The majority of the world’s behavioural studies are based on the weirdest people on Earth: us.

That is the claim of Dr. Joe Henrich, the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Evolution based at the University of British Columbia, who co-authored a review of the world’s top behavioural science journals that found 96 per cent of their findings were based on Western nationals.

What’s wrong with that? We are freaks when our behaviour is compared to the rest of the world. And while researchers claim their findings are about mankind, the way we operate isn’t just different to our earthly cohabitants, we are on the fringes.

“The findings suggest that members of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies (WEIRDS), including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans,” the study reads.

Would you read the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (of Undergraduate Psychology Students)? Probably not, but according to Henrich and his team, 80 per cent of the study subjects in the prestigious journal were psych undergrads.

“Since undergraduates are so convenient, we imagine that they are going to be somewhere near the mean (of cultural variation), but in our analysis that is not the case,” says Henrich in an interview with the Star. “In fact, they tended to be near the end of the distribution.”

The UBC study, The Weirdest People in the World? , compared research subjects from modern industrialized societies with those from small-scale societies. It then compared the university-educated Americans normally used in studies with the rest of the Western world.

So, why are the people used in most behavioural science studies so weird?

After examining differences in decision-making, cooperation, self-concept, and visual perception across the globe, Henrich and his team found that WEIRDS were more likely to apply analytical rather than holistic reasoning, tended to be more individualistic instead of collectivistic (especially Americans), and downplayed divinity in their moral reasoning.

But WEIRDS weren’t just slightly different in their approaches than the rest of the world; they scored at the extreme of the spectrum in most categories examined.

“WEIRD people . . . grow up in, and adapt to, a rather atypical environment vis-à-vis those of most of human history,” the study reads. “It should not be surprising that their psychological world is unusual as well.”

Add to that the fact that small, monogamous nuclear families in which children are sent away to school for a large part of the day just aren’t the norm across the globe, and you can start to see why we might not be the best test subjects.

“There is lot of research showing that something is in the brain and if you see it in the brain you think it is something common to the human species,” says Henrich. “But just because something shows up in the brain doesn’t mean it is significant for the human race.”

And while you may think it’s safe to say that something as seemingly universal as visual perception among Homo sapiens is the same, it’s not.

Consider the Müller-Lyer illusion in which you are shown two lines of equal length, but one has concave arrows on either end and the other convex arrows. For Westerners this is a trick: The line with concave arrows normally appears one-fifth longer before we realize both are the same length. But for the San foragers of the Kalahari, the question is just silly, as they never perceive a difference in length between the lines.

“This is not just a problem for behavioural research, it is also a problem for research on feet and running,” says Henrich.

When 3.6 million-year-old footprints were discovered in hardened ash in Laetoli, Tanzania, they were compared to the footprints of Westerners. It was determined that while the Australopithecus were bipedal, they were not as bipedal as people today.

The same footprints were later compared with the footprints of a group in the Peruvian Amazon. The results were very different. They showed that our possible ancestors were just as bipedal as the modern Homo sapien. Why the difference? “Cushioned shoes have made Westerners more flat-footed, rendering it impossible for us to even make general assumptions about foot anatomy,” says Henrich.

Compounded with the fact that most scientists publishing studies in behavioural journals are from WEIRDS, and you begin to see why the global human behaviour tag might not be appropriate to most studies.

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“In psychology there is a tendency to use your own intuitions,” says Henrich. “This has shaped the types of research programs you get out of us. This is not the same for, say, chemistry.”

But there are similarities between Homo sapiens, Henrich points out. We just need more comprehensive global surveys to find out what they are.

“We do not yet know of a principled way to predict whether a given psychological process or behavioural pattern will be similar across populations in the absence of comparative empirical research,” reads the study. “It would surely be of much value to the field if there were a set of criteria that could be used to anticipate universality.”