If You're Reading This, You're Probably Weird

What do I mean by weird? Put simply, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). You may be up in arms. Someone somewhere else is considered "Eastern," poor and undemocratic. Well, that is also the point. Because, in all likelihood, you are probably one (if not more) of these things. You are probably educated enough to read a scientific blog, industrialized enough — perhaps also rich enough —- to have access to a computer and leisurely browsing time.

Regardless of your thoughts on the matter, this makes you a poor representative of your species. In sum, weird.

As of 2008, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology — the premier journal of human social behaviour — 80% of the subjects had been undergraduates in psychology, the clear majority of which are American. And this is true for behavior publications en masse: 70% of all psychological publications come from the United States and almost the same percentage of those American results is based on undergraduates studying first-year psychology. Seems like the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology of First-Year American Psychology Undergraduate Students would be a more fitting name for the publication.

But even top natural science journals, including Nature and Science, often extend brain and behavior findings from undergraduates to our species as a whole, providing cookie-cutter headlines for popular science websites obsessed with search engine rankings. That is to say, the only human brain we have actively tried to understand is the one that is the weirdest, most foreign, and most inadequate for a comprehensive understanding of homo sapiens.

Since the 1990s, we have known that cultures differ quite acutely in economic decision-making, punishment, formal v. intuitive reasoning, and other areas of moral psychology. But our previous folk assumptions about homo sapiens have been even more compromised by continuing research into differences in areas such as neuroanatomy, previously held to be fundamental and "universal." Some recent examples:

• A 2010 comparative cross-cultural study found that low-level perceptual processing and spatial cognition differed between Western versus non-Western, industrial versus small-scale societies, and even between the US and the rest of the West.¹
• A transcultural neuroimaging study conducted in 2008 demonstrated that one's cultural background can influence the neural activity that underlies both high- and low-level cognitive functions.²
• A 2010 paper, aptly titled "Culture Wires the Brain," found substantial differences between Westerners and East Asians in focal object processing, attention, and categorization.³

So what makes the WEIRD so weird? The most popular explanation is that these weird subjects — not solely, but in part because of their education, wealth, democracy, etc. — are more individualistic and thus have a tendency to process objects, rules, categories, and even distance in different ways. This definition is wanting, but it does get the point across: we are cognitively different because we are cultured differently.

This is a difficult pill to swallow. When one speaks of cultural difference as something more fundamental and innate than a simple meal or music preference, there is bound to be a strong reaction. But self-censorship would inevitably be a glass ceiling on our understanding of the pan-human condition. Differences ought to be accounted for as differences and no more. Not superior or inferior functions, but (slightly) different functions. A healthy comparison might be the differences in compound metabolism or disease diagnosis between cultures (i.e., that Chinese people may not have some of the detrimental effects from cigarette smoking that Westerners do).4 It is clear that there are differences in these regards across human cultures — even if we do not know the exact reasons — but it is equally clear that this does not imply that any cultures have "inferior" or "superior" functions.

Even our neuroanatomy is shaped by our experiences, which mainly occur in a specific cultural context. By raising awareness not of our differences but of our respective cognitive biases, we can begin to appreciate the uniqueness of human beings across the planet with more clarity . . . and a lot less weirdness.

--Taylor Burns

Image Credit: http://wikimedia.org

References:

1. Henrich, J. J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. The Weirdest People in the World? Behavioural and Brain Sciences 33, 61–83 (2010).

2. Han, S., and Northoff, G. Culture-sensitive neural substrates of human cognition: a transcultural neuroimaging approach. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9, 646–654 (2008).

3. Park, D. C., & Huang, C. M. Culture Wires the Brain: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science 5, 391–400 (2010).

4. Shriver, M. D. Ethnic Variation as a Key to the Biology of Human Disease. Annals of Internal Medicine 127:5, 401–403 (1997).