Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 128 | Joseph Henrich on the Weirdness of the West

Episode Date: January 4, 2021

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. Support Mindscape on Patreon. 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. Personal web site Lab web site Harvard web page Wikipedia Amazon author page Twitter

Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best-sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Book Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Club on the I-Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Welcome to the first episode of 2021, brand new year. Hope that it holds some good things for you, me, the rest of the world, the whole bit. So there's a play by George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra. And in there, Caesar has a line that is, pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature. In this case, Caesar is talking about his secretary, Britannis, who is, of course, of Britain.

but I think that the lesson is a little bit wider than that. I think that we all tend to think that the customs of our tribe and island are laws of nature. The ways that we behave, the ways that we think, the ways that we feel, what we think are right and wrong, we grow up in a certain environment. We tend to think that's the right way to do it. Some of us rebel against it, others don't. But it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of reflection to say, you know, it could be really, really different. And I think that's an easy thing to say about customs, right?

you know, which hand you hold the fork with when you eat or something like that, maybe even about morality, depending on your issues about morality. But what about more objective things, like our psychology, how we actually think, what actually goes on in our brains? Today's guest is Joseph Henrik, and he has argued that modern views of psychology have been drastically shaped by the fact that most psychological studies, most research work in this field, has been done by, and on, a very particular subset of people, what he calls weird. That's an acronym.

Not just that they're weird, but I think that's supposed to be the resonance of it. It's an acronym standing for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. The point being that not only are most psychologists

in sort of Western universities where these characteristics would be common, but most psychological studies are done on college students at those universities, right? If any of you have been to college and taken a psychology course,

like I say at the beginning of the podcast, you might have participated in these studies. And guess what? It turns out that Western educated, industrialized, rich, democratic college students are not a representative sample of all of humanity. And so Joe Henrik's point is not just that we're looking at a very specific subset, but that it is a weird subset. He makes a very persuasive case that weird people are not just a subset of all humanity, but they are outliers psychologically. In fact, even sort of at an anatomical level in terms of what is going on in the brain, he argues that people in the weird sphere have sort of repurposed their left brain hemisphere for language, whereas a lot of other cultures, the left hemisphere is used more for facial recognition.

And of course, this is going to have a very important impact on what you take the truths of psychology to be. Things that are habits or customs of your people, you might take to be laws of nature. And in the best mindscape tradition, Joe actually has a very interdisciplinary background. His undergraduate degrees are in anthropology and aerospace engineering. He worked as an engineer for a while, in fact, before returning for his PhD in anthropology.

He later became a professor, both in psychology and in economics, and is now a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. So he has a lot of different subfields covered there. And what he's doing these days is moving his research on from the simple fact that weird people are weird to asking how they became that way.

And that's the subject of his new book called The Weirdest People in the World, How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Now, he has a very, very specific and sort of outlandish theory about how this happened, and we'll talk about it in the podcast. Very, very, roughly, very, very simplified. His idea is that in Europe, the Christian Church, forbid marriages within families.

That, you know, worldwide, it was very, very common for people to marry their cousins, if not their brothers and sisters, but at least, you know, close people within their families at the cousin level. And he thinks that the church forbidding cousin marriage encourage association between people who are outside your family, pro-social behavior, where you were sort of forced to make common cause with people who are not your family members, because you wanted to marry them or, you know, they would be your in-laws. And that led to guilds and certain ways of working and associating and the economy took off. This is a very specific idea. We talk about it.

You may or may not believe it. He summons a lot of evidence for it, so it was absolutely worth taking seriously. It's worth, you know, comparing to what we talked about with David's to Savage, where we talked about the history of democracy and how it took off in Europe in a way that was earlier than in other places. So the point of all this discussion in my mind is not to say that certain ways of thinking and being are right and wrong. It's just to say that there are certain ways of thinking and being and to not take those ways just because they're part of your own culture as laws of nature. To be a little bit more open-minded, reflective, recognizing that the ways we are might be specific, might not be perfectly general. It's a good attitude to keep in mind as we approach the new year.

