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We Aren't the World: Why Americans Make Bad Study Subjects
Lasrick writes "This is just fascinating: Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics, and explain why social science studies of Westerners — and Americans in particular — don't really tell us about the human condition: 'Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.'"
why would you study a bunch of primitive, gun-loving hillbilly rednecks?
YOu euro-trash are teh ones that are different!
Fuck all YA all.
'Merica! YEAH!
"Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.'"
Are they saying all the Americans are fat birds, unable to fly?
no shit sherlock
Well Duh, studying one of the richest and most powerful nation is stupid. You can only learn so much about a group studying it's extremes, not to mention powerful societies tend to do there own thing (because they don't see a need to copy things) and the longer in power the more noticeable it becomes.
This headline is the most hateful and prejudiced comment about Americans I have heard all day!
What we have in the US is a completely non-uniform population.
*rant*
I mean, the people who vote for the neoConfederate Tea Party Republicans, and the funniementalist who claim to believe in Jesus as love, and want to create a dictatorship to make sure everyone belives as they do don't even live on this planet.
*/rant*
The US is completely fractured - the so-called "culture wars" are literally talking about complete, non-geographic or semi-geographic societies. To try to come to conclusions with that - and I haven't read the article, but I'll wager it's a very small sample size - is ludicrous.
mark
Lord Bradley: Precisely. But, if our economy was threatened, then it would be our duty to protect our intrests.
Anna Leonowens: Our economy?! Our interests?!
Lady Bradley: The ways of America are the ways of the world, my dear.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Innovation in 'social science' amounts to finding new ways to disparage Americans specifically, and more generally anyone with the temerity to emulate them. These are professional malcontents; the finest hate-mongers on Earth, teaching us all what we are to loath. Hindu hut-dwellers are about the only form of humanity not subject to their highly refined contempt.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
If one was trying to scientifically "draw broad generalizations" about humans, why would you ever select samples from just one nation (regardless of which one)?
Use a dozen nations, some more developed than others. Heck, use one hundred nations. How else would you be abled to defend statistically valid results?
Leaving out any arbitrary set of 330 million humans would seem to lead you further away from meaningful conclusions. Are Americans not also human?
Singling out one country for inclusion or exclusion sounds like something other than impartial, apolitical science for drawing "broad generalizations".
If you don't like America (or wherever), that's fine and dandy... but please don't call your hand-picked findings the "human condition". Especially if you're going to choose the humans based upon any one individual's peculiar set of ideals.
We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone. -management
The instrumental goal underlying a lot of psychology and economics research is "what should we do in the U.S.?" It's all dressed up in basic-science, idealistic language, but ultimately what the penguin taxpayers funding the research most care about is penguin economics and penguin psychology, not so much the rest of the birds...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. "It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money," says Henrich.
"They just didn't understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game."
The big corporations were way ahead of the curve.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Now scientifically proven! ;)
It should be possible to mod an entire article as flamebait...
*grabs popcorn*
only the part that matters.
Few of the studies have reproducible results and fewer are able to draw hard, unambiguous, numerical conclusions from their data. So it doesn't make much difference whether american students or penguins were used as test subjects - unless the study was on the motivational effect of raw fish.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Um, is it not a good idea in general to isolate studies to one select population, US or not is you want to look at the world?
From talking with dormmates, it seemed that they consist of long-winded, carefully documented presentations of the obvious. Like we couldn't have guessed that the "ultimatum game" (two participants must agree on how to split up $100, or they both leave empty handed) might not have the usual end result in a Stone Age tribe not used to handling money?
I always knew Americans were poor examples of human beings!
-AlPhAbEt
This is, however, a form of exceptionalism. So be happy!
Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world.
So what does their study say about "western" who have been raised rural?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Müller-Lyer illusion -- Put those images in an image editor and measure the lines -- they've presented unequal lines to exaggerate the illusion -- and make its application completely meaningless to the viewers. Pretty lame.
"We aren't the world! We aren't the children! We aren't the ones who make a better day..."
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
The article isn't actually about the Western world, or how Americans are "bad study subjects". Rather, the research TFA talks about is indications that Western assumptions about cognition are based on Western culture, rather than biological design*. In essence, the researchers acknowledge that some of the basic fundamental ideas of perception may not be so fundamental.
