This is now my way, where is yours? Thus did I answer those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way, it does not exist. Thus spake Zarathustra.
Recent psychological research suggests that people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies — WEIRD, for short — not only live differently from the vast majority of the world’s population, but think differently too.
The unsettling realization for psychologists — the vast majority of whom are WEIRD themselves — is that they don’t actually know much about how the rest of the world thinks. A recent study by Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia notes that in the top international journals in six fields of psychology from 2003 to 2007, 68 percent of subjects came from the United States — and a whopping 96 percent from Western, industrialized countries. In one journal, 67 percent of American subjects and 80 percent of non-American subjects were undergraduates in psychology courses.
Does this really matter? Aren’t we all the same, after all? Not really, it turns out. WEIRDos tend to be more individualistic and more competitive than people from non-industrialized Asian and African societies. In tests measuring how groups of people work together, Westerners — and Americans in particular — are far more likely to look out for themselves. They even perceive space differently. When viewing the classic Müller-Lyer illusion (>–< vs. <-->), Americans are far more often and more easily fooled than Africans, possibly as a consequence of living in a world of concrete square angles rather than natural shapes.
