Rethinking 'WEIRD': It's Time for a Change
Why we should rethink the language used in cultural psychology.
Updated November 26, 2025 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan’s 2010 article, "The weirdest people in the world?" 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 in 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, in 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'
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 humblebrag, 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 for improving psychological science. Using a term that inadvertently raises an emotional barrier is counterproductive. Thus, if for no other reason, please stop using this term because it can be offensive and hurtful.
A few other reasons I don’t use WEIRD (or non-WEIRD)
What are better terms?
Ideally, be as specific as possible. What is the contrast that is most relevant to your point?
Adler, J. M., Bogart, K. R., Frantz, C. M., Salter, P. S., & Thalmayer, A. G. (2024). Two Years Into the Next Chapter at PSPR. Personality and Social Psychology Review , 28 (1), 3-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868323122241
Arnett, J. J. (2008). The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to become less American. American Psychologist , 63 (7), 602–614.
Henrich, J. (2020). The weirdest people in the world: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 33 (2–3), Article 2–3.
Kagitcibasi, C. (2002). A model of family change in cultural context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 6, 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1059
Thalmayer, A. G., Toscanelli, C., & Arnett, J. J. (2021). The neglected 95% revisited: Is American psychology becoming less American? American Psychologist , 76 (1), 116–129. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000622
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Amber Gayle Thalmayer, Ph.D. , is an Assistant Professor for Personality, Mental Health, and Culture at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, and a Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, South Africa.
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