Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan’s 2010 article, "The weirdest people in the world?" was a watershed. Two years earlier, Arnett (2008) defined the extent to which psychological science relies on narrow and atypical human samples: Western college students. Henrich and colleagues decisively demonstrated the costs of this bias, showing samples from Western contexts to be outliers on a wide variety of psychological phenomena. (See also Shinobu Kitayama’s work on the co-constitution of culture and the mind).

At that time, psychologists working outside the West faced an uphill battle to get studies published, including skeptical demands to justify the relevance of such work. Many articles document these frustrations.

I taught cultural psychology from........

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