Normal is a subculture

What we consider normal is a function of the norms of the culture we grew up in. Behavior encouraged in one culture can be entirely unacceptable in another. That’s why it’s easy to label something as weird: it simply doesn’t match the norms of whatever subculture shaped us – a combination of our family, our neighborhood, and our institutions. It’s also why diverse teams are so hard to build. Different points of view mean different assumptions, and different assumptions look like weird behavior, at least at first. But those weird behaviors are often exactly what break through groupthink. The assumptions worth questioning are usually the ones nobody in the room thought to question, because everybody in the room grew up with the same “normal.”