Partly because this item has two alternate titles, it has been submitted lots of times before (sometimes without many comments) without people noticing the duplicate submissions. One of the earliest submissions (430 days ago)[1] had well over 100 comments. My comment at the time linked to the full paper[2] by the original authors, which was one of many papers I discussed with professors of psychology (most of whom do their research in the framework of behavioral genetics)[3] that school year in the journal club I attend at my alma mater university.
Plainly, basing psychological research on subjects who are mostly undergraduates at United States universities is not a good idea, and there are now increasing efforts to broaden the samples of human beings used to investigate general human characteristics. Cross-cultural validation was considered very important in studies of personality psychology even before this paper was published,[4] for example.
Anyway, this perspective comes easily for me, as an American who has lived in a non-Western country for six years of my life (with knowledge of the language, the classical literature, and the traditional culture). Definitely the United States is not the center of the Universe. The study authors referred to people from Western cultures, who were Educated, and who live in Industrialized, Rich, Democracies as "WEIRD" people, and of course that acronym marks out a minority of the world population. I am part of that minority, but I have seen how non-Western, (then) less educated people lived as their country made a transition from being agricultural, poor, and dictatorial to being industrialized, rich, and democratic, and along the way the local culture changed as local conditions changed.
Definitely the United States is not the center of the Universe.
Yes, this became especially clear to me personally while working in Asia during the Second Gulf War. In the U.S., people (mainly hand-wringing liberals like my circle it must be said) shrilly intoned "What is the rest of the world going to think of us?!"
Meanwhile, in Taiwan, they simply weren't thinking about us. Yes, we came up in the news sometimes, with respect to specific political issues. However, that invasion ("war") on the whole had no direct bearing on Taiwan.
What's weird about American culture includes how convinced we are that everyone is looking at us as if we were the sun and the rest of them planets. I'm convinced it's leftover pride from the so-called world wars and it's been vented as a means of social control for the industrial military complex. ("We're the cops of the world, boys.")
It also includes the fact that we go around the world measuring everyone else. When was the last time a bushman from New Guinea wandered into your office park and administered a psychological test to you and your co-workers?
Going deeper, what's truly unusual about us is that we expect to discover or create a system that explains everyone else. E.g. we expect to find atomic-level principles that direct the behavior of every other culture out there as if our investigations into natural science should be a template for social values the world over.
While I don't disagree with your conclusions, my own personal experiences abroad were quite different. When I was a student in Germany, US news showed up on the nightly news and in the newspaper every day. I was regularly engaged in debate about US politics by neighbors - most of whom were better informed than the average American.
Plainly, basing psychological research on subjects who are mostly undergraduates at United States universities is not a good idea
Good for what, or whom? The original BBS article shows that a slew of psychological results, even those from the most robust subfields like perceptual processing, are not so universally constant as they were previously assumed to be. From the point of view of a particular paper on the processing of visual illusions, for instance, this is bad news insofar as it violates the data from that paper; and bad insofar as models based on that data will now require an asterisk.
I maintain that this isn't a bad thing. In the grand scheme, it would obviously be better if models of cognition that grew out of psych research were 'correct' and took into account all relevant issues from the very start, so that (for instance) we knew that environmental geometry would give rise to perceptual foreshortening and lengthening effects in one case and not another.
But this isn't the way the logistics of the field works; and the 'increasing efforts to broaden the samples' you mention is still an infinitesimal drop in the bucket in 99% of the cases. I work in the psych department of a major research university and I'll tell you that screwing down the demographic requirements of our investigations would not lead to fuller and more apt models, it would lead to an utter absence of the experiment to begin with, as we lack the money to ship in enough !Kong tribesmen and Mongolian sheepherders to round out our sample. And even if we could somehow get all those folks, it would lead to the utter absence of most experimental effecss: the results of such disparate effects, for reasonable sample sizes, would look like noise.
Fine, you might say; you shouldn't be doing science anyway, that's the whole point -- it's not science if you're skewing your investigation so heavily. But considering the logistical realities, and the cultural and institutional history that led to the emergence of an infrastructure for the pursuit of the scientific enterprise in the first place, it doesn't seem so bad to have a body of 'rigorous' knowledge that can then be amended, and indeed that is rigorous enough for its practitioners to realize, in response to surprises, that it ought to be amended.
To come back to the article, we have years of research on the ultimatum game where subject behavior under various manipulations has been carefully mapped out; and the existence of these precise results on this admittedly WEIRD dataset are why we can see departures from those results and take note of them; and think about how different cultural constructs might account for the violations of the model; and think about how we might adapt the model in response.
Put more briefly, having a lot of data on a small and unrepresentative population is a useful tool in the quest for building good models, so long as we realize, from time to time, the ways in which the models are inadequate.
