Do scientists make "broad, and quite likely false, claims about what drives human behavior"?

Have you sometimes been skeptical about the results of research when the subjects are all college undergrads, and wondered how representative these subjects were of people as a whole? Regarding that skepticism, here's the abstract of an article for you from Science (AAAS):

A WEIRD View of Human Nature Skews Psychologists' Studies
Dan Jones
Although undergraduates from wealthy nations are numerous and willing research subjects, psychologists are beginning to realize that they have a drawback: They are WEIRDos. That is, they are people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic cultures. In a provocative review paper published last week, a pair of researchers argues that WEIRDos aren't representative of humans as a whole and that psychologists routinely use them to make broad, and quite likely false, claims about what drives human behavior.

Excerpts from the article in the Ken Pope news e-mail (email Dr. Pope to subscribe):

Suppose you're a psychologist at a research university, trying to figure out what drives human behavior.

You have devised simple, clever experiments in which people play economic games or perceive visual illusions, and you would like large sample sizes.

How will you find subjects?

For generations of psychologists, the answer has been

straight-forward: Use the pool of thousands of undergraduates at your university.

But although undergrads from wealthy nations are numerous and willing subjects, psychologists are beginning to realize that they have a drawback: They are WEIRDos.

That is, they are people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic cultures. ...

"A lot of psychologists assume that one group of humans is as good as the next for their experiments, and that results from these studies apply more broadly. We show that this assumption is wrong," says Heine.

"WEIRD subjects are some of the most psychologically unusual people on the planet."

There's little doubt that psychologists have relied on WEIRDos.

...

Psychology undergraduates were the sole subjects in 67% of U.S. studies and 80% of studies in other countries.

Overall, 96% of subjects were WEIRDos.

This would be fine if WEIRDos were representative of people from other cultures, but they are not, [Joseph] Henrich, [Steven] Heine, and [Ara] Norenzayan argue in the BBS paper.

Although cultural variation is sometimes assumed to be superficial, Heine says that cultures differ in fundamental aspects such as reasoning styles, conceptions of the self, the importance of choice, notions of fairness, and even visual perception.

...

The reliance on WEIRD data has led to a biased picture of human psychology, says Heine.

...

"We will never figure out human nature by studying American undergrads," says Henrich.

Does this hold true for neuroscience research that does brain scans on undergrads? Are those results skewed? My guess would be yes, but of course it is only a guess.

Notes:

More about WEIRDOs from an article in Nature (go to the second subsection titled "Enter the WEIRDOs."

Another question about the real-life relevance of college psych lab experiments from a quote included in a recent post at idealawg:

Even the most ingenious experiment can’t replicate how individuals behave in the real world. We change and adapt over the course of months and years, reflect and learn, and call on the help of friends and family. These vital and unpredictable improvisations won’t happen in the vacuum of the college psych lab, with a besmocked Ph.D. student hovering close by.

Comments

[Joe Markowitz]

When somebody says you can't understand human nature by studying American undergraduates, I wonder why not. Aren't American undergraduates as human as any other human beings? Although I'm sure you could design some experiments in which the cultural experiences of well-off highly-educated young people might affect the outcome, there are lots of other experiments where it should make no difference whether you used a rich white kid from an American suburb, or a poor tribesman from the most remote parts of the world. Both are equally human beings, and an experiment designed to have applicability to all human beings should not suffer from the choice of subject. College students would be flattering themselves if they think their brains are more highly evolved or differently shaped from the brains of any other humans from any other part of the world. Have the last couple of centuries of industrialization really changed the evolution of human brain all that much from the past 100,000 years of human history? I doubt it.

[StephanieWestAllen]

Thanks for stopping by and commenting, Joe. I think the influence of culture and subculture do affect how brains differ. More about cultural neuroscience in some of my earlier posts here:

http://westallen.typepad.com/brains_on_purpose/2010/03/crosscultural-conflict.html

[Joe Markowitz]

I notice that I made a similar comment on the post you directed me to. I guess the whole idea of cultural diversity, especially when it is taken to the extreme of suggesting that different cultures can create any significant physical differences between groups of human beings, just makes me really uncomfortable. I think that idea can lead to stereotyping and discrimination and from there right down the slippery slope to genocide. I am much more comfortable with the idea that all human beings are essentially alike, in the sense that there are only superficial differences between different cultures and nationalities, and in the sense that people must be judged as individuals and not based on their membership in any ethnic or cultural group, and in the sense that no person can claim to be any more of a human being than any other person, and also in the sense that all humans have basically the same genetic makeup. Once we start thinking that physical distinctions between different ethnic or cultural groups are significant, we are in serious danger of forgetting about our shared humanity.

[StephanieWestAllen]

This discussion has come up in almost every cross-cultural communication class I have taught (and in the classes taught by my colleagues, too). It leads to rich conversations that cannot be done justice in this medium.

I think trivializing and not respecting differences can lead to great conflict and misunderstanding. Sometimes the trivializing is a stage in acceptance of cultural differences. I wish I could think of who the leading researcher is on the stages. I will ask a colleague later this week who is one of the gurus of this arena.

Here is a very abbreviated version of the stages:

http://westallen.typepad.com/idealawg/stages-of-accepting-cultu.html