The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph HenrichMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a sort of broad and ambitious book. The author is an anthropologist and one of the people who coined the term WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) to describe the populations most psychological studies are done on. The book covers:
- a review of the literature on cross-cultural psychological differences
- a review of the anthropological research on how cultural norms evolve and how they interact with people’s psychology
- the author’s theory of how WEIRD societies ended up being so unusual and successful, tracing back to the marriage- and family-related policies of the Catholic Church in the medieval era.
I found it super interesting and compelling. My favorite things:
For one, I’d heard the term WEIRD, and I knew about some studies showing cross-cultural psychological variation. But actually system-1 understanding that not everyone thinks like me seems really hard, and really important. Tbh I already have enough trouble with the fact that other people in my very specific subcultures sometimes think in different ways from me. But did you know non-WEIRD people:
- don’t experience the endowment effect
- give very little to the other person in the ultimatum game (and are totally fine with being given very little)
- don’t show much correlation between happiness and self-esteem
- have less differentiated personalities? (ie the Big 5 doesn’t apply, there are fewer than 5 factors)
For another, his picture of history through the lens of cultural evolution made a lot of things click: it felt like trad done right. What drew me to trad thinking was that it seemed to get a lot of things right that most people around me would frustratingly miss; I’d hear lots of people criticizing organized religion, or monogamy, or something, without ever seeming to reflect on how long it had existed, or how successful and prevalent it was throughout different human societies, and wonder why.
This book asks why, and comes up with answers: organized religion and monogamy were both hugely important to the success of earlier human societies, and those that had them outcompeted those that didn’t. But it also doesn’t stop there: modern WEIRD culture, which promotes lots of things like “individualism” and “innovation” and “questioning tradition” is the most successful culture in history. I ended up with a feeling of smug superiority to parochial traditionalists; as an unmarried, childless woman residing halfway across the world from my family, with an individualist psychology, a high level of market integration, and strongly universalist, utilitarian beliefs, I’m actually at the apex of Western civilization: the true successor to a thousand years of Western tradition from Charlemagne through the Enlightenment to today.
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