So with that, let's go. Joe Henrik, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Good to be with you, Sean. So I was an undergraduate taking a psychology course some number of years ago. We won't say how many. And I remember that one of the requirements for the course was that we act as test subjects for one of the psychology professors' experiments. Right. And it slowly dawned on me, like, are most psychology results coming from testing undergraduate students?

That seems like a very non-representative part of the world. So you've really dug into that and made that realization a lot more quantitatively established. Yeah. So it turns out that that requirement, the kind of undergraduate intro psych where you have to be a lab rat for the psychologists existed for decades. So until about 2010, over 90% of all psychological studies were done with university undergraduates in the U.S. or Europe, Canada, places like that. And we raised the alarm about this in a 2010 paper called the weirdest people in the world. Others had raised the alarm prior to this. But we really underlined it because there had been enough data done in diverse societies to show that not only were undergraduates,

one population among many, unusual, but they often, when seen in a global perspective, anchor the extreme ends of the distribution. So we dubbed them weird people, where weird stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, just to kind of mark off and raise people's consciousness about the unusualness of their subjects. Now, since then, they've moved away from using undergraduates, but now it's mostly online subjects from the U.S. Okay, so I'm not sure if that's better or worse. Pulling errors are on our minds these days. But so just to be super clear here, I did a podcast just a few months ago with Olga Hassan about growing up weird.

But she meant weird in the old-fashioned sense, like different than the people around. you. You have a very specific meaning of this wonderful acronym weird. Yeah. And it's like I said, it's just been to raise consciousness that the subjects most commonly used by psychology for decades and also other experimental disciplines like behavioral economics are just one population among many and also psychologically distinct, like extreme and many measures that people are interested in. So a lot of the psychology textbooks that you would have had in your intro class are really a kind of cultural. psychology. It's telling you about the psychology of the population studied by the psychologist,

but it shouldn't be readily generalized to the species. Yeah, you know, I want to be understanding to the psychologists, because they've had a hard time recently, you know, with replication crises and so forth. And, you know, so I want to emphasize that as much as we want to say that it needs to be better, it's hard. Psychology is super hard. It's way harder than theoretical physics, I can definitely vouch for that. The brain is a complicated thing, right? Yeah, of course. And, I mean, you know, oftentimes, as with so many things, it's not so much the individuals doing it. So when we raised this alarm in our 2010 paper, lots of psychologists immediately solve the problem. But the institutions are set up so that it makes it hard, right?

So if you're a psychology graduate student, you've got to crank out a few papers before you graduate, and you're incentivized to find the easiest most accessible subjects you can find to run your experiments. So things like learning a language and moving to a different place or setting up multiple field sites is just impractical from the PhD perspective. Yeah, I mean, physics has a lot more money to do these experiments than psychology does. I have to say that also. So the important thing about this finding is that it's not just, well, you've studied a certain population now. you have to study other populations. It's that, as you already mentioned, these weird people are not just a point in the distribution,

but an extreme point. Like we, since many of the listeners are going to be in this weird categorization of, let me remember what it is, Western educated, industrialized, industrialized, rich and Democratic. I was supposed to memorize that beforehand. But so since many of us are that, it's interesting to see that we are the outliers in the distribution. We're not just specific. We are literally different than most people in a systematic way. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, so lots of things that psychologists care about. So psychologists, for example, have been interested in people's tendency to conform to their peers. So experiments, which are pretty commonly taught in introductory classes by the psychologist named Solomon Ash, show people's willingness to, in judging their lengths of lines go along with their peers, so this peer conformity. And it turns out that these weird people, the subjects commonly used by psychologists, are the least conformist of all the populations that have been studied. Right. I mean, I think that you have a whole bunch of examples of experiments where weird people are a little bit different than anyone else. And

some of them kind of makes sense to me. It makes sense to me that there could be a distribution, but others, I was like, wow, I can't really break out of my weird box. I really think that the weird people are just right here. So you have this example of the giving money, right? You know, someone has money and they can give some fraction of it to someone else who can either accept it or reject it. Could you explain that one to us? Sure.

