The Asian Future of Evolutionary Psychology

Introduction

I hate to rain on your parade, but I have some bad news: in a hundred years, we'll all be dead. We'll be dead, and there will be a bright young Chinese graduate student named Justine Chen, or whatever, reading about the history of psychology in her 114^th story Shanghai apartment, on Tuesday, March 9, 2106. With the other forty 1^st-year Ph.D. students in her program, she'll be reading this week about early 21^st century Euro-American evolutionary psychology. She might skim the textbook's micro-biographies of Buss, Cosmides, Gangestad, Pinker, and Sperber.

Now, here's the decision point we face today: she'll be reading about evolutionary psychology as either a minor historical footnote that flared brightly for a couple of decades and then burnt out, or as the very foundation of her discipline.

This is not science fiction. There really will be a Tuesday, March 9, 2106. There really will be a lot of Chinese psychology Ph.D. students in Shanghai. They really will take history of psychology courses. We really will be dead. Evolutionary psychology really will be burnt out and faded away, or it will be the dominant paradigm in the behavioral sciences in Asia.

The good news is that we get to decide, now, which fate will befall our beloved science in Asia. And, as I'll try to explain in this essay, the demographic, psychometric, and economic facts of the world mean that if our science does not thrive in Asia, it will fail as a global human enterprise.

Why Asia?

Why make all this fuss about poor old Asia? Because its growth in population, economic wealth, cognitive capital, and scientific influence is blind-siding us. Most of us have no idea how quickly and massively Asia is overtaking the West — and how inevitable its scientific dominance will be by mid-century.

Consider Table 1, which reviews some key current statistics for Asian countries in comparison to the U.S. and the E.U., including population, GDP per capita, mean IQ, % literacy, and % of the population that supports a monotheistic religion (Jewish, Christian, or Muslim). The table's countries (rows) are arranged into 5 categories:

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1:

Asian Countries compared to Western powers as of 2006

Country	People (millions)	Pop growth %/year	$GDP per capita	GDP growth %/year	Mean IQ	% Literate	% Monotheistic
Western powers
Europe (EU)	457	0.2	28,100	1.7	100	99	>50
U.S.A.	298	0.9	42,000	3.5	98	99	77
(Subtotal	755)
Current Asian powers
Japan	127	0.0	30,700	2.4	105	99	1
S. Korea	49	0.6	20,400	3.9	106	98	26
Taiwan	23	0.6	26,700	3.8	104	96	5
Hong Kong	7	0.6	37,500	6.9	107	94	10
Singapore	4	1.4	29,900	5.7	103	93	30
(Subtotal	210)
New Asian powers
China	1,314	1.4	6,300	9.3	100	91	5
India	1,095	1.4	3,400	7.6	81	60	17
(Subtotal)	2,409)
Developing Asia
Vietnam	84	1.0	3,000	8.4		90	7
Thailand	64	0.7	8,300	4.4	91	93	6
Burma	47	0.8	1,600	1.5		86	8
Nepal	28	2.2	1,500	2.5		49	5
Malaysia	24	1.8	10,400	5.2	92	89	low
Sri Lanka	20	0.8	4,300	5.0		92	14
Cambodia	14	1.8	2,200	6.0		74	2
Laos	6	2.4	1,900	7.2		66	2
(Subtotal	287)
Mono-theistic Asia
Indonesia	245	1.4	3,700	5.4	89	88	96
Pakistan	166	2.1	2,400	7.8		49	98
Bangladesh	147	2.1	2,100	5.4		43	83
Philippines	89	1.8	5,100	4.6	86	93	94
(Subtotal	647)

Notes:

People: population in millions

Pop growth %/year: population growth rate per year, given births and deaths

GDP per capita: in U.S. $ purchasing power parity

GDP growth %/year: real GDP growth rate per year

Mean IQ: average intelligence quotient (global mean = 85)

% Literate: % of adults over age 15 who can read and write, averaged across sexes

% Monotheistic: % of population that is Jewish, Christian, or Muslim

Mean IQ estimates are from Lynn and Vanhanen (2002);

All other figures are from the CIA World Factbook online, as of May 2006:

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/

Countries excluded due to population less than 4m: Bhutan, Brunei, Macau, Mongolia.

