{"id":2092,"date":"2010-07-02T13:43:18","date_gmt":"2010-07-02T11:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/?p=2092"},"modified":"2024-02-24T11:00:20","modified_gmt":"2024-02-24T10:00:20","slug":"the-weirdest-people-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/blogs\/icci-blog\/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"The weirdest people in the world?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a forthcoming issue of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, anthropologist Joe Henrich, and psychologists Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan review the available database of comparative social and behavioral science studies (here are <a href=\"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-content\/uploads\/WEIRDinScience.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Science<\/a>&#8216;s and <a href=\"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-content\/uploads\/466029a.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nature<\/a>&#8216;s comments). They found that people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies \u2014 who represent as much as 80 percent of study participants, but only 12 percent of the world\u2019s population \u2014 are not only unrepresentative of humans as a species, but on many measures, they\u2019re outliers.<\/p>\n<p>Abstract<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world&#8217;s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers \u2013 often implicitly \u2013 assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these \u201cstandard subjects\u201d 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<hr \/>\n\n\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-content\/uploads\/ssoar-2010-henrich_et_al-The_weirdest_people_in_the.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., &amp; Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?.\u00a0<em>Behavioral and brain sciences<\/em>,\u00a0<em>33<\/em>(2-3), 61-83.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a forthcoming issue of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, anthropologist Joe Henrich, and psychologists Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan review the available database of comparative social and behavioral science studies (here are Science&#8216;s and Nature&#8216;s comments). They found that people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies \u2014 who represent as much as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":685,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v15.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The weirdest people in the world? - International Cognition and Culture Institute<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The weirdest people in the world? - International Cognition and Culture Institute\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In a forthcoming issue of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, anthropologist Joe Henrich, and psychologists Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan review the available database of comparative social and behavioral science studies (here are Science&#8216;s and Nature&#8216;s comments). They found that people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies \u2014 who represent as much as [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"International Cognition and Culture Institute\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-07-02T11:43:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-02-24T10:00:20+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\">\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The ICCI Team\">\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Estimated reading time\">\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"1 minute\">\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/\",\"name\":\"International Cognition and Culture Institute\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/?s={search_term_string}\",\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world\/#webpage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world\/\",\"name\":\"The weirdest people in the world? - International Cognition and Culture Institute\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2010-07-02T11:43:18+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-02-24T10:00:20+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#\/schema\/person\/3663e04874ff7df2f070d2982a1474ad\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/scary-committee.localsite.io\/blogs\/icci-blog\/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#\/schema\/person\/3663e04874ff7df2f070d2982a1474ad\",\"name\":\"The ICCI Team\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/#personlogo\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/cdc7166b2c4c44441b1c2c13cea716e8?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fcognitionandculture.local%2Fwp-content%2Fthemes%2Fbelle%2Fuser.png&r=g\",\"caption\":\"The ICCI Team\"}}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/685"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2092"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18547,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092\/revisions\/18547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}