WEIRD tales and other be-sci horrors

The first scene of Shakespeare’s Macbeth ends with the words:

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

Spoken by the weird sisters – three sinister women who are behind the malign events of the play – these words cue the audience for what to expect from these characters.

The sisters provide information that seems contradictory and confusing, but has some element of truth. Even if it’s not always apparent exactly what the nature of this truth is.

Throughout the play, their words will punish the optimistic Macbeth as he sieves their prophecies for what he hopes to hear.

Scary indeed. And the sisters are certainly weird. But at the time the original text was written, the word ‘weird’ (spelled ‘wyrd’) would not have meant ‘strange’ as it does today. It meant ‘to have the ability to control human destiny’.

Do WEIRD people still control human destiny?

Because behavioural science is guided by the WEIRD. And it might be limiting our ability to create truly inclusive online experiences.

Why?

Behavioural science needs humans to study. The cheapest and quickest way to do this is to use whatever humans you have around. That’s a problem because universities (where behavioural science labs usually are) are full of weird humans. So a lot of behavioural science studies use humans who are weird.

Or more appropriately, WEIRD.

WEIRD stands for White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic.

A lot of the readily available participants for behavioural science have the kind of backgrounds that are common to university students. Not all of them are white, or from rich, democratic, industrialised countries. But certainly more of them than the global population. They’re nearly all more educated than the average too.

Is this a problem? Well, yes.

We’re constantly drawing conclusions from studies that treat a specialised population as a universal one. And the more we create online experiences based on the norms of this group, the more we sideline any diversity of thought.

Testing on one type of brain?

Our own (WEIRD) experiences online have shaped the way our brains process them. Yet anthropologists know that what we consider to be ‘intuitive’ is often anything but. It’s the result of the reinforcement of expectation, and it’s far from universal. Isolated cultures don’t even react to human facial expressions in a universal way.

There’s no real way to fix this. The online world is entirely unnatural, and all our ‘intuitions’ there are learned.

The best we can do is to remember this. To consider our biases, and check them with others. And to take the results of our WEIRD testing and see if non-WEIRD people have the same experiences.

Fair may not be foul, as Shakespeare’s creepy sisters suggested. But if we only speak to WEIRD people, it might not be quite as fair as we think it is.