Why WEIRD Samples Might Not be Weird

The WEIRD acronym (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic) is a negative and provocative buzzword that stuck. Such self-flagellation has been the trend in modern academia

Again, I find myself defending psychological science as actually a beautiful area of research. I encourage people to study it, to master the scientific branch of it, and go on to a great career. I can think of no better job than that of a psychologist, forensic psychologist, or academic psychologist.

The body of research should be enjoyed and respected with a proper amount of scientific skepticism, but without broad-brush cynicism. Without thinking of the whole cannon of research as essentially unreliable due to past participants being from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) samples. I argue here that the fact that many samples have resided in western cultures is usually not the most important confound in most psychology research articles.

The WEIRD acronym was introduced by Henrich et al in 2010, in what actually is a paper I encourage people to fully read. The title was a very provocative “The weirdest people in the world?,” and this article seemed to touch a kind of masochistic anti-western trend in academic. I do disagree with the subtle suggestion that the whole cannon of research is put in doubt by Henrich et al’s arguments, but it is probably essential reading for graduate students, so long as some skepticism comes with it. The danger is that Henrich’s critique of behavioral science feeds into the narcissistic tendencies of some young (and old!) scholars, and they feel they have discovered a serious general and broad critique without much effort on their part required.

I encourage students and academics to do the hard work instead: to read old research, to find decades-old work on external and ecological validity, to find old research on non-western samples, and to essentially actively seek disconfirming evidence and argument regarding the WEIRD meme. I also encourage people to understanding the “weird” label in the context of academia being swamped in some utterly dreadful anti-western scholarship in postmodernism, moral relativism, and critical theory.

Joseph Henrich himself, being well grounded in evolutionary theory, seems to agree that the meme has been taken too far by some. He, with colleagues, has written about his concerns in some parts of this article and this. Props to them for doing so, and indeed he does seem sensible in the brief correspondence with me via email. Nevertheless, the negative connotation of the word “weird” is something that will go on fitting into the modern zeitgeist of self-flagellation in academia in western countries. It seems to be the case that Henrich and colleagues are good scientists, and they may dislike how some academics (who are hyper-critical of the west) have used the meme.

In my domain of memory function, I can speak with some expertise. I do not think the fact that many (but not all) participant samples are western is much of a confound. We have massive variation in samples over thousands of experiments. There may be some exceptions, and I am excited to read about exceptions if they are discovered and then replicated over time. Nevertheless, the WEIRD simplistic meme is not leading students (and academics) to do the detail-oriented critical thinking and hard work that is necessary in establishing real specific problems in existing research. Some professors and students are using the simplistic meme to discount previous research in such a way that it absolves them of the difficult task of actually reading the enormous past research cannon in psychology. Rather than examining Sperling’s or Baddeley’s early experiments and articles in memory, they would rather believe they are kind of above all of the past research. Some come to feel they are, in essence, part of a new superior generation or a new moral class of academics.

As a scientific skeptic, I question such simplistic memes. I encourage people to work hard and read. I guarantee you that culture will not always be the most important confound in most areas of research. If there is a strong evidence and theory, culture should be studied, but if not, grant money should not just automatically given to scholars pulling the culture-lever because the zeitgeist encourages it. Above all, there must be no cultic social pressure to comply with a certain narrative, as can happen when it comes to any topic that deals with criticism of the west in academia.

We already knew about culture and ecological validity before the WEIRD argument was laid down. We knew, for example, that Freudian repression theory is a cultural set of ideas originating in France, Austria, and then spreading (Pope et al, 2007). We already were researching that. For other areas of memory research, culture and other demographics have been studied much more than outsiders might imagine. Over many studies, we tend to find little differences in demographic variables on memory tasks, and as a result that is not the headline of the research that is then published. There is a lot of competition in memory research to find differences between groups, and the fact that little is reported means there is probably few differences. There will be interesting exceptions, and we should try to find them. All I am saying is that we have been searching for decades already, and we have a lot of null results on sex, race, socioeconomic status, and so on.

Another critique of a simplistic WEIRD meme is to ask what is the purpose of psychological science? Is it to find evidence of mechanisms and treatments for the taxpaying public? Yes. Is it the public who is set to benefit from such knowledge western? Yes. Will well researched psychological science therefore apply to the public? Yes. So research on western samples in most cases is important. Is it important to find out whether such treatments work on a distant tribe? I do not know—it is certainly interesting but my instinct say that perhaps distant tribes should be left alone. I do suspect that some of the basics of clinical findings will probably work in a distant tribe, but this is an esoteric area of research. While it is important, finding generalizable treatments and mechanisms in western samples could help millions more people.

I hope this article helps students and academics get out of a simplistic WEIRD critique of psychology research, and instead carefully and scientifically critique specific research with the most sensible limitations. Undergraduates are too often coming out of learning the WEIRD critique by making that the first self-criticism in their limitations section of their discussion sections. In many cases, there are many confounds that are much more important, such as deficiencies in sample size, size of manipulation, replication, lack of attention in participants, and a theory not based on a deep enough reading of past evidence.

It is in fact of some irony that Henrich and colleagues chose to label westerners “WEIRD,” when they open their 2010 piece as follows (p. 61):

In the tropical forests of New Guinea the Etoro believe that for a boy to achieve manhood he must ingest the semen of his elders. This is accomplished through ritualized rites of passage that require young male initiates to fellate a senior member…

And they go on to call westerners weird? Really?

Of course, it may be that Henrich et al were not being moral relativists here, and in my correspondence with him, I am convinced he is not and is a good scientist who would join me in critiquing the simplistic uptake of his WEIRD acronym. But the fact that some anti-western academics, perhaps those influenced by postmodernism and critical theory, came to elevate and repeat the WEIRD acronym like a one-word argument, and to insist that first year students be given the meme as soon as they enter university, is perhaps a step backwards away from doing the demanding work to find specific confounds in research. Instead, the acronym might be introduced with some critique of it—including a defense of past research in psychological science—to third year students. It will be liked by many young adults without question because it in effect disparages past generations in a way that may feel good to a new generation, so careful skepticism should be added into the learning process.

I do encourage readers to read the Henrich papers in full, rather than hear the meme in passing in a lecture or tutorial, and then conclude that all of behavioral science needs to be tested on remote tribes before it can be trusted. Ironically, the worse scholarship comes out of such lazy and narcissistic cynicism, and I encourage a love of psychological research with careful specific skepticism which is actually a lot of humble work.

References

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and brain sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83. (pdf link)

Apicella, C., Norenzayan, A., & Henrich, J. (2020). Beyond WEIRD: A review of the last decade and a look ahead to the global laboratory of the future. Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(5), 319-329. (link to full text of article)

Henrich, J. (2024). WEIRD. In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.8e9a83b0 (link to full text)

Pope, H. G., Poliakoff, M. B., Parker, M. P., Boynes, M., & Hudson, J. I. (2007). Is dissociative amnesia a culture-bound syndrome? Findings from a survey of historical literature. Psychological medicine, 37(2), 225-233.