128 | Joseph Henrich on the Weirdness of the West

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2021

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:03.7	Welcome to the first episode of 2021, brand new year. Hope that it holds some good things for
0:10.0	you, me, the rest of the world, the whole bit. So there's a play by George Bernard Shaw,
0:14.8	Caesar and Cleopatra. And in there, Caesar has a line that is pardon him, Theodotus. He is a
0:21.1	barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
0:25.8	In this case, Caesar was talking about his secretary, Britannus, who is of course a Britain,
0:31.4	but I think that the lesson is a little bit wider than that. I think that we all tend to think
0:35.7	that the customs of our tribe and island are laws of nature. The ways that we behave, the ways
0:41.6	that we think, the ways that we feel, what we think are right and wrong, we grow up. In a certain
0:46.7	environment, we tend to think that's the right way to do it. Some of us rebel against it, others
0:50.9	don't, but it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of reflection to say, you know, it could be really,
0:56.2	really different. And I think that's an easy thing to say about customs, right? You know, which
1:01.4	hand you hold the fork with when you eat or something like that, maybe even about morality,
1:06.0	depending on your issues about morality. But what about more objective things like our psychology,
1:12.4	how we actually think, what actually goes on in our brains? Today's guest is Joseph Henrich,
1:18.1	and he has argued that modern views of psychology have been drastically shaped by the fact that most
1:23.6	psychological studies, most research work in this field has been done by and on a very particular
1:29.9	subset of people. What he calls weird, that's an acronym, not just that they're weird, but I think
1:35.0	that's supposed to be the resonance of it. It's an acronym standing for Western educated,
1:39.7	industrialized, rich, and democratic. The point being that not only are most psychologists in
1:46.0	sort of Western universities where these characteristics would be common, but most psychological studies
1:52.0	are done on college students at those universities, right? If any of you have been to college and
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