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Oct 28, 2017 · Psychology. Attracting WEIRD Samples. Attracting representative samples requires thought. Posted October 28, 2017 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan. Key points. A large proportion of psychology studies rely...
May 1, 2010 · The over-sampling of American college students may be skewing our understanding of human behavior, finds an analysis by researchers from the University of British Columbia.
Jun 16, 2024 · This article delves into the implications of the WEIRD bias in psychological research, examining its impact on the validity and generalizability of findings, and exploring ways to address these limitations.
- Why the acronym WEIRD? The acronym WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic—aims to raise people’s consciousness about psychological differences and to emphasize that WEIRD people are but one unusual slice of humanity’s cultural diversity.
- And yet you caution readers not to set up a WEIRD vs. non-WEIRD dichotomy as they read your book. Can you expand on that? That’s right. While WEIRD should raise people’s consciousness about psychological differences, it’s not meant to suggest a simplistic dichotomy or binary worldview.
- What are the big questions this book aims to answer? I’d say there are three, and they are interrelated. First, how can we explain the psychological diversity that has now been documented around the world?
- What’s the connection between culture and psychology? Our minds are frequently understood using a misleading digital computer metaphor, with our brains and psychological processes as the hardware and our cultures—our values, customs and know-how—as the software.
WEIRD is generally viewed as something that skews our understanding of human behavior. An analysis conducted by the researchers from the University of British Columbia finds that people from WEIRD societies not only represent as much as 80 percent of study participants, but are also outliers.
Summary. Psychology has a WEIRD problem. It is overly reliant on participants from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Over the last decade this problem has come to be widely acknowledged, yet there has been little progress toward making psychology more diverse.
Jun 6, 2023 · We have made some progress over the past decade in addressing the limitations of WEIRD samples in psychological science, but several challenges remain.
