Weird Pride is not about WEIRD pride, in the sense of Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic.

This is an acronym used to give a name to a common problem in social sciences, but also more broadly: acting as if countries and people that broadly fit those descriptors are representative of the world at large, when in fact they could be considered outliers.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being Western, educated, industrialised, rich or democratic, necessarily, it’s just that it’s a bit weird that researchers from rich Western countries have failed to see the problem with treating everyone else as if they were weird.

Given how pervasive this is in psychology, it could be argued that most of what people think they know about other kinds of difference is shaped by passing through the homogenising lens of ‘WEIRD‘ subjects. The people involved in Weird Pride Day so far are mostly from ‘WEIRD’ countries, so we try to be very cautious about generalising from our own experiences. We are particularly interested to hear about experiences of weirdness, diversity and acceptance from places (and from backgrounds) that are less well-represented in Western media and research.