What's Wrong w/ WEIRD science (Western Educated Indistrialized Rich Democratic)

Today we confront the stark reality that our understanding of human behavior could be deeply skewed. With an overwhelming majority of psychological studies based on a narrow demographic slice of humanity, the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) bias raises profound questions about the universality of research findings. 

Then, we navigate the intimate and often controversial realm of parenting, where the choice between co-sleeping and bed-sharing stirs passionate debate among parents and experts alike. 

I examine a meta-review, dissecting the nuanced advantages and potential hazards linked to these practices. We take a close look at how factors such as socioeconomics and cultural norms shape parental decision-making and, consequently, child development.

Bringing in perspectives from various cultures, including the Aka tribe's unique childcare approaches, this episode offers an eye-opening contemplation on the deep-seated need for physical connection in rearing our young. 

Chapters

• 0:04 Limitations of Western Behavioral Science
• 15:07 Parenting Practices and Cultural Differences

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

I. I Am your host, owl medicine, best-selling author, founder of decolonized healthcare and host of this podcast. Thank you very much for deciding to spend your time with me. There are lots of places that you could be and lots of things that you could be putting your attention on, and you chose to come Some place to learn something that might benefit you or might benefit the world, and I want to say thank you for that. So welcome, welcome, welcome if you haven't been here before, welcome. I'm glad to have you.

Speaker 1: 1:16

This is going to be a fun podcast episode for me, because it's all about being weird and, and Most specifically, it's all about weird science. And no, I do not mean weird science, the 1985 comedy sci-fi hit. I Mean weird science, as in the science that we in the Western world use every day and we call it the end all be all answer to everything that we could ever need. Let's talk about science for a second. Say what is the purpose of science? The purpose of science is to know stuff, to learn stuff, to Find out stuff. We ask, we ask, hopefully, thoughtful questions in a careful way and we design studies in a careful way so we can observe what interactions are happening and by limiting the number of variables and the number of the number of inputs and taking really, really careful notes, and the idea is that in science, we can get to universal truths by doing this. And here's the problem with science in the world is, the places in the world that can afford science are Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. For those of you listening super close, you might have noticed that that spells out weird Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, which makes sense because we're we're the people who can afford science and spending money on science and scientific explorations. But what that means is we need to be careful to understand that, especially in places where we have looked and realized that our science is studying people. And if we're trying to understand the universal truths about people, we can't just study Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic demographics. It's not. It's not a good idea.

Speaker 1: 3:25

So in 2008, there was a study of more than 4,000 articles published over 20 years that found that 95% of behavioral science research subjects come from the US, europe and English-speaking countries like Australia 95% of behavioral science research subjects over 20 years. So when we're studying human behavior, what we're studying is not human behavior. We are studying Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic human behavior. It's a very specific niche and Because these are all like English-speaking countries, well before I even go there, there's a few more things to understand here. Not only was it 95% of the behavioral science research coming from English-speaking countries like US, europe, australia 68% of subjects are from the US and more than two-thirds of American psychology research subjects are undergraduate students. 66%, or more, more than 66%, I guess, is actually what it says more than 66% of American psychological research subjects are undergraduate students. That's crazy to me, because the problem with that is that I don't know if anybody else now understands this, but American college students are not representative of all human beings. Just throwing it out there, like if we're studying something to understand what unifies it all, what is the like, the universal truth behind it. Maybe we should try studying something other than college students.

Speaker 1: 5:22

Now, okay, let me. Let me take a second to say right here because this is hopefully what you're starting to see why I wanted to cover this. It's been something that was brought up to me on my radar maybe five or six years ago, and it's slowly like trickled its way into my brain how far reaching the consequences of this is, but I do feel like I need to take a second to say one. I already said that it makes sense that industrialized, wealthy, westernized nations do science, especially behavioral science stuff, because we have the money to do so. And same thing with this goes all of these psychology students and all of these psychology studies on students make sense because the people who are doing studies are doing studies in colleges and they need people to do them on. And college students are right there and they're willing and they understand the need for research. And so I get it.

