Theory of Knowledge - Course Companion for Students Marija Uzunova Dang Arvin Singh Uzunov Dang

: “WEIRD societies … are some of the
description
psychologically unusual people on Earth”
most
et al 2010b). Why did so many scientists
(Henrich
WEIRD was normal?
assume
8.2 shows the distribution of the studies
Figure
in Psychological Science in 2017: 93%
published
2003 and 2007, 96 per cent of experimental
Between
in the leading psychology journals were
volunteers
68 per cent of papers relied exclusively on US
WEIRD;
and in the prestigious Journal of Personality and
subjects;
Psychology, 67 per cent of total subjects were US
Social
students. ‘Many elds have a model organism
psychology
they study … A lot of medicine is done with mice, a
that
of genetics is done with fruit ies. And in psychology,
lot
studies of children and development are from
Most
‘with the time, resources and motivation to
families
human sciences are predicated on the
The
that people are similar enough
assumption
allow for generalizations about human
to
But how similar are we? What are the
behaviour.
of generalizing and universalizing
implications
results of these studies, based on the
the
of US undergraduate students, to the
behaviour
of humankind? Fortunately, this is not just a
rest
from countries coloured blue on the map.
came
blue shows the United States; the mid-
Dark
shade shows Anglophone colonies with a
blue
majority; light blue is used
European-descent
Western Europe. The regions are sized by
for
(data from Hruschka 2018).
population
their infant to participate in a development
bring
at a university laboratory’, as Anne Fernald
study
Stanford University wrote in her response to the
of
paper. These are, she pointed out, ‘even less
WEIRD
than the college students who predominate
diverse
studies with adults’. At the 2010 International
in
on Infant Studies, less than one per cent
Conference
the 1,000 presentations included participants from
of
families, even though they make up
disadvantaged
per cent of children in the US.
20–40
that the answer is “No, WEIRD is weird
evidence
and in fact may “represent the worst
indeed”,
on which to base our understanding
population
homo sapiens” (Henrich et al 2015).
of
results based on this subset to
Extrapolating
populations around the world is not only
other
suspect, it can also have damaging
scientifically
consequences, as discussed in III.2.
real-world
III. Methods and tools
III. Methods and tools
Figure 8.3
Distribution of studies published in Psychological Science in 2017. The map is distorted to reect relative population sizes.
Source Hruschka (2018).
the model organism is the American undergraduate. …’
(Colvile 2016)
rhetorical knowledge question because we have
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