### more\/consistency and contradictions A very influential recent direction in psychology and neuroscience has come from the realization that the vast majority of experiments in these fields are done on a tiny slice of humanity, from which we extrapolated presuming a universal human nature. Over 90% of such experiments are done in North America, northern Europe and Australia, and 70% of those are on psychology undergrads. That's a slice of a slice, and it turns out to be an outlier, now referred to as W.E.I.R.D. for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rational, and Democratic. W.E.I.R.D. people love classifications, they bin and label the world, including themselves. Their understanding of behavior is centered on mental states anchored in invariant traits in the individual. This is an essentialist fallacy but is enforced by assigning supreme moral value to consistency. The characteristic outlier feature of W.E.I.R.D. people is that they aim to "be themselves" across contexts and see inconsistencies as hypocrisy (or pathology) for which they severely penalize others and themselves. Non-W.E.I.R.D. people come in many variations but generally care about consistency **within** contexts, not **across** them. Behaving conservatively with grandparents and being a wild trouble-maker with mates is variation across contexts, and non-W.E.I.R.D. people see it as evidence of wisdom, maturity, and social adeptness. Seen as an evolutionary adaptation, W.E.I.R.D.'s emphasis on consistency allows cooperation with strangers through explicit rules, which in turn allows for scaling up of social and business networks. This became a dominant strength in the presence of the physical technologies of industrialization because they also scale through standardization. It has downsides and limitations. At the individual level, aspiring for such strict and literal consistency creates characteristic internalizations of the unavoidable contradictions, such as cognitive dissonance and guilt, and a pervasive sense of not really knowing oneself. At the social level, relationships endure as long as they remain mutually beneficial, reducing values to a narrow concept of utility that cannot survive context changes. At the explanatory narrative level, the core essentialism understands causality in terms of singular explanations (root causes) which makes the system inflexible and fragile when contexts clash. These features are all present in "code" narratives of people and their behavior. Arguably, our era is asking for a different mechanism of coordinating and scaling. Then again, the split into W.E.I.R.D. and non-W.E.I.R.D. is itself an oversimplified classification of what we actually encounter in a globally connected world. In practice, **the between** engages with all this directly, by its suitably structured and located pair of hubs. - [J. Henrich, **The WEIRDest people in the World**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World) - For some explicit examples of consistency across vs within context and its relationship to control, see [J. Weisz, FM. Rothbaum, and TC. Blackburn, "Standing out and standing in: the psychology of control in America and in Japan"](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1985-19980-%20001).