The weirdest people in the world?
- PMID: 20550733
- DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
The weirdest people in the world?
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.
Similar articles
-
Weird people, yes, but also weird experiments.Behav Brain Sci. 2010 Jun;33(2-3):84-5. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X10000038. Epub 2010 Jun 15. Behav Brain Sci. 2010. PMID: 20550737
-
The persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: A call to action.J Exp Child Psychol. 2017 Oct;162:31-38. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2017.04.017. Epub 2017 May 30. J Exp Child Psychol. 2017. PMID: 28575664 Free PMC article.
-
Culture and the quest for universal principles in moral reasoning.Int J Psychol. 2011 Jun 1;46(3):161-76. doi: 10.1080/00207594.2011.568486. Int J Psychol. 2011. PMID: 22044230 Review.
-
Beyond Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance.Psychol Sci. 2020 Jun;31(6):678-701. doi: 10.1177/0956797620916782. Epub 2020 May 21. Psychol Sci. 2020. PMID: 32437234 Free PMC article.
-
Fairness, fast and slow: A review of dual process models of fairness.Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2018 Jun;89:49-60. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.02.016. Epub 2018 Feb 24. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2018. PMID: 29486224 Review.
Cited by
-
Adrenocortical and autonomic cross-system regulation in youth: A meta-analysis.Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2024 Jan;159:106416. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2023.106416. Epub 2023 Oct 18. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2024. PMID: 39081795
-
Whose body is it anyway? Cultural reflections on embodiment illusion research in eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder.Front Psychiatry. 2024 Jul 15;15:1433596. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1433596. eCollection 2024. Front Psychiatry. 2024. PMID: 39077628 Free PMC article. No abstract available.
-
Preschoolers' Comprehension of Functional Metaphors.Open Mind (Camb). 2024 Jul 19;8:924-949. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00152. eCollection 2024. Open Mind (Camb). 2024. PMID: 39077109 Free PMC article.
-
Insights from the EQUALS4COVID19 study on migrant mental health in Portugal: a cross-sectional mixed-methods approach.BMC Public Health. 2024 Jul 29;24(1):2023. doi: 10.1186/s12889-024-19563-x. BMC Public Health. 2024. PMID: 39075428 Free PMC article.
-
Cultural Issues Related to ICD-11 Mental, Behavioural and Neurodevelopmental Disorders.Consort Psychiatr. 2021 May 25;2(2):7-15. doi: 10.17816/CP67. eCollection 2021. Consort Psychiatr. 2021. PMID: 39070734 Free PMC article. Review.
MeSH terms
LinkOut - more resources
Full Text Sources