Are You a Dissident of a Culture of Honor?

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If you were a dissident in modern China these days, of people who two generations ago were wheat farmers rather than rice farmers. You're more likely to have filed for a patent. If your ancestors lived in a desert, you were more likely to be polytheistic. Mothers from collectivist cultures on the average sing lullabies to their newborn at different decibels. And that's just the first step. All you're doing from the very first step there up until adulthood is propagating the cultural values you were raised with and that leave an imprint into your brain"

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There’s no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestselling book Behave, where he examines the influences on our behavior from a variety of timescales, from the very short (signals from the amygdala) to the quite ancient (genetic factors tracing back tens of thousands of years and more). It’s a dizzying tour that helps us understand the complexity of human action.

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Robert Sapolsky received his Ph.D. in neuroendocrinology from Rockefeller University. He is currently the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the McGovern Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Wonderfest’s Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

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