We all know stereotypes about people from different countries; but we also recognize that there really are broad cultural differences between people who grow up in different societies. This raises a challenge when most psychological research is performed on a narrow and unrepresentative slice of the world’s population — a subset that has accurately been labeled as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Joseph Henrich has argued that focusing on this group has led to systematic biases in how we think about human psychology. In his new book, he proposes a surprising theory for how WEIRD people got that way, based on the Church insisting on the elimination of marriage to relatives. It’s an audacious idea that nudges us to rethink how the WEIRD world came to be.
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Joseph Henrich received his Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Among his awards are a Fulbright scholarship, a Presidential Early Career Award, the Killam Research Prize, and the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize. His trade books include The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smart, and the new The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
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0:00:00.1 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. Welcome to the first episode of 2021, a brand new year, hope that it holds some good things for you, me, the rest of the world, the whole bit.
0:00:12.8 SC: So there’s a play by George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra, and in there Caesar has a line that is “Pardon him, Theodosius: He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature”. In this case, Caesar was talking about his secretary, Britannus, who was, of course, a Briton, but I think that the lesson is a little bit wider than that. I think that we all tend to think that the customs of our tribe and island are laws of nature. The ways that we behave, the ways that we think, the ways that we feel, what we think are right and wrong, we grow up in a certain environment and we tend to think that’s the right way to do it. Some of us rebel against it, others don’t. But it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of reflection to say, it could be really, really different, and I think that’s an easy thing to say about customs, which hand do you hold the fork with when you eat or something like that, maybe even about morality, depending on your issues about morality, but what about more objective things like our psychology, how we actually think what actually goes on in our brains.
0:01:16.4 SC: Today’s guest is Joseph Henrik, and he has argued that modern views of Psychology have been drastically shaped by the fact that most psychological studies, most research work in this field has been done by and on a very particular subset of people, what he calls WEIRD, that’s an acronym not just that they’re weird, but I think that’s supposed to be the residence of it. It’s an acronym standing for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. The point being that not only are most psychologists in sort of western universities where these characteristics would be common, but most psychological studies are done on college students at those universities, right?
0:01:55.6 SC: If any of you have been to college and taken a psychology course, like I say at the beginning of the podcast, you might have participated in these studies, and guess what, it turns out that western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic college students are not a representative sample of all of humanity. And so, Joe Henrik’s point is not just that we’re looking at a very specific subset, but that it is a WEIRD subset. He makes a very persuasive case. That weird people are not just a subset of all humanity, but they are outliers psychologically. In fact, even sort of at an anatomical level, in terms of what is going on in the brain, he argues that people in the weird sphere have sort of repurposed their left brain hemisphere for language, whereas a lot of other cultures, the left hemisphere is used more for facial recognition. And of course, this is gonna have a very important impact on what you take the truths of psychology to be.
0:02:54.4 SC: Things that are habits or customs of your people, you might take to be laws of nature, and in the best Mindscape tradition, Joe actually has a very interdisciplinary background. His undergraduate degrees are in Anthropology and aerospace engineering. He worked as an engineer for a while. In fact, before returning for his PhD in Anthropology, he later became a professor both in psychology and in economics, and is now a professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, so he has a lot of different sub-fields covered there. And what he’s doing these days is moving his research on from the simple fact that weird people are weird to asking how they became that way, and that’s the subject of his new book called the The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
0:03:42.9 SC: Now, he has a very, very specific and sort of outlandish theory about how this happened, and we’ll talk about it in the podcast. Very, very roughly, very, very simplified his idea is that in Europe, the Christian church forbid marriages within families, that worldwide it was very, very common for people to marry their cousins, if not their brothers and sisters, but at least close people within their families at the cousin level. And he thinks that the church forbidding cousin marriage encouraged association between people who are outside of your family, pro-social behaviour, where you were sort of forced to make common cause with people who are not your family members ’cause you wanted to marry them or they’ll be your in-laws and that led to guilds and certain ways of working and associating and the economy took off.
0:04:37.7 SC: This is a very specific idea, we talk about it, you may or may not believe it, he summons a lot of evidence for us that was absolutely worth taking seriously. It’s worth comparing to what we talked about with David Stasavage where we talked about the history of democracy and how it took off in Europe in a way that was earlier than in other places, so the point of all this discussion in my mind is not to say that certain ways of thinking and being are right and wrong, it’s just to say that there are certain ways of thinking and being and to not take those ways just because they’re part of your own culture as laws of nature, to be a little bit more open-minded, reflective, recognising that the ways we are might be specific, might not be perfectly general. It’s a good attitude to keep in mind as we approach the New Year, so with that, let’s go.
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0:05:42.6 SC: Joe Henrik, welcome to Mindscape podcast.
0:05:44.6 Joseph Henrich: Good to be with you, Sean.
0:05:46.0 SC: So I was an undergraduate taking a psychology course some number of years ago, we won’t say how many and I remember that one of the requirements for the course was that we act as test subjects for one of the psychology professors experiments. And it slowly dawned on me like, are most psychology results coming from testing undergraduate students? That seems like a very non-representative part of the world, but so you’ve really dug into that and made that realisation a lot more quantitatively established.
0:06:19.0 JH: Yeah. So it turns out that that requirement, the kind of undergraduate intro psych where you have to be a lab rat for the psychologist existed for decades. So until about 2010, over 90% of all psychological studies were done with university undergraduates in the US or Europe, Canada, places like that, and we raised the alarm about this in a 2010 paper called the. The WEIRDest People in the World. Others had raised the alarm prior to this, but we really underlined it ’cause there had been enough data done in diverse societies to show that not only were undergraduates, one population among many, unusual but they often, when seen in a global perspective, anchor the extreme ends of the distribution. So we dubbed them weird people where weird stands for western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic just to kind of mark off and raise people’s consciousness about the unusualness of their subjects. Since then, they’ve moved away from using undergraduates, but now it’s mostly online subjects from the US.
0:07:20.4 SC: Okay, so I’m not sure if that’s better or worse, polling errors are on our minds these days. So just to be super clear here, I did a podcast just a few months ago with Olga Khazan about growing up weird, but she meant weird the old-fashioned sense like you’re different than the people around you. You have a very specific meaning of this wonderful acronym WEIRD.
0:07:43.1 JH: Yeah, and like I said, it’s just been to raise consciousness that the subjects most commonly used by psychology for decades and also other experimental disciplines like behavioural economics are just one population among many and also psychologically distinct, like the extreme and many measures that the people are interested. So a lot of the psychology textbooks that you would have had in your intro class are really a kind of cultural psychology, it’s telling you about the psychology of the population studied by the psychologist, but it shouldn’t be readily generalised to the species.
0:08:15.5 SC: Yeah, you know I want to be understanding to the psychologists ’cause they’ve had a hard time recently with replication crises and so forth, and so I wanna emphasise that as much as we want to say that it needs to be better, it’s hard, the psychology is super hard, it’s way harder than theoretical physics, I can definitely vouch for that. The brain is a complicated thing, right?
0:08:40.3 JH: Yeah, of course. And I mean oftentimes, as with so many things, it’s not so much the individuals doing it, so when we raise this alarm in our 2010 paper, lots of psychologists immediately saw the problem, but the institutions are set up so that it makes it hard, right? So if you’re a psychology graduate student, you’ve gotta crank out a few papers before you graduate and you’re incentivised to find the easiest, most accessible subjects you can find to run your experiments, so things like learning a language and moving to a different place or setting up multiple field sites is just impractical from the PhD perspective.
0:09:16.7 SC: Yeah, I mean physics has a lot more money to do these experiments than psychology does, I have to say that also. So the important thing about this finding is that it’s not just, well, you’ve studied a certain population, now you have to study other populations. It’s that, as you already mentioned, these weird people are not just a point in the distribution, but an extreme point like we, since many of the listeners are going to be in this weird categorisation of… Let me remember what it is, western, educated, industrialised, darn it… Rich, and democratic. Yeah, I was supposed to memorise that beforehand. So many of us are that it’s interesting to see that we are the outliers in the distribution, we’re not just specific, we are literally different than most people in the systematic way.
0:10:08.2 JH: Yeah, yeah, and lots of things that psychologists care about. So a psychologist, for example, have been interested in people’s tendency to conform to their peers, so experiments, which are pretty commonly taught in introductory classes by the psychologist named Solomon Asch, show people’s willingness to, in judging their lengths of lines, go along with their peers, so this peer conformity. And it turns out that these weird people, the subjects commonly used by psychologists are the least conformists of all the populations that have been studied.
