Joseph Henrich

This is a technique developed by my postdoc, Muhammad Atari.

We take a psychological questionnaire that's been validated.

It's in English.

And we want to get an equivalent in ancient Chinese.

So we run it through a kind of semantic similarity comparison.

And we look for quotes from the ancient Chinese corpora that match each sentence in the English corpora.

And then we rebuild the questionnaire in ancient Chinese.

So that's our psychological measure for something like individualism or collectivism or moral universalism.

And then we take each book or each paragraph in each book and we do a comparison, cosine similarity comparison between the two sets of text there.

And that allows us to stamp each paragraph with a measure of individualism, for example.

And then we do that for the entire corpora.

And this allows us to track psychological change across space and time in China.

And then we can correlate that with kinship intensity and we get the same correlations that we do in Europe.

Yeah, I am worried about that because just the destruction of languages.

So we're losing languages left and right.

English is a particular form that you don't find in lots of languages, so that's just an example of the kind of cultural diversity we're losing.

Yeah, so that's definitely a worry.

I do think that we're getting new variants.

So if you look at – so Japan adopts a lot of weird institutions.

But it's really creating a new third unique thing.