So there's a few different versions of that. But the most common one I think that some listeners might be familiar with is called the ultimatum game. So two players are allotted a sum of money, say $100. And it's the job of the first player who's called a proposer to offer a portion of that hundred to the second player. The second player then has two choices. They can accept the amount of the offer. And then it's getting the game's over. It's one shot.

So it's not repeated. You don't know the name of the other person or anything. Or they can reject it. And if they reject it, both players get zero. And so this was initially done in industrialized societies in the early 90s. And it was found to be a pretty consistent result. So the modal offers about 50%. and mean offers are about between 40 and 50%.

And, I mean, it's interesting. A strict utilitarian would say that you should just accept the offer even if it's just a penny, right? Well, a rational self-interested, so someone who is trying to maximize money would accept any positive offer, any non-zero offer. Because you can think about it from the point of view of the responder. If they're faced with a choice between, say, $1 if they accept and $0 if they reject, There's no reason to reject, so always accept. Yeah. So this is the example where I can kind of see it both ways because clearly if, you know, I want some money.

So I could accept. If they give me a little bit of money, I'll accept it. That makes sense. But also I'm embedded in the culture and embedded in a society. And I imagine that this kind of transaction might happen over and over again. I don't want to be, you know, the mark for the con game. I want to, you know, stand up for myself and try to establish some equilibrium where I get a bunch of money. Right.

And so it turns out that that varies. And in some societies, it's really hard to find someone who will reject a positive sum of money. And you tend to get low offers. Now, it doesn't go all the way to zero. So about the lowest mean we found is 25% of the total. Whereas in other societies, you get more closer to 50%. 48 might be the mean and most offers are half. And that's how-

And lots of rejections for people who go below, about 40 or 30%. And that's our weird friends? Yeah. So pretty common. industrialized, but certainly strong in weird populations. And what's interesting is the initial experiments were done amongst university students. And they show the same pattern, but they're actually a little bit weaker. It turns out that we're still being socialized when we're 20 or 22, and that will continue

to get more willing to reject and more concerned about fairness, I guess you could say. I remember reading a study. I'm not sure whether it was ever replicated or not saying that economists treat individuals as rationally self-interested, and then when you tested people and whether they were rationally self-interested, the group that is most rationally self-interested turned out to be economics students.

And professors, like, they're trained into that. They're socialized into it. Yeah, that's a finding that has been replicated. And it's interesting because it turns out that mostly it's by selection into the discipline. So what they did is they studied first year, are a freshman and seniors in economics and non-economics. And most of the difference, say, three-quarters of the difference, appears by who becomes an

economist. And then you get another 1% over the four years. But the difference between non-economists and non-economists is relatively small compared to the cross-cultural differences that we found. I believe that. That makes sense. You did have a sort of throwaway line in one of your talks that I was listening to where you did, you or someone, did test with chimpanzees?

and they were much closer to the ideal economic actor than human beings were? Yeah, so after I did the first round of these experiments in diverse societies, and we found all this variation, we started to wonder whether this could be done with apes. And so I worked with a primatologist named Joan Silk and a comparative experimentalist named Danny Pauvinelli, along with some postdocs, Sarah Brazen and Jennifer Vank. And we studied two different groups of chimpanzees, captive populace. And we developed the simplest game we could think of, which is just to give the chimps two choices. If they pick choice A, they get some food and another chimp gets some food.

And if they pick choice B, just they get food. And we found that the chimps were indifferent to which of these they picked. So you would, you know, you would think if you even care a tiny bit about others, you'd always pick A because you get the same amount no matter what. So it's all about whether the other guy gets anything. And the chimps were indifferent. So this was kind of a selfish response. We do this with young children, and we see concern about others develop gradually as the kids get older. Is this possibly a species-dependent thing?

I mean, I have a vague recollection that Franz de Wall has experiments with other kinds of monkeys, or rather with monkeys, where they do seem to be more empathetic and wanted to be fair to their fellow simians. Yeah, so Franz has some experiments with capuchins, where he actually shows that when you compare capuchins to strangers, they're just like the chimpanzees. But if you compare them with another member of their capuchin group, who they know are familiar with and they'll go back in the cave with after the experiment, then they're more generous. Oh, that's very interesting. Yeah, this is, I told you, psychology is much harder than physics. There's always an exception to every rule. Hiring new people is one of the hardest and most important thing that a small business can do.

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anywhere. Get a free $75 credit at Indeed.com slash mindscape. Indeed.com slash mindscape offer valid through March 31 terms and conditions apply. But okay, so I can understand why different cultures might react differently to that test. But then you have another example where you're asking about the blame that we attached to someone for taking someone else's bag and depends on whether or not they did it by accident or intentionally. So why don't you tell us about that one, too? Sure. So we went to 10 different populations around the world. We did it in Los Angeles, but then we went to traditional societies in Africa and South America and Island Southeast Asia.

And we developed vignettes where we tried to make it so everybody in each of these places face what you might think of as a theft scenario. We did a few other harm scenario and a taboo scenario, but I'll just describe the theft scenario. So people are at a busy market and someone puts a bag down. Now, either someone comes up and takes that bag where we don't set up it to be an accidental theft. Then another one, a similar bag is placed next to it. And then the person mistakenly takes the wrong bag. And so from the point of view of the victim, they lose their bag, so they lose their stuff. So the harm to the victim is the same. It's just a question of whether the act was intentional or could be inferred to be intentional or whether it was clearly accidental.

And we found that the folks in Los Angeles, and also we did some work in rural Ukraine, where it the extreme end of the distribution. So most concerned about intention in terms of whether the person should be punished, meaning that the person who took the bag and whatnot. And then it went all the way down to folks in Fiji who didn't make use of intention. at all. So they weren't concerned about people's mental states. They, they judged the thief equally harshly in both conditions. And that's what I really do have trouble wrapping my brain around. And this is, it's a great example of how things that we think of as purely rational are, in fact, extremely culturally conditioned, right? I mean, to me, it just seems obvious that intent should matter.

When you want to blame someone, their intent for doing the thing that you're blaming them for is clearly relevant. But there's a whole other way of thinking that discounts them. that. Yeah. So some societies are, are, are, have strict, what they call strict liability. So that's kind of the legal term, which would mean that if you kill someone, it doesn't matter whether you did it by accident. You say your arrow, uh, ricocheted off a deer and hit, hit a person, or whether you actually shot them because there's a loss of life, a loss of a person. And so the penalty to you is the same. And you see this in a lot of anthropological work on, on traditional law. So in societies that have blood revenge, if members of one claim, and so, the number of one claim, and you see,

kill another clan, then if the proper blood money isn't paid, doesn't matter whether it's on purpose or by accident, you can murder someone in the clan from which the murderer comes. And there's no sense in which it has to be the person who did the murdering because the other members of the clan are interchangeable. So you could just as easily kill their brother, even though he wasn't involved, right? Yeah. So he's completely innocent.

So this is something you see throughout the anthropological record in lots of societies. And is this somehow, I don't want to, you know, push the data beyond what they're able to tell us, but it's just somehow indicating some sense in which different cultures approach the theory of minds of others in some way? You know, the fact we conceptualize other people as making choices, and that's the locus of good or badness, those choices those individuals are making. Yeah, so I think that that's pretty important. It's hard to get it just from this data, but if you look at other, we've done some theory of mind studies and other studies looking at people's mental states.

There's a line of kind of historical literature on this. And in the Western kind of European tradition, there's an increasing emphasis on thinking about what's inside people as animating their characteristics. It could be their dispositions. Yeah. It could be honest. It could be their mental states.

