From an article by Bethany Brookshire in Slate:
- WEIRD is the phenomenon that plagues a lot of psychology and other social science studies: Their participants are overwhelmingly: Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries. They’re WEIRD.
- And not only are they WEIRD, they are overwhelmingly college students in the United States participating in studies for class credit.
- Thinking about the source of the data for a lot of hyped, overinterpreted psychology research puts the results into a whole new light.
- It’s not a bad thing to be WEIRD. And most of these studies do have value. They can tell us a lot about how college students think and behave. And many studies probably can be generalized to the rest of the population, at least the rest of the WEIRD population. But do most WEIRD studies generalize to humanity as a whole? In the case of social punishment, probably not, but in the case of emotional expression, it looks like they do. It depends on what question you’re asking.
- Psychologists have become very careful about this in the past several years, and they have begun to really examine the WEIRD population and whether it is representative. Most studies now will carefully add qualifiers, such as “in college populations” or “in Western society.”
- But the WEIRD context is often lost in translation, with many journalists and commenters easily assigning the findings to the world population in general.
- So the next time you see a study telling you that...men are funnier than women, or whether penis size really matters, take a closer look. Is that study WEIRDly made up of college psychology students? And would that population maybe have something about it that makes their reactions drastically different from yours?
- If so, give the study the squinty eye of context. As we often add “… in bed” to our reading of the fortunes in fortune cookies, it’s well worth adding “… in a population of Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic college students” to many of these studies. It can help explain many of the strange conclusions.
Read the full article here. It's a nice little overview of this important research issue. And I love those three concluding points above. I'm not sure, though, that I agree with the writer's statement that "psychologists have become very careful about this in the past several years." Some have, certainly. But MANY have not.
[To some extent this could be seen as a top-down issue: research publications require researchers to report the number of participants in each study--but further details about samples are typically considered optional unless they relate (directly) to the questions being tested. "Requiring" the disclosure of more information about each sample (e.g., sex; ethnicity/race; age) might be a step in the right direction. Perhaps that info could appear on the publication website instead of being printed in any individual article? How great would it be to see the breakdown for each study displayed in PsycInfo--right under the (required) abstract! My usual response: "I'm optimistic...but not particularly hopeful."]
