Speaker 1: Today, I'm going to be speaking with Joe Henrich, who's professor of human evolutionary
biology at Harvard University and also author of the book The Weirdest People in the World
How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. It's really great having
you on today. I appreciate your time. Speaker 3: Yeah, good to be with.
Speaker 1: So let's first talk about Weird is an acronym WTI, RDF for Western educated,
industrialized, rich and Democratic. So how did you first start to sort of think about this,
this group of people as a group of people and sort of what the defining characteristics are?
Speaker 3: Yeah. So around 2006 or so, I began working with two cultural psychologists,
Steve Hein in R and R in Xi'an at the University of British Columbia. And, you know, we had come
together over lunch and stuff and began to talk about our research. And what we each
had realized somewhat independently was not only was there cultural variation around the world and
key aspects of psychology, but that the populations most commonly studied by
psychologists and others were unusual when seated in that global perspective. So they were often
at the tail end of the distribution or, you know, distinctively set apart from other populations.
So we came up with the idea of writing a paper together. The weirdest people in the world
meant to raise an alarm, kind of a methodological, methodological concern
aimed at psychologists and others that they were over generalizing from the populations
that they studied, that they they couldn't make assumptions about human behavior by studying
American undergraduates or people online, people from those sources.
And then as a as a way of referring to the populations most commonly studied by researchers,
we came up with the acronym Weird just as way, and it's meant as a consciousness raising device
to kind of remind researchers that they they should be cautious about generalizing.
Speaker 1: So when we talk about the characteristics,
Western makes sense, educated makes sense, industrialized, rich and democratic. When we
talk about rich, are we talking about rich at a global scale or are we saying even within these
Western countries we're talking about the rich? Speaker 3: Well, I mean, what we had in mind was
mostly psychologists were sampling undergrad at the time. They were mostly sampling undergraduates
from a small handful of countries. So the US, Canada, a couple of places in Europe, Australia,
places like that. So, you know, to the degree to which American undergraduates tend to be
disproportionately sampled from the middle and upper class. Yeah. So in that case it leaves out
lower asks. And then of course, globally, those are among the richest countries in the world.
Speaker 1: Before we move on to some of the other aspects of your research, it's often
repeated and things that are often repeated aren't necessarily true, but it's often repeated that
if you compare folks from the large cities in the United States to the rest of the U.S.
and then compare them to people from places like London and Paris, etc.,
that the folks from large cities across these countries are much more similar than those
within the United States living living in urban versus rural settings, for example. Do you think
in your research, does that sound right to you or does that maybe miss some important things?
Speaker 3: Well, it definitely misses some important things. So
in putting together the evidence that we were able to gather. You can compare, you know,
corporate managers or executives from around the world working all working at, you know,
leading productive companies. And you can detect the same kind of psychological variation you can
get if you compare, you know, the groups from lower socioeconomic status or, you know, more
representative populations of these countries. Speaker 1: Can you talk a little bit about, you
know, in the title of the book, you use the term psychologically peculiar. Peculiar can just mean
unique and different, but it can also mean that the sort of something maybe that we
would identify is stranger or unusual. What are the psychological peculiarities of this
group that is often the source for for studies? Speaker 3: Yeah. So the key thing I wanted to
focus on is trying to understand the psychological variation we find around across populations around
the globe. So some of the key dimensions that emerged were, one is a kind of psychological
cluster or complex called individualism. That's associated with how people think about themselves,
about overconfidence in self esteem and the role of guilt versus shame.
And so there's a whole cluster there where people in weird societies tend to think about themselves
as unitary individual decision makers rather than nodes in a social network. They tend to
be over. Are confident. They tend to have concerns about guilt, but shame is relatively unimportant.
This goes along with another pattern which is analytic versus holistic thinking.
So there tends to be an inclination towards more analytic thinking. So breaking problems down into
parts, assigning properties to those parts, and then reasoning from that point of view,
as opposed to looking at the relationships among parts to make explanations. So we find lots of
variation there. The use of intentionality and moral judgment to be another one.
So lots of Westerners really think intentions are important. But in other places, you know,
intentions don't seem to be important at all, at least in making some moral judgments.
