The most recent edition of Behavioral and Brain Sciences carries a remarkable review article by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan, ‘The weirdest people in the world?’ The article outlines two central propositions; first, that most behavioural science theory is built upon research that examines intensely a narrow sample of human variation (disproportionately US university undergraduates who are, as the authors write, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, or ‘WEIRD’).

More controversially, the authors go on to argue that, where there is robust cross-cultural research, WEIRD subjects tend to be outliers on a range of measurable traits that do vary, including visual perception, sense of fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, and a host of other basic psychological traits. They don’t ignore universals – discussing them in several places – but they do highlight human variation and its implications for psychological theory.

As is the custom at BBS, the target article is accompanied by a large number of responses from scholars around the world, and then a synthetic reflection from the original target article authors to the many responses (in this case, 28). The total of the discussion weighs in at a hefty 75 pages, so it will take most readers (like me) a couple of days to digest the whole thing.

It’s my second time encountering the article as I read a pre-print version and contemplated proposing a response, but, sadly, there was just too much I wanted to say, and not enough time in the calendar (conference organizing and the like dominating my life) for me to be able to pull it together. I regret not writing a rejoinder, but I can do so here with no limit on my space and the added advantage of seeing how other scholars responded to the article.

My one word review of the collection of target article and responses: AMEN!

Or maybe that should be, AAAAAAAMEEEEEN! {Sung by angelic voices.}

There’s a short version of the argument in Nature as well, but the longer version is well worth the read.

Of course, I have tons of quibbles with wording or sub-arguments, ways of making points, choices of emblematic cases and the like in the longer BBS article (and I’ll get to a couple of those below the ‘fold’), but I don’t want to lose my over-arching sense that there is so much right in this piece. So before I get into the discussion, I just want to thank all of the authors, not just Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan, but also the authors of the responses, who pulled it together when I didn’t try. The collection is a really remarkable discussion, one that I find gratifying in such a prominent place, and I do hope that the target article has a significant impact on the behavioural sciences.

If you have one blockhead colleague who simply does not get that surveying his or her students in ‘Introduction to Psychology’ fails to provide instant access to ‘human nature,’ this is the article to pass along. If that colleague still doesn’t get it, please stop talking to them. Really. You. Are. Wasting. Your. Breath. If Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan don’t shake their confidence, I’m not sure what can.

Abstract

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.

Article summary

If you absolutely don’t want to read the target article (you should), I’ll also provide a bit of summary discussion to supplement the abstract. Skip ahead to the next section if you just want my response.

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan first survey some of the evidence that Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic subjects – more specifically, University undergrads – are disproportionately the empirical foundation for claims being made, either explicitly or implicitly, about human nature. The evidence here is pretty staggering, even for someone like me who is suspicious of psychology for precisely this reason.

A recent survey by Arnett (2008) of the top journals in six sub-disciplines of psychology revealed that 68% of subjects were from the US and fully 96% from ‘Western’ industrialized nations (European, North American, Australian or Israeli). That works out to a 96% concentration on 12% of the world’s population (Henrich et al. 2010: 63). Or, to put it another way, you’re 4000 times more likely to be studied by a psychologist if you’re a university undergraduate at a Western university than a randomly selected individual strolling around outside the ivory tower.

Moreover, psychology is disproportionately American, and especially English-speaking, even compared to other scientific fields. 70% of all psych citations originate from US research institutions, compared with 37% in a field like chemistry, and the top four countries for psychology citations are all English speaking.

Despite the skewed sampling, psychologists seldom offer cautionary notes about the source of their data or its potential cultural boundedness, and likely would be testy if the cross-culturally critical among us suggested that they retitle their publications to reflect the source of their information: such as, the Journal of Experimental Psychology in High-Enrollment American Research Universities: Undergraduate Psychology Students’ Perception and Performance, a personal favourite. Henrich and colleagues do a good job of pointing out where there are exceptions to the pattern, and many of the authors of comments have been leaders in trying to implement broader, cross-cultural sampling, but the pattern is pretty pronounced in spite of noteworthy exceptions.

