Cross-Cultural Experimentation: An Initial Attempt

Procedures for making cross-cultural comparisons have been relatively standardized in the field of anthropology. Typically, the instrument used is the anthropologist, the data he collects are his personal observations combined with information from native informants, and the report he makes is his interpretation of how two cultures differ. The merits of this procedure have often been demonstrated, and the limitations too have been discussed. A major limitation has been the fact that the final results of this type of cross-cultural study can only be constructed from the subjective interpretations of one or more anthropologists in the field. Assuming that anthropology follows a development similar to other scientific fields, this period of subjective observation should ultimately be followed by some sort of experimental evidence to test the ideas gathered by the observational method.