{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"WEIRD: Adventures of an acronym","description":"Welcome to our 10th episode! Today\u2019s show is another in our \u2018mini minds\u2019 series. We\u2019ve been experimenting with different formats for our minis, as you may have noticed, but today we\u2019ve got another in the classic blogpost style. The topic is the acronym WEIRD\u2014maybe you\u2019ve heard it used. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It\u2019s become a shorthand for the idea that people in WEIRD societies are a bit unusual relative to the rest our species. The term was first introduced 10 years ago. On this episode I talk about its origins and the far-reaching influence it\u2019s had since. As with all episodes, be sure to check out the show notes for a smorgasbord of links and tidbits. There was a lot I had to leave on the cutting room floor with this one. But I swept some of it up and put it in the notes for anyone who\u2019s interested. Enjoy!   A text version of this "mini" is readable here.    Notes and links 2:00 \u2013 The birthplace of the acronym: \u2018The weirdest people in the world?\u2019 2:44 \u2013 A 2008 paper by Jeffrey Arnett that provided key support for the first part of Henrich et al.\u2019s two-part argument. 3:35 \u2013 The visual illusion in question is the M\u00fcller-Lyer Illusion. 3:52 \u2013 These cultural differences in spatial conceptualization were first widely reported by Stephen Levinson and colleagues. See his book for the full story (or see a popular article of mine for a much shorter version). 4:33 \u2013 See the commentary by Meadon and Spurrett titled \u2018It\u2019s not just the subjects \u2013 there are too many WEIRD researchers.\u2019 4:45 \u2013 See the commentary by Rozin titled \u2018The weirdest people in the world are a harbinger of the future of the world.\u2019 For an expansion of Rozin\u2019s argument, with more examples, see my article on \u201cglobal WEIRDing\u201d. 5:45 \u2013 See David F. Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood. (Note that only the second edition came out after the WEIRD article was published.) One part of child development that proves unexpectedly variable across cultures is learning to walk and other motor milestones. 6:30 \u2013 The intersection of smell and WEIRD-ness is discussed in a recent special issue\u2014see the editorial introduction here. Long-standing ideas about the impoverished nature of human olfaction are discussed here. 6:48 \u2013 A study comparing olfactory sensitivity in Tsimane people and Germans. 6:55 \u2013 For discussion of the idea that odors are ineffable, see this article. The same article was also among the first to characterize the elaborated and consistently applied odor lexicon of a hunter-gatherer group. Other papers have since built on this work. 7:23 \u2013 See the paper titled \u2018WEIRD bodies: Mismatch, medicine, and missing diversity.\u2019 Foot flatness and flexibility in \u201cconventionally shod\u201d populations are discussed in this paper. 8:10 \u2013 The researchers behind the original WEIRD paper\u2014and their students\u2014have kept busy themselves, exploring and expanding many related themes. See papers on theodiversity, the possible influence of the Catholic Church on WEIRD psychology, and the use of a new tool for mapping degrees of cultural distance. 8:22 \u2013 For a variety of articles raising issues of sample diversity, see: the 2014 opinion piece on the exclusion of left-handers from studies in cognitive neuroscience; another piece on diversity issues in cognitive neuroscience, focusing on issues of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic homogeneity; an article on \u201canglocentrism\u201d in linguistics; and a commentary on \u201cmissing diversity\u201d in genetics. 9:11 \u2013 For the idea that our understanding of primates may be skewed by a focus on captive primates, see \u2018The Mismeasure of Ape Social Cognition.\u2019 For the STRANGE framework, see here. 10:00 \u2013 For recent critiques, see here and here. The quote about the \u201chomogeneous West\u201d comes from the Broesch et al. (2020) paper; the quote about treating humans as \u201cendangered butterflies\u201d comes from Barrett (2020). Conducting research on sensitive populations is a major theme of Broesch et al. (2020). 11:15 \u2013 The analysis of persistent sampling problems in developmental psychology is here. The analysis of the journal Psychological Science is here. Patricia Bauer\u2019s editorial is here.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https:\/\/www.diverseintelligencessummer.com\/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https:\/\/www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk\/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https:\/\/sarahdopierala.wordpress.com\/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play\u2014or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod. ","author_name":"Many Minds","author_url":"https:\/\/disi.org\/manyminds\/","html":"