of the past, and how far they explain features of the present which are again measurable and relatively narrow.
This is a point worth grappling with. And let’s be fair—there are many obvious ways in which cultural transmission clearly has had an effect on modern society.
Case in point: Xmas is approaching! And the fact that we have this arbitrary ritual of meeting once a year to celebrate is a very clear and measurable example of a cultural value being passed down through generations.
And yet, all these studies fail to find any strong effect in their analyses. What is going on?
Here are two possibilities:
a) cultural transmission mostly affects abstract social values like religion or political tendencies but not concrete personal values like trust.
b) abstract social values are easy to measure and quantify; concrete personal values elude a precise quantification.
I do certainly think that there is some truth to hypothesis b). It is easy to ask people about religion and note down their answer; it is harder to measure trust except in very superficial ways. The studies on trust rely on imperfect proxies like surveys.
I still think that hypothesis a) has more explanatory power. It is consistent with the literature on parental transmission, where my rough impression of the consensus is that children tend to culturally inherit abstract beliefs from their parents but not behaviours, which are mostly dictated by the shared cultural context and genetics.
Here is an excerpt from Bryan Caplan’s Selfish reasons to have more kids (pp. 45):
Parents have a big effect on religious labels, but little on religious attitudes and behavior. Parents strongly affect which religion their children say they belong to. A major study of over 7,000 adult Australian twins finds that identical and fraternal twins are highly and equally likely to share a religion—precisely what you would expect if nurture mattered a lot and nature didn’t matter at all. Another study of almost 2,000 women from the Virginia Twin Registry reaches a similar conclusion: Family has a big effect on religious denomination, while genes have at most a small effect.
[...]
Twin and adoption research reveals surprisingly little parental influence on how truly religious children grow up to be. One early study of almost 2,000 adult Minnesota twins reared together and apart found little or no effect of parenting on religiosity. Researchers measured the twins’ interest in both religious activities (such as attending services, volunteering, and religious study) and religious occupations (such as being a minister, priest, rabbi, missionary, or religious writer). Identical twins were much more similar on both measures than fraternal twins. Nurture effects were small for religious activities and zero for religious occupations. A recent follow-up found similar results.
My impression is that the same goes for politics. I do not know if other belief / attitude clusters have been studied, but I think it would be a safe bet to think they would have found the same pattern.
Of course, bear in mind that I am no sociologist. So take everything I am saying with a dose of healthy skepticism.
Do you have any ideas about how to make progress on [studying the cultural legacy of intentional movements]?
There is a large corpus of historical analysis studying social movements like the suffragettes or the slavery abolitionists. My bet is that there would be large value in summarizing their learnings and taking an “eagle’s-eye view” to look for interesting patterns in this movements. How long did it take since the movement was conceived until it spread? How did the main ideas originate? Can we build “infection models” of cultural ideas, making retrospective predictions of eg how many people supported LGBTQ+ rights each year? My outsider perspective is that there is very few people / teams working on the intersection of qualitative analysis and history of social movement, so I expect plenty of low hanging fruit there.
Within the community there has already been some work on summarizing historical movements. For example, Nuño Sempere talked about the Spanish Enlightment and General Semantics here, Holden Karnofski summarized ALL HISTORY here and Alex Hill and I wrote about the history of women’s rights and animal rights here. I would like to see more work on this vein, and more actual historians participating in the community.
Snodin and Kinniment’s research on succesful technological fields is also relevant, as an example of the kind of history-flavored, “eagle’s-eye view” research I think the EA community can excel at.
Regarding specific movements I would personally be interested in studying more closely: animal rights, feminism, the abolition of slavery, the Enlightment, the Scientific revolution, nazism, major religions and Russell’s rationalism are easy examples of cultural movements that became widely successful at some point and will be good to look at from an “eagle’s-eye view” perspective. Finding failed social movements to study is harder, though identifying a collection of them would be a great project for an early career researcher.
Another tangential topic I am interested in learning more about is cultural transmission in the near term, eg from grandparents to grandsons. Will the grandchildren inherit 1/4th of the variation of the cultural values of their grandparent relative to their respective cultural environments? There surely must be studies on the topic, though I haven’t looked closely.
