What It Means to Be WEIRD

WEIRD as used here does not refer to uncanny or strange people.  It refers instead to people who live in Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic countries. 

I first encountered the term WEIRD in Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.”  As Haidt explains, to analyze how our minds work in forming ideas about politics and religion, he had to expand his Foundations of Morality Matrix beyond what would apply to people that lived in WEIRD countries.  He did so because an article published in 2010 had shown significant differences in moral attitudes between what its authors identified as WEIRD people and the rest of the world. 

Ten years later in 2020, Joseph Henrich (one of the article’s authors) published his own book The WEIRDEST People in the World in which he shows how people in WEIRD countries differ psychologically and culturally from non-WEIRD countries, how these cultural traits came about, and how they facilitated the institutions that emerged in modern western societies.  As with all macro studies of this genre, there is a risk of oversimplification and loose generalizations.  On the other hand, it offers some new perspectives on how the western world (underdeveloped and backward 1000 years ago) came to its modern form, including its market economies and rules-based institutions.  It also offers insights into contemporary American attitudes.

So, first, who are these WEIRD people?  According to the evidence in the book, they are found mostly in Christian countries, and in particular in Western Europe, North America, and Australia.  Their concentration increases within Protestant populations.  As we will see, the reason for this geographic particularity has its roots in practices adopted by Christian Churches.

Second, what traits distinguish WEIRD people?  Henrich presents a plethora of statistical results to isolate these traits.  WEIRD people tend to be highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformists, and analytical.  WEIRD people focus primarily on their own attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations and less on their social roles.  Due to their mostly Christian upbringing, they are more likely to be moved by feelings of guilt than shame. 

In WEIRD societies there is an inflexible and more prejudiced extrapolation from character traits to behavioral outcomes, which is called dispositionalism.   For example, because I believe “he is lazy” explains to me why he is unemployed.  Dispositionalism comes with several psychological biases.  One of them is Cognitive Dissonance, which makes us uncomfortable with inconsistent beliefs, which we manage to reconcile with ex post rationalization.  Another one is Fundamental Attribution Error, that is, judging others depending on how we feel or think about them.

How did these traits come about?  Henrich argues that the primary factor was changes in marriage restrictions imposed by the Christian Churches.  Specifically, the Church sanctioned only monogamous marriages and prohibited marriages between relatives, like first and second cousins.  The result was the dismantling of family clans and life surrounded by one’s kin.  Young people were forced to seek spouses in other clans and move away.  To survive in unfamiliar social environments, medieval Europeans had to learn to live with strangers in a web of relationships that was unlike the kin-based arrangements they relied upon previously.  They had to develop relationships based on trust, rules and norms instead of kinship.  Where before interpersonal relationships based on kinship were sufficient to facilitate social arrangements and economic exchanges, now people had to rely on impersonal relationships.

The new impersonal social fabric had some important consequences.  First, it enabled communities to scale up to bigger towns and cities.   It also allowed markets to expand by relying on arms-length rules instead of kinship.  Holding one to his/her part of the bargain no longer relied on affinity and obligation toward one’s kin but on the need to comply with rules and norms that made cooperation mutually beneficial.  This was particularly important for the development of financial markets.  The financial literature presents strong evidence that financial markets had an earlier and faster growth in countries that were influenced by legal principles and cultural institutions that we mostly observe in Protestant-dominated countries.  Finally, societies that were now dominated by impersonal relationships had to develop political institutions that were based on the rule of law than on kinship-related power arrangements. 

In addition to marriage restrictions, individualism and self-reliance were boosted by the Protestant Reformation and the importance of self-salvation.  Literacy became necessary for seeking independent understanding of the holy scriptures.  This plus a reformist attitude further accentuated individualism and self-reliance.     

An important upshot of Henrich’s analysis is that by the time economic ideas and technology had become friendly to the emergence of capitalism, there were markets, built on trust and rules, able to accommodate trade well beyond the local level.  Having developed individualistic, self-reliant, and driven people, WEIRD societies also had the entrepreneurial capital to propel capitalism to prominence.

To the extent Henrich’s research is valid, we can draw some useful implications for our own contemporary world.  Some will credit Christianity as a positive force in the creation of modern institutions.  Others will see in the Christian practices that dismantled family clans and kin-based arrangements the erosion of socio-centric values and the ascendancy of hyper individualism.

An important lesson is that WEIRD countries should stop looking at other societies through their own lenses of individualism and arms-length ways of life.  The insistence on applying WEIRD attitudes to understand and judge the rest of the world is counterproductive and misguided.

Finally, the book helps us better understand today’s white American Evangelicals, arguably the most nonconformist and self-reliant of Christians.  Whether we agree or not with their individualism and their placing personal rights over social roles, Henrich’s book gives us a historical perspective that helps us understand where they come from.