Moral universalism. So the degree to which you think everyone should be judged by the same
moral standards versus moral particularism, where you make a difference between how people within
some circle should be judged versus people outside that circle. Trust in strangers is
another important one. Things like that. Speaker 1: What are the sources of these
peculiarities? I mean, is it is it media? Is it the characteristics themselves, like being,
you know, rich or industrialized or whatever the case may be? Does religion and and or
churches play a role? What what what causes this? Speaker 3: Well, I mean, there's probably lots of
factors that affect overall global psychological variation. But in the book, I was particularly
interested in trying to understand why it was that European and European descent populations became
particularly individualistic and particularly have a strong, impersonal processing quality.
So this trust in cooperation with strangers, which should be contrasted with a more interpersonal pro
sociology, where people are much more cooperative and positively inclined towards people they know,
people they have relationships with, that kind of thing with in-group loyalty.
So the the case that I make is that much of the kind of unusual nature of European society as
it emerged in the last 500 years, comes from a particular set of taboos and prescriptions
that one branch of Christianity, the one that evolves into the Roman Catholic
Church, began to promulgate in late antiquity and eventually, although gradually spreads throughout
many parts of Western Europe and transforms the intensive, complex kinship organizations that
you would find in many pre-Christian European societies and breaks them down into monogamous,
tubular families. And then this opens the door for other kinds of institutions,
impersonal institutions, eventually things like democracy and Western law and whatnot.
But initially things like guilds, universities, monasteries that were organized differently and
built around notions of individuals trying to attract individuals. So it really puts these
populations on a different kind of cultural evolutionary trajectory than we we see in many
societies around the world and back into history. Speaker 1: So if I understand correctly,
even though today in the United States, for example, Roman Catholics are not a majority, the
evolution and growth of the Roman Catholic Church, starting 500 years ago in Europe,
led to, in a sense, psychological changes, which include acceptance of certain types
of relationships to institutions that are still very relevant today. In terms
of how this group you study relates to the world. Speaker 3: That's right. You should think of that
the stuff the Catholic Church did as initiating a kind of cultural evolutionary process. And
these principles get to varying degrees embedded in secular institutions and become part of the
general cultural milieu. One of the one of the cases I make in the book is that this practice led
to the emergence of Protestantism. So, you know, there's this goes on for a thousand years before
Martin Luther and others initiate this Protestant reformation, which, of course,
is a is a constellation, a mosaic of different religious movements that are rebelling against
the Catholic Church. But, I mean, they have sort of super weird characteristics
in the sense that they're really focused on mental states, the role of intentionality,
sensuality on the individual, emphasis on hard work, deferral of gratification.
So it is only further accentuates some of the basic characteristics that had
been developing prior to that. Speaker 1: You know, some of
the characteristics you write about in that you've spoken about high level of individualism
may be analytical to some degree in a way that's not as common in other societies or in other
parts of society, non conformism, etc.. I will often hear from people when they visit a country
that is outside of of this group, you know, friends who have done work in Southeast Asia
or have gone to Africa, etc. and they seem to very quickly pick up on the fact that there's just sort
of like something different about the perspective on the world around them. That has to do with
some of the traits that you're pointing out here. So it seems as though part of the reason many who
are part of this weird group aren't aware of this is they're just around people like
themselves all the time. In other words, we have the ability to notice when folks are different,
we maybe just aren't spending enough time around them, but that once you do, you realize that there
is there is some kind of cultural difference here. Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean,
that's the real value to traveling and living in other societies. So, you know, I come up as an
anthropologist, so as a cultural anthropologist, so I got to live in Amazonia in small communities.
I did a long stretch of fieldwork in the South Pacific on remote islands and, you know, really
tried to dig in and live among the people and the degree to which other people did that for other
reasons, it really does kind of, you know, it's like a fish out of water or something. You really
then begin to notice that lack of water around you or that the striking difference that you don't
see unless unless you get removed from the water. Speaker 1: Is it hard to understand some of these
things just by being told about them? Because what my mind is going to is if you read some of Jared
Diamond's books, for example, where he talks except. Pensively about his time spent in the
Pacific with the Maori people, etc. When you just read his descriptions of the culture, yes it's
different. But I can only imagine that the degree to which you can really feel that partially has
to be from actually being there thousands of miles from where you normally are and sort of being told
about this phenomena can only really do so much. Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I, there's different ways
to get at it. So of course, you know, living with people and learning the language and trying to
really engage in the society is that is the best way to get a feel for it. Yeah. I mean, there are,
you know, I guess, you know, things like novels can try to bring you and put you in the shoes
of someone living in that society, you know, an honor society where you're very concerned about
maintaining Your Honor because that protects your family and it's core to your identity as a person.
