Much of the psychological theory, and conclusions, that underpin judgments about other people’s motivations, is based on research done in the Western world.

Psychology is very new in China, to the extent that after opening up in 1979 the number of qualified psychologists in China could be counted on the fingers of one hand. It was much the same for lawyers, although I think the figure for qualified lawyers was about 70.

So how dangerous is it to rely on this research, and how much of it is applicable to the Eastern world?

According to many researchers, the fundamentals are the same but there are obvious differences. Skills are easier to measure and seem to suffer less from cultural distortion. They show consistency around world. But the motivations that drive people into the office every day do not show the same consistency. If anything, what is constant about them is the lack of constancy.

People from different cultures have been raised differently; make decisions in different ways; and as a result have imbued a starkly different set of values. It varies from the Protestant Work Ethic of Northern Europe to the communitarian work spirit in Japan; from the free-wheeling anything-goes attitudes in San Francisco to the conservative don’t-ever-borrow-money approach that you find in Germany. The differences go right down to the level of whether people will accept phonecalls from a telemarketer, or whether they need to know someone before they do business with them.

But how different are these issues across the world?  And with the reliance on Western students for psychological research, could we be missing out on this variance?

Into the mix comes a new study which says that an over-reliance on research subjects from the U.S. and other Western nations can, and we’d assume probably does, produce false claims about human psychology and behavior. They contend that the psychological tendencies of the research subjects, usually US and European university students, are highly unusual compared to the global population. The researchers call the subjects WEIRD because they are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD).

Money quote (my emphasis):

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

Specifically they suggest there are big differences when it comes to motivation, behavior, visual perception, fairness, spatial and moral reasoning, memory and conformity. WEIRD subjects tend to be more individualistic, analytic, concerned with fairness, existentially anxious, less conforming and attentive to context compared to those from non-WEIRD societies.

So be careful about universal claims in any psychology research. You may end up making weird decisions.