#361 Joseph Henrich: The WEIRDest People in the World
RECORDED ON JUNE 19th 2020.
Dr. Joseph Henrich is Professor and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is interested in the question of how humans evolved from “being a relatively unremarkable primate a few million years ago to the most successful species on the globe”, and how culture affected our genetic development. He is also the author of The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
In this episode, we focus on Dr. Henrich’s new book, The WEIRDest People in the World. We first talk about innate anchors, how societies evolved in complexity, the role that agriculture played, and the various aspects of WEIRD psychology. We then get into the Catholic Church’s Marriage and Family Program of the Middle Ages, and the different aspects of sociality that it influenced, including marriage, monogamy, urbanization, legal systems, work ethics, and even science and the Enlightenment values. We also talk about how we might evolve psychologically in the future, social engineering, and the replication crisis in social psychology. Toward the end, we answer some questions from a follower.
Time Links:
Innate anchors
The rise of chiefdoms
What agriculture changed
WEIRD and non-WEIRD psychologies
Emotions, guilt and shame
Impersonal prosociality
Can harmful norms and institutions last in human societies?
The Catholic Church’s Marriage and Family Program
Kinship in China, and rice cultivation and irrigation
Monogamous marriage
Market integration
New systems of law
Values of the Enlightenment
Work ethics
The development of science
The industrial revolution in England
The future
Social engineering
The replication crisis in social psychology
Questions from a follower
Follow Dr. Henrich’s work!
Follow Dr. Henrich’s work:
Faculty page: https://bit.ly/3aQSlww
Website: https://bit.ly/2MW4oPE
Culture, Cognition and Coevolution Lab: https://bit.ly/3cUV4pz
Culture, Cognition and Coevolution Lab (YT channel): https://bit.ly/2Aw0RVt
Works on ResearchGate: https://bit.ly/35jLQku
Books on Amazon: https://amzn.to/30Ct4Vl
The WEIRDest People in the World: https://amzn.to/3gdZvNM
Twitter handle: @JoHenrich