Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

Max Weber (1894-1920) is generally recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern sociology. This collection pays homage to his influence, not just within sociology, but also political theory, science and religion.

Professor Allwood (2011, ?On the foundation of the indigenous psychologies?, Social Epistemology 25 (1): 3?14) challenges indigenous psychologists by describing their definition of culture as a rather abstract and delimited entity that is too ?essentialized? and ?reified?, as well as ?somewhat old?fashioned? and ?too much influenced by early social anthropological writings? (p. 5). In this article, I make a distinction between the scientific microworld and the lifeworld and argue that it is necessary for social scientists to construct scientific microworlds of (...) theories for the sake of pushing forward the progress of any field in the social sciences. Allwood and J. W. Berry (2006, ?Origins and development of indigenous psychologies: An international analysis?, International Journal of Psychology 41 (4): 243?68) also recognized that western mainstream psychology is a kind of indigenous psychology. Therefore, theoretical construction in western psychology also implies a reification of culture. My central question is, then: why is the reification of the western culture of individualism a merit for the progress of psychology, and why the reification of non?western cultures by indigenous psychologists a mistake? (shrink)

Brian J. Walsh and J. Richard Middleton offer a vision for transforming economics, politics, technology and every part of contemporary culture.

This interview with Kwang?Kuo Hwang offers an introductory insight into the emergence of the field of indigenous psychologies. In the process of doing so, it attempts to illuminate the main historical factors behind its development, its key issues of debate and the important challenges it faces. It also provides details pertaining to new theories and methods that have recently emerged in connection with the indigenous approach and how they have contributed to its advancement. In addition, it outlines Hwang?s proposed strategy (...) towards the goal of developing a universal psychology. (shrink)

Discourse on Thinking questions that must occur to us the moment we manage to see a familiar situation in unfamiliar light.

Scientific indigenous psychologies have been developed mostly in non‐western countries. Indigenous psychologies, seeing mainstream psychology as too western in its cultural foundation, are based on the culture of the society being investigated. In this article I critique the concept of culture used by representative researchers of indigenous psychologies in the English‐language literature and contrast it to current concepts of culture in the social sciences. Furthermore, I argue that the concept of culture used in this literature has implications for the cultural (...) contents that are identified as the culture of a specific society. I also suggest that the political dimensions of what contents of culture are associated with a specific society are not given sufficient attention in this literature. Finally, alternative approaches to culture for the indigenous psychologies are discussed. (shrink)

The culture concept used in the indigenous psychologies is important since these psychologies aim to be rooted in the local culture of the research participants. Culture is an empirical phenomenon. Thus, the extent to which meaning content is shared in a society, and by what categories of people, is an empirical issue. It should not be solved by default by the use of a culture concept that assumes that all cultural content is shared. The philosophical and pragmatic?political reasons suggested by (...) Hwang and Liu are not convincing enough to change this conclusion. Moreover, irrespective of the cultural concept used, it is imperative that the researcher has empirically informed him/herself about the cultural understanding of the participants in the study. Finally, the indigenous psychologies are not intrinsically allied with the nation state and need to be seen as a part of cross?cultural psychology. (shrink)