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

by Joseph Henrich

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020
A Bloomberg Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020
A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2020
A Human Behavior&Evolution Society Must-Read Popular Evolution Book of 2020

A bold, epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that has profoundly shaped the modern world.

Perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. If so, you’re rather psychologically peculiar.

Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves—their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries?

In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition—laying the foundation for the modern world.

Provocative and engaging in both its broad scope and its surprising details, The WEIRDest People in the World explores how culture, institutions, and psychology shape one another, and explains what this means for both our most personal sense of who we are as individuals and also the large-scale social, political, and economic forces that drive human history.

Includes black-and-white illustrations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374710453
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/08/2020
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	704
Sales rank:	249,238
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist and the author of The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, among other books. He is the chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, where his research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making, and culture.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Prelude: Your Brain Has Been Modified 3

What God Wants 7

The Histories of Religions, Biologies, and Psychologies 16

Part I The Evolution of Societies and Psychologies

1 WEIRD Psychology 21

Really, Who Are You? 24

Marshmallows Come to Those Who Wait 38

UN Diplomats Get Parking Tickets 41

Obsessed with Intentions 49

Missing the Forest 52

The Rest of the Iceberg 55

2 Making a Cultural Species 59

Evolved to Learn 61

Evolving Societies 68

Avenues into Your Mind 82

3 Clans, States, and Why You Can't Get Here from There 87

How Ilahita Got Big 88

When, How, and Why Did Societies Scale Up? 103

Getting to Premodern States 112

Going End Around 121

4 The Gods Are Watching. Behave! 123

Moralizing Gods and Contingent Afterlives 128

The Evolution of Gods and Rituals 139

Hell, Free Will, and Moral Universalism 146

Persuasive Martyrs and Boring Rituals 148

The Launchpad 151

Part II The Origins of WEIRD People

5 WEIRD Families 155

Dissolving the Traditional Family 159

The Carolinglans, Manorialism, and the European Marriage Pattern 186

Downstream Transformations 191

6 Psychological Differences, Families, and the Church 193

Kinship Intensity and Psychology 194

The Church Altered Kinship and Changed Psychology 224

Opening the Floodgates 230

7 Europe and Asia 233

The Church's Footprints 234

Psychological Differences Within China and India 244

Fertile Ground 252

8 WEIRD Monogamy 255

A "Peculiar" Institution 258

Polygyny's Math Problem 263

A Testosterone Suppression System 268

Trust, Teamwork, and Crime 274

Putting the Pieces Together 281

Part III New Institutions, New Psychologies

9 Of Commerce and Cooperation 287

Market Integration and Impersonal Prosociality 290

"No Hui, No Market Towns" 301

The Commercial and Urban Revolutions 307

Round Up 320

10 Domesticating the Competition 322

War, Religion, and Psychology 322

Europeans Made War, and War Made Them WEIRDer 332

Taming Intergroup Conflict 340

When and Why? 350

Harnessing the Powei of Competition 357

11 Market Mentalities 360

How Work Became Virtuous 367

Be Yourself: The Origins of WEIRD Personalities 379

It's Big, but How Big? 390

Part IV Birthing the Modern World

12 Law, Science, and Religion 395

Universal Laws, Conflicting Principles, and Individual Rights 398

Representative Governments and Democracy 407

The WEIRDest Religion 415

Dark Matter or Enlightenment? 427

13 Escape Velocity 430

Wiring Up the Collective Brain 442

More Inventive? 460

Psychology and Innovation in the Modern World 465

Escaping the Trap 466

14 The Dark Matter of History 469

Guns, Germs, and Other Factors 474

Globalization and Its Discontents 484

Appendix A Milestones in the Marriage and Family Program 491

Appendix B Additional Plots 499

Appendix C The Psychological Impacts of Relational and Residential Mobility 501

Notes 507

Bibliography 585

Index 657

Editorial Reviews

07/20/2020

Henrich (The Secret of Our Success), a psychology and economics professor, proposes a grand thesis about how the cultures he identifies as WEIRD—“Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic”—came to be so, in this ambitious and fascinating book. The acronym is intentional, to signal that the cultural experience and individualistic mindset of countries such as the U.S. and U.K. are historically unusual. The first major shift Henrich identifies occurred in medieval Europe, as traditional kin-based loyalties were weakened by the intellectual and cultural dominance of the Roman Catholic Church. In his view, the later emergence of representative democracy wasn’t due to “an intellectual epiphany” but to the experience of those people in the late Middle Ages who “began to form competing voluntary associations” and thus became more open to viewing themselves as individuals. Henrich also explores the persistent distinction in mindset between individualistic and communal societies, based on psychological studies conducted by himself and colleagues. For example, people in individualistic societies more often reported experiencing guilt, concerning how one views oneself, while those in communal societies more often felt shame, concerning how one is viewed by other people. This meaty book is ready-made for involved discussions. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"A fascinating, vigorously argued work that probes deeply into the way “WEIRD people” think."