0:10:38.3 SC: Right, I mean, I think that you have a whole bunch of examples of experiments where weird people are a little bit different than anyone else, and some of them kind of makes sense to me that it makes sense to me that there could be a distribution, but others I was like, wow, I can’t really break out of my weird box. I really think that the weird people are just right here. So you have this example of giving money, right? Someone has money and they can give some fraction of it to someone else who can either accept it or reject it, can you explain that one to us?
0:11:11.8 JH: Sure, so there’s a few different versions of that, but the most common one I think that some listeners might be familiar with is called the ultimatum game. So two players are allotted a sum of money, say $100, and it’s the job of the first player who’s called the proposer to offer a portion of that hundred to the second player. The second player then has two choices, they can accept the amount of the offer, and then the game is over, it’s one shot, so it’s not repeated. You don’t know the name of the other person or anything. Or they can reject it. And if they reject it, both players get zero. And so this was initially done in industrialised societies in the early ’90s, and it was found to be a pretty consistent result, so the modal offers about 50%, and mean offers are between 40% and 50%.
0:11:56.7 SC: And it’s interesting that a strict utilitarian would say that you should just accept the offer even if it’s just a penny, right?
0:12:05.4 JH: Well, a rational self-interested. So someone who is trying to maximise money would accept any positive offer, any non-zero offer, ’cause you can think about it from the point of view of the responder, if they’re faced with a choice between say $1, if they accept and zero dollars, if they reject. There’s no reason to reject. So it’s always accept.
0:12:24.4 SC: Yeah, but this is the example where I can kind of see it both ways, because clearly if I want some money, so I could accept. If they give me a little bit of money, I’ll accept it. That makes sense, but also I’m embedded in the culture, I’m embedded in the society, and I imagine that this kind of transaction might happen over and over again, I don’t wanna be the mark for the con game, I wanna stand up for myself and try to establish an equilibrium where I get a bunch of money.
0:12:50.8 JH: Right, and so it turns out that that varies, and in some societies, it’s really hard to find someone who will reject a positive sum of money, and you tend to get low offers. Now it doesn’t go all the way to zero so about the lowest mean we found is 25% of the total, whereas in other societies, you get more closer to 50%, 48% might be the mean, and most offers are half. That’s a lot of rejections for people who go below 20% or about 40% or 30%.
0:13:17.3 SC: And that’s our weird friends.
0:13:20.9 JH: Yeah, so pretty common industrialised, but certainly strong and weird populations, and what’s interesting is the initial experiments were done amongst university students, and they show the same pattern, but they’re actually a little bit weaker. It turns out that we’re still being socialised when we’re 20 or 22, and it will continue to get more willing to reject and more concerned about fairness, I guess you would say.
0:13:42.8 SC: I remember reading a study, I’m not sure whether it was ever replicated or not, saying that economists treat individuals as rationally self-interested, and then when you tested people and whether they were rationally self-interested, the group that is most rationally self-interested turns out to be economics students and it’s like they’re trained into that. They’re socialised into it.
0:14:05.8 JH: Yeah, that’s a finding that has been replicated and it’s interesting because it turns out that mostly it’s by selection into the discipline, so what they did is they studied first year freshmen and seniors in economics and non-economics, and most of the difference, say three quarters of the difference appears by who becomes an economist, and then you get another 1% over the four years, but the difference between economists and non-economists is relatively small compared to the cross-cultural differences that we found.
0:14:39.7 SC: I believe that, that makes sense. You did have a sort of throwaway line in one of your talks that I was listening to, where you did… You or someone did tests with chimpanzees and they were much closer to the ideal economic actor than human beings were.
0:14:54.4 JH: Yeah, so after I did the first round of these experiments in diverse societies, and we found all this variation, we started to wonder whether this could be done with apes, and so I worked with a primatologist named John Silk, and then a comparative experimentalist named Danny Povinelli, along with some postdocs, Sarah Brosnan and Jennifer Vonk and we studied two different groups of chimpanzees, captive populations, and we developed the simplest game we could think of, which is just to give the chimps two choices. If they pick choice A, they get some food and another chimp get some food, and If they pick choice B just they get food. And we found that the chimps were indifferent to which of these they pick, so you would think if you even care a tiny bit about others, you’d always pick A because you get the same amount no matter what. So it’s all about whether the other guy gets anything and the chimps were indifferent, so this was kind of a selfish response. We do this with young children, and we see a concern about others develop gradually as the kids get older.
0:15:53.3 SC: Is this possibly a species-dependent thing? I mean I have a vague recollection if Frans de Waal has experiments with other kinds of monkeys, or rather with monkeys, where they do seem to be more empathetic and wanted to be fair to their fellow simians.
0:16:11.6 JH: Yeah, Frans has some experiments with capuchin’s’s, where he actually shows that when you compare a capuchin to a stranger, they’re just like the chimpanzees, but if you compare them with another member of their capuchin group who they know and are familiar with, and they’ll go back in the cage with after the experiments, then they’re more generous.
0:16:31.1 SC: That’s very interesting. Yeah, I told you, psychology is much harder than physics. There’s always an exception to every rule, but okay, so I can understand why different cultures might react differently to that test, but then you have another example where you’re asking about the blame that we attach to someone for taking someone else’s bag, it depends on whether or not they did it by accident or intentionally, so why don’t you tell us about that one, too?
0:16:55.0 JH: Sure, so we went to 10 different populations around the world, we did it in Los Angeles, but then we went to traditional societies in Africa and South America and islands, South East Asia, and we developed vignettes where we tried to make it so everybody in each of these places face what you might think of as a theft scenario. We did a few other… A harm scenario and a taboo scenario, but I’ll just describe the theft scenario, so people are at a busy market and someone puts a bag down. Now either someone comes up and takes that bag, where we don’t set it up to be an accidental theft. And then another one, a similar bag is placed next to it, and then the person mistakenly takes the wrong bag, and so from the point of view of the victim, they lose their bag, so they lose their stuff, so the harm to the victim is the same, it’s just a question of whether the act was intentional or could be inferred to be intentional, or whether it was clearly accidental, and we found that the folks in Los Angeles and also we did some work in rural Ukraine, we’re at the extreme end of the distribution.
0:17:58.6 JH: So most concerned about intention in terms of whether the person should be punished, meaning the person who took the bag and what not, and then it went all the way down to the folks in Fiji who didn’t make use of intentions at all. So they weren’t concerned about people’s mental states, they judged the thief equally harshly in both conditions.
0:18:17.2 SC: And that’s what I really do have trouble wrapping my brain around, and it’s a great example of how things that we think of as purely rational are in fact extremely culturally conditioned, right? I mean, to me, it just seems obvious that intent should matter when you wanna blame someone, their intent for doing the thing that you’re blaming them for is clearly relevant, but there’s a whole another way of thinking that discounts that.
0:18:42.0 JH: Yeah, so some societies have strict… What they call strict liability, so that’s kind of the legal term, which would mean that if you kill someone, it doesn’t matter whether you did it by accident, say your arrow ricocheted off a deer and hit a person, or whether you actually shot them, because there’s a loss of life, a loss of a person, and so the penalty to you is the same. And you see this in a lot of anthropological work on traditional law. So in societies that have blood revenge, if members of one clan kill another clan then if the proper blood money isn’t paid… Doesn’t matter whether it’s on purpose or by accident… That you can murder someone and the clan from which the murderer comes and there’s no sense in which it has to be the person who did the murdering, ’cause the other members of the clan are interchangeable, so you could just as easily kill their brother, even though he wasn’t involved. So he’s completely innocent. So this is something you see throughout the anthropological record in lots of societies.
0:19:37.7 SC: And is this somehow… I don’t wanna push the data beyond what they’re able to tell us, but is this somehow indicating some sense in which different cultures approach the theory of minds of others in some way? The fact we conceptualize other people as making choices, and that’s the locus of good or badness, those choices those individuals are making?
0:20:01.2 JH: Yeah, so I think that that’s pretty important. It’s hard to get it just from this data, but if you look at other… We’ve done some theory of mind studies and other studies looking at people’s mental states. There’s a line of kind of historical literature on this, and in the Western European tradition, there’s an increasing emphasis on thinking about what’s inside people as animating their characteristics. It could be their dispositions, it could be honest, it could be their mental states, and this is how… This is our sort of gut reaction to explain behavior. It’s something about that person, what he believes, what kind of person he is, his personality, something like that, whereas in lots of other places there’s much more emphasis on the kind of social world as marionette… As holding the strings to the marionette. So the social ties, who are his alliances, where his allegiances is, this kind of… What are his social relationships and that can be used to explain people’s behavior. And of course, we can do that in both systems and that kind of explanation can make intuitive sense to WEIRD people like me, but it’s not our first inclination when we go to explain something and when we’re looking to make our way through the world.