Henrich and colleagues then go on to use existing studies to contrast WEIRD subjects with other sorts of people on a series of increasingly close, ‘telescoping’ contrasts: first, they compare industrialized and ‘small-scale’ societies in areas such as visual perception, fairness, cooperation, folkbiology, and spatial cognition. The authors then highlight the contrast of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ populations on measures such as social behaviour, self-concepts, self-esteem, agency (a sense of having free choice), conformity, patterns of reasoning (holistic v. analytic), and morality.

The authors then examine how Americans specifically stand out from other subject pools in comparative research to highlight how the specific dominance of US subject pools in psychological research might skew our understanding. In particular, Henrich and colleagues survey the issue of individualism, choice, and other outlying US traits. This section is among the thinnest in the article, but it is still full of suggestive data, especially for those of us who are sensitized to the dissimilarities glossed over in the catch-all term, ‘Western’ (my Australian wife and I, a Yank, frequently find ourselves contending with Oz-Sepo contrasts in daily life, even though Australia and the US would typically be considered quite similar ‘Western’ cultures).

Finally, Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan contrast the Americans who typically wind up as psychology subjects with the whole population of the US, highlighting the diversity among adult Americans in such area as social behaviour, moral reasoning, cooperation, fairness, performance on IQ tests and analytical abilities. US undergraduates exhibit demonstrable differences, not only from non-university educated Americans, but even from previous generations of their own families.

Herich et al. are careful to point out that ‘difference’ is not the whole story, that there are underlying similarities among the diverse groups, and they are agnostic about the causes of various contrasting results. They suggest (2010: 79) that determining a set of criteria for traits likely to be universals would be helpful to psychology and behavioural science and offer a few examples.

But perhaps the main point is a cautionary one, arguing that the developmental environment for WEIRD children may be statistically unusual in a wide variety of ways from the typical environment of modern Homo sapiens throughout our species’ time on the planet:

The fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of the behavioral sciences may render them one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens…. WEIRD people, from this perspective, grow up in, and adapt to, a rather atypical environment vis-à-vis that of most of human history. It should not be surprising that their psychological world is unusual as well. (2010: 79-80)

As a counter-balance to the oddity of WEIRD subjects, and their overwhelming over-representation in psychological research to this date, Henrich and colleagues recommend an ambitious cross-cultural research agenda, changes to publication policy to redress the imbalance, and a range of other practical, albeit quite difficult, policies.

They highlight that adding subjects to our pools may not be sufficient to fix biases that are inherent in research questions, method, or theory, a point that several of the commentators also discuss, some with less optimism than Henrich and colleagues (for example, Gosling, Carson, John and Potter; Shweder; and Baumard and Sperber).

Overall, what most recommends this article is not that these arguments have never been made before, but rather the breadth and depth of the empirical sources that Henrich and colleagues draw into the discussion. For example, Paul Rozin, who arguably has made very similar arguments before, lauds Henrich and colleagues, writing about the message of cross-cultural variation, ‘never has it been so thoroughly documented and elaborated into all the domains in which it is relevant. And never so convincingly’ (2010: 108). High praise, indeed.

So what possible quibbles could I have with a piece that clearly has so much so right? Let the picking of nits begin!

Is being WEIRD really what makes them odd?

Henrich and colleagues use the acronym WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) to capture the distinctiveness of the typical subjects used in psychology experiments – university students in psychology classes – but I suspect that this acronym, however clever, fails to truly capture how odd these subjects are. One could add a host of other terms that would highlight other outlying characteristics of this population, especially differences that may not be so obvious to WEIRD researchers.

Although WEIRD is terribly catchy and quite manageable, it may not even focus us on the most important distinctions, nor may it reflect a good starting point for a truly trans-cultural psychology, carting our own self-conceptions and obsessions, surreptitiously, into the cross-cultural comparisons. Is WEIRD weird enough to constitute a break from typical ways of thinking among the WEIRD researchers? (God, this if fun. It’s one reason I think the article has legs: rhetorical catchiness.)

