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Most Psych Research Totally WEIRD

Chances are if you're reading this, you're WEIRD. That is, from a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic population.

This convenient acronym provides a simple way for University of British Columbia researchers to express just how odd it is to use this one type of subject for the great majority of research.

In Explaining why experimental behavior varies across cultures: A missing step in "The weirdest people in the world?", published in June's ;Behavioral and Brain Sciences (pre-print article available here), they write that between 2003 and 2007, a whopping 96 percent of subjects from studies in the behavioral sciences came from Western, industrialized countries such as the U.S., Australia and Israel. A further 68 percent of these subjects were American. In American studies, 67 percent of subjects were undergraduate university students, as were 80 percent of subjects from other countries.

"In other words," they state, "a randomly selected American undergraduate is more than 4000 times more likely to be a research participant than is a randomly selected person from outside of the West."

This is problematic because findings from such studies are often generalized as conclusions about universal human behavior. However, the article notes studies which have shown that even apparently universal aspects of human nature like visual perception can vary greatly between cultures, with the WEIRD folks often appearing as outliers. The Americans that constitute the great majority of study subjects may in fact be the biggest outliers of all, as the most optimistic, patriotic, litigious and populist Westerners.

Write the authors:

Behavioral scientists now face a choice – they can either acknowledge that their findings in many domains cannot be generalized beyond this unusual subpopulation (and leave it at that), or they can begin to take the difficult steps to building a broader, richer and better-grounded understanding of our species.