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Online Games for Studying Human Behavior
Abstract
Much has been written on the potential for games to enhance our ability to study complex systems. In this chapter we focus on how we can use games to study national security issues. We reflect on the benefits of using games and the inherent difficulties that we must address. As a means of grounding the discussion, we will present a case study of a retrospective analysis of gaming data.
... Map metaphors for biological systems are linked to causal analyses (e.g. mapping between cause and effect) and therefore influence policy and culture [9,140,141]. ...
... We could be asking about problematic behaviours like violent aggression or pro-social behaviours like grooming. What is of interest are the differences between the populations, and as I and others have argued, these questions cannot be answered by looking only at the differences among the individuals constituting the populations (Longino 2013(Longino , 2019. What we really want to know is what explains the difference in frequency, etc., of certain interactions, not why individuals engage in those interactions. ...
This paper draws on the author's work in social epistemology and on comparative studies of sciences of human behavior to draw attention to the importance of interaction. Drawing further on recent and contemporary research in biology, she argues that interaction ought to be considered a distinct ontological category, not reducible to properties of its participants.
... It has been stated with considerable evidence, that science is a social creature (Longino, 2013). By this we mean, that scientific studies are not produced in a vacuum; on the contrary, they are intricately influenced by a host of social, political, economic and religious variables. ...
Resumen En este artículo se provee un trasfondo breve del estatus actual de los estudios psicológicos de LGBT en Puerto Rico. Una revisión histórica resalta el hecho que hasta hace apenas una década atrás, la investigación psicológica y discusiones de erudición sobre LGBT en Puerto Rico eran fragmentadas y escasas. Sin embargo, durante la última década se pueden documentar avances y éxitos en áreas tan diversas como investigación, políticas públicas, actividades profesionales, y presencia sistemática en los medios noticiosos. En este artículo revisamos los contenidos de las dos revistas principales de psicología en Puerto Rico y cuantificamos el número de artículos sobre LGBT desde que estas revistas comenzaron a publicarse y también presentamos los resultados de las presentaciones profesionales de LGBT en las convenciones de la Asociación de Psicología de Puerto Rico (APPR). Por último, cuantificamos el número de libros profesionales sobre LGBT en las últimas tres décadas. Los resultados indican que desde el 1980 al 2005 las publicaciones profesionales psicológicas y presentaciones en la APPR incrementaron exponencialmente luego del 2007. Documentamos que desde el 2007 hasta el presente se ha incrementado el trabajo sistemático relacionado a LGBT, en donde incluimos libros, artículos, disertaciones doctorales, boletines especiales, guías, presentaciones y política pública. Un avance notable ocurrió en el 2007 cuando dentro de la APPR se creó un Task Force cuyo propósito era avanzar la presencia del tema dentro del seno de la psicología puertorriqueña. El Task Force permitió, por primera vez en Puerto Rico, la alianza de un conglomerado de psicólogos/as que facilitaron el estudio riguroso y y discusión de LGBT en foros públicos e incluso dentro de la APPR. A la luz de la productividad y éxito obtenido en la última década,
... It has been stated with considerable evidence, that science is a social creature (Longino, 2013). By this we mean, that scientific studies are not produced in a vacuum; on the contrary, they are intricately influenced by a host of social, political, economic and religious variables. ...
Resumen
En este artículo se provee un trasfondo breve del estatus actual de los estudios psicológicos de LGBT en Puerto Rico. Una revisión histórica resalta el hecho que hasta hace apenas una década atrás, la investigación psicológica y discusiones de erudición sobre LGBT en Puerto Rico eran fragmentadas y escasas. Sin embargo, durante la última década se pueden documentar avances y éxitos en áreas tan diversas como investigación, políticas públicas, actividades profesionales, y presencia sistemática en los medios noticiosos. En este artículo revisamos los contenidos de las dos revistas principales de psicología en Puerto Rico y cuantificamos el número de artículos sobre LGBT desde que estas revistas comenzaron a publicarse y también presentamos los resultados de las presentaciones profesionales de LGBT en las convenciones de la Asociación de Psicología de Puerto Rico (APPR). Por último, cuantificamos el número de libros profesionales sobre LGBT en las últimas tres décadas. Los resultados indican que desde el 1980 al 2005 las publicaciones profesionales psicológicas y presentaciones en la APPR incrementaron exponencialmente luego del 2007. Documentamos que desde el 2007 hasta el presente se ha incrementado el trabajo sistemático relacionado a LGBT, en donde incluimos libros, artículos, disertaciones doctorales, boletines especiales, guías, presentaciones y política pública. Un avance notable ocurrió en el 2007 cuando dentro de la APPR se creó un Task Force cuyo propósito era avanzar la presencia del tema dentro del seno de la psicología puertorriqueña. El Task Force permitió, por primera vez en Puerto Rico, la alianza de un conglomerado de psicólogos/as que facilitaron el estudio riguroso y y discusión de LGBT en foros públicos e incluso dentro de la APPR. A la luz de la productividad y éxito obtenido en la última década, ofrecemos ciertas recomendaciones que pueden ser de ayuda para continuar avanzando los estudios en Puerto Rico y otros países Latinoamericanos.
