Well yeah, strong relativism is a steaming pile of nonsense. But I’m not sure that you need strong relativism to get future-oriented behaviour differences, weak priming effects could well add up over time to produce noticeable differences in amount of savings over a long period.
What kind of factors did you have in mind? As far as I know they controlled for country, city, religion, income, family values.. probably some other stuff I can’t remember. And at least some of the pairs of households he compared were in non-Western countries, again I can’t remember off the top of my head.
I agree that less-than-strong forms of relativism can have an effect; priming effects are well enough known that it would be downright weird if human language was somehow exempt. But, again, this comes down to the non-linguistic factors, and distinguishing their effects from the effects of linguistic priming.
I can’t address the specifics of how well they conducted their study—it’s something of a black box to me. However, the graph around 8:15 in the video shows some seriously wonky stuff that I will flat-out refuse to accept as properly controlled for measuring the effect of linguistic priming. Consider, for example, the fact that the average Swedish saving rate is ~24% , while in Norway they save ~32%, when we could be having the argument whether they even have separate languages (mutual intelligibility, etc.). Compare the various English-speaking countries, such as Canada and the US: extremely similar culturally and linguistically, yet we get differences. If they had really managed to set up the study so perfectly that language was the only variable, we shouldn’t be getting differences, or certainly not ones this salient.
Some country/language pairs do match up nicely; Sweden and Denmark are almost identical, and the same goes for the US and the UK. But the shortcomings of the graph call the whole thing into question; based on what I’m seeing, I don’t trust Chen et al. to be able to extract the linguistic differences from all the other factors. They’ve gone wrong somewhere, even if it’s impossible to say exactly where and exactly how much just by watching the video.
Well yeah, strong relativism is a steaming pile of nonsense. But I’m not sure that you need strong relativism to get future-oriented behaviour differences, weak priming effects could well add up over time to produce noticeable differences in amount of savings over a long period.
What kind of factors did you have in mind? As far as I know they controlled for country, city, religion, income, family values.. probably some other stuff I can’t remember. And at least some of the pairs of households he compared were in non-Western countries, again I can’t remember off the top of my head.
I agree that less-than-strong forms of relativism can have an effect; priming effects are well enough known that it would be downright weird if human language was somehow exempt. But, again, this comes down to the non-linguistic factors, and distinguishing their effects from the effects of linguistic priming.
I can’t address the specifics of how well they conducted their study—it’s something of a black box to me. However, the graph around 8:15 in the video shows some seriously wonky stuff that I will flat-out refuse to accept as properly controlled for measuring the effect of linguistic priming. Consider, for example, the fact that the average Swedish saving rate is ~24% , while in Norway they save ~32%, when we could be having the argument whether they even have separate languages (mutual intelligibility, etc.). Compare the various English-speaking countries, such as Canada and the US: extremely similar culturally and linguistically, yet we get differences. If they had really managed to set up the study so perfectly that language was the only variable, we shouldn’t be getting differences, or certainly not ones this salient.
Some country/language pairs do match up nicely; Sweden and Denmark are almost identical, and the same goes for the US and the UK. But the shortcomings of the graph call the whole thing into question; based on what I’m seeing, I don’t trust Chen et al. to be able to extract the linguistic differences from all the other factors. They’ve gone wrong somewhere, even if it’s impossible to say exactly where and exactly how much just by watching the video.