0:21:06.7 SC: Well, and this is one of the… I guess we should get a little bit more systematically into what it means to be WEIRD in your sense. One of their aspects is this analytic thinking versus holistic thinking, I guess, is the dichotomy here, and to me, again, ’cause I am embedded in this and I’m admitting it, analytic thinking. That’s a good thing, it’s just sort of thinking carefully about things, but is it a matter of what you look at first? Do you look at the parts first and then put them together if you’re an analytic thinker, versus looking at the whole and then maybe subdividing if you’re a more holistic thinker?
0:21:42.4 JH: Yeah, and it also affects… It’s very deep in the sense that it affects even the things you pay attention to. So if our decisions and our kind of data taking process as intelligences moving through the world is affected by what we attend to, then this analytic thinking is important because analytic thinkers tend to focus on the focal object, and holistic thinkers tend to look and they remember more of what’s in the background. And when you do eye tracking, you find that some populations will just attend more and then remember more things in the background, whereas the more analytic thinkers are focusing on the foreground and looking at the kind of main object or whatever the individual is. Other data suggests that the immediate reaction of analytic thinker is to figure out what the parts are. So if you’re a physicist, you might break things down into particles and give them properties, and then the system is explained by the particular properties of the particles that you assign it to, whereas if you’re more of an analytic thinker, you think about the relationships. In the case… Yeah.
0:22:40.4 SC: You mean holistic. Sorry, you said, if you’re more of an analytic thinker, you meant more of a holistic thinker?
0:22:45.0 JH: Oh, sorry, yeah, more of a holistic thinker, you’re thinking about the relationships between the particles. So for example, I like to think about explaining human behavior this way. An analytic thinker thinks like an economist, they assign preferences and beliefs, and then they explain people’s behavior based on preferences and beliefs, properties of individuals. Whereas a holistic thinker looks at the relationships, so if someone’s behaving as a thief or something like that, and then the holistic thinker is gonna be like, “Well, he probably doesn’t like that person,” or maybe that person took something from him or they would use the contextual relationships to explain it, rather than saying that person is dishonest and assigning them a disposition.
0:23:23.8 SC: Right, and so it seems like analytic maps on to sort of a reductionist view of the world. Is that a fair thing? As a…
0:23:31.3 JH: Yeah, and in the book, then I move into some speculative thinking towards the end of the book, but I think you can see this in science, in the emergence of science, ’cause one of the first moves of scientists, of course, is to try to break things down into their little bits, and then figure out how they fit back together once you got the bits.
0:23:48.0 SC: So maybe I should let you put into words what exactly… What are the first things we should think of when you say the WEIRD psychology? This analytic thinking is part of it. Clearly individualism is a huge part of it, but what are the three words we should remember 10 years from now if we’re listening to this podcast about what WEIRD-ness really entails?
0:24:09.9 JH: Well, yeah, your first point is always the one I open with, which is thinking about the individuals and focusing on their attributes and aspirations instead of thinking about people’s relationships. So this is associated kind of psychologically with things like overconfidence and a tendency to self-enhance rather than being kind of humble, to put forth your best… What you think are your best attributes. Another one is the one we’ve been talking about, which is analytic thinking. So approaching things, looking for categories and assigning properties as opposed to looking at background relationships in context. Another one is concerned with impartial principles over the kind of in-group loyalty and social relationships that govern so much social structure. So those are three big ones.
0:24:58.5 SC: I wonder, have you studied sort of consequentialist versus deontological versions of morality? Deontological being like, “Here are the rules and we should obey them,” consequentialists being like, “Let’s go and do whatever it takes to get the best outcome.” It sounds like WEIRD people would be more consequentialist and other cultures, traditional cultures might be more deontological.
0:25:23.2 JH: Yeah, I think that broadly holds true. The only thing that’s tricky is in a lot of the experiments that are used to do that, the individuals… It’s kind of a weird experiment in the sense that like you use these trolley problems and the individuals are often… None of the relationship information is specified.
0:25:44.6 SC: Right, okay.
0:25:46.5 JH: So I think you could really pick up the differences if you started talking about the relationships, who they were or what their ethno-linguistic group was, what the relationships are, do they know anybody you know, things like that. And that’s kind of like the non-WEIRD people are much more interested, that’s the information they wanna know, ’cause that feeds into their decision-making whereas it’s much easier to even entertain the abstract question if you’re WEIRD because you’re gonna… You’re like one of the key principles here, do the counting if you’re utilitarian.
0:26:17.2 SC: Okay, that makes sense. So the utilitarian… Because the people who invented the trolley problem are WEIRD, they don’t care what your relationship is with the people on the tracks, they just care how many of them there are.
0:26:27.7 JH: Right. They’re trying to illustrate a principle or multiple principles. Yeah.
0:26:30.3 SC: Yeah, I see, okay. So we WEIRD folks are more individualistic. One of the phrases that I got out of your writing was favoring impersonal pro-sociality over interpersonal relationships. So in some sense, we’re individualistic, we think about ourselves, but that makes us more… I don’t wanna say fair, but at least more uniform in our dealing with others rather than favoring our kin group or something like that.
0:27:00.9 JH: Yeah, yeah, and there’s often this kind of tension in how people think about this, ’cause this I think too is a WEIRD trait. People think either you’re cooperative or not cooperative. And actually what the world looks like, I think, is that it’s about who you’re cooperative with. And so you can think of social distance from yourself or from your group, and what’s the kind of slope of the line that moves away from you, is it really steep such that people who are far away from you are essentially strangers and you’re treating them with self-interest… You’re behaving self-interestedly towards them, or is it much more shallow, so that your second cousin is not very different from a stranger if you’re trying to make a choice between how some policy is gonna affect them or who you’re gonna hire or something like that.
0:27:45.1 SC: Yeah, and one of the ways that shows up is in the difference between guilt versus shame, both of which sound bad, but the WEIRD cultures are much more interested in guilt, roughly speaking?
0:27:57.2 JH: Right. Right. And so the key to understanding this is that… Or I think the key is that when you’re trying to navigate your way through a WEIRD individualistic world, you’re looking for relationships, so you might be looking for business relationships or co-authors, if you’re an academic, you’re looking for mates, spouses, friends, and in each case, you’re cultivating an individual uniqueness, so what do I bring to this, what’s interesting about me that people might wanna hang out with me or marry me or write a paper with me? And in the more relational world, what you bring is a set of relationships, and you’re born into these relationships and you’re trusting people who you’re connected to through sets of relationships.
0:28:38.7 JH: So if in this world we’re cultivating this unique individual self, guilt plays a big role ’cause you’ve set some personal standards for yourself, so I’m gonna go to the gym, and I’m gonna read interesting books, and so you’re kind of… You feel guilty if you don’t do those things, even though those aren’t social norms in your society, and people aren’t gonna look badly on you if they find out you skip the gym and took a nap or something like that. But in a shame society, it’s a lot about complying with the social norms and not being the tall poppy that stands out. So there you’re much more concerned with shame and how you look in the eyes of others. And this gives this contrast, which is a very old idea in anthropology, that there are shame societies and guilt societies. But psychology and other… And actually, the web has provided ways to measure the difference between populations and how much they’re worried about these.
0:29:28.5 SC: Peter Singer has this thought experiment where someone is drowning and you walk by and you could save them, would you do it? And most people would try to do it, and then he’s like, “Well, but there’s thousands of people you could save in Africa who you don’t know with that much effort or even much less, why don’t you do that?” And I guess the implicit thing going on there is that every life is equally worthy, and I know that… I think in your about that there’s that sort of descriptive side of things, not the normative side of things, but it almost… Our weirdness almost sneaks in as an unspoken assumption to how we should think about right and wrong. We take it for granted that we should think about all lives equally, even if we don’t always act that way, but there’s a whole another way of thinking that would say, “Well, of course, it matters a lot more to me if my cousin is drowning than if someone I don’t know.”
0:30:21.9 JH: Right, and so I make the case that it’s this psychological transformation that focused on individualism and impartial principles that kind of opened the door for things like universal human rights, where we’re making this species level generation, we still keep the non-humans out of it, but we say that all humans should have certain rights, privileges, things like that. And that’s a very WEIRD way of thinking.
0:30:43.8 SC: Peter Singer does not keep the other species out of it, by the way, he wants to…
0:30:48.4 JH: Right, of course. But that’s interesting that the circle continues to expand even beyond homo sapiens.
