Today in our research methods seminar on designing experiments, when we were talking about choosing informants, the professor asked why a psychologist tends to choose participants from university students. Someone said it was meant to represent the general population. Yes, that’s the intention, but they fail at it. Psychology as a science, he said, is basically based on white 18 to 25-year-old educated people. What’s the acronym for this group? WEIRD. I did a quick search on Google — western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.
Of course that’s a generalization. But I do find some truth to that, not necessarily about psychology as a scientific field but about my own academic experience. In a way my studying abroad is a process to become more WEIRD. The fact that I’m writing this in English is WEIRD. The fact that I have trouble deciding between two essay titles while a mile away in the city center people take drugs and sleep on the street and two generations ago people in my family died from not having enough salt to eat is WEIRD.
I find all this quite weird. The contradictions between me and the outside, the contradictions within myself. I’m exhilarated and uplifted by all the wonderful resources, people and experiences I’m fortunate enough to come across but I’m also, just about the same time, overwhelmed and confused. I do not know how to hold myself still in this very moment, and in the next moment I’m doing great things, having discussions worth bragging about. I’m living and enjoying and consuming the wonder of this modern education, until I find that it is myself that’s being consumed.
Maybe I’m feeling this way just because it started pouring on my way home and I had to walk in the rain for half hour holding three thick hard-cover books, which I just borrowed from the library and I’m supposed to finish reading before meeting with two professors tomorrow. The night is coming earlier and earlier. At four o’clock it’s almost dark outside. It’s not wrong to be fortunate. It’s a blessing, not a sin. But sometimes I do feel it’s a sin. I made the choice to be where I am but I also didn’t make the choice. Why am I where I am, doing what I’m doing? I’m a blob of thoughtless thoughts being pushed from here to there by the tides.