It really has nothing to do with Americans being inherently bad study subjects. Rather, it accuses the field of anthropology of focusing too heavily on a single (though changing) culture throughout its history. In other words, sampling bias exists.
* "Design" In the "structure and function" sense, not the "somebody intentionally built this" sense.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations
Uh, that's because America is diverse as fuck. Hell, humanity is diverse as fuck.
Trying to draw accurate yet broad generalizations about humanity are impossible.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
This summary has almost nothing to do with the underlying article, and the headline draws a completely erroneous conclusion. It isn't about Americans being bad study subjects at all, but rather the idea that extrapolating between two cultural groups that have vastly different environments is much harder than previously thought.
A sentence from the cited article might explain the different behaviour experienced when running the "Ultimatum" game with the Machiguenga
The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies.
So if one offers a valuable and rare commodity to people living a life near sustenance, one gets other results than if one does the same experiment with people who have most of their needs (over)fulfilled and do not need the stakes of the game? That is IMHO not surprising but quite in line with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Maybe social scientists (and economists) should start to evaluate the context of their experiments more carefully. Alas they are missing the 'laws of nature' whose violation leads to checking every plug.
Research published late last year suggested psychological differences at the city level too.
Some of the differences they've found actually are interesting, though. Like this familiar illusion, which has tricked many Westerners, but Bushmen from the kalahari see them as obviously equal length. (Let's hope they didn't use those images for comparison in the actual tests, as this guy pointed out, the lines actually are different length!)
I've often thought that someone with a good set of scientific principles could go into the fields of sociology and do a lot of easy work and get famous.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The words "Researchers found that Americans perceive the line with the ends feathered outward (A) as being longer than the line with the arrow tips (B)." accompanies a drawing in which the "arrow tips" are labled "A" and the other line is labled "B"
Hopefully this was the journalist and his editor being morons. If the researcher himself made this mistake then the test results are worthless.
Not sure any shaking is actually taking place here. I'm currently studying psychology and we've already come across examples of cultural affects on results in experimentation in the first year (and the experiments we've studied go back to the 60s/70s). Mind you, in ecomonics, doing some actual science would be ground breaking (you know your 'science' must be soft when psychologists think you're a bunch of light weights).
oops...
The line, "Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood", reminded me of much of my (admittedly anecdotal) experience with two vegetarians. I've had two friends that were lifelong vegetarians and decided to move out of the city and onto farms. One of them actually started a farm. The other one I met later in life and had moved back from an agricultural commune. Both had become meat-eaters; though not hard-core ones. It seems like spending time directly with nature changed them. Mother Nature, apparently, is perfectly fine with inter-specie killing for food.
Myself, I grew up on a farm. I've only understood vegetarianism (for moral reasons) in an intellectual sense. I've never felt the emotional problem with killing other animal types.
(This is only an observation. I have no problem with vegetarianism. To each his own.)
"the equivalent of studying GLORIOUS EAGLES." get your imagery straight.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
I think the real story is that sociologist were dumb enough to think that 'fairness' is evolutionary determined.
If I throw a ball at your face and you duck... that's biological; no one wants to get hit in the face.
But fairness? Seriously? No wonder no one they so dumped upon by the other 'real' sciences.
As a foreign language instructor for adult students I've certainly struggled with the American mindset. In every class there's always a few who I call anti-culturalist. They just can't comprehend that there's other ways of doing things that aren't wrong but simply different. The more a person has traveled the less they seem to struggle with this. Everyone should spend a year or two living somewhere really foreign, that would do a lot for human relations. Maybe the size of the United States just makes the rest of the world seem so far away, theoretical.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
As usual in most "scientific" papers, this one talks about obviousness. All cultures have their own idiosyncrasies. To use subjects from one to predicted behavior on the other is a perfect path to failure. Actually even using groups inside a given culture to predict the behavior of the whole is due to failure most of the time.
"...they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. "
Well let's be sane here.
Any single population of any single country is probably a poor pick if you're looking to characterize all of humanity.
Someone else suggested modding the article flamebait, I agree.
In other words: the concept of ceteris paribus is utter bullshit.
Film at 11.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Captain Obvious is telling us social studies are useless.
As if we didn't already know that!
