The Weird American: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic

Throughout our class studies we’ve been talking a lot about intercultural communication, culture and the intersection these two concepts—how they relate, how they differ and how they influence each other. We’ve studied how different cultures have social structures that are different from others due to different communication techniques, social styles, and organization (Maletzky 2008) as well as how these cultural foundations shape our identities and ways of viewing the world (Martin & Nakayama 2010). However, it wasn’t until I read the following article that I realized that we have only conceptualized these concepts through a Westernized—mostly American—point of view of what constitutes the standards of culture and communication. The grand majority of social sciences research has been Western psychologists studying Western subjects to establish the “communal norms” about human behavior. Indeed this article entitled “Why Americans are Weird” reveals that:

A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.

The article is an insightful reminder that not everyone perceives the world through a “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic" lens, but indeed questions, “what other certainties about ‘human nature’ in social science research would need to be reconsidered when tested across diverse populations?”

In the article, a group of social scientists began with standardized economic, cultural and habitual tests that have been proved again and again to be a “human standard” and conducted the tests on other cultural groups that weren’t Western (ex. the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin). The researchers found that Western behaviors, social inclinations, manners of thinking, and perceptions of reality are completely divergent from other humans on the planet, and that specifically “Americans were often the most unusual” concluding that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.” Given this fact, it becomes clear that standardizing human behavior on Western (mostly American) subjects is probably the worst group from which to draw these types of wide-ranging generalities.  The article uses a brilliant analogy saying that “researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds”.

I think this article brings up interesting points about the Western ethnocentricity of academia and social psychology in general, and there is much further research needed from alternative cultural perspectives in order to expand the widespread generalizations about human behavior that are so prevalent in social/cultural theoretical analysis today.