Psychology › Schools & history › The replication crisis
WEIRD samples: who psychology studies
2010· Concept
Well replicatedStrong, repeated evidence.
Most psychology research studies Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) people, an unusual slice of humanity.
See it on the Psychology map →What it says
In 2010 Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan pulled the evidence together. An audit of top journals (2003–2007) found about 96% of participants came from Western industrialized countries, home to about 12% of the world's people; many were American college students. On several measures, including visual illusions, fairness in money-sharing games and how people describe themselves, WEIRD people turned out to be outliers rather than typical humans. Some studies find East Asians think more holistically, attending to context.
Why it matters
A result that holds for American undergraduates may not describe human nature. Before trusting any finding, ask who was studied.
The evidence
Status: well replicated. Journal audits repeatedly confirm the sampling skew, and cross-cultural studies document real differences on several measures, though many basic processes look similar everywhere.
Open questions
How much has changed: samples are more global now, but students and online panels still dominate, and many findings remain untested elsewhere.
Connections (2)
▸WEIRD samples: who psychology studies add a generalizability problem to The replication crisisWell replicated
The connection
The replication crisis asks whether a finding is real; WEIRD samples ask 'real for whom?' An effect repeated many times on American undergraduates may still fail elsewhere. Surprisingly, the Many Labs 2 project, testing 28 effects across 36 countries, found little variation: effects that worked tended to work everywhere, and failures failed everywhere.
Who showed it and when
Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan, University of British Columbia, 2010; Many Labs 2 published in 2018.
The evidence
Audits of journal samples document the skew; cross-cultural studies show some measures, such as visual illusions and fairness norms, genuinely vary.
Open questions
Which effects differ by culture is unresolved; even Many Labs 2 relied largely on university and online samples rather than truly diverse populations.
▸WEIRD samples: who psychology studies challenge universal claims of Ekman's basic emotions and universal facesMixed evidence
The connection
Ekman's high agreement rates came mostly from people with Western schooling or media exposure, choosing from lists of emotion words. When researchers visited more remote groups and let people describe faces freely, agreement dropped. Namibia's Himba sorted faces by behavior, such as laughing, rather than emotion categories, and Trobriand Islanders read the wide-eyed 'fear' face as threatening.
Who showed it and when
James Russell's 1994 critique; Maria Gendron and Lisa Feldman Barrett with the Himba of northwestern Namibia, 2014; Carlos Crivelli in Papua New Guinea's Trobriand Islands, 2016.
How solid is it?
Published field studies show recognition falls with free labeling and less Western contact, although smiles are read as happy nearly everywhere.
Open questions
Whether gaps reflect real cultural variation or translation and method problems. A 2021 analysis of 6 million videos from 144 countries found expressions occur in broadly similar contexts worldwide.