In the last election cycle the Republicans tried to point out that what America calls poor would not be called poor in most other nations. But they got lots of flak and backed off. But there is some truth in noting that "there is no food in the fridge in my kitchen" sounds crazy to people who don't have homes, and those who do don't have kitchens, and those who do dont have fridges! It like the story about the poor written by a rich kid. "There was a poor man. His butler was poor, His chauffeur was poor, His cook was poor and so was his maid.
A household barely on the poverty line in USA is richer than 80% of the world! About 10% of the world, or 700 million people or twice the population of USA, lives in less than $365 a year! Again these dollar figures are not the foreign exchange rate based dollars. These are "purchase power parity" dollars. Which means the $365 buys in the poor country, what $365 would buy in the USA.
So the conclusions of this study are rather obvious.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.
Okay, this would make sense if they were applying human studies to all primates: monkeys, apes, gorillas, etc. But, they're applying the studies to the same species. It's still not good, but it's not as bad. It's like applying the studies of penguins in one geographic location to all penguins. Bad, but not as bad as suggested.
The G
We aren't the world, we aren't the children
We aren't the ones who make a brighter day
So lets stop giving
There's a choice we're making
We're saving our own lives
Ain't true we'll make a better day
Just you and me
Researchers found that Americans perceive the line with the ends feathered outward (A) as being longer than the line with the arrow tips (B). San foragers of the Kalahari, on the other hand, were more likely to see the lines as they are: equal in length.
But they are not equal in length: http://imgur.com/24V6a81
Circumcision is child abuse.
Line B is definitely longer than line A in that Muller Lyer Comparison.
Unless my copy of photoshop is showing its bias also.
All the way down.
In the late eighties, I (like many other undergrads) were required to "volunteer" to be the subjects of psych and sociology studies when we were in intro psychology classes.
I talked a good bit with a particular political science prof whose specialty was survey research and the measurement of public opinion. I noted that no reasonable researcher would try to extrapolate such a biased sample to be representative of the world population. He pretty much agreed and lamented the situation.
Yet, that was exactly what was being done. Ignoring the myriad flaws in the research I could see with just the viewpoint of participating, none of the people doing the studies that I talked to saw any reason to control for the completely unrepresentative sample.
They were quite happy to make predictions equally about inner city youth, Appalachian rural elderly and middle aged residents of The Hamptons all from studies that were exclusively late teen early twenties college students.
I was appalled that this "goop" might end up being used as the basis for social policy decisions.
The problem with these so-called "sciences" is that they deal only with historical data for particular groups of people at particular times.
These "sciences" pattern themselves after the epistemology of physics, yet they have no universal constants and no fixed relations.
They are ill-equipped to find the regularity in the concatenation and sequence of phenomena.
The Austrian School of economics isn't affected by these results. It depends on a different epistemological foundation.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies.
Henrich's approach to the ultimatum game seems flawed. He mentions that he offers the equivalent of a few days wages, which is probably too much. The game is usually played for significant, but smaller sums, such as the value of a free lunch. For a sufficiently large starting sum, even tiny portions are enough to be worth something. For example, if you were asked to decide on a split of $200 out of a total $2000, you would probably want to spite the splitter. But you would also probably be overruled by your desire to get a free $200. It's only when we start looking at a smaller total with similar proportions -- say, $2 out of $20 -- that we start to see small portions being worth sacrificing to spite the other guy.
Proportionality is a bad metric in this scenario, and he should probably use some thing like "hours of equivalent labor" instead. (And in that case, he better hope everyone is used to making equal amounts of money in such an hour, which is certainly not true in Western societies.) By sticking to proportionality as a metric long after it becomes meaningless, Henrich buries the signal in noise. He has made it too easy for the splitter to "buy off" the decider.
The Pacific Standard description of the game also misses the point when they say that (for Western subject) the game tends towards and average 50/50 split. The average isn't nearly as interesting as the highest refused split/lowest accepted split, which tells you exactly how much someone is willing to sacrifice to spite the other party/the minimum "fair" proportion. This figure tends to be down near 30%. (It is up for debate how the subjects are internalizing this number as fair... whether it is closer to, say, "half of an even share (25%)," or "half of what the splitter makes (33.33%)," or some other figure.)
