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

Social behavior is ordinarily treated as being under conscious (if not always thoughtful) control. However, considerable evidence now supports the view that social behavior often operates in an implicit or unconscious fashion. The identifying feature of implicit cognition is that past experience influences judgment in a fashion not introspectively known by the actor. The present conclusion--that attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes have important implicit modes of operation--extends both the construct validity and predictive usefulness of these major theoretical constructs of social psychology. Methodologically, this review calls for increased use of indirect measures--which are imperative in studies of implicit cognition. The theorized ordinariness of implicit stereotyping is consistent with recent findings of discrimination by people who explicitly disavow prejudice. The finding that implicit cognitive effects are often reduced by focusing judges' attention on their judgment task provides a basis for evaluating applications (such as affirmative action) aimed at reducing such unintended discrimination.

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Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-Esteem, and Stereotypes.

Attachment--and loss.

Allport specified four conditions for optimal intergroup contact: equal group status within the situation, common goals, intergroup cooperation and authority support. Varied research supports the hypothesis, but four problems remain. 1. A selection bias limits cross-sectional studies, since prejudiced people avoid intergroup contact. Yet research finds that the positive effects of cross-group friendship are larger than those of the bias. 2. Writers overburden the hypothesis with facilitating, but not essential, conditions. 3. The hypothesis fails to address process. The chapter proposes four processes: learning about the outgroup, changed behavior, affective ties, and ingroup reappraisal. 4. The hypothesis does not specify how the effects generalize to other situations, the outgroup or uninvolved outgroups. Acting sequentially, three strategies enhance generalizationodecategorization, salient categorization, and recategorization. Finally, both individual differences and societal norms shape intergroup contact effects. The chapter outlines a longitudinal intergroup contact theory. It distinguishes between essential and facilitating factors, and emphasizes different outcomes for different stages of contact.

http://majorsmatter.net/race/Readings/Pettigrew%201998.pdf

Intergroup contact theory

Mfost of social psychology's theories of the self fail to take into account the significance of social identification in the definition of self. Social identities are self-definitions that are more inclusive than the individuated self-concept of most American psychology. A model of optimal distinctiveness is proposed in which social identity is viewed as a reconciliation of opposing needs for assimilation and differentiation from others. According to this model, individuals avoid self-construals that are either too personalized or too inclusive and instead define themselves in terms of distinctive category memberships. Social identity and group loyalty are hypothesized to be strongest for those self-categorizations that simultaneously provide for a sense of belonging and a sense of distinctiveness. Results from an initial laboratory experiment support the prediction that depersonalization and group size interact as determinants of the strength of social identification.

The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time

Most research on social identity and relative deprivation has focused on the salience of social identity in social comparisons. In contrast, little research has studied relative deprivation in relation to one's identification with the ingroup, and across a variety of comparison targets. Using samples of Latino and African–American respondents, the present study investigated ingroup identification and relative deprivation in comparisons with Ingroup Members, Other Minorities, and Whites. High-Identification respondents felt more group deprivation than Low-Identification respondents in comparisons with both Other Minorities and Whites. High-Identification respondents also reported more personal deprivation than Low-Identification respondents when comparing themselves with Whites and less personal satisfaction when comparing themselves with Other Minorities, yet they generally expressed satisfaction in comparisons with Ingroup Members. Results suggest that ingroup identification and comparison targets are important considerations for deprivation research, as one's relationships with targets may be associated with outcomes of social comparisons. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Ingroup identification and relative deprivation : an examination across multiple social comparisons

Tokenism is defined as an intergroup context in which very few members of a disadvantaged group are accepted into positions usually reserved for members of the advantaged group, while access is systematically denied for the vast majority of disqualified disadvantaged group members. In a laboratory experiment, Wright, Taylor and Moghaddam (1990) found that when disadvantaged group members are denied upward mobility because of a policy of tokenism they did not respond with socially disruptive forms of collective action. Instead, they chose a more benign individual nonnormative response. The robustness of this unexpected response to tokenism is explored in two experiments. In Experiment 1, the use of a relevant real-world ingroup as the target of tokenism resulted in a pattern of responses consistent with Wright et al.'s (1990) findings. In Experiment 2, interaction with other disadvantaged group members prior to the imposition of the policy of tokenism also did not alter participants' behavioural responses. These findings support the robustness of this pattern of response to tokenism, and strengthen concerns that tokenism may be an effective tool for reducing the likelihood of collective action directed against the discriminatory practices of the advantaged group. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Responding to tokenism: individual action in the face of collective injustice

Social identity theory (SIT) proposes that disadvantaged group members take collective action only when intergroup boundaries are believed to be impermeable and in-group status is perceived as illegitimate and unstable. In North America, the actual permeability of intergroup boundaries is often ambiguous, and decisions to take collective action are made against a dominant ideology of individual mobility. This research used the context of tokenism-highly restricted boundary permeability-to reflect this social reality and to test the impact of referent informational influence and information from a salient out-group on endorsement of collective action. In Experiment 1, information from an in-group member describing tokenism as illegitimate and demonstrating a norm of anger increased interest in collective action. In Experiment 2, messages from the advantaged out-group focusing attention on collective injustice also increased interest in collective behavior. Findings support SIT; while highlighting the impac...

Ambiguity, Social Influence, and Collective Action: Generating Collective Protest in Response to Tokenism

Collective action in response to disadvantage: Intergroup perceptions, social identification, and social change.

White Americans who participate in the Black Lives Matter movement, men who attended the Women's March, and people from the Global North who work to reduce poverty in the Global South-advantaged group members (sometimes referred to as allies) often engage in action for disadvantaged groups. Tensions can arise, however, over the inclusion of advantaged group members in these movements, which we argue can partly be explained by their motivations to participate. We propose that advantaged group members can be motivated to participate in these movements (a) to improve the status of the disadvantaged group, (b) on the condition that the status of their own group is maintained, (c) to meet their own personal needs, and (d) because this behavior aligns with their moral beliefs. We identify potential antecedents and behavioral outcomes associated with these motivations before describing the theoretical contribution our article makes to the psychological literature.

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Stephen C. Wright

Papers

Ingroup identification and relative deprivation : an examination across multiple social comparisons

Responding to tokenism: individual action in the face of collective injustice

Ambiguity, Social Influence, and Collective Action: Generating Collective Protest in Response to Tokenism

Collective action in response to disadvantage: Intergroup perceptions, social identification, and social change.

Beyond Allyship: Motivations for Advantaged Group Members to Engage in Action for Disadvantaged Groups: