Joseph Henrich > Quotes

“Monogamous marriage changes men psychologically, even hormonally, and has downstream effects on societies. Although this form of marriage is neither “natural” nor “normal” for human societies—and runs directly counter to the strong inclinations of high-status or elite men—it nevertheless can give religious groups and societies an advantage in intergroup competition. By suppressing male-male competition and altering family structure, monogamous marriage shifts men’s psychology in ways that tend to reduce crime, violence, and zero-sum thinking while promoting broader trust, long-term investments, and steady economic accumulation”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“For many Westerners, “it’s natural” seems to mean “it’s good.” This view is wrong and comes from shopping in supermarkets and living in landscaped environments. Plants evolved toxins to deter animals, fungi, and bacteria from eating them. The list of “natural” foods that need processing to detoxify them goes on and on. Early potatoes were toxic, and the Andean peoples ate clay to neutralize the toxin. Even beans can be toxic without processing. In California, many hunter-gatherer populations relied on acorns, which, similar to manioc, require a labor intensive, multiday leaching process. Many small-scale societies have similarly exploited hardy, tropical plants called cycads for food. But cycads contain a nerve toxin. If not properly processed, they can cause neurological symptoms, paralysis, and death. Numerous societies, including hunter-gatherers, have culturally evolved an immense range of detoxification techniques for cycads. By contrast with our species, other animals have far superior abilities to detoxify plants. Humans, however, lost these genetic adaptations and evolved a dependence on cultural know-how, just to eat.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

“The case I’ve presented in this book suggests that humans are undergoing what biologists call a major transition. Such transitions occur when less complex forms of life combine in some way to give rise to more complex forms. Examples include the transition from independently replicating molecules to replicating packages called chromosomes or, the transition from different kinds of simple cells to more complex cells in which these once-distinct simple cell types came to perform critical functions and become entirely mutually interdependent, such as the nucleus and mitochondria in our own cells. Our species’ dependence on cumulative culture for survival, on living in cooperative groups, on alloparenting and a division of labor and information, and on our communicative repertoires mean that humans have begun to satisfy all the requirements for a major biological transition. Thus, we are literally the beginnings of a new kind of animal.1 By contrast, the wrong way to understand humans is to think that we are just a really smart, though somewhat less hairy, chimpanzee. This view is surprisingly common. Understanding how this major transition is occurring alters how we think about the origins of our species, about the reasons for our immense ecological success, and about the uniqueness of our place in nature. The insights generated alter our understandings of intelligence, faith, innovation, intergroup competition, cooperation, institutions, rituals, and the psychological differences between populations. Recognizing that we are a cultural species means that, even in the short run (when genes don’t have enough time to change), institutions, technologies, and languages are coevolving with psychological biases, cognitive abilities, emotional responses, and preferences. In the longer run, genes are evolving to adapt to these culturally constructed worlds, and this has been, and is now, the primary driver of human genetic evolution. Figure 17.1.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

“Perhaps you are WEIRD, raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. If so, you’re likely rather psychologically peculiar.”
― Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“The results reveal the power of prestige: when the gold-starred player had the opportunity to contribute money first, he or she tended to contribute to, and thus cooperate in, the joint effort, and then the following player—the low-prestige person—usually did as well. So, everyone won. However, when the low-prestige player got to contribute money first (or not), he or she tended not to contribute to the joint project (not cooperate), and then, neither did the high-prestige player. Even”
― Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

“Each century of Western Church exposure cuts the rate of cousin marriage by nearly 60 percent.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“The assembly of the innovation engine that propelled the Industrial Revolution becomes easier to see once we recognize how the psychology of premodern Europeans had been quietly evolving in the background for at least eight centuries. Of course, there are many economic and geographic factors that matter too, but if there’s a secret ingredient in the recipe for Europe’s collective brain, it’s the psychological package of individualism, analytic orientation, positive-sum thinking, and impersonal prosociality that had been simmering for centuries.”
― Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“the particular idea of endowing individuals with “rights” and then designing laws based on those rights only makes sense in a world of analytical thinkers who conceive of people as primarily independent agents and look to solve problems by assigning properties, dispositions, and essences to objects and persons. If this approach to law sounds like common sense, you are indeed WEIRD.”
― Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“[Evolutionary selection pressures for general communication] explain why humans are peculiar in having our rather small irises set against a white background—the sclera—in our eyes. Anyone watching us can infer where we are looking or whom we are looking at. Experiments with apes and infants show that apes watch the orientation of the heads of others while human infants watch the eyes.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

