WEIRD economics
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Lots of good stuff is being written on the burgeoning field of behavioural economics.
I found a great resource at the Economic Logic website (which I highly recommend!).
Many people criticise behavioural economics research as social experiments that are based on trivial ideas. The following document focuses on one criticism of behavioural economics – namely that their samples are taken from WEIRD populations (that is Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic societies).
The paper can be read in full here but to illustrate one of its main points:
“A recent analysis of the top journals in six subdisciplines of Psychology from 2003?2007 revealed that 68% of subjects came from the US, and a full 96% of subjects were from Western industrialized countries, specifically North America, Europe, Australia, and Israel. The make?up of these samples appears to largely reflect the country of residence of the authors, as 73% of first authors were at American universities, and 99% were at universities in Western countries. This means that 96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world’s population… Furthermore, a randomly selected American undergraduate is more than 4000 times more likely to be a research participant than is a randomly selected person from outside of the West.”
”The assumption that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population is incredibly limiting.
Taking the common Ultimatum game, among subjects from industrialized populations—mostly undergraduates from the U.S., Europe, and Asia—proposers typically offer an amount between 40% and 50% of the total…with offfers below about 30% often rejected.
The research presented in this new paper however, shows that ”randomly sampled from 23 small?scale human societies, including foragers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, and subsistence farmers, drawn from Africa, Amazonia, Oceania, Siberia and New Guinea…show that the people in industrialized societies consistently occupy the extreme end of the human distribution. Notably, some of the smallest scale societies, where real life is principally face?to?face, made low offers and did not reject.”
Since there are fundamental differences in the psychology, motivation, and behaviour of different societies, questions of a “human nature” basis need to be generalised a bit more carefully.
I found it a fascinating read - read the full paper here.
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