How STRANGE are your study animals?

How STRANGE are your study animals?

Study animals are often STRANGE

Are your turtles tired, your spiders jaded or your fish oddly bold? Ten years to the day after the call to widen the pool of human participants in psychology studies beyond those from WEIRD societies (that’s Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), animal-behaviour researchers Michael Webster and Christian Rutz write that “mounting evidence suggests that there could be similar sampling problems in research on animals”. They propose a framework with a fitting acronym — STRANGE — that researchers can use to design studies, and to declare and discuss potential biases.

Nature | 10 min read