Table 1 reveals a one key point. Altogether, if we exclude the likely anti-Darwinian cultures of Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, the current and emerging Asian powers include a total of 2.9 billion people — half the world's population, and about four times as many people as in the U.S. and E.U. combined. These Asians already have high literacy rates, high average IQs, fast-growing economies, and a relative freedom from memetic infection by the Abrahamic religions. Psychology is already becoming hugely more popular at Asian universities (Zhang and Xu, 2006). That is the current state of play, as of 2006.

Table 2 highlights even more starkly Asia's enormous scientific potential. It lists current U.S. census bureau projections of likely Asian populations in 2050, in descending order of size. It also lists the estimated mean IQs of some Asian countries (from Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002), plus some alternative scenarios in which mean IQs increase through the expected Flynn effect that typically accompanies economic growth (increasing average intelligence through better nutrition, education, media exposure, or other factors). Assuming the standard deviation of IQ in each case is 15 points, one can calculate the proportion of each Asian country's population that has an IQ above 130 — about the minimum threshold needed to gain a science Ph.D. and to make original research contributions. By multiplying this science-capable proportion by each country's estimated total population, one gets a very rough estimate of the absolute numbers of science-capable people in each country.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 2:

Estimated populations and cognitive capital as of 2050

Country	total population (millions)	estimated mean IQ	% population with IQ > 130	actual population with IQ > 130 (millions)
India	1,601	81	0.06	0.96
(India	1,601	(90)	0.38	6.07)
(India	1,601	(100)	2.28	36.50)
China	1,424	100	2.28	32.47
(China	1,424	(105)	4.85	69.06)
Indonesia	336	89	0.33	1.11
(Indonesia	336	(100)	2.28	7.66)
(Pakistan	295	(100)	2.28	6.73)
(Bangladesh	280	(100)	2.28	6.38)
Philippines	148	86	0.17	0.25
(Philippines	148	(100)	2.28	3.37
(Vietnam	108	(100)	2.28	2.46)
Japan	100	105	4.85	4.85
Thailand	69	91	0.47	0.32
(Thailand	69	(100)	2.28	1.57)
(Nepal	53	(100)	2.28	1.21)
(Burma	53	(100)	2.28	1.21)
S. Korea	45	106	5.48	2.47
Malaysia	43	92	0.57	2.45
(Malaysia)	43	(100)	2.28	0.98
Asia total (w. Flynn effect)	4,555			146.9
Europe	546	100	2.28	12.45
U.S.A.	420	98	1.66	6.97
Euro-America total	966			19.4

Notes:

Mean IQ estimates are from Lynn and Vanhanen (2002)

Parenthetical estimates for China and India reflect different possible Flynn effects that might raise mean IQ to 105 (China), or 90 or 100 (India), or 100 (other countries, including those for which no Lynn and Vanhanen estimates were available)

Populations with mean IQs above each thresholds were calculated based on (threshold — mean) divided by estimated standard deviation of IQs (15), yielding % population above the threshold according to standard normal distribution (z) tables, times total population

E.U. total population estimate of 546m includes: Turkey (86m), Germany (74m), U.K. (64m), France (61m), Italy (50m), Spain (36m), Poland (32m), Romania (17m), Netherlands (17m), Portugal (10m), Belgium (10m), Serbia (10m), Sweden (9m), Czech Republic (9m), Hungary (8m), Austria (8m), Switzerland (7m), Denmark (6m), Ireland (5m), Norway (5m), Finland (5m), Bulgaria (5m), Albania (4m), Bosnia (4m), Croatia (4m)

All estimates are from the U.S. Census Bureau online as of May 2006: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idbnew.html

By 2050, Euro-America will have about 19 million science-capable people, whereas, assuming reasonable Flynn effects, Asia will have about 147 million science-capable people. That is, Asia will have about 8 times the collective brain-power of Europe and the U.S. combined. China alone, with 69 million science-capable people, will have more than 3 times the brain-power of Euro-America. Asian dominance in cognitive capital still holds even if we exclude the monotheistic Asian countries that are unlikely to pursue secular humanist behavioral sciences very enthusiastically (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, which will have about 24 million of the science-capable Asians). That would still leave 123 million science-capable Asians in non-monotheistic countries — more than 6 times as many as in Euro-America. (Also note that Europe will have about twice the collective brain-power of the U.S. by 2050).

