I feel like it would help if WEIRDness were predicted by psychological theory to moderate particular effects in particular directions, which could be tested with more power than the more open-ended/uninformed question of whether it moderates any effects in any directions.
I think the biggest problem with Joe Henrich's complaint here is that he is assuming standard psychological studies are basically reasonable (that they study relevant phenomena with good methods), and that they're merely unreasonably generalized. Meanwhile I feel like a lot of the studies he complains about probably shouldn't even have been done, or at least should have been done in a much better way.
I could buy that once psychology started producing a huge stream of good research, value could be gained in making it more cross-cultural. But we're not really there yet...
I'd argue Japan, Korea, Singapore and some parts of China and Taiwan require a different or modified acronym. It's evident that they have also diverged from "most of the world" in many positive ways, but they are less individualistic than WEIRD nations and still more ethnocentric.
I appreciate your point, but I think you are pushing it a bit far. Sure, we don't know that being WEIRD does change the results of experimental findings but it's apriori plausible that it does and therefore it reduces the confidence we should have that such findings hold generally. In other words, the burden is on the experiment to offer evidence the effect holds generally not on someone holding plausible concerns that it doesn't generalize to prove that it doesn't.
To put the point differently, if physicists do a bunch of experiments measuring the effect of gravity on matter and have some apriori reason to think it's plausible that gravity might work differently on anti-matter then the failure to run the experiments on anti-matter does limit the degree of support those experiments give to claims about how gravity works (that apply to both matter and anti-matter).
Having said this, it all seems academic since psychology rarely has detailed theoretical models and there are equally, if not larger, concerns about extrapolating the results of studies to the situations we want to apply them relating to other ways the experimental and application environments differ.
I feel like it would help if WEIRDness were predicted by psychological theory to moderate particular effects in particular directions, which could be tested with more power than the more open-ended/uninformed question of whether it moderates any effects in any directions.
I think the biggest problem with Joe Henrich's complaint here is that he is assuming standard psychological studies are basically reasonable (that they study relevant phenomena with good methods), and that they're merely unreasonably generalized. Meanwhile I feel like a lot of the studies he complains about probably shouldn't even have been done, or at least should have been done in a much better way.
I could buy that once psychology started producing a huge stream of good research, value could be gained in making it more cross-cultural. But we're not really there yet...
Isn’t Hong Kong considered WEIRD?
I clicked through to the first study and it compares US V HK. My priors are that HK is WEIRD and that we’d expect to find little effect?
It's probably more WEIRD than mainland China, but it's still not really Western. It's debatable that Korea and Japan are too.
I'd argue Japan, Korea, Singapore and some parts of China and Taiwan require a different or modified acronym. It's evident that they have also diverged from "most of the world" in many positive ways, but they are less individualistic than WEIRD nations and still more ethnocentric.
I appreciate your point, but I think you are pushing it a bit far. Sure, we don't know that being WEIRD does change the results of experimental findings but it's apriori plausible that it does and therefore it reduces the confidence we should have that such findings hold generally. In other words, the burden is on the experiment to offer evidence the effect holds generally not on someone holding plausible concerns that it doesn't generalize to prove that it doesn't.
To put the point differently, if physicists do a bunch of experiments measuring the effect of gravity on matter and have some apriori reason to think it's plausible that gravity might work differently on anti-matter then the failure to run the experiments on anti-matter does limit the degree of support those experiments give to claims about how gravity works (that apply to both matter and anti-matter).
Having said this, it all seems academic since psychology rarely has detailed theoretical models and there are equally, if not larger, concerns about extrapolating the results of studies to the situations we want to apply them relating to other ways the experimental and application environments differ.
The burden of proof traditionally falls on the person making positive claims. In this case, the positive claim is about moderation.