Abstract
In this article, we provide a brief background of the current status of psychological LGBT studies in Puerto Rico. An historical inspection highlights the fact that until a nearly a decade ago psychological research and scholarly discussions of LGBT in Puerto Rico was fragmented and negligible. Nevertheless, the last decade has seen notable advances and successes in such diverse activities as research, public policy, professional activities, and a wide and constant presence in mass media activities. We review the contents of the two leading psychological journals published in Puerto Rico and quantified the number of articles on LGBT since the inception of the two journals and also present the results of the number of LGBT professional presentations in the Conventions of the Puerto Rico Psychological Association (PRPA). Lastly, we quantify the number of professional books related to LGBT studies in the last three decades. The results indicate that from 1980 to 2005 professional psychological publications and presentations were absent or negligible in Puerto Rico. Also, the number of professional presentations in the PRPA incremented exponentially after 2007. We document that from 2007 to the present we have seen a wealth of scholarly work related to LGBT that includes books, articles, doctoral dissertations, special bulletins, guidelines, presentations, and public policy. A particularly notable advancement was achieved in the PRPA when in the year 2007 it established a Task Force to advance the presence of LGBT among Puerto Rican psychologists. The Task Force permitted, for the first time in Puerto Rico, the alliance of a conglomerate of psychologists that allowed the rigorously study and discussion of the LGBT in open public forums and inside the PRPA. In light of the productivity and successes obtained in the last decade, we offer some recommendations that may be helpful to further advance LGBT studies in Puerto Rico and in other Latin American countries.
... wing length). In the case of studying consciousness as a trait within its phylogenetic context, some work deploys a biological epistemological pluralism (Seth et al. 2006), akin to pluralistic frameworks for animal behavior (Kellert et al. 2006;Longino 2000Longino , 2013Tabery et al. 2014). However as stated, studies of consciousness face the additional limitation that hidden internal states of systems (i.e. the extent of conscious awareness) are hidden, as opposed to the externally visible motor outputs of behavior (Tinbergen 1963;Gordon 1992;Silvertown and Gordon 1989). ...
The appearance of consciousness in the universe remains one of the major mysteries unsolved by science or philosophy. Absent an agreed-upon definition of consciousness or even a convenient system to test theories of consciousness, a confusing heterogeneity of theories proliferate. In pursuit of clarifying this complicated discourse, we here interpret various frameworks for the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness through the lens of social insect evolutionary biology. To do so, we first discuss the notion of a forward test versus a reverse test, analogous to the normal and revolutionary phases of the scientific process. Contemporary theories of consciousness are forward tests for consciousness, in that they strive to become a means to classify the level of consciousness of arbitrary states and systems. Yet no such theory of consciousness has earned sufficient confidence such that it might be actually used as a forward test in ambiguous settings. What is needed now is thus a legitimate reverse test for theories of consciousness, to provide internal and external calibration of different frameworks. A reverse test for consciousness would ideally look like a method for referencing theories of consciousness to a tractable (and non-human) model system. We introduce the Ant Colony Test (ACT) as a rigorous reverse test for consciousness. We show that social insect colonies, though disaggregated collectives, fulfill many of the prerequisites for conscious awareness met by humans and honey bee workers. A long lineage of philosophically-neutral neurobehavioral, evolutionary, and ecological studies on social insect colonies can thus be redeployed for the study of consciousness in general. We suggest that the ACT can provide insight into the nature of consciousness, and highlight the ant colony as a model system for ethically performing clarifying experiments about consciousness.