0:30:54.7 SC: Right, right, right. So, good. And so we’re more individualistic, more analytic, there’s another aspect which it’s because I care about time and the universe a lot, I have to emphasize, which is the idea I think that WEIRD people are more future-oriented, or maybe even, if I can be bolder, more willing to extend their self hood to other places and times and take actions accordingly to try to do things now that will benefit my future self.
0:31:25.2 JH: Right, right. So there are these experiments, one is the famous Marshmallow Test, where you give children a choice between one marshmallow now or two if they wait and they actually end up in the experiment there’s a little bit of deception, the children are just… You’re waiting to see if he caves in and eats the marshmallow, and there’s some limited time, like 15 or 20 minutes. And then another one is where you give people choices between $100 now or $130 in a year and have people make a series of binary choices and that seems to vary a lot around the world, and I suggest… And there are various amounts of evidence to support this, that the ability to cultivate that deferring of gratification was fostered by these institutions that were developing in Europe in 1500, 1600 in which you could save money, you could individually own things, and so there were real incentives for cultivating this kind of long-term savings and this particular way of thinking about money. And then things like Protestant thinking and whatnot even encouraged that more, so there’s a relationship between Protestantism and this deferring gratification. This is a Weberian idea, and… Yeah, so I think… And so there’s probably a bunch of these little ratchets that help push up our patience that are built into our institutions.
0:32:42.7 SC: Yeah, I mean, the origin of it, I wanna definitely get to that. I’m sort of biting my tongue about why we became WEIRD because it’s so interesting, and I wanna get all the weirdness on the table first before we ask where it came from. But because there’s so many different aspects, and I wonder if there is a grand unified theory of it all. Another aspect is this idea of authenticity and presenting different selves or faces to the world. We WEIRD people think that there is a virtue in being the same when we talk to different sets of people, whereas non-WEIRD societies, apparently, from what I read in your book, just take for granted we would act differently in different circumstances.
0:33:22.4 JH: Yeah, and the key to, I think, understanding that is there’s lots of relationships that are prescribed to be a certain way, so how you treat elders or how you treat parents, and a lot of times you’ll call multiple people father or mother, and there might even be people who you’ll have a classificatory relationship, so you’ll call them uncle even though they’re not really your uncle. And part of what that’s telling you is how you’re supposed to treat them like you would treat an uncle, and you have a whole series of rules and prescriptions about how you treat different kinds of relatives. So for example, famously in lots of societies, there are these cross-cousin relationships. So this, for example, would be your mother’s brother’s son, would be on one of your cross-cousins and you have a joking relationship with them. So constant practical jokes, making fun of each other, it’s just a normal way to behave, but you never behave that way to your grandfather. And so these very different ways of behaving and of course, that we can understand that, WEIRD psychology can understand that, but there is a much bigger premium on being consistent across…
0:34:26.8 JH: So if you have certain attitudes, you’re supposed to have those attitudes as you meet different people and appear in different situations, and if you don’t, people can think of you as two-faced or hypocritical, so we have these very critical terms, whereas in other traditions, it can be thought to be wise and sensible to not always present the same face in a different situation.
0:34:50.1 SC: Yeah. Unlike the intentionality and blame business, here I can very much sympathize with the non-WEIRD attitude towards these things. I do question whether or not this valorization of having a single unified self that behaves the same way to all different people in all different circumstances, is something that we should hold up as a good thing. I guess a little bit of sympathy towards the non-WEIRD side for me.
0:35:18.3 JH: But nonetheless, there is a kind of popular discourse about finding your true self.
0:35:23.3 SC: Oh yeah, right, right.
0:35:24.9 JH: People are always trying to look for that thing down there. It’s somewhere in there, if I can just find it, I’ll be happy.
0:35:29.3 SC: And just to sort of finish these… Ticking off some of the WEIRD boxes, there’s the idea that maybe stems from our individuality, that we have free will, that we can make choices that are rooted in our personal volition that then affect the rest of the world, and I was surprised to hear that this is a WEIRD trait as well.
0:35:51.6 JH: Well, yeah, so I think it begins… You can see it with these moralizing religions, so it’s more than just WEIRD, but it just gets accentuated in the Western tradition where a great deal of emphasis is placed on the making of these individual choices, but it probably, it has seeds that go back into the moralizing religions which have spread to lots of places, ’cause you have to make choices that will affect whether you get into heaven and things like that in other traditions.
0:36:17.2 SC: I see, okay. How do we experimentally test when free will came on the scene? This is a job for Cultural Anthropology, I guess?
0:36:29.4 JH: Well, so there’s a lot of research to be done on this, but there is a historical literature where they try to look at different religious texts and back into time to try to find discussions of free will. So Saint Augustine in the Western tradition, he spends a lot of time on this. Anthropologists of course, have provided lots of data from diverse societies, and some of this provides insights into whether there’s free will, and then you can run experiments, and the way they do… Psychologists have done experiments on this is actually with a technique called priming, so they have subjects read our philosophical arguments that either argue for the existence of free will or argue against it, and then they have to make decisions or do some psychological tasks after they’ve been primed and favor a free will, or suggest that their free will doesn’t work, like you know, do you wanna have cookies after it, how many cookies are you gonna take or you have to make a decision about allocating money to charity or to yourself and how believing relatively more of free will or less affect those decisions.
0:37:31.2 SC: And sorry, so what is the answer?
0:37:35.7 JH: Well, at least when you do it with Western subjects, when you prime them with free will, they give more to charity, so they’re more generous.
0:37:42.8 SC: ‘Cause they’re giving themselves credit, right? I mean, sort of fits in with that.
0:37:46.2 JH: Yeah. Yeah. And I think they eat less cookies too.
0:37:50.2 SC: [chuckle] Yeah, I don’t know. My dietary habits have become worse in the pandemic, so I blame the world, not my individual choices whatsoever.
0:37:58.4 JH: Of course.
0:38:00.8 SC: But another crucial aspect of this, maybe I should pause here to ask, how well have we done in sketching out the attributes that we associate with weirdness? Is there anyone that we’re missing, or are we given the people the basic picture?
0:38:13.6 JH: I think we’ve given a good overview. One thing that I think is interesting… You mentioned you’re interested in time, so how we think about time, I think was shaped over this cultural evolutionary period, and so we tend to think about time in absolute sense and many of us were trained in a world where we watched a clock, so meaning a clock with numbers, where the hand moves around the clock, and that’s actually a number line, a linear number line that’s been wrapped around in a circle. And it kind of teaches us that time is linear, but when you look at past practices, it’s not clear that people saw time as linear the way we do, because the day would change, the length of the day would change assuming… Depending on what latitude you’re at and the day would flex, so the length of hours actually varied in lots of societies, where at some point in Europe, they developed a constant hour, it’s always 60 minutes. And they began… Even before the mechanical clock kind of spread rapidly throughout Europe, people were using candlesticks and hourglasses and things like that to measure time, and there seemed to be almost an obsession with measuring time, and a real concern with it. So wage labor became hourly. So suddenly you’re measuring… Money and time can be put together and of course, Ben Franklin coins the… “Time is money.” And then we talk about time like it’s money. We’re always trying to buy time, save time, we’re running out of time. Those kinds of things.
0:39:43.6 SC: Well, actually, it only now occurs to me that you say that, when I had a conversation a few months ago with Lera Boroditsky, who studies language and metaphors for time, usually spatial metaphors. Time is going up or down or forward or backward. I don’t think we talked about time is money as a metaphor, but yes, of course. It’s valuable. We spend it. And so forth. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you’re saying that we can sort of look to pinpoint when that became a cultural metaphor?
0:40:12.3 JH: Yeah, well, so we know that Ben made it up, right? But Ben is of course in a much longer cultural tradition where it looks like people became increasingly concerned with time, and one simple marker of this is just the diffusion of the mechanical clock. So kind of 13th, 14th century, mechanical clocks start diffusing and they start in Italy, but they rapidly go from city to city and towers are trying to one off other towers and they would ring bells and it led to the city kind of literally running like clockwork, like they ring the bell and everybody wakes up and then has breakfast and then there’s the lunch bell and so the city begins to run like clockwork. But the clock doesn’t diffuse into the Middle East and other cultures didn’t seem to have the immense interest in getting a clock the way the Europeans do.
0:40:58.2 SC: That is very interesting. Have you ever read Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps by your Harvard colleague Peter Galison?
0:41:05.0 JH: It’s on my list. I haven’t read it.