For example, when I brought one of my Brazilian subjects to an American university at which I previously taught, his characterization of the American students’ differences from young Brazilians with whom he had more contact focused on none of these traits (W. E. I. R. or D.). He was more struck by their large size (both height and BMI, to put it nicely), their frumpy androgynous clothing (anyone here not wearing a sweatshirt?), their materialism, their clumsiness and physical ineptitude, and their ethnic and personal homogeneity. If my Brazilian colleague were to characterize the oddness of the WEIRD, he wouldn’t focus on the traits Henrich and colleagues have chosen in their designation.

From the perspective of my admittedly non-academic Brazilian colleague, the truly outstanding characteristics of the US students were characteristics like their body types, the diminishing of gender markers, and the evidence of extraordinary peer-group conformity in bearing, expression and personal presentation. His observations are hardly scientific, but they suggest that focusing on ‘Western-ness’, education, economic system, wealth, and political system certainly doesn’t exhaust the parameters of difference and it might not even highlight the most salient, although it does correspond to patterns of the Big Variables in Western scholarship about difference (when I was in grad school, it was the Holy Trinity: gender, class and ethnicity).

I don’t think that my point is a fundamental disagreement with Henrich and colleagues, but a concern that the parameter of difference we choose to highlight, even in the simplest designation, might itself be a culturally-generated bias. Anthropologists are well acquainted with having our subjects point to traits that are invisible to the Western research as ‘the crucial’ characteristic for understanding the gap. For example, ‘rich’ may seem an obvious contrast to poverty, but we know that not all ‘poverty’ is the same, nor are all ‘rich’ people able to experience in the same way their material situation. Some economists have argued that inequality is more crucial for understanding the experience of deprivation, for example, than absolute wealth. And poor populations often fix, not on their material deprivation, but on other qualities to describe their difference from the wealthy (or the WEIRD). For example, religious differences, family dynamics, or caste might be salient to people from other cultural backgrounds.

In addition, I worry that some of our cultural ideology and self deception may be smuggled in under the terms themselves, especially ‘Western,’ ‘industrialized’ and ‘democratic.’ ‘Western’ has been too comprehensively discussed to really dwell on here, but I’m struck by both ‘democratic’ and ‘industrialized’ as forms of self description for Americans, especially. After all, isn’t ‘de-industrialization’ or post-industrialization a key economic transformation in the United States, and aren’t many American commentators worried about the hollowing out of ‘democracy’ in an age of voter apathy and corporate domination of media and political lobbying?

If WEIRD college students aren’t voting in large numbers, for example, and feel profoundly alienated from politics, isn’t it problematic to think of ‘democracy’ as shaping their attitudes? I’d be more inclined to say we should examine the landless farmers in Brazil I worked with while studying the Landless Movement to understand ‘democratic’ populations. They had long community meetings modeled on the labour movement or anarchist movement to come to decisions. I doubt my university students in the US had experienced anything nearly as ‘democratic.’

Again, I think that my critique is more than a bit unfair, as Henrich and colleagues are writing for an experimentalist academic community that needs to be made aware of the distortions introduced by accustomed research methods. They’re not writing for an audience of deconstructivist, left-leaning, post-colonial political economists, anthropologists, or cultural studies scholars. My ‘critiques’ are more about how we might shepherd the next stage of research if Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan are successful with their intervention. I worry that, even if psychologists, brain scientists, and evolutionary theorists decide that they need to take human variation seriously, anthropology isn’t going to be ready as a discipline to help (one more reason I appreciate the inter-disciplinary program that Henrich and his colleagues are sketching).

So, to sum up this post-Henrich, next stage concern: I worry that W.E.I.R.D. classification flatters the WEIRD, focusing on traits that Westerners typically highlight to describe themselves in ways that are, however inadvertently, pretty self-congratulatory. If we were to call the same group, Materialist, Young, self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking, Isolated, Consumerist, and Sedentary (MYOPICS)… you get the idea. (By the way, I’m not committed to this, only to getting my own acronym – You know the steps in the cheap acronym process: Set acronym. Find words to fit each letter.)

