Chapter Five: Beyond WEIRD Morality Summary and Analysis

Haidt interviewed dozens of people at McDonald's restaurants when he was working toward his dissertation. He would tell them fictional stories about people doing things like eating their dogs, cutting up the American flag and having sex with chickens. Some would laugh and others would confront him for not knowing that those things were immoral.

An article entitled, "The Weirdest People in the World?" asserted that most psychological research was conducted on a subset of the general population who were: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic - the first letters of which word form the acronym "Weird." It has long been established that Western people have a more independent view of themselves than do East Asians. WEIRD people think more analytically than do people from other cultures. In a non-WEIRD society, members are...