He is correct in that it will be culturally influenced. That is a big part of the point. In fact, when the experiment was originally devised, it was considered surprising that people would refuse any split at all. It is, after all, free money split between anonymous parties in exchange for no work at all. The reason people behave in this "illogical" manner is because reputation has worth, and if you want to avoid being cheated in society, it pays to have a reputation for being spiteful and willing to take a small loss to inflict punishment on those who wrong you. No transaction happens in a vacuum. The point is that the social gaming conditioning "leaks through" into our behavior even though the experimenter has (usually) done his best to remove all social components that would reward such spiteful behavior.
Now, Henrich has spent a few years doing this sort of thing, and it's been looked over by plenty of competent people, so I'm presuming his team's understanding is really not so shallow as it is presented here. But still, it is a bit odd to look at this collection of anecdotes that seems to demonstrate "culture matters" and come away with the conclusion that Westerners, and especially Americans, are weird. This is especially true when so many experiments of the previous century were aimed at identifying cultural behaviors and disentangling them from basic human response... in essence, all experiments which prove both that humans are similar (because they respond similarly under highly controlled conditions) and that culture matters (because that what influences them to behave slightly differently under different conditions). An experimenter has to be keenly aware of the culture under test, because experiments can amplify subtle differences if it doesn't account for them.
From the experiment with the Machiguenga (follow link in summary) , the split between players matters less then it does in 'Western' (i.e. American) society. They are much more likely to share their wealth among the tribe after the game is over. So it doesn't matter who walks away with what amount during the game.
From a practical point of view, the giver in the game has more certainty of getting his share up front than he does in trusting the (outsider) sociologist to give the remainder to the other participant as agreed. So get the money now and split it with the village afterwords.
Have gnu, will travel.
For example, study subjects who happen to be Ashkenazi Jews or African Americans are likely to give very different results on just about any metric.
The result of adding together multiple, discrete populations, each having their own normal distribution of attributes, is to create a lepto-kurtotic population - with fat tails and a tall peak at the average.
Most non-Western cultures (outside South America) are far more homogeneous, geneticly and culturally. The rest of the world really is more normal than the US.
The minorty which scare us the most are not your redneck, or whatever, but the 46% of people which believe the world is 11000 year old or so, and the politician pandering to them, or even believing into that apocalypse thingy. And you want to know why it scares us is the fact they have access to nuclear bombs.
Being English, I think they are saying your Fat, Loud and unable to even learn to speak one Language properly
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
Why would be want to study dirty, smelly foreigners? We already know their "human condition" is unbathed.
Every distinction highlights something while obscuring another. For example, the very choice of presenting certain "games" to people from other cultures brings forth the differences in behavior, but obliterates the impact of introducing a certain interaction that is not familiar to another culture. While this make perfect sense for certain comparative studies, what is wrong here is the surprise factor. Assuming that a framework derived from the study of only one culture can be applied to all mankind is the mistake here, it isn't a problem of the US culture.
The basis of the biological and social aspects of the human species have been reseached before from other disciplines. If anybody wants to read more about it, I can recommend one approach that is well explained in two books: The Tree of Knowledge and Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Enjoy.
I'm not sure you could pick any single population of people (other than the human race as a whole) and call them an "average representation." I'm guessing that in some aspects, every culture will have some attributes in which it differs markedly from the average.
In the particular subset tested, Americans were different, but it seems to be drawing a bit of a broad brush to say that it follows that all sociological studies run on Americans will come out different, while implying that other study subjects would be superior.
Reconsider.
Psych courses have the reciprocal ratio as engineering courses. Also generally easy As as long as you remember not to think, just regurgitate.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It doesn't seem like citizen ownership of small arms has been all that much of a factor in helping insurgencies to resist soldiers with body armor and military-grade weapons. IEDs and captured/smuggled military-grade weaponry like RPGs and Stinger missiles seem to have been far more of a problem for the military than citizens taking pot shots will small arms.
Americans are fat
Americans are people
Therefore, we can conclude all people are fat.
You need some work on the proper use of American (you're not your).
You mean, like the Chinese or Asian people can somehow showcase us the benefits of non-toxic vegetarian diet, since Westerners are not really representative in those areas, at all? Who'd thunk it?
The China Study
http://books.google.no/books?id=KgRR12F0RPAC&hl=no&source=gbs_book_other_versions
Because Asians do eat vegetarian.
I have a feeling you meant English.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
As as long as you remember not to think, just regurgitate.
