El paper de WEIRD declara que la muestra es pequeña y no representativa. Transcript: Speaker 1 The article was titled The Weirdest People in the World, question mark, and it made two key points. The first was a point about over-representation. Psychologists, by their own account, were trying to understand the human mind, the mental makeup of our species as a whole. But to do this, they were drawing on a razor-thin slice of that species. They were drawing overwhelmingly on people from societies that were Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. People who were W-E-I-R-D. Weird. Important as this first point was, it wasn’t necessarily news. Earlier analysis had found that, as Henrik and colleagues summarize it, quote, 96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world’s population, end quote. Now to be clear, all science relies on sampling. You can’t bring all 7.8 billion humans into the lab for a study. What you do is test some and generalize from that sample. And this works fine if your sample is representative of the population you want to understand. But that’s a critical if, and it brings us to the paper’s second key point. This group, this thin, yet overrepresented sliver of humanity, may not actually be so representative. (Time 0:02:00)
ciencia experimento homo_sapiens muestra población psicología
ciencia experimento homo_sapiens muestra población psicología
WEIRD e infancia Transcript: Speaker 1 One line of corroborating evidence comes from the study of child development. Weirdness begins early, it turns out. This is one of the main themes of a book by David Lancy, titled The Anthropology of Childhood. Parents in weird societies tend to closely monitor how their children play. They talk to them directly and teach them explicitly. They attend to their every utterance and bend to their every preference. In the weird world, Lancy notes, children are elevated to the status of God-like cherubs. These tiny angels are the pinnacle of our society’s imaginary pyramid, the center of attention, the celestial body around which the rest of family life revolves. Not so everywhere. Children elsewhere are widely seen as beneath adult concern, as marginal, even expendable. (Time 0:05:37)
evidencia homo_sapiens infancia WEIRD
evidencia homo_sapiens infancia weird
WEIRD y los sentidos. Transcript: Speaker 1 Another line of corroborating evidence comes from cross-cultural studies of the senses. For centuries, Western scholars consider the human sense of smell to be feeble, degenerate, rudimentary. Not nearly as well-developed as the sense of sight or hearing or even touch. But it turns out this depends in large part on culture. Studies with non-reparticipants such as the Chimanea Bolivia have found they are actually better able to detect small compounds than Europeans are. Children scholars have also long claimed that it’s basically impossible to describe odors, that they are somehow fundamentally ineffable. But we now know that culture matters here, too. Undergatherers in Southeast Asia have been found to use an elaborated vocabulary for labelling odors, and to apply it in highly consistent ways, much like how weird people consistently Apply color words. (Time 0:06:23)
cognición evidencia WEIRD
WEIRD y nuestro cuerpo y salud. Transcript: Speaker 1 Even weird bodies are unusual. A recent paper in the subfield of evolutionary medicine reviews a number of so-called mismatched diseases. These are conditions that arise out of a mismatch between how we weird people use our bodies today and how our bodies were used for much of human history. We have fewer children and encounter fewer pathogens, we move less, we eat more of some things like fat and sugar, and much less of others like fiber. This overall departure and lifestyle seems to contribute to a host of issues, from Alzheimer’s and insomnia to metabolic syndromes and bowel issues. The effects of weirdness even reach down to our very foundations. That’s right, our feet. We are more prone to hammer toes and bunions. A life of wearing shoes makes our feet flatter and stiffer. From our noses down to our toes, there are a variety of ways that weird people are weird, and many researchers are now busy investigating those ways. (Time 0:07:14)
cuerpo evidencia salud WEIRD
WEIRD y étnias raciales. Transcript: Speaker 1 Another review of the same subfield is to cry the lack of diversity even within US samples, noting that quote, the vast majority of what is known about the neural underpinnings of human Cognition comes from studies limited to racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically homogeneous samples. Meanwhile, a recent article laments a deep vein of Anglo-centrism and linguistics, and another article, this one in the journal Cell, bemoans that missing diversity in the study Of human genetics. It reports that, as of 2018, people of European ancestry have accounted for 78% of the subjects in genome-wide association studies. (Time 0:08:29)
evidencia homo_sapiens racismo WEIRD
evidencia homo_sapiens racismo weird
Challenges and Impact of the WEIRD Acronym Criticism of the WEIRD acronym is growing due to concerns that it promotes Western exceptionalism and overlooks the role of race. The term has been criticized for oversimplifying non-Western societies and creating a homogeneous ‘non-weird’ category. There are also concerns about the ethical treatment of diverse cultures in research. While the discussions around these criticisms are ongoing, it remains uncertain whether the paper has actually instigated meaningful change in addressing these issues in the behavioral sciences. Transcript: Speaker 1 As the influence of the weird acronym grows, criticisms of it have also started to emerge. Some worry that it perpetuates problematic ideas about Western exceptionalism. A pair of anthropologists has suggested that the unnamed core of weirdness is actually whiteness, and yet race is barely mentioned in these discussions. Others worry that the acronym lumps a rich variety of societies and communities into a bland residual category, the non-weird. It’s as if, quote, all non-Western groups are interchangeable and all equally different from the homogeneous West, end quote. Many also point out that the implicit call for more work across cultures raises other important issues. Investigations of far-flung and often vulnerable populations need to proceed sensitively. This means no helicoptering in, running studies, and helicoptering out. And it means no treating humans like, quote, endangered butterflies to be photographed before going extinct, end quote. These are all important issues, and fortunately, they’re now being hashed out. But for those who are sympathetic to the weird paper and its arguments, there may be an even bigger issue. Has the paper actually changed anything? Researchers across the behavioral sciences can now put a name to an important issue, certainly. But does that mean the issue is actually being addressed? The evidence so far is mixed. (Time 0:09:49)