

Behavioral science paper upends discipline - anigbrowl
http://northwestern.academia.edu/documents/0079/0481/Target_and_commentaries.pdf

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shalmanese
This is, perhaps, the strongest introduction I've ever read to an academic
paper:

"In the tropical forests of New Guinea, the Etoro believe that for a boy to
achieve manhood he must ingest the semen of his elders. This is accomplished
through ritualized rites of passage that require young male initiates to
fellate a senior member (Herdt 1984/1993; Kelley 1980). In contrast, the
nearby Kaluli maintain that male initiation is only properly done by ritually
delivering the semen through the initiate’s anus,not his mouth. The Etoro
revile these Kaluli practices, ﬁnding them disgusting. "

~~~
VMG
Indeed. I couldn't go on reading after that because I had the feeling that the
article already climaxed (pun slightly intended)

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randomwalker
The paper takes a long time to get to an illustration of its thesis, but the
very first example is stunning:

There are cultures in the world that are _completely unaffected_ by this
illusion - <http://goldmark.org/jeff/papers/ridley/html/img1.gif>

If something as basic as visual perception is so hugely affected by culture,
the paper asks, is there _any_ aspect of psychology that is not? How, then,
can we trust the conclusions of studies whose subjects are all drawn from the
same, highly unusual cultural group?

I'm glad I stuck with it until I got to this point. Now I _have_ to read the
rest of it.

~~~
gwern
I think the arrow thing may be idiosyncratic. I, as best I can recall, have
never seen the top arrow as being longer.

Things as important as mental visualization have been denied in all
seriousness by great intellectuals; are they lying or are they just different?
see <http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/>

------
mturmon
Here is a summary of this very long review article, as done by a Science
magazine summary I read:

"Although undergraduates from wealthy nations are numerous and willing
research subjects, psychologists are beginning to realize that they have a
drawback: They are WEIRDos. That is, they are people from Western, educated,
industrialized, rich, and democratic cultures. In a provocative review paper
published last week, a pair of researchers argues that WEIRDos aren't
representative of humans as a whole and that psychologists routinely use them
to make broad, and quite likely false, claims about what drives human
behavior."

~~~
cabalamat
Not only that, they are typically psychology students, which further narrows
down their typical ages and educational backgrounds.

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anigbrowl
Please don't edit the title. 'WEIRD people:' references an acronym in the
paper's title (Western Educated Industrial Rich Democracies) which is
fundamental to the thesis presented.

~~~
phreeza
I posted this without editing the title a while back, went unnoticed...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1506269>

~~~
petercooper
You didn't put in buzzwords like "behavioral," "science," or "paper."

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shalmanese
I find the title on HN to be overly dramatic. There have been criticisms of
this bias for at least 40 years that I'm aware of. What this article does is
add more empirical nuance to this well-worn criticism but it's certainly not
upending anything.

------
siglesias
However, in the case of Behavioral Economics (in which I am a researcher) the
"generalizability" of such findings to the "human race" is something of a red
herring. Do you think Wal-Mart cares when they routinely take advantage of bad
depth judgments and sell cereal boxes that appear bigger when in fact they
just shrink the dimension not visible on the shelf? When they routinely offer
decoy options in stereos that make the more profitable option appear more
compelling? Guess what: consumer psychology, especially for our commercially
driven culture, is endlessley valuable.

Call it what you will, the WEIRD world is a big world--one whose laws and
economic assumptions have great impact on the rest of civilization. The goal
of behavioral economics isn't to generalize about the human race (although
several of its hypotheses do), but rather to inform sound policy (to not take
human rationality for granted, for example) and to help WEIRDOs better
understand their day-to-day decisions so that they can make better ones going
forward. I think that's a valuable program, don't you?

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gwern
LessWrong coverage from last year:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/17x/beware_of_weird_psychological_sa...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/17x/beware_of_weird_psychological_samples/)

------
all
This shows how little the basic Western mindset has changed from the days of
imperialism, colonies, and barbarian savages. I recall, in my anthropology
course of yore, encountering similar disparities between the WEIRD cultures
and whatever people group we were studying. Nobody ever thought to put
ourselves on the spectrum. It was always presented as 'us' vs 'them'. And 'we'
were always the right way to do things, of course. That being said, I'm glad
my culture didn't have such rituals for manhood.

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wisty
I find the content of the article more interesting than the conclusion. A good
read on the differences between cultures.

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Ardit20
Most psychology students would know about cultural differences and that you
can not generalise. In fact, when writing a paper the first criticism is that
generalisation should be made with caution because... and you list well pretty
much every variability in the data.

That said however, most psychology students are going to be working in the US
and apply their knowledge to the US population.

It was interesting however to read about the differences between students and
the general population.

I think one suggestion might be that rather than culture per se, it might be
that some societies are more evolved which could explain many of the
differences when comparing the west to the rest. Also, the focus of the paper
seems to be on trying to find universal processes, and probably after give a
just so evolutionary story for these processes. I do however think that
looking at how we have evolved is not much different than looking at history.
It might teach us of what was, but in very limited ways of what is.

It is a good paper though. It highlights that psychologists are a bit lazy and
do not do proper and thorough research but just create some theory and find
the minimum data needed to support it.

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zyfo
Reminds me of the Pirahã 'One-Two-Many' language.

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6303-language-may-
shap...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6303-language-may-shape-human-
thought.html)

