The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

Henrich argues that "WEIRD" populations — Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic — are cognitively and psychologically unusual compared to the rest of human history and most of the contemporary world, and that almost everything social science claims about "human nature" is really a claim about WEIRD brains. For product direction this is a quiet but destabilising book: the user research, the A/B tests, the design heuristics we inherit from Silicon Valley are mostly calibrated on a sliver of humanity. Henrich's history of how Western Christianity produced this psychological profile is one of the more ambitious explanatory projects in recent social science. The argument is contested, the data is voluminous. A book that makes you suspicious of claims that begin with "people tend to…".