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Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan’s 2010 WEIRDest people in the world article was a watershed. Two years earlier, Arnett (2008) defined the extent to which psychological science relies on narrow and atypical human samples: Western college students. Henrich and colleagues decisively demonstrated the costs of this bias, showing samples from Western contexts to be outliers on a wide variety of psychological phenomena. (See also Shinobu Kitayama’s work on the co-constitution of culture and the mind).
At that time, psychologists working outside the West faced an uphill battle to get studies published, including skeptical demands to justify the relevance of such work. Many articles document these frustrations.
I taught cultural psychology from 2008 to 2013 in the United States, and then from 2023 in Switzerland. In both places I was often the first instructor from whom students had heard any mention of Western bias or the overwhelming evidence that culture shapes psychology. Students were quick to grasp the significance of these realities and to develop interest in the topic. But they were bewildered to look back on their years of education based on a small subset of humanity, without having heard about the role of culture in psychology.
In the last few years, things changed. The Henrich article slowly gained momentum. It garnered around 6,000 citations its first 10 years, then double that the following five. Substantive change didn’t happen overnight—our 10-year update to Arnett (Thalmayer et al., 2021) covering 2008—2018 showed that European samples became more common in top APA journals and that reliance on college student samples shifted toward online platforms like Mechanical Turk. But the last few years brought a noticeable shift, with rising awareness of the scope of Western bias and why it is problematic. Top journals like Personality and Social Psychology Review and Psychological Science, among many others, made major shifts in editorial roles and policies to encourage global inclusion.
At my university, the curriculum finally shifted. The good news: For the first time, in 2024 and 2025, students arrived at my upper-division classes having heard about western bias and the need to expand our research lens. The bad news: The entire topic is encapsulated for them, as it is for many researchers, into the term “WEIRD.”
Henrich and colleagues used this acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic” nations, to underscore how unusual this cluster of characteristics is for societies in the history of the world, from which almost all of our psychological data stems. This acronym is now standard parlance to refer to the problem of Western bias in psychology, with the term “non-WEIRD” now used to refer to samples from contexts outside the West.
Now as an instructor, an editor and a reviewer, I no longer have to explain the fact of Western bias (though I think its significance is still underrated). But I constantly have to explain why I don’t use the terms WEIRD and non-WEIRD.
Why I don’t call people ‘WEIRD’: It’s only fun for those it describes
Let’s go straight to the most important reason I don’t use the terms WEIRD or non-WEIRD: Westerners calling themselves “WEIRD” is a humble brag, a joke that is only funny for those on the inside.
If you watch a white, Western psychologist (such as myself) learn this term for the first time, you see a smile as they get the joke. Is it unkind to call it a smirk? It’s a natural reaction to the clever twist: this is a list of characteristics that we may take for granted, but that on reflection are not the norm across the globe or for human societies over time; then they add up to an acronym that is a put down, but also sometimes used to acknowledge quirky unique specialness.
I have seen the term introduced to groups in Africa and Asia, and there, no one smiles. Why not? Because being educated and rich are prestige markers virtually everywhere, and prestige matters to everyone, something Henrich himself conveys better than anyone in his 2020 book. Claiming that the West is uniquely ‘WEIRD’ implies that only they have these desirable characteristics, while everyone else is uneducated, undemocratic, and poor. This does not feel good.
Creating stronger collaborative links across cultural distances is a top priority to improve psychological science. Using a term that inadvertently raises an emotional barrier is counter productive. Thus, if for no other reason, please stop using this term because it is offensive and hurtful.
A few other reasons I don’t use WEIRD or non-WEIRD
- All Western countries are rich and industrialized, so it is redundant. You don’t need to say WEIRD, you could just say Western.
- Referring to all societies outside the West, 89% of the world’s population, as “non-WEIRD” implies that they lack all of these qualities, when the main one they lack is simply not being Western. Asian countries are rich and industrialized, and many countries around the world have better education and democracy than some Western ones.
- People weren’t meant to be called WEIRD, it was a term for societies. But this is routinely misused.
- Calling people “non” anything should be avoided, as it defines them in terms of others, whose greater importance is implied by the framing. Instead, the characteristics of interest should be elevated.
What are better terms?
Ideally, be as specific as possible. What is the contrast that is most relevant to your point?
- Western, while an inexact metaphor on a round globe, works pretty well. Ideally, it can be specifically defined when used, for example, as ‘the economically advantaged Western European countries and English-speaking, majority-European heritage countries in North America and the Pacific (Australia and New Zealand).”
- Majority World, a term introduced by Cigdem Kagitcisbasi, is nicely accurate, but also requires explanation, since it inverts the common usage of majority vs. minority in Western countries.
- If the point is to contrast richer and more industrialized countries to less wealthy and industrialized ones, a useful specific contrast might be ‘high income’ or ‘OECD’ (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), countries as compared to low and middle-income countries (LMIC), as these are precisely defined terms.
- Global South and Global North are commonly used. Like Western, they are spatially imperfect, eliding a number of exceptions. This isn’t my favorite solution, but it is preferable to WEIRD, and is much more acceptable around the world.
