ABSTRACT
Weird can mean strange, but, in cultural psychology at present, WEIRD—an acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”—has become a widely prominent concept. It was originally proposed by Joseph Henrich and colleagues in 2010 as a mnemonic describing a collection of features of societies, especially the United States, overrepresented in samples used in cross-cultural research. Originally, it was directed toward correcting this research bias, but since that time, Henrich has extended WEIRD to represent an underlying sociohistorical dynamic that has propelled those societies to dominant positions in the world. Critiques of WEIRD can be simulated by suggesting alternatives to the letters of the acronym. Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful (YAVIS) was said to represent the ideal psychotherapy client; perhaps WEIRD similarly describes an ideal individual in Western culture or possibly specifies a preferred combination conferring the opposite of weird or strange—normality and rationality.
