The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

by Joseph Henrich

'A landmark in social thought. Henrich may go down as the most influential social scientist of the first half of the twenty-first century' MATTHEW SYED

Do you identify yourself by your profession or achievements, rather than your family network? Do you cultivate your unique attributes and goals? If so, perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.

Unlike most who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, nonconformist, analytical and control-oriented. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically peculiar? What part did these differences play in our history, and what do they mean for our collective identity?

Joseph Henrich, who developed the game-changing concept of WEIRD, uses leading-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics and evolutionary biology to explore how changing family structures, marriage practices and religious beliefs in the Middle Ages shaped the Western mind, laying the foundations for the world we know today. Brilliant, provocative, engaging and surprising, this landmark study will revolutionize your understanding of who - and how - we are now.

'Phenomenal ... The only theory I am aware of that attempts to explain broad patterns of human psychology on a global scale' Washington Post

'You will never look again in the same way at your own seemingly universal values' Uta Frith, Professor of Cognitive Development, University College London

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, History, Science, Anthropology, Sociology, Economics

704 pages, ebook

First published September 8, 2020

About the author

Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist. He is the Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology of Harvard University and a professor of the department.


Joseph Henrich's research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making and culture, and includes topics related to cultural learning, cultural evolution, culture-gene coevolution, human sociality, prestige, leadership, large-scale cooperation, religion and the emergence of complex human institutions. Methodologically, he integrates ethnographic tools from anthropology with experimental techniques drawn from psychology and economics. His area interests include Amazonia, Chile and Fiji.

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite non-fiction books are those that provide me with some new insight. It’s pleasant enough to read books that reinforce my existing views, but I don’t enjoy them as much as a book that presents me with new arguments and leaves me thinking about their implications. This book achieves that. There’s a lot in here that I find quite difficult to accept, but I have to concede that the author provides a mass of evidence for his arguments. The amount of research within the book is quite incredible, which is just as well as I think Prof. Henrich’s thesis will have to stand up to some pretty heavy criticism from his fellow academics. I should warn the potential reader that the book has a lot of graphs! I may disagree with some of the detailed arguments, but overall it is hard to contest the author’s claim that “It’s no longer tenable to continue pretending that all populations are psychologically indistinguishable or that cultural evolution doesn’t systematically modify how people think, feel, and perceive.”

Prof. Henrich’s starting point is that “Culture can and does alter our brains, hormones, and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, emotions, and many other aspects of our minds”.

One of his many examples was of interest to me personally. I have poor facial recognition skills, something which has caused me the odd embarrassment down the years. Professor Henrich explains this is a common feature of “highly literate” people, and I would think almost everyone on this site would come within that category. It’s apparently caused by overdevelopment of the parts of the brain that deal with language, at the expense of those parts that deal with face recognition. On average, highly literate people have poorer face recognition skills than the norm. Who knew?

Having made the case for a link between culture and changes to the brain, the author highlights that all human societies formed on the basis of “family ties, ritual bonds, and enduring interpersonal relationships.” Such societies operated to different principles than modern Western ones. Land and property were held communally, and no single individual could sell or dispose of it. There were expectations around the sharing of wealth. There was a principle of group responsibility – any member of a clan could be held responsible for the actions of one - and in contrast to the modern western emphasis on “self-esteem”, what matters in kin-based societies is reputation, the esteem of others. The overall effect is to promote “conformity to peers, deference to traditional authorities, sensitivity to shame, and an orientation toward the collective (e.g. the clan) over oneself.”

In kin-based societies, marriages are often arranged with a view to economic and social ties between families, and these ties are maintained over generations by practices such as cousin-marriage, polygyny, and marriage between in-laws, step-relatives etc. Everyone is ensnared in a complex web of obligations to other members of their extended kin.

In Europe, the Catholic Church banned all of the above marriage practices, and also divorce. The Orthodox Church did the same, although the author argues they were not as strict (I wasn’t totally convinced by that last claim). Over time, the (unintended) effect was to destroy the kin-based structures that had previously existed in Europe. The nuclear family became standard, with individual ownership of property and lineal inheritance.

This leads to the last part of the author’s argument. These changes to social structures explain why, from the Middle Ages onwards, the former backwater of Western Europe surged past other parts of the world in terms of economic and technological development. Freed from their familial obligations, Europeans could choose their friends and business partners, could migrate more easily to cities, and form voluntary associations with strangers. These changes promoted innovation, the growth of impersonal business dealings, and concepts such as individual rights, personal accountability, and universal laws. Events such as the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution were a consequence of psychological shifts that began centuries earlier.

Despite the length of this review, it’s really a very poor summary of the complexity and nuance of the author’s arguments. I would recommend the book to those who have an interest in psychology or anthropology, but most of all to those with an open mind.

[BlackOxford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Words Are Eating Your Brain

There can’t be any doubt that the language we speak contributes to the way we perceive and judge the world. The words we use are defined by other words, all of which have connotations and associations unique not just to the language but to particular subsets of language users. This we call culture and feel justified in making the distinction between, say, European and Asian cultures in which attitudes toward and the meanings of things like trust, guilt, loyalty and rationality (not to mention the rather broader topics of law, morality, science, god, etc.) vary enormously.

This cultural variability is nothing new to science or popular knowledge. Nor is the contribution that language makes in preserving cultural distinctions and practices. What is new though, at least to me, is that language practices - particularly that of reading - have a marked effect on human physiology. Reading actually changes the structure of the brain. For example, among those populations that read “… verbal memories are expanding, face processing is shifting [to the] right [hemisphere of the brain] , and corpus callosa are thickening—in the aggregate—over centuries.”

Therefore, as literacy rates have increased in certain countries (mainly in the Northern hemisphere) over the last 500 years, language “has jury-rigged aspects of our genetically evolved neurological systems to create new mental abilities.” It is very much as if language itself has a life of its own and has infected the human species for use as the vector of its development.

So much for those AI theorists who put the conquest of technology over humanity some time in the future. The fundamental technology we have is language. And in a sense it has controlled human development from its arrival in the species. We have quite literally been its tool as it carries out its neurological transformation. Our brains are being re-wired constantly every time we open a book or read a billboard.

Like a parasite that promotes self-serving behaviours in its host, language encourages “the value of ‘formal education’ or institutions such as ‘schools’—as well as technologies like alphabets, syllabaries, and printing presses.” Those with greater language-facility are more likely to ‘get ahead’ and rise to social roles of high repute. Taking Henrich seriously, it becomes difficult not to think of language as an alien race come to enthral us for unknown ends.

For me, these observations by Henrich, are wonderfully interesting, evocative, and stimulating. But he goes on to bury them in mountains of rather passé and more than exceptionally boring details from hundreds of anthropological and ethnographic studies that do nothing but distract from the book’s key point - that language is physically reshaping us in ways we are only beginning to comprehend. His paean to Western culture conveniently omits mention of its racism, misogyny, and violence. Oh well, I suppose he has he academic reputation as well as popular street cred to consider. Fortunately I do not.

[Henry Percy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I borrowed this book from my local library, so I do not show up as a verified purchaser. All page numbers refer to the Kindle version. I learned a great many interesting things from this book, but so much of the methodology is troubling.

I sent these observations and more (5 pages worth) to Mr. Henrich before posting this review. He informed me that the first item, which I thought was a typo, was correct, and my second point was not "on target," so he stopped reading. So much for intellectual curiosity. This review does not include all the points that I emailed to him, and I have reorganized things for presentation here.

The Ethnographic Atlas

Henrich sets great store by the Ethnographic Atlas (p. 156), a “database of over 1,200 societies (ethnolinguistic groups) that captures life prior to industrialization … So, 99.3 percent of societies in this global anthropological database deviate from the WEIRD pattern.”

I looked the Atlas up on the web and could find no way to sort the societies by population size, but I would venture to guess that many were a few thousand souls or less. In other words, an ethnolinguistic group of a thousand members counts as one, while the one billion or so WEIRD people also count as one. What are we comparing here? Nowhere does Henrich rigorously define WEIRD, so I have to guess which countries are in and which are out. I assume that WEIRD includes, say, Australia and the Czech Republic, but those two societies cannot possibly count as a single ethnolinguistic group.

In Chapter 5, Note 2, Henrich tiptoes around some of the deficiencies in the Atlas and ends with this broadside: “But, the summary dismissal of the Atlas found in cultural anthropology and surrounding fields reflects a lack of scientific training, an aversion to quantification, and statistical illiteracy.” A little sensitive there? And what a tightly reasoned refutation: an ad hominem attack. Cast the disbelievers into outer darkness!