0:41:07.0 SC: Very worth reading. Yeah, and one of the points he makes, a little bit past the eras you’re talking about, but he makes the point that Einstein never would have invented relativity if he hadn’t been a patent clerk, who was a patent clerk at a time when clocks were a big deal, and he was thinking about synchronizing time over different cities, and that helped him to think about what it meant to synchronize time.
0:41:27.5 JH: Yeah, that’s a great example.
0:41:31.5 SC: So this business about time is very, very good and important because it is hard to break out of how we think about the world and to realize that there are other ways of thinking about it, not only in cultures in different parts of the world, but even in our ancestral cultures, the idea that we de-emphasize being individuals, having free will. Keeping track of time is just a hard one for us to do. One of the things you emphasize is the co-evolution of genes and culture. The fact that these shifts in ways of thinking play back and forth with shifts in our actual genomes.
0:42:13.2 JH: Yeah, so in my previous book, The Secret of our Success, I argue that lots of the features of humans has been shaped by culture, so things like the way tools and fire have shaped our hands and our intestines and our digestive systems. And then I think a lot of our big brains expanded as a response of having to learn lots of cultural information about how to make tools and shelters and arrow poisons and things like that, so this complex body of knowledge that transmits non-genetically. In many ways, I think our brains have evolved to be good at acquiring all that information.
0:42:51.5 SC: And one of the interesting differences between weird and non-weird cultures is… Shows up in the hemispheres of our brains, maybe this is not a physiological difference, but the idea that we’re not as good at looking at… Recognizing faces, for example.
0:43:06.1 JH: So, yeah, crucial distinction. So it is a physiological difference, it’s just not a genetic difference.
0:43:11.5 SC: Right.
0:43:12.9 JH: So there’s a lot more to biology than just genetics, and so as a consequence of learning to read as we grow up, there’s a bunch of changes that we can see in people’s brains, and so neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have done a lot of work on this. And you can study illiterate populations, and they seem to see faces, for example, equally. So if you look at the brain activation, you get equally in the left and right hemispheres. It’s only when you learn to read that the facial recognition is driven somewhat out of the left hemisphere, so that neuroscientists thought that humans, humans the species, were right hemisphere biased for facial recognition. But it seems like that’s all or mostly a product of the fact that they studied mostly literate populations, and of course, throughout most of human history people have been illiterate. So it’s only recently that we became right hemisphere biased in facial recognition, and that’s because there’s a lot of neurogeography used for recognizing words and processing words quickly and of course, and we also have things like a thicker corpus callosum, so the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres. We have other psychological patterns for literate populations where when we hear speech, we get more whole brained activation, maybe because parts of our brain are turning it into letters, and that’s another way to store and represent it and interact with it.
0:44:33.4 SC: I have to ask, is there some knowledge what breaks the symmetry between the right and left side of the brains? I would have expected that half of the children who become literate have those parts of their brains that do that on the right half and half have it on the left half, but there’s something systematic.
0:44:51.8 JH: Well, yeah, that’s… So it’s building on a… I’m not a neuroscientist, but my reading of this work is that there’s already an asymmetry in human’s brains that we have language centers on the left. And so neuro geographically, you’ve got to seat the reading near the language, ’cause obviously they’re connected. And then there’s also object recognition, and that’s where you start impinging on the neurogeography usually used for faces, but… Yes, it’s the left bias because that’s where language is.
0:45:19.1 SC: I see, so the difference been left and right brains is there even in pre-literate societies, but basically literate societies have this whole extra thing that they need to associate with language, namely reading, and that sort of grows in the brain and pushes facial recognition to the other side.
0:45:36.3 JH: Yeah, yeah, and one of the fascinating parts of it is, of course, scripts that we use for reading, you know, you can think of Chinese characters or Kanji characters or Arabic script or Hebrew, they’re all very… They’re different. They’re the same in many ways, but they’re different in certain key and interesting ways, but yet the area of the brain that gets transformed for reading is more or less in the same place. It’s not exactly in the same place, but amazingly, it doesn’t pop up anywhere, it pops up within this certain area in the brain.
0:46:06.3 SC: And of course, it can’t be genetic, right? Like we haven’t been reading that long to evolve a new part of our brain.
0:46:15.4 JH: Right. Yeah, and so this is one of the points that I’ve tried to get across in my last book and this book, is we have to get beyond this kind of dualistic way of thinking, where there’s genetic things that we think of as biological and then there’s cultural learned things which seem to be almost ethereal. When we learn culture, that wires things into our brains, and… You know, whether we’re learning a language or we’re learning to juggle, if we’re learning the complexity of streets in London, we know that this alters, for example, our hippocampus. And so you get physical changes in the sub-structure, which means that cultural evolution is a kind of biological evolution. It’s just not a kind of genetic evolution.
0:46:52.4 SC: Right. So to be clear on what that means, it’s something that can affect our ability to reproduce and pass things down to further generations, but it’s just not encoded in our DNA.
0:47:02.9 JH: Exactly. And it’s actually transmitted, so something like their Protestantism or values and education and teaching kids to read is something that’s passed from one generation to the next, and that then affects how people behave in the world. They learn to read, and that then alters their neuro-circuitry in their left hemisphere.
0:47:20.4 SC: Right. Okay, good. So speaking of Protestants, let’s get… This is probably the time we should talk about where all this came from. I mean, you’ve convinced me… I think it’s a pretty easy target for the claim that WEIRD populations are different and the specific ways in which they’re different make perfect sense to me. It seems to be a much harder claim to make to really understand where that came from, but you’re boldly doing it as a good scholar is supposed to do. So should we start even very early in societies with how societies scale up back in the early days of the switch from hunter gathering to agriculture?
0:48:01.0 JH: Yeah. So here I’m mostly drawing on work in anthropology and archaeology. I mean, Jared Diamond summarizes some of this stuff in his book Gun, Germs and Steel. But the central idea is that with the beginnings of agriculture, you could have food production so you could have larger populations, and as populations scale-up, they’ve got to control land and territory in order to do agriculture, so you need to get groups to cooperate on larger scales. And one of the… Perhaps the main way that societies do this when they first begin to scale up is they switch from what’s called extensive kinship.
0:48:34.3 JH: So you’re building social relationships the way a mobile hunter-gatherer band would where you have… You’re building social links that go far away, so that you have this broad network of people you can depend on, depending on whether they’re shocks or other kinds of things, you can move around the landscape to different friends in different places. So it’s a really intense group that can defend some territory, so a clan where everybody’s related, they all see themselves as owners of the land and they’re all gonna fight fiercely to control this territory. And so that’s kind of how we start getting larger groups, we get clans and then we can get groups of clans. There’s things called age-sets which create bonds between clans. There’s another social structure called segmentary lineage, which is another way that clans can get together to control territory and the scaling up process.
0:49:20.7 JH: And so I make the case that this created a certain kind of social network based on kin ties, cousin marriage, structures like the clan where we see ourselves as related to an ancestor in the past. There’s inheritance rules that help bind this together, residence rules about where people live after they get married, that sets who you’re gonna grow up with who you’ll perform these links with. So all this affects our social structure, and that then affects our psychology in some of the ways we talked about. Giving this more holistic thinking, concern about clan loyalty or social relationships, more conformity, things like that.
0:50:00.7 SC: Right, so just to be clear, this sort of development of clan structure or kinship relations, that’s not the weirdness. That’s the thing that the weirdness will eventually sort of react against, so early humans around the world develop this sort of clan kinship structure.
0:50:17.2 JH: Exactly, so this is occurring as societies scale up, and there’s a lot of scaling up that’s being driven by the emergence of food production. So animal domestication and agriculture, especially things like rice-based agriculture, wheat-based agriculture are particularly strong in this kind of scaling up process. So there’s lots of ecological factors that we think are relevant to this, but then you get to the early states and what they seem to be is… A group stratifies, so you get one set of kin relations that are the elites and then lower strata, which could go all the way down to slaves and aside from the slaves, everybody is linked together through these kin ties. So kin ties take care of when you’re injured, they determine who you’re gonna marry or at least have a big influence on it. And they take care of you when you’re old. So you’re really woven into a tight social fabric there, but states begin to have these bureaucracies, so they could be military bureaucracies or traditional bureaucracies. There are often religious elements to all this that allow these larger groups, so the first states emerge.
0:51:21.0 JH: And the case that I make in the book is this creates a kind of path dependence, because so much of these early states were dependent on these tight kin bonds that there was no pathway, essentially, from an evolutionary perspective, to the kinds of societies, to modern societies today, which are based on these small families where the economic and political institutions aren’t interwoven with these big kinship bonds and whatnot and those gotta be kept suppressed. And so then the question is, how did you ever get to the point where you could build this other… You could go down this other trajectory?