Keluarga bertanggung jawab terhadap pendidikan anak sejak dini. Fungsi pendidikan dan fungsi ekonomi dalam keluarga tidak dapat dipisahkan. Peneliti melakukan observasi dengan wali kelas IIIA di SDS IT Cinta Islam Padang Siswa tersebut merupakan korban perceraian dari orang tuanya. Dan juga siswa tidak tinggal dengan salah satu orang tuanya, namun tinggal dengan nenek. Sehingga ditemukan sikap penyimpangan oleh siswa tersebut. Selain itu peneliti juga menemukan tingkah laku agresif. Berdasarkan pertimbangan diatas peneliti tertarik untuk meneliti perilaku agresif anak sekolah dasar. Dalam penelitian ini penulis menggunakan metode penelitian lapangan atau field research. Penelitian ini, menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif untuk penelitian berkaitan dengan penilaian subyektif dari sikap, pendapat dan perilaku. Jenis penelitian studi kasus, metode untuk menghimpun dan menganalisis data berkenaan dengan sesuatu kasus. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian terdapat Faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi sopan santun anak, yaitu faktor orang tua, lingkungan,dan sekolah di SDS IT Cinta Islam Padang. Sedangkan bila pasangan suami istri yang bercerai sudah mempunyai anak yaitu dampak psikologisnya, apabila anak tersebut masih kecil maka tidak baik terhadap perkembangan jiwa si anak.
Jogos possuem propósitos multifacetados e multidisciplinares e tem sido uma das mídias de maior influência na cultura popular. A capacidade empática que o meio possui envolve os jogadores em narrativas para eles sentirem-se como os personagens em tela. Este artigo, via metodologia overview, procurou compreender elementos e técnicas que a indústria de videogames, desde sua origem até o presente momento, tem empregado para gerar empatia nos jogos. Este sentimento torna jogadores capazes estar na situação do personagem, e portanto, mais compreensivos a realidades alheias a sua. Este é um dos passos deste grupo de pesquisa na busca da construção de um framework conceitual para o design de jogos empáticos.
The previous chapters convey the image of causal analysis in public policy and beyond as a fragmented field where research communities seldom learn from each other’s findings. This chapter resumes the ontological, epistemological, and methodological evidence that causal analysis is characterized by a plurality of objects and “incommensurable” interpretations. It also argues that the same evidence pinpoints how this plurality is complementary at every level, and causal structures raise as the elements that link ontology and methodology and can organize heterogeneous findings to improve learning across accounts.
This chapter develops from a presentation in a 2016 workshop on wargaming sponsored by the Deputy Secretary of Defense as part of an initiative to use wargaming to help foster innovation. The presentation was to a working group charged with addressing how wargaming can support the Department of Defense larger analytic process. The chapter describes the model-game-model paradigm – an analysis centric view that is only one way to connect gaming to other analytic processes, but an important one. It draws implications for the building of simulations and using wargaming as part of doing so. The chapter focuses on relating gaming to the conceptual model and a highly simplified computational model. It deals with model building and game design and designing and executing a human wargame and learning from it. The chapter introduces “multiscenario analysis” across different assumptions about the thinking of Red and the myriad uncertainties of military operations.
The proliferation of ubiquitous computing devices, such as smartphones, biometric devices, fitness devices, entertainment gadgets, wearable, and nonwearable devices, enabled us to capture, store, process, and analyze the daily-life activities, which comes under the umbrella of lifelogging systems. These devices are equipped with various lifelogging tools and applications to capture and store user’s activities. Among these devices, smart TV is a device having all the capabilities to capture, store, process, and analyze a viewer’s activities. It supports computing capabilities, sensors, and other peripheral devices that can make a smart TV more intelligent for capturing and storing a viewer’s daily-life interactions, preferences, activities, and events of individuals and families. This captured data on a smart TV can be used for a variety of fields and domains, such as analyzing watching behavior and mental model, memory augmentation, viewer’s monitoring, user modelling, context-aware recommendations, e-learning, e-commerce, viewer’s privacy and security, and designing and development of adaptive user interface (UI). This chapter presents a critical review of current lifelogging systems and a comparison of different computing devices such as computers, smartphones, wearable devices, and smart TV for lifelogging capabilities. It also investigates the prominent applications of smart TV-based lifelogging systems, current challenges, and issues. Due to the vast applications of smart TV-based lifelogging, this area is still broad and needs proper attention to develop a secure, applicable, and robust lifelogging system.