And this is our sort of gut reaction to explain behavior. It's something about that person, what he believes, what kind of person he is, his personality, something like that. Whereas in lots of other places, there's much more emphasis. on the kind of social world as marionette, you know, as the holding the strings to the marionette. So, the social ties. So who are his alliances, you know, where are his allegiance is, this kind of, what are

his social relationships? And that can be used to explain people's behavior. And of course, we can do that in both systems. And, you know, that kind of explanation can make intuitive sense to weird people like me. But it's not our first inclination when we go to explain something and when we're looking to make our way through the world. Well, and this is one of the, I mean, I guess we should.

get a little bit more systematically into what it means to be weird in your sense. One of their aspects is this analytic thinking versus holistic thinking, I guess, is the dichotomy here. And to me, again, because I am embedded in this and I'm admitting it, you know, analytic thinking. That's a good thing. It's just sort of thinking carefully about things. But is it a matter of what you look at first? Do you look at the parts first and then put them together if you're an analytic thinker versus looking at the hole and then maybe subdividing if you're more holistic thinker? Yeah, it's kind of, and it also affects, it's very deep in the sense that it affects even the

things you pay attention to. So if our decisions and our kind of data taking process as, you know, intelligence is moving through the world is affected by what we attend to, then this analytic thinking is important because analytic thinkers tend to focus on the focal object and holistic thinkers tend to look and they remember more of what's in the background. And when you do eye tracking, you find that some populations will just attend more and then remember more things in the background,

whereas the more analytic thinkers are focusing on the foreground and looking at the kind of main object or whatever the individual is. Other data suggests that, you know, the immediate reaction of an analytic thinker is to figure out what the parts are. So if you're a physicist,

you might, you know, break things down into particles and give them properties. And then the system is explained by the particular properties of the parts, that you assign it to. Whereas if you're more of an analytic thinker, you think about the relationships. You mean whole, sorry. You said if you're more of an analytic thinker, you meant more of a holistic thinker. Oh, sorry, yeah. More of a holistic thinker. You're thinking about the relationships between the particles. So, for example, like I like to think about

explaining human behavior this way. An analytic thinker thinks like an economist, right? They assign preferences and beliefs. And then they explain people's behavior based on preferences and beliefs, properties of individuals, whereas a holistic thinker looks at the relationships. So if someone's behaving as a thief or something like that, then the holistic thinker is going to be like, well, he probably doesn't like that person or maybe that person took someone something from him or, you know, they would use the context or relationships to explain it rather than saying, you know, that person is dishonest and assigning them a disposition. Right. And so it seems like analytic maps on to sort of a reductionist view of the world. Is that a fair thing? Is that a

Yeah, and in the book, I mean, then I move into kind of some speculative thinking towards the end of the book, but I think you can see this in science, in the emergence of science, because one of the first moves of scientists, of course, is to try to break things down into their little bits and then figure out how they fit back together once you've got the bits. So maybe I should let you put it into words. You know, what exactly, what are the first things we should think of when you say the weird psychology? I mean, this analytic thinking is part of it. Clearly, individualism is a huge part of it. But, you know, what are the three words we should remember 10 years from now for listening of this podcast about what weirdness really entails? Well, yeah, your first point is always the one I open with, which is thinking about the

individuals and focusing on their attributes and aspirations instead of thinking about people's relationships. So this is associated kind of psychologically with things like overconfidence and a tendency to self-enhanced rather than being kind of humble to kind of put forth your best, what you think are your best attributes. Another one is the one we've been talking about, which is analytic thinking. So approaching things looking for categories and assigning properties as opposed to looking at background relationships and context.

Another one is concerned with impartial principles over the kind of in-group loyalty and social relationships that govern so much social structure. So those are three big ones. I wonder, have you studied sort of consequentialist versus deontological versions of morality, right? I mean, you know, dayantological being like, here are the rules and we should obey them, consequentialist being like, let's go and do whatever it takes to get the best outcome. It sounds like weird people would be more consequentialist and other cultures, traditional cultures might be more deontological.

Yeah. I think that broadly holds true. The only thing that's tricky is, in a lot of the experiments that are used to do that, the individuals, it's kind of a weird experiment in the sense that the, like you use these trolley problems. And the individuals are often, none of the relationship information is specified. Ah, right. So I think you could really pick up the differences if you started talking about the relationships, you know, who they were, what their ethno-linguistic group was, what their relationships are. Do they know anybody you know, things like that? And that's kind of like the non-weird people are much more interested.