Of course, as in Euro-America, most Asian people with an IQ above 130 will not become behavioral scientists. They will become doctors, lawyers, business managers, or frustrated screen-writers. The point is this: as long as the proportion of bright people who become behavioral scientists is roughly comparable between Euro-America and Asia, there will be vastly more Asian behavioral scientists by mid-century — 6 to 8 times as many as in Europe and the U.S. combined.

This leads to a striking prediction: by 2050, the vast majority of psychology research will be done in Asia by Asians. The exact proportion may be as low as 60%, or as high as 90%. It depends on how quickly Euro-American politicians continue eviscerating behavioral sciences funding, how quickly other developing economics (e.g. Russia, Brazil) start investing in science, and many other factors. Let's pick 75% as a very rough but reasonable estimate of Asia's share of all psychology journal papers, citations, books, grants, and conference talks, by 2050.

The main question for us is this: will Asians in 2050 be doing evolutionary psychology, or something else?

Will Asian economic power translate into scientific power?

Savvy Economist-reading business people know that by 2050, China and India will have not just the world's largest populations, but the world's largest economies. There will be about 4.5 billion people in Asia (including 1.6 billion in India and 1.4 billion in China), compared to about 550 million in the European Union, and 420 million in the U.S. By 2050, China and India will no longer be poor. If China's GDP continues to grow at 8–10% per year, and India's at 6–8% a year, then by 2050, both will have larger economies (each over $30 trillion — yes, trillion — GDP per year) than the U.S. or Europe.

These massive Asian economies will mean massive Asian middle classes. Out of the 4.5 billion Asians, probably most will be reasonably affluent middle-class citizens, who can afford decent food, shelter, clothing, education, transportation, and leisure. Most will be near the happiness asymptote (currently around $10,000/year GDP per capita), where higher earnings no longer increase subjective well being. Most of the younger generation will be college-educated.

Their concerns will probably follow the standard Maslow hierarchy of needs: physiological (air, water, food, sleep, warmth), security (physical safety, stable jobs, retirement, health insurance), love (mates, friends, family), esteem (status, success), self-actualization, and self-transcendence. In other words, the first generation of affluent Asians will be materialistic. They'll pursue engineering and business degrees, seek economic security for their families, and adopt the nouveau-riche norms of conspicuous consumption. This is already happening from Bangalore to Seoul, just as it did in 1950s America and Europe. That first affluent generation of Asians will be tough-minded, practical, workaholic, anti-intellectual, and mostly contemptuous of psychology.

However, their children and grand-children will spark the Asian scientific renaissance. Their sons and daughters will grow up materially spoiled but emotionally neglected. They will take prosperity for granted. They will rebel against conspicuous consumption, seek alternative paths to status, and adopt the ancien-régime norms of conspicuous leisure and self-actualization. They will start college in economics or genetics, but then they will fall in love, take drugs, read Chuck Palahniuk novels, have existential crises, and end up majoring in psychology. (So it goes.) Their money-obsessed parents will be appalled at first, but gradually realize there's a certain cachet in being able to brag about a kid with a Ph.D. The second and third generation of Asian middle-class youth — not the first generation — will drive the Asian dominance in behavioral sciences by mid-century.

A historical analogy

Our situation is analogous to that of German psychologists around 1900. Some of them — Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Hugo Münsterburg, Karl Bühler, Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Lewin, and Egon Brunswik — realized that America was the future of 20^th century science. They overcame their Eurocentrism to emigrate to the U.S., or to welcome promising young English-speakers in their labs (such as G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, E. B. Titchener, and William James). Other 19^th century German psychologists thought that Germany would always be pre-eminent; they stayed put, focused on German students, wrote and taught in German, and had little impact on the long-term global development of the behavioral sciences.

We face a similar decision point. How long will we keep pretending that Euro-American psychology will dominate the 21^st century behavioral sciences? The longer our ethnocentrism lasts, the more certain our historical obscurity and obsolescence becomes.

Think of it this way: we all like to be cited. Citations mean impact. Citations feel like intellectual immortality. A well-cited scientific career seems a meaningful scientific career — at least in the short term. In the long term though, citations fade, papers stop being read, and science moves on. Honestly, when was the last time you actually read Münsterburg or Lewin? Their only lasting historical influence is indirect — through the students trained by the students they trained, and the ideas spawned by the ideas spawned by their papers, books, and talks. Only insofar as they took pains to reach out and nurture a rising scientific super-power (the U.S., in their case) did their careers have any lasting historical meaning.