How the WEIRD get weird

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan are really good in the target article to refrain from too much speculation about the explanations for the peculiarity of the WEIRD. It’s one of the many things that I think they need to be congratulated on, and their openness invites a wide-ranging discussion of the many likely contributing facotrs. But many of the specific qualities highlighted in the Henrich et al. piece and in the responses likely do not stem directly from being either W., E., I., R. or D., so the classification itself can be misleading.

For example, one of the prime candidates for the cause of some of the measurable differences is variation in child-rearing techniques, especially forms of verbal interaction with infants and young children, their visual and sensory environments, and the manual forms of care given to children. WEIRDness doesn’t necessarily determine this childhood environment, even though many childcare practices that might help to create the psychological statistical anomalies we find in these populations do correlate with being WEIRD. If English is affecting how the WEIRD think in ways that make them unusual, for example, there’s no inherent reason why English speaking-ness necessarily leads to WEIRDness, although the WEIRD are disproportionately English-speaking (especially those surveyed for psychological research).

Again, this is not so much a critique of Henrich and colleagues but a consideration of where we go from here, how we get at human psychological variation. The point is just that it will not be enough to try to get populations who are different to Us (if You, the reader, are WEIRD) in ways that we recognize. For example, although poor populations within Western countries may demonstrate significant variation, they might not, and not because variation is not possible; they might share child caring practices with wealthier countrymen without sharing wealth or income profile. The choice of comparison should be motivated by the research question and hypotheses about relevant causal dynamics, not simply, like the broader reliance on WEIRD subjects, the result of convenience in sampling.

Who you callin’ ‘SMALL-scale’!?

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan use the term ‘small-scale,’ although they are very clear what the term means and that it is not a thin proxy for ‘primitive’ (see p. 123, fn#4). I’m more than a bit uncomfortable with the term ‘small-scale’ although it is arguably the most acceptable classification for the groups that are being clustered (and miles and miles and miles better than ‘primitive’ and other bare-facedly ethnocentric terms). The problem is, what’s the contrast with ‘small-scale’? If it’s ‘Western,’ than we have an asymmetrical binary distinction where some groups will arguably fall under both categories or under neither.

For example, ‘small-scale’ focuses on a cluster of traits that don’t NECESSARILY co-vary, although they might in until-recently foraging groups: small, geographically-bounded groups with slight division of labour, local organization through kinship, self-sufficient in food provisioning, and face-to-face interaction. The obvious ‘none of the above’ cases in the ‘small-scale v. Western’ contrast are non-Western groups who are not small-scale, such as city dwellers in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Pacific (outside Australia and New Zealand). This group would constitute a substantial part of the world’s population, if not the largest grouping.

And what about Western populations living in small-scale settings? For example, I live in a very wealthy town of around 2000 people where I frequently encounter people I know on the street. As members of a gentrified country town, we grow and eat a lot of local produce, more so every year for ideological reasons, and, given 5 or 10 minutes, most of the locals can find kin or age-cohort connections in a process that is as seemingly obligatory as it is tedious for a ‘blow in’ (local argot for an in-migrant) like myself to watch. I’m surrounded by people interested in green lifestyles, self-sufficiency, ‘slow food,’ reconnecting socially – many of them living on million-dollar properties. We’re obviously WEIRD – waaaaaay WEIRD – but also, in an admittedly tendentious argument, ‘small scale.’

I don’t think for one SECOND that Henrich and colleagues are not aware of this issue, but I think that the problem highlights a stumbling block for anthropologists doing cross-cultural comparisons more generally: the use of binary classifications is likely to be a nagging intellectual handicap. Much more useful is to really think through Henrich’s suggestion, in the same footnote (p. 123, fn#4), about an ‘n-dimensional’ comparative space for talking about cultural distinctions.

