The weirdest people in the world? - University of British ...

The weirdest people in the world? Joseph HenrichDepartment of Psychology and Department of Economics, University of BritishColumbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z4, J. HeineDepartment of Psychology, University of British Columbia, VancouverV6T 1Z4, NorenzayanDepartment of Psychology, University of British Columbia, VancouverV6T 1Z4, scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world s top journals basedon samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies . Researchers oftenimplicitly assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these standard subjects are asrepresentative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparativedatabase from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results acrosspopulations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species frequent outliers.

uncommon among the traditional societies of Melanesia and Aboriginal Australia (Herdt 1984/1993), as well as in Ancient Greece and Tokugawa Japan. Such in-depth studies of seemingly “exotic” societies, historically the province of anthropology, are crucial for understanding human behavioral and psychological vari-ation.

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