Department of Psychology and Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z4, Canada.
Behav Brain Sci. 2010 Jun;33(2-3):61-83; discussion 83-135. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X0999152X. Epub 2010 Jun 15.
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
行为科学家经常在世界顶级期刊上发表关于人类心理学和行为的广泛观点，这些观点的样本完全来自于西方、受过教育的、工业化的、富裕的和民主的（WEIRD）社会。研究人员——通常是隐含的——假设要么人类群体之间几乎没有差异，要么这些“标准主体”与任何其他群体一样具有代表性。这些假设合理吗？在这里，我们对行为科学的比较数据库进行了回顾，结果表明，不同人群的实验结果存在很大差异，而且与其他物种相比，WEIRD 被试尤其不寻常——经常是异常值。回顾的领域包括视觉感知、公平、合作、空间推理、分类和推理归纳、道德推理、推理风格、自我概念和相关动机以及智商的遗传性。这些发现表明，包括儿童在内的 WEIRD 社会成员是最不具有代表性的群体之一，无法推广到关于人类的一般化研究。这些发现中的许多都涉及到与心理学、动机和行为的基本方面相关的领域——因此，没有明显的先验理由可以根据从单一亚群体中抽样来声称某个特定的行为现象是普遍存在的。总的来说，这些实证模式表明，我们需要更加谨慎地根据从这个特别单薄且相当不寻常的人类切片中提取的数据来解决关于人性的问题。最后，我们提出了一些结构性重组行为科学的方法，以最好地应对这些挑战。
