You are WEIRD
On Being an Historical Outlier
(15 min read) How you are radically different from almost everyone who has ever lived — and why that matters for understanding the past.
This Substack assumes a basic standard of human decency. Those who are purposefully cruel, dehumanize others, show contempt for the law, or celebrate violence — or those who impose such people on the rest of us through political support — should not be here. (Read more here.)
In 2010, three psychologists — Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan — published a paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences entitled “The weirdest people in the world?” and thus introduced an acronym that has since spread well beyond its original field.
WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, and it describes the “psychological software” that you run on. Or, to use another metaphor, it describes the cultural and mental waters you swim in — so ubiquitous that you don’t even realize they are there.
(A note before going further: the W stands for Western, but the cluster of traits the acronym describes is not confined to the “West” in any geopolitical sense. It doesn’t matter if you live in Mumbai or Taipei — if you are reading an English-language essay on Substack, with enough cultural background to follow it and enough leisure to want to, you are substantially WEIRD.)
Henrich and his co-authors were making a methodological argument aimed at their own field. An overwhelming majority of behavioral science research — studies of cognition, perception, moral reasoning, fairness, self-concept, and much more — has been conducted on WEIRD participants, usually American undergraduates. The field quietly assumes that whatever is true of these participants is true of humans generally. But that assumption is wrong. On trait after trait, WEIRD populations are not representative of humanity; they are outliers, and often extreme ones.
However, the implications go well beyond academic psychology — my interests are in the historical and anthropological. Because while WEIRD people are outliers among living humans, they are dramatically even more so among all humans who have ever lived. Anyone trying to understand any period of history more than a century or so old is essentially dealing with another culture, and must reckon with the same problem the behavioral scientists above ran into. The minds doing the studying are not the same as the kind of minds being studied.
WEIRD History
WEIRDness is a culture like any other. And it didn’t just fall from the sky, it was built by specific historical forces.
The most visible are the ones you likely already know about. One is the Enlightenment, which over the 18th and 19th centuries and in a select group of societies normalized rights-based morality, secular epistemology, and the elevation of the soverign individual. The other is the Industrial Revolution, which over the 19th and 20th centuries produced material abundance, wage labor, urbanization, and the dissolution of traditional kin and guild structures in favor of national, and even supra-national, institutions. And before these events, the printing press and the Protestant revolutions it enabled had already begun reshaping how Europeans read, thought, and organized themselves.
I traced parts of this story in my posts last year on The Printing Press & the Protestant Revolutions and The Birth of Nation-States & Today’s World Order.
Joseph Henrich’s 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World pushes the story back even further. His argument, broadly, is that the medieval Catholic Church’s long campaign against cousin marriage and extended-kin structures — beginning in late antiquity and throughout the early medieval period — is what made the later revolutions possible in the first place. Dissolve kinship as the primary unit of social life, and you create the conditions for impersonal institutions, individualism, and all the rest.
Just How Weird?
It’s easy to underestimate how unusual we are.
Let’s start with the findings of the original paper. Ninety-six percent of the participants in published psychological studies came from countries containing just twelve percent of the world’s population. And within that twelve percent, samples were overwhelmingly drawn from the even narrower slice of university students. An entire science of human nature was built on a sliver of humanity substantially unlike the rest.
And if we shift from “populations studied” to “populations that are actually WEIRD,” the numbers remain very small today and vanishes as we go back further in time.
If I had to guess, I’d estimate the fully WEIRD at perhaps fifteen percent of humanity today, with another twenty or so percent partially so — it’s certainly not a majority. A century ago, full WEIRDness was probably less than five percent of the global population. Two centuries ago it was almost nothing — a handful of philosophers, reformers, and atypical urban professionals scattered across Western Europe and the young United States. Go back further and it disappears entirely.
You are almost certainly among the WEIRDest people who have ever lived. So am I. So, probably, is nearly everyone you know.
Mind you, this is not a criticism. Many WEIRD traits — rights-based morality, scientific epistemology, impersonal institutions — are genuine achievements, hard-won and worth defending. But they are not defaults. They are what happened in one corner of the world under a particular set of conditions; they are not what being human has historically looked like.
