The Weirdest People in the World?
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| - | "I and my fellow Penn students were weird in a second way too. In 2010, the cultural psychologists Joe Henrich, Steve Heine, and Ara Norenzayan published a profoundly important article titled “[[The Weirdest People in the World?]]” The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD). They then reviewed dozens of studies showing that WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature. Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans, and within the United States, the educated upper middle class (like my Penn sample) is the most unusual of all." --''[[The Righteous Mind ]]'' | ||
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| “[[The Weirdest People in the World?]]” (2010) is a study by Joe Henrich, Steve Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. | “[[The Weirdest People in the World?]]” (2010) is a study by Joe Henrich, Steve Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. | ||
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| by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. | by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. | ||
| - | Keywords: behavioral economics; cross-cultural research; cultural psychology; culture; evolutionary psychology; experiments; external | + | Keywords: [[behavioral economics]]; [[cross-cultural research]]; [[cultural psychology]]; [[culture]]; [[evolutionary psychology]]; [[experiments]]; [[external validity]]; [[generalizability]]; [[human universals]]; [[population variability]]. |
| - | validity; generalizability; human universals; population variability | + | |
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“The Weirdest People in the World?” (2010) is a study by Joe Henrich, Steve Heine, and Ara Norenzayan.
Abstract: Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
Keywords: behavioral economics; cross-cultural research; cultural psychology; culture; evolutionary psychology; experiments; external validity; generalizability; human universals; population variability.