How can we export evolutionary psychology across the Pacific in the early 21^st century, just as some Germans exported experimental psychology across the Atlantic in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries? How can we ensure that early 21^st century Euro-American evolutionary psychology plays a foundational role in the mid-21^st century Asian behavioral sciences? If we don't, and if future psychology is centered in Asia, then most of our efforts so far will have been futility, vanity, dust in the wind.

Two possible scenarios

We might win the battle to establish evolutionary psychology in North America and Europe, and lose the war to give it any lasting place in global (i.e. mostly Asian) science. We face endless local, transient distractions that make it hard to keep the big picture in mind. We worry about papers, talks, courses, grants, tenure, grad students, and collaborators. So did the 19^th century Germans. No doubt there were endless incentives and anxieties, quotidian sticks and carrots, that made it easy for them to ignore the rising scientific power across the ocean — just as we are today.

Imagine two scenarios. In the first, evolutionary psychology fights the long, uphill battle for scientific acceptance in Euro-American behavioral sciences. We work hard, fast, and smart to do great research, publish great papers, and train great grad students. We gradually have more and more impact in the American Psychological Society, the British Psychological Society, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie. We start getting decent grants from NSF, NIH, ESRC, and DFG. HBES conferences attract several thousand bright-eyed young scientists. We reach 2050, and evolutionary psychology seems triumphant — in Euro-America. The problem is, Euro-America has unwittingly become a scientific backwater. The top 10 most-cited psychology journals are still in English, but they are all published in Asia, and 75% of the paper authors are Asian. Those authors aren't doing evolutionary psychology. They're doing social cognitive neuroscience, or Terror Management Theory, or Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction research, or god knows what. They're doing that stuff because the scientists from those fields took the trouble to export their ideas to Asia at the right time.

Now imagine the second scenario. Evolutionary psychology picks its battles more intelligently. We forget the APS, BPS, DGP, NSF, NIH, ESRC, and DFG. We realize that the U.S. is morphing into a fascist-fundamentalist plutocracy that will never seriously support Darwinian research. We realize that Europe holds more medium-term promise, but that Asia is the long-term future. We work hard, fast, and smart to influence the psychology societies, departments, grant agencies, and popular science media of the key Asian countries. Psychology departments have existed in most Asian countries since the early 20^th century, but they are frustrated, underfunded, and neglected (Higgins and Zheng, 2002; Jeng and Fu, 2001; Pandey and Singh, 2005). We could gain the first-mover advantage in shaping their intellectual outlook for decades to come. We nurture the emotional bonds of collaboration and mentorship. They appreciate our attention and respect. No one else from the Western behavioral sciences is bothering with poor old Asia. Evolutionary psychology becomes the dominant paradigm in all the key psychology departments (e.g. Bangalore University, the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indira Gandhi National Open University, Kyoto University, Nanjing University, Nanyang Technological University, National University of Singapore, Seoul National University, Shanghai University, Taiwan University, Tohoku University, University of Hong Kong, Yonsei University.) Evolutionary psychology is still misunderstood, mocked, rejected, and reviled in the U.S. and Europe. But we don't care. We're playing the science version of the board-game Risk: whoever wins Asia probably wins the game.

I prefer the second scenario. It has two cardinal virtues: it's vastly easier, and it's vastly more effective in the long run. But it has one problem: it requires a leap of imagination beyond ethnocentrism. It demands that we pay more than lip service to the ‘psychic unity of mankind’. We have to realize that it doesn't matter who does evolutionary psychology, as long as it gets done. We can't care about the skin colors or accents of our successors. Evolutionary psychology has historical roots in England and California, and it has been a crowning intellectual achievement of Euro-American science. But if it remains so exclusively white, it will wither and die. Even if we ‘only’ influence Chinese psychology, we'll be influencing the foundational behavioral science in what will be, by 2050, the world's largest, richest, most intelligent, most secular, and most advanced society.

Factors that will make it easier or harder to ‘sell’ evolutionary psychology in Asia

We face a marketing problem. We want to export an intellectual product — evolutionary psychology — to a foreign market. Good market intelligence is crucial.