0:51:55.0 SC: Is this something we can compare in any useful way to primates? To gorillas and monkeys and so forth? Are they weirder than most human beings?
0:52:08.2 JH: Well, I guess they’re weirder… The thing about other non-human primates is that they don’t have a culture, so they’re not gonna have social norms and institutions. You could say that gorillas have a kind of despotism because they have these silver backed males who control this harem of females. So there are some parallels like that, but what I think is interesting is that in mobile hunter-gatherer societies, they’re sort of weirder in the sense that they don’t have these clans or other kind of tight bonds, so when psychologists have done experiments like simple perception experiments… A famous one measures field independence. They look more like WEIRD people. So they’re field independent, just like WEIRD people, and it’s really the agriculturalists who are field dependent, and this has to do with your ability to see things independently moving in space aside from the background. So it has that kind of analytic versus holistic feel to it.
0:53:08.7 SC: Right. I wonder, this is probably too far to go, but I do wonder if this has theological implications for the difference between Judeo-Christian ways of thinking about humanity versus Buddhist or Confucian or Daoist ways of thinking about who we are or how we fit into the universe.
0:53:27.5 JH: Yeah, and I certainly… It turns out that in the modern world, 90% of Christians are cultural descendants of this Western European tradition, so this wasn’t true when things started. So the branch of Christianity that eventually evolved into the Roman Catholic church was just one branch among many. There were Syrian Christians and Armenian Christians and Ethiopian Christians, Chaldean Christians. But there was such an explosion of this one particular branch rooted in the Catholic Church that that dominates much of what we think of Christian thought today.
0:54:03.1 SC: Right. And you in particular, this is sort of the major point, I guess, at least that people seize on… You wanna put your finger on the very specific idea that the church tells you not to marry your cousin as a real turning point in the make-up psychologically of WEIRD people versus the non-WEIRD.
0:54:22.0 JH: Well, I want to expand a little bit beyond that, because I think that the key element is the way that the brand of Christianity that eventually becomes Roman Catholicism, they did a whole bunch of things to the family. So they banned cousin marriage, they altered the inheritance system in ways that would have ended clans. They ended polygamy, they preferred neolocal residence, they tried to end arranged marriages. And all of these things point in the direction of creating monogamous nuclear families. So I was making this case earlier about how there’s this path dependence problem, so the early states are all interwoven with these dense kinship networks that grew up during the agricultural period, when we were completely dependent on agriculture and had to control territory. So how do you get around that? Well, the church is what allowed this other path to spring up because it broke all that stuff down into monogamous nuclear families, even less intensive kinship than that we see amongst hunter-gatherers. And then the question is, well, how do we create a world where we can only have monogamous nuclear families, because there are taboos on marrying our cousins and we can’t have lineal sense systems, and you get these new institutions, these voluntary institutions and these representative governments that pop up in the high middle ages.
0:55:42.3 SC: So the idea is that if you can’t marry or… Yeah, if the family unit is a monogamous relationship, hopefully one where people have marital fidelity, then there’s just less room for constructing a large group of people who are all kin in some sense. You’re not remarrying within the same group over and over again, but you still need social relations and therefore you’re sort of nudged towards making social relations with people who you are not kin with. Is that an over-simplification but okay?
0:56:19.0 JH: Yeah, I know, I mean, that gets at the major thrust, and the key to remember is the degree to which as an individual in these worlds of intensive kinship, you’re dependent on this kin network for your… It’s the people who you cooperate with economically, it’s your political power. In Rome, of course, there is a patriarchal society, so only the head of the family had any legal rights, so even if you’re an adult, you could be a 40-year-old man, if your father’s alive, you’re under his legal umbrella in some sense. And so there’s no individual rights or anything like that in this other world, but then because everything gets broken down into monogamous nuclear families, people need to figure out ways to create mutual insurance and to have some security when they’re old and when they get injured, and then who are my allies, like who… I don’t have this network of kin I can tap if I need to defend my honor or I’m being harassed by someone, and so they built these voluntary associations. So guilds begin as a kind of mutual insurance network, and you get universities and monasteries and a whole variety of different institutions that are all doing the same thing. They’re doing the social functions that kinship groups used to do.
0:57:32.2 SC: Yeah, and this whole idea of sort of cosmopolitanism and the idea that you could move to other places and start a life and associate with people who are not in your family, you’re saying that all sort of comes from this idea that the church wants the family to be relatively tiny.
0:57:51.0 JH: Yeah, and it’s not… The key here is that as best I can tell, there’s no intention in the church. They’re just kind of following what they think God wants in and it has this unexpected by-product effect. And a key one is the one you mentioned there, which is this residential mobility. So you find in lots of places, people are still tied back to the rural farms and stuff, so I see this in Fiji, I’ve seen it described in China, in Africa. So they still have responsibilities and obligations back home, but they go to the city maybe to make money, or for some short period when they’re there, they’re probably living with relatives or at least people from the region where they come from, and they’re just spending some time there. Whereas when you break everyone down to nuclear families, there’s nothing to go back home too. There’s not some big network of kin, you’re not tied to ancestors who are buried in your land, so you have ritual responsibilities. You can just move to the town and become a citizen of that town. So what you get are new towns sprouting up all over Europe where people would join and they’d be members, and this is where the idea of citizenship comes from. Citizen of a town, and by joining, I sign a contract, I swear an oath to God that I’ll fulfill my responsibilities and obligations to this town, to this group of strangers that I’m joining.
0:59:02.5 SC: And since many of our listeners are probably in this WEIRD group, do you mean to imply by this that in non-WEIRD societies that wouldn’t happen? This idea of going to a town and becoming a citizen of it is just much less common?
0:59:16.5 JH: Well, so today, things have changed, of course, ’cause a lot of these institutions have been exported around the world, but in former times, and kind of think about the medieval period, it certainly wouldn’t have worked were you kind of… Were you joining a voluntary association. So for example, I looked at the spread of representative governments, and one of the chapters in my book shows how that the more years a region of Europe had under the church, the more likely… Or a town, you’re likely to see representative governments pop up in a town. During that exact same period, the frequency of representative governments popping up in the Islamic world is zero, like there’s not a single case of representative government popping up. So it’s just a different way of thinking about the world.
0:59:57.9 SC: I want to actually give you a chance to expand on these data because they really are wonderful. You have all these plots about how long a certain culture has been exposed to the ideas of the Western church versus various measures of individuality and cosmopolitanism, etcetera. It’s actually quite nice to see that kind of quantitative evidence.
1:00:20.6 JH: Yeah. So what we did, and this is working with three economics colleagues, is we put together all the data we could find that measured psychology, and then we put together data from anthropological databases on kinship structure, so we were able to show the places that have more of this intensive kinship, as I’ve described. It has a bunch of the psychological patterns that we’ve been talking about, and often they’re pretty strong correlations, and then we try to figure out, “Well, how can we measure church exposure?” So we built a database of the diffusion of the Catholic Church across Europe, so for each bishopric, so that’s kind of an administrative hub within Catholicism, we know its GPS coordinates and its data founding. And so then we can take a person who’s in a survey and tag him in space and and then say how long that region has been under the Catholic church, and then we can use that to predict these features of psychology that we can get from survey measures or when we go globally, we can get from other kinds of measures.
1:01:19.8 SC: I know that you already sort of demurred the question of why the church took this policy, you know, said, “That’s what they think God did.” Do we know anything more about specifically why this was a choice that was made particularly in the Western church and not in the Islamic world or China or India or any place like that?
1:01:38.7 JH: Yeah, so there’s a couple of different ways of looking at that. So first, it’s a bit of a complex picture, so there’s certainly some early church fathers who seem to recognize what you could describe as the social benefits or the way of expanding the circle of society by preventing cousin marriage. So Saint Augustine writes about this a bit, but then when you read… You’re trying to read up on what the actual… Was happening at these councils and the debates, it doesn’t seem to have come up very much, that social benefits. People are more concerned about, “Well, there’s a plague hitting and God’s angry with us for not adhering… There’s too much incest,” by which they mean too much cousin marriage, and we’ve got to really crack down on this cousin marriage. So they would increase the penalties and expand the circle and do things like that, and… So there’s that feature. The other thing that the… Jack Goody has argued is that this benefitted the church financially. So the church gets a lot of revenue flows from simple things like selling the chance to marry your cousin, but also from bequests. So Christians, Lead Christians became convinced that if they wanted to get into heaven and they were rich, they had to give to the poor, and of course, if you give to the poor while you’re living, that can be inconvenient, but if you give on your death bed then that’s a lot more convenient.
