In that case, wyrde—weird—could be considered a kind of prediction, a destiny. Much like what psychology suggests, your unusualness is a fabric woven from the thread of your life. Your identity, your environment, and your experiences all combine to make you who you are. But your weirdness is also a hint at what you might live to see and do, at what hidden powers you possess. “Weird,” then, is your potential.

Chapter 2

The Realization

Your middle school teacher was wrong. Like it or not, it matters what other people think of you. Again and again, research has shown that our opinions about what’s right are shaped by the people around us. And usually, what we consider “right” is whatever everyone else is doing.

Psychologists in labs have changed individuals’ perception of how much a dot of light moved, how long a line is, or even how much it’s appropriate to hurt someone, simply by surrounding them with the opinions of other people. In group-discussion experiments, people rate those who agree with the average sentiment of a group highly; they reject those who disagree with the group.19 To encourage people to use less energy, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District sent residents report cards revealing how their energy use compared with that of their neighbors. The utility set the norm, and people used less energy as a result.20 All these findings point to roughly the same conclusion: we like to fit in with the group; we like people who fit in with the group; we dislike those who don’t. These norms, or unwritten rules about what we “ought” to be doing, determine what’s weird or isn’t.

Michael Ain broke norms because most doctors weren’t short. My family broke norms in Texas with every facet of our being, from our language to our religion, or lack thereof.

On an individual level, how much we care what society thinks of us might be influenced by our biology. In a 2014 study,21 the psychologist Shinobu Kitayama found the degree to which we uphold cultural norms is related to the type of variation we have on one gene, the dopamine D4 receptor gene.

The gene doesn’t change how we behave; instead, it influences how much we endorse the prevailing norms of our environments. Asians who carried certain variations of this gene became more interdependent. They were more likely to endorse values related to social harmony, collectivism, and modesty. Meanwhile, European Americans who carried the same gene variants became more individualistic—a traditionally white American norm. The gene makes you more of a rule follower, whatever the rules happen to be.