When something is weird it is markedly different from its environment. In her piece on making strangers, Sara Ahmed notes that “The figure of the stranger is familiar; the stranger is thus someone we recognise (as a stranger) rather than someone we do not recognise.” In the piece she is deconstructing stranger danger, highlighting that the word stranger often carries an identity of its own, one that has been deliberately drawn to frame one’s reaction to it.
When we say research is WEIRD, we are looking at a very different type of stranger and environment. Yet, just like Ahmed’s stranger, research that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, takes a very specific known unknown shape – and is easily recognized when it is out of place.
Joe Henrich, who originally coined the term, argued that WEIRD people have a fundamentally different culture than everyone else in the world. That they think and act differently. He also argued that the Catholic church drove the cultural divergence by stopping people in Europe from marrying close relatives (thus implying that non-WEIRD groups are in-bred).
Like a host of other researchers, I personally disagree with Henrich’s argument about the process and culture of WEIRDness. I find it reductionist and even patronizing about different groups of people around the world. In this blog we will focus on the more common descriptive use of the term, as “a narrow subsegment of the world population.”
This narrow subsegment dominates the field of published research. The research that the development community cites and applies comes especially from the US, UK, Germany and a few other countries. It’s by Western, usually white, researchers at leading universities within these countries about well educated, well-off people within them. Those facts are largely indisputable, and that’s the definition of WEIRDness we’ll focus on here.
And it’s not just study samples either. We can break behavioral research into four parts, each of which draws from a narrow (WEIRD) subsegment of the population.
- Agenda setters: The people that prioritize research and their cultural milieu
- Researchers: The people who formulate and execute the research
- Location: The place the research is conducted
- Participants: The people who are researched in that location
The field is making progress in broadening “the participants” and “the location” of behavioral research, but little progress in the other areas. Less than 1% of authors and research participants in top psychology journals are from Africa despite the continent making up 17% of the world’s population. Even in areas where the research is becoming less centralized to the US it is largely through the inclusion of WEIRD Europe. This problem is faced by social science at large and the development community more broadly and has not significantly improved over the last three decades.
WEIRDness directly affects our work because it shapes whether or not we can effectively drive beneficial behavior change in international development. Blindly taking behavioral insights and techniques developed from well-off college students in the US can mean that we do ineffective, or simply foolish, things.
For example, here’s a story often told at Busara about our first experiment in the field. While trying to measure the effect of stress on decision making we turned to a well-known, and often used, technique that was originally developed in Germany. The Trier Social Stress Test uses public speaking to induce stress by requiring participants to make an interview-style presentation, followed by a surprise mental arithmetic test, in front of an interview panel who do not provide feedback or encouragement. Similarly, we had our participants give a mock interview in front of a panel of experts dressed in white lab coats. In western settings, this method produces a reliable and large impact on measured stress: speeches are stressful, and white coats conjure an image of an authoritative scientist.