Muthukrishna et. al. have created what may be one of the most elegant examples I have seen of a methodological tool stolen from a hard science (in this case, population genetics) and refitted to work for the social sciences.
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A new bombshell working paper by @JoHenrich, @Adrian_V_Bell,
@mmuthukrishna, and a few others not on twitter has just dropped https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=468065099084001023007009096009127074002033009058089053073090104071091002069068120090056119012045118056006023025016073029119118050004033058059086030016084112076088011047082044027119096031021081007102106115104110014018070087106123067002076107005025029100&EXT=pdf …
My take: For sociologists, p. scientists, and economists interested in cross cultural comparison, this is a really big deal.
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Population geneticists are interested in the genetic features of entire populations. One of the fun things they do is try to determine how different one population sampled is from another. The way they do this is with a measure called a "Fixation Index" (Fst).
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There are like 10 videos on youtube that explain how the fixation Index statistic is calculated and the math isn't hard, so I won't explain it here. But the basic idea is that the statistic contrasts the frequency of gene variants ('alleles') in two or more populations
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and then uses this contrast to measure how dissimilar--or "distant" the two populations are. Who is genetically closer to the people of Beijing: Koreans or Cantonese? You can answer questions like that with a fixation index statistic.
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Muthukrishna et. al.'s idea was that you could do something very similar with with cultural traits. We don't have a cultural genome of course, but they kind of jury rigged an approximation of a genome by collecting together 24 different psychological measures which have been
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tested in different populations and treated the answers to these measures as gene variants. (These psychological measures are for things like extraversion, tightness-looseness, individualism, and so forth).
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What this means is that the authors have come up with a very clever measure of how culturally 'distant' two (or more) populations might be from each other. Populations that are largely similar, say the U.S. and Canada, will score low on the measure. Dissimilar=higher score.
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This graph, for example, shows how the various populations score in relation to the United States and to China. X-axis=distance from U.S. as measured by a battery of psychological measures Y-axis=distance from China as measured by a battery of psychological measurespic.twitter.com/BJABHOchgs
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To pick at a few of things that stand out here: Japan and Norway are about the same 'distance' away from the U.S., but are distant on *different* measures, for Japan is much closer to the Chinese results than Norway is.
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Already you can see some of the interesting applications of this data: do you remember the debate we had a few weeks back on this space on whether a Japanese person would face greater shock if they moved to China or the UK? https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1058020548716855296 …
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Folks thought the question was silly (Japan has to be closer to China, right?), but if culture shock is mostly a matter of *norms* then this data suggests that a Japanese person would feel about equally adrift in either the Anglosphere or in China. That's a trivial ex, but...
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it is not hard to think of more serious ones. Take, for example, attempts to assess whether differences in cross-cultural norms increase the transaction costs of international business. It would be very easy to use this data to answer this question.
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Another way the data could be used is to assess cultural variation *within* countries. The authors have already tried their hand at this, showing that regional variation within the United States is less than in China, India, or Europe:pic.twitter.com/vhhs5Eu1JJ
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And again, not hard to see fun applications of this approach: is their a correlation between within regional cultural distance in a country and social capital? Social trust? Violence? Voting?
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I would not call this a *revolution* in cross cultural comparison. But once the data is online I see no reason why it should not be the standard data set for p. sci, sociology, and econ studies that want use cultural difference as their independent variable.
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Finally, the whole method--importing the Fixation Index to a non-genetic context--is brilliant, and could easily be adapted to all sorts of political or sociological data. I am excited to see what people do with it.
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Nice summary
@Scholars_Stage. We have 2 follow up papers that tackle the questions in your thread. The answers fit your intuitions. I'll post the working papers soon. A more user friendly version of the tool is also almost ready. More soon. -
Looks cool! We introduced a related measure of cultural distance also adapted from genetics, ФST, that has also been used productively by
@Robert_M_Ross,@SimonJGreenhill,@DrQueue, and others. Would be nice to see some comparison of the methods. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1733/1606 …
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I have seen something similar before using the 2 first principal components extracted from the World Values Survey. Had similar results to this.
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If you can remember or link to this paper, I'd be interested in it because that was my first thought to try.
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