Why “Eastern & Western Design — How Culture Rewires The Brain” is wrong

John Mauriello from Design Theory — Screenshot from the video “Eastern & Western Design — How Culture Rewires The Brain”

This post is a short critical response to the video titled “Eastern & Western Design — How Culture Rewires The Brain” by the channel Design Theory. The video makes a case to show that culture influences how we perceive and design the world, which is, overall, fine I suppose.

My criticism is mainly two-fold:

1. Overall, this is a very classical way of looking at culture and how the brain works;
2. The video presents evidence that “banning cousin marriage” is likely responsible for the disparities between “Eastern” and “Western” design. I argue that trying to pinpoint the trajectory of complex adaptive systems to a single event (so-called “root cause”) is ridiculous and simply bad science.

There seem to be several historical inaccuracies as well and the references in the video description are, to say the least, rather thin (mainly comprised of 2 books). However, please note that I won’t treat any of these points here.