
'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2020-09-wild-west-mentality-lingers-modern.html
======
phobosanomaly
In many parts of the United States when you call 911, you're lucky if anyone
shows up within an hour. It's a couple hours to get to a Wal-Mart or a store.
It's difficult to get anyone to drive 40 minutes outside the nearest town and
navigate unmarked dirt roads to do basic plumbing or home repairs.

As a result, people have to learn to repair things, make things, use a gun, do
first aid, lay shingles, hang drywall, pour concrete, solder pipe, weld,
change oil, replace an alternator, lay PVC pipe, etc.

People in the community learn emergency medicine and how to manage a structure
or brush fire by volunteering with the local volunteer fire/EMS, because
that's the only show in town.

Roads wash out in the rainy season, so 4x4 is an absolute necessity. People
learn to gauge sand you can drive through in 2x4, sand you can drive through
in 4x4 and sand you just can't drive through by eyeballing it.

I grew up in a very remote part of the California desert and everyone was like
that. It's just what you have to do to get by because you keep finding
yourself in situations where you need to call on these types of skills, and if
you're living out there you have a lot of free time without interruption or
distraction to learn the skills. Lots of people moved out from the city, and
over the years they picked up a lot of those skills and became extremely self-
sufficient.

~~~
pnathan
> In many parts of the United States when you call 911, you're lucky if anyone
> shows up within an hour. It's a couple hours to get to a Wal-Mart or a
> store. It's difficult to get anyone to drive 40 minutes outside the nearest
> town and navigate unmarked dirt roads to do basic plumbing or home repairs.

That's pretty far out; I think that's pretty extreme. At least in Idaho/WA IMO
(different geography and settlement pattern, prolly). But your point is still
valid for the bulk of rural US - you just gotta know how to deal, because the
cavalry is a ways out and expensive.

~~~
pnw_hazor
We have a homestead in NE WA we are developing, a few weeks ago, for the first
time ever, I called 911 because of a potentially dangerous laceration. We have
a full first aid kit with plenty of "stop the bleed" stuff but I didn't want
to take any chances. So because the bleeding was controlled we waited for the
EMTs.

It took 25 minutes for the EMTs to arrive. But that is because the nearest EMT
team was not on another call. Otherwise, it could have take 45-60 minutes to
get a team from the next nearest town/county.

Later that day on the way home to Seattle we stopped at an urgent care to get
stitches for $175.

Though, I am seriously thinking about getting an AED to keep out there.

~~~
phobosanomaly
One of the posters above mentioned Wilderness First Aid, which is a great
course. Wilderness First Responder goes more above-and-beyond and includes
things like relocating a dislocated kneecap or shoulder, splinting, bandaging,
administering injections, wound care, clearing a spine, identifying brain
swelling from a head injury, etc.

You can do it in a week, living on-site.

Edit: There's also a component on helicopter operations, such as laying out a
landing site for when things get really spicy.

------
arminiusreturns
Can anecdotally confirm. Sometimes it quite annoys me that those personality
traits are so embedded in myself though, because it seems to constantly be a
headbutting of cultures that so many Americans on the coastal big cities just
don't get or approve of, and love to condescendingly talk about that kind of
personality as lesser or barbarous in some way.

I love the mountains and freedom they offered me, the lessons they taught me,
and the beauty and solitude from an exhausting world they provided. After the
war when I became an atheist, I would tell others in the community when they
asked me to go to church that the mountains are my church.

All that said, I doubt it will last. There is a huge influx of people (not
just retirees, but refugees from the coastal cities) who would be considered
rich into mountain communities, driving out the locals by prices and changing
the demographic hugely. I keep a close eye on land for sale and land parcels
that used to be huge are starting to be divided into 5 acre parcels and sold
off... I can already see the distant future of this, turning mountain towns
into you have to be rich towns like Aspen, and it makes me very sad.

I can't wait till we have independent space travel, which is when I believe
the frontier spirit will be reborn again. Humanity will need it then again!
Alas, I probably won't live that long.

~~~
vb6sp6
> Sometimes it quite annoys me that those personality traits are so embedded
> in myself though, because it seems to constantly be a headbutting of
> cultures that so many Americans on the coastal big cities just don't get or
> approve of, and love to condescendingly talk about that kind of personality
> as lesser or barbarous in some way.

"rugged individualists" always seem to care a lot about how they are viewed by
"coastal elites". We'd all be a lot happier if we cared less about how we are
viewed by others.

~~~
arminiusreturns
It's not just about caring how I am viewed for no reason, it's that I have to
deal with the culutural differences daily both professionally and personally,
but mostly professionally. I keep my politics etc to myself in the workplace,
but the coastal elites seem to want to shove theirs down everyones throats,
even in the workplace, which is very jarring. It's one of the same reasons I
fled the bible belt and went to DC for a while (only to find I disliked the
east coast), but to see the similarities in dogmatism and tribalism between
the bible belt and the coastal elites is... informative.

I keep having this semi-irrational fear that the SV startup I work for will
found out I'm not "one of them" and fire me for cultural differences.

