Arrogant Western Academics

I was outraged by reading an article by the American Psychological Association on work carried out over neural mechanisms to detect social cheating. In the last three paragraphs it describes work in which a nonliterate group in Ecuador were tested for their ability to detect social cheating. Leda Cosmides, a co-author mentioned:

“They were just as good as detecting cheating as highly educated students in the developed world”
“…people have developed an evolutionary strategy for determining when somebody has violated a tit-for-tat agreement. It appears to be buffered against cultural variation.”

I’ll not question the evolutionary slant absolutely unjustified by the type of study, but focus my outrage on the implicit suggestion that ‘dumb natives’ can perform as well as ‘us’. Why the fuck do you even have to study that? Isn’t it obvious; all humans live in social groups, why should studying renissance art theory make you smarter in dealing with other humans???!!! Maybe it’s just me, but there is an underlying cultural arrogance in the logic behind authoring such research that i find really offensive.

Posted by Ian at October 7, 2002 08:17 PM | TrackBack §