There's a potential issue in keeping your identity small; I've noticed it within myself: I dislike people who don't. It annoys the hell out of me, and I regard them as part of the outgroup.
Which suggests to me that "keeping your identity small" ("individualism," loosely speaking) is part of my identity.
I'm not sure if this is an actual problem, so for now I simply keep it in the back of my mind as a potential biasing factor.
Which suggests to me that "keeping your identity small" ("individualism," loosely speaking) is part of my identity.
I think incorporating Graham's lesson is valuable to being rational.
That said, I don't think "individualism" is the only way to keep your identity small. For example, a collectivist is perfectly capable of having a small identity.
WEIRD may be weirder than you think. We Aren't The World writes of psychological experiments on non-Westerners that give vastly disparate results from results that have been assumed to be hardwired, and the implications of this:
Henrich used a “game”—along the lines of the famous prisoner’s dilemma—to see whether isolated cultures shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness. In doing so, Henrich expected to confirm one of the foundational assumptions underlying such experiments, and indeed underpinning the entire fields of economics and psychology: that humans all share the same cognitive machinery—the same evolved rational and psychological hardwiring. The test that Henrich introduced to the Machiguenga was called the ultimatum game.
...
To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”
...
At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West.
Edit: The actual papers this article writes about are covered in this post by Ciphergoth from a few years ago.