So so that's another way. And then, of course, you know, some amount of
travel can at least give you a feel for it. Speaker 1: Are any of the distinctions that
you study can can value judgments be assigned to them to some degree
in terms of either what's, quote, better for the individuals within
or for the groups in society? Is that a whole or is this merely we're observing
differences and that's as far as it goes? Speaker 3: Well, so my mission in the book
was just to, well, kind of start out by documenting the differences. But the thing
I was really interested in doing is explaining the variation and coming to my readers, many of
which I sort of assumed as I as I wrote the book, would be mostly weird. So I was trying to jar them
in ways that would make them recognize the water, so to speak. So recognize the sort of
psychological differences. So when I talk about analytic thinking, you know, analytic thinking
can be very powerful, breaking things down into parts and assigning them properties. It's really
the basis of how you know what physics is, right? Break everything down into particles and give them
charges or spin or charge or something like that, and then explain everything from that.
Psychologists give people personalities and try to explain that economists do a similar thing.
So it's very powerful, but you can miss the forest. So like some of the subsections in the
book are like missing the forest, reminding people that if you're too much of an analytic thinker,
you can miss how all the parts fit together and how the relationships are so important. So, for
example, when you do when psychologists do work on what leads to effective problem solving in teams,
the best teams at solving problems in engaging in creativity are teams that have a mixture
of analytic and holistic thinkers. So you need both growth groups. Towards the end of the book,
I really emphasize the role of embracing cultural differences for generating innovation.
So most, most innovations are or combinations of existing ideas. And so the degree to which
you can get people with very different ideas, different ways of seeing the world
to interact and mutually trusting and potentially cooperative and beneficial ways you're just going
to generate more innovation. So one of the things I've been researching lately is, is the degree to
which immigration energized economic growth and innovation patenting within the United States.
Speaker 1: You talk in the book about delayed gratification and differences among different
societies on delayed gratification. Many of us have probably heard of these studies that
were done on little kids where, you know, they say, I'm going to put a cookie in front of you
and I'm going to leave. And if you don't eat it, I'll give you a second cookie later and you kind
of evaluate, you know, who does what. I think to some degree. In weird societies as defined by you,
being able to delay gratification is seen as objectively good.
And that may not always be the case, but it seems as though it's seen as sort of like a virtue in
some sense, being able to delay gratification. And one of the things you found is that not delaying
gratification is more common among non weird people. Is that a place where there's actually
sort of like logical explanations for why it's not objectively better to delay gratification
if you consider the context, maybe? Speaker 3: Yeah. So that's a great
case because people do have a sense that that's sort of a virtue. That's very much
a Protestant virtue, actually. So you get that right out of Protestantism.
So the way to think about it is that these aspects of our psychology are adapted to the institutional
and ecological environments that we have to confront. So they did have Chris Blackmon and
colleagues, political scientists and economists. The University of Chicago did this research in
Liberia, where they they basically created a training course to try to increase the self
regulation of poor men. They try to make them more patient and more willing to defer gratification.
The training worked and they were able to show that on the psychological tests,
men were willing to defer gratification more. And initially, there seemed to be a big success
because the men were able to begin to develop little nest eggs of savings and things like that.
Right. Okay. So that's working. But then it turns out that because the environment is so unstable,
the men would get robbed or they'd get shaken down by the police or something would happen
and they'd lose their complete nest egg so they wouldn't get the pleasure that would have come
from indulging in that. So that that's one way. And you need a stable environment where you can
preserve that savings and you need the chance that you're going to be alive when you get a chance to
take advantage of it. Otherwise it's better to to consume now when you're sure you're going to get
something out of it. The other thing that that varies across societies is in a lot of cases,
if I accumulate much, my my relatives are going to come and ask for it, essentially. So we'll die.
There'll be a funeral or there'll be a wedding. So what I do one way to deal with any kind of rising
surplus is just to give it away, have a party or give it to others. And the way people think
about that, or maybe not consciously, but the way it ends up functioning, is that you're storing
your surplus in the goodwill and relationships you have with others. Right? When you're in need,
you don't have to have a nest egg. Your nest egg is scattered among all these
friends and relatives and close contacts that you've cultivated over long periods of time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's super interesting. And to some degree, I've studied that a
little bit in Hasidic Jewish communities, and there's that that phenomena is very, very
notable there. Interestingly enough, the book is fascinating. It's called The Weirdest People in
the World How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
We've been speaking with the book's author, Harvard University professor Joe Henrich.
Joe, really appreciate your time today. Speaker 3: Okay. Well, it's great to be with you.