Both of my parents are psychologists. My high school sweetheart became a psychologist. A lass I'm currently courting is a psychologist. I can even claim it as a minor in my undergraduate degree.
So when I say psychology is WEIRD, I mean something specific. And I want to be clear upfront: this is not a diversity argument. It's a validity argument.
WEIRD is an acronym: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic.
And it turns out, if you look closely at where the psychological research underpinning most change management frameworks actually comes from — you find that the overwhelming majority of it was built on WEIRD populations.
The figures, when you encounter them for the first time, are genuinely startling.
The numbers nobody talks about in change management.
In 2010, researchers Joe Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan published a paper that should have caused a significant rethink across the behavioural sciences.
They examined the research underpinning psychology journals aka: the actual empirical work that forms the foundation of how we understand human behaviour. Their finding: approximately 96% of the subjects in leading psychology studies came from WEIRD backgrounds. Yet WEIRD populations represent only around 12% of the world's people.
An earlier analysis by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett in 2008 found that 68% of journal articles in psychology came from authors connected to American institutions. And within American studies, a further problem: 67% of participants were college students — teenagers and young adults whose brains are, quite literally, still developing in ways that affect risk evaluation, reward sensitivity, and decision-making.
Read that again: the psychological foundation of most behavioural science was built primarily on American college students. Then generalised to the world.
Now ask yourself: how much of the change management theory you draw on — stakeholder engagement models, resistance frameworks, adoption curves, readiness assessments — traces its intellectual lineage back to that same research base?
The answer is: most of it.
Why this matters for change work specifically.
The standard response to the WEIRD critique is to treat it as a cultural sensitivity issue. Train people on cultural awareness. Add a diversity lens to your communications plan.
I'm not sure that approach is working out for any of us.
What I'm arguing is something more structural: if the frameworks you're using to diagnose, design and deliver change were built on a specific slice of human behaviour — Western, educated, relatively affluent, operating in stable democratic institutions — then they will systematically misread what's happening in organisations that don't fit that profile.
And most of the organisations we work in don't fit that profile. Not fully.
A manufacturing workforce in regional Australia. A healthcare organisation with clinical and non-clinical staff across wildly different educational backgrounds, cultural origins, and relationships with institutional authority. A local council serving a diverse community, with a workforce that spans professional services and frontline trades — and as I've observed firsthand working with councils, even the structural design of these organisations resists the top-down frameworks most change programmes arrive with. A university with significant international student and staff populations.
Each of these organisations gets handed WEIRD-derived change frameworks as though they're universal tools. The fact that they often produce mediocre results is sometimes attributed to resistance, or poor sponsorship, or inadequate resourcing.
It might simply be that the framework wasn't built for these people.
Frameworks are still worth using. The question is whether you're deploying them as a lens — something to look through — or a law, something to impose.
Three questions worth asking before you deploy any change model.
Consider this a Framework Stress Test. It takes about ten minutes and it's worth doing before you commit to any significant piece of methodology.
1. What population was this built on?
Where did the research come from? If it's primarily from Western organisational settings — large corporates, universities, government departments — how similar is that to your current context? If it's from clinical or academic psychology, what assumptions are being transferred into an organisational setting?
2. What is different about this organisation that the framework might not account for?
Sector, culture, workforce demographics, relationship with authority, history of change — what's specific to here? What assumptions embedded in this framework might not hold?
3. What would a practitioner from a non-WEIRD context change about this approach?
This is the hardest question to answer, especially if your team is predominantly from similar backgrounds. It requires genuinely seeking perspectives from outside your own frame of reference — and being willing to adjust based on what you hear.
These questions don't require you to abandon your methodology. They require you to hold it more lightly, and to treat your first reading of any situation as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion.
The Quiet Influencers in your organisation will often surface this before any assessment tool does. They're closest to the actual human texture of the work. When the framework says one thing and they're saying another, believe them.
A practical implication most change plans miss.
The WEIRD problem shows up most acutely in communication design.
Most change communication is designed to be rational, clear and logical. Here are the facts. Here are the reasons. Here is the timeline. This approach assumes that information, processed through a Western-educated cognitive framework, will produce the desired response.
Doing a quick sweep over the types of organisations I've worked in — regional not-for-profits, manufacturing sites, councils, universities with significant first-generation student populations — this assumption fails quietly and consistently. Not because people don't understand the information. Because the information doesn't connect to how they actually make sense of change in their context.
Change happens one conversation at a time. Not one broadcast at a time. The conversation-by-conversation approach is not just a nice sentiment. It's the methodology that works when your framework's assumptions about how people process information don't hold.
The uncomfortable version.
Here's what the WEIRD critique really implies for the change management profession.
Much of the evidence base we cite to justify our approaches was built in a narrow corner of human experience, then globalised without adequate testing. The frameworks we hand to clients as best practice are, in many cases, best practice for a specific type of organisation — one that may not resemble the one in front of us.
But change management is not a pseudoscience...even if that's the attitude of the hardcore "delivery above all else" operators. It is a young discipline that's still developing the intellectual complexity it needs, when compared to the wider arc of scientific progress.
The gap between what we know and what we confidently claim to know...is wider than most change plans acknowledge.
The practitioners who consistently do the best work — across the widest range of organisational types — are the ones who treat every engagement as genuinely novel. Who don't assume the last framework will work here. Who ask more questions than they deploy answers.
Epistemically correct behaviour, given what we actually know about the research foundations of our field.
And the posture that separates the practitioners worth hiring from the ones who arrive with a methodology and leave with a report.
The WEIRD critique was advanced by Joe Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan in their 2010 paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett's 2008 analysis appeared in American Psychologist.