Modern Wisdom - #422 - Dr Joe Henrich - Evolution, Psychology, Monogamy & Culture

Episode Date: January 15, 2022

Joe Henrich is Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and an author. Humans like to think that we're sovereign individuals with agency over our preferences and actions. But we are also a part of our social environment and Joe has teased apart some fascinating trends which explain how our location and culture have huge impacts on the way we behave, our preferences on everything from dating to work and family life to religion. Expect to learn why the things we consider to be human nature could just be cultural conditioning, the dangerous future if there's lots of sexless men, how the choice between growing rice and wheat impacts family life, what having diplomatic immunity from parking tickets can teach us about human nature, how Joe's lab can use language to archaeologically tell us about social trends from history and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy The Weirdest People In The World - https://amzn.to/3F3wUY7  Follow Joe on Twitter - https://twitter.com/JoHenrich  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the show, my guest today is Joe Henrik. He's a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University and an author. Humans like to think that we're sovereign individuals with agency over our preferences and actions, but we are also a part of our social environment and Joe has teased apart some fascinating trends, which explain how our location and culture have huge impacts on the way that we behave and our preferences on everything, from dating, to work, and family life to religion. Expect to learn why the things we consider

to be human nature could just be cultural conditioning. The dangerous future, if there's lots of sexless men, how the choice between growing rice and wheat impacts family life, what having diplomatic community from parking tickets can teach us about human nature, how Joe's lab can use language to archaeologically tell us about social trends from history, and much more. Don't forget, if you haven't already joined the Modern Wisdom Locals community, you can go there right now for free, and I will be putting up some livestream Q&A's over the next week.

That is modernwisdom.locals.com, come and connect with me and thousands of other listeners to the Modern Wisdom show, modernwisdom.locals.com. But now it is time for the wise and wonderful Joe Henrik. I had a conversation with a friend Daniel a couple of months ago on the podcast and on it he explained to me that a lot of the traits that we associate with human behavior, the sort of unwritten rules that govern the way that we go about our lives, he summarized it as cultural conditioning, masquerading as human nature, because the only time that we've been able to do psychological experiments, which have been sufficiently robust and while practiced using the scientific method, has only been

during this time, this time period. What's your thoughts on that cultural conditioning masquerading as human nature? Yeah, well, I think there's a lot of reasons to be concerned about that because so much research, I mean, if you look at the percentage of subjects in psychology experiments that come from modern Western societies, it's about 95 or 96%. So my colleagues and I raised concerns about this in a paper we published in 2010 called the weirdest people in the world, where weird is an acronym that stands for Western educated industrialized, rich and democratic.

And if you think about, you know, the origins of human nature, humans will evolve in relatively small scale, primate societies, hunting and gathering. So that's very much the kind of environment that a lot of human nature is evolved for. And then you put them in a society with hospitals, lots of interaction with strangers, police forces, judicial stuff. And I mean, you can expect you're going to get a very different phenotype when you do that. What is the boundary of Western? Well, so the important thing about the acronym weird is that it's really a consciousness-raising device. And so what I really do in the book is try to get rid of the need to define something like Western, and we try to explain the cultural evolutionary processes that lead down this

particular path and cause people in this society to have unusual psychology. But one of the exercises I do in the book is to explain variation among European regions. So I can tell you why Southern Italy is different from Northern Italy and try to explain variation among different Italian provinces. You know, I try to explain why Eastern Europe is different than Western Europe and tag that to events in European history that led to the diffusion of some institutions versus other kinds of institutions. I'm going to guess that there's a particularly stock difference between Italy and China, though. Yeah, so I mean, I get these global level differences, but in one of my chapters,

I look at variation within China and try to show why more wheat or more rice growing parts of China are different from more wheat growing parts of China. So again, you can tap the variation within each of these countries, we can show the same thing with India. Dig into wheat versus rice. Yeah, so one of the key ideas that I develop is that our psychology, the way we think about lots of things, whether we're individualistic, whether we think analytically versus holistically, whether we trust strangers or are more nepotistic, depends on our kin-based institution, so our

family structure. And that can be affected by lots of things. And I think one of the important things that mattered in Europe was actually religion had a big impact on this. But in China, ecology and the kinds of things you can plant affect this. So in places in China where you can grow patty rice, you need fairly intensive large groups to engage

and sustain cooperative labor. And so this favor is more intensive plans. So in China, you can show that certain ecological conditions led to stronger plans, and that leads to more holistic thinking, greater nepotism, and some other downstream effects of that. More important. So human social psychology responds to its local ecology in a way? Yeah, and one of the things I mean, it can respond directly to environment, but in this case, it's responding through the institutions that are favored.

So you could imagine that there could be other institutions that aren't based on patrilineal clans, which is what emerged in China, that would lead to a different psychology, even though the ecology was the same, because there's more than one way to skin a cat. So what would be an example of that? What would be an alternative? Well, so for example, the kinds of societies that existed in California prior to the European expansion were hunter-gatherer societies that had fairly intense kinship,

but now Los Angeles doesn't have very intense kinship. And that's exactly the same ecology just with different different approach to it. There must be some fundamental features of human nature I'm guessing. There must be some things that are like the building blocks upon which institutions and culture and rice and wheat can have their impact. Yeah, so I wrote a lot about that in my book called The Secret of Our Success, which came out in 2016, and one of the key ideas, so I was just mentioning these kin-based institutions and family structure. But there's a reason why I think that's the oldest

and most fundamental of human institutions. And it's because we do have instincts that we share with other primates and other animals. So our tendency to be particularly altruistic and giving to members who who individuals who were closely related to genetically. We also have incest aversion towards, you know, brothers and sisters, but that can be extended by incest taboos to shape our social structure and shape our families.

We have a pair bonding instinct, which is the foundation of lots of marriage systems, but of course, there's lots of ways to use that pair bonding instinct. Some societies have polygamous marriage, some societies add some polyandry, and others have just normative monogamous marriage. Are you familiar with the Westamark effect? Sure. That's just incestive version, essentially. Yeah. Would you be able to explain how that sort of comes about or how that manifests usually? Yeah. So the idea is that, you know, like other animals, humans have to avoid inbreeding.

