Here is an uncomfortable fact about the science of human behavior: most of what we know about “people” was learned by studying a very particular, very unusual slice of people. For decades, psychology built its theories on one narrow population and quietly assumed the findings applied to everyone. They often don’t.
This is the WEIRD problem, and understanding it changes how you should read almost any psychological finding – especially if you live, as I do, outside the world where those findings were produced.
What WEIRD Means
The term comes from an influential 2010 paper by Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, titled “The weirdest people in the world?” WEIRD is an acronym: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It describes the populations that dominate psychological research.
The core issue is simple to state. Most psychological theories were developed, and then tested, in Western settings – and very often on college campuses, with university undergraduates as participants. Psychology became, to a striking degree, the study of the Western university student. The theories were then written up as if they described human nature in general.
The provocation in Henrich and colleagues’ paper was that this population is not just unrepresentative but often an extreme outlier. On a wide range of measures – visual perception, spatial reasoning, fairness, cooperation, moral judgment, notions of the self – Western, educated participants frequently sit at the far end of the human distribution, not in the middle. The people psychology studies most turn out to be among the least typical of our species.
But Aren’t Humans Just Humans?
The natural objection is that people are people. A memory experiment is a memory experiment; why should it matter whether the participant is in Boston or Batumi?
For some things, this is largely true. Lower-level psychological functions – basic sensory processing, fundamental memory mechanisms, core perceptual and cognitive operations – are relatively stable across humanity. A finding about how iconic memory decays is unlikely to depend heavily on culture.
But psychology is not only the study of low-level functions. The moment we move into higher-level domains – social psychology, developmental psychology, emotion, identity, moral reasoning, relationships – culture plays an enormous role. And here, results found in one culture may simply not transfer to another.
I can give an example from my own research. In a study of cultural life scripts – the culturally shared expectations of what happens in a typical life, and when – we found that different cultures carry genuinely different scripts. Some life events that appear in one culture’s script are absent from another’s; the same event can be timed differently or valued differently. The Georgian life script was not the Danish one or the American one. That is direct evidence that culture shapes the way we live and experience our own lives – not a peripheral detail, but the very structure of the expected life course. If something as fundamental as the imagined shape of a life varies by culture, we cannot assume that theories of development, identity, or social behavior travel unchanged from one society to another.
Classic cross-cultural work points the same way. Even something as seemingly basic as susceptibility to visual illusions has been shown to vary across societies. When perception itself is not perfectly universal, the assumption that higher-order social and emotional processes are universal looks very shaky.
How Psychology Became So WEIRD
If this population is so unrepresentative, how did the field become so dependent on it? The answer is mostly mundane, which is part of the problem.
The first reason is convenience. University undergraduates are the cheapest and most available research participants imaginable. They are physically present in the departments where research happens, and in many systems they are required to participate in studies for course credit. If you are a researcher who needs 200 participants by the end of the semester, the students sitting in your introductory course are right there.
The second reason is the geography of the discipline. Psychology’s centre of gravity has long been in North American and European universities. The researchers, the journals, the funding, and the participant pools were all concentrated in WEIRD societies, so WEIRD samples became the default without anyone deciding they should be.
The third reason is incentives. Academic careers reward publication volume, and convenience samples let you publish faster. Recruiting a representative or cross-cultural sample is slow and expensive; running your available undergraduates is quick. The system rewarded the quick path.
And underneath all of it sat a tacit assumption: that the mechanisms being studied were universal, so the particular sample did not much matter. If you already believe your findings describe human nature in general, sampling feels like a technicality rather than a threat to validity. That assumption is exactly what the WEIRD critique overturns.
Where Georgia Fits – And the Trap We Risk
Georgia is not WEIRD in the classic sense, but it is also not the kind of dramatic contrast case – a small-scale, non-industrial society – that cross-cultural researchers often reach for. It sits somewhere in between, which makes it an interesting place to do psychology.
But here is the concern I keep coming back to. There are almost no fully adapted psychological scales in Georgian. Some instruments have been tested at the population level, but most scales used here were validated on student samples, or in better cases on whatever samples happened to be available. In other words, Georgian psychology risks reproducing the very WEIRD problem in miniature – building local knowledge on the local equivalent of the American undergraduate.
The irony is sharp. We can criticize international psychology for over-relying on unrepresentative Western students, and then turn around and validate our own instruments on unrepresentative Georgian students. Importing a scale from a WEIRD context and validating it on a convenience sample stacks two sampling problems on top of each other: the theory may not transfer to Georgia, and our local validation may not represent Georgia either.
What This Means for How We Work
None of this is a reason for despair, and it is certainly not a reason to ignore international research – the global literature is indispensable. It is a reason for care. Three principles follow.
First, be careful with results imported from other cultures. Treat a finding established in a WEIRD context as a hypothesis about Georgia, not a fact about Georgia, until it has been checked here.
Second, validate the scales. A questionnaire that works in English is not a questionnaire that works in Georgian until it has been properly adapted and psychometrically validated on a Georgian sample. This is slow, unglamorous work, but it is the foundation everything else rests on.
Third, focus on population-based samples wherever possible, so that our results actually represent the population we claim to describe – not just the students who were easy to reach. And we should hold the same humility outward: our Georgian results might not transfer to other countries either. Transferability is a two-way street, and the honest default in both directions is caution.
The WEIRD critique is often read as a criticism of Western psychology. It is really a criticism of a habit of mind – the habit of mistaking a convenient sample for humanity. That habit is not confined to the West, and guarding against it is part of doing psychology responsibly anywhere, Georgia very much included.
Reference
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.
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Giorgi Tchumburidze
September, 2026