How to Understand Culture & WEIRD People

Cultural Psychology Can Make You a Better Traveler

Over the past three months, I’ve published my parents’ travel stories where they wandered amid CIA shadows and sticky red tape, celebrated with the Sandanistas, dwelled on a monkey-ridden island with a beat-loving recluse, and unshackled the chains of conformity.

Each story is accompanied by a sociopolitical or cultural psychology article. This week, I updated a piece from a year ago, “How to Understand Culture & WEIRD People: Cultural Psychology Can Make You a Better Traveler.” The article has helped many of my students strengthen their cultural competence and travel experiences.

How to Understand Culture & WEIRD People

First off, what is culture? Food, traditions, language, and so on, right? Well, yeah, but we need a better explanation than that at Born Without Borders. So, let's get a bit academic here and use Richerson & Boyd's definition.

Culture is any information acquired from other members of one's species through social learning that can affect an individual's behaviour. In other words, culture is any idea, belief, technology, habit, or practice we acquire through learning from others.

Even if you've never left the street you grew up on, you're still part of more than one culture. Cultures are people who exist within some shared context.¹ So your school, workplace, gym, knitting club, S&M dungeon, abandoned warehouse rave crew or whatever it may be has a culture. So what the hell do people mean when they say things like, “The culture is so much richer here?” Do they mean that there are more ideas, beliefs, technologies, habits, and practices? Do they mean that there are more groups of people mixing?

Throughout my life, I've heard Canadians and Europeans say, "There's more culture in Europe than in Canada." Sometimes, they even say "North America," meaning the handful of cities they visited (usually not including those in Mexico). When I ask them what they mean by that, they typically mention that there's more history and language diversity—and not as many strip malls.

Saying that Europe has so much more history and language implies that Canada didn't have a culture till white folk came around. More than 70 indigenous languages are spoken across Canada², and Clovis sites dated 13,500 years ago were discovered in western North America³. Now, you might argue that Europe has over 200 unofficial languages⁴, and you can't really compare prehistoric Paleoamericans like the Clovis to, let's say, the Greeks. But I will say that many indigenous cultures were traditionally oral, so unlike Europeans, they didn't have everything written down to show "how much culture" they had. Also, Europe is a continent, and Canada is a country.

Now, if we're comparing continents, Africa has over 1000 languages and has the oldest civilizations to boot. But I doubt that I’m going to hear a Parisian say “La culture de Mombasa est tellement plus riche que la nôtre” (Mombasa’s culture is so much richer than ours) any time soon.

The point is saying one place has more culture than the other doesn't get us anywhere. From my experience, it usually leads to people talking about the museums, galleries, and landmarks they visited. As much as I enjoy learning about history and taking part in "high" culture activities, such as gawking at all the artifacts Europeans stole from Africa and South America, it's only a tiny piece of the puzzle for how to understand people and culture.

To figure out how culture shapes us and what psychological phenomena are universal, let's start with a hierarchical framework created by Steven J. Heine and one of my favourite professors, Ara Norenzayan.