“The most prominent approach argues that humans have five largely independent dimensions of personality: (1) openness to experience (“adventurousness”), (2) conscientiousness (“self-discipline”), (3) extraversion (vs. introversion), (4) agreeableness (“cooperativeness” or “compassion”), and (5) neuroticism (“emotional instability”). These have often been interpreted as capturing the innate structure of human personality. Psychologists call these personality dimensions the “BIG-5,” but I’ll call them the WEIRD-5.”
― Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“When the Church banned marriage to in-laws, classifying them as “siblings” to make such unions incestuous, the bonds between kin-groups were broken by the death of either spouse, since the surviving wife or husband was prohibited from incestuously marrying any of their affines.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“Skilled readers are probably worse at identifying faces, since jury-rigging the relevant brain areas impinges on the fusiform gyrus, an area that specializes in face recognition. In fact, the well-established neurological asymmetry in face processing, favoring the right side of the brain, may be due to the effects of learning to read, which drives face processing out of the left side and shifts what it can to the right side.5 I was personally glad to hear this, as I now have an excuse for why I forget faces so often—I’ve recycled some of my facial recognition neuronal firmware to support my reading addiction.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

“Intentions and beliefs, or what’s in a person’s heart, are most important.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“Paternity certainty captures the notion that, in some species, males have to worry about whether they are the genetic father. All other things being equal, the more paternity certainty a male has, the more willing he will be to invest in his mate’s offspring. In many primates, including chimpanzees, females mate promiscuously, so males usually have little or no idea who their offspring are, and they don’t care much.10 Even in pair-bonding primates, male investment is pretty minimal, such as in gorillas, where males act only to protect their mates and their offspring from other males. By reinforcing pair-bonds, marriage norms can make better fathers, and failing that, they can make more fathers,”
― Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

