The WEIRDest People in the World—A Review
A review of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 704 pages (September, 2020).
A decade ago, researcher and scholar Joseph Henrich, together with psychologists Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan, published a landmark paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences titled, “The weirdest people in the world?”1 No, the target of the label “weird” were not the Araweté horticulturalists of lowland South America, where mothers-to-be seek sex with multiple men in the belief that semen from multiple fathers is needed to form the fetus.2 Nor were they the Māori of New Zealand, who have been known to collect and preserve the heads of enemy chiefs they killed in battle as trophies of war, (the mokomokai.) The target of the weird label was Western people. More specifically, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, or WEIRD.....MUCH MORE
WEIRD was not meant as a pejorative, but as an apt description of this group of psychologically peculiar people, who are distinct from the majority of humanity both now and throughout human history.
Indeed, WEIRD individuals are psychologically peculiar in a number of ways. For instance, if asked the question, “Who are you?” WEIRD people are more likely to describe themselves in terms of their skills, occupation, achievements, and talents rather than by their relationships—they are “a doctor,” “hardworking,” or “a pianist” rather than “Alex’s son” or “Clara’s boyfriend.” Additionally, when judging others, they are typically more likely to assign responsibility to personal characteristics rather than external circumstances. For instance, they are likely to assume that the guy driving recklessly ahead of them on the highway is a complete idiot and terrible driver rather than a worried son rushing his father to the nearest emergency room. While WEIRD people are more individualistic, self-centered, impersonally prosocial, guilt-ridden, and analytical, many non-WEIRD people, from the Chinese to the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert, display opposite psychological trends. Non-WEIRD people tend to be more collectivistic, other-focused, more partial to their in-groups, shame-ridden, and holistic thinkers.
The central argument of Henrich and his collaborators is that there has been and continues to be an over-reliance on WEIRD samples in research. And while many of these findings purport to shed light on the human mind and behavior in general, they actually only illuminate the psychology of a small proportion of the human species. WEIRD people make up only around 12 percent of the world’s population and yet over 90 percent of the subjects in psychology research.1 While this methodological critique was and continues to be extremely important for researchers, it left the question of how WEIRD psychology came to be, unresolved. Explaining WEIRD psychology, together with elucidating the key factors that contributed to the scaling-up of small Western societies into large complex states, are the two central focuses of The WEIRDest People in the World. Joseph Henrich addresses them in this sweeping and magisterial book, likely to become as foundational to cultural psychology as the WEIRD acronym he and his colleagues coined a decade ago....
