Aside from its catchy title, this paper seems pretty relevant for those do experimental psychology and behavioural economics:
The Weirdest People in the World?
Joseph Henrich, Steve J. Heine, Ara Norenzayan
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, selfconcepts and related motivation and the heritability of IQ.
4 comments:
Very interesting. A lot of economists (including Antasio and others in IFS) are increasingly doing experiments in different cultural contexts to examine the robustness of experimental economics findings. It will be a really good development in behavioural economics as this kicks in. The advent of things like the Dutch LISS panel is also helping to ensure that BE ideas are tested increasingly on nationally representative as opposed to just student samples.
This is a serious issue, in my opinion, in the field of Envolutionary Psychology where is tons of work, mostly with data from the US data or other WIERD countries, from which authors make grand claims.
Typically in empirical psychology, the study cohorts are university students. Hence claims from the cognitive sciences tend to reflect data that arises from brains in the pursuit of course credit and a free sandwich:)
Funny, because psychologists don't really believe in individuals being rational decision makers but their students clearly are. Hmmm, free sandwich...
Post a Comment