Reading several books in the field of psychology I noticed that authors regularly address their readership with notes highlighting the method of research and by doing so express their intent to interest readers from all walks of life here, including from a broad political spectrum. Most recently in a book the author demonstrated that his sampling method does not constitute, what apparently in the field of psychology is a common term, a WEIRD sample. The definition offered reads: A WEIRD sample is disproportionally composed of people who are Western, Educated, Individualist, Rich, and Democratic. It gave me pause – in my mind I correlated this sample with the term “weird” in its very sense and in my personal interpretation really wondered how a group of people associated with these attributes could be classified as a weird group of people. This was the trigger for sitting down and writing this note – while with no outcome in mind initially it was somewhere going to touch on polarization in modern societies eventually. As always, I started some research – here looking up the definition of “weird” – where the Cambridge dictionary defines it as “very strange and unusual, unexpected, or not natural”. Along the way I found reference to the origin of this statement – namely an article published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2010: “The weirdest people in the world?” by J. Henrich, S. Heine and A. Norenzayan. Their definition is ever so slightly different in the choice of words calling the members of samples in many psychological studies “W.E.I.R.D.” because they came from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. That is still a grouping but much broader and would here include the entire population of the US or other countries without distinction. Clearly the title choice of the article must have been driven by a deliberate play on the true meaning of the word “weird” to attract readership, while it’s literal meaning is not correlated to the subject of their findings and observations at all. I get that having been a marketeer myself for a long time. The objective was to highlight that given the vast roots and high level of active work of psychological research in Western countries like England and a large part of Europe, the US and Australia their samples of people as psychological research subjects are associated with these countries and their cultures. The article wonders if the findings of such research are therefore applicable to a broader set of countries and cultures around the world. The authors question that and have themselves launched research to investigate their hypothesis. The word that tripped me was “people” in the first definition vs. “societies” in the second description, but I remembered from my English classes many years back that “people” has two definitions – one as a group of individuals that is frequently used, but also a second one as a nation which can stand as a synonym for society. So, after all, both definitions are aligned. I also found out that apparently there have been a number of other people that published their concerns about the acronym and its definition in articles and posts. Some are going the other way of questioning if the selection of attributes is a sufficient descriptor of the groups in a given society.
I stopped my research here. Reflecting on my own pause after reading the acronym initially I must acknowledge that a sort of unconscious initial reaction if not a bias piqued my interest in the statement with the above noted initial direction of response. Proven wrong so profoundly – luckily with a little digging on my own – I register this as a reminder to myself to pay close attention to words and the context and background in which they have been used – before moving on the any judgement.