All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

Two primary goals of psychological science should be to understand what aspects of human psychology are universal and the way that context and culture produce variability. This requires that we take into account the importance of culture and context in the way that we write our papers and in the types of populations that we sample. However, most research published in our leading journals has relied on sampling WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. One might expect that our scholarly work and editorial choices would by now reflect the knowledge that Western populations may not be representative of humans generally with respect to any given psychological phenomenon. However, as we show here, almost all research published by one of our leading journals, Psychological Science, relies on Western samples and uses these data in an unreflective way to make inferences about humans in general. To take us forward, we offer a set of concrete proposals for authors, journal editors, and reviewers that may lead to a psychological science that is more representative of the human condition.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/45/11401.full.pdf

Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens: Making psychological science more representative of the human population.

Justice as fairness, political not metaphysical

Choice Under Uncertainty: Problems Solved And Unsolved

Culture is a human universal, yet it is a source of variation in human psychology, behaviour and development Developmental researchers are now expanding the geographical scope of research to include populations beyond relatively wealthy Western communities However, culture and context still play a secondary role in the theoretical grounding of developmental psychology research, far too often In this paper, we highlight four false assumptions that are common in psychology, and that detract from the quality of both standard and cross-cultural research in development These assumptions are: (i) the universality assumption, that empirical uniformity is evidence for universality, while any variation is evidence for culturally derived variation; (ii) the Western centrality assumption, that Western populations represent a normal and/or healthy standard against which development in all societies can be compared; (iii) the deficit assumption, that population-level differences in developmental timing or outcomes are necessarily due to something lacking among non-Western populations; and (iv) the equivalency assumption, that using identical research methods will necessarily produce equivalent and externally valid data, across disparate cultural contexts For each assumption, we draw on cultural evolutionary theory to critique and replace the assumption with a theoretically grounded approach to culture in development We support these suggestions with positive examples drawn from research in development Finally, we conclude with a call for researchers to take reasonable steps towards more fully incorporating culture and context into studies of development, by expanding their participant pools in strategic ways This will lead to a more inclusive and therefore more accurate description of human developmentThis article is part of the theme issue 'Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution'

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.2017.0059

Variation is the universal: making cultural evolution work in developmental psychology.

A literature in which most data are outliers is flawed, and the target article sounds a timely alarm call for the behavioural sciences. It also suggests remedies. We mostly concur, except for arguing that the importance of the fact that the researchers themselves are mostly outliers has been underplayed. Improving matters requires non-Western researchers, as well as research subjects.

It's not just the subjects ― there are too many WEIRD researchers

John Rawls was the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century. His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, revolutionised moral and political philosophy by offering a deductive way out of the intellectually unsatisfying reliance on brute intuitionism while avoiding the pitfall of irrelevance by implausibility that had plagued other contract arguments. Rawls’s elegant, novel and iimovative approach provided a parsimonious solution to the problem of distributive justice by using, mutatis mutandis, the familiar device of the social contract. His was an ambitious project that attempted to “provide a deductive basis for the principles that account for [our considered] judgements” (1971: p. 185). Indeed, Rawls stated categorically that his argument was meant to be “strictly deductive,” going as far as to say “we should strive for a kind of moral geometry with all the rigor which this name connotes” Q,. 121). Rawls’ grand ambitions, however, did not long survive: under intellectual pressure fro...

Evaluating the Veil

Andy Clark (1989, 1993, 1997) is a leading philosophical exponent of a view of mind as an 'associative engine', or connectionist pattern-completer, composed of multiple special-purpose modules that communicate in only limited ways and eschew detailed forms of internal representation. The modules, Clark and his allies argue, are both coordinated and integrated by the environment, whilst 'off-loading' onto it by calling on external computational resources ('external scaffolds') to reduce cognitive load. Defenders of this position further maintain that even examples of sophisticated and distinctively human cognition, such as long-term planning or running a multi-national company, emerge from connectionist pattern-completing brains in the 'constraining presence of public language, culture and institutions' (1997: 33). This constellation of ideas, Clark argues, amounts to a completely new science of mind that radically reforms 'our whole way of thinking about intelligent behaviour'. Unfortunately, this rhetoric far outstrips the evidence: while a reasonable case can be made that external scaffolds are necessary for many types of cognition, the assertion that pattern-completion plus external scaffolding is a sufficient explanation of all human cognition has not been demonstrated. The insufficiency of the Clarkian view is particularly evident in the case of advanced cognition in the economic sphere.

Michael Meadon

Papers

It's not just the subjects ― there are too many WEIRD researchers

Evaluating the Veil

Being Where? Andy Clark and the Problem of Advanced Cognition