Joseph Henrich Essay

508 Words3 Pages
Joseph Henrich Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist and Professor of Psychology and Economics. He is the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution at University of British Columbia. He traveled to Peru and to perform some fieldwork amongst the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin. Joseph played games and conducted tests with random people and observed how they behave different from the US society. The test that Henrich introduced to the Machiguenga was called the ultimatum game. The rules are simple: in each game there are two players who remain anonymous to each other. The first player was given an amount of money $100, and told that he has to offer some of the cash, in an amount of his choosing, to the other subject. The second player can accept or refuse the split. I think Behavior is formed by the culture you grow up into. Culture is information stored in people's heads that gets there by some kind of social learning, teaching, any kind of observational learning. Second, study Henrich did is they began to find research suggesting wide cultural differences almost everywhere they looked in spatial reasoning, the way we infer the motivations of others, categorization, moral reasoning, the boundaries between the self and others, and other arenasthey believed, were not genetic. The distinct ways Americans and Machiguengans played the ultimatum game, for instance, wasn’t because they had differently evolved brains. Rather, Americans, without fully realizing it, were manifesting a psychological tendency shared with people in other industrialized countries that had been refined and handed down through thousands of generations... When people are constantly doing business with strangers, it helps when they have the desire to go out of their way...when they feel cheated. Because Machiguengan culture had
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