The psychological study was conducted perfectly.
The experimental design was sound. The sample size was adequate. The controls were tight. The results were published in a peer-reviewed journal. Thousands of people read it and accepted its conclusions about how human memory works.
There was one problem: the findings were specific to 5% of the global population.
The study participants were Western. Educated. Industrialized. Rich. Democratic. The psychologists conducting the research came from WEIRD countries. They designed experiments based on assumptions that made sense in WEIRD countries. They interpreted results through the lens of WEIRD cognition.
And then they published it as universal human psychology.
This is the foundational sin of modern cognitive science. We have spent decades studying how people think, but we’ve almost exclusively studied how Western people think. And then we’ve called it human cognition.
The research that finally exposed this was damning. When scientists tested the same cognitive tasks across different cultures, the results didn’t replicate. The biases that appeared universal in WEIRD subjects vanished in other populations. The memory patterns that seemed hardwired into human neurology turned out to be culturally constructed.
I felt that knowledge physically when I first read it.
All of the theories I had been taught about how memory works, how perception functions, how decision-making operates. All of it assumed that humans were fundamentally individualistic. That we perceived objects in isolation. That our reasoning was logical and linear. That we categorized things based on universal properties.
It never occurred to the researchers that these might be culturally specific ways of thinking.
Because it never occurs to Western researchers that our way is culturally specific. We assume our way is the default human way. Everything else is variation.
But it’s not.
In collectivist cultures, people remember not the individual object but the relationship between objects. They don’t remember the red cup. They remember the cup in relation to the person who gave it to them. The context that surrounded it. The cultural meaning embedded in it.
This isn’t a memory failure. This is a different memory system entirely. One that’s optimized for relational thinking instead of categorical thinking.
When these people were tested on Western cognitive tasks, they performed worse. So researchers concluded they had worse memories. But when Western people were tested on relational memory tasks from collectivist cultures, they performed worse. By the same logic, they had worse memories.
The truth is simpler and more unsettling: there is no universal human cognition. There are culturally constructed ways of thinking that become neurologically embedded.
I watched a conversation between a Western colleague and a colleague from India about a business decision. They kept talking past each other. The Western person was analyzing individual variables. Price. Features. Competition. She was deconstructing the problem into component parts.
The Indian colleague was talking about the ecosystem. The vendor’s family situation. The historical relationships between companies. The way this decision would affect long-term connections. He was seeing the whole network.
Both were intelligent. Both were using valid reasoning. But they were literally thinking in different cognitive architectures. His brain had been trained to hold relational context. Hers had been trained to isolate variables.
The Western approach feels more scientific. More objective. More logical. This is because science was invented in the West. We built scientific thinking to match our cultural cognitive style, then convinced ourselves it was universal truth.
But logical analysis is a culturally specific way of thinking.
So is abstract reasoning.
So is the ability to transfer learning from one domain to another without explicit instruction.
All of these are Western cognitive strengths. They’re not universal human strengths.
In other cultures, people develop different cognitive strengths. Holistic thinking that grasps complex interconnected systems instantly. Contextual reasoning that automatically accounts for subtle social dynamics. Pattern recognition that operates across entirely different domains because the patterns are relational rather than categorical.
These aren’t less sophisticated. They’re differently sophisticated.
But because Western culture dominates global institutions, WEIRD cognition becomes the standard. Non-Western ways of thinking get labeled as less analytical. Less rational. Less evolved.
This is psychological colonialism.
And it’s happening in your head right now.
If you were educated in a Western system, your brain has been shaped to think like a Westerner. Not because it’s superior. But because you were trained by people who believed it was superior.
Someone from a non-Western culture moving to the West doesn’t assimilate to our values. They assimilate to our cognitive style. They learn to think in categorical, analytic, decontextualized ways. Their brain’s neural pathways actually shift to match the new culture’s patterns of thinking.
And often they lose things. Lose the ability to hold relational complexity. Lose the contextual awareness that was once automatic. Lose connection to the way their brain used to work.
This is the cost of cultural cognitive colonization.
The dark part is that most cognitive psychologists still don’t know this is happening. They still design experiments assuming Western cognition is default. They still interpret results through that lens. They still publish findings as if they’re universal.
And billions of people organize their education systems, their mental health care, their business practices around findings that were never tested on them.
The question cognitive science should be asking now is: which aspects of our thinking actually are universal? And which are we only now discovering are cultural?
The answer is: almost nothing is universal. Almost everything we thought was hardwired into humans is actually written in culture.
Including how you think right now.
Citation:
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.
Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108(2), 291-310.
Segall, M. H., Campbell, D. T., & Herskovits, M. J. (1966). The influence of culture on visual perception. Bobbs-Merrill.
Barrett, H. C., Broesch Touch, J., & Broesch, J. (2020). On the varieties of cultural learning. Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(5), 351-369.