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

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Статья посвящена вопросам влияния власти на поведение человека. Авторы рассматривают данные различных источников, в которых увеличение власти связывается с напористостью, а ее уменьшение - с подавленностью. Конкретно, власть ассоциируется с: а) позитивным аффектом; б) вниманием к вознаграждению и к свойствам других, удовлетворяющим личные цели; в) автоматической переработкой информации и резкими суждениями; г) расторможенным социальным поведением. Уменьшение власти, напротив, ассоциируется с: а) негативным аффектом; б) вниманием к угрозам и наказаниям, к интересам других и к тем характеристикам я, которые отвечают целям других; в) контролируемой переработкой информации и совещательным типом рассуждений; г) подавленным социальным поведением. Обсуждаются также последствия этих паттернов поведения, связанных с властью, и потенциальные модераторы.

Power, approach, and inhibition. Власть, напористость и подавленность

Recent years have seen an explosion of research on the N2 component of the event-related potential, a negative wave peaking between 200 and 350 ms after stimulus onset. This research has focused on the influence of ‘‘cognitive control,’’ a concept that covers strategic monitoring and control of motor responses. However, rich research traditions focus on attention and novelty or mismatch as determinants of N2 amplitude. We focus on paradigms that elicit N2 components with an anterior scalp distribution, namely, cognitive control, novelty, and sequential matching, and argue that the anterior N2 should be divided into separate control- and mismatch-related subcomponents. We also argue that the oddball N2 belongs in the family of attention-related N2 components that, in the visual modality, have a posterior scalp distribution. We focus on the visual modality for which components with frontocentral and more posterior scalp distributions can be readily distinguished.

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Influence of cognitive control and mismatch on the N2 component of the ERP: a review.

Low self-esteem and depression are strongly related, but there is not yet consistent evidence on the nature of the relation. Whereas the vulnerability model states that low self-esteem contributes to depression, the scar model states that depression erodes self-esteem. Furthermore, it is unknown whether the models are specific for depression or whether they are also valid for anxiety. We evaluated the vulnerability and scar models of low self-esteem and depression, and low self-esteem and anxiety, by meta-analyzing the available longitudinal data (covering 77 studies on depression and 18 studies on anxiety). The mean age of the samples ranged from childhood to old age. In the analyses, we used a random-effects model and examined prospective effects between the variables, controlling for prior levels of the predicted variables. For depression, the findings supported the vulnerability model: The effect of self-esteem on depression (β = -.16) was significantly stronger than the effect of depression on self-esteem (β = -.08). In contrast, the effects between low self-esteem and anxiety were relatively balanced: Self-esteem predicted anxiety with β = -.10, and anxiety predicted self-esteem with β = -.08. Moderator analyses were conducted for the effect of low self-esteem on depression; these suggested that the effect is not significantly influenced by gender, age, measures of self-esteem and depression, or time lag between assessments. If future research supports the hypothesized causality of the vulnerability effect of low self-esteem on depression, interventions aimed at increasing self-esteem might be useful in reducing the risk of depression.

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Does low self-esteem predict depression and anxiety? A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies.

The narcissism spectrum model synthesizes extensive personality, social-psychological, and clinical evidence, building on existing knowledge about narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability to reveal a view of narcissism that respects its clinical origins, embraces the diversity and complexity of its expression, and reflects extensive scientific evidence about the continuity between normal and abnormal personality expression. Critically, the proposed model addresses three key, inter-related problems that have plagued narcissism scholarship for more than a century. These problems can be summarized as follows: (a) What are the key features of narcissism? (b) How are they organized and related to each other? and (c) Why are they organized that way, that is, what accounts for their relationships? By conceptualizing narcissistic traits as manifested in transactional processes between individuals and their social environments, the model enables integration of existing theories of narcissism and thus provides a compelling perspective for future examination of narcissism and its developmental pathways.

The Narcissism Spectrum Model: A Synthetic View of Narcissistic Personality.

Despite the common lay assumption that males and females are profoundly different, Hyde (2005) used data from 46 meta-analyses to demonstrate that males and females are highly similar. Nonetheless, the gender similarities hypothesis has remained controversial. Since Hyde's provocative report, there has been an explosion of meta-analytic interest in psychological gender differences. We utilized this enormous collection of 106 meta-analyses and 386 individual meta-analytic effects to reevaluate the gender similarities hypothesis. Furthermore, we employed a novel data-analytic approach called metasynthesis (Zell & Krizan, 2014) to estimate the average difference between males and females and to explore moderators of gender differences. The average, absolute difference between males and females across domains was relatively small (d = 0.21, SD = 0.14), with the majority of effects being either small (46%) or very small (39%). Magnitude of differences fluctuated somewhat as a function of the psychological domain (e.g., cognitive variables, social and personality variables, well-being), but remained largely constant across age, culture, and generations. These findings provide compelling support for the gender similarities hypothesis, but also underscore conditions under which gender differences are most pronounced.

Evaluating gender similarities and differences using metasynthesis.

Having insight into one’s abilities is essential, yet it remains unclear whether people generally perceive their skills accurately or inaccurately. In the present analysis, we examined the overall correspondence between self-evaluations of ability (e.g., academic ability, intelligence, language competence, medical skills, sports ability, and vocational skills) and objective performance measures (e.g., standardized test scores, grades, and supervisor evaluations) across 22 meta-analyses, in addition to considering factors that moderate this relationship. Although individual meta-analytic effects ranged from .09 to .63, the mean correlation between ability self-evaluations and performance outcomes across meta-analyses was moderate (M = .29, SD = .11). Further, the relation was stronger when self-evaluations were specific to a given domain rather than broad and when performance tasks were objective, familiar, or low in complexity. Taken together, these findings indicate that people have only moderate insight into their abilities but also underscore the contextual factors that enable accurate self-perception of ability.

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Do People Have Insight Into Their Abilities? A Metasynthesis:

People are often presumed to be vulnerable to a desirability bias, namely, a tendency to be overoptimistic about a future outcome as a result of their preferences or desires for that outcome. In this article, this form of wishful thinking is distinguished from the more general concepts of motivated reasoning and overoptimism, and the evidence for this bias is reviewed. The authors argue that despite the prevalence of the idea that desires bias optimism, the empirical evidence regarding this possibility is limited. The potential for desires to depress rather than enhance optimism is discussed, and the authors advocate for greater research attention to mediators of both types of effects. Nine possible mediational accounts are described, and critical issues for future research on the desirability bias are discussed.

The influence of outcome desirability on optimism.

Objective: To derive a robust and comprehensive estimate of the overall relation between Big Five personality traits and health variables using metasynthesis (i.e., second-order meta-analysis). Method: Thirty-six meta-analyses, which collectively provided 150 meta-analytic effects from over 500,000

Zlatan Krizan

Papers

The Narcissism Spectrum Model: A Synthetic View of Narcissistic Personality.

Evaluating gender similarities and differences using metasynthesis.

Do People Have Insight Into Their Abilities? A Metasynthesis:

The influence of outcome desirability on optimism.

Does personality predict health and well-being? A metasynthesis.