Priming

Chapter 4 is an extended discussion of “priming,” the modifications to people’s behavior after exposure to a stimulus. Henrich presents priming as a fact of human behavior, without qualifications. As it happens, after completing Henrich’s book I read Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions, also published in 2020. Ritchie begins Chapter 2 with a discussion of priming. Test subjects asked to name an object respond slightly faster when shown a fork if it was preceded with a picture of a knife or spoon. That is uncontroversial, and fairly trivial. But far more has been claimed about priming, that it alters behavior.

Ritchie discusses Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate in Economics and author of one of the most popular psychology textbooks, published in 2011. One instance of priming Kahneman cites in his book is a study reported in Science: if you prime subjects with a screensaver of floating banknotes, afterwards they will “prefer ‘to play alone, work along, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.’” And all from watching a screensaver! I’m reminded of the folktale of nail soup. And Kahneman is not shy in the conclusions he draws from this moral tale: “’Disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true. More important, you must accept that they are true about you.’”

Just one year after Kahneman’s text appeared, priming theory began to come apart. One of the seminal studies could not be replicated and had to be retracted. More followed. In 2017 Kahneman wrote, “The experimental evidence for the ideas I presented in that chapter was significantly weaker than I believed when I wrote it. This was simply an error: I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm … but I did not think it through.” Congratulations to a Nobel laureate for admitting his mistake. To repeat, Kahneman retracted his assertions and apologized in 2017, three years before publication of The WEIRDest People. Was Henrich unaware of that? Shouldn’t that caveat be included, at least in a note? Henrich certainly knows of Kahneman, mentioning him briefly in the Preface as a “famed psychologist.”

See also Ritchie, p. 94 on “romantic priming”: after being shown a picture of an attractive woman, men take more risks and spend more. “Proven” in 15 papers reporting on 43 experiments. Then David Shanks and colleagues did large-sale experiments and could not replicate the effect.

Henrich's Appendix C contains another long disquisition on priming, in the midst of which this appears: “Priming results are always a worry, since they often don’t replicate.” That’s it. One sentence. And what a damning admission it is. If the very concept of priming frequently does not replicate, isn’t that a sign that it is a weak theory at best? Nevertheless, Henrich builds a tower of conclusions based on priming theory.

Guilt vs. Shame

On p. 34 Henrich defines “shame” and “guilt”: “shame” is external while “guilt is different; it’s an internal guidance system and at least partially a product of culture, though it probably integrates some innate psychological components like regret.” And just like that, “innate psychological components like regret” drop from the sky, a deus ex machina to salvage the theory. Is regret then genetic? Apparently those in WEIRD societies are born with guilt (original sin, anyone?), yet it mysteriously bypasses those in the rest of the world (perhaps they’re missing “innate psychological components like regret”), who are culturally dosed with shame.

On p. 202 Henrich tells us that a researcher “used translations of ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ from nine languages to gather data on the frequency of Google searches involving these terms in 56 countries over the preceding five years.” We’re to believe that there are binary pairs of words in nine other languages that map precisely to “guilt” and “shame” in English? But “guilt” and “shame” are not even mutually exclusive in English (see Merriam-Webster). I know from my own efforts at translation that finding a word in the target language that captures all the nuances of a word in the source language can be nearly impossible for many terms, yet Henrich is confident that a researcher has done so for nine languages.

Appendix B, Fig. B.2, shows the “Relationship between the frequency of searches for ‘shame’ vs. ‘guilt’ on Google and the Kinship Intensity Index (KII). The dashed line represents the zero line; countries above the line search more often for ‘shame’ than ‘guilt.’ Those below the dashed line search for ‘guilt’ more than ‘shame.’ The plot statistically removes the variation among the nine languages used, allowing us to focus on comparing the 56 countries.”

And just like that the “variation among the nine languages” is made to "statistically" disappear. In no less than four places in the book (though not here) Henrich speaks of “statistical razzle-dazzle.” Having translated three books from Italian to English, I would love to know what kind of “razzle-dazzle” he or other researchers apply to eliminate variations within a language or between languages.

Acceptance of Unscientific Polls

P. 209: “Using MFQ data collected online from 285,792 respondents from 206 countries …” Self-selecting respondents to a survey on the internet are representative of what? And how, pray tell, does that research adjust for age, sex, education, income or any other variable? Yet Henrich draws sweeping conclusions from the results: “This analysis confirms … Overall, these findings … converge with [other] surveys. From these results, a picture is emerging.” Confirmation bias? Remember, Henrich charges anyone dismissing the Ethnographic Atlas with “statistical illiteracy.”

Consider this: In 1936 the Literary Digest predicted a landslide win for Alf Landon over FDR from a poll of 2 million people. On the other hand, George Gallup predicted an FDR win based on a scientific survey of 50,000. So tell me again, sir, what "data collected online from 285,792 respondents" tells us?

Farmers vs. Hunter-Gatherers

P. 104: “With the ‘right’ set of institutions, farmers could spread across the landscape like an epidemic, driving out or assimilating any hunter-gatherers in their path.” Really, “epidemic”? Talk about loaded language. The book is permeated with a wistful, nostalgic air whenever hunter-gatherers are discussed. Perhaps Henrich should live as one for a year. I know, he has lived amongst various tribes, but he clearly did so as a Westerner (he mentions driving his car to the village to shop; it’s a safe bet he did not earn his shopping money by selling berries he had gathered). I would love to hear his report after he has fashioned all his raiment, doctored all his wounds, slain and gathered all his food, and especially defended “his” fishing holes and berry patches against all comers. I wonder what his attitude toward the “epidemic” of farmers would be then.

P. 102: “The Matsigenka and other similar populations, which can be found sprinkled around the globe, provide important insights into the nature of human societies and the role of institutions and history in shaping our sociality and psychology.” There are 7.8 billion people on this planet, of which WEIRD populations comprise about one billion, while there are about 7700 Matsigenka, or one Matsigenka per 130,000 WEIRD people. Other tribes Henrich so frequently cites are even smaller. There is something unsettling about a discipline where vast, sweeping generalizations are made from outliers and applied to huge populations. In another instance, Henrich takes exception to the “claim that humans are ‘ultrasocial,’ vastly more cooperative than other species. My response is always ‘Which humans?’” Henrich thinks he has refuted the generalization by citing outliers.

Nonrepresentative Populations

According to Wikipedia, the richest ZIP Code in the US is in Montchanin, Delaware, with a per capita income of $654,485 (68 people live there), while the poorest Census Designated Place is Little River, California, with median household income of $3,194 (82 people live there). The median income for all households in the US is just under $64,000. In other words, those two areas are extreme outliers. Should we study the lifestyles, attitudes, and mores of the richest and poorest locales? By all means. Can we use those tiny populations to explain the behavior of the vast majority of the 330 million people in this country? Doubtful.

Envoi

Here's a challenge. Before reading The WEIRDest People, first read Stuart Ritchie, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. Then see how many of those problems apply to Henrich's volume.

[Jason Furman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The WEIRDest People in the World is among the best books I have read in the last five to ten years. In his earlier book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (also an outstanding book), Joseph Henrich chronicled the success of the human species, grounding it in our ability to learn from each other and the co-evolution of culture and genes, a story that takes place over hundreds of thousands of years. The WEIRDest People in the World is effectively a sequel (but you need not read The Secret of Our Success first as the ideas are repeated/summarized in the new book) that zooms in on the last roughly 1,500 years to understand why the West was so successful in its rapid growth and conquest of much of the rest of the world. Henrich’s explanation over-simplified: the Catholic Church banned cousin marriage which broke up kinship networks, then Protestant churches emphasized reading and individual interpretation. The combination led to a new “WEIRD (i.e., Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic)” psychology that helped lay the foundation for individual rights, democracy, markets, innovation, and the success the West enjoys today. Aspects of this have been imitated elsewhere helping to spread prosperity.

Some big think grand explanations for everything books take wild and creative stabs backed up by intuition but not much evidence. This book is creative (although maybe not “wild”) but is grounded in meticulous research, much of it done by Henrich and his team but also drawing on a wide range of other research by economists, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and others. Henrich can do page after page after page of evidence, scatterplots, descriptions of natural experiments and regressions, etc. It also has both fox-like qualities (summarizing everything around a single theory) but also hedgehog-like qualities (lots of causal arrows pointing every which way and bringing a lot of different explanations together). It also draws on such a wide range of material, criss-crosses so many places, that it shows Henrich as an impressive polymath, but not one who is out to impress but to prove, often with a list of eight arguments to make his proof.

