ABSTRACT
Did you know that Western habits and cultural preferences are di erent from those of the rest of the world? Cultural psychologists have shown that people raised in “Western-educated industrialized rich democratic” (WEIRD) countries often exhibit di erent psychological processing than do people from less WEIRD countries. e very way Westerners think about themselves and others makes them distinct from other humans. Even the way Westerners perceive reality is di erent from how everyone else does. Some of the most notable di erences are
around the concepts of individualism (value personal success over group success) and collectivism (value group over the individual). Generally speaking, WEIRD populations are socially oriented to think of themselves as individuals entitled to free expression, even if that means violating social norms or acting in ways that breach traditional expectations. WEIRD societies actually account for only about 12 percent of the world’s population, and they tend to be outliers in the way they perceive and react to the world around them (Henrich, Heine, and Norensayan, 2010). In other words, the WEIRD are the weird. Ironically, the world of business manage ment-and this includes change management-is dominated by Western-oriented theory and practices, and this has led to the belief that e ective Western management practices can be applied uniformly and with equal e ectiveness across geographies and cultures. We really need to question this thinking.
