HOW does the culture we live in influence our psychology, motivation and decision making? Joe Henrich was a cultural anthropologist working in the Amazon when he first tried to find out. He pioneered the use of experimental cooperation games like the prisoner’s dilemma and the ultimatum game outside the lab. Later, he realised that his findings have big implications for psychological research, which tends to focus on students from Western backgrounds. In 2010, he introduced the “WEIRD” concept to describe the unusual psychology of the subjects in the vast majority of these studies. Now professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, he tells New Scientist about the origins of WEIRDness, its impact on history and its role in the modern world.
Dan Jones: When did you realise that you, your colleagues and most of the people you teach are WEIRD?
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Joe Henrich: The WEIRD label emerged from a series of lunches I started having around 2006 with two cultural psychologists, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan. We had noticed that in the behavioural sciences and psychology in particular, about 96 per cent of study participants were from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic societies – and that they were often psychological outliers in comparison with other populations. WEIRD people tend to show greater trust in strangers and fairness towards anonymous others; think more analytically rather than holistically; make more use of intentions in moral judgements; are more concerned with personality, the self and the cultivation of personal attributes; they are more individualistic and less loyal to their group; and they are more likely to judge the behaviour of others as reflecting some enduring disposition rather than temporary situational factors.
So is it the West versus the rest?
It is important not to set up a dichotomy between the WEIRD and non-WEIRD. WEIRDness is a multi-dimensional continuum, and there is a lot of variation even within Western Europe. , we took data from the World Values Survey and, using techniques from population genetics, analysed the cultural distance of various populations from the US, the weirdest of WEIRD countries. This WEIRD scale shows New Englanders as the WEIRDest population in the world and substantially different to populations in the Middle East and Africa at the other end. Interestingly, although there is a huge body of research in social psychology setting up an East-West dichotomy, it turns out that the typical subjects studied in Japan or China are kind of in the middle of the WEIRD spectrum.
How did the WEIRD mind evolve?
This is the question I have been trying to answer for the past 10 years. In my new book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, I argue that social changes ushered in by what I call the marriage and family programme of the Western Catholic church was a major driving force, especially their impact on kinship.
Why is kinship so important?
Kinship systems are collections of norms that define how we should behave in various contexts. They were likely the first human social institutions to emerge because they are built on our evolved psychology. The institution of marriage, for example, taps into our species’ pair-bonding psychology, and notions of extended kin groups play on a core kinship psychology for helping and caring for our children, siblings and other close relatives.
The social norms that make up kinship systems structure the world you are born into. They shape who you can marry, what you can inherit and own, who you form alliances with, where you live and what kind of economic activities you engage in. As we grow up among the norms and institutions of our society, we develop psychological adaptations to navigate this social world.
What does kinship have to do with WEIRDness?
In most agricultural societies, people have lived enmeshed in kin-based institutions within tribal groups or networks. Inheritance and post-marital residence often followed either the male or female line – but not both – so people often lived in extended unilineal households, and wives or husbands moved to live with their spouses’ kinfolk. Many kinship units collectively owned or controlled territory, and kin-based organisations provided members with protection, insurance and security, caring for sick, injured and poor members as well as the elderly. Arranged marriages with relatives such as cousins were customary, and polygynous marriages were common for high-status men. These intensive kin networks nurture a non-WEIRD psychology, creating a more collectivist mindset with greater conformity, obedience to authority, nepotism and in-group loyalty.
How did the church change kinship systems?
The Western church introduced prohibitions on marriage to blood relatives that were extended to include distant relatives, eventually up to sixth cousins, which broke down ties between families, tribes and clans. It prohibited polygamous marriage and discouraged the adoption of children so that some lineages simply died out because they had no heirs. The church also encouraged, and sometimes required, newly married couples to set up independent households, and promoted the individual ownership of property.
Why would this change people’s psychology?
Instead of being born into a world where you inherit most of your social relationships, where everything is about social relationships, and there is strong in-group loyalty, obedience and conformity, now you have to find and develop your own mutually beneficial relationships. And when you are deciding which towns, guilds or other voluntary associations to join – which will be your new safety net, rather than your kin network – you are looking for people that share your interests, beliefs and so on. This focuses attention on people’s underlying personalities, traits and dispositions, rather than their pre-existing relationship to you. Your success in the world is now tied to cultivating your attributes, making yourself appealing to others because you are going to do business together or get married.
