Behavior across Cultures: Results from Observational Studies

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-
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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