"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."
"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."
"'The WEIRDest people in the world' was a watershed article, bringing awareness to Western bias in psychology. Calling people, samples, regions, or countries WEIRD or non-WEIRD is funny for some, but hurtful for others. There are better terms than WEIRD for describing regional differences in psychology."
A 2010 WEIRD critique revealed pervasive Western bias in psychological research and built on a 2008 finding that psychological science heavily relied on Western college student samples. Psychologists outside the West faced publication barriers and skeptical demands to justify relevance. University students often lacked prior exposure to cultural effects on psychology, leading to surprise and interest when confronted with evidence that culture shapes mind. Over the past decade citation rates for the WEIRD critique increased markedly, and sample composition in top journals began to diversify, with European samples becoming more common and reliance on college samples changing.
Read at Psychology Today
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