Behavior across Cultures: Results from Observational Studies

Behavior across Cultures: Results
from Observational Studies
RUTH H. MUNROE AND ROBERT L. MUNROE
In cross-cultural settings, most of the things that
children do plus a large number of the things that
adults do can be systematically watched and recorded.
Data from such activities allow us to address
many issues centering around people's
ordinary behavior. For example, we are a highly
social species much involved in interaction with
others, thus the general question may be posed; Are
there social behaviors that are typical for certain
types of people? We also must nurture and care for
our basically helpless offspring if they are to survive;
thus: Is there some universality in the way we
meet infants' need for near-constant care? And we
have to invest our labor each day, that is, we need
to work if we are to live, thus: Can we discern any
regularity in our work patterns? These spheres of
life-our social behavior, our parenting, and our
routines of daily activity-have been fruitfully investigated
by means of observational techniques,
and we have chosen specific questions within each
sphere for the present discussion.
Before proceeding with the questions themselves,
we note that our emphasis is on observational
studies that have been carried out in people's
everyday environments while adhering to a set of
methodological standards. The term everyday enuironments
is self-explanatory; the studies sample
people wherever they are. With respect to methodological
standards, we feel it is insufficient to have
only anecdotal accounts or casual observations of
people's behavior. These can be very useful, but
they must be looked upon as sources of hypotheses
that will require verification on the basis of more
formal studies. Thus, we might hear from an anthropologist
that babies under six months of age are
always kept indoors in a certain society. Our reliance
on a statement like this would be bolstered
considerably if the sample were described and if
Ruth H. Munroe is Professor of Psychology at
Pitzer College. After undergraduate education at Antioch
College, she received a Master's Degree in Measurement
and Statistics and an Ed.D. in Human
Development from Harvard University. For several
years she served as Secretary-General of the International
Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. She is
the co-author, with Robert L. Munroe, of a chapter entitled
"Observations of Behavior as a Cross-Cultural
Method," which is to appear in the Handbook of Psychological
Anthropology, Philip K. Bock, Editor (Greenwood
Press, forthcoming).
Robert L. Munroe is Professor of Anthropology at
Pitzer College (of the Claremont Colleges, California),
where he has taught since 1964. He has carried out research
in Africa, Asia, Central and North America, and
the Pacific. Recent publications include three monographs,
co-authored with Ruth H. Munroe, on time use
in Belize, Kenya, and Samoa. The monographs form
part of a series edited by Allen Johnson of UCLA and
published by HRAF Press, New Haven, CT.

108 15/Behavior across Cultures: Results from Observational Studies
observers had been trained and had achieved reliability
using a standardized observation technique
and schedule. In other words, if a general statement
is made, we want not simply a flat assertion but
also a detailed specification of the means used to
derive it. So, keeping these methodological considerations
in mind, we can now turn to the three
representative question-sets and some partial empirical
answers.
Question 1: Are boys everywhere more aggressive
than girls? If such a sex difference exists, does it hold
across all types of aggression? Aggression is of special
interest as a form of social behavior both because it
is frequently associated with males and because its
range runs from children's mild attacks to full-scale
warfare. Although aggression has been among the
most widely studied topics in all of psychology,
relatively little of the research has been based on the
systematic observation of children and on standardized
definitions for aggressive behavior. We
want to report briefly on these kinds of data, which
have been gathered from ten societies around the
world, including most of the major culture areas.
Children aged 3 to 11 were studied in their homes
and communities as they engaged in normal social
activities with others, nurturing, scolding, helping,
and hitting-in short, doing those things that
youngsters typically do. Several thousand behavioral
acts were observed and coded according to
the categories of social behavior into which the
acts fell. The categories included three types of aggression:
physical assault, rough-and-tumble play,
and verbal attack such as insulting, threatening, or
challenging. As Table 1 indicates, a very strong preponderance
of aggressive acts was displayed by
boys. The last column in the table, which gives
overall tendencies, shows that in no group did the
girls display a higher level of total agonistic behavior
than boys, even though there were two societies
in which boys and girls were equal. (One of these
semi-exceptional cases, interestingly enough, was
the United States, which had formed the basis for
the original generalization!) For each type of aggressive
behavior considered separately, as we see
in the first three columns, only one society in ten
showed the girls to be higher than the boys. For
verbal aggression, however, there were enough
"ties" that just six of the ten societies had a higher
level for boys than girls. Based on our data, then,
we can say in answer to our initial question-set,
first, that boys do seem to aggress more frequently
than girls across a wide variety of cultures; and
second, that while the subcategories of aggression
also tend to show boys to be higher than girls, the
cross-cultural tendency is relatively weak so far as
verbal aggression is concerned. In general, this
rough cross-cultural count mirrors quite well the
usual Western-based finding, with boys almost always
more frequently observed in the physical
forms of aggression, but with girls not far behind in
verbal aggression, and sometimes rivaling boys in
that respect.
Question 2: Are females always the main caretakers
of children? Don't fathers ever match mothers in this
regard, or at least get themselves heavily involved in
caretaking activities? Females are the main caretakers
TABLE 1
Sex differences in aggression in 10 societies
Type of Aggression
Society" Assaultine Horseolav Verbal All
Belize
India
Kenya (a)
Kenya (b)
Mexico
Nepal
Okinawa
Philippines
Samoa
U.S.A.
+" indicates that boys' scores were higher than girls'.
"-" indicates that girls' scores were higher than boys'.
=" indicates that boys' and girls' scores were approximately equal.
"Data for Belize, Kenya (b), Nepal, and Samoa were taken from Munroe and Munroe
(1984). Data for India, Kenya (a), Mexico, Okinawa, the Philippines, and the U.S.A.
were taken from Whiting and Edwards (1973).

