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“Heritage Americans”? No, WEIRD people.

“Heritage Americans”? No, WEIRD people.

Last updated on: December 31, 2025 at 10:34 am by Jane the Actuary

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“Heritage Americans”? No, WEIRD people. 2025-12-31T10:34:05-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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“Thanksgiving-Brownscombe” by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe – Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal http://www.lakenhal.nl/persberichtendetail.php?id=144. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thanksgiving-Brownscombe.jpg#/media/File:Thanksgiving-Brownscombe.jpg

There’s been a whole debate raging on twitter recently, in which one side says, “anyone with American citizenship is just as American as anyone else,” and the other side saying, “people whose ancestors have been in America for longer are more American than new arrivals,” and the first side countering, “you’re just being racist!”

But the issue isn’t race: it’s WEIRDness. And unfortunately, Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World didn’t become a part of the mainstream understanding of the world after it was published in 2020, because it’s crucial. Mr. Henrich, if you’re listening, please prepare an abridged version to get more readers than the existing 500 page tome.

Who are “WEIRD people”? The acronym stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, but that’s more a matter of outcome than underlying characteristics. Due to developments during the Middle Ages, and originating from the Catholic Church’s prohibition on consanguineous marriages, which ultimately extended to sixth cousins, Western Christendom, and ultimately the Protestant parts in particular, developed psychological characteristics wholly different from the rest of the world.

Here’s the author’s own description in an interview about his book:

If you measure people’s psychology using the tools that psychologists and economists do, you’ll find substantial variation around the world. Societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic often anchor the extremes of these global distributions. Among the most prominent features that make people WEIRD is prioritizing impersonal pro-sociality over interpersonal relationships. Impersonal psychology includes inclinations to trust strangers or cooperating with anonymous others. Another big one is having high levels of individualism, meaning a focus on the self and one’s attributes. This is often accompanied by tendencies toward self-enhancement and overconfidence. WEIRD people also rely heavily on analytic thinking over more holistic approaches to problems. I’ll give you an example: Analytic thinking places people or objects into distinct categories and assigns them properties to account for their behavior. Here people get assigned preferences or personality. Particles and planets get assigned charge and gravity. On the other hand, holistic thinkers focus on relationships, context, and interaction. For example, if person A is yelling at person B, an analytical thinker might infer that person A is an angry person while a holistic thinker worries about the relationship between persons A and B. This patterning extends to mental states. WEIRD people tend to focus on people’s intentions, beliefs, and desires in judging them morally instead of emphasizing their actions. In many non-WEIRD societies, for example, the penalties for premeditated murders and accidental killings were the same while in many WEIRD societies they came to depend on the killer’s mental states, on his intentions and beliefs.

But this is a lot of psychological jargon. What was most compelling for me (and I’m writing this part from memory) are the charts from international surveys with questions like: “if you are your friend are in a car crash, and you are asked to testify, would you lie to protect your friend?” Henrich also says that WEIRD people are distinctive in being more individualistic, with much less pressure to conform, and that non-WEIRD people are much more kin-focused, prioritizing the well-being of their kin (tribe, clan, extended family) above what we in the West think of as the rule of law or fairness in hiring or other business dealings.

As a side note, Henrich calls into question many of the psychological “truths” identified by running experiments with college students who get extra credit for participating in them, and says that much of what is described as simply the norm of how the brain develops is not universal at all.

(There’s a 2010 working paper out there on the internet with some of these ideas.)

In any event, when you look at what (most) people on twitter mean when they talk about “heritage Americans” being “more American,” it’s really a reaction to newcomers from non-WEIRD places bringing with them a completely different mindset. Someone from a non-WEIRD society may superficially seem to have assimilated, by speaking English, going to college, getting a white collar job, and paying their bills, but they retain the mindset of their native country – and, no, this isn’t a matter of some kind of genetic predisposition but simply of families passing down these cultural beliefs that “stick” even after superficial assimilation.

And the US/the West can manage with a small minority of non-WEIRDos, though it risks diminishing our quality of life. To take a small example, periodically a UK twitter account will lament the fact that its tradition of “honesty boxes” for farm produce is bound to disappear because migrants take advantage of the opportunity to help themselves to produce without paying. Being able to have institutions which rely on basic honestly of those around us, benefits everyone.

But large numbers of immigrants from communities with a wholly different values system, prioritizing the kin network without regard for American values of rule of law or fair play, are unsustainable. That drives nepotism and cronyism in hiring, and juries in which a member of the same “clan” (or in the US, ethnic group) finds the defendant not guilty regardless of the evidence, and systems of fraud such as the food benefits and autism scams in Minnesota in which a nation’s laws only matter to the extent there’s a risk of prosecution, which is weighted against the possibility of financial gain instead, and in which (as we saw in the Feeding our Future trial) that risk of prosecution can always be mitigated by bribery.

And this has nothing to do with skin color. Is it “racist” nonetheless? I think in a way it’s a bit of the reverse, that there’s some racism in the usual attitude of taking our WEIRD mindset and believing that everyone across the globe thinks the same way rather than recognizing that we, Americans and the West, are the outlier.

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