By Jonathan Wynn
What if I told you that if you thought you were normal, you
might just be weird?
Some friends of mine have a ten-year-old, and I pulled a book
off their shelf to read it aloud. The title asks, Are You Normal? It’s a
fun book,
published by National Geographic and by Mark Shulman, intended to educate kids on
how their favorite foods and activities compared with other kids’ tastes, activities,
and home life. If you like your peanut butter chunky, for example, it means you
are only like 25% of the population. If you are an only child, you might not be
normal because only one in seven don’t have a brother or sister. And so on.
As sociologists, we know that what we might think of as ”normal”
is socially constructed and highly malleable from time to time. But we also
know that it is context-based. What is normal for some might not be normal in
one place might be very much so in another. Furthermore, the data in Are You Normal? is based upon kids the
United States and Canada (its target audience) even though there are rather
large differences across cultures. Peanut butter and siblings are less common in,
say, China.
Social scientists now know that this hiccup in our ways of
understanding social life—the limited populations we study—is weird. Or,
actually, WEIRD. An article, “The
Weirdest People in the World?” in Behavioral
and Brain Science points out that, like the National Geographic book, the
social sciences have focused on a very small slice of the human mosaic. Namely:
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic people. W.E.I.R.D. The
acronym is intended to point out that this demographic is not necessarily
generalizable.
The idea
comes from Joe Henrich’s graduate research in Peru. He conducted a variation on
a game called ”the prisoner’s dilemma,“ where a researcher gives one person an amount of money and
says that s/he can split it with a second person. That second person, however,
has the choice of either accepting the deal or nixing it completely.
Henrich
points out that, in the U.S., the sharing was largely 50-50 because folks were as
fair in distributing resources as they were punitive: the second subject was
more likely to nix what they saw as a raw deal. In Peru, Henrich found the
first person’s offerings as much less equitable and the second person was less
likely to squash any offer of money. The second person, in evaluating the
offer, was more likely to feel both parties should get at least something. It
turns out North Americans are different in this regard to many other groups in
the world. We are, in this way, WEIRD. (A more detailed discussion is available
here.)
Teaming
up with Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan, Joseph Henrich developed this into a larger quandary about the social
sciences. Here is a key quote from the original article:
The
fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of the
behavioral sciences may render them one of the worst subpopulations one could
study for generalizing about Homo sapiens…. WEIRD people, from this
perspective, grow up in, and adapt to, a rather atypical environment vis-à-vis
that of most of human history. It should not be surprising that their
psychological world is unusual as well (2010: 79-80).
When the
authors examined the top psychology journals, they found that 96% of the
research subjects were from Western, industrialized nations. I could not find similar data on sociology
(although my guess is that it might be less). Maybe you’ve experienced this
conundrum as well: I remember when I took my Introduction to Psychology class
we had to submit ourselves to at least three research experiments, and I
wondered how generalizable a study could be—one of them was about attitudes on
sex—based upon 18-20 year olds American’s perceptions of sexuality. Yikes!
The issue of WEIRDness reminds me of another experience from
my freshman year, reading Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual Among
the Nacirema.” Within, the author studies a
strange economically driven culture, wherein the “fundamental
belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly
and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease.”
I don’t want to ruin the trick of it, but suffice to say, it says more about what
is normal for ”us” than it does about what is normal for "them," and you should
take a few minutes to read the short piece. I am curious to know how you might
think this older study—from 1956—can illuminate our understandings of the WEIRD
”us” and the normal “them.”
So, what
can be done? Well, the authors recommend, among other things, that researchers
should study diverse and difficult-to-reach research subjects, and conduct more
cross-cultural research. They specifically encourage scientists to examine how
differences in culture shape different cognitive outcomes, motivations, and
choices. (Here’s a short
piece from Nature offering a brief
introduction from the authors, and here’s a great
critique of their thesis.)
These suggestions raise interesting questions about research
methods and assessment. If WEIRDians design research how might that shape the outcomes?
Are there different approaches that could mitigate the WEIRDian origins of
social science research? How might WEIRDians use and promote research conducted
by non-WEIRDian groups? How, do you think a sociologist,
perhaps Pierre Bourdieu,
would understand this cultural exchange?