Behavioral science paper upends discipline

This is, perhaps, the strongest introduction I've ever read to an academic paper:

"In the tropical forests of New Guinea, the Etoro believe that for a boy to achieve manhood he must ingest the semen of his elders. This is accomplished through ritualized rites of passage that require young male initiates to fellate a senior member (Herdt 1984/1993; Kelley 1980). In contrast, the nearby Kaluli maintain that male initiation is only properly done by ritually delivering the semen through the initiate’s anus,not his mouth. The Etoro revile these Kaluli practices, finding them disgusting. "

The paper takes a long time to get to an illustration of its thesis, but the very first example is stunning:

There are cultures in the world that are completely unaffected by this illusion - http://goldmark.org/jeff/papers/ridley/html/img1.gif

If something as basic as visual perception is so hugely affected by culture, the paper asks, is there any aspect of psychology that is not? How, then, can we trust the conclusions of studies whose subjects are all drawn from the same, highly unusual cultural group?

I'm glad I stuck with it until I got to this point. Now I have to read the rest of it.

Here is a summary of this very long review article, as done by a Science magazine summary I read:

"Although undergraduates from wealthy nations are numerous and willing research 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 last week, a pair of researchers argues 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."

Please don't edit the title. 'WEIRD people:' references an acronym in the paper's title (Western Educated Industrial Rich Democracies) which is fundamental to the thesis presented.

I find the title on HN to be overly dramatic. There have been criticisms of this bias for at least 40 years that I'm aware of. What this article does is add more empirical nuance to this well-worn criticism but it's certainly not upending anything.

However, in the case of Behavioral Economics (in which I am a researcher) the "generalizability" of such findings to the "human race" is something of a red herring. Do you think Wal-Mart cares when they routinely take advantage of bad depth judgments and sell cereal boxes that appear bigger when in fact they just shrink the dimension not visible on the shelf? When they routinely offer decoy options in stereos that make the more profitable option appear more compelling? Guess what: consumer psychology, especially for our commercially driven culture, is endlessley valuable.

Call it what you will, the WEIRD world is a big world--one whose laws and economic assumptions have great impact on the rest of civilization. The goal of behavioral economics isn't to generalize about the human race (although several of its hypotheses do), but rather to inform sound policy (to not take human rationality for granted, for example) and to help WEIRDOs better understand their day-to-day decisions so that they can make better ones going forward. I think that's a valuable program, don't you?

LessWrong coverage from last year: http://lesswrong.com/lw/17x/beware_of_weird_psychological_sa...

This shows how little the basic Western mindset has changed from the days of imperialism, colonies, and barbarian savages. I recall, in my anthropology course of yore, encountering similar disparities between the WEIRD cultures and whatever people group we were studying. Nobody ever thought to put ourselves on the spectrum. It was always presented as 'us' vs 'them'. And 'we' were always the right way to do things, of course. That being said, I'm glad my culture didn't have such rituals for manhood.

I find the content of the article more interesting than the conclusion. A good read on the differences between cultures.

Most psychology students would know about cultural differences and that you can not generalise. In fact, when writing a paper the first criticism is that generalisation should be made with caution because... and you list well pretty much every variability in the data.

That said however, most psychology students are going to be working in the US and apply their knowledge to the US population.

It was interesting however to read about the differences between students and the general population.

I think one suggestion might be that rather than culture per se, it might be that some societies are more evolved which could explain many of the differences when comparing the west to the rest. Also, the focus of the paper seems to be on trying to find universal processes, and probably after give a just so evolutionary story for these processes. I do however think that looking at how we have evolved is not much different than looking at history. It might teach us of what was, but in very limited ways of what is.

It is a good paper though. It highlights that psychologists are a bit lazy and do not do proper and thorough research but just create some theory and find the minimum data needed to support it.

Reminds me of the Pirahã 'One-Two-Many' language.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6303-language-may-shap...