I live in a WEIRD country
That’s a western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) country. Odds are most of you live in one too. So it’s unfortunate, according to a recent study, that people who live in such countries—and typically a particular subset of those people, to boot—provide much of our data on human psychology and behavior.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia examined a comparative database of information from various behavioral sciences and found that it would be hard to find a population less suited for broad generalizations about humans than the inhabitants of WEIRD countries, who provide far and away the majority of data for behavioral studies. The areas they looked at included “visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ.” College students in the US are a subgroup that has its own quirks that differentiate it even from the general run of WEIRD people, and I’m guessing that they are one of the more heavily used groups for psychology research.
So whatever other reservations you may have about things like how well surveys or lab experiments capture people’s real-life behavior and attitudes, add to that the possibility that what we’re learning about is really an atypical batch of humans. A few years back I read David Buller’s book on evolutionary psychology, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books)
There’s more information in this story from Science Daily. The paper is:
Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 2-3, June 2010, pp 61-83.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
