WEIRD psychology

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imagine a biologist who only studi

plants it's not hard because that's what

scientists do they specialize they learn

as much as possible as deeply as

possible become an expert but imagine

now that that scientist said that here

or she was studying all living things

the the nature of life and they they

took for granted that the insights

gained from studying plants told them

everything they needed to know about how

all living things worked mushrooms and

lyans animals of All Sorts insects even

though we know of it about four times as

many insects as plant species of the

species of Life we've cataloged plants

make up less than

177% that is the current situation in

Psychology actually it's worse as a

number of psychologists have pointed out

their research disproportionately

examines people from their own own home

countries from the wealthiest most

industrialized nations even within those

countries the subjects that they test

are disproportionately University

students young adults who happen to

register for an introductory psychology

class these are the vast majority of

recruits for psychology experiments to

put it another way if you're a

university student you are 4,000 times

more likely to get recruited for

psychology research than any other

person psychologist Jeffrey Arnett

reported in a 2008 article an American

psychologist that 96% of all subjects in

Psychology research were drawn from

countries that represented only 12% of

the world's total

population 12% of all people are

left-handed in the UK about 12% of the

population experiences depression each

year in Australia 12% live below the

poverty line earlier this year the Euro

Zone had 12% unemployment in the US 12%

of adults have diabetes California has

12% of the US population only 12% of US

stick with our New Year's resolutions so

is it really sound to base our

understanding of of human nature on a

close study of only

12% because even within these countries

undergrads are the predominant subject

arnet suggested that psychology research

was really neglecting 95% of the world's

population some psychologists are

acutely aware of this problem and they

they pushed their field to be more

Global more interested in the variety of

human nature in 2010 Joseph Henrich

Steven Hein and aroan Zan wrote an

article that laid out the problem in

detail they suggested that psychology

subjects were the weirdest people in the

world

by that they meant the way subjects were

recruited was biased to favor people who

were Western educated industrialized

rich and Democratic we know lots

psychologically about weird people less

so about the rest of us the sampling

bias wouldn't be a problem if we could

be confident that everyone else on the

planet resembled the weird

people uh some psychologists might be

working with that assumption but Henri

hin and noran Zay make clear what a

problem this is that is weird people are

weird in another sense whenever we have

good cross-cultural psychology data

weird subjects aren't normal or average

or even just a little bit different

they're often real outliers if you play

strategy games meant to test people's

sense of fairness for example weird

subjects behave in Extreme Ways compared

to other groups such as hering peoples

or foragers or miners elsewhere in the

world in fact when Henri and his

colleagues looked at the data weird

subjects turned out to be outliers on

virtually everything they could find

data on visual perception fairness

cooperation spatial reasoning

categorization and inferential induction

that is the way that we extrapolate from

what we already know moral reasoning

reasoning style self-concepts and

related motivations the heritability of

IQ even really basic sentury factors

like whether or not you fall for an

optical illusion turn out to suggest

that Western subjects are outliers weird

subjects for example fall the most for

the MU liar illusion in some populations

this simply is not an illusion if you're

a sa forager or a South African minor

you're liable to see it a glance at

these lines of the same length

crosscultural psychologists think that

it takes living in a world of perfectly

right angle rooms and carpentered spaces

to train your visual system to think

that these lines are different lengths

as they write in their conclusion

Henrich and his colleagues say although

we are certainly not the first to worry

about the representativeness of

prevalent undergraduate samples in the

behavioral sciences our efforts to

compile an empirical case have revealed

an even more alarming situ situation

than previously recognized the sample of

contemporary Western undergraduates that

so overwhelms our database is not just

an extraordinarily restricted sample of

humanity it is frequently a distinct

outlier Vis A other Global samples it

may represent the worst population on

which to base our understanding of homo

sapiens but there are two additional

issues with the possibility of

extrapolating from weird subjects first

the very description weird wealthy

educated industrialized and so on might

be self- flattering it's how West

westers and other wealthy people like to

think of themselves elsewhere I've

argued that it may not be the weird

qualities that make these subjects such

outliers maybe Western University

students are outliers because they're

myopics that is they're materialist

whereas other people inhabit a world of

spirits and non-material forces

westerners tend to think that objects

and non-objects are clearly distinct

they're young not just because they're

University students but even in relation

to people the same age and other

societies who may already have families

and Leadership roles in the community

myopics may be more self-obsessed in a

variety of ways including the idea of

building a career investing in your

future and not having a strong corporate

identity like a clan

or group maybe pleasure seeking and pain

aversion to a greater degree than the

people University students especially in

US research universities may ironically

be more socially isolated sometimes

living in ageg graded residential

colleges where they don't interact much

with older or younger people myopics

also live in a pervasive consumerist

Society they often have identities that

are based not on production uction or

occupation but on consumption and

finally westerners in general are

terribly sedentary by every single

measure we have which may shape our

psyches and and nervous systems in

powerful

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ways the second problem is that our

understanding of human psychology is not

only built disproportionately on

studying these types of people it's

disproportionately built by these types

of people shaped by the questions that

weird researchers ask by the

Fascinations and blind spots this group

of people who we know are outliers to

borrow from Donald Rumsfeld it's not

just the things we know we don't know

it's the unknown unknowns the questions

that psychologists haven't asked about

Human Experience because we don't even

know that we haven't asked them this is

one place that psychological

anthropology and neuroanthropology comes

in I hope anthropologists are accustomed

to exploring alongside people who are

quite different to us that is weird in

their own ways the many ways that human

beings are we don't have to imagine

human variation or try to derive it from