―Kirkus

"Ambitious and fascinating . . . This meaty book is ready-made for involved discussions."
―Publisher's Weekly

"Joseph Henrich has undertaken a massively ambitious work that explains the transition to the modern world from kin-based societies, drawing on a wealth of data across disciplines that significantly contributes to our understanding of this classic issue in social theory."
―Francis Fukuyama, author of The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay

"This delightful and thought-provoking book argues there is nothing natural about most of the values, attitudes and priorities of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) people. They have evolved over time, in response to specific historical, institutional environmental circumstances. It is more vital than ever to understand how we can improve living standards throughout the world and deal with spectacular global challenges. Understanding where humanity's diversity has come from and in what way it matters for confronting our problems is vital. This fascinating book is a must-read for everybody who cares about these questions."
―Daron Acemoglu, co-author of Why Nations Fails and co-author of The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

"A dazzling achievement. In the course of explaining how modern Western culture differs from all others past and present, Joseph Henrich has both altered and unified the fields of anthropology, history, psychology and economics. He destroys the assumption, common in psychology and endemic in economics, that human nature is everywhere the same. His account makes it possible to understand why some cultures have readily adopted Western tools to transform their societies, economies and politics while others reject those tools."
―Richard Nisbett, author of Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking

“Henrich’s book combines a startling account of the mental and social oddities of westerners with a persuasive new explanation for them. The concept of a universal human psyche will never be the same again.”
―Richard Wrangham, author of The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

"This is a deep and important book of tremendous erudition, engagingly written with vivid examples, that highlights at once the ways in which human beings are similar and dissimilar the world over.”
―Nicholas Christakis, author of Blueprint

"This book is a tour de force. It seamlessly combines ideas from evolutionary biology and cultural evolution with data from the psychology laboratory, field experiments in remote villages, high-tech econometrics and ethnographic anecdote to explain why people in western societies think differently than other people, and how these differences culturally evolved over the last 1500 years. The WEIRDest People in the World sets a new standard in the human sciences."
―Robert Boyd, author of How Humans Evolved

"There's nothing so fascinating as a social anthropologist's analysis of his own tribe. Joseph Henrich shows how strange and exceptional Western society is when compared with most of the world, and links it with features of the WEIRD brain."
―John Barton, author of A History of the Bible

“In the last 500 years, Westerners have become more educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic than any other societies in history―which, says Joe Henrich, has made Westerners think differently about the world from everyone else. Drawing on anthropology, economics, history, and psychology, this magnificent book measures and even explains just how different Westerners are. It is a major contribution to the debates over why the West rules. It will make you think even more differently about the world than you already do.”
―Ian Morris, author of War! What is it Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots

“Joe Henrich has thought more deeply about cultural evolution than anybody alive. His fascinating insights into just how weird people like he and I are, with our western lifestyles, and what the implications of that are for better and for worse, are a great contribution to scholarship and literature.”
―Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

"Written in clear and vivid prose, Joseph Henrich’s new book argues that the psychological characteristics of populations in modern prosperous countries are not universal to human societies. They were the result of institutional changes brought about by the Catholic Church in Europe during the middle ages, and laid the foundation for almost everything else that followed. Whether or not you agree, this bold and original book will shape the debate about the origins of modern society for years to come."
―Paul Seabright, author of The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life