The core point and the one that I found completely persuasive in the book is that psychology varies across cultures and that for years Western psychologists made the mistake of studying WEIRD university students and thinking their psychology was universal. Instead, Henrich argues that there are lots of psychologies but broadly speaking they can be grouped into two sets of characteristics. WEIRD people are individualistic, self-obsessed, analytical, and see ourselves as unique beings that try to stick to impartial rules that are enforced by an internal feeling of guilt. In contrast, in many other cultures people are more focused on the group (often a kinship group), do not focus on their self realization, and try to do right by the people around them—a feeling enforced by shame in front of others more than internal guilt. Many other traits vary across these two types including patience, timeliness, whether morality is judged by intentions or outcomes, and much more.

Henrich advances a wide range of evidence for this core point including laboratory experiments played across countries, within countries, and with different immigrant groups within countries, data on actual behavior like parking tickets and blood donations, observational studies, and more. Any given study by itself might not be completely persuasive but the large mass of them, many extremely careful, leaves relatively little doubt in my mind about this argument.

Next comes Henrich’s explanation of the rise of WEIRD psychology as the consequence of the breakup of kin networks by the Catholic Church and the rise of protestantism and reading. I found this very plausible but far from a certainty, which is not Henrich’s fault but the difficulty of being completely certain about any aspects of historic causation, especially when everything moves together and causes everything else. Henrich, however, is not just making an assertion, he has a lot of evidence in the form of the history of banning cousin marriages, the correlation between the degree of cousin marriage and various psychological traits, and a number of different natural experiments that involve comparing areas that historically were under different religious rules.

Finally, Henrich links all of this to the rise of western Democratic and market institutions, something I found highly plausible—and was completely persuaded that we over-emphasize the individual thinkers we credit with the modern world (Locke, Hume, Smith, Montesquieu) and underemphasize the deeper and more slowly evolving cultural and psychological roots of these institutions.

I do have my worries about the argument. Psychological explanations of differences in growth have a long and sorry history, often fitting an explanation after-the-fact that was invalidated subsequently (e.g., the idea that Korean culture is incapable of generating growth which was dramatically disproven after 1950). Some of the “natural experiments” are so remote it is hard to know what to make about them, like some Swiss lord that died around 1,200 and then differences centuries later. This raises another issue with the timing of the psychological changes, which are sometimes portrayed as very deep and the result of factors centuries before and in other cases seem to change very quickly (see, again Korea). Some of the functionalist explanations for why different cultures/institutions evolved beg the question of why in some places but not others and the role of contingency. All that said, these are all sources of my uneasiness with unqualifiedly embracing the argument in the book and none of them really find fault with any of the empirical evidence or claims--all of which moved me a lot in Henrich's direction.

The WEIRDest People in the World is definitely a long book. But it is really worthwhile. It does not just provide a new and compelling explanation of the rise of the West, it also makes one think about how many aspects of psychology that seem universal are really contingent and how these can change and adapt over time. Ultimately, the book left me with a profound awe for the human species that can understand so much about itself both by working collaboratively with a wide variety of intellectual tools and also by single individuals with enormous creativity and ability to synthesize evidence.

[Stefan Schubert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henrich essentially does three things in this book:

1) He shows that the West is more psychologically different from other parts of the world than is usually assumed.

2) He argues that Western psychology was a major cause of the Scientific and Industrial Revolution, and why the West came to dominate the world.

3) He gives an explanation of how Western psychology developed. His theory is that the Catholic Church's rules against cousin marriage and a range of other customs that sustained "intensive kinship" broke the power of clans and paved the way for a more individualistic society, where people were less partial in favour of their kin.

Methodologically, the book takes a cultural evolution-perspective, that Henrich outlined in greater detail in his previous book *The Secret of Our Success*.

It's an extremely ambitious big-picture book. I can't evaluate all of the evidence, but it's highly thought-provoking and worth reading (even though it's long).

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 4 out of 5]

We Westerners tend to think we are the "normal" ones and all the rest of humanity, where they differ from us, are uncultured, uncivilized, or strange.

Most psychology experiments have been done on Western university students, and we think that what those studies show about people is the norm for everyone everywhere and at all times.

However, as the author of The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous explains, it's we Westerners who are peculiar.

WEIRD stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic" and author Joseph Henrich details the psychological and physical ways we have changed from both our Hunter-Gatherer and subsistence farming ancestors.

Relating how learning to read changes the brain (our facial recognition suffers in order to use part of the brain that gives us that ability), Mr Henrich shows how the spread of Protestantism throughout Europe encouraged literacy of the masses and set off a sleuth of psychological changes.

Even before that, Catholicism changed us by creating the "nuclear family" and eroding our natural kinship alliances.

There are many other factors that led to our changes, and the changes are vast. We have better analytical skills but make for less loyal friends. We are much more trusting of strangers, but at the expense of close relationships with extended family.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. It was fascinating to look at the changes over time, and to learn how we differ from most people. Of course, as much of the rest of the world has gained greater literacy, education for the masses, industry, and more, the differences aren't as extensive as they once were. Still, there are myriad ways in which we remain different.

My only complaints about this book are that there was a lot of overlap and too many examples. It could have been 100 pages shorter without suffering any or much loss of information. Also, there is not one mention of homosexual or transgender people. In many societies, especially pre-Christendom, gay and transgender people were normal and accepted. However, the author writes as though there have only been straight, cisgender people throughout history.

Still, this book gave me a greater understanding of why there are cultural clashes when people immigrate to other countries, and reminded me that culture shapes us at least as much as our DNA.

Westerners might be different but we are not special and our culture is not "above" that of others. Though it's hard for me not to think that democracy is always better and that people should have inalienable rights, there is no concrete reason this should be so. Our thinking about these things comes from the culture in which we are raised.

It's helpful to be reminded of this, and it's fascinating to look at societal evolution throughout the last couple millennia. Anyone interested in psychology or anthropology will find much to appreciate in this book.

[Charles Freeman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have posted a full two star review on Amazon.co.uk under Charles Freeman.
I have worked as a historian of European thought and culture for many years and bought this book as a result of the reviews. It fails at every historical level and I am amazed that the Professor Henrich did not check with his historian colleagues before writing it.
He argues that the Church controlled marriages so successfully and with such restrictions from 400 AD that people were 'forced', his words, to seek mates from other tribes or ethnic groups. False- marriages were not controlled by the Church until the sixteenth century and there is no evidence that they took place outside kinship groups.The whole of Henrich's argument follows from this misconception and so the book as a whole fails completely.
Kinship groups from medieval society are usually unrecorded so his argument that the marriage laws broke 'cousin marriages' up is impossible to prove. Luckily by the fifteenth century we have full records from Florence and they show (see a Comment I have added to my Amazon review) that kinship groups were essential for social survival and recorded in detail.
Then Prof. Henrich introduces the idea that European society as a whole developed WEIRD characteristics- notably individualism. In fact,the economic structure of society (largely work on the land) meant that very few people had the energy to be individuals and it got worse with industrialisation and the tyranny of the factory floor and the mines. (See E.P.Thompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class'.) Individualism was only possible for the MINORITY who were able to live off the profits of others.
I think other readers will question whether WEIRD people form an ethnic (dare I say it 'white' group). And if they are assumed as a result of WEIRD psychology to be superior to non-WEIRD groups, then what follows? I leave it to others to make their own opinions. It certainly needs open discussion although the mass of adulatory endorsements and reviews suggest that this book should be considered one of the great books of the century and may inhibit discussion. Time and thoughtful reading will tell. Treat this book with caution. Charles Freeman.

[Cav · Rating 2 out of 5]

The WEIRDest People in the World was a mixed bag for me...

Author Joseph Henrich is a Canadian professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, and Chair of the department, according to his Wikipedia page.
I put this book on my list after Henrich's appearance on Michael Shermer's Science Salon podcast, which I enjoyed.

Joseph Henrich :


The WEIRDest People in the World is a very in-depth dive into social psychology that expands upon its subtitle. It is a very long book: the versions I have clocked in at ~20 hours for the audio, and almost 700 pages for the PDF. I think the page count here could have been cut down quite a bit for the sake of both brevity and clarity.

The subject of this book is an extremely interesting one, but it could have been delivered in a more readable fashion. The writing here is decent, but the material is dense, and the reading is dry and arduous more often than not. The book is a very data-driven read; featuring a plethora of graphs, maps, and charts placed throughout. Henrich employs both large data sets as well as cites many different case studies here. Maybe a little too much, IMHO, having the reader losing the forest for the trees at times...
I also think that some people unfamiliar with social psychology and its related jargon might find themselves a bit lost here at times.

