Look who’s running the asylum.

And, in fact, the whole discipline of psychology. National Post exposes the sad truth that industrialized, post-Enlightenment Westerners are weird:

The article, titled “The weirdest people in the world?”, appears in the current issue of the journal Brain and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Henrich and co-authors Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that life-long members of societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic — people who are WEIRD — see the world in ways that are alien from the rest of the human family. The UBC trio have come to the controversial conclusion that, say, the Machiguenga are not psychological outliers among humanity. We are.

“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,” Dr. Henrich says.

Problem is, we’re the ones we’ve been basing most of our psychological studies on. And we’ve totally messed up the baseline.

Tags: psychology