“Reading this book feels like digging in your backyard and discovering a lost city. What Henrich has unearthed is truly astonishing: The modern West owes its prosperity to strange ways of thinking, created by accident centuries before the European Enlightenment. If that sounds improbable to you, prepare to meet a mountain of evidence, compiled by one of the great systematic thinkers of our time. This book is at once monumental and thrilling."
―Joshua Greene, author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“In this brilliant synthesis of cultural evolution and social psychology, Joseph Henrich explores the deep historical roots of individualism, generalized trust, impersonal prosociality, and analytical thinking―in short, the psychological traits that make people WEIRD.”
―Peter Turchin, the author of Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

"Polymath and pioneering thinker Joseph Henrich has made a major contribution to the social sciences by demonstrating, through careful study, how Western societies are psychologically odd, relative to the rest of humanity. Now, in this engaging and accessible text, Henrich elaborates on these important ideas, by explaining how the West got to be WEIRD in the first place, and how the peculiar psychology of Western countries proved instrumental to their success. Along the way, Henrich makes a compelling case that human minds are not fated to think in a universal manner, but tune themselves surprisingly flexibly to the idiosyncrasies of local culture."
―Kevin Laland, author of Evolutionary Causation: Biological and Philosophical Reflections

"Generations of scholars have grappled with the question of why the West rose. Henrich’s intriguing new answer reveals how history shaped psychology and psychology changed history. Western Europe’s shift from traditional kinship networks to voluntary associations fostered the individualism and literacy that opened up a uniquely WEIRD path to transformative progress. Propelled by a bold vision, this landmark study is required reading for anyone curious about the origins of modernity."
―Walter Scheidel, author of Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

"The most absorbing, provocative, and compelling book I have read in a long time. Joseph Henrich’s thrilling exposé of cultural variety and evolution is grounded in meticulous science, and his arguments go beyond the milestone of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. You will never look again in the same way at your own seemingly universal values.
―Uta Frith, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development, University College London

“A masterpiece. Staggering in range, intricate in detail, thrilling in ambition, this book is 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, author of Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking

"If you are considering reading this book, you are almost certainly WEIRD. Henrich lucidly explains how and why you got that way. Going beyond both blank slate, social constructivist and naïve models of common human psychology, he also makes a powerful case that, for human beings, culture and biology are always inextricably intertwined.”
―Edward Slingerland, Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia and author of Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

"The Weirdest People in the World is a novel and fascinating look at our democratic western societies. The book presents a wealth of evidence that cultural learning and specific cultural rules of kinship relations generated the psychological foundations underlying the economic success of “the West”. It is an exciting read that covers economics, sociology, psychology, history, and neuroscience."
―Ernst Fehr, University of Zurich, author of Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain

From the Publisher

2020-06-03
The chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard limns the social and mental conditions that have made the West wealthy.

Other writers, notably Carlo Cipolla, have linked the rise of literacy to prosperity in the developed world. Henrich takes the argument further to correlate it to being “WEIRD”—i.e., "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.” Literacy is a major component, especially the Protestant literacy that placed the vernacular Bible into the hands of individuals, emphasized free will, and encouraged the cultivation of individual traits and interests. So it is that Westerners—and members of societies that have emulated the West, such as Japan—also have peculiar, novel, and relatively recent mental markers, including a bias toward the right hemisphere of the brain and for analytical processing of data in the place of “broad configurations and gestalt patterns.” There are emotional and sociological sequelae, including the development of cultures that favor guilt over shame and of notions of justice and social organization that accord high levels of trust to strangers as opposed to kin-based groups. This last represents a significant break with primate tradition, with its preference for “kin altruism.” There are all kinds of wrinkles to this engrossing story, which Henrich illustrates with graphs and charts. Where there are high rates of cousin marriage, he writes, the more likely it is that people mistrust strangers; concomitantly, there are few “impersonal trust levels” that allow for the flourishing of credit and trade. Throughout, the author dives deep, even correlating the willingness to donate blood to the extension of kin altruism to those who aren’t related to us. “Many WEIRD people,” he writes, “have a set of folk beliefs that lead them to assume that any observed psychological differences among populations are due to economic differences.” In fact, the opposite is true: First come the psychological differences, then comes the money, which, the author allows, isn’t perfectly understood.

A fascinating, vigorously argued work that probes deeply into the way “WEIRD people” think.

Kirkus Reviews