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.

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The WEIRDest People in the World

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WEIRD languages have misled us, too [Comment on Henrich et al.]

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.

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Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition.

Publisher Summary In the domain of personality psychology, the trait concept has carried the burden of dispositional explanation. A multitude of personality traits has been identified and new trait dimensions continue to join the growing list. In a similar fashion, the concept of attitude has been the focus of attention in the explanations of human behavior offered by social psychologists. Numerous attitudes have been assessed over the years and, as new social issues emerge, additional attitudinal domains are explored. The chapter provides little evidence to support the postulated existence of stable, underlying attitudes within the individual, which influence both verbal expressions and actions. It examines the relation between two or more actions that were assumed to reflect the same underlying disposition. The aggregation of responses across time, contexts, targets, or actions or across a combination of these elements permits the inferences of dispositions at varying levels of generality.

Attitudes, Traits, and Actions: Dispositional Prediction of Behavior in Personality and Social Psychology

Studies of social support networks have almost exclusively measured only their positive aspects. In this research, we investigated both the helpful or positive and the upsetting or negative aspects of social networks in a longitudinal study of spouses caring for a husband or wife with Alzheimer's disease, a progressive senile dementia. Measures of helpful and upsetting aspects of the care givers' networks, derived from interviews and daily interaction ratings, were studied for their relations with overall network satisfaction and depression at an initial interview period (n = 68) and at a follow-up period about 10 months later (n = 38). Results from hierarchical multiple regression analyses, in which care givers' age and sex and a measure of the spouses' health status were controlled, showed that the care givers' degree of upset with their networks was strongly associated with lower network satisfaction and increased depression at both time periods. Helpful aspects bore little or no direct relation to either depression or network satisfaction. Helpful aspects of the network did, however, interact with network upset in predicting network satisfaction, and depression (combined probabilities test, p less than .05). Longitudinal predictions of follow-up depression, after age, sex, care givers' health status, and initial depression levels were controlled, showed that changes in upsetting aspects of one's network were predictive of changes in depression over time. We interpreted these results within an attributional framework that emphasizes the salience of upsetting events within a social network.

Social networks: we get by with (and in spite of) a little help from our friends.

Previous studies have found cross-cultural variation in field dependence. In this study, cross-cultural differences were expected depending on the degree of individualism or collectivism of the respective cultures. Samples were taken from two prototypically individualist cultures, the United States and Germany, and two collectivist cultures, Russia and Malaysia. As predicted, field dependence did not differ between those samples that represented the same type of culture, either collectivist or individualist. However, a clear difference could be found between the two types of cultures; that is, U.S. and German participants were more field independent than were Russian and Malaysian participants.

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Cross-Cultural Variations in Identifying Embedded Figures Comparisons from the United States, Germany, Russia, and Malaysia

Publisher Summary The social judgment should be considered a two-step process. The first step consists of the perception, storage, and internal representation of some stimulus or stimuli. The second step consists of a response that may be thought of as the external presentation of the internal representation. In the field of psychophysics, this idea forms a central part of the theory of signal detection and of the input–output transformation model. A person is said to perform a differentiation task if there exist two sets of stimuli having different attributes and the individual must decide to which of the two sets a given stimulus belongs. Differentiation is discussed in the chapter, wherein it describes differentiation task and stimulus definition, the differentiation process, the differentiation response, factors affecting differentiation ability, factors affecting response tendency, and the independence of differentiation ability and response tendency. This chapter also discusses about magnitude estimation, the perceptual process in magnitude estimation, and the response process in magnitude estimation. The chapter discusses various applications detailing social influence, social accentuation, attitude and memory, and other applications—ethnic identification, interpersonal attraction, stress, etc.

Arnold Upmeyer

Papers

Cross-Cultural Variations in Identifying Embedded Figures Comparisons from the United States, Germany, Russia, and Malaysia

Perceptual And Judgmental Processes In Social Contexts