While the prosocial motivation of the bigman is restricted to the village level, the scientist's extends more widely. The heavy emphasis on the scientist's social responsibilities contrasts starkly to responses given by Western students and provides food for thought. Student's comments also engendered notions of restrictive conformity and security. In this view learning and thinking exist only within the existing limits of knowledge and unaltering social structures. Student justifications do not report any activities of scientists that may violate the stability of society by introducing change.
Scientists solve problems in order to retain the existing society rather than change it.
There is a heavy accent on matters of environmental maintenance as opposed to technological innovation. Tradition was another important feature in students' descriptions. Experiments serve as rituals rather than as implements of discovery, and a knowledge of rules controls that ritual. Similarly, creativity's place is science is to recreate at the technical level, rather than create at the conceptual level. What at first appears to be a concern with achievement and personal success is more accurately centred on interest in the success of the ingroup while the lack of concern with government is not so much self- direction through independent thought and action as the limitation of concern to the members of the more restricted ingroup.