So breeding with close genetic relatives. And the reason is, is that in all of us, we contain recessive alleles that can cause disease. And if you mate with a close sibling, they're likely to have the exact same recessive. And if you bring two recessives together, then that leads to the disease phenotype. So you have to avoid individuals who

share this common descent, because they're likely to have the same bad recessives. And one of the things that evolution has done to allow us to do that is when we're co-reared with members of the opposite sex, we develop a disgust reaction to the idea of having sex with them. And this is really interesting. And it kind of shows the texture of evolution

because at the same time, we feel really close to those people. And we want to help them and support them, we're disgusted at the idea of having sex with them. So you might have you having a warm evening with your family playing monopoly or something, but then that never breaks into having sex because there's good evolution every reason for that. That's actually a way I get my students thinking about this in human nature when I teach that. The interesting thing from that, it was an example in, I want to say Steve Stuart Williams book, where he says, a lot of the time, if you have a family that breaks up when the children are young and the children don't get to spend time together, you get situations where brother and sister, perhaps, or daughter and father, a lot of the time, if the father daughter and father a lot of the time, if

the father hasn't been a part of their life, come back together in later adulthood and you have quite awkward situations that can come out of that because you haven't had this whatever you want to call it, Westermark window of imprinting where the disgust mechanism has been activated. And then you loop back around and some pretty dodgy stuff. So that's one of the interesting ways that scientists have been able to figure this out is because there's things like in Taiwan and actually in China, they have minor marriages. So you'll get babies essentially are betrothed and they'll bring the future bride baby in and be co-reared with her future

husband. And that's a big mess in terms of marriage because it activates the Western Mark effect, even though they're not technically genetic relatives. And so those minor marriages they end up having fewer children and they're more likely to divorce, all the things you might expect. Yeah, I wouldn't have imagined that that would have stuck about, given that it'll have pretty poor outcomes. You're literally working against a pretty ingrained, English and resistance. And one reason why it might stick around in these particular situations is that, you know,

China and India have a long history of having a male bias, and so they end up having a lot more boys than girls. And so if you want your son to definitely have a wife in the future, you can lock in that wife if you get a Merle six months old. Yeah, that's about as soon as you can. So I want to talk about Monogamy and male psychology. You say that Monogamous marriage norms constrained the darker aspects of male psychology. Talk me through that Well Do I say darker? I hope I don't say darker. That was that's my

Summary so Well, do I say darker? I hope I don't say darker. That was my summary. Yeah, so the idea is that because of the differences in male and female biology, human males can benefit from multiple matings. And there's nothing about a pair bonding instinct. So gorillas have a pair bonding instinct that prevents you from having multiple parabands. And this is true of men and women, except men can benefit because they can, you can think of serial versus parallel. So men can have babies with multiple women at the same time, whereas women can only have one baby

at a time, right? And so there's fewer, there's less benefit for a woman having multiple husbands than a man having multiple wives. And polygene turns out to be pretty common across human society. So in the largest anthropological database that we have, 85% of human societies allow elite and high status men to take additional wives.

So how was that study conducted, like who was the sample size? Well, so back in the 1950s anthropologists began putting together a database called the ethnographic Atlas, which contains over 1200 different societies. So it's, you know, in their societies from all different continents, basically all the places where anthropologists had collected data. And that was elite and high status males were permitted to take more than one partner. Yeah, but even if you look at hunter-gatherer society, so 90% of hunter-gatherer societies

allow prestigious men to take additional wives. And they don't typically take many, but they might have two or three. You know, it's very rarely do you see more than four wives in hunter-gatherer society. Why do you think that is? Just difficulties for the male to support more than four. Yeah, yeah. And the societies that do have monogamous marriage, it's typically because the men are too similar, right? So there's no benefit to...

Oh, there's a flamenco hierarchy. Yeah. So if the men are more or less the same because of the nature of the economy, then polygene doesn't appear. Is polygene just more efficient resource allocation then? Well, I mean, that's what evolutionary biologists have argued that if you give females the choice and there's high inequality among men, say, and wealth, it would be fitness maximizing for them to allocate according to the available resources. So if you have a choice between being the second wife of a guy who's three times richer, then you're in number two choice, then that's an easy choice.

I mean, there's things with paternal investment and stuff because there's only one male and then you're in your number two choice, then that's an easy choice. I mean, there's things with paternal investment and stuff because there's only one male and you can only do so much paternal investment. But if resources are the critical thing, having enough food say, then that logic makes sense. But what it does do is that it'll inevitably create a pool of low status unmarried men

if there's too much polygene. And those are the guys who cause problems because they're faced with possibly being zeroes in the evolutionary race. And so they are willing to take big risks in order to catapult themselves up the status hierarchy and have a chance to get into the marriage and mating market. Are there any examples from history of times where there's been large swaths of sexless men at the bottom of this underclass? Yeah, it appears lots of times.

I mean, the places that we know best ethnographically are in these gerontocracies that appear in Africa. What's that? And these are gerontocracies. So gerontocracy is ruled by the old, essentially. And so, and really it's old men. So what some societies have figured out is they put men

through a series of initiation rights. And at various initiates, you have to be, you know, you say you might have to be in your mid to late 30s to get through the final initiation right, which allows you to finally take a wife. So that means you got this big pool of 20, 30, something men who are basically the warrior caste, the warrior class. And eventually they're gonna pass through the right assuming they survive and get to be old men twenty thirty something men who are basically the warrior cast the warrior class and eventually

they're going to pass through the right assuming they survive and get to be old men and then get to be polygamous but the older men are basically taking the younger women so as soon as they're old enough to have babies essentially they may get married off as wives to these older men and then there's all these young guys roaming around and this leads to a lot of conflict because you need to accumulate enough bride price and you know And so there's a lot of rating and things like that, but lots of societies have had that so places where the elite, you know in the Inca Empire as tech empire the elites all