Speaker 1: 6:32

I'm not trying to discount how important or I'm not trying to discount the science that we have already. There obviously are holes in it. There's bad science, there's good science, there's lots of science in between, but it's all helpful on some level or another, some more than others, some less than others. But I'm not saying that the science that we have right now is bad. I'm saying that it is woefully, woefully incomplete. So, as one example, researchers have found that western subjects tend to have higher self-esteem than many non-western subjects, which I find interesting, and some scientists have actually pointed out that this might reflect how different cultures value things like modesty and have nothing to do, obviously, with innate biological mechanisms, which is what we're trying to understand. If we're trying to understand human behavior, we're trying to understand those most basic principles, and now we can't separate biology from behavior, that's. I know we've talked about that a lot on this. It's kind of my favorite subject, but it is really important to understand that this could affect how people describe themselves, but also it could dramatically affect how they actually feel.

Speaker 1: 7:54

So let's take a second to just look at the typical American psychology subject. The typical American psychology subject is an undergrad student, like I said, and they have noted differences that we have, that they've calculated, doing cross-cultural studies in things like their self-perception, their ethics and their economic decision-making. Then there was a they took these students and they give them an ultimatum game that's what they call it. They found that undergrad students in this game are more likely to offer less money to another person compared to American adults who aren't currently, and may have never been, college students. The typical research subject's behavior doesn't really tell you how a typical person manages money. It just tells you how a college student manages money. And so, and because these studies, like I said, they're they're psychological, they're behavioral, they're truly trying to get a lot of useful things, and there are so many little things hidden in our cultures that we think are innate to all of us, that are only innate to our culture, and we really don't know that until we get out of the country and go travel. That's why I think traveling is so, so freaking important.

Speaker 1: 9:08

A number of studies have found that people who speak English and other Indo-European languages tend to use words meaning like left or right to describe where things are, which makes perfect sense to us. Otherwise, how are you going to say where something is so somebody else can find it? But if you look at smaller unit cultures, smaller unit meaning, like the family units in smaller villages and that sort of thing, they don't have the terms like left and right, because the terms left and right are egocentric, they're self-centered. From my perspective, something is to my right or to my left, and that's how we describe things from our perspective, whereas many other cultures not westernized, not the weird cultures wind up using allocentric terms. They say behind or above, or even use cardinal directions like north, south, east and west, and these are just a few of the differences and that we know for sure.

Speaker 1: 10:13

That pop up. These are just a few of the differences that we know for sure, pop up in science and it's kind of it's kind of crazy that we have such a huge gap. But it's not if you really think about it. It feels crazy because it's like, wow, we have such a big blind spot. But if you ask scientists, they'll tell you they know we have a huge blind spot, unless, like, especially if you ask researchers, they'll tell you that we have huge blind spots.

Speaker 1: 10:43

Other folks I mean everybody's different, but I think we all understand that Western science is limited, especially my listeners. We understand that Western science is limited, but I wanted to take a minute to talk about how limited it is, because this whole thing they call it weird demographics or weird science and again, not the movie, but actual weird Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic countries, democratic populations these weird populations are fundamentally different from the majority of the populations in the world. We're a very, very, very small. Especially when you look at American college undergraduate college students, that is such an insanely specific demographic that only studies a certain type of person, mostly at a certain age, at a certain class. You know like you got to have a certain level of income. It's like the type of person who goes into psychology underground versus the type of person who joins the Marine Corps, very different types of people. When you're looking at all of these people are American.

Speaker 1: 11:55

Then I've talked before on here about that book, american Nations and how we actually have, I think, 12 distinct, culturally and genetically distinct regions of the United States that are dramatically different from one to the other, and still we're only a tiny percent of the world's population. And if we want to understand, truly understand, behavioral sciences, economic sciences, then we have to stop thinking that we're the only ones worth studying, and I don't think that that's actually the thing, right? Any questions? Alright, mostly weird sciences the behavioral sciences, psychology, economics and cognitive science. And of course, it's really difficult to go to other countries and to other cultures and try to build these studies. We honestly probably would do a terrible job if we did. And if we did try, I'm sure there would be a lot of people like in arms, up in arms about it, saying that we, that we are doing something terrible to the culture or erasing the culture or a cultural appropriation or something. There's always going to be challenges.