As Americans, this is what we have always believed. It is what we stand for. It is the essence of who we are.
Give a man a thought and you have only annoyed him into beating you to a pulp for being a smartass, but teach him how to achieve a perfectly blank mind without even a hint of a thought and to blindly obey authority and to regurgitate the most popular state-sponsored slogans and you have taught him to be an American for a lifetime. But he already knew how not to think and so beat you to a pulp for being an arrogant, know-it-all, smartass.
From a young age we are all taught that our true mission is to give the rest of the world a wedgie and then make loud armpit farting noises at it to demonstrate our inherent superiority. A superiority that only we will ever fully understand. It shall remain forever a mystery to the rest of the planet who just see a bunch of obese, spoiled, angry, retarded, religious fanatics with too many guns and too much time on our hands.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
This reminds me of a book I read about prisoner's of war in south east Asia in world war 2. US, British and Australian prisoners were taken in large numbers in the early months of the pacific war, and often put in mixed camps. Several anecdotes described the differences between the nationalities of prisoner.
The British prisoners rigidly maintained their military command structure. (perhaps remnants of the class system?)
The American were individualists who were most likely to become the hero or the black marketeer.
The Australians were egalitarian and community orientated (the ill defined Australian value of mateship or helping your mates)
It intrigues me that 3 nations coming from pretty much the same genetic stock and culture can have quite different reactions to the same events. I expect that the 3 nations cultures have converged since WW2.
Interestingly, at least in the horrible conditions of a Japanese world war 2 prisoner of war camp, the Australians had the best rate of survival in mixed camps.
I for one don't get what you're trying to say. But there's a very simple, obvious explanation for this big cultural difference:
Leftism hasn't reached their society yet. Leftism teaches us that we should punish those who are lucky, even if it means we lose money. Obama's answer to one of Charles Gibson's questions in one of the 2008 debates is a perfect example. He said he would raise taxes on the rich even if it meant less revenue for the government, doing it out of fairness.
It would seem such values have to be taught, and this peoples just hasn't been.
Being English, I think they are saying your Fat
You need some work on the proper use of American (you're not your).
Erm, I believe if you're going to go correcting someone else's grammar, yours should probably be impeccable. Ergo, it should be "you're, not your". Heil.
Yes, there are many unique things about American culture. But you could say the same thing about pretty much any culture (that's what makes travel so interesting.) What makes America inherently "less average" than any other arbitrary group of people? I could find an "outlier" in just about any population: culture is young/old, independent/ex-colony, western/eastern, rich/crushingly-poor, city-based/rural-based, agrarian/heavy-industry, landlocked/an island, peaceful/war-torn, democracy/despotism, capitalist/socialist/communist, nationalist/regioned, immagrant-heavy/isolationist, etc. How can we even guess if a particular society's "quirk" (vs. most of the rest of the world), and every society is going to have at least one, effects the results?
For example: I could say: "Results from China are going to be suspect because their culture is far older than norms, and the strange mix of Confucianism, Communism, and Capitalism is replicated nowhere else in the world." "Brazil is no good because their relatively recent colonial past has polluted the results vs. what we would expect from an older society, and there's too much variation between rural tribes and the denizens of Rio." You get the idea...
And what use is the "Global Mean" anyway? Even if such a population existed, how much predictive effect would it have for an individual situation?
lol American saying we arn't the world.. must be a crazy one, centric noob Americans.
Psychologists used to use a group of Minnesotans "the Minnesota Normals" to classify behavior as "normal" or not.
A hot woman licking her lips doesn't make you think of Ludevisk? - Pervert.
Well, they abandoned the "Minnesota Normals" years ago. (Come to think of it, the two words don't really go together well.)
But now they tell us that Americans aren't the most accurate global standard either? - How shocking! Who knew?!
Quick question: What was the former occupation of Washington? Logger or Soldier?
The Rebels successfully enlisted very large numbers of existing soldiers. It's easier to capture an armoury when you've got the key.
IMHO part of the problem is many Americans see themselves and the government as separate and opposing things while the government is supposed to be the will of the people. It's been ridiculous on many occasions, but one of the most stupid was both Reagan and Carter declaring they were complete outsiders to government that were going to pull the government into line. I think more recently Romney, once again more of an insider than just about anybody (just like Reagan he ran a State government for a while), pretended not to be part of government at times.