maintained large heroms and so If you look at the early descriptions from the friars, for example, that showed up in the Aztec empire, they talked about how your average Indian, you know, average Aztec man had trouble finding a wife because the elites had basically taken all the available women. Yeah, you talk about the math problem, right? Yeah. Yeah, so this is this idea that when, you know, because males and, you know, humans tend to have one male and one female, you can end up with this huge, you know, huge pool of males when the elite males take all the, all the, all the women is wives. It's not a, it's not too far from what we're seeing in the modern world, though. I'm aware that it's not because polygyny is happening all over the place. In fact, even the marriage as an institution

and religious rights and stuff are declining. And you can say that contraception and looser rules and norms around premarital sex and casual relationships and stuff like that. There is currently an asymmetry. I think the number of men reporting no sex between the age of 18 and 30 tripled since 2010. So in the last 10 years, that number's tripled. You also have women between the ages of 40 and 45 at the white women at the highest uses of antidepressants at the moment.

And that is sometimes pointed toward women who may have hit the wall and are looking at a future that she's potentially childless without a family because they haven't been able to find a partner that they feel attracted to. So you have kind of two big swaths of both genders that aren't neither of them are particularly happy with the situation, both of them are single, but you end up even though those women haven't been tied up by high status man at the top of the tree, you still get the sexless underclass of men, and presumably whether it's because women have been captured by another man or women haven't hypergumously found somebody that they're fundamentally attracted to, the sexist and the class of men are probably

not fantastic, no matter why the women aren't interested in them. Yeah, no, it's the exact same logic, except here what's happened over the last half century is that increasing female choice and female labor participation, female labor market participation, means that it's now an option for women to not get married and there's strong evidence that women prefer males that are high status, higher status than they are. And so that means that women were increasingly willing to just opt out of the marriage market entirely if they can't get a higher status man, which means you got this pool of men who are who can't get a date basically. And apparently you can see this in data from dating apps.

Like there's a relatively small group of men who get all the interest from the women, and there's a whole bunch of men who never get a single message. You said that getting married reduces a man's odds of committing a crime. Then when the man got divorced or their wives passed away,'s odds of committing a crime, then when the man got divorced or their wives passed away, the likelihood of committing a crime increased again after that. Yeah, so what the data looks like,

it looks like monogamous marriage. Now, Polygene is a separate thing. Monogamous marriage domesticated males and probably even has a hormonal effect of producing testosterone. Reduced testosterone when you get married and then again, when you have children, married and then again when you have children. And then you have children.

And that's in, there's this happens in lots of animals where you basically, if the male's going to invest in the offspring, you have to lower his testosterone, probably make a few other adjustments so that he's willing to protect the nest. He's less disagreeable. He's less likely to get into risky behavior and get into a fight with someone and then be dead

and then the child doesn't have a father anymore. Right. Right. So he's not doing things to kind of show off and impress the girls. He's doing things like a father would do. Where and so what happens when they get divorced is they have to go back on the marriage and mating market. So T levels go up and that means the risks of things like crime, things that would raise

your status. You want to get some more money so you can buy a fancy car or whatever, a relevant... The state of expressing. The state of expressing. The state of expressing, you want to pull. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, whatever your status display is.

And yeah, so that's the consequence. Rolling the clock forward, seeing this imbalance that we have in the sexual marketplace at the moment, and it doesn't really feel like either gender's fantastically happy with it. I'm not asking you to come up with an applied solution, but what's your prediction if you were to roll the clock forward

from here with regards to this imbalance, this sort of gender imbalance that we have in the sexual marketplace? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. There could be a variety of technological solutions, so it could be the way, I mean, that's a good question. There could be a variety of technological solutions. So it could be the way, for example, a lot of people find their mates now on these dating apps. It could be the dating apps could be adjusted.

So there would be more chance for diverse matches. And maybe that's going to happen through competition amongst different apps. Another thing is we don't know what's going to happen with sex robots and other kinds of fantasy play based on technology. So that seems, I mean, one place to look is Japan where there seems to be a lot of use of that kind of thing. And there's whole, there's a whole class of males that have opted out of kind of the gating and marbles. What's the name for those guys that live in apartments together? Yeah. Well, there's herb of words. I don't know if that's when you're thinking of it. No, well, it's the Japanese word for it. I can't remember this. I don't know.

There's like this, it's not eki guy, but it's something like that. But yeah, they call them, don't the Chinese call them like herbivore men or plant men or something like that. The Chinese going through this, we need to make Chinese men manly thing right now. They don't want them, anybody to look like K-pop stars, so they've restricted the amount of time that kids can play video games. Do you see this? Yeah, so they're only allowed to play video games

between eight and nine PM Friday Saturday Sunday. They're trying to sort of remasculinize Chinese men and they look at the K-pop stars and I'm sure it's called like Plant men or vegetable men or something her before men might be it and yeah, they don't want that Yeah, it's um It's it I don't know what it is. I would like to hope that we could reinvigorate marriage as an institution I don't know whether you saw today, but the Pope

I don't know whether you saw today, but the Pope got in trouble while the Pope trended on Twitter for saying that people who get pets instead of having children and building a family are basically not doing their civic duty as a human being, which was a, I know, I guess a pretty outlandish thing for the Pope to say that. Right. It's like an enforced child rearing coming from the Pope. Someone did make a joke around the fact that if there's anybody that shouldn't be encouraging more children to be around it to the Roman Catholic church,

they haven't got a fantastic record. Yeah, they've got to work in their track record, but. Yeah, I don't know, man. It's sex robots things an interesting one. Um, yeah, yeah, it's got no easy, I mean, there are some potential solutions, but it doesn't have an obvious one. I mean, you know, clearly gender equality is not something we want to relinquish. So whatever the solution, it's got to be involved gender equality.