Speaker 1: 13:07

But I just wanted to talk about how big of a blind spot this weird science stuff is, and now I'm going to segue into the second half of this, which is just another region of why studying like this weird science stuff is important, and this is about how weird not the acronym, but the actual definition, but also the acronym how weird Westernized child rearing is compared to other places in the world, because, again, we think everything that we do is normal. So I wanted to just take a minute. I'm not a parent, but I think that raising children is probably the single hardest and most not rewarding I mean most rewarding but not rewarded job on the planet, and it's very interesting to me as I was looking this stuff up, trying to build an outline for the podcast. There's lots of very interesting things that we really should understand a little bit better about child rearing in the West. One, let we can talk about bed sharing, and for this one I actually found a science article, a meta analysis, which, if you don't know what a meta analysis is, that's just when they take a whole bunch of studies and then compile a whole bunch of studies and look at the results of all of those studies and they do a deep dive into the studies to rank them in order of how good the study is, looking at things like population size and controls and all of that comes out to a decent p value. They look at those types of things to stratify which ones were the best and which ones have the most reliable outcomes that, like, we can trust, and which ones have less reliable outcomes, and they, once they're stratified in that level, then they kind of put all that information together to give us our best guess as to what we know about.

Speaker 1: 15:07

Whatever the subject of the meta analysis or the meta review is and this one was a meta review of co-sleeping and this is really interesting because essentially the jury is still out it's one of the most controversial subjects in parenting research. The later literature has popularized and polarized the debate. Everybody's fighting in one side or the other, it seems. But there are damages that are associated, like benefits and complications that come up with bed sharing. They are both physical and psychological. In this review they actually reviewed 659 published papers, peer reviewed editorial pieces and commentaries on the topic of parent child bed sharing, and what they've tried to do is create like a narrative walkthrough of the many different domains of bed sharing research. They look at socioeconomic and cultural factors and purported risks and outcomes, like they specifically look at sudden infant death syndrome and sleep problems and found that general design limitations and lack of convincing evidence in the literature making it really hard to give any kind of strong generalizations as to what's good and what's bad.

Speaker 1: 16:28

So the question is to share or not to share a bed, and it seems like it shouldn't be a big deal, but it is a very, very controversial thing. There's bed sharing versus co-sleeping. Bed sharing is when you're in the same bed and co-sleeping we used to call bed sharing, but now it's shared rooms. Co-sleeping is sleeping in the same room, whereas bed sharing is being in the exact same bed. And they looked at a lot of factors here, including reactive versus intentional bed sharing. Cross-cultural studies indicate that bed sharing rates are higher for predominantly Asian countries than more so than predominantly Caucasian countries, and are stable during the preschool years and they suggest little change over the period once bed sharing becomes established.

Speaker 1: 17:22

However, parents bed share for many reasons aside from traditional reasons to bed share, including breastfeeding, infant irritability or illness, parental ideology, the parents' own sleep experiences, convenience anxieties, so on and so forth. The consequences or risks are sudden infant death syndrome is kind of the biggest one that people are worried about, and when they looked at the studies with sudden infant death syndrome, like for one reason or another, and bed sharing, what they found is, well, one, the evidence is both for and against, but what they did find is most of the evidence against the risk factors that add to sudden infant death syndrome. The ones that are the most important for, like that make co-sleeping or not co-sleeping, but they make bed sharing more dangerous are sleep disturbances, like you have some kind of sleep disorder, insomnia or narcolepsy, or even sleep apnea if you have those things, or are obese, which makes sense because the big fear is that we roll over on top of our child and smother our child in our sleep and any kind of sleeping disorder is going to make it harder for you to wake up and because you're going to be constantly waking up, so your body might wake up but your brain might not, and that's the danger, because you might roll over on top of your baby and smother them. Same thing with the obesity, and I think that's part of why there is so much back and forth on. It is because there are risks and there are benefits, but so long as, like the main, the biggest risk is actually just smothering your baby and bed sharing is not the only thing in child rearing that makes us weird, and part of the reason that we do this we do the cultural thing of not sharing beds is.

Speaker 1: 19:23

In the West we have a very, very strong concept of the independence and we're told that we need to put our babies in another room, far away, so they can learn to be independent from an early age. But what we know is that that actually just breeds really, really terrible attachment styles, so those children have behavioral and psychological problems later in life. Keeping your children close to you is really important. Physical touch with your children is really really important, and in the West, in our hyper-independent version of the world which again is why it's a terrible idea to just study these weird populations we don't touch our children nearly as much.