Some of the topics covered in these pages include:
• Martin Luther, literacy and the protestant reformation.
• Short-term sacrifice for long-term gain. Patience; the marshmallow test.
• The role of organized religion in social trust and the establishment of societal norms and taboos.

I also felt that The WEIRDest People in the World had too many lists that tended to bog the reader down, leaving them lost in the woods at times...
The book could have also used better formatting for the sake of clarity. I felt that its thesis was not clearly summarized and defined at the beginning, which detracted from the message it was trying to convey. The thesis should have been laid out more clearly up-front, and then expanded upon in the later chapters.

***********************

While social psychology is a very interesting field to me, and I was excited to see where the author would take this topic, I found most of the writing here to be too dry and long-winded for my tastes. The book started off well enough, but then quickly dove into the weeds. The data laid out in these pages could have made for a great story, but that story is not told here...
2 stars.

[TheBookWarren · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75 Stars (Rnd ⬆️) — This book is something I continually come back to months later. It’s still rising and rising in my eyes, such is the residual effect it’s had on my view of the world & the lens for which I view the Western world and how it’s evolved me as well as all geographic-regional-themed-history.

This nonfiction masterpiece is one I was put onto by the IMPECCABLE recommendations of The New York Times Book Review Podcast. At this point all I can truly muster with any true succinct-brevity is… Bravo!!!

Offering astonishing insights into the current Western World Psyche by delving into a deep-dive of a particular history, being the Western-Educated-Industrialised-Rich-Democratic. This Psychology digest is a treasure trove of rich and deep research shared with sublime honesty and detail whilst being written in a seldom-offered combination of frankness and anomalous that is breathtaking.

Each chapter is another level of enriching reveals that is akin to unwrapping a giant pass-the-parcel one layer at a time without ever having to actually pass the parcel, instead keeping it for yourself and gauging on each layer of wonder slowly and assuredly.

Gaining insight into why the West is the west, what makes us so unique and WEIRDly composed due to hundreds of years of carefully forged path is a pleasure unlike almost any I’ve experienced whilst reading, certainly nonfiction. So just do yourself a favour cus this is a dive-in-head-first kind of Novel you just have to experience yourself.

[Jeanette]

Choosing not to rate this book because I have immense problem with the methodology and language choice he uses as prime dependable quotients in his arguments.

I read something from all chapters and studied the chartings to understanding. At times I don't much disagree with many of these, but at the same time I don't fall for what he is doing in the equivocations.

Other reviewers have detailed exactly what I oppose as both "psychological" and "historic" absolute definitions and generalizations he considers accurate.

Fellow historians and forensic evolutionist associates will not agree to his continually assumed suppositions, almost as a "some is all" fallacy.

His language nuance is incorrect in many cases- as in the matter and cognition for which he uses the "forced" definition toward marriage partners. As a student of social psychology for many years, I became rather appalled by the different cultural slants he puts into word choices.

Others have done the review of this incredible/ unreliable quantity factor far better than I could. Read some of them. They nailed what he has done here.

Also from the get-go I also dispute his acronym of "weird" dual nuance. And the author cannot write well either, so I could never rate this more than 2 stars at the most.

[Olivia R · Rating 2 out of 5]

The basic premise is fine and seems well-supported, if not particularly interesting/engaging and repeated far too many times.

My main problem with this book is the author’s huge oversight of the centrality of racism and imperialism to Western civilization (the “W” in WEIRD should stand for white supremacist, and the “I” for imperialist). In no way can psychology fully explain the domination of Western nations—you have to look to exploitation, genocide, and colonialism, which this author does not.

He goes so far as to suggest that countries in the global south are poor because their psychology does not match up with Western institutions. Again, his failure to recognize the role of imperialism and white supremacy is incredibly offensive. The book reads like propaganda for Western imperialism as a result.

The book is also essentially about male psychology, which of course is treated as human psychology. Even the parts of the book that focus on kinship and marriage look mainly at their public effects (trade, innovation, work, etc.) and not on domestic labor. The author is incredibly heteronormative and talks about men and women in disturbingly naturalized ways. The male silhouette on the cover should have warned me that this would be the case, but unfortunately I read the whole book anyway.

[Patrick Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

2024-03-18 I finished this book about two weeks ago, a couple weeks after our book group discussed it. I was mad that I could not finish before the discussion, since I was really getting into the book, and wanted the full experience of having it all read before the discussion. But the discussion did help me see the need to finish the book.

The book's subtitle: "How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous" is a topic that I have spent many years reading and thinking about, discussing and even writing book reviews and e-mails on. The multi-disciplined nature of this book: economics, history, and primarily psychology was of interest too, since the first two I have read and studied much of, but the last, not so much.

I hope this review has the parts I highlighted attached below, since there are many and they could be useful.

Generally, I thought the book was a net-positive, since it highlighted some important factually history.

One of the points was brought up in the Prelude, then discussed in more detail several other places in the book: the spread of literacy throughout the world was quite clearly due to the Protestant Reformation, or at least so closely follows the spread of Protestantism throughout the world, that other explanations seem dubious.

Another point highlighted and emphasized in the book was the remarkable enrichment of the world - vastly increasing human population and per capita wealth - due to the Industrial Revolution, and capitalist and other (he focuses on one) institutional policy/norm in particular

That this Harvard professor has written a best selling book that highlights just these points is a real positive to me, in this age of wacky anti-industrial, anti-human policy preferences of environmentalism, wokism, post-modernism, etc.

If I can make time to review my extensive notes from reading the book, I will add more.

[Alex Zakharov · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The WEIRDest People in the World” will undoubtedly and deservedly become a classic in sociology, despite the fact that Henrichs’ thesis per se is not particularly new. After all, the importance of impersonal institutions for state development has been widely acknowledged (e.g. Henry Maine’s famous “from status to contract” concept), the underappreciated effect of Catholicism on European societies has been repeatedly pointed out by Francis Fukuyama, and the role of competition and experimentation in driving ideas and innovation has been explored by Joel Mokyr and Deirdre McCloskey.

Henrich’s chief contribution is to integrate various lines of thinking into a unified framework, explicitly specify the direction of causality, and quantify causes and effects. Specifically, he claims that Western Christianity’s policies towards marriage and family were directly responsible for the breakdown of kinship based institutions. Furthermore, the breakdown of these kinship based institutions led to a particular and historically-unique psychological profile, a profile geared towards individuality, impersonal pro-sociality, and analytic thinking. In Europe, this profile animated the emergence of guilds, free cities, and universities which in turn accelerated the rate of innovation, culminating in Industrial Revolution. And that, in turn, spawned a number of what he calls WEIRD societies (Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic).

Henrich has been criticized for being cavalier with the data, and frankly the criticism is deserved. The precision of claims such as “a century of exposure to Western Christian Church cuts cousin marriage rate by 60%” are difficult to take too seriously, and many of the data-driven charts in the book seem more ambiguous then Henrich’s interpretation of them. That said, Henrich does present multiple sources of diverse types of data including marriage patterns, growth of voluntary associations, psychological variation, testosterone levels, church exposure, and literacy, and all findings are pointing in the same direction. Henrich also presents a slew of other evidence supporting his thesis. For example, a long dated list of family planning polices enacted and enforced by Western Christian Church over 800 year period is quite effective. Overall, he builds a very convincing case, and while we can scoff at some specifics, the directionality of his claims is on the money.

My only substantive criticism is not related to Henrich’s central thesis, but to his foray into genomics. Near the end of the book, Henrich asks whether observed psychological variation is a result of nature or nurture. To answer, he constructs an arcane argument suggesting that WEIRD psychological traits must be primarily shaped by culture, and that genes, if anything, would have pulled in the opposite direction. That is utter nonsense. We don’t need to construct a theory of whether culture dominates psychological variation or genes do, we can measure it directly. And in fact, the source of psychological variation in humans (the bread and better of behavioral genetics) is not in dispute – heritability of most psychological traits is at least 50%. As such, any social science theory that predicts that genes have no role to play in psychology can be immediately falsified.

Still, the book is a must read, get to it.

[José Cerca · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not entirely finish reading. I am a scientist myself, and I find evolutionary psychology just an entertaining story, but strikingly lacking a degree of scientific rigor:
1. Many of the conclusions are brought forth by correlations.
2. Total disregard of cultural differences across European cultures, borders, and movement of people.
3. Many of the stories presented are just story-telling. Anecdotal e.g. when I got to why Samu would kill a merchant in a polygamous world, it makes sense in a story plot, but how much data is there to show this? I could not read any further.

