INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY?helping clients there who have mental health problems, and running
rehabilitation programmes. A small minority also advise police on
so-called psychological profiling – using clues from a crime scene and
patterns of behaviour to infer the characteristics of the perpetrator and
the way they’re likely to behave next.
The future of psychology
Psychology is thriving. Students are queuing in ever greater numbers to
study the subject. New technologies are offering undreamt of opportuni-
ties. The world over, from President Obama’s White House appointments
(for example, Cass R. Sunstein) to the French prime minister’s creation
of a brain and behaviour research unit to inform public policy, there are
signs that political leaders are recognizing the value to be gained from
this burgeoning young science.
And yet it would be remiss not to mention the challenges facing the
discipline. Perhaps most worryingly of all, commentators have noticed
that an extraordinarily high percentage of experimental participants in
psychology are WEIRD – that is, from Western, Educated, Industrialized,
Rich and Democratic countries.
Writing in The American Psychologist in 2008, Jeffrey Arnett analysed
leading psychology journals and found that 68 percent of participants
were based in the US, and 96 percent were from rich, Western countries. In
a separate 2004 analysis in The Psychologist magazine, Hugh Foot and Alison
Sanford found that up to 90 percent of participants in American research
on perception and cognition were university students. These figures
suggest that many findings from psychology are grounded on a seriously
biased sample. What’s true of the average white, youthful, middle-class
student may well not apply to an elderly farmer in West Africa.
This argument was made most loudly in a 2010 article by Joseph
Henrich of the University of British Columbia and his colleagues. They
dug out rare research featuring diverse samples to show that there
are cross-cultural differences in various aspects of human psychology,
including visual perception, memory, morality and the heritability of
intelligence. In fact, according to Henrich’s team, “WEIRD participants”
often perform unusually compared to people from other cultures,
making them a particularly inappropriate subject group to study.
“...[T]hese empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in
addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from
this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity”, they wrote.