1:03:00.2 JH: So a lot of people were making massive deathbed bequests of land to the church, and the church became the largest land owner in Europe. So this was at least a profitable thing to do. Now, whether… It’s a debate among historians, and there’s a lot of critics of Goody, because there’s no smoking gun evidence where the church is like, “Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna get a big wealth flow if we just implement this.” So it’s easy to believe that various bishops may have noticed that this fills their coffers, so maybe they’re more likely to go along with the policy, they’re more likely to implement it. But I think that really the deeper and more important point, which is often missed in how we think about things, we tend to wanna look for the kind of rationalization or justification when we see someone do something that ends up being successful, and so it’s certainly the Catholic Church is successful, whatever else you think about it, but… Yeah, it’s important to realize that other groups were trying other kinds of experiments, so over in Persia, Zoroastrians were encouraging cousin marriage and even encouraging brother-sister marriage and incest at the elite levels, and Islam was trying to constrain polygyny, but just to four wives.
1:04:04.5 JH: But they had an inheritance custom that said that daughters had to inherit half of what sons inherit, which led to a very unusual practice of parallel cousin marriage. So daughters would marry their father’s brother’s son, which is otherwise quite rare in the anthropological record, and that would cause a very different social structure to emerge. So if you just think about different groups, different religious groups as coming up with different notions of what they think God wants and not really random, but a lot of randomness in that process. Then some groups are that… They might have picked it just by chance that end up leading to long-term success, and so it’s not always fruitful to think that we can look back into the minds of the people in the past and assume that they saw the wisdom of what they were doing rather than just being… Sometimes you get lucky.
1:04:53.3 SC: Yeah. And it does… The bright side of this way of thinking about it, I think, one of the bright sides would be to say that this might be an example where we’re always looking for explanations in a very materialist way. You know, here is the reasons why the conditions would have led to this no matter what, but maybe here, ideas, whether those ideas were right or wrong, actually had a huge influence on how society developed.
1:05:19.9 JH: Yeah, and I think that’s a really important idea ’cause I’m certainly have… Much in my work actually looks at how the economic or ecological conditions favor this or that cultural practice, but the interesting thing about religion is that it forces people to do stuff or it motivates people to do stuff they wouldn’t otherwise do. Do crazy things that would otherwise seem not very economically smart, and that can then, because of that, it can have these big knock-on effects because people are sort of going out of the normal modes that you would operate in.
1:05:49.5 SC: And it’s also… It’s the parallel with how we think about natural selection in the biological realm, it is very clear when you talk about how different societies were experimenting with different ways of doing things and sort of… Whatever the motivation was, the Western church hit on a system that really encouraged competition and the free market of whatever… Both money and ideas.
1:06:14.3 JH: Right, right. And yeah, I think this is a really important way of thinking, and it runs a little bit contrary to how people typically think about social science and think about things. We have a very cognitive heavy, individuals doing smart and sensible things based on their appraisals of the situation, rather than people are sort of groping around myopically, and this was just one particular path that these populations started groping their way down.
1:06:38.5 SC: Yeah. But, I mean, this is how evolution works. It is really random… Natural selection works. There’s random mutations and the ones that work will catch on and so in some sense, that’s a way we can think about why WEIRD-ness took over the world.
1:06:52.4 JH: Right. Yeah, that’s… Exactly.
1:06:56.1 SC: And you say the Western church. I think that’s a very specific choice because of course, we think of the Catholic Church, but the Protestant churches count also, and in fact, I think you tried to make the case that Protestantism accelerated this trend, the Protestants were even more WEIRD friendly than the Catholic church was.
1:07:15.4 JH: Yeah, and one of the things that I had in my mind when I got started is, you know, famously there’s this German sociologist Max Weber who had emphasized the connections between Protestant faith, Protestant beliefs and the emergence of capitalism and markets, and the kind of big economic expansion you see after Protestantism right from 1500. But Protestantism is such an individualistic religion where people are kind of alone, the only thing that matters is your mental states, so your faith, your good works don’t matter, is the big debate. People work super hard, they’re very frugal, at least this is the aspiration.
1:07:52.3 SC: The work ethic. The Protestant work ethic.
1:07:55.8 JH: Yeah, the work ethic. Exactly. But how do you get to a world where that is a kind of religion that can spread and so I think that the world, at least where Protestantism was successful, was already pretty individualistic and where mental states already mattered a lot. So this was very much just wrapping the kinds of intuitions people had from their psychology, wrapping them in sacred garb and making them even more powerful by doing that. So we talked about reading before, and to emphasize this point about Protestantism is the notion was that every individual, men and women, should learn how to read so they can read the Bible for themselves and understand it enough to improve their personal relationship with the supernatural being. And that’s just so arrogant from the point of view of most religions where…
1:08:44.1 JH: Why should every person have to do this? You gotta be a specialist, you gotta be a scholar, you gotta read some ancient language. But Protestants had them… We’re gonna write the Bible in German, and we’re gonna teach all the girls and just because women are oppressed at this period, we’re gonna teach them all to read the Bible, and they’ve gotta do it too, so female literacy begins spreading with male literacy. It’s just a very unusual… From the point of view of lots of other societies, just a very unusual way to think about things.
1:09:09.9 SC: But you can see why it would catch on. I mean, I don’t wanna run ahead of the data, but it seems natural that if the story is on the right track, then it would nudge us in the directions of things like capitalism, democracy, the Scientific Revolution, all of these things that we think of as being fundamentally based in individuals trying their best to do something and both competing and cooperating with each other to do it.
1:09:35.9 JH: Yeah, and that’s kind of my case, that Protestantism was a kind of accelerant on the kind of psychological and economic processes that were underway.
1:09:45.4 SC: And is there… How much do we know… I sort of asked this already, but maybe I can ask it in a different way, how much do we know about the comparative… What was going on 1000 years ago, or 500 years ago in China or the Islamic world? I mean, they had very advanced societies, but are you gonna say that it’s because they didn’t quite catch on to this individualism idea that Europe leapt ahead a little bit?
1:10:11.3 JH: Yeah, so I make the point… A big point of the book is that Europe was a very unlikely place to find this, if you had been in… Have an alien appearing at the Earth from orbit at one point in the year 1000, and noticing all this activity in China and the Middle East and Central Asia and places like that, where there’s lots of impressive science being done and impressive monuments being built and Europe seems to be a relative backwater in the year 1000, and there’s also some Muslim scholars who were making similar observations. And so then the question is, why did this happen?
1:10:48.9 JH: And I make the case that it’s the change in psychology initiated by the church and the change in the social world, led to these new institutions, led to things like representative government, gave a boost to things like science, and then eventually led to more rapid innovation, ’cause I make the case for the collective brain, which is this idea that innovation is driven by the recombination of ideas. So the larger a population you have and the more interconnected it is, the more ideas can flow among diverse minds and create baby ideas. And so I have various lines of evidence in this penultimate chapter making the case that there’s apprentices moving around Europe and masters get taken jobs in different cities, and just lots of opportunities for different ideas to be combined. More people are becoming literate, so they’re reading books written in the past or written by someone who lives very far away, just swapping ideas.
1:11:43.7 SC: It resonates… Let me be self-indulgent here just for a second, ’cause it resonates with two previous podcast guests that I’ve talked to. One is Jeffrey West, who in his book Scale tries to make this case that just getting a bunch of people together in the same place, talking to each other is a huge accelerant to new ideas, and that sounds like it’s part of your larger story.
1:12:06.6 JH: Yeah, and so you see urbanization, it starts going up. I described this process where people are moving from the hinterlands ’cause they’re not tied to their kin groups anymore, and the cities and towns are… You’re both getting new towns where they’re adopting these charters of rights and privileges for individual citizens, and you’re getting cities growing, so rapid urbanization, passing China in about 1200. Well, probably doesn’t pass the circa Mediterranean until after 1500, but just larger cities, lots of trade between the cities, so ideas flowing between the cities. For the most part, one shared religion, so people can flow… Universities have scholars moving from town to town. So just lots of things energizing that flow of ideas.
1:12:50.1 SC: And at the risk of stepping on a third rail here, another podcast I did was with Will Wilkinson, who is a policy analyst, who talks about the polarization divide in the United States, which he claims is mostly for many, many good, very empirical reasons is mostly an urban rural divide, and he actually relates psychological tests, the big five of personality inventory, to the choice to live in an urban area versus a rural area. And again, you see that people who are open to new ideas are gonna be driven to the urban areas where things are exciting and not necessarily comfortable, whereas people who are more traditional, but maybe also more conscientious will be happier in a more stable rural environment.