And this brings those of us studying history to a problem. If WEIRD psychology is recent and still unusual, then every time we try to understand people who are not WEIRD — including virtually every historical figure and culture from before c1900 — we face a choice. We can project our own minds backward and outward, assuming that everyone everywhere basically thought and felt and reasoned the way we do. Or we can try to see them on their own terms.
The first option is easier. It is also, almost always, worse for true understanding.
Why This Matters
Being WEIRD is simply part of the human condition — to be born into a specific time and place — and so it is not a cognitive bias in the technical sense. But it functions like one. It creates blinders: default assumptions that the way you think, feel, and reason is the way all humans think, feel, and reason. And because the assumption is invisible to the person making it, the blinders go unnoticed.
But the cost of not noticing is steep.
Project your values backward and you will find Crusading knights bigoted, Confucian scholars authoritarian, and Victorian women oppressed. Judge the past by present standards and most of human history becomes a parade of moral failure. Impose familiar categories on unfamiliar societies and you will systematically misunderstand what those people were actually doing.
None of that is good history, nor good thinking.
The alternative is harder. It requires holding your own framework lightly enough to set it down — to ask not “why were they so irrational?” but “what made sense inside their world?”
Recognize, for example, that the idea of inalienable human rights had to be invented, and that this invention largely occurred over the course of the 18th century. This means that a 15th-century person who didn’t recognize them and therefore could not condemn slavery as inherently wrong was not failing morally; he was simply someone living before that particular moral framework existed.
To understand history you must suspend the conviction that you stand at the end of it, with the right answers.
This, by the way, is a critical part of what I described elsewhere as History as a Philosophical Practice. It is the slow work of training yourself to think like someone who has lived for five hundred years and seen many worlds, rather than someone who has lived for a few decades and seen one.
Recognizing your WEIRDness is a precondition for that work. Without it, you just project your parochial viewpoint onto everyone else.
Being WEIRD
Even though WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, those words are not the most useful organizing categories for understanding WEIRD psychology and culture. While our level of material abundance (“Rich”) is indeed a critical difference between us and others, the other main axes of difference are our notion of progress, our reliance on impersonal institutions, our analytic mode of cognition, and our deep sense of individuality.
We will discuss each of these in turn below, using the example of Europeans in the High Middle Ages for comparison and contrast. But this deeply non-WEIRD culture is our counterpoint only because I have spent so much time with you looking at Gothic cathedrals that I think it will feel natural. So keep in mind throughout that almost every comparison would also hold for ancient Greeks or Egyptians, 17th century American colonists, or most Indonesians or Quechuans today.
Rich
Let’s start with the easiest: we are unimaginably rich.
Not rich in the comparative sense of having more money than your neighbors. But rich in the sense that the material abundance of WEIRD life is so far removed from the horizon of nearly every human who has ever lived that the word “wealth” barely captures the gap.
The men who quarried and dressed the stones for a Gothic cathedral worked harder, ate worse, slept colder, and died younger than nearly anyone reading this essay — including those who would call themselves struggling. Even the comparatively wealthy bishop who commissioned the building — for all his power and authority and fine vestments — had no plumbing, no electricity, no antibiotics, no aspirin. He worried about bad harvests. He could not read at night without ruining his eyes by candlelight.
This was not simply a medieval problem. It was the human problem, until almost yesterday. Everyone who lived before the early 20th century — peasant, priest, merchant, king — lived inside a horizon of material vulnerability that has now, for perhaps as much of a billion of us, been almost entirely lifted. The differences between elites and peasants in the past were real, but they were differences within a shared condition of exposure to harvest failure, disease, and local scarcity.
We know this in the abstract, of course. But we do not know it in our bones unless we have worked in a remote village for the Peace Corps or done something similar.
The default WEIRD assumption is that there will always be food in the refrigerator, water from the tap, light in the room, and medicine in the cabinet. But none of these were defaults for any human society before the 20th century, and many, if not most, of them are still not defaults for most humans alive today.
This abundance is a key foundation for our psychology. It is not just a comfort but a precondition — for the leisure to develop a rich inner life, for the security to think in long horizons, for the trust that impersonal institutions will deliver what family used to. Without it, none of the other WEIRD traits stabilize.