[Henri Tournyol du Clos · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an important thesis, but you should read the papers on which it is built and ignore this bloated monstruosity. Henrich cannot write, that should be obvious to everyone by now.

[Peter McCluskey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!

Henrich previously wrote one of the best books of the last decade. Normally, I expect such an author's future books to, at best, exhibit regression toward the mean. But Henrich's grand overview of humanity's first few million years was merely a modest portion of the ideas that he originally tried to fit into this magnum opus. Henrich couldn't quite explain in one volume how humanity got all the way to industrial empires, so he split the explanation into two books.

The cartoon version of the industrial revolution: Protestant culture made the West more autistic.

However, explaining the most important event in history makes up only about 25% of this book's focus and value.

Henrich doesn't want us to think of it as the most important event - because he views it not as a single event, but as a stage in a long process. Most books on the industrial revolution concentrate on some subset of the 1500-1800 time frame. WEIRDest People devotes a majority of its attention to the prior millennium.

When I last reviewed a book on the industrial revolution, I was pessimistic about ever getting enough evidence to distinguish between too many plausible hypotheses. Henrich found a solution: most of the proposed explanations describe features that contributed to the industrial revolution; they follow naturally from the way that WEIRD culture (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) altered our psychology.

Important aspects of this new culture / psychology include: analytic thinking, nonconformity, impersonal prosociality (trusting strangers, treating them fairly), and internal attributions (e.g. the idea that a good afterlife depends on internal mental states, rather than rituals).

Along the way, Henrich provides at least partial answers to a surprising number of questions that I carelessly neglected to ask, such as:

* how do rules about cousin marriage affect conformity (as measured by the Asch Conformity Test)?
* how strong is the correlation between how individualistic a society is and its rate of innovation?
* why does Latin have 25 words for prostitute?
* how did the peculiarities of rice cultivation affect the ability of southeastern China to develop science?
* how do social safety nets influence a society's rate of innovation?

Much of Henrich's focus is on this key question: how do increasingly large groups of people cooperate enough to form increasingly large societies?

The Dunbar Number and its cousins
There's a phenomenon that is somewhat well known among financial traders of a limit of about 20 stocks, beyond which traders can't remain sufficiently aware of the details to be a competent market maker.

Henrich describes what is likely another manifestation of the same phenomenon in "truly individualistic" human cultures, such as the Matsigenka, where hamlets rarely get as large as 25 people before nuclear families decide they prefer to set off on their own.

I've also noticed a seemingly similar phenomenon in business, particularly in a dot-com where I worked that rapidly grew from 4 to 75 people. At some point between the 20 person size and 40 person size, it switched from feeling like users were part of the company's community, to a feeling that users were distant people who were dealt with via specialists such as customer service. Also, internal politics went from not being detectable, to being important.

Sadly, Henrich doesn't mention a name for this 20-25 entity limit. Nor does he name the Dunbar Number, despite providing important insights into how cultures manage to create social groups that are bigger than the Dunbar Number.

Dunbar-sized tribes often end up with rituals that artificially create interdependence and kin-like bonds that help hold the tribe together.

Switching from a system of bilineal descent to unilineal descent prevents some kinds of conflicts between extended families.

Some other norms that promote harmony in large villages include: arranged marriages, making entire clans responsible for harm caused by any clan member, and well-defined hierarchies.

The Evolution of Religion
There's at least one more size limit, well above the Dunbar Number, where rituals that expand kinship become inadequate for further expansion. To overcome that, societies needed Big Gods who can command subjects to cooperate with distant co-religionists.

Belief in heaven and hell correlates with (and likely causes) a large increase in economic growth. Alas, belief in heaven alone doesn't seem to be very valuable.

A similar pattern is seen for belief in supernatural punishment in societies before European contact.

The estimated probability of a historical transition to a complex chiefdom when no such punishment existed was - surprisingly - close to zero. By contrast, when ancestral communities already had beliefs in supernatural punishments for important moral violations, there was a roughly 40% chance of scaling up in complexity every three centuries or so.

Those religions succeeded better if they destroyed the kinship institutions that had previously been needed for scaling up past the Dunbar Number.

Why? Kin-based clans interfered with loyalty to larger, more abstract groups such as Christianity or nations. Here's a quote from a politician in contemporary Pakistan that illustrates how kin-based group identity conflicts with newer, larger social groups: "I have been a Pashtun for six thousand years, a Muslim for thirteen hundred years, and a Pakistani for twenty-five."

How? By changing many rules involving marriage and family relations. That included banning the marriages between cousins (a ban which sometimes extended to sixth cousins), and requiring monogamy.

Don't assume you can design your own religion:

the powerful Mughal emperor Akbar the Great tried to unify his Muslim and Hindu subjects by making his own highly tolerant religious creed ... At its peak, the powerful emperor's religion accumulated a total of only 18 prominent adherents before vanishing into history.
My point is that throughout human history, rulers needed religion much more than religion needed rulers.

I sometimes got the feeling that the Western Christian church's success at stamping out kin-based institutions had to be mostly due to careful planning and foresight, but Henrich implies that's mostly hindsight bias, and calls the process "accidental genius". Henrich has good arguments that cultural evolution includes an important amount of semi-blind trial and error, but I suspect he goes a bit overboard with this line of thought.

E.g. Deuteronomy 25:5-10 clearly describes levirate marriage as an obligation. How does unplanned exploration of cultural variation get from there to declaring levirate marriage a sin, while still treating the bible as the word of God?

Fukuyama has a better model for that than Henrich: in The Origins of Political Order, he implies that the church had a fairly deliberate strategy of destroying the kinship ties that were hindering the church's goal of inheriting property. Note that it's fairly WEIRD of me to care about whether the church's strategies were intentional.

Flynn Effect
The power of Henrich's model can be illustrated by asking how it explains the big 20th century increase in IQ. Henrich doesn't discuss this topic directly, but if I'd read WEIRDest People before learning of the Flynn Effect, I expect I would have found the Flynn Effect unsurprising. It seems like a natural consequence of thinking styles that became more analytical, abstract, reductionist, and numerical.

Moreover, Henrich's model provides clues as to why low-IQ cultures are reluctant to adopt the changes that raise their IQs. It's not that they're lazy or held back by harmful mutations (Henrich doesn't dismiss the existence of those problems; instead, he convinced me that WEIRD culture shifts are more powerful explanations).

An important insight is that people take cues from their environment early in life, and use those cues to invest in cognitive features that are expected to yield the most benefit.

WEIRD culture gets people to invest more in high-IQ cognitive features, at the cost of less investment in skills that foster social ties (e.g. learning to read at early age seems to impair facial recognition). "WEIRD people are bad friends" - beliefs such as impartial rules, and moral universalism have important social consequences. E.g. WEIRD people are less willing to lie in court to keep their friends out of jail. It looks hard to separate that effect from the cognitive styles that promote high IQ.

There are also trade-offs between analytical thinking and holistic thinking. IQ tests tend to favor the analytical approach that Western societies reward, while kin-based societies reward holistic thinking more (see Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders).

Comparison with Related Explanations

Many other books on the industrial revolution now sound like the proverbial blind men and an elephant.

* In The Origins of Political Order, Fukuyama sees about 20% of what Henrich sees, and is the only person I'm aware of that traces the origins of key features further back than does Henrich. Fukuyama also explains better why the industrial revolution happened in Europe rather than China. This now looks like clearly the second most important book on the industrial revolution.

* State, Economy, and the Great Divergence, by Peer Vries identifies a modest fraction of the cultural differences that Henrich discusses. Vries seems to disagree with Henrich about the mobility of the average British worker, but otherwise supports Henrich more than I recalled. Vries' expertise as a historian lends credence to Henrich. I wish I had time to carefully recheck the extent to which Vries' evidence supports Henrich, but Vries is hard to read.

* Nick Szabo's Book Consciousness explanation captures a medium-sized portion of Henrich's vision, and the two complement each other fairly well.

* The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World, by Douglas Allen examines cultural changes around the time of the industrial revolution. Allen agrees with Henrich that cultural adaptations to new conditions drove economic advances. Their ideas are fairly compatible, yet there's surprisingly little overlap between the two books.

* The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, by Kenneth Pomeranz raised the bar by pointing out that leading discussions of the industrial revolution failed to explain why Europe did better than China, but Pomeranz went overboard in claiming those two regions were similar. Pomeranz tried to argue against cultural explanations in general, but seemed confused as to how culture could explain more than differences in luxury goods. Were older cultural explanations (such as Max Weber's?) really that weak?

* Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall almost sounds like a sequel to Henrich's books, explaining how Western culture is decaying due to problems such as Christianity being replaced by religions that are less well adapted to modernity. Henrich has increased my confidence that Where is my Flying Car? is more than half-right about the causes of the Great Stagnation.

How Credible?
I'll guess that the book is about 80% correct.

Henrich exaggerates and oversimplifies a modest amount, but he seems to be a pretty careful researcher, actively trying to find empirical tests of alternate causal models.

He often cites evidence that isn't especially compelling, but he's careful not to depend much on any one piece of evidence. E.g. he apologizes for only being able to cite one study each for the claims that the BIG-5 personality dimensions and endowment effect are not universal.

The book is somewhat limited by only having a sample size of one for some of his broadest claims, but Henrich manages to find a larger sample size for many interesting sub-points. E.g. I had assumed that China's one-child policy was tricky to evaluate because it was only imposed once. Yet Henrich points us to Sex ratios and crime: Evidence from China, showing that we can get sort-of-causal evidence from comparing provinces that implemented the policy in different years. Yes, it sure looks like the policy caused crime to increase (the policy may have also had desirable effects via weakening kinship ties - Henrich doesn't express any overall opinion on the policy).

Henrich has a remarkable range of expertise (anthropology, evolutionary biology, engineering, psychology, and economics); these maybe make him better than a historian for the purpose of this book.

Historians are apparently upset at being bypassed, and at the inadequate nuance of a shorter version of WEIRDest People, but their disagreements don't sound particularly important to me.

Conclusion
This book is essential reading for any serious scholar of human nature.

Not only does it demystify some of the most important processes of human history, but it also provides an unusually balanced view of how Western culture compares to other cultures. Henrich discredits both "all cultures are equal" worldviews, and most of the common claims of Western superiority. Western culture is genuinely superior in key respects, but that superiority comes with possibly large downsides.

Henrich is a master at organizing large amounts of evidence into an understandable package.

Please don't treat this review as an adequate substitute for reading the book. I can't describe enough of Henrich's model to sound half as convincing as Henrich's full description is. I only hope to whet your appetite enough to convince you to read the book.

P.S. I was maybe a bit misleading when I used the word autistic to describe the psychological changes that Henrich attributes to Christianity / Protestantism. I can't confirm that he's even familiar with autism. I find it to be a convenient label to approximate his more nuanced, but hard to summarize, description of Western psychology.

[Roo Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe 2.5 stars. A subtitle for this book might be: Correlation = Causation. Henrich packs in a ton of social science research, from pre-civilization up through modern day. A lot of it is very interesting, some I have never heard before. However, I had two big issues with this book.

1. Its premise is that the psychological differences found by those living in western culture were caused by the Catholic church's marriage and family program dating back to early middle ages. This was an interesting and fundamental aspect of the book. The church apparently broke down kinship based society by implementing rules against marrying cousins, stopping polygamy, and many other family-trust based practices. But then, this basically "caused" capitalism, the industrial revolution, and just about anything else one can ascribe to the progress of the West. He tried to dance around the causation a little bit with a "causal chain", but not very persuasively. I just found this to be a big stretch and a massive dismissal of how other correlating factors were relevant.

2. He rarely tied the litany of social studies, that were just all over the place, back to his premise. I was regularly wondering how what he was talking about related to his overarching point.

You could read the first and last two chapters and probably come away with 90% of what Henrich needed to say. But again, there was some interesting research, and I appreciated the new perspective on an age old discussion that Henrich brought to light. Hard to say if I can recommend this book or not.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the book, there were a ton of interesting ideas there. But I did have some qualms. Some sections had overly long descriptions of social science experiments. I think a lot of charts shown were not really super helpful. A lot of that kind of stuff could have been in an appendix or website for people who wanted extra details. But there were a lot of interesting conjectures on how societal changes can affect personality and psychology (and vice-versa) and a good lesson that human psychology is not best studied by testing American college students. Also I appreciated a lot of the history lessons in the book.

[Emil O. W. Kirkegaard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended. Main theory about the importance of the church rules is perhaps not true. See Kevin Macdonald reply in mankind quarterly.

[Nilesh Jasani · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the times we live in, it is not easy to unabashedly glorify a race as highly successful and sing songs of its unique facets as reasons behind that success. This is particularly difficult when the unique list consists of cultural norms and practices that might be widely unacceptable in other civilizations, implicitly demeaning others' practices.

The provocative book on the WEIRD does this and far worse. The author spends almost no effort on sugarcoating by highlighting any of the WEIRD cultures' adverse outcomes. He agrees in passing that there have been a few substantial ones, but the book sticks to its purpose of explaining why a particular group of people could embark on a substantial innovation quest while others could not.

The claims that different races are psychologically wired differently and the causes lie in their cultural history are sensational, if not outright sacrilegious. The author explicitly links these claims to these races' economic and lifestyle divergences, which is even more scandalous.

The book might not sit easily with a lot of people, but it is a compelling read with myriads of powerful and highly original arguments. If the text smacks of triumphalism of some kind, which could be abused by bigots with relevant agendas, it is a small side effect as those with perverse purposes do not necessarily need such books.

The main point about the co-evolution of psychology and culture is staggering. It might not be as theoretically solid as the author thinks, but it is worth exploring and knowing. That certain first Catholic, and subsequently Protestant, habits bred individuals that were less connected to and who less identified with their kins, which became the seed that eventually bloomed to market-oriented, selfish homo economicus is not an easy construct. The book makes the case solidly.

With many case studies, historical anecdotes, and behavioral experiments, the author has something new to offer in virtually every section of the book. Even those who vehemently disagree with the conclusions could walk away with a lot of new knowledge and information, given the breadth of the academic landscape traversed by the author.

From simple things like how people from different races respond to a simple question like who are you to the parking tickets of different countries' delegates at the UN, the distinction between guilt and shame to the way different cultures interact with strangers, how literate people's brains behave in recognizing faces to polygamy's impact on hormones...the book fluently moves from one new set of information to the next with staggering clarity and alacrity.

As more work is done and more books are written on the idea threads that originated in this book, a lot of criticism will be heaped on every logical leap made in the book. The bigger issue is what it means for future: WEIRD tendencies were great for a particular stage in human evolution - like in the last five- or so hundred years, but they would not have worked well in a hunter-gatherer community, for instance. Or, not when one is fighting a pandemic!

There is a massive transformation in many other societies in the post-tech world because of the changed lifestyles and information availability. From the author's well-argued different psychological starting points, one can argue, different societies are psychologically transforming differently and will likely have completely different economic evolutions going forward. In other words, it is quite possible that WEIRD may not remain economically ahead forever.

In summary, this is one of the rare works which will spawn a new field. The author's style and writing skills supplement staggering conclusions and mountains of new information/arguments. Worth reading multiple times.

[Justina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well-argued book with a great selection of examples and exploration of the implications. Henrich goes out of his way to convince you the relationships hold (drink for every time he says the results stand even after holding x number of factors constant). The ingenuity is the acronym and the central insight is that many sweeping conclusions about human psychology including assumptions used in economics apply specifically to people in democratic, rich Western societies, who are historical and global outliers. Even the *dimensions* of personality -- for instance extraversion versus introversion -- are shaped by the need to develop individual niches to thrive in these particular countries. What is amazing is the way that particular psyche has developed thanks to the unintended consequences of institutions such as Christianity, which might have banned cousin marriage and discouraged inheritances for arbitrary/selfish reasons but have instead completely reshaped the future of a few continents. The conclusions of this book are a testimony to persistence.

(As someone raised in a non-WEIRD place with colonial ties to a WEIRD country and educated in one of the WEIRDEST countries of all, I am amused to find some hybrid qualities in myself...)

