Cultural Theory and Society
“Kahan’s argument about the woman who does not believe in global warming is a surprising and persuasive example of a general principle: if we want to understand others, we can always ask what is making their behaviour ‘rational’ from their point of view. If, on the other hand, we just assume they are irrational, no further conversation can take place.”
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-nudge-us/
Would you put in more effort if you thought you could win a large cash prize?
What about if that prize was broken up into a series of smaller prizes – how hard would you work then?
‘In praise of big prizes’ at the Freakonomics site, had some advice for a professor at the University of Texas who changed his practice of handing out cash prizes to students in favour of a more level system.
http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/28/in-praise-of-big-prizes/
The author writes that actually,
“larger top prizes and a steeper prize gradient will elicit more effort than a flatter gradient, one with more prizes of smaller amounts (Lazear and Rosen, 1981).”
He suggests that a large amount of prize money is what motivates top sports people such as Tiger Woods, and that perhaps the professor could adapt and use this approach in an educational setting:
“he would get better written work if he went back to the old system, just as Tiger Woods is better motivated by a big winning prize for a whole tournament than he would be by small prizes for having the best score in a particular round.”
In a previous post on Fourcultures about Fatalist development aid I noted how schemes to randomly assign cash handouts to poor people seem to work quite well. According to the Economist, though, there are situations in which conditional handouts work better. In one example, would-be aid recipients were required to submit a business plan before going into the lottery.
Perhaps these schemes using contrived randomness, a Fatalist strategy, would be better if they used high value tournaments instead – a very Individualist strategy.
One small problem is that the prize money that seems to motivate Tiger Woods to get out of bed is slightly higher than that available in college classes or in development aid programmes.
First prize for the 2013 US Masters tournament was $1,440,000. That’s quite a lot of money. Even the 50th placed golfer still won $20,160.
In contrast, the top University of Texas student paper won $1,500. In even starker contrast, Kenyan villagers identified by the charity Give Directly receive $200.
“We send each recipient household a total of $1,000 over one to two years, or $200 per household member for the average household. Our analysis suggests that this amount is fair, well-understood, and potentially transformative.”
When Individualism can provide a US Masters level of money to colleges and to poor villages in Africa, maybe then its policy prescriptions will be more credible.
See also: Fatalist development aid
[image credit: public domain, pixabay]
This white paper is worth reading and owes quite a lot to the cultural theory understanding of organisations.
(Found at http://sourcesofinsight.com/4-workplace-archetypes-hierarchy-market-place-adhocracy-and-village/)
The Economist evaluates a scheme to give poor people cash handouts at random, instead of through traditional aid programmes. Mixed results…
Fatalism, as described by Grid-Group Cultural theory, is more than merely the worldview that blind fate rules our lives. It takes this as a given and then seeks to make the world even more random. This has been termed ‘contrived randomness’. It has a strong pedigree as a tool for public policy (for example, random assignment of jury service, random alcohol checks on drivers, etc.) Taken to further lengths it can be used in ‘aleatory democracy’ – harnessing contrived randomness to benefit democratic organisation.
See also: How to be a fatalist
A Simple Primer on Cultural Cognition
The New Republic has a short summary of the cultural cognition project: how to talk to climate change deniers.
Those who ‘deny’ climate change aren’t mad, deluded or evil – they’re just paying close attention to the community to which they owe allegiance. Various groups make use of publicly held views to create a kind of ‘badge of membership’. That’s why, for example, conservatives rarely wax enthusiastic about climate change policy. The issue has been polarised. The communal viewpoint is strong, which means that for individuals there’s little to be gained and much to be lost in opposing it. It’s all-important, in Margaret Thatcher’s timeless phrase, to remain ‘one of us’.
A great example of this is the case of former Congressman Bob Inglis. He’s a bona fide conservative who came unstuck in 2010 when the Tea Party decided it didn’t like his stance on climate change. Since losing his seat, far from giving up and toeing the line, he’s set up an initiative that aims to construct a conservative dialogue on climate and energy policy: ‘Putting free enterprise to work on energy and climate’. He’s proof that there’s little or nothing inherently liberal about climate change. Imaginative policy makers should be able to work with almost any kind of raw material. This American Life had a great piece on the issue.
