Are Psychologists Too Complacent to Change Their Field?
Psychology should be about all people, not just those in wealthy nations. So say most researchers. But, this paper argues, those words don't mean they actually care.
For generations, the discipline of psychology has been dominated by people from one narrow subset of humanity. The designers of psychological experiments, and those who served as test subjects in them, have been mostly WEIRD. According to the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich, who identified the problem, WEIRD stands for societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Because the majority of human beings don't share those characteristics, the WEIRD bias casts doubt on psychologists’ claims about universal traits of "the mind."
Henrich and his co-authors pointed this out more than a decade ago. So, last month, in this article on the website of the Association for Psychological Science, Patrick S. Forscher, Dana M. Basnight-Brown, Natalia Dutra, Adeyemi Adetula, Miguel Silan, and Hans IJzerman ask: Why hasn't much of anything been done to reduce WEIRD dominance? Could it be just really hard to coordinate? Maybe, they write.
However, there is a less charitable interpretation of the lack of action: Most practicing psychologists simply do not care enough about the WEIRD problem to do anything about it. If true, this explanation would suggest an attitude of complacency: Psychological scientists are doing well enough with their ad hoc studies on undergraduates and MTurkers to satisfy the developed world’s appetite for think pieces, YouTube videos, and pop psychology books. Meanwhile, there are classes to teach, grants to write, committees to chair, and senior theses to supervise. Is solving the WEIRD problem really worth the effort?
The psychologists here are speaking to their colleagues, but if you're a civilian interested in the pipeline that sends ideas out of psych labs and into your conversations, the whole piece is worth reading.
For the purposes of this newsletter, I'll just mark the subject of institutional and intellectual indifference as worth thinking about. It's easy for clever people to identify a problem and talk about it and not actually change much about business-as-usual. Another example, maybe, of "care" that is not care?