There is no author summary for this book yet. Authors can add summaries to their books on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
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.
This chapter reviews the recent research on motivation, beliefs, values, and goals, focusing on developmental and educational psychology. The authors divide the chapter into four major sections: theories focused on expectancies for success (self-efficacy theory and control theory), theories focused on task value (theories focused on intrinsic motivation, self-determination, flow, interest, and goals), theories that integrate expectancies and values (attribution theory, the expectancy-value models of Eccles et al., Feather, and Heckhausen, and self-worth theory), and theories integrating motivation and cognition (social cognitive theories of self-regulation and motivation, the work by Winne & Marx, Borkowski et al., Pintrich et al., and theories of motivation and volition). The authors end the chapter with a discussion of how to integrate theories of self-regulation and expectancy-value models of motivation and suggest new directions for future research.
