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How STRANGE are your study animals?

A new framework for animal-behaviour research will help to avoid sampling bias — ten years on from the call to widen the pool of human participants in psychology studies beyond the WEIRD.
  1. Michael M. Webster

    1. Michael M. Webster is a lecturer in the School of Biology, University of St Andrews, UK.

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  2. Christian Rutz

    1. Christian Rutz is a professor in the School of Biology, University of St Andrews, UK, and worked on this article while he was the 2019–2020 Grass Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

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Hawksbill Sea Turtle with a satellite transmitter attached to its shell swims through shallow blue water

A hawksbill sea turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata) tagged with a satellite transmitter. Credit: Pete Oxford/NPL

Ten years ago this week, researchers pointed out that many important findings in human experimental psychology cannot be generalized because study participants are predominantly drawn from a small, unrepresentative subset of the world’s population: societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD)1. Mounting evidence suggests that there could be similar sampling problems in research on animals. Behavioural studies of a wide range of species — from insects to primates — could be affected, with researchers testing individuals that are not fully representative of the wider populations they seek to understand. For example, certain sampling protocols are likely to trap the boldest animals, potentially skewing experimental results2.

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Nature 582, 337-340 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01751-5

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