There is a wealth of psychological theory regarding the drive for individuals to congregate and form social groups, positing that people may organize out of fear, social pressure, or even to manage their self-esteem. We evaluate three such theories for multi-scale validity by studying them not only at the individual scale for which they were originally developed, but also for applicability to group interactions and behavior. We implement this multi-scale analysis using a dataset of communications and group membership derived from a long-running online game, matching the intent behind the theories to quantitative measures that describe players’ behavior. Once we establish that the theories hold for the dataset, we increase the scope to test the theories at the higher scale of group interactions. Despite being formulated to describe individual cognition and motivation, we show that some group dynamics theories hold at the higher level of group cognition and can effectively describe the behavior of joint decision making and higher-level interactions.
This chapter summarizes our view of priority challenges for social‐behavioral modeling. Some challenges are inherent: individuals behave in complicated ways and social systems are complex adaptive systems (CAS). Such systems pose wicked problems for policy‐makers. Other challenges relate to specific scientific problems. We discuss a selection of these: rebalancing the portfolio of models and methods, confronting uncertainty, synthesis, the dynamic of connecting theory and data, and redefining model validity. We summarize briefly elements of a way ahead.
Preventable diseases, environmental crises, and terrorist attacks cause hundreds of thousands of deaths annually in the United States alone and many more worldwide. Appropriate individual behaviors and decisions can mitigate loss of life from each of these, but understanding and changing the behavior of individuals in risk situations is highly challenging. Computational modeling of dynamic human behavior may help us understand phenomena if we have validated the models appropriately with data allowing causal inference. Traditional experiments can also help, but they are not seldom designed for generalizability to the real world. Creating representative real‐world scenarios in virtual environments can fill gaps by testing the effectiveness of theory‐driven, evidence‐based manipulations in artificial but lifelike situations. In some cases, real‐world behavior predicts virtual behavior, and given virtual interventions effectively predicts real‐world behavior change. In this work we explain the advantages of such representative designs and how to create and validate them.
In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings of explanatory pluralism both within philosophy of science and psychiatry – namely moderate/temporary pluralism, anything goes pluralism, isolationist pluralism, integrative pluralism and interactive pluralism. Next, I discuss the pros and cons of these different understandings of explanatory pluralism. Finally, I raise the question of how to implement or operationalize explanatory pluralism in scientific practice; how to structure the “genuine dialogue” or shape “the pluralistic attitude” Campaner is referring to. As tentative answers, I explore a question-based framework for explanatory pluralism as well as social-epistemological procedures for interaction among competing approaches and explanations.
This article highlights the importance of establishing comprehensive taxonomies in the booming sector of serious games. Although various authors have proposed partial classification systems in this field, very little has so far been published on serious game taxonomies which serve to classify any type of serious game. This article proposes a comprehensive serious game taxonomy. The aim of this taxonomy is to gather the particular features of video game design and development, the platforms used to run the games, and operational aspects such as use, users, and distribution by highlighting the idiosyncrasies of the serious component. To this end, 16 criteria are discussed in this work. The taxonomy collects a large number of features that will be useful for those looking for a serious game (e.g., to teach a subject or train a skill). If they wish to use an existing game, the taxonomy helps to choose between the different options. If they need to develop a custom game, the taxonomy details the design alternatives to consider. The proposal has been applied on 22 serious games, and some interesting conclusions are drawn from this study. In addition, a web application has been built to support the proposal.
Serious games are growing rapidly as a gaming industry as well as a field of academic research. There are many surveys in the field of digital serious games; however, most surveys are specific to a particular area such as education or health. So far, there has been little work done to survey digital serious games in general, which is the main goal of this paper. Hence, we discuss relevant work on serious games in different application areas including education, well-being, advertisement, cultural heritage, interpersonal communication, and health care. We also propose a taxonomy for digital serious games, and we suggest a classification of reviewed serious games applications from the literature against the defined taxonomy. Finally, the paper provides guidelines, drawn from the literature, for the design and development of successful serious games, as well as discussing research perspectives in this domain.