~~~
ed25519FUUU
And these fears are not unfounded. For example, the 12 year old Colorado
student suspended from school because of a toy gun being seen on Zoom. And
that was just a toy...

Firearms are just one such cultural flashpoint, where "don't ask don't tell"
is really the only modus operandi for those surviving inside the SV
monoculture.

------
briga
The early settlers of North American were in some sense selected by
personality. It must have taken a certain sort of risk-taking personality to
give up everything and climb aboard a crowded rickety passenger ship for a
month-long journey to a vast and mostly uninhabited land. The people who
arrived in America and decided to take it one step further by moving away from
the crowded cities of the east into the vast and dangerous interior of the
continent must have been a special breed.

You can still see some of these early mountain towns today--some are
practically unchanged from what they looked like 100 years ago.

~~~
bluntfang
>The early settlers of North American were in some sense selected by
personality. It must have taken a certain sort of risk-taking personality to
give up everything and climb aboard a crowded rickety passenger ship for a
month-long journey to a vast and mostly uninhabited land.

Many early settlers were criminals. I wonder if that personality selection
shines through.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_transportation#Transport...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_transportation#Transportation_to_North_America)

~~~
jki275
Keep in mind also that "criminal" meant something a bit different in colonial
times than it does today.

~~~
watwut
It meant something more violent then today.

------
abeppu
> However, "openness to experience" is much higher, and the most pronounced
> personality trait in mountain dwellers.

> "Openness is a strong predictor of residential mobility," said Götz. "A
> willingness to move your life in pursuit of goals such as economic affluence
> and personal freedom drove many original North American frontier settlers."

> those who left their early mountain home are still consistently less
> agreeable, conscientious and extravert, although no such effects were
> observed for neuroticism and openness.

I have difficulty reconciling these statements.

\- mountain dwellers have higher openness to experience

\- openness to experience is a predictor for residential mobility

\- but the people who move away from mountain regions _don't_ have higher
openness to experience (but stay disagreeable, unconscientious and
introverted)?

I would have expected the selection bias to show up in the other direction: I
would expect the people who stay put to have lower openness to experience, and
the people who move to have higher openness to experience.

~~~
aaron695
Absolutely. You'd expect mountain people to be conservative.

They can't afford to take more risks.

Not sure if you'd expect liberal people to seed the place and conservative
genetics to evolve.

Or conservative genetics to seed the place and stay strong.

------
2trill2spill
> Now, well into the 21st century, researchers led by the University of
> Cambridge have detected remnants of the pioneer personality in US
> populations of once inhospitable mountainous territory, particularly in the
> Midwest.

As a person who was born and raised in the Midwest[1], just where are these
mountainous regions they speak of in the Midwest? There's the black hills[2]
and that's pretty much it. I wonder what definition of the Midwest the
University of Cambridge is using, cause it sounds like they are talking about
the intermountain west[3], not the midwest.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hills)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermountain_West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermountain_West)

~~~
falcolas
As someone who lives in this "Intermountain West", I've never heard of the
"Intermountain West" term before your post. It seems like a term that someone
came up with, but it's never caught on.

I've typically heard of us referred to as the Western US (as opposed to the
West Coast).

~~~
2trill2spill
I hadn't heard of the term either until moving to Utah, I noticed quite a few
orgs/business with the term intermountain in it, like intermountain
healthcare. But when I was living in the midwest we just referred to the
mountain region as "out west".

~~~
jakeva
I'm from Utah, my parents ran a business with the word 'intermountain' in it
but I remember thinking it was a strange word. And (aside from intermountain
healthcare, which I doubt I would have remembered without your comment) I
don't think it's a word I've heard or seen used otherwise.

------
chmod600
This reads like the scientific version of a stereotype.

Maybe kind of interesting, but extremely prone to misinterpetation, over-
generalization, and potentially prejudice.

~~~
zajio1am
Stereotype Accuracy is One of the Largest and Most Replicable Effects in All
of Social Psychology:

[http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-
res...](http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-response)

~~~
voxl
The issue with stereotypes is the same issue with comparing IQs between
subsets of the population: averages do not work when its one individual
applying it to another individual. Variance is very high with humans, and the
idea that your Uncle Joe thinks his black friend has a big dick because of the
stereotype is idiotic.

------
scottlocklin
Urban WEIRD[0] weasels trying to understand normal humans really is something
to see. It's as if they're studying some bizarre carnivorous plant or
cannibalistic space aliens from the Planet Koozebane.

 _" Such rugged terrain likely favored those who closely guarded their
resources and distrusted strangers, as well as those who engaged in risky
explorations to secure food and territory."_

I'm pretty sure New Yorkers or San Francisco residents are more likely to
distrust strangers and not share than mountain people.

 _" These traits may have distilled over time into an individualism
characterized by toughness and self-reliance that lies at the heart of the
American frontier ethos"_

Yeah, or the fact that the guy who lives in the mountains can't call the
building superintendent to change his lightbulb might have something to do
with them having slightly more self reliance. I didn't grow up in the
mountains, but I did grow up poor: it has much the same effect.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias)

------
blueyes
I grew up in a mountainous area of the US, and can confirm the presence of
these personality traits, although it's hard for me to evaluate if they are
more or less prevalent than in the coastal city where I now live (hello,
mobility!). It's so hard to see into the lives of others, especially of enough
of them to get a representative sample.

For those interested in the history of the European settlement of the US, I
would suggest the book Albion's Seed:

[https://b-ok.cc/book/1242050/e88335](https://b-ok.cc/book/1242050/e88335)

The relevant part of the book is about the Scots-Irish settlers who came from
the Borderlands. Those "Borderers," or Rievers, are historically combative,
individualistic, and distrustful of government. They settled large parts of
Appalachia, and from there they helped to clear the forests of the midwest and
mine the Rockies. Think Daniel Boone. Think Alamo. They like to think they are
independent and they like to fight.

The repercussions on US politics are huge.

It's hard to tell from the article through the link what the authors are
asserting. While the conditions in the mountains may cultivate certain
characteristics, they also attract certain populations. So this could be as
simple as: mountain people settle in the mountains.

------
pnw_hazor
I graduated HS from a mountain town in NE Washington and recently have been
developing a property/homestead out there again.

My wife usually remarks how nice the people are out there in the wild west
compared to here in Seattle.

Politics is polarized out there too -- with old timers and hippies clashing
readily. But, nobody lets it get in the way of being friendly and helpful. One
friend remarked that it is because people need each other more so politics is
kept in better perspective.

Some counties in NE Washington have formally recognized the "Code of the
West".

"The Code of the West was first chronicled by the famous western writer, Zane
Grey. The men and women who came to this part of the country during the
westward expansion of the United States were bound by an unwritten code of
conduct. The values of integrity and self-reliance guided their decisions,
actions and interactions. In keeping with that spirit, we offer this
information to help citizens of Ferry County who wish to follow in the
footsteps of those rugged individualists by living outside city and town
limits."

[PDF]: [https://www.ferry-
county.com/PDF_Files/Commissioners/Code_of...](https://www.ferry-
county.com/PDF_Files/Commissioners/Code_of_the_West_Doc.pdf)

~~~
throwaway0a5e
My rule of thumb is that if the weather isn't crap a substantial portion of
the year than the people are probably crap. Then you take the binary result of
that and multiply by the distance to the nearest few luxury European car
dealerships to get just how crappy/not crappy the people are. It's actually
quite accurate regardless of local population density.

------
sudosteph
My whole family is from Appalachian parts of NC, and even though I consider
myself a "city person" (born and raised in Charlotte) - the traits from the
article do match up pretty well with my personal big 5 traits.

The agreeableness thing is interesting, because that's one of those traits
where I've always heard there is a pretty significant difference on average
between men and women (with women tending to score higher). Anecdotally, I
think this could be the factor to explain a family trend, that I'm told is not
uncommon in the region. The women in my family tend to do really well for
themselves by going after non-traditionally female career paths and doing well
- despite super modest backgrounds. My great-grandma went from working at a
mill to building and running a modest mobile home park, great-aunt got a
scholarship and became a doctor way back in 60s, my mom got a full scholarship
and moved out of the mountains to start her own own business in a male-
dominated field. Meanwhile the male side includes - a hobo, taxi-driver,
mining/odd jobs, and another close family member who has been on the run from
the law for dealing drugs for many years now.

------
dreamcompiler
I'm one of these "mountain people" so I see a lot of what's true in this
article, but there's also a flip side: Mountain people look out for each other
on the mountain. I've never lived in a place before where there's such a
strong sense of helping out one's neighbors as there is here in the mountains
of NM. We plow each others' driveways when it snows; we help older neighbors
run errands; we respond to 911 calls by volunteering at the local fire
department. It's a nice feeling of both community and privacy at the same
time.

------
bjt
Having grown up in Utah, and living there now, I agree with the assessment of
self reliance being emphasized much more here than other places I've lived
(England, California).

When thinking about causality though, it seems to me like a mistake to leave
out the Mormon influence. It's not just Utah, but Mormons founded many towns
in Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, and Nevada as well. Distrust of the federal
government was frequently and explicitly taught by church leaders into the
early 1900s.