15/Behavior across Cultures: Results from Observational Studies 109
of infants and young children in all known cultures.
Available ethnographic evidence over the years led
anthropologists to claim this, and subsequent observational
studies have corroborated it. As to fathers,
their involvement in caretaking does vary
culturally, but it has always been reported as very
low compared with that of mothers. Direct observation
has, again, confirmed this point, with mothers
found involved in direct care of infants about 20-25
percent of their time, fathers no more than 2-3 percent.
This wide gap between mothers and fathers
has prompted many speculations, including the
possibility of a maternal instinct and a division of
These results lay to rest any
supposition that adult males may
be fundamentally disinclined to
undertake intensive caretaking or
nurturing behavior.
labor based on physical characteristics, such as size
and strength, that differentiate the sexes in all societies.
The findings of a recent observational project,
however, have demonstrated that an extreme cultural
instance can cause us to revise our ideas about
what might seem to be natural behavior. Anthropologist
Barry Hewlett (1991) lived with and studied
the Aka Pygmies of the Western Congo Basin.
He had noted, casually, that fathers were highly
involved in infant care. He then carried out several
hundred hours of systematic observations and, on
that basis, reported that: fathers averaged a full
hour per day holding the baby during daylight
hours, spent 20 percent of their time in early evenings
actively caring for the baby, were found no
farther than an arm's length from their babies for
half the day, and, in the Aka's forest-camp setting,
were within view of the baby a remarkable 88 percent
of the time. (Even with this level of involvement,
father care of the Aka infant was below that
of the mother.) These results lay to rest any supposition
that adult males may be fundamentally disinclined
to undertake intensive caretaking or
nurturing behavior. Hewlett also found that Aka
fathers, though intimate, affectionate, and helpful
with their infants, did not engage in vigorous or
rough-and-tumble play. His data clearly do not support
the recent idea that infants become attached to
their fathers by means of father-initiated stimulating
play. But to return to our question, we have in
the Aka case a level of paternal care far exceeding
anything hitherto reported. As in other societies,
the Aka father's caretaking does not match that of
the mother, but involvement with his baby is very
high indeed.
Question 3: Does leisure time increase with modem
urban life? Or is it in the technologically and economically
simpler societies that people have time to spare? At
mid-century, the consensus was that the Western
world possessed a technical competency capable of
granting us all the leisure we might want. It was
argued that from the perspective of a hunter-gatherer
like the Tasmanian, "we apparently had a
magic which made the plants grow as abundantly
as we wanted and the animals herd together as
tame as dogs. . . ready to be slaughtered at will"
(Forde, 1952, p. 2). And for their part, hunters were
considered to be "threatened with starvation and
working constantly to achieve bare survival" (Netting,
1977, p. 9). But this traditional view was completely
reversed when the first systematic
observations on time use among hunters began to
be collected. The food quest, as among the !Kung
Bushmen, occupied adults only a few hours per day
on average, and foragers were suddenly rechri
tened "the original affluent society," with industrial
peoples said to work longer and harder than all
others.
Now, however, behavior observations have
been extended to societies at all levels of cultural
complexity and in many areas of the world, and we
are able to answer the question of relative work and
leisure in a more precise way. We note first, though,
that the term "labor" is used more inclusively than
for just subsistence activity and includes work as
broadly defined, namely, the wage jobs most of us
engage in, our household chores, the shopping, the
preparation of food, active caretaking of children,
and so on. It appears, contrary both to the earlier
view and to the more recent one, that we in the
urban-industrial world put in approximately the
same time on daily labor as those in food-collecting
societies. Yet lying between us and the hunting peoples
on a scale of cultural complexity are the agrarian
societies, and what we have learned from
observation is that these agriculturalists work
longer hours than either us or the hunter-gatherers.
Not only adults but children too follow this pattern;
one comparison, for example, showed that during
nonschool hours for children aged 3-10, those in