In what ways do the online behaviors of wizards and ogres map to players’ actual leadership status in the offline world? What can we learn from players’ experience in Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOGs) to advance our understanding of leadership, especially leadership in online settings (E-leadership)? As part of a larger agenda in the emerging field of empirically testing the “mapping” between the online and offline worlds, this study aims to tackle a central issue in the E-leadership literature: how have technology and technology mediated communications transformed leadership-diagnostic traits and behaviors? To answer this question, we surveyed over 18,000 players of a popular MMOG and also collected behavioral data of a subset of survey respondents over a four-month period. Motivated by leadership theories, we examined the connection between respondents’ offline leadership status and their in-game relationship-oriented and task-related-behaviors. Our results indicate that individuals’ relationship-oriented behaviors in the virtual world are particularly relevant to players’ leadership status in voluntary organizations, while their task-oriented behaviors are marginally linked to offline leadership status in voluntary organizations, but not in companies.
Virtual worlds have exploded in popularity and drawn attention from researchers as worth studying in their own right. An additional, more radical form of scholarship has also emerged, namely, using virtual worlds to study real-world behaviors. If valid, this would enable using virtual worlds as “petri dishes” for communication scholars. However, there are several necessary conditions to be met first. The most fundamental is the establishment of a “mapping principle,” or the extent to which behaviors in one space are consistent with behaviors in another. This article outlines the mapping principle, spells out potential misuses, and offers a systematic exploration of validity and reliability issues. With those laid out, a research framework for mapping is presented.
We report results of an experiment on prices and demand in a fantasy-based virtual world. A virtual world is a persistent, synthetic, online environment that can be accessed by many users at the same time. Because most virtual worlds are built around a fantasy theme, complete with magic, monsters, and treasure, there is considerable skepticism that human behavior in such environments is in any way “normal”. Our world, “Arden”, was designed to test whether players in a typical fantasy environment were economically “normal.” Specifically, we tested whether fantasy gamers conform to the Law of Demand, which states that increasing the price of a good, all else equal, will reduce the quantity demanded. We created two exactly equivalent worlds, and randomly assigned players to one or the other. The only difference in the two worlds was that the price of a single good, a health potion, was twice as high in the experimental world than in the control. We allowed players (N = 43) to enter and play the environment for a month. We found that players in the experimental condition purchased 43.1 percent fewer of the potions, implying a demand elasticity of -0.431. This finding is well within the range one expects for normal economic agents. We take this as evidence that the Law of Demand holds in fantasy environments, which suggests in turn that fantasy gamers may well be economically normal. If so, it may be worthwhile to conduct controlled economic and social experiments in virtual worlds at greater scales of both population (thousands of users) and time (many months).
This article investigates the long-standing liberal hypothesis that trade ties facilitate interstate peace. Rather than assuming that trade will always promote peace, the author highlights the need to consider both the nature and context of economic linkages in assessing whether such ties are more likely to dampen or amplify interstate conflict. The study encompasses a diverse group of dyadic relationships for the period 1870-1938, 14,341 dyad years, and includes 270 militarized interstate disputes and 14 wars. After controlling for the potentially confounding influences of contiguity, regime type (joint democracy), relative capabilities, and alliance commitments, the author finds evidence that economic linkages have a dramatic influence on whether or not dyads engage in militarized disputes, but no influence on the occurrence of wars. Rather than inhibiting conflict, extensive economic interdependence increases the likelihood that dyads will engage in militarized interstate disputes. Peace through trade is most likely to arise among dyads composed of mutually dependent trading partners. Even then, the relationship between interdependence and conflict appears to be curvilinear, where low to moderate degrees of interdependence reduce the likelihood of dyadic disputes, and extensive economic linkages increase the probability of militarized disputes. Extreme interdependence, whether symmetrical or asymmetrical, has the greatest potential for increasing the likelihood of conflict.
