PSYC 1720 Assignment

PSYC 1720 Assignment | Saint Paul College

Weird Research Assignment

            This New York Times article gives us insight on a study that was conducted by the University of British Columbia. The study was to find human universals by reading psychology papers. The study focused on a group of outliers that they referred to as WEIRD or westernized, educated people from industrialized, rich democracies. They compare human traits and decide what is universal. For example, Americans are the only people and culture that go out of their way to give a baby its own room. Another fact that I found interesting is that westerners define themselves by psychological traits and non-westerners define themselves by relationships.

            The problem with this type of research is that they are focusing on the WEIRD people and that's not giving us insight into other populations. In order to find universal human traits it can’t be focusing on one group. I think the reason they focused on the WEIRD group so much is because that is where the majority of their papers and research came from. There are so many cultural differences and just because it's American, shouldn’t make it universal. This will be relevant for our studies in this course because we are studying human development and  universal human traits will play a big role in that. This is an interesting article and I would like to see more on that study.

Resources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/world/americas/26iht-currents.html