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.

No abstract

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process-content distinction.

uch research on human behaviour and psychology assumes that everyone shares most fundamental cognitive and affective processes, and that findings from one population apply across the board. A growing body of evidence suggests that this is not the case.Experimental findings from several disciplines indicate considerable variation among human populations in diverse domains, such as visual perception, analytic reasoning, fairness, cooperation, memory and the heritability of IQ 1,2 . This is in line with what anthropologists have long suggested: that people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies -and particularly American undergraduates -are some of the most psychologically unusual people on Earth 1 .So the fact that the vast majority of studies use WEIRD participants presents a challenge to the understanding of human psychology and behaviour. A 2008 survey of

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10-12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term, cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and by-product approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate.

Growing cross-cultural evidence suggests that East Asians are less likely to show the correspondence bias, or a preference for explanations of behavior in terms of traits, dispositions, or other internal attributes of the target. The scope of this evidence spans several research paradigms and diverse methodologies. The cultural difference, however, appears not to be caused by an absence of dispositional thinking in East Asian cultures. Indeed, extensive ethnographic and psychological data indicate that "dispositionism" is a cross-culturally widespread mode of thinking, although East Asians believe dispositions to be more malleable and have a more holistic conception of the person as being situated in a broad social context. The East-West split in attribution thus originates primarily from a stronger "situationism" or belief in the importance of the context of behavior in East Asia. Consequently, East Asians are more likely than Westerners to avoid the correspondence bias as long as situational constraints are salient. One of the greatest and most remarkable misunderstandings we have about people, one that gives rise to many other inferential failings, is the belief that behavior is usually best regarded as reflecting personality traits or other internal attributes. This "lay dispositionism" (Ross & Nisbett, 1991) lies behind the so-called correspondence bias (Gilbert & Malone, 1995), or the preference for explanations of behavior in terms of internal attributes of the target. The correspondence bias sometimes results in the fundamental attribution error (FAE; Ross, 1977), or the tendency to overassign causality to traits and underassign it to situations. The FAE may be said to occur when people infer a disposition corresponding to behavior under conditions in which the true cause lies in the situational context or when the reasoning process leading to the dispositional inference can be shown to be flawed in such a way as to produce dispositional inferences erroneously (see Jones, 1979, and Gilbert & Malone, 1995, for extensive reviews). For example, college students infer, after reading an essay praising Fidel Castro, that the essayist truly likes Fidel Castro, even when they know that the target person was assigned to write a pro-Castro essay by a debate coach or an instructor in a course (Jones & Harris, 1967). People attribute volunteering to a disposition when monetary compensation was the true cause (Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Maracek, 1973), and they ignore role determinants of

We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality, experiments measuring religiosity and actual prosocial behavior suggest that this association emerges primarily in contexts where reputational concerns are heightened. Experimentally induced religious thoughts reduce rates of cheating and increase altruistic behavior among anonymous strangers. Experiments demonstrate an association between apparent profession of religious devotion and greater trust. Cross-cultural evidence suggests an association between the cultural presence of morally concerned deities and large group size in humans. We synthesize converging evidence from various fields for religious prosociality, address its specific boundary conditions, and point to unresolved questions and novel predictions.

No abstract