We report results of an experiment on prices and demand in a fantasy-based virtual world. A virtual world is a persistent, synthetic, online environment that can be accessed by many users at the same time. Because most virtual worlds are built around a fantasy theme, complete with magic, monsters, and treasure, there is considerable skepticism that human behavior in such environments is in any way “normal”. Our world, “Arden”, was designed to test whether players in a typical fantasy environment were economically “normal.” Specifically, we tested whether fantasy gamers conform to the Law of Demand, which states that increasing the price of a good, all else equal, will reduce the quantity demanded. We created two exactly equivalent worlds, and randomly assigned players to one or the other. The only difference in the two worlds was that the price of a single good, a health potion, was twice as high in the experimental world than in the control. We allowed players (N = 43) to enter and play the environment for a month. We found that players in the experimental condition purchased 43.1 percent fewer of the potions, implying a demand elasticity of -0.431. This finding is well within the range one expects for normal economic agents. We take this as evidence that the Law of Demand holds in fantasy environments, which suggests in turn that fantasy gamers may well be economically normal. If so, it may be worthwhile to conduct controlled economic and social experiments in virtual worlds at greater scales of both population (thousands of users) and time (many months).
Games and game communities provide a rich opportunity for social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) researchers to study large‐population behaviors in partially controlled settings. The data sources include in‐game data provided by game application programming interfaces (APIs); meta‐game data provided by online websites discussing game strategies; asynchronous community data provided by forums, podcasts, and videos; and synchronous community data provided by live streaming video and chat. In this chapter, we describe the characteristics of these data and the challenges to accessing and interpreting the data. We illustrate the use of these sources with three case studies observing (i) in‐game behaviors in League of Legends, (ii) changes in popularity of deck archetypes in Hearthstone, and (iii) subculture characteristics in Twitch.tv. Finally, we present several future research recommendations.
Over the past 50 years, many thousands of conflict simulations have been published that bring the dynamics of past and possible future wars to life.
In this book, Philip Sabin explores the theory and practice of conflict simulation as a topic in its own right, based on his 30 years of experience in designing wargames and using them in teaching. Simulating War sets conflict simulation in its proper context alongside more academically familiar techniques such as game theory and operational analysis. It explains in detail the analytical and modelling techniques involved, and it teaches you how to design your own simulations of conflicts of your choice. The book provides eight simple illustrative simulations of specific historical conflicts, complete with rules, maps and counters.
Simulating War is essential reading for all recreational or professional simulation gamers, and for anyone who is interested in modelling war, from teachers and students to military officers.
How strong are normative prohibitions on state behavior? We examine this question by analyzing anti-nuclear norms, sometimes called the “nuclear taboo,” using an original survey experiment to evaluate American attitudes regarding nuclear use. We find that the public has only a weak aversion to using nuclear weapons and that this aversion has few characteristics of an “unthinkable” behavior or taboo. Instead, public attitudes about whether to use nuclear weapons are driven largely by consequentialist considerations of military utility. Americans’ willingness to use nuclear weapons increases dramatically when nuclear weapons provide advantages over conventional weapons in destroying critical targets. Americans who oppose the use of nuclear weapons seem to do so primarily for fear of setting a negative precedent that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons by other states against the United States or its allies in the future.
Online survey data were collected from 30,000 users of Massively Multi-User On- line Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) over a three year period to explore users' demographics, motivations, and derived experiences. Not only do MMORPGs ap- peal to a broad age range (Mage 26.57, range 11- 68), but the appeal is strong (on average 22 hours of usage per week) across users of all ages (r -.04). An exploratory factor analysis revealed a five factor model of user motivations— Achievement, Relationship, Immersion, Escapism, and Manipulation—illustrating the multifaceted appeal of these online environments. Male players were significantly more likely to be driven by the Achievement and Manipulation factors, while female players were significantly more likely to be driven by the Relationship factor. Also, the data indicated that users derived meaningful relationships and salient emotional experiences, as well as real-life leadership skills from these virtual environments. MMORPGs are not simply a pastime for teenagers, but a valuable research venue and platform where millions of users interact and collaborate using real-time 3D avatars on a daily basis.
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
Can the Internet reach beyond the U. S. college samples predominant in social science research? A sample of 564,502 participants completed a personality questionnaire online. We found that 19% were not from advanced economies; 20% were from non-Western societies; 35% of the Western-society sample were not from the United States; and 66% of the U. S. sample were not in the 18-22 (college) age group.
Social‐Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems
- S. Guarino
- L. Eusebi
- B. Bracken
- M. Jenkins
Game‐Based Experimentation for Research in Command and Control and Shared Situational Awareness
- P.P. Perla
- M. Markowitz
- C. Weuve
Whole Earth Security: A Geopolitics of Peace
- D. Deudney