Thanks for the informal post! I really liked it, and probably wouldn’t have read the whole paper.
I have a few thoughts that I’d be curious for your take on.
I’m a bit unsure how generally the papers you’re looking at apply to the broad question of changing values. A few intuitions:
These papers look at measurable and relatively narrow features of the past, and how far they explain features of the present which are again measurable and relatively narrow. My intuition would be that most of what matters in terms of values is pretty hard to measure, and might not show up in very concrete slices of reality. But maybe this is confused: if there were big fuzzy effects, they would show up in narrow concretisations?
Naively I’d say that past values and culture have had a huge impact on current values and culture. Many religions have persisted for a long time, there are differences in values between cultures that seem to have been relatively persistent, everyone inherits a bunch of assumptions from their society many of which have been around for a long time… (Below, Lumpyproletariat makes a similar point I think.) If all of my ancestors were Chinese, I expect I would see the world quite differently to how I actually do, with European ancestors. I don’t really understand how intuitions like this relate to your findings. Do you have any ideas?
Do you have any ideas about how to make progress on this? E.g. examples of intentional movements that seem worth looking into, proxies that might work...?
Thank you Rose! You make interesting points, let me try to reason through them:
This is a point worth grappling with. And let’s be fair—there are many obvious ways in which cultural transmission clearly has had an effect on modern society.
Case in point: Xmas is approaching! And the fact that we have this arbitrary ritual of meeting once a year to celebrate is a very clear and measurable example of a cultural value being passed down through generations.
And yet, all these studies fail to find any strong effect in their analyses. What is going on?
Here are two possibilities:
a) cultural transmission mostly affects abstract social values like religion or political tendencies but not concrete personal values like trust.
b) abstract social values are easy to measure and quantify; concrete personal values elude a precise quantification.
I do certainly think that there is some truth to hypothesis b). It is easy to ask people about religion and note down their answer; it is harder to measure trust except in very superficial ways. The studies on trust rely on imperfect proxies like surveys.
I still think that hypothesis a) has more explanatory power. It is consistent with the literature on parental transmission, where my rough impression of the consensus is that children tend to culturally inherit abstract beliefs from their parents but not behaviours, which are mostly dictated by the shared cultural context and genetics.
Here is an excerpt from Bryan Caplan’s Selfish reasons to have more kids (pp. 45):
My impression is that the same goes for politics. I do not know if other belief / attitude clusters have been studied, but I think it would be a safe bet to think they would have found the same pattern.
Of course, bear in mind that I am no sociologist. So take everything I am saying with a dose of healthy skepticism.
There is a large corpus of historical analysis studying social movements like the suffragettes or the slavery abolitionists. My bet is that there would be large value in summarizing their learnings and taking an “eagle’s-eye view” to look for interesting patterns in this movements. How long did it take since the movement was conceived until it spread? How did the main ideas originate? Can we build “infection models” of cultural ideas, making retrospective predictions of eg how many people supported LGBTQ+ rights each year? My outsider perspective is that there is very few people / teams working on the intersection of qualitative analysis and history of social movement, so I expect plenty of low hanging fruit there.
Within the community there has already been some work on summarizing historical movements. For example, Nuño Sempere talked about the Spanish Enlightment and General Semantics here, Holden Karnofski summarized ALL HISTORY here and Alex Hill and I wrote about the history of women’s rights and animal rights here. I would like to see more work on this vein, and more actual historians participating in the community.
Snodin and Kinniment’s research on succesful technological fields is also relevant, as an example of the kind of history-flavored, “eagle’s-eye view” research I think the EA community can excel at.
Regarding specific movements I would personally be interested in studying more closely: animal rights, feminism, the abolition of slavery, the Enlightment, the Scientific revolution, nazism, major religions and Russell’s rationalism are easy examples of cultural movements that became widely successful at some point and will be good to look at from an “eagle’s-eye view” perspective. Finding failed social movements to study is harder, though identifying a collection of them would be a great project for an early career researcher.
Another tangential topic I am interested in learning more about is cultural transmission in the near term, eg from grandparents to grandsons. Will the grandchildren inherit 1/4th of the variation of the cultural values of their grandparent relative to their respective cultural environments? There surely must be studies on the topic, though I haven’t looked closely.