Parishti Project

There is a Western-Educated-Industrialized-Rich-Democratic [1] (WEIRD) sampling bias in psychology.

In 2010, University of British Columbia researchers (Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan) released a study entitled The Weirdest People in the World demonstrating that the availability of undergraduate students in university settings, and their willingness to participate in psychological studies meant that they were over-represented in the sampling of published psychological studies.

WEIRD studies produce a profound understanding of western undergrads that cannot be generalized to the rest of the profession.

In the practice of law, we have known for generations that there is a difference between the reasonable man and the reasonable woman, in assessing the risks associated with domestic violence. For example, attacking an opponent in his sleep might not be a rational/reasonable [2] for an able-bodied man, it may be a completely rational/reasonable for an abused woman in fear for her life. The difference between these two rationalities is now recognized as a type of PTSD.

The recognition of Battered Woman Syndrome proves that courts can (and do) adjust legal tests to accommodate new information -- when that information is available to them. As long as WEIRD biases persist in psychology, they will persist in the practice of law.

WEIRD biases find their way into the legal profession through:

1. Publication. The acceptance of a study for publication in a scientific journal generally involves a peer-review process, suggesting compliance with accepted scientific standards. Acceptance for publication imbues selected studies with credibility. The process itself contributes and amplifies the existing WEIRD biases.[3]
2. Dissemination. While the original publication may state the limitations of its finding (such as disclosing a WEIRD bias), the digestion and republication of the findings in secondary and tertiary media often do not include these limitations.
3. Legislation. Backgrounders and lobby groups employ WEIRD research to generate support for the drafting and enactment of legislation, writing WEIRD biases into law.
4. Pleadings. While legislation must be applicable to everyone, the application of WEIRD research to individual cases starts with the drafting of pleadings. Before the creation of Battered Woman Syndrome by the courts, a lawyer had to argue it in pleadings.
5. Expert Witnesses. Pleadings are not evidence. For WEIRD research to be accepted as evidence, it must be supported by a witness (usually an expert witness)

At every step along the way, the impact of WEIRD biases is amplified as more voices join the choir.

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[1] The authors of the original study chose these labels. See Origins of Democracy on the issue of whether democracy is an appropriate label.

[2] Rationality is entangled with the reasonable person standard in the legal profession. Because the reasonable person standard is an objective test (sometimes modified for partial subjectivity for context but not for the qualities of the actor) many feminists reject rationally as a gendered construct.

[3] For example, the PATRIARCH checklist, developed by psychologists to distinguish between domestic violence (DV) and honour-based violence (HBV) without peer review, continues to be sold to law enforcement even though it produces both false positives and false negatives.