R&R: Why you’re probably weird
No, not in the Tim Walz way.
Happy Sunday! I hope you’re having a great Labor Day weekend. I know I said on Friday that you wouldn’t hear from me until September 9 — but I still wanted to sneak in one more R&R as a “thank you” for paid subscribers before leaving for the week.
As a reminder, R&R is a Sunday email for paid subscribers offering a recap of the week and recommending pieces of journalism I’ve enjoyed, as well as a place for loose thoughts from the previous week that didn’t find their way into a particular newsletter.
On that note, I want to start this morning with some leftover thoughts from my piece earlier this week on Bernie-Trump voters:
If you are reading this newsletter, you are most likely weird in at least two ways.
No, I don’t mean “weird” like how Tim Walz calls JD Vance “weird.”
What I really mean is WEIRD, as in you probably belong to a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic society. Harvard University professor Joseph Henrich is the one who popularized this moniker, referring to people in the United States and other Western countries who might believe their ways of thinking are common worldwide — when, in fact, WEIRD societies are rather “psychologically peculiar” compared to the rest of the globe.
Henrich’s book, “The WEIRDest People in the World,” is an exploration of how WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies differ psychologically, and how those differences came about.
Early in the book, Henrich writes that he and his colleagues began examining WEIRDness when they realized that
Most of what was known experimentally about human psychology and behavior was based on studies with undergraduates from Western societies. At the time, 96 percent of experimental participants were drawn from northern Europe, North America, or Australia, and about 70 percent of these were American undergraduates.
This meant that the vast output of modern psychological research was flawed, since it was massively skewed towards examining Western college students even though (as the book explains) educated people in the West are deeply unrepresentative of humanity at large.
I’ve come to believe that the U.S. political media suffers from a similar problem: basing its reporting on a skewed input, thereby leading to issues in its output. And that brings me to the next way you, dear reader, are likely somewhat weird.