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.

/pdf/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-480wr4m3kb.pdf

The WEIRDest People in the World

Some of the most fundamental questions concerning our evolutionary origins, our social relations, and the organization of society are centred around issues of altruism and selfishness. Experimental evidence indicates that human altruism is a powerful force and is unique in the animal world. However, there is much individual heterogeneity and the interaction between altruists and selfish individuals is vital to human cooperation. Depending on the environment, a minority of altruists can force a majority of selfish individuals to cooperate or, conversely, a few egoists can induce a large number of altruists to defect. Current gene-based evolutionary theories cannot explain important patterns of human altruism, pointing towards the importance of both theories of cultural evolution as well as gene–culture co-evolution.

/pdf/the-nature-of-human-altruism-ppoynuxnrq.pdf

The nature of human altruism

https://www.econ.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:ffffffff-9758-127f-0000-00004797af07/iewwp106.pdf

Third Party Punishment and Social Norms

After the introduction in Section 2, we very briefly sketch out current theoretical and empirical developments in the social sciences. In our view, they all point in the same direction: toward the acute and increasing need for multidisciplinary longitudinal data covering a wide range of living conditions and based on a multitude of variables from the social sciences for both theoretical investigation and the evaluation of policy measures. Cohort and panel studies are therefore called upon to become truly interdisciplinary tools. In Section 3, we describe the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), in which we discuss recent improvements of that study which approach this ideal and point out existing shortcomings. Section 4 concludes with a discussion of potential future issues and developments for SOEP and other household panel studies.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/150550/1/diw_sp0001.pdf

The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP): Scope, Evolution and Enhancements

Die experimentelle Okonomie fuhrt typischerweise Labor-Untersuchungen durch, die mit homogenen und selektiven Versuchspersonen arbeiten. Reprasentative Surveys leiden hingegen unter Mesfehlern und der Frage, ob hypothetisches Verhalten, das erhoben wird, mit tatsachlichem Verhalten korrespondiert. Deswegen prasentieren wir eine Methode, mit der man die Schwachen beider Ansatze uberwindet, indem man Survey-Daten mit Experimenten kombiniert. Die von uns entwickelte Methode hat den Vorzug, dass sie es auf preiswerte Art und Weise erlaubt, Experimente, die die Interaktion zweier Personen erfordern, mit Standard-Surveys zu kombinieren, die auf der Unabhangigkeit der befragten Personen beruhen. Wir illustrieren die Moglichkeiten unserer Methodik mit einer Untersuchung uber Vertrauen und Vertrauenswurdigkeit in Deutschland, bei der eine reprasentative Umfrage mit einem Experiment uber eine Dilemma-Situation verbunden wurde. Unsere Resultate zeigen zum einen, dass nicht alle Survey-Fragen uber Vertrauen mit den Ergebnissen des Experiments korrelieren. Zum zweiten zeigen unsere Ergebnisse, dass altere Menschen (65 Jahre und alter), Hochqualifizierte und Personen, die in grosseren Haushalten leben, im Experiment unterdurchschnittlich Vertrauen offenbaren. Fur Auslander, Katholiken und die Anhanger der grosen Volksparteien finden wir uberdurchschnittliches Vertrauen. Vertrauenswurdigkeit bzw. Altruismus zeigen im Experiment Altere und Befragte mit gutem Gesundheitszustand. Unterdurchschnittliche Vertrauenswudigkeit bzw. Altruismus zeigen jungere Befragte (bis zu 35 Jahren), arbeitslos Gemeldete und Befragte ohne eine Parteineigung.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/20527/1/dp715.pdf

A Nation-Wide Laboratory: Examining Trust and Trustworthiness by Integrating Behavioral Experiments into Representative Surveys

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioural relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and representative surveys thereby overcoming crucial weaknesses of both approaches. One of the major advantages of our approach is that it allows for the integration of experiments, which require interaction among the participants, with a survey of non-interacting respondents in a smooth and inexpensive way. We illustrate the power of our approach with the analysis of trust and trustworthiness in Germany by combining representative survey data with representative behavioural data from a social dilemma experiment. We identify which survey questions intended to elicit people’s trust correlate well with behaviourally exhibited trust in the experiment. People above the age of 65, highly-skilled workers and people living in bigger households exhibit less trusting behaviour. Foreign citizens, Catholics and people favouring the Social Democratic Party or the Christian Democratic Party exhibit more trust. People above the age of 65 and those in good health behave more trustworthy or more altruistically, respectively. People below the age of 35, the unemployed and people who say they are in favour of none of the political parties behave less trustworthy or less altruistically, respectively.

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self- selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and representative surveys thereby overcoming crucial weaknesses of both approaches. One of the major advantages of our approach is that it allows for the integration of experiments, which require interaction among the participants, with a survey of non-interacting respondents in a smooth and inexpensive way. We illustrate the power of our approach with the analysis of trust and trustworthiness in Germany by combining representative survey data with representative behavioral data from a social dilemma experiment. We identify which survey questions intended to elicit people's trust correlate well with behaviorally exhibited trust in the experiment. People above the age of 65, highly skilled workers and people living in bigger households exhibit less trusting behavior. Foreign citizens, Catholics and people favoring the Social Democratic Party or the Christian Democratic Party exhibit more trust. People above the age of 65 and those in good health behave more trustworthy or more altruistically, respectively. People below the age of 35, the unemployed and people who say they are in favor of none of the political parties behave less trustworthy or less altruistically, respectively.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/36428/1/360691935.pdf

Examining trust and trustworthiness by integrating behavioral experiments into representative surveys

Repräsentative Analyse der Lebenslagen einkommensstarker Haushalte

"Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and representative surveys thereby overcoming crucial weaknesses of both approaches. One of the major advantages of our approach is that it allows for the integration of experiments, which require interaction among the participants, with a survey of non-interacting respondents in a smooth and inexpensive way. We illustrate the power of our approach with the analysis of trust and trustworthiness in Germany by combining representative survey data with representative behavioral data from a social dilemma experiment. We identify which survey questions intended to elicit peoples trust correlate well with behaviorally exhibited trust in the experiment. People above the age of 65, highly skilled workersnand people living in bigger households exhibit less trusting behavior. Foreign citizens, Catholics andnpeople favoring the Social Democratic Party or the Christian Democratic Party exhibit more trust.nPeople above the age of 65 and those in good health behave more trustworthy or more altruistically,nrespectively. People below the age of 35, the unemployed and people who say they are in favor ofnnone of the political parties behave less trustworthy or less altruistically, respectively."

https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/52039/1/iewwp141.pdf

Bernhard von Rosenbladt

Papers

A Nation-Wide Laboratory: Examining Trust and Trustworthiness by Integrating Behavioral Experiments into Representative Surveys

A Nation-Wide Laboratory: Examining Trust and Trustworthiness by Integrating Behavioral Experiments into Representative Surveys

Examining trust and trustworthiness by integrating behavioral experiments into representative surveys

Repräsentative Analyse der Lebenslagen einkommensstarker Haushalte

A Nation-Wide Laboratory - Examining trust and trustworthiness by integrating behavioral experimen