The contrast of ‘small-scale’ to ‘Western’ seems to me to be an artifact of more simplistic forms of cross-cultural comparison, more ‘primitive’ intellectual projects than the one Henrich and colleagues are proposing. So much of the discussion in the article, including the really intriguing graphs showing the wide range of variation WITHIN both WEIRD and ‘small-scale’ groups, runs counter to the dichotomy, highlighting the fact that human diversity can’t be too quickly recuperated with old-fashioned Us-Them thinking. I don’t think Henrich and colleagues fall victim to bipolar thinking as an intellectual short-cut, but I worry that there’s dead-falls lurking along the path of the terminology itself.

My own candidate for one source of the oddity

Although Henrich and colleagues are laudably restrained in speculating about the sources of differences between WEIRD populations and other groups, I want to put another candidate on the table that’s discussed by Lana B. Karasik, Karen E. Adolph, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, and Marc. H. Bornstein in one of the responses that I enjoyed a lot. They talk about ‘WEIRD walking,’ the way that WEIRD populations are also outliers in terms of motor development in ways that many people in the field overlook.

Karasik and colleagues describe how WEIRD children’s patterns of motor development became enshrined in psychology through testing procedures, test items and norms into an understanding of universal ‘stages’ of motor development (see 2010: 95). Even when cross-cultural research was conducted, these culturally-specific criteria, derived from examining WEIRD developmental pathways, meant that researchers were often carrying with them tools that were ill-suited to study other sorts of children. Or these psychologists were simply comparing diverse children to WEIRD ones on standards set by the WEIRD children.

One example of this that I have discussed is overhand throwing, a task that has been used in some tests of motor coordination in spite of the fact that different cultural groups demonstrate enormous variability in the activity because it is a skill, not a universally-acquired entailment of being human. Some children learn to throw in environments that support, model and reward the activity; others never really learn to throw particularly well because their activity patterns simply do not include the opportunity to learn (I’ve written in a book chapter that will soon appear about ‘throwing like a Brazilian,’ an analogue to ‘throwing like a girl’).

Karasik and colleagues point out that even such ‘basic’ motor abilities at crawling are susceptible to manipulation: the trend to put newborn children on their backs to sleep in the West, for example, has retarded the development of crawling in a population where children formerly would routinely sleep on their bellies. In some groups, normal development may not even include crawling, children skipping the stage entirely or using some other intermittent form of locomotion, like ‘bum-shuffling’ or scooting about while seated.

In my own research, the physical abilities of WEIRD university students stand out more clearly as strikingly odd than many of their other traits, and I’m convinced that the extraordinary inactivity of this population, coupled with their high calorie diets, has more diverse and wide-ranging effects than simply leading to an epidemic of obesity, Type-II diabetes, and other diet-related health problems. For example, capoeira instruction, a subject close to my heart, has to start at a much different place for American youth than it does with Brazilian kids in Salvador where I did my field research. Even teaching salsa lessons at a Midwestern US university drove home the profoundly different motor starting point, prior to the lessons, of young adults in the US compared to Brazilians (and I suspect, to many populations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere).

The point is not just to rehearse the typical alarmist discussion of the ‘obesity epidemic,’ but also to point out the profound potential implications of radical differences in activity environments for children during their development. I don’t think most WEIRD theorists realize just how powerful an influence sedentary living is on our psychological, physiological, metabolic, endocrine, and neural development because most of us, subjects and researchers alike, are SO sedentary. WEIRD bodies have so much unused energy from their diets, especially with their levels of activity plummeting, that I find it hard to believe we understand metabolic patterns that would have dominated much of human prehistory.

To argue that WEIRD subjects are a good window in on ‘human nature’ is difficult when, from the perspective of metabolic energy and expenditure, the WEIRD are such outliers in the whole history of our species. We know that this radically unusual metabolic situation — massive energy surplus with less and less expenditure — is profoundly affecting mortality patterns: in WEIRD societies, most of the leading causes of death are, arguably, directly linked to the human body’s difficulty of coping with this situation, and that’s even after generations of sedentary life in which to adapt. But the psychological and neurological consequences of sedentarism are less well understood in part, in my opinion, because most WEIRD researchers have a hard time even imagining how arduous life would have been. Throughout human existence, most humans likely have been phenomenally active, and athletic, compared to WEIRD populations, out of necessity.

