Monday, March 12, 2018

Nicolas Geeraert — How knowledge about different cultures is shaking the foundations of psychology

Clearly, humans are in many ways very similar – we share the same physiology and have the same basic needs, such as nourishment, safety and sexuality. So what effect can culture really have on the fundamental aspects of our psyche, such as perception, cognition and personality? Let’s take a look at the evidence so far.
Experimental psychologists typically study behaviour in a small group of people, with the assumption that this can be generalised to the wider human population. If the population is considered to be homogeneous, then such inferences can indeed be made from a random sample.
However, this isn’t the case. Psychologists have long disproportionately relied on undergraduate students to carry out their studies, simply because they are readily available to researchers at universities. More dramatically still, more than 90% of participants in psychological studies come from countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (W.E.I.R.D). Clearly, these countries are neither a random sample nor representative for the human population.
Last evening I was reflecting on how silly this approach is. Not just statistics either. It lies at the foundation of the assumption that Western liberalism is "natural" as well as the assumptions about "natural law" that abound in Western thinking and form the basis for Western values.
In Logic 101, this is called the informal fallacy of hasty generalization. It also involves the moralistic fallacy. In psychology, it is a blend of cognitive biases, e.g., confirmation and anchoring bias.
In other terms, this approach to supposedly fact-based reasoning is fallacious  and persisting in holding incorrect assumptions is irrational.
This is the Achilles hell of liberal internationalism, liberal interventionism, and liberal globalization. Paradoxically, it is also illiberal.
The Conversation
How knowledge about different cultures is shaking the foundations of psychology
Nicolas Geeraert | Senior lecturer, University of Essex

See also

Roger Farmer's Economic Window
Ergodicity
Roger Farmer | Distinguished Professor of Economics at UCLA

See also

Information Transfer Economics
Ergodicity!Jason Smith

Related

Grasping Reality
Should-Read : Lots to think about about how statistics and economics should be being taught these days: Drew Conway
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

1 comment:

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Behavioral economics ― forever stuck at the proto-scientific level
Note on Tom Hickey on ‘Nicolas Geeraert ― How knowledge about different cultures is shaking the foundations of psychology’

Psychology/Sociology 2018: “Experimental psychologists typically study behaviour in a small group of people, with the assumption that this can be generalised to the wider human population. If the population is considered to be homogeneous, then such inferences can indeed be made from a random sample. However, this isn’t the case. Psychologists have long disproportionately relied on undergraduate students to carry out their studies, simply because they are readily available to researchers at universities. More dramatically still, more than 90% of participants in psychological studies come from countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (W.E.I.R.D).”

J. S. Mill 1874: “Just in the same manner does Political Economy presuppose an arbitrary definition of man, as a being who invariably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained in the existing state of knowledge.”

“Not that any political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind are really thus constituted, but because this is the mode in which science must necessarily proceed.”

“In political economy for instance, empirical laws of human nature are tacitly assumed by English thinkers, which are calculated only for Great Britain and the United States.”

The subject matter of economics is the behavior of the economic system and NOT the behavior of humans or a tiny part thereof.#1 Science deals with invariances/universal laws. There is no such thing as a universal behavioral law. Because of this, there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a ‘social science’.#2 Economics is a system science but economists have not realized it until this day.#3

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

#1 For details of the big picture see cross-references Not a Science of Behavior
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2015/12/behavior-cross-references.html

#2 What is so great about cargo cult science? or, How economists learned to stop worrying about failure
https://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/05/what-is-so-great-about-cargo-cult.html

#3 Redefining economics
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/04/redefining-economics.html