Are YOU Represented?

When one goes through the I-ASC S2C Professional Training Cohort to become an S2C Practitioner, you’re asked to write six lessons over the course of your training. As many of you know, as a speller, there’s a specific hierarchy of questions that you work through, starting in the Acquisition Phase with questions with only one possible answer and working up to the Application Phase where we get into creative writing, summary, and synthesis questions. Practitioners need to be well-versed in writing not only interesting and engaging lessons, but they also need to be able to write and color-code questions correctly. Each practitioner-in-training is able to choose topics for five of the lessons, but for one assignment, they are given a specific curriculum topic and allowed to choose what they want to focus on within that topic. During my training, that topic was psychology.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am drawn to things (and people!) that are quirky and let’s just say it…weird! One day I WILL write that lesson on the history of being shanghaied! So it will be no surprise, if you know me, that I ran straight to Google and typed in a search for “Weird Psychology.” But that’s where it really got interesting because it turns out that psychology isn’t just weird, it’s truly WEIRD.

In psychology, the acronym WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. And what it refers to is the fact that most behavioral science theory is based on research that very intensely examines only a very narrow sample of human variation. Behavioural science is defined as the scientific study of human or animal behavior, and psychology is just one of its different branches. In 2010, in an issue of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, Joe Henrich, PhD, Steven Heine, PhD and Ara Norenzayan, PhD, reviewed a database of behavioral and social science studies. Their findings revealed that people from WEIRD societies represented as much as 80 percent of the study participants.

As it turns out, most of the study participants are college students (which explains why they are WEIRD) and the fact that they are oversampled might be skewing our understanding of human behavior. While WEIRD subjects make up 80 percent of study participants, they make up only 12 percent of the world’s population. They are not only NOT representative of humans as a species…by many measures they are outliers. Beyond that, even, psychology is disproportionately American, and English-speaking especially, even compared to other fields of scientific study. 70 percent of all psychology citations originate from research institutions in the United States. When you compare that with a field like chemistry, where that number is only 37 percent, it seems very high. It is still assumed by many that what is found in one population can be generalized to others, and cross-cultural work is often tedious and slow. Additionally, publication frequency is rewarded, making the slow and tedious route a difficult strategy for many.

But does it matter? It does…because those WEIRD subjects are outliers on a range of measurable traits that do, in fact, vary. These include social behavior, moral reasoning, visual perception, sense of fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning as well as performance on IQ tests and analytical abilities. A lot of these behaviors and perceptions are, no surprise, based on the environments and the contexts in which we grew up. The subjects not only exhibit differences from Americans not university-educated, they are even different from previous generations of their own families. When we think about the source of the data for all of this psychology research, it puts the results in an entirely different light.

If you took an Intro to Psychology class at any university in the United States, you probably remember being surveyed for at least one study. For me, it was a requirement! This is where the majority of these studies are done. If not required to take part in the study, college students are still cheap…many would fill out a survey or two for a coupon for some free fries! Let’s be honest, I probably would have! While the studies fail to provide instant access to human nature, behavioral scientists still regularly publish broad claims about human behavior and psychology in top journals all around the world based on samples entirely drawn from WEIRD societies. And, until recently, they have rarely offered any cautionary notes about the source of data and the potential cultural limits that may be present. They assume that these “standard subjects” are just as representative of our species as any other population.

Research tells us that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are some of the LEAST representative populations that could be found for generalizing about humans. Here’s an example. WEIRD children’s motor-development patterns have become enshrined in psychology, through test items, testing procedures, and norms, into the current understanding of universal ‘stages’ of motor development. So even when someone did conduct cross-cultural research, the specific criteria came from examining WEIRD developmental pathways and meant that these researchers had tools that were not well-suited to study these other children. Or, simply put, they were comparing the diverse children to WEIRD children, but on standards that had been set by the WEIRD children.

Just to be clear, it’s absolutely not a bad thing to be WEIRD, and there can be value found in most of these studies. We know a LOT about how college students behave, and how they think. The studies can be generalized to the rest of the WEIRD population, but can they be generalized to humanity as a whole? It likely depends on which question is being asked. The good news is that Psychologists have started to become more careful about this in recent years, examining whether or not the WEIRD population is representative. You’ll start to see more qualifiers in studies not that say “in Western society” or “in college populations. However, that WEIRD context is more often than not lost in translation, with a large number of journalists assigning the findings to the general population of the world.

Blue countries represent the locations of 93 percent of studies published in Psychological Science in 2017. Dark blue is U.S., blue is Anglophone colonies with a European descent majority, light blue is western Europe. Regions sized by population. Daniel Hruschka, based on data from Rad et al PNAS 2018, CC BY-ND

Our researchers need to be much less cavalier when addressing questions regarding human nature on data that comes from this thin and unusual slice of humanity. We need broader and cross-cultural sampling, and while we are at it, let’s get some spellers in those samples as well! In the meantime, what can we do, as consumers of information and knowledge? Take a closer look! Is the study you’re reading about made up of WEIRD college students? And more importantly, whoever the subjects are, do they have something about them that would make their results or reactions differ drastically from yours? Are YOU represented?

Kelly Berg is an S2C Practitioner at Growing Kids Therapy Center and a member of the I-ASC Leadership Cadre living in Herndon, Virginia. She would happily fill out a psychological survey for free french fries, especially if they were from Chick-fil-A.