This is an ABC podcast.

Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN. I'm Lynne Malcolm.

And today, we're getting a little weird.

Yeah, so we first coined the acronym Weird, which stands for Western, educated, industrialized,

rich and democratic.

When two colleagues of mine, R. Noren Zion and Steve Hina at the University of British Columbia,

we compiled all the available evidence on psychological differences across societies that we could

find.

This was between about 2006 and 2010.

And we found that not only were the most commonly used subjects by psychologists, which

were university students often in the U.S. or Europe, also places like Australia and the

U.S., not only were they one population among many

showing a lot of cultural variation in psychology, but they were often anchoring the extreme

ends of the distribution.

So they were unusual from a global perspective.

So we started referring to these subjects as weird using the acronym as a way of kind of raising people's

consciousness about how unusual the most commonly used subjects in psychology were. And we're

talking about 96% of all participants in psychology experiments are from weird societies.

Professor Joe Henrik, anthropologist and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

He and his colleagues first coined the term weird in their 2010 paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

It's called the weirdest people in the world.

They sounded the alarm about the dangers of conducting the majority of psychological research

...