One of the key concepts of my credibility assessment method (to be detailed in my soon-to-be-published book, Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment: A Reality-based Alternative to Deception Detection) is Context. Culture, sub-culture, religion, region, language, and other factors are part of Context.
Attempting to judge credibility (or detect deception) without having competence in the target context is a recipe for failure.
A case study that proves this is Margaret Mead and her attempt at ethnology in Samoa.
This excerpt from the book illustrates the importance of contextual competence when making assessments of credibility.
Case Study: Margaret Mead—Results of Failure to Develop Cultural Contextual Competence
Studying a culture as an academic or as an observer is less likely to lead to contextual competence. Interacting with a culture as an academic or observer can create a false sense of competence. An excellent case study of this is Margaret Mead in Samoa. Mead, a society girl in the thrall of social reform radical Franz Boas, bought in to Boaz’s mission to prove that American societal norms around family, love, and sex were unnatural. As a graduate student under Boas at Columbia University. Mead was sent to Samoa to find evidence to support his theories of cultural relativity. Her dissertation focused on the sexual activities of adolescent girls and young women in Samoa.[1] In this work, she compared her claims about Samoan culture with American culture. She went on to robust activity in academia and American society, advocating for relaxed moral standards, claiming that her and Boas’s work proved that strict standards were not natural. Her Samoan claims were credited with launching the sexual revolution in the US.
Margaret Mead spent five months in Samoa, gathering evidence on the social life of Samoan teenage girls. Mead was a 23-year-old American graduate student. She was a follower of a movement in American academic circles that was attempting to prove that there was no such thing as human nature. They wanted to show that human activities were totally based on local situations. They were especially eager to destroy American traditions of sexual morality, to prove that American customs were unnatural.
At the end of her five-month visit, Mead wrote a best-selling book. She reported that Samoan adolescent girls were free to distribute their sexual favors among a variety of partners. Mead wrote,
Adolescence in Samoa is a period of promiscuity before marriage…Freedom of sexual experimentation is encouraged, and even expected. With a girl distributing her favors among many youths adept at amorous techniques.
But, before and after Mead, other researchers reported that both premarital and extra-marital sex are strictly prohibited by Samoan custom. They describe the Samoans as a devoutly Christian people with a severe sexual morality that was even stronger during Mead's time in Samoa.
So, Mead's ground-breaking research was totally wrong.
How did Mead's research go so wrong? What led her to write a book about non-existent free love in Samoa? Was Margaret Mead fooled by the Samoan girls who were her only source of information?
For her study of girls in Samoa, she claimed to be competent in the Samoan culture, convinced others she was, and shared her false expertise with the world. But, in fact, she was a naïve outsider with little in-depth understanding of the target culture. Her subjects, young Samoan girls, told her lies constantly, spinning fantastic stories that Mead interpreted as reality. Mead was both incompetent in the context of Samoan culture, and unaware that she was incompetent. The result was her laughably wrong judgements and assessments of the false evidence she gathered.
In The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A historical analysis of her Samoan research[2], anthropologist Derek Freeman described how Mead’s cultural incompetence made her an easy target for the girls she thought were providing her with cultural insights. Mead was played for a fool by the girls.
Mead was hoaxed by two of her closest companions and informants, Fa'apua'a and Fofoa, about Samoan adolescent sexual mores. Embarrassed by Mead's frequent questions on their sexual behavior, they would pinch each other and blandly agreed with all she had suggested to them, telling her with due embellishment that they, like other young women and adolescent girls, regularly spent their nights with members of the opposite sex. Unknown to her, the two girls were engaged in what the American anthropologist O'Meara describes as recreational lying or taufa'ase'e, as Samoans would say.
Even more damning than Freeman’s analysis, a short film in 1988 exposed Mead’s incompetence by visiting Samoa. The film-makers interviewed her original informants, as well as local experts on Samoan culture. Heiman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa[3], much like the videotaped last testament of the Khost bomber, allows the subject of faulty assessment to speak.
In the film, Mead’s main informant, who was a teenage girl in 1926, revealed the truth about Mead's research. The Samoan lady remembered her interactions with Mead clearly.
Mead would ask us what we did at night. We girls would pinch each other and tell her we were out with the boys. We were only joking but she took it seriously. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars and love making fun of people. But Margaret thought it was all true…. we just lied and lied.
But who was manipulating and who was manipulated?
Demonstrating much better cross-cultural competence than Mead ever did, a Samoan professor of Samoan Studies shared her assessment that Mead’s incessant sexual questions of the girls, and her later writing about sexual issues, were because:
Margaret Mead was talking about herself. [Mead's] whole book is totally opposing our customs and culture. We're no different from you in America….
Mead was primed to hear what she wanted to hear. The Samoan girls, making fun of her without her knowing it, lied to Mead.
Mead was both naïve and sinister. Naïve in that she was clueless about the culture she visited for just five months. And sinister in that she took the girls' lies and amplified them as fake evidence in support of a theory that became settled science in American culture. This settled science, based on lies, had a negative effect on American culture.
It seems that Mead was a willing victim of the girls' manipulation. Her cultural incompetence could be termed aggressively ignorant. Her conclusions could be called self-fulfilling prophesies. Regardless, she then built her career by manipulating her American audience with her own lies.
The Samoan professor concludes with a comment about Mead’s contextual incompetence: Mead's Samoa is make-believe.
[1] Mead, M. (1928). Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. W. Morrow.
[2] Freeman, D. (1998). The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A historical analysis of her Samoan research. Westview Press.
[3] Heimans, F. (1988). Margaret Mead and Samoa.