I’m going to have to write something more in depth on this, but I just feel the need to flag it. If I had written a response, I probably would have focused on this trait because it runs against WEIRD researchers’ self understanding. The WEIRD tend to think of themselves as unusually healthy, and by measures of things like infectious disease rates, death from accident, and infant mortality, they certainly are. But from a broad, cross-cultural view, the extraordinary inactivity of the WEIRD, coupled with their access to very energy dense, highly processed food sources, makes them outliers in ways that I’m not sure we fully comprehend.

Taking issue with some of the responses

A number of the commentators bring really interesting points to the discussion. A few that I have to single out for special praise are Majid and Levinson on WEIRD languages; Leavens, Bard and Hopkins on BIZARRE chimpanzees (the acronym thing is apparently contagious); Karasik and colleagues on motor development; Chiao and Cheon on brain imaging; Ceci and colleagues on hiccups in research design; Fessler on unknown unknowns in shame research; Lancy on ethnocentrism in child development research… There’s really a lot of great discussion, most of it building upon what Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan have laid out in the target article. Again, I can only really recommend that you read the original.

That said, there are a couple of responses that I have to take issue with, including a couple that Henrich and colleagues handle far more diplomatically than I would have.

‘Difference is really uniformity if you just ignore difference’

Lowell Gaertner, Constantine Sedikides, Huajian Cai and Jonathan D. Brown basically write a piece that says, ‘yeah, yeah, differences, differences, yada yada…. But the over-arching human universals, the kind that we label with vague generalities that could be applied to anything, are really the point, and they’re GENETIC!’ Frequent readers of our weblog will know that this kind of argument gets me as hopped up and raving as a post-Halloween kindergarten class. (And don’t even get me started on errant use of the word, ‘reify’…) Danks and Rose offer a similar, but less objectionable use of this argument strategy, suggesting that universality is in the learning process, not in what is learned.

Henrich and colleagues do an excellent job of shredding the specific empirical case made by Gaertner and colleagues about the universality of ‘positive self-views’ (see esp. pp. 119-121), so I won’t dwell on the nuts and bolts. Flogging a dead horse and all. What I just want to highlight is that the idea that there is something ‘essential,’ an obdurate and universal ‘human nature,’ is NOT evolutionary thinking. To argue against ‘human nature’ is not to be anti-evolutionary.

For some reason, some (though not ALL) theorists try to make the argument for human variation appear to be against evolution, which is something I can NOT understand, except in the narrow confines of the history of feuding within anthropology. Even in my freshman human evolution course, one of the key arguments from Week Two is that even Darwin’s classical perspective on natural selection says that species change and that variation is a fundamental precondition for natural selection even if stabilizing selection produces patterns of continuity over time.

But the bigger problem with Gaertner et al. is the common assumption that, although there’s diversity in ‘behaviour’ or ‘phenotype,’ on some other higher level of abstraction, there’s unity, even if that unity has to be stated in such vague terms that it’s essentially meaningless. Likewise, I’m not convinced that Danks and Rose are on solid ground, or making much progress by trying to separate out learning processes from what is learned, and then to argue that the processes are universal. As an empirical statement, the argument for universal learning processes is obviously false. Some societies, like WEIRD ones, have extensive, explicit, segregated systems for formal learning; others have virtually no separate contexts for learning or have very different sorts of institutions than classrooms.

I just don’t think I get why some theorists must, as soon as confronted by evidence of diversity, immediately declare that there’s ‘uniformity,’ at some ‘higher level’ of abstraction. The act can often sound like a vague rearguard defense, as if there is some underlying need to demand uniformity in spite of evidence to the contrary. For example, confronted by the empirical reality of profound dietary variation in humans, of survival for multiple generations at near starvation levels, of culturally-induced dietary restrictions, of eating patterns that are unhealthy and self-destructive, even voluntary self-starvation or gross over-consumptions, some defenders of universalism, like Gaertner and colleagues say, ‘the diverse diets are connected and assimilated by a universal need for sustenance’ (2010: 93).

