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)

Recent trends in marketing have demonstrated an increased focus on in-store expenditures with the hope of “grabbing consumers” at the point of purchase: but does it make sense‘ To help answer this question, the authors examine the interplay between in-store and out-of-store factors on consumer attention to and evaluation of brands displayed on supermarket shelves. Using an eye-tracking experiment, they find that the number of facings obtained has a strong impact on evaluation that is entirely mediated by its effect on (...) visual attention and works particularly well for frequent users of the brand, for low market-share brands, and for young, highly educated consumers who are willing to trade off brand and price. They also find that gaining in-store attention is not always sufficient to drive sales. For example, top and middle shelf positions gain more attention than low shelf positions; however, only top shelf positions carry through to brand evaluation. Our results underscore the importance of combining eye-tracking and purchase data to obtain a full picture of the effects of in-store and out-of-store marketing at the point of purchase. (shrink)