There are many discussions to be had about diversity. One such discussion pertains to a term that I somehow learned only recently: the WEIRD problem.
A lot of research in the social sciences is done in academic settings; that is, at universities. Suppose that you’re a grad student doing research in psychology. You need research subjects, but where can you get them? Why, look, there appears to be a large pool of them nearby—namely, legions of undergraduates. So you sign a bunch of them up for your battery of tests, crunch your numbers and p-values, and publish a paper.
This happens all over in American universities, and for all I know, in European ones as well. But it’s possible that drawing from a pool of American (or European) college students inherently biases your results. Thus the WEIRD problem, which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. This describes the countries from which these test subjects come.
Is this a problem? It sure can be if you want to draw universal conclusions about your work. According to one article, “WEIRD subjects, who are from countries that represent only about 12 percent of the world’s population, differ from other populations in moral decision making, reasoning style, fairness, even things like visual perception. This is because a lot of these behaviors and perceptions are based on the environments and contexts in which we grew up.”
The naïve assumption might be that you can ask college students questions about, say, ethics and learn something about humans at large. But there’s a good possibility that all you’re learning about is the ethics of college students. So your results might be—heh-heh—weird.
Origins. Last weekend we were obliged to celebrate the Fourth of July close to home, but we decided to at least have traditional cookout food. This included corn on the cob. As I was prepping the corn I got to wondering why we call them ears of corn.
Lots of people have apparently wondered the same thing, because there are explanations aplenty. The story is that in Old English, the word ehir or ahir referred to the “flowering spike or seed-bearing head of certain cereal grasses.” (OED) You might remember that corn—maize—is a food from the New World, so it would not have been known to the Saxons. Their word ehir referred to the seed stalk of wheat, barley, or rye. In the US, corn is maize, but long before the English language knew about maize, the word corn meant “seed” (for example, barley-corn), and in the Old Country, an ear of corn meant (and in some dialects still means) “seed-head.”
The word ear to refer to the listening device stuck on your head comes from a different root, namely ora in Old English. How did both ehir/ahir and ora end up in modern English as ear? The original words each underwent a set of sound changes whose paths both led to the word we spell ear. This happens sometimes (to bear/teddy bear, to bark/tree bark). People who study the evolution of English can explain the exact sequence of changes that caused all this. I can’t, though, so I will leave it at this.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.