How have you gone about testing this idea?
First we created two “kinship intensity” indices. One measured the strength of kinship ties in more than 1200 populations from around the world, drawing on anthropological observations dating back more than 100 years and recorded in the Ethnographic Atlas [a database of cultures across the world]. The other looked at rates of cousin marriage across Europe over the 20th century, with higher rates meaning higher kinship intensity. We also developed measures of how long different countries and regions within Europe had been exposed to the Western church. Then we looked at 24 psychological variables related to WEIRD psychology that have been studied across many countries and populations. and the longer the church had been present, the WEIRDer the minds of people living there today.
You believe WEIRDness also helps explain how the West became “particularly prosperous”. What is the link?
A WEIRDer and more individualistic psychology provides fertile ground for the development of formal institutions and notions of individual rights and equality before the law that would be hard to conceive of in a world of clans or kindreds. As people in the West moved away from tight kinship networks towards voluntary associations of strangers in the form of labour unions, guilds, monasteries, universities and businesses, they adjusted psychologically to be more trusting of people outside their kin group and also developed contract law to buttress voluntary associations. This happened much earlier than in places such as China. The WEIRD mind is also particularly patient, as documented in many studies, which – combined with trust and an individualistic drive to set yourself apart – helps drive innovation in technology and economic activities. This eventually launched the Industrial Revolution.
“The picture of psychology we have doesn’t represent that of Homo sapiens”
What are the downsides to WEIRDness?
In societies where there is a strong sense of kinship, like Fiji where I have done fieldwork, there is a sense of security, community, oneness – a kind of comfort that comes from the warm embrace of knowing you are at the centre of a tight web of relations who will always have your back. They aren’t tied to you because you are a convenient contact or are currently smart or successful, they are tied to you in a deep way and they will be tied to your children. This is a snug, secure, happy feeling. WEIRDness undermines this feeling.
People living in tribal or clan-based societies also tend to see themselves as links in a chain connecting past to future, creating a sense of continuity that gives people a real sense of meaning and security. Then you get Westerners who are like “I’m an individual ape on a pale blue dot in the middle of a giant black space” and “What does it all mean?”.
What are the consequences of psychology’s bias towards WEIRD subjects?
It means that the picture of “human psychology” portrayed in the textbooks, and still in many journal articles, doesn’t represent the psychology of Homo sapiens at all. Perhaps even more concerning is how this bias hampers our efforts to understand the origins and nature of psychological processes and brain development. Much of what looks like reliably developing features of minds, with clear developmental trajectories over childhood, turn out to be the result of cultural products, like the institutions, values, technologies or languages individuals confront and must learn, internalise and navigate to make their way in the world. This applies not only to psychology and neuroscience – including perception, memory, learning, motivations, reasoning and sociality – but also to aspects of human physiology, anatomy and health. WEIRD people have flat feet, impoverished microbiomes, high rates of myopia and unnaturally low levels of exposure to parasites like helminths, which may increase their risk of heart disease and allergies.
Then there is the applied side of the WEIRD people problem. If people in different places are psychologically different, then the same forms of government, social policies and economic programmes will often have very different impacts and results. This has often been ignored, as WEIRD governing institutions and economic policies have been transplanted, often word-for-word, into countries and communities around the world. I suspect that some of the failure of well-intentioned efforts to generate economic growth or improved health conditions result from failures to account for differences in people’s cultural psychology.
Is the world becoming WEIRDer?
With increasing urbanisation and globalisation there is a trend towards smaller families and WEIRDer ways of thinking. Even something as simple as the spread of Western-style schools is going to push people towards more analytic thinking. So a loss of psychological and cultural variation is occurring. But I think we are going to see new ways of organising communities and structuring the social world and people’s relationships. So, I don’t think we have to worry that the institutions that spread out of Europe over recent centuries are going to crush the world’s psychological and social differences. As people reinterpret what they learned from other societies and synthesise their own way of doing things, the world will continue to blend and fragment in a mosaic of cultural and psychological diversity.
