Section 3 General Topics

Essential Question: What are some basic topics related to DEI that could be useful to incorporate into any of the core classes offered here at UNC.

Abstract: Any psychology course offered at UNC is inherently related to issues of race, ethnicity, culture, or identities based on one’s gender or sexual identity. These types of social identities are either used as variables across different domains in psychology (e.g., seeing how these identities moderate effects of interest), or in contrast, social identities might be ignored completely in a given area of research, and members of certain groups might be underrepresented in that research. In the general topics section, we have slide-decks to prepare students to think about how different types of social identities - like race and ethnicity - might be relevant to think about when learning about any field in psychology. For example we address: (1) The question of what is race? What are the origins and history of this word and how does it continue to impact us today? ; (2) what are WEIRD psychology samples, what can we gain by doing cross-cultural work; (3) What are ways in which psychological inquiry is biased by researchers, gatekeepers, funders, etc; (4) What is the history of psychology - and how did core areas of research co-evolve with racial justice initiatives.

Note: The Social Psychology program put together several slides based on their area expertise. Slide decks are available on Cultural Psychology, Emotion, Essentialism, Implicit Bias, Intergroup Relations, Racism and Prejudice, Research Methods, Social Psychology and Health, Social Identity Motivation, Stereotype Threat, and Systemic vs Individual Racism. You can find all these slides HERE.

Class Topics and Learning Objectives

• Topic: WEIRD Psychology
  • Objective: The main goal is to convey that much of what we know about human psychology and neuroscience comes from studying a population that is not representative of the whole world. This topic can be inserted when discussing research methods relevant to the course. This topic is important to teach because drawing conclusions from WEIRD samples ignores diversity and limits our understanding of human psychology and neuroscience. Treating WEIRD-ness as default can also perpetuate existing systems that benefit WEIRD populations to the detriment of non-WEIRD populations (e.g. by influencing policy decisions). Teaching this can help set up other topics like individual differences, ecological validity, cross-cultural differences.
  • Slide Deck: Here.
  • Resources:
    • Apicella, Norenzayan, & Henrich (2020). Beyond WEIRD: A review of the last decade and a look ahead to the global laboratory of the future. Evolution and Human Behavior.
    • Rad, Martingano, & Ginges (2018). Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens: Making psychological science more representative of the human population. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
    • Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences. (and associated commentaries)
    • Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan (2010). Most people are not WEIRD. Nature (Note: This is a one page opinion piece written at a level that would be accessible to intro-level undergraduates.
    • The 2010 BBS paper and 2020 Evolution and Human Behavior papers contain lots of great examples of cross-cultural differences from various subfields of psychology.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Teaching by UNC Psychology & Neuroscience DEI Education Subcommittee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.