Joseph Henrich

people you would just meet and not know their name or not know anything about their families.

So more market-integrated societies have norms that say you should just generally be fair-minded with people who you don't know and won't see again.

Whereas the Machiganga lifestyle is small-scale farming, they live scattered throughout the tropical forests of Peru, north of Cusco where Machu Picchu is, and they're just not a lot of trade and exchange, so they don't have these market norms.

To them, when I would interview them after, they would be like, yeah, why would anyone reject free money in this case?

Which is pretty close to the rational thing one might expect based on game theory.

Right.

Yeah, so this is very interesting because it's perceptual.

So psychologists have shown there's this tremendous variation in analytic versus holistic thinking.

And one of the hallmarks that they found in terms of attention is what people pay attention to when they look at a scene or a picture or a video.

And Americans, more analytically oriented societies, will tend to focus on the central object.

So in this case, imagine there's an underwater scene with fish swimming around.

The Americans tend to focus on the central fish and they watch what the central fish does.

They don't tend to notice very much stuff in the background.

The folks from East Asia would remember a lot more about what was going in the background and their eyes would cover more of the scene and just not kind of glue to the central actor.

Yeah, so this seems to be part of a larger package.

You know, in an individualistic society, people tend to focus on themselves and their own attributes, and they think about others dispositionally.

So what are the attributes of another person, honest or dishonest, without thinking of all the contextual variation, right?

Whereas if you're from a more holistic society, a more collectivistic society, you're thinking about the relationships between individuals.

People aren't either honest or dishonest.

They're honest in some circumstances with some kinds of people and not so honest in other kinds of circumstances.