All posts tagged: ethnically

The ancient Goths were an ethnically diverse group

The ancient Goths were an ethnically diverse group

Published by skeptic

An artist’s impression of how Visigoth warriors may have looked in the 5th century The Creative Assembly (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) The Goths were a multi-ethnic society, according to a study of DNA from Gothic graves. The people buried there had ancestry from places as far afield as Scandinavia, modern-day Turkey and North Africa. The findings run counter to one long-standing idea about the Goths: that they were Scandinavian peoples who moved south to the eastern Mediterranean. “If Gothic identity were primarily a biological lineage descending from Scandinavia, we would not see this,” says Svetoslav Stamov at the National Museum of History in Bulgaria. The Goths were living in eastern Europe at least as early as the 3rd century AD and remained there for centuries. Goths often lived near the frontiers of the Roman Empire, sometimes fighting for the empire and sometimes against it. One Goth group, the Visigoths, sacked the city of Rome in AD 410, helping to bring down the Western Roman Empire. However, Goths are one of history’s least understood groups. Much of …

Broad claims about gender and behavior fall apart when studies include ethnically diverse samples

Broad claims about gender and behavior fall apart when studies include ethnically diverse samples

Published by José Betancourt

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides evidence that racial and ethnic differences in certain behaviors are just as large as the widely known differences between men and women. The research suggests that generalizations about human behavior are often flawed because they rely on samples composed largely of White individuals. As a result, broad assumptions about how gender influences competitiveness and risk tolerance do not hold true across all demographic groups. Scientists in the behavioral sciences frequently face criticism for relying on study participants who represent a very narrow slice of human experience. Historically, researchers have heavily recruited individuals who are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and from democratic societies (known as WEIRD samples). Because these samples largely consist of university students in North America and Western Europe, they do not reflect the global population, leading to a major gap in the scientific understanding of how behavior varies within a single country. A significant body of behavioral economics literature examines how men and women differ in their willingness to …