And but that's going to lead to this problem. Yeah, it's, it's so strange to think back at the fact that there is absolutely no reason that women shouldn't have equal access to employment, to education, to the ability to gain status and prestige and all of those sorts of things. But bizarrely, the fact that women were held back over the last, you know, post-industrial revolution, but pre what, the last 40 years,, let's say something like that, 30 years, that made it easier for women to find a relationship with a man that they were fundamentally attracted to

because they weren't competing themselves out of the overall dominance hierarchy by rising up it. It's so weird, that dynamic, so fascinating and sort of stark and brutal as well. Right, right. And then the tricky part is if you're a woman, the higher you go up the status hierarchy, the less attractive most men get, right? Because you only like men that are, you know, at least you're equal, right?

Really like higher, but equals probably okay. Lower, that just seems lame. Well, dude, think about how brutal it is that you can spend a decade building up your career or getting a PhD or doing a startup or whatever, some super high performing woman. And then you think, right, I would also like to have a family let's look at the potential dating pool that I have. There's like three guys. There's three guys out of seven billion people

that are above and across from where you are. Yeah, it's tough. It's nuts. So let's go back to the weird characteristics and stuff. You had something about conformity? Was one of those? Yeah, so one of the package of weird traits is relatively low conformity.

So conformity varies a lot around the world and you can predict it with this kinship data. So when you have small monogamous nuclear nuclear, families tend to have low conformity. Now, of course, there's probably lots of other things that affect this, but that's one of them. And then you can imagine that's going to affect things like innovation. So in order to have robust innovation, creativity, people have to be allowed to go outside the rules and think it's okay to go outside the rules.

Individualism is associated with greater innovation, at least based on patent and things like that. What is it? So there's a homogeneity around this particular group of people, but within this we have different subcultures. Silicon Valley is an example like that's this, hotbed of innovation and stuff like that. How do you see it?

Do you see it as a predisposition for people that are within this weird group, the Western group, or is there a glass ceiling? How do you see it? Well, no, I mean, it's at least so we've studied the US patent data from basically 1800 until about 1940. And we can predict the amount of patenting in a county by knowing the distribution of last names, because we can use the distribution of last names to tell us how clumpy people are in terms of kinship. So, no way. Yeah, yeah.

And we can actually trace, we're using newspapers to actually trace it to features of psychology. So there's this the psychologist Michelle Gelfin has talked about norm tightness versus norm looseness and if you're too tight with the norms that's kind of like conformity and so people aren't good innovators in tight societies. What do you mean by tight norms? Tight norms. So people who are from societies with tight

norms will report yes people are watching my behavior. I don't feel like I can take my own actions. I worry a lot about how people judging me, things like that. Of course, that's a feature of being human, but it does vary across societies and communities. So places that are relatively looser tend to produce more patterns. Cities, of course, tend to be looser because you're still not living with basically the kids you went to high school with, which if you're in a small town, there's kind of this permanent community, right? Oh, yeah.

In any case, we're getting to the point where we can connect the dots between the number of immigrants flood into a place, it gets looser, more innovation is generated, and you can see the psychological shift that goes along with it, at least based on the newspaper data. That's wild. What does the newspaper actually have to do with it? So what we can do is, so there are new techniques developed, you know, basically in the field of cultural evolution, where we can try to measure psychology

by looking at the text. And so in the simplest versions of this, you just look at like collections of words. So people in tight societies tend to use certain kinds of words. Or you can look at individualism. So when you describe individuals, do you tend to describe them according to traits and characteristics and attributes? Or do you tell me who someone's father is and what their social group is and things like that? So one's more individualistic and one's more collectivist. So you can use these to get psychological measures from text, and then you can apply those to newspapers and books and, you know, fictional

corporate and things like that. So this is allowing us to look at change in psychology through time and across space. What is the least conforming society that you found? Well, across nationally, it's definitely, you's definitely places like Australia, the US, places like that. I mean, places you'd expect. Australia being non-conforming does not surprise me at all. I've seen some videos coming out of there recently and they have scraps with each other. They don't need to go up against the police. They have a problem with each other.

What about loss aversion? That was another one. Well, I mean, there is some data on cross-national loss aversion, although I don't think we put that to the test yet to try to see if we can explain the variation. But in the US, generally somewhere like California is more individualistic and non-conformeting. A lot of trends in the US start in California

and then spread east. So something like Silicon Valley tends to be more non-conformist and more individualistic as well as places like New York City. Urbanization correlates with this. I would guess that loss of vision, having high loss of vision, would correlate with lower creativity also because people are prepared to take fewer risks. Right. Interesting. Yeah. And something like overconfidence, it also tends to generate innovation,

because really, most innovations, you're probably going to fail for a variety of reasons. So being overconfident, if a population is more overconfident, it tends to produce more innovations because someone gets lucky, right? So if everyone thinks they can do it, they all try and one of them succeeds and then the society gets an innovation. That's cool. What are the most overconfident people? Well, Americans are very overconfident. That's cool. What are the most overconfident people? Well, Americans are very

overconfident. That's a surprise. In the slides. And so we're still mapping the variation kind of within the US. Yeah. I've noticed this. I went to Austin. I spent five weeks in Texas just before Christmas. And it really is a stark difference between, I would say confidence and sort of blue sky vision to a degree as well. And the way into personally that people deal with the potential of success even for their friends. So as an example, I got invited on a really big show and I had an hour and a half before I was going to leave to get picked up and I went on a little walk and during the time that I did this walk

Three of my friends from America that I'd met within the last I don't even been there two weeks Three of my buddies either texted me or rang me. I was like, hey man Just wanted to let you know I know that you're gonna be nervous for tonight But I'm gonna be watching you're gonna crush it. I really really rooting for you. I'm thinking of these Have they coordinated between, they don't know each other, but it was just so alien to me as a stuffy, tall, poppy syndrome, stiff, upper lip, bread.

Ah, okay. That was very, it was lovely, but really stood out to me. Yeah. Well, I don't, but really stood out to me. Yeah, well, I don't know if it's related to this, but there is another factor that I talk about in the weirdest people in the world is non-zero sum thinking. So if you, the world is zero sum, if you get more famous and more successful, that means there's less success for me.

