WEIRD-Confucian Comparisons

The realization that most behavioral science research focuses on cultures labeled as WEIRD—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (Arnett, 2008; Henrich et al., 2010; Thalmayer et al., 2021)—has given an impetus to extend the research to more diverse populations. Confucian East Asian societies have relatively strong social and technological infrastructure to advance science and thus have gained much prominence in cross-cultural studies. This has inadvertently fostered another bias: the dominance of WEIRD–Confucian comparisons and a tendency to draw conclusions about “non-WEIRD” cultures in general based on data from Confucian societies. Here, analyzing 1,466,019 scientific abstracts and, separately, coverage of 60 large-scale cross-cultural psychological projects (N_samples = 2,668 from N_countries = 153 covering n_participants = 3,722,940), we quantify the dominance of Confucian over other non-WEIRD cultures in psychological research. Our analysis also reveals the underrepresentation of non-European Union postcommunist societies and the almost total invisibility of Pacific Island, Caribbean, Middle African, and Central Asian societies within the research database of psychology. We call for a shift in cross-cultural studies toward midsize (7+ countries) and ideally large-scale (50+ countries) cross-cultural studies, and we propose mitigations that we believe could aid the inclusion of diverse researchers as well as participants from underrepresented cultures in our field. People in all world regions and cultures deserve psychological knowledge that applies to them.