Comments
Partly because this item has two alternate titles, it has been submitted lots of times before (sometimes without many comments) without people noticing the duplicate submissions. One of the earliest submissions (430 days ago)[1] had well over 100 comments. My comment at the time linked to the full paper[2] by the original authors, which was one of many papers I discussed with professors of psychology (most of whom do their research in the framework of behavioral genetics)[3] that school year in the journal club I attend at my alma mater university.
Plainly, basing psychological research on subjects who are mostly undergraduates at United States universities is not a good idea, and there are now increasing efforts to broaden the samples of human beings used to investigate general human characteristics. Cross-cultural validation was considered very important in studies of personality psychology even before this paper was published,[4] for example.
Anyway, this perspective comes easily for me, as an American who has lived in a non-Western country for six years of my life (with knowledge of the language, the classical literature, and the traditional culture). Definitely the United States is not the center of the Universe. The study authors referred to people from Western cultures, who were Educated, and who live in Industrialized, Rich, Democracies as "WEIRD" people, and of course that acronym marks out a minority of the world population. I am part of that minority, but I have seen how non-Western, (then) less educated people lived as their country made a transition from being agricultural, poor, and dictatorial to being industrialized, rich, and democratic, and along the way the local culture changed as local conditions changed.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5282343
[2] Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.
http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina...
[3] http://www.psych.umn.edu/research/areas/pib/
[4] http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=103...
Yes, this became especially clear to me personally while working in Asia during the Second Gulf War. In the U.S., people (mainly hand-wringing liberals like my circle it must be said) shrilly intoned "What is the rest of the world going to think of us?!"
Meanwhile, in Taiwan, they simply weren't thinking about us. Yes, we came up in the news sometimes, with respect to specific political issues. However, that invasion ("war") on the whole had no direct bearing on Taiwan.
What's weird about American culture includes how convinced we are that everyone is looking at us as if we were the sun and the rest of them planets. I'm convinced it's leftover pride from the so-called world wars and it's been vented as a means of social control for the industrial military complex. ("We're the cops of the world, boys.")
It also includes the fact that we go around the world measuring everyone else. When was the last time a bushman from New Guinea wandered into your office park and administered a psychological test to you and your co-workers?
Going deeper, what's truly unusual about us is that we expect to discover or create a system that explains everyone else. E.g. we expect to find atomic-level principles that direct the behavior of every other culture out there as if our investigations into natural science should be a template for social values the world over.
While I don't disagree with your conclusions, my own personal experiences abroad were quite different. When I was a student in Germany, US news showed up on the nightly news and in the newspaper every day. I was regularly engaged in debate about US politics by neighbors - most of whom were better informed than the average American.
I want to add some nuance to this.
Good for what, or whom? The original BBS article shows that a slew of psychological results, even those from the most robust subfields like perceptual processing, are not so universally constant as they were previously assumed to be. From the point of view of a particular paper on the processing of visual illusions, for instance, this is bad news insofar as it violates the data from that paper; and bad insofar as models based on that data will now require an asterisk.
I maintain that this isn't a bad thing. In the grand scheme, it would obviously be better if models of cognition that grew out of psych research were 'correct' and took into account all relevant issues from the very start, so that (for instance) we knew that environmental geometry would give rise to perceptual foreshortening and lengthening effects in one case and not another.
But this isn't the way the logistics of the field works; and the 'increasing efforts to broaden the samples' you mention is still an infinitesimal drop in the bucket in 99% of the cases. I work in the psych department of a major research university and I'll tell you that screwing down the demographic requirements of our investigations would not lead to fuller and more apt models, it would lead to an utter absence of the experiment to begin with, as we lack the money to ship in enough !Kong tribesmen and Mongolian sheepherders to round out our sample. And even if we could somehow get all those folks, it would lead to the utter absence of most experimental effecss: the results of such disparate effects, for reasonable sample sizes, would look like noise.
Fine, you might say; you shouldn't be doing science anyway, that's the whole point -- it's not science if you're skewing your investigation so heavily. But considering the logistical realities, and the cultural and institutional history that led to the emergence of an infrastructure for the pursuit of the scientific enterprise in the first place, it doesn't seem so bad to have a body of 'rigorous' knowledge that can then be amended, and indeed that is rigorous enough for its practitioners to realize, in response to surprises, that it ought to be amended.
To come back to the article, we have years of research on the ultimatum game where subject behavior under various manipulations has been carefully mapped out; and the existence of these precise results on this admittedly WEIRD dataset are why we can see departures from those results and take note of them; and think about how different cultural constructs might account for the violations of the model; and think about how we might adapt the model in response.
Put more briefly, having a lot of data on a small and unrepresentative population is a useful tool in the quest for building good models, so long as we realize, from time to time, the ways in which the models are inadequate.