Your Brain Has Been Altered: A Selection from Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World (2020)
“Your brain has been altered, neurologically rewired as it acquired a skill that your society greatly values. Until recently, this skill was of little or no use and most people in most societies never acquired it. In developing this ability, you have:
(1) Specialized an area of your brain’s left ventral occipito-temporal region, which lies between your language, object, and face processing centers.
(2) Thickened your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain.
(3) Altered the part of your prefrontal cortex that is involved in language production (Broca’s area) as well as other brain areas engaged in a variety of neurological tasks, including both speech processing and thinking about others’ minds.
(4) Improved your verbal memory and broadened your brain’s activation when processing speech.
(5) Shifted your facial recognition processing to the right hemisphere. Normal humans (not you) process faces almost equally on the left and right sides of their brains, but those with your peculiar skill are biased toward the right hemisphere.
(6) Diminished your ability to identify faces, probably because while jury-rigging your left ventral occipito-temporal region, you impinged on an area that usually specializes in facial recognition.
(7) Reduced your default tendency toward holistic visual processing in favor of more analytical processing. You now rely more on breaking scenes and objects down into their component parts and less on broad configurations and gestalt patterns.
What is this mental ability? What capacity could have renovated your brain, endowing you with new, specialized skills as well as inducing specific cognitive deficits? The exotic mental ability is reading. You are likely highly literate. . . .
Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code. A society in which 95 percent of adults are highly literate would have, on average, thicker corpus callosa and worse facial recognition than a society in which only 5 percent of people are highly literate. These biological differences between populations will emerge even if the two groups were genetically indistinguishable. Literacy thus provides an example of how culture can change people biologically independent of any genetic differences. Culture can and does alter our brains, hormones, and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, emotions, and many other aspects of our minds. . . .
You are riding in a car driven by a close friend. He hits a pedestrian. You know that he was going at least 35 mph in an area of the city where the maximum allowed speed is 20 mph. There are no witnesses, except for you. His lawyer says that if you testify under oath that he was driving only 20 mph, it may save him from serious legal consequences.
Do you think:
a. that your friend has a definite right to expect you to testify (as his close friend), and that you would testify that he was going 20 mph, or
b. that your friend has little or no right to expect you to testify and that you would not falsely testify that he was only going 20 mph?
This is the Passenger’s Dilemma, which has been done with managers and businesspeople around the world. If you picked response (b), you’re probably pretty WEIRD, like people in Canada, Switzerland, and the United States, where more than 90 percent of participants prefer not to testify and don’t think their friend has any right to expect such a thing. This is the universalistic or nonrelational response. By contrast, in Nepal, Venezuela, and South Korea, most people said they’d willingly lie under oath to help a close friend. This is the particularistic or relational response, which captures people’s loyalty to their family and friends. . . .
There’s nothing special about the content of the Passenger’s Dilemma. In places where people would help their friends by testifying, they also report a willingness to (1) give their friends insider company information, (2) lie about a friend’s medical exam to lower his insurance rates, and (3) exaggerate the quality of the cuisine at a friend’s restaurant in a published review. In these places, the ‘right’ answer is to help your friend. People aren’t trying to distinguish themselves as relentlessly honest individuals governed by impartial principles. Instead, they are deeply loyal to their friends and want to cement enduring relationships, even if this involves illegal actions. In these places, being nepotistic is often the morally correct thing to do. By contrast, in WEIRD societies, many people think badly of those who weight family and friends over impartial principles and anonymous criteria like qualifications, merit, or effort.”—Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020)