“The radial patterning of Protestantism allows us to use a county’s proximity to Wittenberg to isolate—in a statistical sense—that part of the variation in Protestantism that we know is due to a county’s proximity to Wittenberg and not to greater literacy or other factors. In a sense, we can think of this as an experiment in which different counties were experimentally assigned different dosages of Protestantism to test for its effects. Distance from Wittenberg allows us to figure out how big that experimental dosage was. Then, we can see if this “assigned” dosage of Protestantism is still associated with greater literacy and more schools. If it is, we can infer from this natural experiment that Protestantism did indeed cause greater literacy.16 The results of this statistical razzle-dazzle are striking. Not only do Prussian counties closer to Wittenberg have higher shares of Protestants, but those additional Protestants are associated with greater literacy and more schools. This indicates that the wave of Protestantism created by the Reformation raised literacy and schooling rates in its wake. Despite Prussia’s having a high average literacy rate in 1871, counties made up entirely of Protestants had literacy rates nearly 20 percentile points higher than those that were all Catholic.18 FIGURE P.2. The percentage of Protestants in Prussian counties in 1871.17 The map highlights some German cities, including the epicenter of the Reformation, Wittenberg, and Mainz, the charter town where Johannes Gutenberg produced his eponymous printing press. These same patterns can be spotted elsewhere in 19th-century Europe—and today—in missionized regions around the globe. In 19th-century Switzerland, other aftershocks of the Reformation have been detected in a battery of cognitive tests given to Swiss army recruits. Young men from all-Protestant districts were not only 11 percentile points more likely to be “high performers” on reading tests compared to those from all-Catholic districts, but this advantage bled over into their scores in math, history, and writing. These relationships hold even when a district’s population density, fertility, and economic complexity are kept constant. As in Prussia, the closer a community was to one of the two epicenters of the Swiss Reformation—Zurich or Geneva—the more Protestants it had in the 19th century. Notably, proximity to other Swiss cities, such as Bern and Basel, doesn’t reveal this relationship. As is the case in Prussia, this setup allows us to finger Protestantism as driving the spread of greater literacy as well as the smaller improvements in writing and math abilities.”
― Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“More individualistic countries are also richer, more innovative, and more economically productive.”
― Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“Having completed their Penance, Catholics are forgiven and can merge back on the fast track to heaven (or so they think). For Protestants, in contrast, there’s no straightforward route from sin to confession, penance, and forgiveness. Instead, doing something sinful—which includes things like thinking about forbidden sex—seems to evoke a compensatory response that involves doing more “good stuff.” Since many Protestants see their occupations as divine callings, or simply see productive work as purifying, their compensatory response is often to work harder.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“The later gods of ancient Greece and Rome, contrary to the popular impressions created by later Christian spin doctors, were the upholders of public morality and would bestow divine favor on individuals, families, and cities. Though subject to the same moral shortcomings as their Mesopotamian forebearers, the Greek gods legitimized rulers, inspired armies, and policed corrupt practices.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“To tighten the synergy between beliefs and rituals, the gods evolved desires and commandments that motivated people to participate in rituals, stick to fasts, maintain taboos, and make credible vows. The new doctrinal rituals more effectively transmit the faith, and, in turn, the new faith motivates the reinforcing rituals through the threat of supernatural punishment. This interlocking cycle helps perpetuate the faith from one generation to the next.50”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“Believing in just heaven (but not hell) doesn’t increase growth; neither does believing in God once the influence of contingent afterlife beliefs have been accounted for. Since many people seem keen to believe in heaven, it’s really adding hell that does the economic work (believing only in hell is rare).42”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“In the urban communities of medieval Europe, the success of merchants, traders, and artisans depended—in part—on their reputation for impartial honesty and fairness, and on their industriousness, patience, precision, and punctuality. These reputational systems favored the cultivation of the relevant social standards, attentional biases, and motivations that apply to impersonal transactions. I suspect these changes in both people’s psychology and society’s reputational standards are an important part of the rapidly rising availability of credit, which helped fuel the commercial revolution.57”
― Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“In 315 CE, for example, the Synod of Neocaesarea (now Niksar, Turkey) banned men from marrying the wife of a dead brother—no levirate marriage. A decade later, in 325, the Council of Nicaea prohibited men from marrying the sister of a dead wife—no sororate marriage—and from marrying Jews, pagans, and heretics.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“you can capture much of human morality along five major dimensions, or what they call “foundations.” The five foundations involve people’s concerns about (1) fairness (justice, equity), (2) harm/care (not harming others), (3) in-group loyalty (helping one’s own), (4) respect for authority, and (5) sanctity/purity (adhering to rituals, cleanliness, taboos, etc.)”
― Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“Other populations focus more on actions and outcomes over what’s “inside.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“we need to recognize the role played by the newly forming voluntary associations, such as towns and guilds, as well as the more individualistic psychology possessed by their members.”
― Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“After their first initiation, for example, boys or teens might be charged with assisting the warriors in the next higher age-grade. Under the command of the senior age-set, warriors often train together and get tasked with tribal defense or tactical raiding. After graduating from the warrior grade, men in their 30s typically attain the privilege of taking a wife and starting a family. Years later, fathers and grandfathers get initiated into a senior level, where they gain political authority as part of a council of elders who make decisions for the entire organization.51”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“The innate psychological foundation of marriage is a long-term pair-bonding instinct, which humans appear to share with some other apes, including gorillas and gibbons, as well as with some monkeys. This instinct can be thought of as a potential strategy, which may be deployed depending on the context. We don’t have to pair bond (it’s not like peeing), but it’s one of the things we’ll be inclined to do under some circumstances. The term “pair-bonding” is often confused with notions of monogamy. It’s important to realize that pair-bonding does not imply monogamous mating. Pair-bonds form between dyads, but a single individual can have multiple pair-bonds. Gorillas, for example, often form long-term pair-bonds with multiple females at the same time. In humans, both historically and cross-culturally, individuals often pair-bonded and married more than one other person at a time—85% of human societies permitted polygamous marriage in some form. Here, pair-bonding refers to enduring, or at least not ephemeral, relationships between mates.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

“Because much of our brain development occurs during adolescence, childhood, and even earlier, the social norms that shape our early life experiences may have particularly large effects on our psychology. For example, a growing body of evidence suggests that we may have evolved to make enduring calibrations to aspects of our physiology, psychology, and motivations based on stress and other environmental cues experienced before age five. As adults, these early calibrations may influence our self-control, risk-taking, stress responses, norm internalizations, and relationships. By shaping our early lives, cultural evolution can manipulate our brains, hormones, decision-making, and even our longevity.40”
― Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“Intensive kin-based institutions bind communities together by intertwining individuals in webs of shared identity, communal ownership, collective shame, and corporate responsibility. In this world, scrutinizing a person’s intentions or other mental states may be less relevant or even counterproductive. In predicting people’s behavior, many contexts are so constrained by social norms and the watching eyes of others that intuiting people’s personal beliefs or intentions won’t help very much. Instead, it’s better to know their social relationships, allies, debts, and obligations.”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

“What are people like when their society has long lacked courts, police, governments, contracts, and even leaders, like mayors, chiefs, and elders?”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous