Henrich attempts nothing less than to trace the roots of cultural progress and how that evolution has shaped human psychology individually, as well as, more importantly, the structures and institutions that have molded modern societies. It is an ambitious project. First, WEIRD stands for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Henrich makes the case that such people are the exceptions throughout human history, not the rule. To study their psychologies and generalize to all of human nature has been a huge mistake prevalent in academic research. Henrich breaks down his thesis in a nutshell, “The spread of a religious belief that every individual should read the Bible for themselves led to the diffusion of widespread literacy among both men and women, first in Europe and later across the globe. Broad-based literacy changed people’s brains and altered their cognitive abilities in domains related to memory, visual processing, facial recognition, numerical exactness, and problem-solving. It probably also indirectly altered family sizes, child health, and cognitive development, as mothers became increasingly literate and formally educated. These psychological and social changes may have fostered speedier innovation, new institutions, and—in the long run—greater economic prosperity.”
What makes WEIRD people weird? “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…. We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time…. We simplify complex phenomena by breaking them down into discreet constituents and assigning properties or abstract categories to these components…. We often miss the relationships between the parts or the similarities between phenomena that don’t fit nicely into our categories…. WEIRD people are also particularly patient and often hardworking. Through potent self-regulation, we can defer gratification—in financial rewards, pleasure, and security—well into the future in exchange for discomfort and uncertainty in the present…. WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative towards strangers or anonymous others…. We WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do…. 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…. Guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation, while shame depends on societal standards and public judgment.”
One trait that Henrich highlights is impersonal prosociality. “Impersonal trust is part of a psychological package called impersonal prosociality, which is associated with a set of social norms, expectations, and motivations for impartial fairness, probity, and cooperation with strangers, anonymous others, or even abstract institutions like the police or government. Impersonal prosociality includes the inclinations we feel toward a person who is not tied to our social network at all…. Impersonal prosociality also includes motivations, heuristics, and strategies for punishing those who break impartial norms…. [WEIRD people] are also more inclined to punish anyone who violates their impartial norms of fairness and honesty even if the violation isn’t directly against themselves…. Countries where people show more impersonal prosociality have greater national incomes (GDP per capita), greater economic productivity, more effective governments, less corruption, and faster rates of innovation.”
Another trait common among WEIRD societies is the emphasis on people’s intentions, rather than real world outcomes. “Intentions, beliefs, and personal dispositions are so central to WEIRD moral judgments that the idea that people in other societies judge others based mostly or entirely on what they did—the outcome—violates their strong intuition that mental states are primary. But, putting relatively little importance on mental states is probably how most people would have made moral judgements of strangers over most of the last 10 millennia.”
Humans are one of the only species who make use of a cultural toolkit. “Unlike other animals, we have evolved genetically to rely on learning from others to acquire an immense amount of behavioral information, including motivations, heuristics, and beliefs that are central to our survival and reproduction. This ability to learn from one another is so powerful compared to other species that we alone can accumulate increasingly complex bodies of cultural knowledge, related to everything from sophisticated projectile technologies and food-processing techniques to new grammatical tools and expanding packages of social norms.” Humans have also coevolved genetically and culturally, each building upon the other. “We have evolved genetically to learn adaptively in ways that calibrate our minds and behavior to the environments we encounter…. Our evolved capacities for cultural learning have been honed to figure out who to learn from, what to learn, and when to use cultural learning over other informational sources like individual experience or innate intuitions…. To figure out who to learn from, adults, children, and even infants integrate cues related to a potential role model’s skill, competence, reliability, success, prestige, health, age, sex, and ethnicity, among others. By preferentially attending to more successful or prestigious people, learners focus their attention and memory on those individuals most likely to possess useful information…. By combining cues like prestige and success with self-similarity cues like sex and ethnicity (e.g. speaking the same dialect), learners can target their attention on those who possess the skills, strategies, and attitudes most likely to be useful to them in their future roles or communities…. When problems are difficult, situations are ambiguous, or individual learning is costly, people should rely more heavily on learning from others…. The sharpening of our cultural learning abilities further fueled cumulative cultural evolution to generate an ever-broadening array of more complex adaptations, thereby generating autocatalytic feedback between genes and culture. As the importance, diversity, and complexity of cultural products ratcheted up, natural selection gradually strengthened our inclinations to rely on cultural learning over our instincts and individual experiences because the tools, protocols, and practices that we acquired from others became far superior to anything that any single individual could possibly figure out on their own…. Human societies, unlike those of other primates, are stitched together by culturally transmitted social norms that cluster into institutions.”
Within humanity’s great variation, different societies and cultures evolved over time, who then competed with each other evolutionarily at the group level. “Norms that favor success in competition with other groups tend to survive and spread. Such intergroup competition can occur through violent conflict…. But it can also occur when less successful groups copy the practices and beliefs of more successful groups or when more prosperous groups simply grow faster, through higher fertility, lower mortality, or greater net immigration.” The key innovation was agriculture, which allowed societies to scale up exponentially. “The potential for agriculture and herding—food production—created the conditions for fierce intergroup competition to drive up the scale and complexity of societies, generating a coevolutionary interaction between agriculture and societal complexity: the more societies relied on agriculture and herding, the more they needed to scale up…. As populations increasingly relied on farming, archaeological studies reveal that the less nutritious diets derived from cereals and other crops produced people who were shorter, sicker, and more likely to die young. However, the effects of sedentism and the productivity of unskilled (young) labor were such that farmers reproduced more quickly than did mobile hunter-gatherers…. Early farming spread not because rational individuals prefer to farm, but because farming communities with particular institutions beat mobile hunter-gatherer populations in intergroup competition.”
Henrich makes the case that religion was a crucial aspect of cultural evolution. “Religions have fostered trade by increasing trust, legitimized political authority, and expanded people’s conceptions of their communities by shifting their focus from their own clans or tribes to larger imagined communities…. Cultural evolution, driven by intergroup competition, favored the emergence and spread of supernatural beliefs that increasingly endowed gods with concerns about human action and the power to punish and reward…. By roughly 200 BCE, universalizing religions included variants of three key features, which were psychological game changers. First contingent afterlives…. Second, free will…. Third, moral universalism.”
WEIRD societies have less strong kinship ties than traditional societies. These ties are both fewer and weaker. “Five of the kinship traits that characterize WEIRD societies [are] (1) bilateral descent, (2) little or no cousin marriage, (3) monogamous marriage only, (4) nuclear family households, and (5) neolocal residence.” The weakening of kinship bonds was a long process in the West. “First, between about 400 and 1200 CE, the intense kin-based institutions of many European tribal populations were slowly degraded, dismantled, and eventually demolished by the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church…. Then, from the ruins of their traditional social structures, people began to form new voluntary associations based on shared interests or beliefs rather than on kinship or tribal affiliations…. The dissolution of intensive kin-based institutions and the gradual creation of independent monogamous nuclear families represents the proverbial pebble that started the avalanche to the modern world in Europe.”
Henrich calls the set of marriage decrees by the Roman Catholic Church the “Marriage and Family Program.” Of most import, these rules prohibited marriage to blood relatives, prohibited marriage to affinal kin, prohibited polygynous marriage, prohibited marriage to non-Christians, created spiritual kinship, discouraged the adoption of children, required both the bride and groom to publicly consent to marriage, encouraged (and sometimes required) newly married couples to setup independent households—neolocal residence, and encouraged the individual ownership of property and inheritance by personal testament.
Why was breaking down kinship ties so important? These ties tended to foster conformity. “By embedding individuals within dense, interdependent, and inherited webs of social connections, intensive kinship norms regulate people’s behavior in subtle and and powerful ways. These norms motivate individuals to closely monitor themselves and members of their own group to make sure that everyone stays in line. They also endow elders with substantial authority over junior members. Successfully navigating these kinds of social environments favors conformity to peers, deference to traditional authorities, sensitivity to shame, and an orientation toward the collective (e.g. the clan) over oneself.” This was the opposite of what traits were selected for in proto-WEIRD societies. “Success in these individual-centered worlds favors the cultivation of greater independence, less deference to authority, more guilt, and more concern with personal achievement.”
The Roman Catholic Church, whether it was intentional or not, did effectively break down European kinship bonds over time. “National populations that collectively experienced longer durations under the Western Church tend to be (A) less tightly bound by norms, (B) less conformist, (C) less enamored with tradition, (D) more individualistic, (E) less distrustful of strangers, (F) stronger on universalistic morality, (G) more cooperative in new groups with strangers, (H) more responsive to third-party punishment…. (I) more inclined to voluntarily donate blood, (J) more impersonally honest (toward faceless institutions), (K) less inclined to accumulate parking tickets under diplomatic immunity, and (L) more analytically minded.” Henrich makes the convincing case that this has nothing to do with Christianity as a religion. “The difference between the Orthodox and Western Churches is important, because it shows that psychological variation, and later economic and political differences, aren’t due to something about exposure to Roman institutions or Christianity per se…. The long-term impact of the Western vs. Orthodox Churches lies in policies about, and implementation of, marriage and family practices, especially those related to incest taboos.”
