Joseph Henrich.  The Weirdest People In The World: How the West Became Pscychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020)

In a paragraph

W.E.I.R.D. people  – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic – are outliers.  They are more individualistic, impartial and trusting than most of humanity which is more tribal. A key cause of Western psychology was the Catholic Church’s marriage rules which weakened kinship.   

Key points

• W.E.I.R.D. people – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic – are outliers and western undergraduates used in psychology studies may not represent humanity.

• Most of humanity is more communitarian, embedded in extended families with degrees of polygamy, cousin marriage and inclusion of in-laws.

• Cultural evolution changes people’s psychology.As happens, for example, when we learn to read. Psychology varies because of cultural history rather than racial differences.

• W.E.I.R.D psychology arose from the Catholic Church’s Marriage and Family Programme which weakened tribal ties.Literacy, as prescribed by some religions, was also a factor.

• W.E.I.R.D characteristics include: Self-focus, self-esteem and self-enhancement; Guilt over shame; Dispositional thinking; Low conformity and deference; Patience, self-regulation, and self-control; Time thrift and hard work; Desire for control and love of choice; Impersonal Prosociality; Impartial principles over contextual particularism;  Trust, fairness, honesty, and cooperation with anonymous others, strangers, and impersonal institutions; An emphasis on mental states, especially in moral judgment; Muted concerns for revenge but willingness to punish third parties; Reduced in-group favoritism; Free will: notion that individuals make their own choices and those choices matter; Moral universalism: thinking that moral truths exist in the way mathematical laws exist; Linear time and notions of progress; Analytical over holistic thinking; Attention to foreground and central actors; Endowment effect — overvaluing our own stuff; Field independence: isolating objects from background; Overconfidence (of our own valued abilities).

• Guilt (internal regulation) over shame (external regulation.)

• UN Diplomats Get Parking Tickets. The higher the international corruption index for a delegation’s home country, the more tickets those delegations accumulated.

• Correlations of Hofstede’s omnibus individualism scale, low Kinship Intensivity Index and low Cousin marriage prevalence with W.E.I.R.D features. Illustrated in studies and maps.

• Tribal gods and universal gods.

• Impersonal markets require both weak interpersonal relationships and potent market norms. Previously, trade occurred along chains of interpersonal relationships.

• If there’s a secret ingredient in the recipe for Europe’s collective brain, it’s the psychological package of individualism, analytic orientation, positive-sum thinking, and impersonal prosociality that had been simmering for centuries.

Comments

A fine book which makes the important point that Western psychology is distinct, sets out the ways in which Western and tradition psychologies differ and the likely historical causes.  In the historical explanation, a lot of weight is given to Catholic marriage norms weakening kinship, and I wonder if other factors should be given greater weight.  For example, the Christian focus on the individual soul may be important, or greater prosperity and more knowledge may facilitate W.E.I.R.D. thinking.  It may also be possible to develop the analysis beyond the binary individualist v tribal axis.  But overall, like the preceding book. The Secret of Our Success, an impressive achievement and an important contribution to understanding which deserves to be widely promoted.

Links

A good summary of Joe Henrich’s thinking is this warm and well-structured conversation on the Jolly Swagman podcast.

This is a link to the book at amazon uk.  I also enjoyed the audiobook.

I also produced Notes on Joe Henrich’s preceding book, The Secret of our Success.

NOTES

Preface

Massively biased samples.  Psychological diversity. Psychological peculiarity.

Four years after our lunch in the basement, Ara, Steve , and I finally published “The weirdest people in the world?” in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2010), along with a commentary in Nature magazine. In these publications, we dubbed the populations so commonly used in psychological and behavioral experiments as “W.E.I.R.D.” because they came from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

In constructing this book, I ended up first producing another book, called The Secret of Our Success (2016).

Prelude

Your brain has been altered, neurologically rewired as it acquired a skill that your society greatly values. The exotic mental ability is reading. Learning to read forms specialized brain networks that influence our psychology across several different domains, including memory, visual processing, and facial recognition. Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code.

The neurological and psychological modifications associated with literacy should be thought of as part of a cultural package that includes practices, beliefs, values, and institutions — like the value of “formal education” or institutions such as “schools” — as well as technologies like alphabets, syllabaries, and printing presses.

This turns a question about neuroscience, and global psychological diversity, into one about cultural evolution and history.

Luther’s subsequent writings on theology, social policy, and living a Christian life reverberated outward from his safe haven in Wittenberg in an expanding wave. This principle, known as sola scriptura, meant that everyone needed to learn to read. Prussian counties closer to Wittenberg have higher shares of Protestants, but those additional Protestants are associated with greater literacy and more schools. Literacy is no special case. Rather, it’s the tip of a large psychological and neurological iceberg that many researchers have missed.

Part I: The Evolution of Societies and Psychologies

1. WEIRD Psychology

Perhaps you are WEIRD, raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. If so, you’re likely rather psychologically peculiar. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, we WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be “ourselves” across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility.

When reasoning, WEIRD people tend to look for universal categories.  WEIRD people are also particularly patient and often hardworking.

Paradoxically, and despite our strong individualism and self-obsession, WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative toward strangers or anonymous others. In fact, relative to most populations, we WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism.

