You’re Probably a Weirdo (Nothing Personal)

A friend alerted me to a report in Science , “A WEIRD View of Human Nature Skews Psychologists’ Studies.” Neither the report nor the original article being reported, which was published in  Behavioral and Brain Sciences, is available online, but Science ‘s  free summary says:

Although undergraduates from wealthy nations are numerous and willing research subjects, psychologists are beginning to realize that they have a drawback: They are WEIRDos. That is, they are people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic cultures. In a provocative review paper published last week, a pair of researchers argues that WEIRDos aren’t representative of humans as a whole and that psychologists routinely use them to make broad, and quite likely false, claims about what drives human behavior.

In the original article, one of the researchers, Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia (“in Canada,” the article helpfully adds), says that these people “are some of the most psychologically unusual people on the planet.” One of his colleagues, Joseph Heinrich, adds, “We will never figure out human nature by studying American undergrads.”

Among other things, social psychologists see people as tending to explain human behavior by their personality and not by their situations, so people are angry because they’re angry people, not because something has happened to them to make them angry. This is called “fundamental attribution error.” People outside “WEIRD societies” look more at the situation than the personality.

Textbooks based on WEIRDos

also frequently describe people as valuing a wide range of options when making choices, being analytical in their reasoning, being motivated to maintain a highly positive self-image, and having a tendency to rate their capabilities as above average. Again, the review article contends, this picture breaks down for people from non-WEIRD societies: These groups tend to place less importance on choice, be more holistic in their reasoning, and be less concerned with seeing themselves as above average.

The article also reports on the differences in responding to the famous experiment when marks at the end of equal length lines make most of us think they’re different lengths. People in “some small-scale societies” aren’t fooled.