One important implication is that many attributes that psychologists have believed to be human universals are really only true for Westerners, a relatively small portion of humanity. A group of researchers, pointing out that most psychology experiments are carried out on samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies, have memorably given this subpopulation the acronym WEIRD. People from WEIRD societies are, it turns out, frequent outliers in experiments conducted globally, and one of the least representative human populations.56