A few questions that came to mind while reading this:
- The book is understandably focused on the benefits (prosperity) of the West. What are the downsides of that psychology and the benefits of more intensive kin-based networks?
- Given the benefits of Christianity outlined in the book and declining religiosity in contemporary Western societies, should we think of us as having fully reaped its benefits already or is there still upside to having religion play a bigger role?
- What are the implications of these psychological differences to promoting human rights/democracy/free-market capitalism in non-WEIRD countries? (There is an intriguing but brief discussion of this at the end)

[S · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sigh.
According to Henrich, WEIRD people are more patient, feel more guilt than shame, have more self-control and so on. In comparison, non-WEIRD people are less patient, have more shame and less to no self-control. Henrich's writing reminds of Harari's: making gross generalisations, misinterpreting research and presenting biased arguments.
For example, Henrich discusses research around self-control: If you were to present a choice to a person that either they accept $100 right now, or $140 (or something) a year later, results show that a WEIRD person will choose $140 in a years time while a non-WEIRD person will choose $100 demonstrating that WEIRD people have more self-control than non-WEIRD people. WTF? Dear Henrich: Have you ever had to beg for money because you did not have enough to eat? I bet not. It isn't that non-WEIRD people have no self-control - just that your ancestors fucked us up royally.
Henrich dismisses that a person's behaviour is shaped by their environment. Oh no, that cannot be true. Because if it was, Henrich would have to discuss how/why the environment of WEIRD vs non-WEIRD people differ so much. Instead, he is happy dishing out adjectives under the guise of personality. What he means is that a non-WEIRD person will always have/be less: self-control, patient. Discounting a ton load of painful history. No, you are right, Mr Henrich. I have a gene that makes me very impatient. And I have no patience to read the rest of your book.
A better book would be Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (or so I hear).
And if you have enjoyed this book
or accept the research discussed
you have very limited perspective taking skills.
So tired of this privilege.

[Stetson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich is an ambitious and novel “Big History” (in the vein of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel or Yuval Noah Harrari’s Sapiens) account of Western civilization. Henrich argues important interactions between biological and cultural factors lead to our unique social institutions and WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) psychology. He deftly draws from the fields of cultural evolution, evolutionary psychology, and economics to support his claims, recapping research finding in captivating yet careful detail.

If you are someone hoping to understand the deep roots of Western psychology and culture, this is a must read. It is one of the most important and high impact books aimed at a general audience from the last decade. It is a must read.

[Yannick M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely important book. Probably will fundamentally change the way they look at the world for many.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book length case why it is completely fine to make out with your hot cousin: just proportionally decrease the intensity of other kin-based relationships and we can all stay WEIRD.

Here's the basic causal sketch that Henrich fleshes out in the book:

Christian church randomly stumbles on norms that undermine kinship intensity, e.g. strict rules against cousin marriage and polygyny
↓
communities with norms that foster cooperation between unrelated people outcompete others, we see increasing individualism, religiosity, normative conformity
↓
impersonal markets develop (previously impossible due to kin-based cronyism), urbanization happens, formal institutions and cities compete for people
↓
Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, Democracy

Here a more detailed synopsis from the book:



I read this as part of a reading group and I found this book to continuously deliver interesting ideas and perspectives that expanded our perspective of human history.

Random parts that stood out to me

Henrich makes a convincing case that patience or farsightedness regarding one's life is a key factor in the success of communities. Another causal sketch:
monogamy ➔ higher share of men have families and correspondingly a stake in success of the community ➔ increased patience ➔ possibility of long-term projects that rely on trust, people invest more in growth

I liked the chapter on the development of the first larger markets. Apparently it was pretty difficult to set up a place with a high concentration of valuable goods that wasn't at a significant risk to be robbed immediately. He mentions an exemplary solution where the whole area surrounding the market was only allowed to be entered by women, with their male guards having to wait outside. The general idea that markets and trade are tricky to set up and require pre-existing norms was new to me and seems important.

I could relate to the story about an individualistic/"shy" Matsigenka tribe from Peru:

„The Matsigenka permits neither repression nor criticism. Should someone, even the missionary whose moral authority he recognizes, try to orient, correct or prevent his behavior, he departs immediately with the phrase: ‘Here one can’t live; nothing but gossip and rumors; I’m going where no one will bother me and I will bother no one.’“

Why did this set of cultural norms develop? Apparently, every tribe that wasn't individualistic and avoiding strangers was sooner or later enslaved by the Spanish colonialists.

Some open questions

- why are the Catholic regions in the South of [[Germany]] significantly richer than the Protestant regions? According to Henrich, Protestantism is associated with work ethic and

Some criticism

- he sometimes draws from studies that pain anyone familiar with the replication crisis, e.g. many priming studies and the marshmallow test

[Santiago Ortiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Psychology seems to have two realms: humans and individuals. Psychology researchers study how humans think, feel, learn, behave, etc… and therapists focus on individuals. There’s the sense that culture is just the background in which "psychologies” express themselves. A big part of this missconception comes from the fact that most of the findings in psychology belong to a very idiosyncratic sample of humans: Western, Educated, and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries (the WEIRD people). And as this book clearly exposes, this sample is truly weird, it posses a very unique psychology, deeply engrained with the also unique culture. But culture is the container of psychology as psychology is the container of culture.

But how to understand and characterize this particular psychology? The book does two things:
-the comparative approach: it contrasts our culture and ways of thinking and behaving against other cultures. This helps detach the reader from the conception that she’s “normal” and the “others” are exotic variations.
-the historic approach: as biologist D'Arcy Thompson famously said “Everything is what it is because it got that way”, by tracing the incremental steps that lead to where we are know, the author helps us understand how and why those unique characteristics of our psychology and culture came to be.

The result is a book that harmonichally combine psychology, anthropology and history, a book that’s insightful, paradigm-changer and fun to read.

[Paul H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was expecting a banal, milquetoast evol-psych / evol-bio / social-psych book built to flatter the prejudices and beliefs of the NYT editorial board -- which, yes, it is indeed that -- and somehow still came away disappointed. The fact that the preface treats Jared Diamond as an actual scholar tells you everything you need to know about Henrich; similarly for his glowing treatment of Kahneman, who may be the most overrated researcher in the history of the universe (one of many casualties of the replication crisis).

Anyway, it takes Henrich 300,000 words to make a single salient point, which is lost in the fog of oversimplified/inaccurate historical 'analysis' and just-so stories: most Western psychological research was carried out on undergraduate students from advanced/Westernized societies and thus is not fully representative of the world's population. There you go. No need to read the book, unless you happen to be a fan of the shallow 'history of everything' genre (see also Spengler, Diamond, Pinker, et al.) and haven't already figured out Henrich's truly ground-breaking thesis: "Cultures have differences."

[Verna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Seems like all supposition to me. Very uninteresting & a difficult read because it didn’t hold my interest. His psychological studies leaned heavily on college age participants & he extrapolated a psychological theory for all of us from that data. The rest of his data appeared to be weak at best. Worst book I have read in a long time.

[Matas Maldeikis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pagaliau! Pagaliau radau knygą kuri man paaiškino kodėl mes tokie skirtingi nuo likusio pasaulio. Ne Rusija, Kinija ar Indija "kitokie". Kitokie esame mes. Ir tai nėra vien "demokratija" prieš "diktatūrą. Tai giliai. Ši knyga atsako kodėl. Privaloma perskaityt kiekvien norinčiam suprasti kodėl mes tokie ir kodėl mes gyvename tokiame politiniame pasaulyje.

[Joe Farmartino · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for broad historical books that attempt to explain why cultures differ, especially with regard to the Great Divergence, where Western Europe separated from the rest of the world around 1500 AD and came to dominate/colonize the rest of the world. Joe Henrich's book "The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous" offers up the best argument I have encountered so far and is one the most fascinating books I have ever read.

Put simply, Henrich's thesis is that the set of beliefs regarding marriage and the family within the medieval Catholic Church led to the demolition of Europe's kin-based network of clans that had previously ruled Europe. This shift began to alter European psychology in ways that promoted the growth of new institutions and voluntary associations like guilds, universities, monasteries, and cities with impersonal markets. These new institutions in turn created a feedback loop, further altering European psychology to make it increasing WEIRD (Western/Educated/Industrialized/Rich/Democratic) and paving the way for novel developments in government, religion, law, and economics that would propel Europe towards unrivaled prosperity.

The key principle Henrich builds his argument on is that human beings vary psychologically based on their environment. The human brain has wide plasticity that allows us to learn norms that are based on our environmental context and surrounding culture. These norms then compete against one another via intergroup competition where the most advantageous norms for group cohesion win out as less cohesive groups are wiped out or absorbed into the more successful one. These cultural norms in turn co-evolve along with our genes that can alter our psychology and even biology in profound ways. Henrich's previous book "The Secret of Success" explains this in depth by citing examples such as how cultures harnessing fire to cook led to the human jaw and digestive track gradually evolving to be smaller since cooked meals were easier to digest. Culture drove biological evolution.