You're crowding me out. But if it's a non-zero sum world, you can be super successful and I can be super successful because we're not, we're not in competition. So the more you think of the world as non-zero sum, the less you're bothered by the success of others. In worlds that are really zero sum thinkers, you get things like which craft accusations, jealousy, people sabotaging each other,

undercutting each other, all that kind of thing. Do you get, is zero-sumness associated with population density? Well, I mean, urban areas, for example, tend to have larger division of labor, more innovation going on, more economic dynamism. So they actually are less zero-sum. Whereas if you're in a small town with a finite or shrinking population, how many dentists can you have? So if someone sets up a second dentist shop, you might actually lose customers, right?

But in a big city, you know. Do you think that islands have any role to play here? Is there something psychologically about being waterlocked to the impact to the way that people and cultures grow? Yeah, I mean, potentially, but I haven't really thought about that, so I don't know any interesting relationships with regard to islands. Yeah, I'm just thinking about the UK. There is definitely a, I can't define them perfectly, but there's a zero-sumness to parts of UK culture. And I was wondering whether that is because we have such high population density.

You know, you have relative, we have a lot of people on quite a small bit of land compared to America that has tons of people on a ridiculously huge amount of land. And I wondered as well whether there's an insulated mentality, perhaps, that comes from being surrounded by water. Right. Well, one place you can get as you're some mentality cropping up is when you're in, say, a city that is declining. Say it was an industrial city and the industrial age has passed.

So the population's moving out. There are no new jobs. Then it actually is a zero. So I mean, it is a zero sum world. There's not a growing pie. They're shrinking pie. So that's why you get a proliferation of people, helping people in cities that are on the up. And it's much more post-apocalyptic,

Mad Max wasteland, when a city is on the... I want all the gasoline, right? Precisely. Confirmation bias, what about that? Let's see. I don't think there's good data. Well, I mean, there's some cultural variation in confirmation bias, but I don't know if anybody's tried to tackle it to see if they can explain the variation in it. All right. It was delayed gratification one of them as well. Yeah. So there's good data on that, and that clearly varies across societies and is associated,

like so individuals who have are more willing to defer gratification are healthier, they save more money, they get more education. We know this can be culturally transmitted, we can transmit it in the laboratory, varies across societies by a lot. One of the arguments I make is that Protestantism seems to be associated with greater deferral of gratification. So if you compare Europeans, Catholics, and Protestants, you can show that they tend to work harder and are more willing to defer gratification. So the Protestant work ethic is a genuine cultural phenomenon. Yeah, because there's a growing body of evidence to say there's something to that. Now, it gets complex because a lot of people who claim to be Protestants are kind of borderline atheists.

So, you know, we look for it more as a kind of historical legacy. So you look at the Protestant parts of Germany, saying compared to the Catholic parts of Germany. So it's, where does the Protestant work ethic finish? And where does Gary V. Hussleculture get up and grind it 4 a.m. begin? That's the difference that we get. That's the tricky part. Okay. What was that's the difference that we get. That's the tricky part. Okay. What was that story about parking tickets?

Yeah, so one of the kinds of data, so we were trying to compare psychological differences among countries to see if we could explain them with some of this kin-stip structure and other stuff. And so there's lots of interesting psychological data, but we found this data set from Ted Miguel and Ray Fishman to economists. And what they did is they got data on parking tickets received by diplomats who come to the United Nations in New York City from around the world. And what we were able to do, so then each diplomat or each diplomatic delegation will accumulate some number of parking tickets and they have diplomatic immunity. So this is a case

where they can park and not have to pay or receive any penalty, then YPD still issues the ticket. So this creates a database of people willing to park in front of fire hydrants or block driveways or double park or all those kinds of things. And so if you tag the kinship intensity, the kind of how complex and intertwined families are of the diplomats home country to the diplomats. You can explain a lot of the variation in the willingness to get parking tickets. So the Canadian diplomat got zero parking tickets.

No way. The diplomat from Sweden got zero. Who got the most? Good question. I don't remember exactly. I'm not sure. The fact that it's the Canadians that didn't get any is... Kind of fits. Pretty funny.

What's about this passenger's dilemma? Can we do this as an experiment for everyone that's listening? Sure. So it's just a question. So you're riding in a car with your friend and your friend is driving recklessly and they hit a pedestrian who's crossing the street and kill them. And so then, you know, there's a legal case and you're asked to testify to lie in court

essentially that your friend was driving under the speed limit and not recklessly. And so the question is, do you want to support your friend? Friend loyalty is a good thing or tell the truth in court. And then you're told by your lawyer that your friend will get convicted then and probably do jail time. It's one of those weird questions because both of the outcomes are things that are supposed to be valued, right? It's supposed to.

Loyalty to friends, everybody likes loyalty to friends. Tell the truth in court, sounds like we should do that. But then the question is which one do you pick, right? What did you tease out to do with that? Well, it's quite a bit of variability. So this will vary across populations, and you know, this was all part of an effort to see what we could explain using these measures of family structure. So we find that, you know, that places with small and agribus nuclear families, people are much more likely to say, I would tell the truth in court. Whereas places with big families where people depend much more likely to say, I would tell the truth in court. Whereas places with big families where people depend

on relationships and you get jobs through relationships and you'll keep the same friends for your whole life, people say, of course I'd be loyal to my friend. It's not even a question. How significant was that? I remember, I asked this question in a seminar once and there was mostly for undergraduates, but there was a postdoc there mostly for undergraduates, but there was a

postdoc there who was working with me from Columbia. And he was just stunned that so many of the Harvard students would said they would tell the truth in court because he was like in Columbia, we would go with the friend. No way. Yeah. What, what was the group of people that was the most ruthless that you found from the most the one that was just prepared to throw their friend under the bus? Well, I mean, Canadians were up there. I think Australians and Americans were up there. Brits too, probably.

Good, good. Keep it safe and court. What about shame and guilt? What's the difference between those two? Yeah, so anthropologists have long noticed that there are shame-based societies where shame is really the governing emotion. And that's the emotion you feel when you violate a social custom or a rule or do something you get you a bad reputation and you're worried about how other people perceive you. So in humans, there seems to be a stylized display so people feel like they want to be small.

