Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic
People are weird…
No No, it’s WEIRD people that are weird…
Yeh that’s what I just said. People are weird…
But I’m saying that it’s WEIRD people that are weird…
I just said that. What were you saying about weird people?
Yo! I said a typical North American is WEIRD. Oh, never mind.
We are the weirdest people in the world.
Growing up in an industrial-era environment with plenty of ’90-degree lines and carpentered edges’ has led WEIRD people to be susceptible to deception.
Dr. Henrich says, “If you’re a Westerner, your intuitions about human psychology are probably wrong or at least there’s good reason to believe they’re wrong.”
If WEIRD people are indeed weird, it is the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that have made them so.
We live in this world with police and institutions and pre-packaged food, TV, the Internet, watches and clocks and calendars. Our heads are loaded with all this information for navigating those environments. So we should expect our brains to be distorted.