the weirdest people in the world?

WEIRD as in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.

I'm so excited about this acronym, I'll readily admit to not having read the source article yet! Here's the abstract by psychologists Joe Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia:

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 obvious a priori grounds 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 of human nature 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.

Found via Andrew Goldstone's "Race, Ethnicity, Brains" - which is in turn a response to this really intriguing "fairy tale" on cultural neuroscience by Paula Moya. Goldstone and Moya both teach at Stanford.

* Image: inspired illustration of Henrich, Heine, Norenzayan's research by Only Dead Fish.

word cloud #2: domestications, multispecies resettlement, barbarians

Another "words (and ideas) that caught my attention" post, apropos of the "origins of human rule" from entry #1 below. Here are the titles of a set of upcoming lectures at Harvard by the the political anthropologist James Scott:

Four Domestications: Fire, Plants, Animals and… Us

The Late Neolithic Multi-Species Resettlement Camp

The Long Golden Age of Barbarians, a.k.a. Non-State Peoples

Which reminds me, I need to read James Scott!

word cloud #1: human rule, before present

Almost everyday I come across interesting turns of phrase or figures of thought that make me pause and think: "oh, I should jot this down somewhere." So I'm going to start collecting them here. This will also double as a public bookmarking system since, more often than not, I won't actually have had the chance to study the source of the phrase yet.

My first two entries are from the "Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles since 13,000" mapping project at Hypercities. I don't know enough about either to explain what they are, so I won't fake it. But I do plan to read through the "Ghost Metropolis" materials, a crazy ambitious history of (what we now know as) L.A. In the course of skimming through the first couple screens these phrases wormed their way into my brain:

1. The Origins of Human Rule of Southern California: which, I learned, began "13.1 to 13 thousand calendar years BP" on Santa Rosa, one of the Channel Islands (when you click on the geolocate button  you swoop in from an outerspace view of the planet earth to this reedy blue dot on a desolate virtual landscape. It's not so much breath-taking as heart-breaking). But to the point: what struck me is this phrase "human rule." Not (just) "human presence," but "rule." I'm intrigued with the idea of politicizing early human life through a multispecies frame. More on this another time.

2. BP / Before Present: I noticed that the "13,000" in the project title doesn't have "BCE" or the old-fashioned "BC" attached. In the body of the text I came across this curious (and perhaps unfortunate) abbreviation, BP. Trusty wikipedia tells me this means "before present." But evidently this present, among the scientists who use this time scale notation system, is not the present per se - but 1950, the point at which modern carbon-dating methods became standard.
     There's a certain shabby beauty in the idea that 1950 somehow constitutes an eternal now (though Wikipedia further informs me that "to account for the concern that the year 1950 has by now moved away from the present significantly, the abbreviation BP has also been re-interpreted to mean Before Physics.") But I wish the idea is as relativistic as the term BP implies. That rather than being a series of fixed points, the past is always relative to the present, always on the move.