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.