Seeing government as the "other" creates so many stupid "only in America" ridiculous X-Files conspiracy theories which means it's seen as easier to keep a dozen automatic weapons in the gun cupboard and dream of some sanitised bloodless revolution (instead of messy realities like Syria) than it is to talk to your local representative about what is pissing you off.
They're comparing the results of giving $100 to your average American, very few of whom, if any, are so poor that $100 is going to make the difference between life and death with offering several days wages to people who are, in all likelihood living much closer to the edge of survival. Of course the giver is going to be a lot less generous when that money can make a huge difference to his or her family and of course the receiver is going to be much less likely to punish their lack of generosity. For one thing they understand what's going through the other person's mind and for another, the cash they have to give up is of significantly higher value.
This isn't an issue of cultural values, it's an issue of scarcity. People are in general a lot less generous in times of scarcity and simultaneously a lot less likely to "prove a point" under the same circumstances.
Go to the same village and perform the same experiment with something they have a relative plenty of and see what results you get then.
I think every one missed the point, Read the title. Its an English person taking the piss.
"It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money," says Henrich. "They just didn't understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game."
Thus exposing Americans as spiteful arrogant morons which the are?
People from cultures more attuned to bribery (euphemistically referred to as "gift-giving" in the study) Or, as we call it, "tipping". Tipping (or "gift-giving") is a degrading and corrupting practice. It implies that the receiver is temporarily whoring himself to the tipper.
In business, the bottom line is profit, not some ethical or moral standard. Isn't a person who receives money in exchange for using their skills and talents (whether acquired through education and training or experience) already a whore by definition? How does accepting a tip or a bribe intensify the whorishness of what we are already doing? From the POV of the gifter, it is value given for value received, and I assure you there is more value in a transaction than just the ch-ching of a cash register. Bribery is a cost of doing business, like taxes and license fees, and it is a factor anywhere and everywhere business is conducted. I ostentatiously over-tip to motivate competition among the hired help to ensure I get preferential treatment. I offer "gifts" to people in a position to facilitate my negotiations with potential customers, and happily accept gifts from people who want me to be their customer. Seriously -- how can anything that greases the wheels of commerce be degrading or corrupting?
Actually, it should be "you're" not "your".
Three scientists took the train northwards from England to attend a multi-disciplinary conference in Edinburgh.
Conversation flagged as the journey continued, until some time after crossing the border into Scotland when the social scientist, used to seeing Friesan herds in the south, pointed out some Highland cattle.
"Oh, look", he said, "the cows are brown in Scotland!"
The physicist put down the newspaper and looked out of the window.
"Yes, so I see, but your remark isn't scientific, you know. You can't know that all the cows are brown. What do you think, Bob?"
Bob the mathematician glanced up over his glasses at the grazing cattle.
"Observation shows that, through this window, at least one side of some bullocks in Scotland appears brown".
Moral: question your assumptions.
Could the difference be because the amount of money offered was different. The $100 in Peru was "roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages" and $100 in the US might be worth a half day work so in Peru if someone gives you $25 you can take the whole family out to a steak dinner and in the US it's a cheap meal for yourself. I wouldn't offer a stranger a trivial amount of money if I wanted them to accept it. The person giving out the money considers what a decent amount of money someone would be happy to receive is and gives them that amount.
The experiment is invalid because the control variable is not constant.
Tyranny starts with Brownshirts
One kind of tyranny does (if you are defining tyranny as an aggregate gross reduction in the availability of positive and negative freedoms throughout a society). But here's the kink. Brownshirts came from Freikorps-like gangs made up mainly of disaffected, militarised men, many of them ex-army, often independently armed, organised on a local or neighbourhood level, and with a deep antipathy to what they perceived as "leftist" Statism.
Da Blog
Penguin: "Any article in which Americans and penguins are mentioned is an insult to penguins."
Of course, this doesn't mean the information is useless, we just need to tag data with area and time of collection and come up with a proper organization schema. For example, popular fashion is to some extent dictated by the dominant posture of the era, without taking into account causes you cannot compare across time and space.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
"Diverse society is bound to fail" --Putnam.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/
Casteism
This was news to anybody? "Shaking the foundations of psychology and economics"? I highly doubt it.