The point is not that there are no universals; it’s that the ‘assimilation’ of diversity into a meaningless ‘universal’ is a hollow exercise that seeks to escape from the very point that Henrich et al. are marking. Gaertner and colleagues argue that apparent, empirically-verifiable diversity is actually unity at an ‘abstract process and function’ level, a retreat to an unfalsifiable and ineffable assertion, especially when coupled with allusions to ‘genotype’ that also can’t be shown to be empirically founded. Even absolute, empirically demonstrated universality is NOT proof that something is ‘human nature’; everywhere on Earth, humans deal with gravity, but this is not due to ‘human nature,’ except that to be a human is, like all other matter, to have mass affected by gravity.

It would be alright, logically, to retreat to universal declarations about human universals of process or function ONLY IF the psychologists who made this retreat would then refrain from making any statement or implying any characterization of humans more specific than that abstract universalism. In other words, if you’re going to argue that the universal trait is the need for sustenance, than you have to stop yourself from making pseudo-evolutionary arguments about food preferences for salt-and-vinegar potato chips, fizzy soft drinks, and ‘death by chocolate’ cake, or anything else. That is, you can’t strategically retreat to abstract high ground as soon as you’re challenged empirically on sloppy universalisms only to boldly foray forth into the land of blanket statements about more detailed characteristics of ‘human nature’ as soon as you think no one is watching.

What I don’t get, I guess, is the defensiveness. Are the knee-jerk universalists worried that, if we concede that there might be fundamental variation in humans, we inevitably move toward racism? If so, we’re in trouble. Do they think that the existence of human genes means that we must necessarily be a species of genetic clones? Are they worried that science can’t be conducted on a topic where one cannot make blanket universalizing declarations? If so, someone should tell biologists because they’re in trouble. Is it just intellectual laziness? Or is it a fear of some previous intellectual error, like the denial of science itself, committed by some intellectuals in the name of diversity? I suspect that it might be the last, but, unfortunately, it often sounds like one of the earlier objections.

I don’t have a problem with saying there are some universals; I just have a problem with someone, when confronted with evidence that a particular trait is NOT universal, immediately trying to declare that it really, really is uniform if we just squint our eyes, blur our understanding, and step back further from the object of study. What’s the point?

You say WEIRD, I say nuh-uh!

I’d also take issue with Paul Rozin’s commentary, although I think he makes some excellent points (and I very much respect his work). My main problem is the assumption that technologically-driven human development will necessarily lead the world to become, well, WEIRDer:

But the main point of my commentary is that although the NAU [North American undergraduate] is truly anomalous, this subspecies of Homo sapiens is a vision of the future. With the Internet, ready availability of information of all sorts, computer fluency as key to success in the world, and ease in negotiating a world where text as opposed to face-to-face interactions are the meat of human relationships, the NAU is at the vanguard of what humans are going to be like. (Rozin 2010: 109)

Perhaps I just don’t share Rozin’s techno-optimistic ‘vision of the future’ online as a species, but Rozin seems to assume that the wealthiest, most well educated, most privileged and greediest resource-consuming sliver of the world’s population is just a bit out in front temporarily from where everyone will eventually arrive. Someday, when we grow up as societies, we’ll all be like college students. God save us if that’s the case, because the environmental footprint is going to be catastrophic unless a lot changes in the next few years.

I don’t think I’d be alone in my suspicion that this view of digital ‘modernization’ is reminiscent of many declarations that some new technology was going to change us fundamentally as a species; so far, I think the evidentiary ball is in the court of the techno-optimists to write a plausible account of how that will happen. Just as some might argue the world is getting WEIRDer, others might argue that the Western nations are less uniformly WEIRD.

