IRIN Global | Why are humanitarians so WEIRD? | Afghanistan | DRC | Central African Republic | Haiti | Indonesia | Kenya | Lebanon | Liberia | Myanmar | Papua New Guinea | Philippines | Sierra Leone | Somalia | Syria | Thailand | United Arab Emirates | Aid Policy: "BELGRADE, 15 April 2015 (IRIN) - I'm WEIRD. I'm not sure whether I became an aid worker because I'm weird, but I was definitely a WEIRD aid worker. I realised this after reading a 2010 academic article which pointed out that an overwhelming proportion of psychology experiments were carried out on an “extraordinarily restricted sample” of humanity – American university undergraduates. The article concluded that this sample was “one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens,” because they were too WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic."
"The result, noted by the 2015 World Development Report (WDR to its friends), is that “development professionals are not always good at predicting how poverty shapes mindsets,” a phrase that maintains the World Bank's position as gold medallists at the Understatement Olympics. Meanwhile the 2014 World Disasters Report (confusingly, also WDR to its friends) emphasises that “Many... organizations are divorced from the realities of the life and the expectations of those who are at risk,” leading to what the Disasters Report describes as a clash between “people's culture” and “organizational culture.”"
'via Blog this'
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment