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

https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/BushLab/Site/Publications_files/Bush_2000_TICS_CingReview.pdf

Cognitive and emotional influences in anterior cingulate cortex

The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

Erik Eriksen is a remarkable individual. He has no college degrees yet is Professor of Human Development at Harvard University. He came to psychology via art, which explains why the reader will find him painting contexts and backgrounds rather than stating dull facts and concepts. He has been a training psychoanalyst for many years as well as a perceptive observer of cultural and social settings and their effect on growing up. This is not just a book on childhood. It is a panorama of our society. Anxiety in young children, apathy in American Indians, confusion in veterans of war, and arrogance in young Nazis are scrutinized under the psychoanalytic magnifying glass. The material is well written and devoid of technical jargon. The theme of the volume is that it is human to have a long childhood which will leave a lifelong residue of emotional immaturity in man. Primitive groups and

Childhood and Society.

/pdf/weird-languages-have-misled-us-too-comment-on-henrich-et-al-57dmcdjt24.pdf

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

Sex differences in general intelligence among high school graduates : Some results from Estonia

The Self-Consciousness Scale (SCS), developed by Fenigstein, Scheier, and Buss (1975), was adapted to the Estonian language. In general, the results supported the 3-factor structure of the SCS. However, many items in the subscales did not load as expected. A 26-item modified scale, the Estonian SCS (ESCS), is presented. A joint factor analysis of the ESCS and the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) scales led to a 5-factor solution, where all the factors that emerged were identified as the Big Five personality dimensions, the ESCS subscales loading most significantly on 3 of these factors: Neuroticism (N), Extraversion (E), and Openness to Experience (O). Correlation analysis revealed a pattern of correlations, characterized by the strongest associations between Social Anxiety and E (r = -.77), Public Self-Consciousness (PubSC) and N (r = .40), and Private Self-Consciousness (PrivSC) and O (r = .34), which quite well corresponds to the pattern of correlations that was reported for the original versions of the SCS and the NEO-PI (Zuckerman, Kuhlman, Joireman, Teta, & Kraft, 1993). We can conclude that all the SCS subscales can be sufficiently well interpreted in terms of the Big Five model of personality dimensions--PrivSC and PubSC appear to describe some variations of the Big Five themes that are not fully elaborated by the NEO-PI rather than being completely independent domains of individual differences.

The Estonian Self-Consciousness Scale and its relation to the five-factor model of personality.

Sex differences in brain size, stature and intelligence in children and adolescents: some evidence from Estonia

The High Quality Science Index (HQSI) was constructed on the basis of the release of the Essential Science Indicators (Thomson Reuters) for the period from January 1, 2002 to August 31, 2012. The HQSI was computed for a country or territory as a sum of normalised scores of the mean impact (citations per paper) and the percentage of papers that reach the top-1% citation ranking. Expectedly, countries or territories that are producing larger Gross National Income per capita and allocate higher percentage of the produced economic wealth for the research and development (R&D) were more likely to achieve prominence in the scientific publications. The size of the country and its population were not important factors to excel in scientific research. Since economic and socio-demographic factors only partly predicted the quality of science in a given country or territory, there is considerable space for historical and science policy factors that could affect the quality of science in a given country. Several countries being in almost identical starting positions twenty years ago have developed on completely different trajectories dependent on policies and decisions made by their policy makers. Possibilities of how to improve reliability of measures of scientific quality have been discussed.

/pdf/factors-affecting-bibliometric-indicators-of-scientific-q99u4onuk0.pdf

Factors affecting bibliometric indicators of scientific quality

http://www.psych.ut.ee/~jyri/en/Mottus-Pullmann-Allik_JRP2006.pdf

Jüri Allik

Papers

Sex differences in general intelligence among high school graduates : Some results from Estonia

The Estonian Self-Consciousness Scale and its relation to the five-factor model of personality.

Sex differences in brain size, stature and intelligence in children and adolescents: some evidence from Estonia

Factors affecting bibliometric indicators of scientific quality

Does personality vary across ability levels? A study using self and other ratings