110 15/ Behavior across Cultures: Results from Observational Studies
farming communities were engaged in work more
than 20 percent of the time, while U.S. and !Kung
Bushmen children spent just 5 percent or less of
their time working. We may ask why it is that the
farmers stay busier than other peoples. Although
the reasons are not known with any certainty, we
can point to two classes of activities to which farmers
must devote considerable time, whereas only
one of them is performed steadily by hunter-gatherers,
and only the other by us in the urban-industrial
world. Farmers, and ourselves, spend a good
deal of time doing chores, for instance, food preparation
and storage, housekeeping, purchasing and
taking care of material goods, laundering clothes,
and so forth; but hunter-gatherers, who accumulate
but minimal property, are spared much of this effort.
Farmers also must dedicate time to subsistence
labor, an activity in which they are joined by
hunter-gatherers, but not by us, since we have specialists
(farmers, ranchers, fishermen) whom we
pay to do this work. So agriculturalists seem to be
kept busy on both fronts, and we and the hunting
peoples are seriously engaged in only one of these
time-consuming activities. Whatever the reasons
for agrarian industriousness, though, the surprise
has been that as we observe work activities in
societies varying sharply on the scale of cultural
complexity, we do not find time-use patterns developing
in a simple linear fashion.
Besides demonstrating the usefulness of observational
research, each of the above sets of studies
also illustrates the value of cross-cultural investigation
generally (cf. Whiting, 1968). The findings on
childhood aggression have helped us answer the
question of whether a sex difference in Westembased
findings was culture-specific or held up
among people in general. The study of infant care
among Aka fathers has enabled us to extend the
range of known behavior; that is, it has discovered
a set of behaviors that were normative in one culture
even though exhibited by few or no individuals
in other cultures. And the issue of labor and
cultural complexity has posed a question that was
cross-cultural in its very formulation, requiring
data from several different types of societies if any
findings were to be generated. Thus a cross-cultural
perspective has enhanced the contribution of all the
sets of studies we have considered.
We noted above that a host of topics are open to
study by observational techniques. For instance,
many who work in Third World countries believe
that young children should be fed five small meals
a day. Although we may question the need for ex-
actly five periods of food intake every day, the
broader point is that children are more likely to
achieve proper physiological development if they
eat frequently. Implicit in such beliefs is the idea
that children should and do eat more frequently
than adults. As it happens, we can easily find out
whether cross-culturally, under naturalistic conditions,
this hypothesis receives support. Allen
Johnson of UCLA has inaugurated a cooperative
venture involving the publication, by the Human
Relations Area Files, of a collection of standardized
time-use databases. Now available for a total of
eight societies ranging over several continents, the
databases can be rapidly consulted to ask whether
children do in fact eat and drink more frequently
than adults. And the answer is yes, they are so
engaged. For a total of twelve possible comparisons
(youths vs. adults, toddlers vs. adults, etc.) for
which such data were presented, every single one
showed more time invested in eating by the
younger groups than by the adults.
The great number of observational studies have
focused on cultural patterns rather than individual
differences, and on gross behavioral categories
(e.e.. infant care, labor) rather than micro-level be-
~ ".
havior. But the varied approaches to observational
research in standard psychological study (cf. Weick,
1985) might lead us tosuspkt that these previous
foci are not the only bases on which cross-cultural
behavioral observation can be founded. One recent
cross-cultural study, for instance, compared fatherabsent
boys with father-present boys, and the dependent
measure was eye-gaze, the issue being
whether in natural settings the father-absent boys
paid more attention or less attention to males in
their social environments. It turned out that fatherabsent
boys looked more frequently at males, perhaps
in unconscious compensation for the fact that
they did not regularly have an adult male model in
the home. (The attention of girls to males was unrelated
to father absence in these samples.) Approaches
of this sort, with a concentration on
individual differences and molecular levels of behavior,
can provide data that are complementary to
traditional observational research in cross-cultural
settings.
LIMITATIONS
The more sensitive and private aspects of people's
lives are essentially off-limits to observational research.
Observation-based inquiry is also not the

15/ Behavior across Cultures: Results from Observational Studies 11 1
optimal choice, and certainly not the only choice,
for the study of cognition, emotion, fantasy, and
numerous other "internal" phenomena. Nevertheless,
the study of overt behavior can be integrated
with a great variety of methodologies in order to
ferret out underlying processes. Regarding the
higher rate of aggression among boys, for instance,
we could bring to bear both physiological research
and the investigation of relevant predispositions
and circumstances, including impulsivity levels,
the availability and importance of particular role
models, socialization techniques, and interests. And
although we were willing to speculate above as to
the reason that father absence was associated with
over-gazing at males, we obviously cannot talk
with assurance about "unconscious" motivation
unless something besides behavioral data can be
mustered. So the contributions of observational research
will undoubtedly be enhanced as they are
incorporated into a larger, more unified effort to
account for human behavior. In the meantime, we
hope that the examples given in this brief presentation
have helped make clear the usefulness of behavior
observation as a tool for cross-cultural
studies.
REFERENCES
-
Forde, C. D. (1952). Habitat, economy and society. London:
Methuen.
Hewlett, B. S. (1991). Intimate fathers: The nature and context
of Aka Pygmy paternal infant care. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
MU NO^, R. L., & Munroe, R. H. (1984, November). Aggression
among children: Predictors and correlates in four
societies. Paper presented at the annual meeting of
the American Anthropological Association, Denver.
Netting, R. McC. (1977). Cultural ecology. Medo Park, CA:
Cummings.
Weick, K. E. (1985). Systematic observational methods. In
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