Chapter 1: How does culture shape our daily routines and choices?
Hey there, Shankar here with some exciting news. Our live Perceptions Tour is returning this summer in partnership with public radio stations around the country. This time, we're heading to Northampton, Massachusetts, Burlington, Vermont, Boulder, Colorado, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Blacksburg, Virginia, San Luis Obispo, California, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
More information is at hiddenbrain.org slash tour. I hope to see you at one of our upcoming stops. Okay, here's today's show. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Think about a time you flipped through an old family album. Maybe you paused on a photo of your grandparents as young adults. Their clothes look outdated. Their expressions, too formal.
Perhaps you imagined what it was like to live in that time and found it impossible. Or think of a film set in medieval times. You may have thought, wow, these people lived in a completely different universe. I have so little in common with them. It's easy to believe the past is sealed off from us, that those lives, those cultures, those ways of thinking have vanished from the world.
But is that true? In ways we don't even notice, the choices, beliefs, and habits of people who lived long before us continue to shape how we see the world today. They influence what we value, the kinds of societies we live in, even how we relate to one another. This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, how culture and history shape the way we think.
When you woke up this morning, you turned off your alarm and brushed your teeth. You had a bite to eat, said goodbye to your spouse, and commuted to work. You clocked in for the day. All of this seems so routine, so commonplace, that we don't stop to think about it. We don't realize how the patterns of our lives are shaped by the long ago and the far away.
As the novelist William Faulkner once said, the past is never dead. It's not even past. At Harvard University, Joseph Hendrick has studied how people who lived in previous centuries continue to shape our lives today. Joe Hendrick, welcome to Hidden Brain. It's great to be with you. Joe, I find myself checking the time constantly. I'm always running from one thing to the other.
I sometimes feel like I live my life according to the dictates of my calendar. You've studied what life was like for people before mechanical clocks were invented. Paint me a picture of that world.
Yeah, that was a world governed by sunrise and sunset, where there were still 12 hours in a day, but the length of those hours varied. There were seasonal rhythms that helped people organize farming. And it was just a very different world than the constant interest in time and saving time and getting more time and thinking of time as money.
I'm imagining that given that people lived in different time zones and in different latitudes, people really started and ended their days at different times in different places of the world.
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Chapter 2: What was life like before the invention of mechanical clocks?
She was a Frankish princess. So Augustine queried the Pope to find out what kinds of things he should be conveying as he faces these challenges from the local people in Kent. And so one question he asked the Pope is, how distant must a relative be for a Christian marriage to be permissible? So can I marry second cousins? Can I marry third cousins?
Another question was, can a man marry his stepmother or his brother's wife? And then can two brothers marry two sisters? And can a man receive communion after a sex dream?
How did the Pope respond to these questions?
Yeah, so the Pope, to the first question, he said, definitely can't marry first cousins. During this period in history, the Church was definitely banning first cousins. They would go on to ban all the way out to six cousins, but at this point, you could marry your second cousins. And you cannot marry your stepmother. So it's not about genetic relatedness.
It's about these family relationships that are created. And certainly not your brother's wife. So that would be a kind of leveret marriage. And the church banned that pretty early on in the history of the Catholic Church. Two brothers can marry two sisters. So that was okay.
So another people commission arrives in England a couple of centuries later. They're checking in on the progress of Christianizing the Anglo-Saxons. What does it find?
Yes, and in general, there's a lot of progress on people officially accepting Christianity. Lots of people have been baptized, but there's still problems around what they describe as incest, by which they mean cousin marriage of various kinds, and also polygyny. So elite men are taking one primary wife, but they're also marrying other women as secondary wives and concubines.
And so I'm imagining the church might not look kindly on these developments.
Yeah, so the question was, is how do we put an end to this? You know, we like the idea that the church is spreading and these people are becoming Christians, but these forms of family weren't acceptable. So one of the things that the Christians really pushed, the church leadership really pushedā was the notion of illegitimate children.
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Chapter 3: How did the introduction of clocks transform society?
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.
Do you think this is, again, evidence of the propensity of weird societies to focus on individualism and individual objects?
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. So there's this interesting different ways of thinking about the world.
Okay.
One of the things that I find fascinating about all of this is that it highlights just how much we can take culture for granted. So for example, we might live in mostly monogamous societies, and so we assume that humans must be wired for monogamy. That, in fact, might not be the case.
Yeah, it's amazing how strong the intuition is, is that however it is where I live is how it is to be human. So yeah, one of the things I've been most interested over my career is trying to figure out what is actually pan-human and what is just the particular societies that we grow up in.
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