Progressive
The consistent growth in material abundance did something strange to the interpretation of time. When each generation kept getting wealthier, healthier, and more capable, the natural assumption was that it will keep doing so. Tomorrow will be better than today, our children will live better than we do, and — somehow — the long arc of history will always bends toward the better.
This is the doctrine of “Progress with a capital P”, and it is one of the most peculiar beliefs ever held by humans.
Almost every other culture has either thought the opposite or thought in static cyclical terms. The ancient Greeks believed they were living in a degraded Iron Age, fallen from earlier ages of gold, silver, bronze, and Heroic. Hindu cosmology places us in the Kali Yuga, the worst and final stage of a great cycle of decline. Indigenous traditions across the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific also generally understand time as cyclical — an eternal return of seasons, generations, and ages; not a march from primitive past to glorious future.
The medieval Christian worldview, which inherited a linear conception of time from Judaism, oriented that line not toward improvement, but toward judgment: a fallen world struggling through history toward an end already written — and not necessarily pleasant, as any glance at the hellish visions on a medieval Last Judgement reveals.
The idea that human history might be getting consistently better — that the future would systematically surpass the past — was essentially unavailable as a default assumption until the Enlightenment, and didn’t crystallize as ideology until the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution began to deliver on the Enlightment’s promise. Our sense of Progress is in many ways Christianity’s linear time stripped of the Fall and the Last Judgment, refitted for an industrial age in which material conditions really are improving year over year.
A medieval mason laying stones in a cathedral that would not be completed in his lifetime — or even his grandson’s — was not building toward a better world. He was building toward eternity, in a world that was the same as his father’s and grandfather’s, and which his somn and grandson would inherit largely unchanged. We assume the opposite by default.
Even today’s pessimism — climate anxiety, political despair — takes the form of grief at Progress betrayed, not the older and more common assumption that stasis or decline is simply the nature of things.
Institutional
Pre-WEIRD societies organized trust, cooperation, and obligation primarily through kinship and personal relationships. WEIRD societies organize them through impersonal institutions: contracts, laws, courts, bureaucracies, corporations, markets. This is not just a difference in scale — it is a fundamental shift in what kind of thing a social bond is.
Consider how strange WEIRD life would look to nearly any human who has lived before us. We get into cars driven by strangers. We work for bosses we are not related to. We hand our credit card numbers to merchants we will never meet. We move across continents and build lives among people we do not know. We expect a phone call to bring police, a contract to bind a stranger, a court to enforce a judgment.
None of this would have been recognizable, let alone normal, to most humans throughout most of history. Two things had to happen to make this possible.
First, the dense web of kin and corporate obligations that organized pre-WEIRD societies had to dissolve. Henrich argues in The WEIRDest People in the World that this dissolution began with the medieval Catholic Church’s long campaign against cousin marriage and extended-kin structures, beginning around the 6th century. Over centuries, European kinship was thinned out, and the institutions that filled the void — guilds, chapters, communes, eventually states — became more impersonal and rule-based.
Second, those institutions had to solidify. A medieval king was real but distant. The Church was vast but uneven. Police did not exist in any modern sense; you could be robbed on the road between two towns and there would simply be no one to turn to, during or after the fact. The state, as we know it — administratively dense and capable of consistently delivering on its claims — is largely a 19th- and 20th-century achievement. Trusting institutions only became rational once institutions became reliably trustworthy.
The cathedral builders sat at a transition point. The cathedral itself was an institutional product — commissioned by the Church, largely built by guilds and chapters, not families — but the men who built it lived inside dense personal networks of kin, vassalage, and cloesly-knit corporate membership. Their world was already moving toward the institutional, but it had not yet truly arrived. Ours has.
Analytic
The WEIRD mind breaks wholes into parts. It sorts the world into categories, applies abstract rules to those categories, and reasons through long chains of inference toward conclusions that hold regardless of context. This is so deeply our default that many WEIRDos mistake it for thinking itself.
Most other cultures have thought differently. The medieval mind, for instance, read the world as a system of nested symbols. Every creature in a bestiary signified something theological. The pelican was Christ; the lion prefigured the Resurrection. Numbers carried meaning — three for the Trinity, four for the Gospels, twelve for the Apostles — and these numbers echoed across scripture, nature, and architecture in patterns that confirmed the unity of God’s creation. Events in the Old Testament prefigured events in the New through correlative and associational thinking.
