Beyond WEIRD: a new tool for measuring psychological and cultural differences between countries will benefit future comparative psychological research,says new research from London School of Economics (LSE), Harvard University, Iowa State University and University of Utah.Due for publication in Psychological Science [DATE], the paper outlines a tool to quantify how close, or how far, societies are culturally. Historically, psychological research, that has strived to uncover the truth about human behaviour, has predominantly focussed on Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) nations, with the USA commonly the anchor of comparison. While psychological research may have compared China and the U.S. little research has been done into the cultural differences, norms and attitudes in, for example, China from Japan. This tool can be used as a good indicator to predict differences in values and trends in things like corruption, and why, for instance, a country would vote to leave the European Union.
Using a key statistic from evolutionary theory, the authors apply a fixation index to the World Values Survey of cultural beliefs and behaviours. This tool will benefit future research by offering a way to design and plan a wide range of comparative psychological projects.Lead author Dr Michael Muthukrishna, Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Psychology at LSE says [QUOTE]
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