WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It's an acronym created by a trio of psychology researchers who wanted to point out how mainstream psychology had a bias. In 2010, Joseph Henrich, Steve Heine, and Ara Norenzayan published a paper detailing their findings that 96 percent of psychology studies examined only people of European descent, and that 70 percent of subjects were American undergraduates. Mainstream academic psychology was therefore extremely unrepresentative of the world, since this demographic only made up 12 percent of the world's population. They found that WEIRD subjects were frequent outliers across multiple domains, such as visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, induction, memory, attention, patience, moral reasoning, risk-taking, pattern recognition, and heritability of IQ. They concluded that researchers had to be more cautious about arriving at generalisations on human nature based on these studies. In 2020, Joseph Henrich published a book titled "The Weirdest People in the World", in which he explored the reasons why WEIRD culture evolved the way that it did. --- Article: - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/weirdest-people-in-the-world/BF84F7517D56AFF7B7EB58411A554C17