------
supernova87a
Well, to whatever extent this is true, I'd like to know --

1) Whether this is something very special to the US, versus happens in every
country, and is a fact of life in remote / non-city areas, and

2) Does this call for a certain approach to how to effectively govern or
design public policy if there is a east/west or city/suburban vs. rural social
divide?

Attitudes in themselves are not a problem. Inability to have people agree on
almost anything to move forward with government and economic life because
there is a permanent divide in social/political climate is.

If a married couple cannot agree on finances, friends, raising kids, etc.
ever, it's not pleasant for anyone.

~~~
082349872349872
The actual article:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0930-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0930-x)

Paywalled, so I haven't checked my question

3) Do people from the University of Cambridge underestimate self-segregation
due to US population mobility?

(FWIW, local politics in my country does anecdotally skew rural/right
urban/left, but we fortunately have many other different divisions whose axes
are uncorrelated with that particular one. I firmly believe having more than
two major parties helps immensely on this front.)

Incidentally, my ultra-low-dimensional model after 2016 was "how far away does
a US voter live from the largest city in their watershed?" It remains to be
seen if this simplistic metric predicts anything useful in 2020.

~~~
rbartelme
Code and Data on OSF: [https://osf.io/y2mdw/](https://osf.io/y2mdw/)

It's a bit funny that this is "open science framework"...when the code sets
the wd with absolute paths, and the R packages are not explicitly versioned. I
wish more scientists would start using Docker to make their work environments
reproducible.

------
kyleblarson
I live in a mountain town and it's literally 'Wild West':
[http://northwesttraveladvisor.com/northwest-
vacation/western...](http://northwesttraveladvisor.com/northwest-
vacation/western-towns.html)

~~~
mikestew
Winthrop is about as literally Wild West as Leavenworth, WA [0] is literally
Bavarian.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leavenworth%2C_Washington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leavenworth%2C_Washington)

(As explanation, both towns decided to become a "theme town", for lack of a
better phrase, around the same time in the 60s-70s. Winthrop was inspired by
Leavenworth, which in turn was arguably inspired by Solvang, CA.)

~~~
kyleblarson
Obviously it was manufactured, but get outside of town a few miles and you are
in real ranch country and it's very much the west. The prius and audi driving
west siders don't usually see that side of things.

------
FpUser
I was born in Siberia region of former USSR. There I would do ungodly amount
of things myself. To the point that I got really sick of doing those. When I
immigrated to Canada one of the things I've come to immensely enjoy is the
ability not to do everything myself. Well a bit later I've also discovered
that you basically have to check everything unless you want it f..ed up
royally.

The apogee was reached when one of the electricians I hired to change my power
switch for water heater did the job and no electricity was flowing to said
heater. He was doing this and that and finally said that he is giving up. This
got me mad and I checked the wiring myself. Are you ready for this ? ... He
screwed both of the 2 outgoing wires to a grounding plate that happened to
have 2 threaded holed completely ignoring everything else that was there.

------
golemotron
I'm trying to understand why this article is on phys.org.

------
jariel
The one thing that stands out is 'lower conscientiousness'. I would have
thought being on the frontier, the #1 thing you needed was that. Very strict
discipline, responsibility etc. - it could be this is more of a 'farmer trait'
and less so a 'mountain' trait.

------
antiterra
Source article (not free):
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0930-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0930-x)

Article with more information:
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mountain-peaks-
se...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mountain-peaks-seem-to-
shape-personality-traits-in-the-american-west/)

------
x87678r
I read somewhere in the real wild west people were very collectivist as they
had to rely on the whole village to work together to survive. The rugged
individualist is a myth. I can't find the link though, anyone have similar
stories?

------
boring_twenties
> mountainous territory, particularly in the Midwest.

I suppose I'm nitpicking here, but this is an oxymoron. The Midwest doesn't
have any mountains.

~~~
viridian
The Appalachian mountains are present in Southeastern Ohio. The hollers don't
just magically appear when you cross the river over from Marietta to
Parkersburg.

~~~
boring_twenties
OK, fine. But clearly this article is trying, and failing, to refer to the
actual Mountain West, not the Appalachian foothills. It reminds me of one of
those joke "US maps for New Yorkers" where half the country is New Jersey.

------
bookmarkable
I would love to see this type of study on Florida.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
That would just be a proxy study on people from the wealthy urban parts of the
northeast.

~~~
samatman
He didn't mean that Florida, he meant the other one.

------
growlist
Hard times make strong men: and they seriously needed to perform an academic
study to prove this? Nice work if you can get the grant money...

And I await the counter-study, i.e. on the detachment from the realities of
life of the average urban Cambridge University psychology researcher.

~~~
doukdouk
Some thoughts on whether hard times make strong men:
[https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-
mirage-...](https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-
i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/)

------
Terr_
> 'Wild West' mentality

Not to be confused with a set of beliefs (some false) about a mythologized
period of history that was almost propagandized by early television media.