Ignorance may be bliss but it’s not democracy
The basis of democracy is an informed public. Voters don’t have to be clever or well-meaning for this to work – but ensuring they are duped amounts to breaking the system and replacing it with something else.
Jay Rosen asks:
Can there even be an informed public and consent-of-the-governed for decisions about electronic surveillance, or have we put those principles aside so that the state can have its freedom to maneuver?
“Since we have not more power of knowing the future than any other men, we have made many mistakes (who has not during the past five years?), but our mistakes have been errors of judgment and not of principle.” J.P. Morgan Jnr, 1933
So Y asked three interesting questions regarding Grid-Group Cultural Theory. This is a line of thought, a method of inquiry, developed by the British social anthropologist Mary Douglas, along with numerous collaboraters, and more recently numerous younger adopters who never actually worked with Douglas. Its early presentation was in the influential book Natural Symbols.
DMK has already given a response to this in the original comments (many thanks!), and here’s my additions.
1. is the theory considered to be a post modern one?
Quick answer: no. Slightly longer answer: The theory was developed on the cusp of the rise of the postmodern as a dominant category of analysis. Neither Mary Douglas nor Aaron Wildavsky were involved with anything that would be recognisable as explicitly ‘postmodern’. Like Derrida, Douglas was strongly influenced by the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. But whereas Derrida subverted structuralism, Douglas extended it. In particular they each took quite different approaches to Levi-Strauss’s methodological use of the distinction between nature and culture. In many ways Cultural theory might appear to advocates of the postmodern as hopelessly compromised by the ‘grand narrative’ that there are four and only four cultural worldviews. That’s what I like about it. On the other hand, there are many, I think, who see the ‘constrained relativism’ (Marco Verweij) of Cultural Theory as being too relativist for comfort. I like that too.
For more context, Richard Fardon’s book is invaluable: Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography.
2. does it have prestige in the academic world or is considered niche theory?
I think it has some prestige, but precisely as a niche theory. For example, in the study of risk, CT is one of three main approaches to the subject, but only one. In social anthropology it would probably be seen as obsolete. Fardon’s book has a section entitled ‘Theoretical Marginality”. However, it’s quite possible to make an academic career out of Cultural Theory (or a re-branding of it) and a number of highly respected academics have adopted or adapted a CT approach for at least some of their work. But there is no large movement or institution that has adopted it as a significant approach. CT’s strength/weakness lies in that fact that it has been applied piecemeal in a large number of different disciplines. It appears to have an explanatory power as yet not fully realised. I think the conceptual strengths of Cultural Theory have not really been matched by its methodological capacity. There is potential to further develop rigorous methodologies that develop some of the concerns of Cultural Theory.
3. do you think that online/virtual communities on the internet can also be classified according to the grid group (like wikipedia, linkedin etc)?
Yes. Prof Sun-Ki Chai, at the University of Hawaii is a very rare individual in that he has both published on Cultural Theory (he edited a book of essays by Aaron Wildavsky, I believe) and patented a web crawler that can analyse web data according to several social science approaches. His work shows a way to do what you suggest, from a predictive social science angle.
The way we power our homes has a strong connection with our cultural expectations.
Here’s an extract from the book Before the Lights Go Out.
![By BenduKiwi (Unknown) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i2.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Cthulhu_and_R%27lyeh.jpg)
Author Mark Haddonmakes the intriguing observation that we don’t have a word for processes that appear to be intentional but actually aren’t.
http://www.markhaddon.com/darwin-teleology
Is he right?
If so, I suspect that this is because at some level humans find intentionality in everything. It’s safer to assume there’s a predator behind every bush than it is to assume the opposite.
Witness, for instance, the horror implicit in Jacques Monod’s paean to ‘blind chance’. He surely wanted it to impart the feeling of sublime terror. Almost reads like HP Lovecraft…
“Drawn out of the realm of pure chance, the accident enters into that of necessity, of the most implacable certainties.”
Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity. New York: Vintage Books, 1971