Much medieval art is in this mode, and the cathedral was its ultimate form — as I explained in my post The Anatomy of Gothic: Space & Symbol. To a WEIRD viewer Gothic buildings and art look like decoration with religious content. To a medieval viewer it was an argument about the nature of reality. This was not a primitive failure to think analytically, it is a simply different (and entirely reasonable) mode of cognition.
Several forces pushed WEIRD minds away from this kind of thinking and towards linear, rationalized analysis. The dissolution of kin primacy made it possible to reason about people and institutions in abstract rather than relational terms. The scientific revolution made naturalistic explanation the default. Secularization completed the move.
But the most important factor was possibly literacy. Oral and semi-literate cultures think in proverbs, rhythms, and patterns that aid memory. But literate cultures can store and manipulate information outside the mind, allowing cognition to engage in more abstract chains of reasoning.
Us WEIRDos are not just literate — we are surrounded from childhood by text, trained to follow arguments across hundreds of pages. This is again unlike the non-WEIRD, where deep literacy was (and is) likely 10% or less. And deep literacy shapes the mind — it cultivates an inner space where ideas can be turned over silently, examined, organized, and recombined. Without it, neither modern science nor modern interiority would be possible — and it is to that interiority we now turn.
Individualistic
Every human who has ever lived has had what we can refer to metaphorically as “an inner life.” What is unusual about WEIRD people is not that we have one but where we locate our selves within it. We are, by default, the inhabitants of our own interiors. The body, the family, the community, the tradition — these are things we have, not things we are. The real “me” is something deeper and inward, distinct from all of them, and should be ultimately answerable to no one but itself.
This is a recent and unusual conception of what a person is. In most human societies throughout most of history, a self has been understood as a position in a web — a node defined by its relationships, roles, and obligations rather than by its private interior. A medieval mason was a son, a brother, a guildsman, a parishioner, a subject of his lord, and a child of God. These were not identities he wore over a deeper “true self.” They were what he was. To strip them away would not have revealed his real self underneath; it would have revealed nothing.
The WEIRD self developed gradually, and is the product of many of the forces we have already discussed. The dissolution of kin primacy thinned out the relational web in which selves had been embedded. Material abundance and the rise of the private home created physical space for solitude in a way that crowded medieval life rarely allowed. Deep literacy cultivated the inner space where ideas and feelings could be turned over silently. And then a new cultural form emerged to make this interior visible to others: the novel, which over the 18th and 19th centuries shifted the central subject of serious narrative from action and fate to consciousness itself.
By the time you reach the late 19th and 20th centuries, the WEIRD self is fully formed: an autonomous, interior, sovereign individual who chooses his own commitments, expresses his own truth, and treats family, community, and tradition as resources rather than constituents. I have a family, we say; not I am part of a family. We do not notice the preposition. We do not notice that for most of human history, and for most humans alive today, the second sentence is closer to the truth.
Whether the first sentence is even correct — whether the autonomous interior self is a discovery, a useful fiction, or a cultural mistake — is a question worth taking seriously.
But that is a question for another essay, coming in two weeks.
For now — and to summarize our exploration of the traits that make us different from most other people and why this matters — let’s return to a sentence I wrote earlier:
Project your values backward and you will find Crusading knights bigoted, Confucian scholars authoritarian, and Victorian women oppressed.
Those judgements are, in fact, all legitimate. But they are only legitimate from a specific viewpoint — they are not objective facts — and they do not present a full picture. Before judging a historical figure or culture, step back and realize that they could just as easily look at how each of us embodies the five traits above and call us spoiled, delusional, lonely, heartless, and hopelessly self-absorbed. From their cultural framework, that judgement would be just as legitimate as ours.
Suggested Reading
Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species, and Making us Smarter. 2016.
Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. 2020.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. 1989.
“A medieval mason laying stones in a cathedral that would not be completed in his lifetime … was building toward eternity”.
Thank you for bringing insight.
So much good food for thought! (ahem, not intentionally meta, but it fits 😅) Greatly appreciate you breaking down these WEIRD concepts into bite size chunks that we can take further in our self-learning, thank you!