They want to disappear from view and not be seen. And this contrasts with more guilt-based societies where there's lots of different rules around. And you might do something like, for example, you might plan to go to the gym on a particular day and instead you eat a big pizza and take an app. So you might feel guilt for that. But really, your neighbor's not judging you. It's just you have set some standard for yourself for which you're not achieving this self and post-standard, so you feel guilt.

And so a couple different ways to measure this, but it seems like there's a lot of variability in the degrees which society is guilt-oriented, so the Dutch are very high on guilt, and there's hardly any shame. Whereas in lots of societies in Africa and the Pacific and stuff, really shame is the main thing. And it's hard to find guilt. You have to search around to find evidence of guilt. The same action calls either guilt or shame.

Yeah, so I mean, these two things can come together, but like in experiments, you can pull them apart by saying, you know, either people do something and no one will never know, or you make something public, you make something, someone do something that's a personal standard versus a communal standard. So in shame societies, there tend to be lots and norms. And so you have to spend a lot of time and cognitive effort making sure you do the right greeting and that you know, you're behaving in just the right way. So there tend to be more rules.

In guilt society, there's fewer rules, but people have more of this self aspirational goals and stuff, so they spend more time thinking about what makes me special rather than trying to see if that should be imposed upon everybody else. I imagine that you must have big clumps of traits that just bundle together like this,

that most of these are going to be correlated with each other. Yeah, so a lot of this stuff I'm talking about at the cross national level, so across countries, this is dominated, this is really a lot of these things we've been discussing a kind of one dimension. Now, I don't think they have to be one dimension. I think there's a particular set of institutions and historical processes which have brought all these together because every now and then we find some outlier society, which is high on these dimensions, but not high on this one or something like that.

So it's not that there are some underlying dimensions. Sometimes when psychologists study this, they see this psychological measures correlate, and they declare that this is because it represents some underlying thing in the brain. Everyone on the planet has the same biology, pretty much. Right? The... I do object to that. We don't has the same biology pretty much, right? The... I object to that.

We don't have the same biology. So here's the thing though about biology. So a lot of times when people say biology, they mean genetics. That's what it means. So one of the big points that I make is that culture changes our biology. So we just talked about how marriage systems affect our testosterone. Testosterone is our biology. If you move from a monogamous to a polygenic society, it changes your biology.

The exact same genetic program in a polygenic society when men get married, their testosterone doesn't go down, because they are still on the marriage and mating market. No way. The marriage system affects the technology. When you learn to read, which is a relatively recent skill, it thickens the corpus callosa in your brain and gets you to specialize circuitry for recognizing letters in your brain. So it changes your brain biologically, just not genetically. Wow, so not only is our psychology responding to our local ecology and the society and the culture and stuff like that, but it's a two way street between what we

were around, how that impacts our own biology, our physiology, and then that subsequently predisposes us to more types of actions, which then bleed back into culture and society and this feedback loop continues. Right. Fuck, that's interesting. So, I mean, so cultural institutions, these kinds of things across societies, technologies, something like just having a phone in your pocket,

maybe actually hurting our memories. So, all of these things affect our biology, it's just that they don't affect our genetics. What were the biggest, impositions, but the biggest impact on the people's personality, was it rates of religiosity, was it the family structure, was it kinship, was it, did you find out what the main impacts were? Well, it's hard to figure out what the relative weight of these things is. So in the case

of religion, I have a whole body of research showing that when people believe and powerful, moralizing gods, they're more likely to be pro-social or cooperate with strangers, even when nobody's watching and then by themselves. So because the God is omniscient, that seems to have some effect on people's prosociality. But some religions say, you can't marry polyianously and you can't marry your cousins. And so those are changing the family structure. So the religion is having an indirect effect on people's psychology through that.

And then in the weirdest people in the world, I make the case that these two factors lead to rising urbanization in Europe, beginning and about the 10th century. And in the 12th century, Europe passes China in terms of of urbanization and having cities with a complex division of labor with lots of different jobs that people can do seems to actually have changed the structure of personalities. So, you know, psychologists have long told us that there's a five factors in personality, so things like neuroticism and conscientiousness, extraversion. But it turns out when you go to small-scale societies like Amazonian populations in Bolivia, you just find two factors.

So there's a good case to be made. Which two? Well, none of the two in the original five. There's like an industrialist, industriousness, and prosociality seem to be the two important dimensions. Wow. So that's something that you've seen by a lot of psychologists as the fundamental parameters that you're playing with for someone's personality. And you can go to a place where not only do you not have any of them, but you also have

two more. You have two different ones. So and that's a case where psychologists did a completely inductive thing. They just started giving people questionnaires. Then they got this result and they could do it amongst lots of different undergraduates. It seemed like it was pretty robust, but as soon as you take it to a society very different from a weird society, just like this is the conversation that we started off with, you get a completely different answer, which means the nature of personality, I think, is an adaptation to all the different socioecology and occupations.

So you can imagine if you have some genetic proclivity to want to be by yourself, if you live in a society where you don't have a choice to become a librarian or a computer programmer, then you're sort of forced to cultivate some degree of public speaking or some degree of social interaction because you need to gain engaging trade or you need to get a cooperative work group for your farm or something like that. But if you can get a job as a librarian and just sit and shuffle the books around, then you can just you become even more introverted and you go down a particular trail. Presumably as well, that will have a selection effect for the people that are likely

to be successful in that society. So the ones that are higher status, that have more resources, that have a stronger group around them. If you're the super introvert in the society that requires you to be extroverted and you are your predisposition is so, so tight that you're not able to step into that. You're going to be competed out of the gene pool. So you end up presumably with societies which over time, what do they begin to look more like themselves? How does that work? Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen any research at the genetic level, but I do have a graduate

student who's working on this idea that one of the things that modern societies where you have lots of labor market choice and mobility is is it better harnesses the available genetic resources. So imagine people vary in like how good, how suited they are for computer programming or how suited they are for being a physician or for being an economist or whatever that various things are.

