Robert Sapolsky has written an epic book, Behave, that attempts to explain why we behave as we do. The book is over 700 pages long and is often technical in nature. It is the most comprehensive study of human behavior ever written. To use Sapolsky’s own words, when asked to summarize his book and human behavior, he wrote, “It’s complicated”.
One aspect of behavior covered in Behave is culture. Sapolsky writes, “Culture matters”. He uses the issue of math scores and the sexes – who’s better? The author writes, “A remarkably consistent finding, starting with elementary school students, is that males are better at math than females”. This sounds straightforward until one digs into results in forty countries. Sapolsky concludes, “The more gender equal the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores”. Iceland is “the most gender-equal country on earth” and, when it comes to math scores, “girls are better at math than boys”.
Sapolsky quotes primatologist and ethologist Francis de Waal to define culture. “” Culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by nongenetic means”. According to anthropologist Donald Brown, there are many similarities in cultures around the world, including “males and females seen as having different natures, baby talk, gods, marriage, prohibition of some type of murder, cooking, names, dance, play, distinctions between right and wrong, empathy, reciprocity, rituals, concepts of fairness, prohibitions, gossip, language, humor, etc.”. There are also many differences between cultures which prompted Sapolsky to write, “Your life will be unrecognizably different, depending on which culture the stork deposited you into”.
Sapolsky refers to the differences between collectivist (Asian) versus individualist (Western) cultures. He defines the former as being about “harmony, interdependence, conformity, and having the needs of the group guiding behavior”, whereas the latter is about “autonomy, personal achievement, uniqueness, and the needs and rights of the individual”. There are significant differences between the two cultures. “In individualist cultures, more people seek uniqueness and personal accomplishment, use first-person singular pronouns more often, define themselves in terms that are personal (“I’m a contractor”) rather than relational (I’m a parent”), attribute their successes to intrinsic attributes (“I’m really good at X”) rather than to situational ones (“I was in the right place at the right time”).
“In contrast, those from collectivist cultures show more social comprehension; some reports suggest that they are better at Theory of Mind tasks, more accurate in understanding someone else’s perspective – with “perspective” ranging from the other person’s abstract thoughts to how objects appear from where she is sitting”.
Sapolsky writes about differences in stratified versus egalitarian cultures, which focus on “how unequally resources (e.g., land, food, material goods, power, or prestige) are distributed…Hunter-gatherer societies have typically been egalitarian throughout human history. Inequality emerged when “stuff” – things to possess and accumulate – was invented following animal domestication and the development of agriculture. The more stuff, reflecting surplus, job specialization, and technological sophistication, the greater the potential inequality”. The author writes that “cultures with more income inequality have less social capital (the collective quantity of resources such as trust, reciprocity, and cooperation). Trust requires reciprocity, and reciprocity requires equality, whereas hierarchy is about domination and asymmetry”. Clearly, being raised in a stratified versus egalitarian culture has a definite impact on how one behaves and sees the world.
Sapolsky also recognizes that crises have an impact on cultures. “In times of crisis – the London Blitz, New York after 9/11, San Francisco after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake – people pull together. That’s cool. But in contrast, chronic, pervasive, corrosive menace doesn’t necessarily do the same to people or cultures. For example, “the primal menace of hunger has left historical marks”. Additionally, “cultural tightness was also predicted by environmental degradation – less available farmland or clean water, more pollution”. In the book, there is much more written on the impact of culture on human behavior.
Sapolsky concludes by stating that “from our biological perspective, the most fascinating point is how brains shape cultures, which shape brains, which shape… That’s why it’s called coevolution”. He also highlights the impact of culture on childhood, “the time when cultures inculcate individuals into further propagating their culture. In that regard, probably the most important fact about genetics and culture is the delayed maturation of the frontal cortex – the genetic programming for the young frontal cortex to be freer from genes than other brain regions, to be sculpted instead by environment, to sop up cultural norms”.
Behave is the most thorough, comprehensive book ever written that attempts to explain why humans behave as they do.