10-01-2017, 09:22 AM
(10-01-2017, 09:03 AM)Vlad Wrote: Good post.
So Puerto Rico is not Trumps Katrina after all. Thanks for making me aware of that.
About the looting though. The Japanese don't loot. After the tsunami and earthquake the Japanese instead of looting come together as a community to see what they could do to help.
I suppose there is a "study" done by some academic elitist to explain away why some cultures are more inclined to loot than others, after all, as humans we're all the same.
Unless we're talking diversity, then we're all different. It depends on what the liberal agenda of the day is.
Plenty, actually. The reason I use words like "generally" when discussing the hierarchy is because there are a number of different factors to explain behavior. Modern researchers approach these things with what is called the biopsychosocial approach. This looks at biological, psychological, and sociological factors to explain behavior. You bring up Japan, which is a prime example of the sociological differences between the US and many other western nations. Cultures like that of Japan are much more collectivist in nature and so their society is more geared towards the group rather than the individual. This is in stark contrast to countries like the US where individualist culture rules the day.
So, while psychologically we can look to Maslow's hierarchy in a disaster to explain individualistic behavior, sociologically a collectivist culture like that in Japan can potentially override that. Or, the sociological impact of that collectivist culture could have caused the learned behavior that produces the psychological effect of Maslow's hierarchy be skewed. We can't forget that often times these psychological studies were very Euro-centric, and apart from the Nordic countries those cultures tend to be very individualistic.
Edit: now this has gotten me thinking about the different expressions of the hierarchy of needs in collectivist versus individualistic cultures. I often think of the hierarchy in individualistic terms because that is the culture I grew up in, but the hierarchy would be expressed differently in a collectivist culture. For example, the base layer of physiological needs: food, water, shelter. For an individualistic culture like the US, the drive would be to find those for yourself. For a collectivist culture, the drive would be to insure those needs are met for your community. So the drive is still the same, but how it is expressed would be different. For an individualistic culture, base needs would have to be met before they started looking towards the community when you look at a general situation.
Thanks for making me look deeper into this. Definitely some interesting things to think about.
