Lecture 3: WEIRD societies

In today’s class, Dr. Heine went over some of his current research in what he calls “The Weirdest People in the World”. However, he uses the term “weird” in a different sense from what most of us would use the term. When we think of that word we think of bizarre, odd and perhaps even freaky things. Weird is the 40-year-old dude who talks to nobody except his pet spider and Chucky replica dolls. Weird is the 60-year-old crazy cat lady on The Simpsons. In this sense, weird just comes to describe anything out of the ordinary, where ordinary describes the majority. In that case, weird can also mean exceptional (perhaps in a good sense, or perhaps as exceptions to the norm) such as in the case of WEIRD societies; WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies.

"GAAAARHHHHHH WEEEAAAAAAAAAAA!!"

Studying WEIRD people (people who live in WEIRD societies) shows that there is quite a bit of differences in various cultural psychologies. People from these WEIRD societies are highly exceptional in many aspects of their psychology. We can show evidence of this by a series of telescoping contrasts between:

-    Industrialized and non-industrialized societies
-    Western and non-Western societies
-    Americans and other Westerners
-    University educated Americans and other Americans

Beginning with the comparison between industrialized and non-industrialized societies we see various domains in which industrialized societies occupy an extreme position. First off, we have visual illusions. The famous Mueller-Lyer Illusion where we find that one line is longer than another (even though they are identical lines) just because of a couple of triangles missing an arm (or v’s) facing different directions on the ends of the line.  The fact that the illusion can only be seen by some societies exemplifies the modularity of mind, a term that means that different parts of the brain serve different functions due to evolution (Noam Chomsky’s view of universal grammar and LAD were loosely based upon this idea, but that’s a different topic of study). The theory is that there is a particular point in our development where we can learn this “mental trait” of perceiving depth via physical corners. This is kind of hard to put into words so this picture from the notes should help:

So basically, if we grow up in a society where this is the predominant architecture, we learn to perceive things being further away or closer to us due to the angles of the top and bottom of a line. Going back on Lecture 2’s idea of general psychology stripping context and content from studies, we can see that this kind of conclusion is not possible. Some other topics of interest where WEIRD societies are different are perceptions of fairness, folkbiological reasoning and egocentric spatial reasoning. Perceptions of fairness can be studied by telling the subject that they were to receive ten dollars and that they could split that amount in any way they wanted, which they would then share with another subject partaking in the study who they would never meet or see. People from WEIRD societies tended to share the money more often than people from non WEIRD societies (I am not 100% sure if this is correct, but I think it is. I also don’t remember what Dr. Heine had to say about folkbiological reasoning. If anyone knows either of these for certain, please leave me a comment!) For egocentric spatial reasoning, WEIRD societies tend to describe the position of an item relative to us by saying it’s on our left or right; other societies use cardinal directions such as north, south, east or west. 

When comparing Western and non-Western societies, there were some domains in which Western societies occupy an extreme position. Westerners tend to use analytic reasoning more than holistic reasoning. Comparing holistic and analytic reasoning is like comparing family resemblance-based and rule-based judgments. Westerners viewed analytic reasoning as the dominant reasoning style, however, a few years back, researchers found that analytic thinking was much less evident in East Asia. Now, there is more evidence showing that analytic thinking is less common almost everywhere in the non-Western world. Westerners also have more independent self-concepts, more motivations for self-enhancement, more desire for choice, they are less conforming and their morality is exclusively based on justice.

Next, in comparing Americans and non-Americans, we find that Americans harbor more defensive reactions to thoughts of death, they are more individualistic, their reasoning is even more analytical and they desire even more choice. When the thought of death crosses people’s minds, they show varied degrees of defensive responses. The thought of death may spur beliefs in the supernatural, patriotism, they more enthusiastically protect the status quo and they become more extreme in their position towards outgroup members. Americans seemed to show the most defensive reactions to thoughts of death; this may stem from the extreme individualistic ideals common throughout the US. When a society is geared more towards a collective whole, the thought of passing away may not be as bad because their culture, nation, etc will continue on. With extreme individualism, the most that will continue on after your death will be your family.

Finally, by comparing college educated Americans and other Americans we see that the former have higher heritability estimates for IQ, more independent views of self, they are less conforming, they have an increased justice-based morality, desire for choice and defensive responses to death thoughts than their less educated counterparts. Important to note here is that the higher heritability estimates for IQ may have more to do with socioeconomic status rather than genetic predisposition. For people to obtain a post secondary education, they must be able to financially support that decision. This is not possible for the bottom layer of the socioeconomic cake (REMINDER: Another thing you should be grateful for in life; we are blessed with the privilege to be in a university, let alone one with a beautiful campus so enjoy it!). In other words, perhaps these IQ results stem more from socioeconomic reasons than the evidence suggests; lower income homes may have less resources to spend on enriching the residential environment with educative amenities. Most adoption agencies (in developed countries) will not allow you to adopt if you have a low income. Low income families have more variability in education compared to mid to high income families; some families set a higher priority than others, Thus, there is a possibility that the heritability estimates of IQ are so high because of the restricted amount of estimates.

Sadly, this was the funniest comic on IQ tests I could find..

To conclude, when analyzing many key psychological phenomena, it is apparent that the WEIRD samples are truly the outliers.  A few exceptions to this case are when viewing emotional expressions (a smile means the same anywhere in the world), desired traits of partners (money and looks, ldo), etc. An obvious issue arises: how can we generalize to the world population or a “universal CPU” when theories are mostly built upon these WEIRD samples? Clearly, psychologists need to be wary of this and focus more attention on samples from other parts of the world; however, this is a difficult thing to overcome, as psychology is really only a revered topic in the WEIRD societies therefore making it expensive to study other countries all over the world. Reiterating the question posed by Dr. Heine at the end of class, what do you think psychologists should do to rectify this problem?