Here are some key practical factors that I think will make it easier to ‘sell’ evolutionary psychology in Asia:

In addition, there are several ideological factors that may promote the adoption of evolutionary psychology ideas in Asia:

On the other hand, there are some key inhibiting factors in Asia that might make it harder to sell evolutionary psychology:

Also, we face some practical difficulties of our own in exporting evolutionary psychology to Asia, including the high cost of travel to Asia, the difficulty of learning Asian languages, and the standard human ethnocentrism that makes us a little less comfortable collaborating with and mentoring members of other cultures. We also have some ideological obstacles to overcome, such as the bizarre assumption that ancient Greek philosophy of mind is a more suitable metaphysical foundation for the behavioral sciences than Buddhist, Daoist, or Confucian traditions. We will have trouble in Asia as long as we think that citing Aristotle, Kant, Hume, or Heidegger is somehow more reputable than citing Zhuangzi, Shen Dao, Gongsun Longzi, or Hu Shih (see Jing and Fu, 2001; Smith, 1992).

On balance, the positive factors seem stronger. Consider this thought experiment: if evolutionary psychology didn't exist, and you were an intelligent alien who wanted to spark the development of evolutionary psychology in one earthling country, which country would you pick? The U.S. is anti-intellectual and deeply religious, frenzied by consumerist self-indulgence and belligerent nationalism, veers between puritanical hypocrisy and pornographic narcissism, and has no serious national media or science journalism. China, by contrast, has a five-thousand-year tradition of intellectual progress, values education and ideas, is strongly secular, and will soon be the world's most populous, prosperous, and progressive country. I would land my flying saucer in Zhejiang Province, not New Mexico.

What to do

We have a good precedent for success with Asia. Ten years ago, HBES was American-dominated. We were not doing a good job of reaching out to European colleagues, of growing a trans-Atlantic science. Then, about five years ago, we made a concerted effort to be more Euro-friendly, holding HBES meetings in London (2001) and Berlin (2004). We have attracted ever-more researchers from Britain, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and Poland to talk at our conferences and to publish in our journals. We are succeeding, slowly, in creating an integrated Euro-American evolutionary psychology.

Some of these same tactics can be extended to Asia. At the last few HBES conferences, ever-more intrepid young scientists have attended from South Korea (e.g. Heesun Hwang, Jae Choe, Kim Ho, Seung-hyo Hong, Dayk Jang) and from Japan (e.g. Kai Hiraishi, Tatsuya Kameda, Rie Mashima, Mayuko Nakamaru, Yoshihisa Nakayama, Ryo Oda, Yohsuke Ohtsubo, Nori Ozawa, Kikue Sakaguchi, Mizuho Shinada, Chisato Takahashi, Noboyuki Takahashi, Takafumi Tsukasaki). Yet how active have we really been — not just in welcoming them, but in cherishing them as a bridge to the Asian future of our discipline? Holding HBES 2008 in Japan would signal a genuine commitment to the future of Asian evolutionary psychology. I hope we'll also have HBES meetings in Shanghai, Bangalore, or other thriving Asian academic centers within ten years.

Another encouraging sign is the forthcoming special issue of Acta Psycholigica Sinica on evolutionary psychology. This is the official journal of the Chinese Psychological Society, with abstracts in both Chinese and English, and all English-language papers translated into Chinese. The special issue is being co-edited by Lei Chang and David Geary, with contributions by Steven Pinker, David Buss, Steven Gangestad, John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and others. We could make similar outreach efforts to the Hong Kong Psychological Society, Indian Psychological Association, Indonesian Psychological Association, Japanese Psychological Association, Korean Psychological Association, Singapore Psychological Society, and Thai Psychological Association.

What else can we do? We can promote the kinds of applied evolutionary psychology that seem relevant to rapidly-developing countries with pragmatic concerns about education, the economy, and social stability (Leung and Zhang, 1995) — such as evolutionary versions of educational, industrial, organizational, consumer, and political psychology. We can promote evolutionary psychology in Australia and New Zealand — the key Asia-friendly British colonies of the Pacific rim. We can promote evolutionary psychology in the best-respected universities of the current Asian powers (Japan and the Asian tigers — Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan), which many developing Asian universities emulate. We can seek out Asian collaborators for cross-cultural research, and Asian graduate students for our Ph.D. programs. We can make our evolutionary psychology course materials more easily available on the HBES website. We can encourage our literary agents to seek Asian-language translation deals for our books. We can seek out and accept invitations to give conference talks and departmental colloquia in Asia. We can send press releases about our research to Asian popular science journalists.

We can build up Asian evolutionary psychology person by person, department by department, journal by journal, country by country. Nothing will be more important to the future success of our science.