Something WEIRD Is Going On

A lot of psychological research of the past has been conducted on American white male psychology students — or rather, on WEIRD people — and that reflects in the results.

WEIRD is an acronym that stands for Western, Educated, and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries. In practice, much psychological research has been carried out with undergraduates from top universities in the United States. In 2010, researchers from the University of British Columbia published the results of a study that concluded that 68 percent of research subjects hailed from the United States, and a whopping 96 percent came from Western nations. Of the American subjects, 67 percent were undergraduates studying psychology.

Of course, availability played a big role in this habit to hire WEIRD. It’s easy to conduct research on a group of people that is right there on campus, big enough, and readily available at low cost or no costs at all for the researchers. The problem is that psychologists have made a lot of assumptions about the general application of their findings. Results found in small groups of people were easily extrapolated to be true for humankind in general.

In recent years — and this will continue into the foreseeable future — many…