Henrich's work is full of studies and data, much of which he has collected himself, which documents how WEIRD psychology differs from much of the world. WEIRD psychology is characterized by individualism, self-focus, analytical thinking, guilt rather than shame based motivations, less conformity, impersonal morality, patience, and less zero sum thinking. In contract, people from kin based societies are far less individualistic, put conformity to their clan above general rules, fear outsiders, and are more motivated by shame imposed by their community rather than individualized feelings of guilt. These differing psychological profiles show up all over today and can even be linked to different rates of parking violations by UN representatives who come from kin based societies. Henrich marshals a massive amount of data to show that extent of kin based institutions within a society shapes psychology drastically. The rates of cousin marriage (the best proxy for measuring kinship in a society) in a country allows Henrich to predict how accepting of representative democracy or economically productive a society is today.

Henrich goes through extensive historical examples to show how the medieval Church’s marriage and family policy led to the rise of WEIRD psychology. This new psychology fueled the rise of voluntary associations, impersonal markets, urbanization, representative democracy, individual legal rights, and economic growth. The more exposure a society had to the Marriage and Family Policy (MFP) of the Church the less kinship based institutions survived and the WEIRDer it became psychologically. Perhaps surprisingly for a secular thinker like Henrich, he concludes that far from being a “Dark Age”, the medieval era set the stage for the rise of the modern world. On the Enlightenment, Henrich downplays the Pinkerian notion of the triumph of reason over religious superstition. Instead, Enlightenment thinkers built on work done by “their intellectual forebearers in the Church.” Henrich writes, “The bottom line is that Enlightenment thinkers didn’t suddenly crack the combination of Pandora’s box and take out the snuff box of reason and the rum bottle of rationality from which the modern world was then conceived. Instead, they were part of a long, cumulative cultural evolutionary process that had been shaping how European populations perceived, thought, reasoned, and related to each other stretching back into Late Antiquity. They were just the intellectuals and writers on the scene when WEIRDer ways of thinking finally trickled up to some of the last holdouts in Europe, the nobility” (429). Henrich refers to this WEIRDer way of thinking (individualism/analytic thinking/impersonal prosociality) as “psychological dark matter” that had long slowly manifested across Europe in the institutions that would shape the modern world.

Overall, Henrich’s argument is very convincing and has impressive explanatory power. Books like “Why Nations Fail” point to the role of inclusive institutions in the success of the West, but they struggle to explain why these distinct institutions arose in the first place. Henrich has no such problem. He has chapters devoted to developments in law, science, markets, and innovation that trace how Europeans new ways of thinking and their unique institutions drove political and economic development. These chapters contain speculation and anything as complex as historical causation is never going to be a slam-dunk. However, the sheer weight of his argument gradually accumulates and becomes quite persuasive.

However, I did find Henrich’s repeated emphasis that the Church “stumbled upon”(471) it’s marriage and family policy as some kind of “accidental genius of Western Christianity” to be somewhat odd. Henrich concedes that the church came up with the MFP “for a complex set of historical reasons” (179) and affirms that he is more interested with the downstream impacts of the MFP on European psychology and history. At times, he seems to suggest that the Church’s motives were merely a cynical scam to monopolize inheritances and Henrich mostly ignores Christian theology throughout the book. In the footnotes, Henrich mentions, “The motivations of Church leaders aren’t paramount. Church leaders, just like the leaders of the Isis cult or Nestorian Christianity, may have developed their beliefs, prohibitions, and prescriptions based on deep religious convictions; or, some may have been playing political games for their own enrichment. It doesn’t matter” (539). As a believer in human depravity, I’d say it’s always some combination of the two, but I’m surprised that Henrich does not have more interest in the actual ideological motivations behind Church policies. After all, he spent 600 pages explaining how these policies led to the rise of the modern! For some, like Tufts Professor, Daniel Dennett, who reviewed the book in the New York Times the motivations certainly matter. As an arch atheist and anti-Christian polemicist, Dennett affirms, “The genius was accidental, according to Henrich, because the church authorities who laid down the laws had little or no insight into what they were setting in motion, aside from noticing that by weakening the traditional bonds of kinship, the church got rich fast.” I am not sure if Henrich would agree with Dennett’s synopsis. Henrich’s work is more nuanced and does not argue that every Church leader was a mercenary.

Still, Henrich is very uncomfortable when it comes to religious motivations. Henrich has an entire chapter on WEIRD monogamy that clearly shows the Church’s deep religious convictions fueled major components of the Church’s marriage and family policy. Henrich describes how the Church worked to end sexual slavery, polygamy, and instill an equal expectation of fidelity for both men and women. This combination subsequently led to lower testosterone levels in Christian Europe, as “the Church, through the institution of monogamous marriage, reached down and grabbed men by the testicles” (273). As a result, this “peculiar version of monogamous marriage, unintentionally created an environment that gradually domesticated men, making many of us less competitive, impulsive, and risk-prone while at the same favoring positive-sum perceptions of the world and greater willingness to team up with strangers. Ceteris paribus, this should result in more harmonious organizations, less crime, and fewer social disruptions” (281). The word “unintentionally” is doing a whole lot of work here. Monogamous commitment and social equality among men and women in marriage were fundamental components of the early Church’s message and come directly out of Christian scripture. The classical historian Tom Holland writes in his book “Dominion” regarding Christian marriage that “the insistence of scripture that a man and a woman, whenever they took to the marital bed, were joined as Christ and his Church were joined, becoming one flesh, gave to both a rare dignity…Here, by the standards of the age into which Christianity had been born, was an obligation that demanded an almost heroic degree of self-denial” (282). Henrich agrees that this new conception of monogamous marriage was “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 and advantage in intergroup competition” (281). Henrich expounds on the impact of this change, “Church monogamy also meant that men and women of similar ages usually married adults, by mutual consent, and potentially without the blessing of their parents. Of course, the greater parity of modern gender roles was a long way off in the Early Middle Ages but monogamous marriage had started to close the gap” (282). Tom Holland also points to this seismic shift. “The Church, in its determination to place married couples, and not ambitious patriarchs, at the heart of a properly Christian society had tamed the instinct of grasping dynasts to pair off cousins with cousins. Only relationships sanction by canons were classified as legitimate. No families were permitted to be joined in marriage except for those licensed by the Church: ‘in-laws’. The hold of clans, as a result, had begun to slip. Ties between kin had progressively weakened. Households had shrunk. The fabric of Christendom had come to possess a thoroughly distinctive weave” (285). While Holland recognizes the religious convictions that drove this revolutionary process, Henrich either sees random chance or punts on the question of motivation altogether.

Henrich filters everything through his approach to cultural evolution and intergroup competition. Countless religions all compete against one another and revolve around myths. The Christian myth happened to work best in competition with other groups in the religious cauldron that was the Mediterranean world of antiquity. After winning out, Christian Church policies slowly transformed European psychology, fueling its unrivaled prosperity. Henrich describes how Christian influences are so profound that “even nonreligious Americans (like me) seem a bit ‘Protestant’” (421). In the cosmic sense for a materialist like Henrich, everything is accidental and organizations “stumble upon” their beliefs since cultural evolution runs everything in the background, favoring scenarios where “people’s explicit theories about their own institutions are generally post hoc and often wrong” (86). While I think Henrich has a point about how banning cousin marriage to an extreme degree in the medieval church had profound consequences, some of which were surely unanticipated (i.e., medieval popes weren’t actively plotting how to fuel the Industrial Age), I think he fails to recognize how much the Church’s policy on things like divorce, equality between the sexes, and monogamy are at the heart of Christian religious conviction. Implementing them in Europe was not accidental. Taming men’s exploitive sexual appetites was not an unintended consequence, but the goal from the start. Great harmony, self-regulation and a unifying Christian identity line up with the gifts of the Spirit. Maybe the Church was on to something.

For Henrich, I think the failure to consider these ideas is a blind spot in his secular perspective. Perhaps establishing the motivations behind the Church’s marriage and family policy does not matter for his argument, but I suspect that he does care. How can you not be curious about the motivations of men and women who remade the world and ultimately paved the path to modern civilization? The motivations certainly matter to someone like Daniel Dennett, with his cynical takeaway and convenient dismissal of the West’s Christian heritage as nothing more than an accidental result of policies masterminded by greedy priests. If anything, by properly rooting the Church’s hugely influential Marriage and Family Policy in history, readers will better understand history. I suspect that Henrich is probably uncomfortable with the idea that Christian theology is the basis of modern WEIRD culture. His research has pointed him to the unique and decisive role of the Church, and his analysis fits nicely with many other historians who have pointed to the role of Christianity in the rise of the West. However, as a secular thinker, Henrich is far more comfortable in the world of intergroup competition than in the minds of medieval churchmen, and I think his analysis about the motivations behind the Church’s Marriage and Family Policy suffers as a result.