Westerners Are WEIRD

WEIRD stands for western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Though WEIRD people are a minority in global terms, they constitute the field of study for most psychological research. “‘If you’re a Westerner, your intuitions about human psychology are probably wrong or at least there’s good reason to believe they’re wrong,’ says University of British Columbia researcher Dr. Joseph Henrich. After analyzing reams of data from earlier studies, the UBC team found that WEIRD people reacted differently from others in experiment after experiment involving measures of fairness, anti-social punishment and co-operation, as well as visual illusions and questions of individualism and conformity.”