The global community includes an incredibly diverse population of humans, yet people often wrongly assume that every culture is similar to their own. Surprisingly this erroneous assumption appears even in research published in the top psychological journals.
Robert Gonzales explains:
The vast majority of psychological studies recruit test subjects who are Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic – or “WEIRD.” Which is… well, weird, given that these people represent a very small segment of the global human population, from a cultural standpoint.
So What?
Gonzales borrows the term WEIRD from a paper title “The Weirdest People in the World,” which was written by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia. The image at right captures a portion of an infographic exploring that article, including the troubling statistic that 93% of studies published in the top six psychological journals from 2003-2007 use only Westerners as their subjects.
How does your own Western life experience color the way you view the world? How aware are you of your own Western bias?
Note: For a consideration of Western bias related to the task of reading the Bible, check out my post reviewing Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien’s Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible (2012).