[Music] imagine a biologist who only studi plants it's not hard because that's what scientists do they specialize they learn as much as possible as deeply as possible become an expert but imagine now that that scientist said that here or she was studying all living things the the nature of life and they they took for granted that the insights gained from studying plants told them everything they needed to know about how all living things worked mushrooms and lyans animals of All Sorts insects even though we know of it about four times as many insects as plant
species of the species of Life we've cataloged plants make up less than 177% that is the current situation in Psychology actually it's worse as a number of psychologists have pointed out their research disproportionately examines people from their own own home countries from the wealthiest most industrialized nations even within those countries the subjects that they test are disproportionately University students young adults who happen to register for an introductory psychology class these are the vast majority of recruits for psychology experiments to put it another way if you're a university student you are 4,000 times more likely to
get recruited for psychology research than any other person psychologist Jeffrey Arnett reported in a 2008 article an American psychologist that 96% of all subjects in Psychology research were drawn from countries that represented only 12% of the world's total population 12% of all people are left-handed in the UK about 12% of the population experiences depression each year in Australia 12% live below the poverty line earlier this year the Euro Zone had 12% unemployment in the US 12% of adults have diabetes California has 12% of the US population only 12% of US stick with our New Year's
resolutions so is it really sound to base our understanding of of human nature on a close study of only 12% because even within these countries undergrads are the predominant subject arnet suggested that psychology research was really neglecting 95% of the world's population some psychologists are acutely aware of this problem and they they pushed their field to be more Global more interested in the variety of human nature in 2010 Joseph Henrich Steven Hein and aroan Zan wrote an article that laid out the problem in detail they suggested that psychology subjects were the weirdest people in the
world by that they meant the way subjects were recruited was biased to favor people who were Western educated industrialized rich and Democratic we know lots psychologically about weird people less so about the rest of us the sampling bias wouldn't be a problem if we could be confident that everyone else on the planet resembled the weird people uh some psychologists might be working with that assumption but Henri hin and noran Zay make clear what a problem this is that is weird people are weird in another sense whenever we have good cross-cultural psychology data weird subjects aren't
normal or average or even just a little bit different they're often real outliers if you play strategy games meant to test people's sense of fairness for example weird subjects behave in Extreme Ways compared to other groups such as hering peoples or foragers or miners elsewhere in the world in fact when Henri and his colleagues looked at the data weird subjects turned out to be outliers on virtually everything they could find data on visual perception fairness cooperation spatial reasoning categorization and inferential induction that is the way that we extrapolate from what we already know moral reasoning
reasoning style self-concepts and related motivations the heritability of IQ even really basic sentury factors like whether or not you fall for an optical illusion turn out to suggest that Western subjects are outliers weird subjects for example fall the most for the MU liar illusion in some populations this simply is not an illusion if you're a sa forager or a South African minor you're liable to see it a glance at these lines of the same length crosscultural psychologists think that it takes living in a world of perfectly right angle rooms and carpentered spaces to train your
visual system to think that these lines are different lengths as they write in their conclusion Henrich and his colleagues say although we are certainly not the first to worry about the representativeness of prevalent undergraduate samples in the behavioral sciences our efforts to compile an empirical case have revealed an even more alarming situ situation than previously recognized the sample of contemporary Western undergraduates that so overwhelms our database is not just an extraordinarily restricted sample of humanity it is frequently a distinct outlier Vis A other Global samples it may represent the worst population on which to base
our understanding of homo sapiens but there are two additional issues with the possibility of extrapolating from weird subjects first the very description weird wealthy educated industrialized and so on might be self- flattering it's how West westers and other wealthy people like to think of themselves elsewhere I've argued that it may not be the weird qualities that make these subjects such outliers maybe Western University students are outliers because they're myopics that is they're materialist whereas other people inhabit a world of spirits and non-material forces westerners tend to think that objects and non-objects are clearly distinct they're
young not just because they're University students but even in relation to people the same age and other societies who may already have families and Leadership roles in the community myopics may be more self-obsessed in a variety of ways including the idea of building a career investing in your future and not having a strong corporate identity like a clan or group maybe pleasure seeking and pain aversion to a greater degree than the people University students especially in US research universities may ironically be more socially isolated sometimes living in ageg graded residential colleges where they don't interact
much with older or younger people myopics also live in a pervasive consumerist Society they often have identities that are based not on production uction or occupation but on consumption and finally westerners in general are terribly sedentary by every single measure we have which may shape our psyches and and nervous systems in powerful [Music] ways the second problem is that our understanding of human psychology is not only built disproportionately on studying these types of people it's disproportionately built by these types of people shaped by the questions that weird researchers ask by the Fascinations and blind spots
this group of people who we know are outliers to borrow from Donald Rumsfeld it's not just the things we know we don't know it's the unknown unknowns the questions that psychologists haven't asked about Human Experience because we don't even know that we haven't asked them this is one place that psychological anthropology and neuroanthropology comes in I hope anthropologists are accustomed to exploring alongside people who are quite different to us that is weird in their own ways the many ways that human beings are we don't have to imagine human variation or try to derive it from
University students we can talk with those who live in different ways study their songs their mythologies rituals day-to-day lives and learn more about what is possible it's not really a problem if you're weird it's it's more of a problem if you don't know that you [Music] are [Music] a B