And what you wanna do is effectively shuffle the genes that are best for those different things into the right categories. As opposed to a cast approach where, you know, you're born into the sandalmaker caste and you're going to make sandals. So it doesn't matter what you like, right? Yeah. You said that an alien visiting earth in around about a thousand AD would struggle to predict that the West would end up being so dominant. Why do you think that is? Well, because if you look at the world around a thousand CE, the most sophisticated, urbanized societies are in China and the Middle East.

It's kind of the Islamic world with a real center in Persia, in Central Asia is producing science and experimental methodists developed and what becomes algebra is developed, and all these things eventually, the number is the symbol for zero, all these eventually move into Europe. But at that point, Europe looks like a backwater. And so I have a quotation from a scholar in Toledo, an Islamic scholar, who talks about the black barbarians to the south and the white barbarians to the north, and then he goes through and he lists all the contributors to civilization, the Persians and the Egyptians

and the folks in the fertile crescent. And the Europeans are clashed with the transition, the Danish, they don't see each other. They're the white barbarians in the North. Wow. So what happened? How is it that Europe ends up being so dominant? If we were these backwards Harry, barbarian people only a thousand years ago, what is it that Europe ends up being so dominant if we were these backwards hairy barbarian people only a thousand years ago, what is it that we do that makes us so special?

Well, the case that I make for why, you know, from 1500 to the current times, European institutions and European populations spread around the world, I lay out a narrative that takes about a thousand years to unfold, but it begins with a particular brand of Christianity, that brand of Western Christianity that eventually evolves into the Roman Catholic Church. And one of the unique things that that church did was it adopted this peculiar set of taboos and prohibitions around marriage in the family. And I make the case that this transformed European families from the kind of kind of kindrids and polygionist clans and stuff that we find anthropologists have documented

around the world, including in places like China and in the Islamic world, into small monogamous nuclear families. And this was, you know, the church didn't intend to do this, but this opened the door for things like charter towns, which had constitutions, where you had voluntary groups of strangers getting together out of mutual need, because all they had with these little monogamous nuclear families.

So if you need a production group, or you need a group for security, or social insurance, you had to form these groups, and sometimes they were monasteries, sometimes they were charter towns. Universities actually started as labor unions, either for students or for professors. He had to form these groups and sometimes they were monasteries, sometimes they were charter towns, universities actually started as labor unions either for students or for professors. And so universities began spreading all these different voluntary institutions. And that eventually over centuries gives rise to our notions of individual rights and democratic

government and stuff which formed the institutions which have now spread all over the world. So does a more atomized, monogamous society is that better for specialization within a workforce? Well, it allows you to move. So typically, clans would specialize. And clans will often will maintain whatever knowledge they've had and only pass it on to other clan members. But if you have the occupational system that developed in Europe, you could, as a stranger, just sign on to be an apprentice of a master

blacksmith and you would learn his things as learn from him and then you would have to be a journeyman. So now you're an official blacksmith, but you have to go do essentially what's a postdoc. So you go to find another blacksmith in another town, you got to do some years with him and you know, then you're learning from all the other journeyman who show up there. Plus you're saying, well, how does what he do compared to my previous master? And you're recombining different ideas, where if you pass things down in family lineages, the only recombining is theft, basically. You know, families are trying to sneak and peek and see what others are doing. I also guess that if you have a big group and you decide that you want to go off and

live your life as a superstar. Blacksmith, the ability to pick up your family and move them with you when the family isn't four people, it's 20 people. It's a multi-epand generational commune somewhere. That's basically not good. And the grandma's not coming with you so that you can fulfill your Blacksmith dreams. And the problems are really not intuitive for some of them from a society with monogamous nuclear family

because these societies with intensive kinship, you have lots of really important responsibilities to all kinds of relatives. So you know, you're responsible for burying your uncle. You have to do rituals to the ancestors to make sure that the land, they'll keep the land continuing to be fertile. You know, if one of your cousins gets injured, you may have to avenge their deaths or their injuries

or something to make sure blood money is paid or things like that. When you leave, you're in a cog in the wheel and you're leaving everybody in the lurch without all these important jobs that you have. You're giving up on lots of obligations, but you're also leaving your social safety net. As long as you hang around these people, if you get injured, they'll take care of you, get old, they'll take care of you. But, you know, to then decode to a town and not have any of that is a tough choice. Did you have a look at Jews or Ashkenazi Jews and stuff? I know they've got some gene

pool oddities in there. Well, there are fun case because Jews in general are a fun case because, you know, I open the weirdest people in the world with looking at literacy. And I make the case that what we think of now is the standards that everybody becomes literate. And the fact that literacy is, you know,

schooling to make sure everyone's literate really begins to spread with Protestantism. And it's because Protestants believe that everyone should learn to read the Bible for themselves, girls and boys. This is why they led to lots of literacy in girls because they had to read the Bible. But the exception to that is actually, I only mentioned it in a footnote in the book, but after the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century AD, C.E. Jews decided that all Jewish boys should learn to read

the Torah in Hebrew. And so Jews become the earliest society with widespread literacy, so almost 100% of Jewish males could read the Torah. And then this opens the door for Jews to spread into urban occupations all over the Islamic world. And that's how Jews end up as a not as a bunch of farmers, which they were in Jesus' time, but as these urban populations that become accountants and all these other kinds of things. You roll the clock forward a couple of thousand years and you have the

highest number of Nobel prize winners per member of the population by some like ridiculous factor, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, so I'm drawing on this book called The Chosen Few, but the argument there is that once you have a culture of literacy, you get a culture of debate about what the Torah says and a culture of commentary on that, and that just cultivates a way of thinking that you get just from sitting at the dinner table

as well as other kinds of training that if you're from the kind of Irish Catholic background that I'm from, we didn't argue about religion or politics or debate scripture, anything like that. Looking at the previous setups for family with regards to this more commune pan generational living on-site with the rest of your family, and also what we spoke about earlier on,

which is this difficulty we have, this atomization, this individualization of society. I don't think that many people are superbly happy with that, at least, existential or psychology, in terms of the psychological health. We have rising rates of suicide amongst men and people report loneliness, etc., etc. Do you ever see a time where we could return back to kinship or pan-generational commune houses where you and auntie and grandma and daughters and cousins all live together?