Speaker 1: 20:12

One of the things the article that made me go huh, this could be a really fun one was all about well, it mentioned co-sleeping, but the other one was all about strollers how in the West we put our kids in tiny trolleys and push them around, and in the rest of the entire world we have physical contact with our babies and we do know they've done studies on moving the baby through space in a stroller versus holding the baby. Still, where they did both, where they were like we're holding the baby, there's physical contact and we're moving forward, or we are just holding the baby or just moving forward, whether, like I don't know if that made sense, just moving the baby, as in pushing the baby in a stroller, just holding the baby in a sling, skin to skin. And it turned out that skin to skin contact with movement was better, and also skin to skin contact without movement was better than just movement, all of that being just movement, being putting the child in the stroller and pushing the stroller, where there is no physical contact between the child and the parent. And nobody else in the world does that. They carry their children around, they carry them around for a very long time and I mean they also train them to walk and all of that. But it's not about just fostering independence all of the time. It's about fostering independence and fostering a deep and trusting connection with the children. So like spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on a stroller is very much a weird white people thing, and I mean that in both ways, both the acronym and in the definition version of weird.

Speaker 1: 21:51

And the last thing I'll bring up is the Aqa tribe. The Aqa tribe is a tribe in the Central African Republic that let the men let the infants suckle on their nettles, as they do it for crying babies when the mothers aren't there, so the babies feel psychologically safe. The tribe said it's not about nutrition, it's about fulfilling an emotional need when the mother isn't there. We could also mention Inuit. The Inuits up north never shout at their children. They never shout at them, and Scandinavians leave their babies outside all year round and they're not worried about them being kidnapped or frozen to death because they have a different culture.

Speaker 1: 22:43

There are many, many ways to parent right. There are many, many, many ways to be in the world and none of them are wrong. There's just wrong times to be that certain way. We also have a very weird thing in the West about circumcision that doesn't exist in the rest of the world. Mutilation is a weird thing that we do for boys. Somehow we think it's okay. We think it's okay for men, but we don't think it's okay for women. There are protests all around the world about genital mutilation for females and, yes, it is worse for females than it is for males the way that they do it, but it's mutilation either way. But here in the West they say that neonatal circumcision the risk exceeds the benefits at least 100 to one. That was like years and years and years ago from the American Academy of Pediatrics and now they're saying that one in six is actually problematic. So circumcision a weird thing.

Speaker 1: 23:49

The fact that we feed our children sugar for breakfast, cereals and pancakes and that kind of yogurt and that kind of crap not a great idea and not something that happens around the world. Parenting, which is what they call, when parents are constantly uploading pictures of their children and that sort of thing that's something that Western parents do, that other parents and other cultures they're not constantly uploading their children's lives, and that's a touchy subject. Now, with everything being online, our children's entire lives are their online image and they have to protect that the way that somebody in the Old West protected their reputation. Another weird thing that we do here in the West is spanking. There's very few things that behavioral psychologists all agree on. There's very, very few, and the only one is that spanking is bad. Also, standardized tests we do them in the Western world and we don't do them the same way in the Eastern or anywhere else in the world. There are many ways that we in the West are different and the reason I wanted to talk about all of this today was to give you a few examples of the way that we are weird, both acronym and in the definition version, because it's important to recognize our way is not the only way.

Speaker 1: 25:17

So I hope that you got something fun out of this. I hope that you learned something interesting. I found it very interesting that the Aka tribe the men let babies suck on their nipples when they're crying, and it immediately made me think of a key, my dog, who's passed. She was such a sweet, loving, loving dog that I had an accident with a cat and the cat was weaned too early and she let that cat suckle on her nipples. Having never been pregnant, she let the cat suckle on her nipples until we're bloody and scabbed because she was just so loving and so nurturing and sweet and just wonderful that way. I miss her very much and she would have gotten along really well with the men in the Aka tribe. I think If you enjoyed today's podcast, leave a comment, shoot me a question that I can answer in the next episode. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for hanging out with me today and remember stay curious and stay uncomfortable. Bye, bye. Wheeeeeeeee будет, wheeeeeeeeesan Whee. It Schoo slow. It straw à la luc. No-transcript you.