Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich And Democratic Research Articles

Playing games and asking questions in a non-WEIRD sample: Adapting and testing the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory in Western Burkina Faso.

A recent debate across the social sciences questions the generalizability of research findings obtained from Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) samples to the rest of humanity at large. In this paper, we aim to adapt and test the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI, Glick & Fiske, 1996), on a small, non-WEIRD sample of men in Burkina Faso. Using a within-participants experimental design we further attempt to cross-validate this adapted ASI with a behavioural measure, namely the dictator game. Generally, the adapted version of the ASI does not perform well in terms of validity and reliability. In the dictator game, women generally receive a larger proportion of the stake than men. While the allocations to male recipients are not related to participants’ levels of hostile or benevolent sexism, there is a significant negative correlation between benevolent sexism and allocations to female recipients.

Applying Memory Research on Campus

OpinionApplying Memory Research on CampusJennifer M. TalaricoJennifer M. Talarico Department of Psychology, Lafayette College, Easton, PA, USA Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:February 28, 2015https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000173PDFView Full Text ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInReddit SectionsMoreReferences Botzung, A. , Rubin, D. C. , Miles, A. , Cabeza, R. , & LaBar, K. S. (2010). Mental hoop diaries: Emotional memories of a college basketball game in rival fans. The Journal of Neuroscience, 30, 2130–2137. First citation in articleCrossref, Google Scholar Dunlosky, J. , Rawson, K. A. , Marsh, E. J. , Nathan, M. J. , Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14, 4–58. First citation in articleCrossref, Google Scholar Edwards, F. (2012). Early to rise? The effect of daily start times on academic performance. Economics of Education Review, 31, 970–983. First citation in articleCrossref, Google Scholar Hastorf, A. H. , Cantril, H. (1954). They saw a game: A case study. Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology, 49, 129–134. First citation in articleCrossref, Google Scholar Henrich, J. , Heine, S. J. , Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61–83. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X0999152X First citation in articleCrossref, Google Scholar Kelly, H. O. (2011, June). New congressional attacks on behavioral science. (American Psychological Association Government Relations update). Retrieved from www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2011/06/congressional-attacks.aspx First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Kuwabara, K. J. , Pillemer, D. B. (2010). Memories of past episodes shape current intentions and decisions. Memory, 18, 365–374. First citation in articleCrossref, Google Scholar Pillemer, D. B. , Goldsmith, L. R. , Panter, A. T. , White, S. H. (1988). Very long-term memories of the first year in college. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 14, 709–715. First citation in articleCrossref, Google Scholar Talarico, J. M. (2009). Freshman flashbulbs: Memories of unique and first-time events in starting college. Memory, 17, 256–265. First citation in articleCrossref, Google Scholar Talarico, J. M. , Moore, K. M. (2012). Memories of “The Rivalry”: Differences in how fans of the winning and losing teams remember the same game. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26, 746–756. First citation in articleCrossref, Google ScholarFiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byPsychological Research on Memory, Meet the Real World28 February 2015 | Zeitschrift für Psychologie, Vol. 222, No. 2 Volume 222Issue 2January 2014ISSN: 2190-8370eISSN: 2151-2604 InformationZeitschrift für Psychologie (2014), 222, pp. 118-119 https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000173.© 2014Hogrefe PublishingPDF download

The Weirdest People in the World?

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.