(Originally published in 29 October 2020, 10:49pm)
I still remember when the WEIRD paper came out. For me, a Brazilian graduate student, it felt like a breath of fresh air among the dominant American and European scientific literature that never acknowledged us, the "non-WEIRD". So everything that every academic in the developing world (now people call us the Global South, or LMIC, among other names) intuitively knew had finally been thoroughly demonstrated by Henrich et al. (2010): that the international psychological literature was heavily biased towards samples with certain characteristics, particularly North American undegraduates.
This fact, as I learned by reading their paper, was not recent news in the (overwhelmingly North American) psychological literature. In fact, several researchers already pointed out that bias before. However, what made the WEIRD paper so special, besides its catchy label, was that it seemed to provide rigorous evidence that some basic psychological processes, thought to be universal, showed differences across cultures.
It wasn't until I left my country that I started realising that the WEIRD paper was interpreted in different ways by me and foreign researchers. Whilst in England, I understood that to my European colleagues I was not WEIRD enough, because clearly I was not one of them. But I was also not non-WEIRD enough, because, despite being a Brazilian, I was not studying any particularly interesting ethnic group. And it was then that I understood that people from the "middle ground" in the WEIRD/non-WEIRD dichotomy were sort of invisible.
What is in a name?
I really have not thought much about the WEIRD acronym until I saw its implications, which I will illustrate with the use of the term Western. Henrich et al. (2010) provide the following explanation in an endnote, which I think it should have been added to the main text. They say:
"We are using “Western” to refer to those countries clustered in the northwest of Europe (the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, etc.), and British-descent societies such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. In particular, we are concerned
about those populations from which most subjects in behavioral and psychological experiments are drawn. We recognize that there are important limitations and problems with this label, but we use it for convenience."
But you see, many Brazilians, and that included myself until fairly recently, understand that our country is Western. Not because we think we are a first world country, but because this is how we learn at school, as a geographical fact. If someone googles "Brasil" and "Ocidental" or "Ocidente" (the Portuguese words for Brazil, Western, and West) they will find several articles in Brazilian Portuguese explaining to Brazilians that "Westerners" do not see us as Westerners. And yes, I know, and my colleagues and students know, that we are Latinos. However, we do not learn this at school, we learn this in our culture, and both the "Westerner" and Latin American identities coexist.
How did I learn I was not a "Westerner"? A British lecturer commented on my coming from a non-Western country. And this is how I knew. Western is as geopolitical construct, with implicit assumptions about how the world is divided. Unfortunately one cannot just get away from its problems for the sake of convenience.
Exotic samples and the invisibility of the Global South
To me, a researcher from the Global South, the WEIRD paper represented an opportunity to showcase our work. To researchers in the Global North, it meant a discussion on whether they could afford travelling to remote places.
Most of the advice published on how to reduce the WEIRDness of the psychological literature is equated to how to access and establish relationships with hard-to-reach communities. These papers rely on vague definitions or intuitions of how non-WEIRD societies or communities are supposed to be, and often have authors who conduct work with traditional societies, thus inadvertently misleading other researchers to conclude that these are the only non-WEIRD people the seminal paper referred to.
This also unfortunately reinforces the international invisibility of researchers from developing countries. The WEIRD label seemed to me, at first, a way out of this compulsory invisibility, imposed by structural, economic and language barriers, that Brazilian and other peripheral researchers often face.
Over the years, I tried to grab at the faint indications of potential changes. Paragraphs in the WEIRD paper and the following comments mentioning the necessity of collaboration with other reseachers. Then other papers that came out, by researchers from the US, Western Europe, Australia, always recommending collaborations. And then more papers, from similar authors, similar topics, and so on. Never publicly acknowledging colleagues from the Global South. Never really engaging with us. Until I realised that, though people may have the best of the intentions, no real changes in this area were materialising.
This is a complicated issue. There are nuances, of course. However, it has been a decade since the WEIRD paper was published. As I look at the Evolution and Human Behavior Special Issue: Beyond WEIRD, I see some of the same names and most of the same institutions once again leading the conversation, even if there is a open call for comments. I see a conversation that does not really reach out to people who want to be part of it, who are outside of it.
Despite the great impact of this publication in terms of citations (7,684 on Google Scholar as of 29 Oct 2020), "The Weirdest People in the World" seems to have barely scratched the surface of the problem.
For a great analysis of the label and its problems, I recommend Clancy and Davis (2019) paper.