1:13:38.2 JH: Right, and within that kind of basic way of thinking… So he’s making an argument for self-selection there, and I’m sure that can play an important role in the US today, but of course in the past, it used to be that 95% of everyone was in a rural society. So a lot of people over the last few hundred years, in general, everybody’s much more urbanized, so there’s been this dramatic change over centuries in the amount of urbanization, and you can… In the book, I touch a little bit on the differences between cities that are on rivers and are port cities, and they tend to be more cosmopolitan, more open to strangers. Immigrants, of course, are a massive boost to invention ’cause they bring fresh new ideas. They actually make the locals, the native borns more innovative when they come in from other places.
1:14:25.6 SC: I mean, you say, of course, but there are people who don’t quite perceive this… These facets.
1:14:29.9 JH: Right. So of course to me because I’ve been actually writing a review of this evidence.
1:14:34.5 SC: Yeah, well, or of course, to anyone who hangs out in universities, you know, that immigration… Getting smart people from all over the world is the best thing that we can do.
1:14:41.8 JH: Exactly.
1:14:44.6 SC: Okay, final previous podcast guest I will ask you to comment on, I recently had David Stasavage on, who has written a wonderful history of democracy, and I learned a lot from it, and if I can boil his story down to a very simple idea, he argues that if you go a thousand years ago and compare Europe to the Islamic world or China, the irony is that technology and state institutions and bureaucracy were weaker in Europe than they were in the Islamic world or China. Just like you said, if an alien were looking down on the year 1200, Europe was a backwater, and because of that weakness, the governments were weak, the kings didn’t know how many taxes to collect or have an efficient way to raise an army, and that made it easier for democracy to develop, and then when democracy developed made it easier for science and technology to take off. So that sounds maybe complementary, but not quite the same as the story you’re telling.
1:15:43.1 JH: Yeah, I think it can be consistent with it. The interesting thing is though, one of my co-authors, which I summarized his work in the book, is that an account like that doesn’t explain why even today you can take immigrants, say you take immigrants to Europe from around the world, and you look at the intensive kinship of where their parents came from. So these are second generation immigrants. You can predict whether they vote, their participation in demonstrations, all kinds of things that make democracies run, based on the kinship system of where their parents came from. So there really is a kind of psychological element in which kinship alters people’s minds in a way that makes them more willing to do the things or more interested in doing the things that make modern democracies run.
1:16:33.2 SC: Yeah, I mean, this is why… This is how we started the conversation, but of course, the psychology is important. Of course bureaucracy is important. Of course technology is important. Of course religion is important. Do you ever like… When you’re following asleep at night, just think, “Oh my goodness, I will never figure this out. There are just too many things going on.”
1:16:53.1 JH: [chuckle] Yeah, yes, I do think that. But I guess part of my… I guess I’m trying to get a big idea on the table and try to convince other people that it’s an interesting idea, which is that so much of social science, so thinking about economics and psychology, but also other disciplines have assumed that psychology is something fixed in humans and that we can assume that constant and then they try to figure out the economics or the institutions or something like that. Now maybe I’m just making the problem harder because they could just… I’m saying you can’t assume that’s fixed, that’s not a parameter now, it’s a state variable. And so you gotta measure more things and it’s gonna take a bigger data set and whatnot to figure it out. And then the key idea is that our minds actually adapt to the institution, so I have emphasized this kinship stuff, but that’s really just one part of a much larger story where things like markets and this competition among societies and religion can affect how we think and what we pay attention to, how long our memories are. So if you wanna understand psychology, you gotta understand history and if you wanna understand history, you gotta understand psychology. So I guess I’m trying to encourage a more interdisciplinary approach to all these questions.
1:18:08.4 SC: Yeah, which I’m very, very sympathetic to. It makes perfect sense. And I guess the other thing that you already said, and I don’t want to get lost ’cause it’s crucially important and tracks very well with what David Stasavage was saying is the idea of the path dependence of these developments. It wasn’t inevitable from the start. Slight differences in choices amplify and branch out and you’re not guaranteed to end up in the same place.
1:18:36.5 JH: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a really important point. And it’s hard to know exactly how things are gonna play out. So one of the things that I’ve suggested in terms of… I think that humans are pretty bad at designing institutions from the top down, but we do know how to design variation selection systems, so you can have a bunch of people trying different ways to make an institution and then see how they perform over some reasonable period of time and then kind of take the best. So we should be… Have a population thinking, a kind of natural selectionist thinking in trying to figure out the best institutions or the best policies to solve problems.
1:19:11.6 SC: Yeah, and a sort of experimental, trial and error kind of attitude towards these things.
1:19:19.1 JH: Yeah, yeah. So I sometimes highlight these experiments where we have… We put students or something in a simple institution where they have to solve a public goods problem, we have them pick which one they wanna go into. Most of the time they pick the wrong one, they don’t pick the institution that maximizes the public good and gives them the highest dollar pay off. They pick some institution that allows them to avoid punishment or have some other thing they like.
1:19:42.7 SC: Right. Yeah, life is complicated, and it’s good to have a whole bunch of different people trying out different things so we can learn from what they do. It makes sense in retrospect. Okay, maybe to close things out, this has been a fantastic conversation, and I know, again, you’re trying to understand what happens in these societies, but once you talk about these issues, it’s almost impossible to not think about what should happen in these societies. Sort of the more moral aspects or normative aspects of these things. People… Everyone knows that western societies are individualistic and that’s led to great material prosperity, but it’s also led to breaking down of the tightness of family bonds and things like that. Can we learn about right and wrong and choices we make for making a good society from this kind of analysis as well as just a society that leads to universities and psychology classes and experiments?
1:20:40.8 JH: Yeah, I don’t… Well, the problem with the normative question is you always gotta tell me what is it you’re trying to maximize, right? So we talked a bit about innovation, and I feel like I have things to say about how to increase innovation, and it’s built around the collective brand, the free flow of ideas, and more trust in the value of immigrants, and so there’s a kind of whole program of what a policy would look like to try to increase innovation, but then you could say, if you care about religious homogeneity or lots of other kinds of things, then it all depends on what you want to do.
1:21:19.4 SC: Yeah, I think… Well, I think that’s fair. Okay, good enough. [chuckle] Do you have any… My final question is… I like to end on an optimistic note on the podcasts, given what we’ve learned about weirdness and the human brain, does this give us any insight on to how we can be even better at… Forget about choosing right from wrong. On those values that we agree on, we want people to be happy and prosperous and so forth, what are the lessons that we learned that we can actually put to work making society a better place?
1:21:57.1 JH: Well, I think that this idea of creating… I’ll go back to my innovation point, which was that taking the lessons of all this kind of innovation, the more that we bring different voices into the conversation and people from diverse backgrounds and have egalitarian conversations, non hierarchical social structures, the more we can develop new ideas and new ways of doing things. So it really is putting together this large collective brain, and that’s the kind of hope for solving a lot of the big problems we face. There are social problems in the sense that we got to cooperate, but if we can also come up with technological solutions or institutional solutions, that’s gonna be really important.
1:22:39.0 SC: I guess, yeah, one of the points you made about weirdness is not that it’s anti-social. It expands the circle of the people we can agree with and work with beyond our kin and family and clan to large groups, maybe even the world, and that’s something that we should joyfully embrace in a time when the world is kind of in trouble in various ways.
1:23:02.1 JH: Right, right. One of the things that… In a WEIRD world, there’s plenty of social groups, but usually the groups are defined by what people wanna say about themselves or what they wanna cultivate in themselves. So if you wanna cultivate support for human rights, then you can join human rights groups and get together with other people who are interested in human rights, rather than the other kinds of groups that one could join.
1:23:26.9 SC: Yeah, and good… Lots of good things we should be doing out there for the world. Alright, Joe Henrik, thanks so much for appearing on the Mindscape podcast.
1:23:33.2 JH: Great to be with you. Thanks.[/accordion-item][/accordion]
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Excellent conversation!
Though the hypothesis explaining the west being rich irked me a bit. Indian empires used to be the richest in the world for the longest period of time in modern history without being individualistic, industrialized, or pleasure-suspending. And the west got rich not by any of these virtues but by looting all these colonies which in turn funded the research and educational institutions throughout industrial revolution.
I understand the collective amnesia of European societies in explaining their economic success, but giving it a scientific label [that too in the same vein as the “white man’s burden”] is not nice, especially for all of us listening to this great podcast in India, or other former colonies in Asia and Africa.
Happy New Year!
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