Throughout our college years, most of us, as students of research-heavy disciplines, will eventually read or be exposed to the findings of countless research papers. Most of what we study in our fields involves people, so it’s not at all surprising how often psychological findings are brought up and presented across various disciplines. After all, an important component of interpreting our discoveries and our history is understanding how human beings think about and interpret things in the first place.
At the very least, psychological research can shed light on and provide strategies for the challenges and trends that occur when we attempt to interact with, manage or organize our peers and peer groups. Naturally, we’d like to generalize these trends in a way that makes predicting and managing our interactions easier. Unfortunately, whether intentional or not, one of the easiest things we falsely assume is the generalizability of our group mindsets or perspectives.
In 2010, a research group from the University of British Columbia published a paper (ironic, I know) that explored the possibility of a psychological research bias towards societies that are primarily Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, known in short as WEIRD. The concern was that a significant amount of generalized psychological research findings were based on samples of undergraduate or college-aged participants residing in WEIRD societies.
According to the American Psychological Association, “(WEIRD) societies — who represent as much as 80 percent of study participants, but only 12 percent of the world’s population — are not only unrepresentative of humans as a species, but on many measures they’re outliers.”
Outliers? Bethany Brookeshire of Slate.com summarizes the research by stating that this segment of the population is not only small, it “differ[s] from other populations in moral decision making, reasoning style, fairness, even things like visual perception. This is because a lot of these behaviors and perceptions are based on the environments and contexts in which we grew up.”
An example of this is demonstrated in our susceptibility to the famous Müller-Lyer optical illusion, in which two identical lines are manipulated to appear to be of different lengths. Eric Michael Johnson of Scientific American explains how “[m]ost Americans are raised in a society where horizontal lines and sharp corners make up much of modern architecture. The brains of American children (and, presumably, most children in highly industrialized countries) have adapted to make optical calibrations as a result of their unique environment.”
This is in contrast to any other population residing in an environment that isn’t heavily industrialized. The article goes on to explain how, based on a series of cross-cultural experiments in 1966 by psychologist Marshall H. Segall, people raised in “forager or horticultural societies don’t grow up in a manufactured environment, so their brains are unaffected by such illusions.”
If these WEIRD societies, much less their college undergraduate youth, differ so drastically from the majority of the rest of the planet, how can research findings such as these be generalized to all of humanity? This is not to say that said research is useless or uninformative. On the contrary, research that utilizes the WEIRD demographic can tell us a lot about the effects of a narrow combination of upbringings and environments on the development of the college-aged mentality.
A lot of research is conducted at universities and by university faculty, all while following university standards and using university resources. Ideally, research participants enrolled in said universities are the most likely available and accessible resources imaginable. Surely you’ve all seen the posters, pamphlets and bulletin boards advertising these kinds of opportunities; they’re hard to miss on a campus this size.
However, as conductors of and participants in this type of research, we must recognize the glaring issue of our confirmation bias. Our findings can seem valid and representative when we most expect them to. With such narrow demographic parameters, said findings will generally appear consistent with our own homogenous cultures and mindsets. Thus, we must concede to more narrowly defined generalizabilities and optimizations of this type of research.
WEIRD populations do not empirically, or even logically, represent the generalizable majority of the human population by any means, especially not the college educated or enrolled. That latter factor alone is enough of an understandably elite sub-category of people that would introduce considerable bias, even within their own societies. If humanity as a whole is to benefit further from psychological research, then we as a society must refrain from spreading unfounded generalizations, especially in an environment supposedly preparing us to go out into the world expecting these generalizations to hold true.