I’d also take issue with Alexandra Maryanski’s commentary, but I’m just not really sure I get where she’s coming from, so I don’t know where to start (Henrich and colleagues don’t respond at length to this piece). On the one hand, Maryanski seems to be aware of cross-cultural research; on the other, I’m not sure she’s really read it the same way that I would. The piece is so shot full of rhetorical questions that it’s hard to follow the logic, but she seems to be saying that, because ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers says that they have ‘high individualism, reciprocity, and low levels of inequality,’ then WEIRD societies are sort of just like the societies in which humans first evolved…

For, despite all the multiple ills of industrialized societies, WEIRD societies may be more compatible with our human nature than the high-density kinship constraints of horticultural societies or the “peasant” constraints of agrarian societies with their privileged few

So, people in industrial societies are JUST LIKE hunter-gatherers, except for the gigantic scale, anonymous interaction, replacement of reciprocity-based relationships with market transactions, and the unprecedented-in-human-history levels of material inequality. (For the slow readers, yes, that’s irony.) Oh, and the domestication of plants and animals, sedentary settlements, high technology, extended classroom education, mass media imagery, enormous social institutions, changes in family structure, decrease parent-infant contact, radically new built environment, completely different, dense social structure…

That’s why I say that, although there’s evidence that she’s aware of the Human Relations Area Files, I’m just not sure how Maryanski read them to come away with the impression that the WEIRD are just like the foraging peoples in the ethnographic record. Maybe the train just left the station without me on this argument, but I do not get it.

The argument she MIGHT make is that, with the enormous proliferation of technology and division of labour, WEIRD humans, especially in the extended adolescent period created by the system of tertiary education that delivers them as subjects to psychology researchers, demonstrate what humans might be like if they were utterly REMOVED from most normal selective pressures. If anything, university students might be demonstrating the utter nihilism and lack of restraint when normal external scaffolding on human behaviour and decision making are relaxed and replaced with fermented motivation, collective peer effervescence, and complete discounting of any future outcomes…

Might make that argument.

I’m not sure I’m persuaded by it, but maybe slavish obedience to peer pressure, high levels of inebriation and pizza consumption, cluttered living spaces, transitory sexual relationships, intermittent high-stress all-nighters punctuating months-long periods of sloth-like inactivity except for feeding, drinking and playing video games – maybe this is in fact what humans choose to do when divested of all responsibility for themselves with virtually no immediate pressures except for self-created social ones. Or maybe I’m just describing my own time in college.

Concluding thoughts

I apologize for this overly long discussion, especially in a blog format, but I just feel terribly inspired by this piece by Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan. I can’t thank the authors enough, and I am going to learn how to use a citation tracker specifically so that I can follow the subsequent impact of this article.

My reservations notwithstanding, I think it’s a remarkable piece, one that really needed to be written, and I congratulate the authors on it. It’s a thorough, well-thought piece, but with the added advantage of having some especially well-chosen examples and that colossal, infectious, acronymic hook, the glossy term that captures such a key idea well. I think the piece will travel well and might actually have a terribly salutary effect on the WEIRD populations it is targeting.

Stumble It!

References discussed:

Arnett, J. 2008. The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to become less American. American Psychologist 63(7): 602-14.

Danks, David, and David Rose. 2010. Diversity in representations; uniformity in learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 90-91. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000075

Gaertner, Lowell, Constantine Sedikides, Huajian Cai, and Jonathon D. Brown. 2010. It’s not WEIRD, it’s WRONG: When Researchers Overlook uNderlying Genotypes, they will not detect universal processes. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 93-94. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000105

Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. Most people are not WEIRD. Nature 466(1): 29.

Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 61-135 (with commentary). doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X Check Joseph Henrich’s homepage for a pdf of the article and related audio files.

Karasik, Lana B., Karen E. Adolph, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, and Marc H. Bornstein. 2010. WEIRD walking: Cross-cultural research on motor development. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 95-96. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000117

Maryanski, Alexandra. 2010. WEIRD societies may be more compatible with human nature. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 103-104. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000191

Rozin, Paul. 2010. The weirdest people in the world are a harbinger of the future of the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 108-109. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000312