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

The culture of education

Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness

The cultural origins of human cognition

http://cs.northwestern.edu/~paritosh/papers/sketch-to-models/klahr-dunbar-dual-space-search-cogsci-1988.pdf

Dual space search during scientific reasoning

U-shaped behavioral growth

https://www.tau.ac.il/~sidst/Papers/Sid/teaching%20as%20a%20natural%20cognition%20cognitive%20development.pdf

Teaching as a natural cognition and its relations to preschoolers’ developing theory of mind

The study was conducted to (a) determine the development of children's understanding of seven properties of the arithmetic mean and (b) assess the effects of the material used in the testing (continuous, discontinuous) and the medium of presentation (story, concrete, and numerical). Twenty children were selected at each of the ages 8, 10, 12, and 14 years. Different developmental courses of the children's reasoning were found on some tasks measuring the properties of the average. No significant effects were found for the materials used or the medium of presentation. The findings are discussed in terms of their importance for developmental psychology and educational practice. The Lord must have loved the average man because he made more of them than the others.

The Development of Children's Concepts of the Arithmetic Average.

Inducing cognitive development and learning: A review of short-term training experiments I. The organismic developmental approach

We suggest that a multidisciplinary approach to teaching has potential to widen its scope. In that vein, we revisit our original claim that teaching is a natural cognitive ability among humans. We elaborate on three requirements for such an ability and report that, first, teaching strategies may be developmentally reliable. Findings indicate a possible normative developmental trajectory from age one year through adulthood. Second, teaching seems to be species-typical, that is, it is a universal human achievement. Third, human teaching with a theory of mind (ToM) is species-unique. Nonhuman animals may teach without a ToM. Teaching is often seen exclusively as what happens when an adult teacher teaches children in school settings. However, teaching's reach is greater than that. Adults teach youngsters in societies where there are no schools. Regardless if there are schools or not in a particular society, young children teach each other. These and other findings about teaching led us to claim, a decade ago, that teaching is a natural cognitive ability in humans (Strauss, Ziv, & Stein, 2002). That claim was subsequently expanded by Strauss (2005). In the ensuing years, the idea has been picked up by others, especially Csibra and Gergely (2009), and has been elaborated and expanded. We revisit our claim in light of advances occurring in a number of fields that impinge on our idea. In this article, we provide a panoramic view of teaching, define teaching, characterize properties of natural cognitive abilities, discuss the claim that teaching is a natural cognitive ability with emphasis on its being developmentally reliable, and make some final remarks.

Sidney Strauss

Papers

U-shaped behavioral growth

Teaching as a natural cognition and its relations to preschoolers’ developing theory of mind

The Development of Children's Concepts of the Arithmetic Average.

Inducing cognitive development and learning: A review of short-term training experiments I. The organismic developmental approach

Teaching Is a Natural Cognitive Ability for Humans