A Weird View of Human Nature Skews Psychologists' Studies

By Dan Jones

"Suppose you're a psychologist at a research university, trying to figure out what drives human behavior. You have devised simple, clever experiments in which people play economic games or perceive visual illusions, and you would like large sample sizes. How will you find subjects? For generations of psychologists, the answer has been straight-forward: Use the pool of thousands of undergraduates at your university.

But although undergrads from wealthy nations are numerous and willing subjects, psychologists are beginning to realize that they have a drawback: They are WEIRDos. That is, they are people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic cultures. In a provocative review paper published online in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) last week, anthropologist Joseph Henrich and psychologists Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia in Canada argue that WEIRDos aren't representative of humans as a whole and that psychologists routinely use them to make broad, and quite likely false, claims about what drives human behavior."

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