Emotionally , WEIRD people are often racked by guilt as they fail to live up to their culturally inspired, but largely self-imposed, standards and aspirations. In most non-WEIRD societies, shame — not guilt — dominates people’s lives.

How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically peculiar? Why are they different? Tracking this puzzle back into Late Antiquity, we’ll see that one sect of Christianity drove the spread of a particular package of social norms and beliefs that dramatically altered marriage, families, inheritance, and ownership.

Psychological shifts fertilized the soil for the seeds of the modern world.

“Who am I?”  Individual attributes or roles and relationships.  Individualism complex or just individualism.

Throughout most of human history, people grew up enmeshed in dense family networks that knitted together distant cousins and in-laws.  Global map of individualism based on Hofstede’s omnibus scale.

The immense importance assigned by the discipline of psychology to notions of self-esteem and positive self-views is probably a WEIRD phenomenon.

It’s other-esteem (“face”) that matters, not self-esteem.

Dispositionalism — a tendency to see people’s behavior as anchored in personal traits that influence their actions across many contexts.  Fundamental Attribution Error.

Shame and guilt.  Social devaluation in the eyes of others.  Guilt is different; it’s an internal guidance system.

Less individualistic societies are more inclined to conform to the group.  Americans are even less conforming now than in the early 1950s.

Global distribution of patience.  UN Diplomats Get Parking Tickets. The higher the international corruption index for a delegation’s home country, the more tickets those delegations accumulated.

Impersonal Honesty Game.  Generalized Trust Question (GTQ). Impersonal trust. Impersonal prosociality.  Intentions.

Self-focused, individualistic, nonconforming, patient, trusting, analytic, and intention-obsessed

KEY ELEMENTS IN WEIRD PSYCHOLOGY.

Individualism and Personal Motivation ■ Self-focus, self-esteem and self-enhancement ■ Guilt over shame ■Dispositional thinking (personality): Attribution Errors and Cognitive Dissonance ■ Low conformity and deference to tradition / elders ■ Patience, self-regulation, and self-control ■ Time thrift and hard work (value of labor) ■ Desire for control and love of choice ■ Impersonal Prosociality ( and Related Worldviews ) ■Impartial principles over contextual particularism ■ Trust, fairness, honesty, and cooperation with anonymous others, strangers, and impersonal institutions ■ An emphasis on mental states, especially in moral judgment ■ Muted concerns for revenge but willingness to punish third parties ■ Reduced in-group favoritism ■ Free will: notion that individuals make their own choices and those choices matter ■ Moral universalism: thinking that moral truths exist in the way mathematical laws exist ■ Linear time and notions of progress ■ Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities and Biases ■ Analytical over holistic thinking ■ Attention to foreground and central actors ■ Endowment effect — overvaluing our own stuff ■ Field independence: isolating objects from background ■ Overconfidence (of our own valued abilities)

2. Making a Cultural Species

William Buckley

Corporate guilt.

A cultural species.  Accumulate increasingly complex bodies of cultural knowledge, cumulative cultural evolution.

A good reputation acts like a magical cloak

Many marriage norms increase paternity certainty.  Affines.  Synchrony. Intergroup competition.

Part II: The Origins of WEIRD People

6. Psychological Differences, Families, and the Church

How intensive kin-based institutions influence people’s psychology and how the Church’s dismantling of intensive kinship in medieval Europe inadvertently pushed Europeans, and later populations on other continents, toward a WEIRDer psychology.

The weaker a population’s traditional kin-based institutions, the WEIRDer their psychology is today. Marriage and Family Program.

Part III: New Institutions, New Psychologies

9. Of Commerce and Cooperation

Impersonal markets require both weak interpersonal relationships and potent market norms.

Trade occurred along chains of interpersonal relationships.

Part IV: Birthing the Modern World

12. Law, Science, and Religion

Enlightenment thinkers didn’t suddenly crack the combination on 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.

13. Escape Velocity

If there’s a secret ingredient in the recipe for Europe’s collective brain, it’s the psychological package of individualism, analytic orientation, positive-sum thinking, and impersonal prosociality that had been simmering for centuries.

14. The Dark Matter of History

The cultural evolution of psychology is the dark matter that flows behind the scenes throughout history.

My account picks up the story of global inequality where Diamond’s explanation falls off — circa 1000 — and places the coevolution of institutions and psychology at center stage.

Over the entire 20th century, culture has raised Americans ’ educational attainment by 9 to 11 years, while natural selection has lowered it by less than 8 months.

This view changes our understanding of who we are and where our most cherished institutions, beliefs, and values came from.

Unfortunately, the social sciences and standard approaches to policy are poorly equipped to understand or deal with the institutional – psychological mismatches that arise from globalization. This is because, not only is little attention given to the psychological variation among populations, but there’s almost no effort to explain how these differences arise.

You can’t truly understand psychology without considering how the minds of populations have been shaped by cultural evolution.

Psychologists treat Americans, and WEIRD people more generally, as a culture-free population; it’s “culture” that makes everyone else appear deviant. Hopefully, it’s now clear that we are the WEIRD ones.

We’ll think, feel, perceive, and moralize differently in the future, and we’ll struggle to comprehend the mentality of those who lived back at the dawn of the third millennium.

Notes

Idiosyncratic religious beliefs about the need for all males to read the Torah drove literacy.