FAZ.NET, 23rd February 2011
allow, my name is Alfonso
provides the ideal test subject for psychologists like Goofy's nephew: highly educated, financially secure and a typical Westerner. How she thinks and feels, should then also the rest of the world apply. Do you have this kind of research does not occur in the bin?
By Georg Rüschemeyer
Maybe Depends on the cultural background? The Müller-Lyer illusion
Who wants to be a psychologist, has to make in many hours of first-time itself becomes a guinea pig. The experimental conscription in the universities brought the already inquiring colleagues willing volunteers. But can knowledge of the of young, educated and economically secure Western students Industrial nations are obtained, transferred at all to the rest of humanity?
Not at all, say the authors of a recent in Behavioral and Brain Sciences published article titled "The weirdest people in the world". Together with two colleagues from the University of British Columbia is dominated by the psychologist Joseph Henrich is a new term for the typical participant psychological studies: western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic - or just WEIRD, what in English so much as strange strange or bizarre means. The concentration of research on such oddities of the human species conceals not only the great variability even in seemingly basic cognitive functions, thought Henry. "Weird" would in most cases even at the extreme edge of the statistical distribution of posts and thus provide a completely false picture of the functions of the human spirit.
hard-wired in the brain
fact, psychological studies are based almost exclusively on the study of people who make up only a little more than ten percent of the world's population. Thus found in a 2008 American Psychologist published analysis of the content of six leading trade magazines that 68 percent of the subjects came from the United States, another 27 percent from other Western industrialized nations, about three quarters of them were students of psychology.
go straight in cognitive psychology, many researchers implicitly assume that their results are representative of the people themselves, criticizing Joseph Henrich. The underlying assumption that to be fundamental things such as perception, learning and memory as a result of human evolution more or less hardwired in the brain and therefore similar for all people. An assumption that does not match the available evidence, the authors say, and prove their thesis that WEIRD are actually more statistical outliers from the human normal distribution, with a number of examples. One of these so-called Müller-Lyer illusion, one of the most famous optical illusions, from the point of the center line of a double arrow is shorter than a reality show in the same long line at the ends of the scroll bars to the inside. The Müller-Lyer illusion is found in many textbooks as an example of cognitive impenetrability, ie the fact that one of the lines will still perceive as different lengths, if you know they are not.
now able to show the American psychologist Marshall Segall already in the sixties of the last century, that is supposedly based on basic visual processing processes Müller-Lyer illusion certainly not perceived by everyone equally. This American students as they assess the same length, one has the apparently shorter line about twenty percent longer stand. In 14 non-Western peoples, the team examined Segall, this value is significantly lower. The members of the San people of southern Africa to take both lines from the outset even the same length as true. One theory is that this could have to do with how often one in Living with straight lines and angles is facing. The view would therefore be directly dependent on culture and lifestyle.
Another example of Henry's own special field of economic decision-making is the so-called ultimatum game: One of two players will receive a cash amount that he can share them using a player. Accepts the offer, the player may keep both their share, he refuses to go away empty both. WEIRD typical offer is usually between forty and fifty percent of the amount and reject offers from less than thirty percent. These results have long been as a result of social evolution of man and his innate sense of justice thus interpreted. But flying off as researchers such as Henry finally in all the world to play the game with other peoples, most behaved much more like a Homo economicus: You did a very small deals were but the players almost always accepted.
Significant cognitive differences
Another example is the perception of space and direction, and its representation in language: panelists from the Indo-European language area prefer an egocentric reference system. "Right" and "left" are with them a matter of the viewer. Many other languages provide spatial relationships, however, prefers allocentrically, so using absolute directions again ("As a fat spider sitting on your shoulder southern"). In one in January in the journal Cognition published study, researchers show Daniel Haun at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, that this difference is not merely linguistic, but also shapes the thinking.
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Haun showed children of hunter-gatherer people of ÞAkhoe Hai / / om (the special characters are for various clicking sounds) from northern Namibia, three lined up on a table toy animals. Children should memorize their order. They were then asked to take the other side of the table where they should establish the animals again in the same sequence. The ÞAkhoe Hai / / om were apparently the absolute position impressed and asked, despite the 180 degree rotation, the northern animal back to the northern position, so swapped the right and left. For school children from a Dutch reference group, the animal was left after the turn left again.
addition to the strong contrast between strange Westerners and normal acting hunters and gatherers Joseph Henrich calls but also examples of significant cognitive differences between Westerners and Asians, Americans and other Westerners, and finally between psychology students and average Americans.
vulnerability to the optical illusion
"For us this is of course a godsend," says Daniel Haun, it has a comparative cultural psychologist more difficult to retrieve information. Students working with colleagues on the other hand think of a morning and evening experiments analyzing the first results. The central claim that WEIRD subject almost always at the extreme edge, Haun holds however for vulnerable: "As the authors have already picked out the finest examples." A counter-example is the Ebbinghaus illusion, appear in the two identical circles of different sizes, when times of small, are sometimes surrounded by large circles. Here too there are significant cultural differences, just WEIRD lie in their sensitivity to the optical illusion in the middle between the Japanese (still vulnerable) and the African people of the Himba.
The total of 28 short comments that were published with the main article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences come to a mixed verdict. Almost all colleagues appreciate that the long suppressed topic again high on the agenda. In a similar manner as would in psychology and in linguistics, far too many of Indo-European transfer languages lessons learned on human language itself, writes about the linguist Stephen Levinson. The Leipzig primatologist Christophe Boesch even warns against sale results to zoo monkeys as representative of their whole way.
about the teachings of the debate, most researchers agree: It would take more field research and far more cautious interpretations of research results to students traditional western thinking and behavior. The origins of their subjects, but not the only structural problem of psychological research, as the comments in Behavioral and Brain Sciences show the way: Of the total of 29 authors and author teams came 22 from North America, six from Europe and only one from the rest of the world.
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