Yeah, I mean, this is definitely a problem, right? Because the trajectory of society is increasingly bringing us down not only to monogamous nuclear families, but now with things like social safety nets and unemployment insurance, really, we can operate as individuals, right? We don't even need to get married anymore. And that leads to loneliness, dislocation, people don't live near their families as they pursue careers and these kinds of things. And that leads to lots of mental health problems and whatnot, not everyone's well suited

in that. So, I mean, you might think that the trajectory of society has got to figure out a way for people to live in community again. Now, it might not be by building petrallennial clans, but there might be lots of ways in which humans can live and endure in communities and get the kind of warmth of having this group that, you know, is there to take care of you and being surrounded by a kind of fellowship. So I do field work in the South Pacific. I'm one of the ways I describe the feeling of being in that village where you're related

to everybody is just being wrapped in a warm hug. And I think that's what a lot of people crave. The tricky part is to continue to energize economic growth while still getting the warm hug. It's strange, right? Because the existential void is filled by achievement and accolade and status and prestige. And the byproduct of that is you're probably

a pretty good commercial engine, pretty good economic individual. Whereas if all you need is a bottle of beer on the porch with your grandmother sat next to you and you don't want to sat on your knee, you're no longer driving as hard. Yeah, that's the tricky part. I don't know, I'd be very, very interested to see

what happens with that commune style, multi-generational living. I don't know, I think it would be pretty cool, but I don't know whether it would just get, I don't know whether you can go back to that. I've just thought as well, is this a potential malignant side effect of UBI that no one's really talking about, that if you increase that social safety net for people at the bottom, you encourage individualization and atomization of people in society. Is that a side effect of it? Yeah, so things like those kind of social safety nets

at the individual level is not gonna help this problem. Because at least now, lots of people do rely on kin and that does forged kin links. They form long-term enduring friendships where people help others out. But if the government's always gonna step in and lay a floor down for everybody, then you're not gonna have to build those enduring human relationships. It's actually also a

worry with technology. This is a related worry. So it used to be that as a kind of merchant or something, you would have to cultivate a reputation for honesty. And one, the best way to cultivate a reputation for honesty is to be honest, right, to actually be honest and be trustworthy. And you know, when you sign a contractor, when you make a handshake agreement, that you're as good as your word. But now everything is secured by these electronic transactions,

like, you know, the Uber's got my credit card number. So it doesn't really matter if I'm trusting, you know, they already got me. So it means that I don't necessarily, I'm not cultivating this sense of that I am a trustworthy guy because everything's fixed by technology. Oh, so they make us less trustworthy. Yeah, so the trustworthiness has been externalized, it's been outsourced, buttrist by technology.

I think I read about how there is a concern among linguists and child developmental psychologists that the use of smart speakers is going to cause reduced Speech skills among young children because they won't you don't ever say Hey Siri, please turn on the bedroom light. You don't say the please There's never a thank you. There's never a please a lot lot of the normal social graces that you go through. They're just not there. Did I just set your phone up when I hastened? You did it. You said hey Siri and Siri responded. I did say please. I mean, that's another thing, right? You associate, you use technology to encourage you. It's so funny thinking about the fact that you said because there is a safety net but it's not so high that you could live

without the assistance of your family. People are almost forced together by necessity and I don't know there's something about this desire for sovereignty that we have at the moment right in the modern world to be a sovereign individual as agency and control over their own trajectory and so on. It kind of works against it. You want to say, well, no, I want to choose to be with my family. I don't want to have to be with my family. You go, well, you say that, but you don't know what's best for you.

A lot of the time, it may be that having to have your family is actually better for you than choosing to not have them and then the existential loneliness that you don't know how to fix. It was fixed when you needed them. Right, exactly. And I think there's a, so one of the things we study in my lab

is the idea that our minds are queued to the group for which we're socially and economically interdependent with and that we have special bonds with people that we're economically interdependent with. And that we have special bonds with people that we're economically interdependent with. And the more you have these programs, it just reduces any economic interdependence at all. And you end up as an island. But at least in nuclear family, there used to be one job

for the female and one job for the male, and they were dependent on each other. My dad can't make toast, right? So he's dependent on somebody to make his toast for him as kind of the idea. But now, you know, we don't have that. You said that belief in an afterlife that depends on one's behavior in life

is associated with greater economic productivity and less crime. For every 20% increase in those who believe in hell in heaven, a country's economy will grow an X-Retenn percent. Yeah, that's wild. That's research from one of my colleagues in the Harvard Economics Department. Just analyzing data that's through time on gross domestic product and data on religious belief and how that changes.

And it's interestingly, it's not heaven, it's the hell, it's the kind of bad side. And the more people believe that there's a hell out there, that they behave a bit better and that leads to some economic prosperity. Hell is what every manager of a sales team needs to be threatening their stuff with. That's the best motivator. Don't get Tony Robbins in. Don't do new, new, new, new linguistic programming. Just bring some theology back in and you're laughing. Joe, we made it. Thank you very much for today.

What are you working on next? What have you got any other cool stuff that you didn't any all up? The big stuff we're doing is the stuff I alluded to with the textual data. So trying to extract psychology from texts and the kind of big game in the lab right now is the Latin corpora. So if we can extract this stuff from Latin, then we can go back a thousand years and we can track it, track changes. This is like being a linguistic lexical archaeologists. Yeah, so I got a team of like, you know, digital humanities guys, Latin scholars, historians, economists. That's pretty cool.

It's good fun. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with the work that you do. Well, so I have pretty good website for both myself and my lab, and if you just Google my name, it should come up. It's like, thanks, Joe. Okay. See you, Chris. you