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Comment by WalterSear | Hacker News Reader

IMHO as a bi-racial person who has spent over a decade on three separate continents, I have come to a very different perspective on culturally-driven explanations for mores and behaviours like Amae, and appeals to duty /conformism/emotional repression. I don't beleive they are anything more than rationalizations for ingrained society-wide behavioral dysfunction.

IMHO, that is.

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I'm inclined to agree, having lived in two different cultures. And most of these dysfunctions are rooted in very similar things when you dig down far enough into them, they pretty much always come down to status issues, just differently expressed and differently rationalized.

The trick is to realize that pretty much no culture is free from this, but I won't say that all cultures are the same.

What exactly do you mean by societal dysfunction? Or is it like pornography: you know it when you see it.

I'm not using the phrase with any formality, I was just trying to find a term that encompassed every situation where people behaved according to publicly acknowledge social scripts, and suffered as a result.

So, any situation where dictates of a society creates a suboptimal social interaction could be considered a social dysfunction?

Maybe something like this?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/minority-report/2014...

> in shame-based cultures, public humiliation, scorn, or censure are relied upon more heavily to keep individuals in obedience whereas the western notion of guilt and corrective behaviors comes from an individual’s development of an internal conscience.

Sure.

Or Midwestern culture's mix of religosity, conformist individualism and confirmation bias, and the resultant suicide and opioid addiction epidemic.

I'd like to see the studies about "conformist individualism and confirmation bias". Surely that wasn'n just a kneejerk "I know you are, but what am I" reaction.

I'm neither from the midwest, or a shame-based culture, though, I have immediate in-law family from both, and relatives I visit, obviously.

Check the NIH for studies, though the bulk of the literature is behind the academic paywall.

But that just begs the question. What’s classified as a “behavioral dysfunction” is going to depend on your culture. If you come from a more “open” culture, a more reserved one will seem repressed and controlling. If you come from a more reserved culture, a more “open” culture might seem childish and unable to handle their own emotions.

No it doesn't: it depends on whether it's dysfunctional or not. Even if the people involved don't see the dysfunction.

Genital mutilation is mentally unhealthy. And yet, many of the people who suffered it insist it's 'their culture' and perform it on their offspring: FGM is a tradition which is passed down and performed by women with FGM.

You may want to argue that that is an extreme example, but there's no big line between this and any other deleterious cultural conscripted conformation - just distance.

I think Sangermaine is right. While the example you gave is certainly, obviously, deleterious, what about countries where the work week is culturally < 40 hours per week? What about those who, on average, work 80+ hours. At what degree is it a "dysfunction". The decision of what is or is not a dysfunction is not as cut and dry as you assume because you are assuming the parameters by which such dysfunctions are determined are as universal as the claims of dysfunction themselves. This cannot be the case, it dismisses too many shades of gray by saying only the colors of black and white are "real" colors.

I never said that differences in effectiveness of societal functions were cut and dry.

I posited that they existed, cultural relativism notwithstanding, and the difference the were being discussed, along with the reactive denials they elicited, were an example of that.

>No it doesn't: it depends on whether it's dysfunctional or not. Even if the people involved don't see the dysfunction.

“It’s dysfunctional because it’s dysfunctional.”

I hope I don’t have to explain why this is, again, begging the question.

What is “dysfunctional”? That’s largely culturally determined, because what’s “functional” is relative to the environmental you’re in.

You seem to conflating morality or human rights with mental dysfunction. I suspect you are doing this because it’s easier than addressing the comment thread I was replying to regarding “open” vs “closed” cultures. What is the objectively correct “functional” mode of human interaction?

> > No it doesn't: it depends on whether it's dysfunctional or not. Even if the people involved don't see the dysfunction.

> “It’s dysfunctional because it’s dysfunctional.”

> I hope I don’t have to explain why this is, again, begging the question.

I think your response also begs the question, assuming an empiricism that should at least be argued. That is, it seems to me that you conflate a non-definition ("there is an absolute notion of dysfunction, although I don't know how to define it") with a circular definition ("dysfunction is the state of being dysfunctional"). These may be equally useful in the present, but the first, which seems to me to be what WalterSear is saying, can be imagined as a spur to useful future discussion (either arguing that there is no such absolute notion, or seeking out the correct absolute notion); whereas the latter is clearly useless and is, I think, an incorrect summary of WalterSear's position.

(Can you really pin down any concept—like morality or human rights, which you mention later—to the degree of specificity that you are requiring of the definition of 'dysfunction'? I know I can't.)

> "there is an absolute notion of dysfunction, although I don't know how to define it"

Don't put words in my mouth and expect me to debate you.

Mea culpa, I mistook your complex discussion for another round of reactive meandering.

Good thing we have a thoroughly cross-cultural construct for developing an understanding of exactly that: clinical psychology.

So, yes, we do know what dysfunction looks like, to an extent.

Psychology has a poor track of reproducibility, so it is not good at understanding yet.

Not to mention that results can also vary depending on, you guessed it, culture.

Cultural psychology is the field that investigates this. By investigating phenomenon in multiple cultures, you get a better idea of what the actual phenomenon you are investigating is, and what is a byproduct of culture. It's not a perfect, obviously, since we are all as much a product of our culture as anything else.

In any case, just because we the tools we have are still in their infancy, that doesn't somehow implies that A) they are utterly useless for anything at all, or B) that every culture everywhere is a perfect realization of a human conception of life, each one exactly equal of any other and none of them at all with any growing up to do.

It's just silly all around.

Your response demonstrates your ignorance of psychology if you’re not even aware of how results often vary across cultures. One area to start educating yourself in is looking into the discussion in the last decade or so of how psychological research has been skewed by over-reliance on “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Democratic) test subjects, and that studies with subjects from places without these attributes often produce different results.

You don’t seem to understand what you’re talking about in the slightest.

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I have an MS in research psychology.

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