How WEIRD is CHI?

Abstract

Computer technology is often designed in technology hubs in Western countries, invariably making it “WEIRD”, because it is based on the intuition, knowledge, and values of people who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Developing technology that is universally useful and engaging requires knowledge about members of WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies alike. In other words, it requires us, the CHI community, to generate this knowledge by studying representative participant samples. To find out to what extent CHI participant samples are from Western societies, we analyzed papers published in the CHI proceedings between 2016-2020. Our findings show that 73% of CHI study findings are based on Western participant samples, representing less than 12% of the world’s population. Furthermore, we show that most participant samples at CHI tend to come from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries with generally highly educated populations. Encouragingly, recent years have seen a slight increase in non-Western samples and those that include several countries. We discuss suggestions for further broadening the international representation of CHI participant samples.

A Systematic Review of Ethical Concerns with Voice Assistants

“…When answering RQ2, 94% of the 85 papers were conducted solely or mostly on participants from North America and Europe (see Table 2). This mirrors a long-running trend in HCI research, with 73% of CHI studies from 2016-2020 recruiting participants from nations with less than an eighth of the world's population [85]. Our review of papers across a range of HAI and HCI venues shows that this effect is even more pronounced in voice assistant research.…”

Who are CUIs Really For? Representation and Accessibility in the Conversational User Interface Literature

“…2 But what about research? An analysis of CHI papers from 2016-2020 found that 73% of CHI studies recruited Western participant samples representing less than 12% of the world's population; this reflects the organisations that submit to CHI, as over 80% of papers used participants from the country of authors' institutions [14]. Inspired by this we have previously investigated these issues in the context of voice assistants and found a similar story.…”