One of the first downstream effects of proto-WEIRD societies was the gradual conception of the rule of law in society. “In assembling these new associations and organizations, the emerging proto-WEIRD psychology—analytic thinking, individualism, and a non-relational morality—would have favored the development of both impartial rules that granted privileges and obligations to individuals (not clans) and impersonal mechanisms for enforcing trust, such as accounting records, commercial laws, and written contracts.” In Europe, this went hand-in-hand with increased levels of individualization, the growth in the formation of voluntary networks, and the urbanization of the population. “The breakdown of intensive kin-based institutions opened the door to urbanization and the formation of free cities and charter towns, which began developing greater self-governance. Often dominated by merchants, urban growth generated rising levels of market integration and—we can infer—higher levels of impersonal trust, fairness, and cooperation. While these psychological and social changes were occurring, people began to ponder notions of individual rights, personal freedoms, the rule of law, and the protection of private property. These new ideas just fit people’s emerging cultural psychology.” In a Europe dominated culturally by the rules first laid down by the Catholic Church, kin-based institutions found it nearly impossible to stay powerful or even relevant. “The Church suppressed nearly all the basic tools of intensive kinship. Under these constraints, family businesses struggled to outcompete other organizational forms. At the same time, politically or economically powerful family lineages were simply more likely to die out without polygyny, customary inheritance, remarriage, and adoption.”
Canon law was another aspect of the Roman Catholic Church that helped shape WEIRD societies. “As analytical thinkers from a moralizing religion, the canonists went looking for universalizing principles…. Since analytical thinkers hate contradictions, much of the development of Western law has been about ferreting out and resolving the contradictions that emerge when one tries to isolate a set of principles and apply them more broadly…. In many [traditional] societies, law is about restoring harmony and maintaining the peace, not, as it is for more analytic thinkers, about defending individual rights or making sure that abstract principles of “justice” are served.”
Henrich concludes by reemphasizing the importance of the ratcheting effects of culture. “The larger the population of engaged minds, the faster the rate of cumulative cultural evolution. That is, the larger the network of people learning or doing something, the more opportunities there will be for individuals to produce improvements…. The greater the interconnectedness among individuals—among learners and their teachers over generations—the faster the rate of cumulative cultural evolution…. Innovation can emerge even in the absence of conscious invention…. Complex innovations almost always arise from the accumulation of small additions or modifications, so even the most important contributors make only incremental additions…. Most innovations are really just novel recombinations of existing ideas, techniques, or approaches…. Lucky mistakes, fortunate misunderstandings, and serendipitous insights play a central role in invention…. Necessity is certainly not the mother of invention. Over the course of human history, people often ignored life-saving inventions for years, sometimes only realizing how much they needed an invention long after its arrival…. Cumulative cultural evolution—including innovation—is fundamentally a social and cultural process that turns societies into collective brains. Human societies vary in their innovativeness due in large part to the differences in the fluidity with which information diffuses through a population of engaged minds and across generations as well as to how willing individuals are to try novel practices or adopt new beliefs, concepts, and tools.”
Henrich makes the case that the cultural evolution of western Europe was uniquely built on circumstances that started with the Roman Catholic Church’s marriage and family program, which then evolved from there to form today’s WIERD societies. Catholic marriage laws were just the first stone in the foundation, however. A unique culture built up from there. “Four voluntary associations—charter cities, monasteries, apprenticeships, and universities—all contributed to broadening the flow of knowledge and technology around Europe…. Breaking kin-groups down into nuclear families would have had complex effects on the collective brain…. Unconstrained by the bonds of kinship, learners can potentially select particularly knowledgeable or skilled teachers from this broader network…. There are many economic and geographic factors that matter too, but if there’s a secret ingredient in the recipe for Europe’s collective brain, it’s the psychological package of individualism, analytic orientation, positive-sum thinking, and impersonal prosociality that had been simmering for centuries…. People’s psychology is influenced not only by the communities they grew up in but also by the ghosts of past institutions—by the worlds faced by their ancestors around which rich systems of beliefs, customs, rituals, and identities were built.”
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