Understanding WEIRD Populations

Hello. My name is Dr Kieran O'Keefe.

I'm associate professor of education with

Research based at Buckinghamshire New University.

In addition, I'm head of school for human and social sciences.

It's a school that covers a number of different subject areas, including

psychology, criminology, social science, education,

sports, science and sports therapy.

In addition to my management roles, I'm also an academic

and a psychologist specialising in

investigative and forensic psychology.

For this course,

I'm going to be focusing on weird

versus non weird within a forensic psychology context

that effectively means looking at

non weird studies that have been done in classic areas of forensic psychology

and then discussing why there's a difference between using that sort of population

and a traditional, weird population that is so often the case in psychology.

And so the three areas that I'll be covering will be first of all,

giving an overview about what we mean by weird

and then going into detail. In two areas of forensic psychology.

One is altruistic punishment. The other one is moral reasoning

and studies that have been done with non weird populations

and then finishing with a discussion about the reasons why there

might be a difference in the results between weird versus non weird

studies effectively

for the first lecture.

What I'd like to do is first of all,

define what we mean when we're talking about weird and why we're

even talking about weird within a psychology or forensic psychology context.

Weird as an acronym coined by Henrik Hein and nor Enzian.

And it's about samples that are drawn

from populations that are specifically white,

educated, industrialist, rich

and democratic

and an acronym. Therefore weird.

We could confidently say in psychology, generally,

that 99% of all published studies

rely on participants recruited from populations

that fit that criteria.

This reliance on a limited population of participants is problematic

from a number of different reasons.

Most obviously, it's a threat to the external validity of our findings.

If we only study psychological phenomenon in one population,

we don't know if or how it works in others. Effectively,

we're limiting our general is ability

to other populations.

This original idea was put forward by Henrik and colleagues in a 2010 paper.

And when we're thinking about

weird,

researchers within psychology often implicitly assume

that either there is little variation across human populations,

or that studies that are done with these

standard subjects are as representative of the species as any other

population.

You will find in many psychology articles

that they will talk about generalising the results

to the wider population.

A review of the comparative database

from across the behavioural 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,

i e.

That they are frequent outliers.

Think about it

this way,

as psychology as a science or a discipline

were effectively using a population

that itself is only representing a small percentage

of the world's population.

So therefore, on that basis alone, we could argue it's difficult

to generalise to the rest of the world's population.

Henrik A. Towel

and his team effectively suggests that members of weird societies,

including young Children,

are among the least representative populations one could find

for generalising about humans.

Many of these findings involved domains that

are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology,

motivation

and behaviour. Hence,

there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming

that a particular behavioural phenomena

is universal. Based on sampling from a single sub population.

So think about that again.

There is no obvious a priori grounds for claiming when

you discover a particular behavioural phenomenon with one small population

that that is therefore, instantly General Izabal

to the rest of the world's population.

Overall,

these empirical patterns that we're talking about 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.

So we're seeing an interesting,

fascinating and I would argue, long overdue

development within psychology

to widen its participant pool

to think very carefully when claims of generalist ability are made,

but also within forensic psychology

to think more about key theories and studies that have been

done traditionally with weird populations and do they equally apply with non

weird populations.

So what I've tried to do here is give you a context,

an overview of what we're talking about in

terms of weird populations or weird studies within

psychology.

For the next lecture, I'd like to give you

the first of a couple of examples where they have used non weird populations,

and this is tackling a particular theme within forensic psychology,

which is about punishment and specifically altruistic punishment