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.

Refining the vulnerability model of low self-esteem and depression: Disentangling the effects of genuine self-esteem and narcissism.

“…Although the studies examined in the present research were conducted in two different countries (i.e., United States and Switzerland) and although one study included Mexican-origin adolescents, it is unclear whether the results generalize to samples from other cultural contexts such as African and Asian countries (Arnett, 2008;Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).…”

Using crowdsourced online experiments to study context-dependency of behavior

“…individual motivations not restricted to one's own well-being but including the well-being of others (Camerer and Fehr, 2004). Marginal totals are well-documented for various populations (Camerer, 2003;Cardenas and Carpenter, 2008;Henrich et al, 2010) and stake levels (Camerer and Hogarth, 1999;Carpenter et al, 2005). Each protocol is easily understandable by participants of different social backgrounds and training.…”

“…Henrich et al, 2010;Levitt and List, 2007;Roth et al, 1991). Crowdsourced online experiments provide a valuable complement allowing flexible grouping of participants along contextual data.…”

“…Above all Henrich et al (2005Henrich et al ( , 2010 have added to our understanding of culturally molded decision-making and its interaction with socio-economic development. However, cross-regional comparisons for estimating effects of living conditions and cultural patterns on economic behavior have run into obstacles due to limited transferability of standardized decision situations into parallel laboratory set-ups (e.g.…”

“…Crowdsourcing platforms facilitate fast and inexpensive implementation of online experiments on large scales (Mason and Suri, 2011), tapping into real online labor markets (Horton et al, 2011) sustained by a substantially broader and more cross-national population (Berinsky et al, 2012) than in traditional experimental subject pools (see Henrich et al, 2010 for a prominent critique). Recently, however, some have questioned the quality of inferences from crowdsourced samples Gupta et al, 2014;Marder, 2015), particularly raising concerns regarding experience and self-selection of participants compromising online experiments' internal and external validity.…”