Like that's the information they want to know because that feeds into their decision-making. Whereas it's much easier to even entertain the abstract question if you're weird because you're like, what are the key principles here? You know, whatever. Let me do the counting if you're utilitarian. Okay, that makes sense. So the utility, because the people who invented the trolley problem are weird. Exactly. They don't care what your relationship is with the people on the tracks.

They just care how many of them there are. They're trying to illustrate a principle or multiple principles, yeah. I see. Okay. So we weird folks are more individualistic. One of the phrases that I got out of your writing was favoring impersonal prosociality over interpersonal relationship. So in some sense, we're individualistic. We think about ourselves.

But that makes us more, I don't want to say fair, but at least more uniform in our dealing with others rather than favoring our kin group or something like that? Yeah, yeah. And there's often this kind of tension in how people think about this. Because, I mean, at this, I think, too, is a weird trade. People think either you're cooperative or not cooperative. And actually what the world looks like, I think, is that it's about who you're cooperative with. And so you can think of kind of social distance from yourself or from your group.

And, you know, what's the kind of slope of the line that moves away from you? Is it really steep such that people who are far away from you are essentially strangers, and you're treating them with self-interest, you know, you're behaving self-interestedly toward them, or is it much more shallow so that, you know, your second cousin is not very different from a stranger if you're trying to make a choice between how some policy is going to affect them or who you're going to hire or something like that. Yeah. And one of the ways this shows up is in the difference between guilt versus shame, both of which sound bad, but the weird, cultures are much more interested in guilt, roughly speaking?

Right, right. And so the key to understanding this is that, I think the key is that when you're trying to navigate your way through a weird individualistic world, you've got to, you're looking for relationships. So you might be looking for business relationships or co-authors if you're an academic. You're looking for mates, spouses, friends. And in each case, you know, you're cultivating an individual uniqueness. So what do I bring to this?

What's interesting about me that people might. might want to hang out with me or marry me or write a paper with me. And in the more relational world, what you bring is a set of relationships and you're born into these relationships and you're trusting people who are who you're connected to through sets of relationships. So if in this world where you're cultivating this unique individual self, guilt plays a big role because you've set some personal standards for yourself. So I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to read interesting books. And so you're kind of, you know, you feel guilty if you don't do those things, even though those aren't social norms in your society and people aren't going to look badly on you if they find out you skip the gym and took a nap or something like that. So, but in a shame society, it's a lot about complying with the social norms and not being the tall poppy that stands out.

So there you're much more concerned with shame how you look in the eyes of others. And this gives this contrast, which is a very old idea in anthropology, that there are shame societies and guilt societies. Right. But we, you know, psychology and other, and actually the web has provided ways to, to measure the difference between populations and how much they're worried about these. You know, Peter Singer has this thought experiment where, you know, someone is drowning and you walk by and you could save them, would you do it? And most people would, you know, try to do it. And then he's like, well, but there's thousands of people you could save in Africa who you don't know with that much effort or even much less. Why don't you do that? And I guess the implicit thing going on there is that every life is equally worthy. And I know that I think that you're about the sort of descriptive side of things, not the normative side of things. But it almost, our weirdness almost sneaks in as an unspoken assumption to how we should think about right and wrong, right?

Like it's, we take it for granted that we should think about all lives equally, even if we don't always act that way. But there's a whole other way of thinking that would say, well, of course, it matters a lot more to me. if my cousin is drowning than of someone I don't know. Right. And so I make the case that it's this psychological transformation that focus on individualism and impartial principles that kind of open the door for things like universal human rights where we're making this species level generation.

We still keep the non-humans out of it, but we say that all humans should have certain rights, privileges, things like that. And that's a very weird way of thinking. Peter Singer does not keep the other species out of it, by the way. he wants to give. Right, right, of course. But that's interesting that the circle continues to expand even beyond, beyond Homo sapiens.

Right, right, right. And so good. And so we're more individualistic, more analytic. There's another aspect, which it's because I care about time and the universe a lot, I have to emphasize, which is the idea, I think, that weird people are more future-oriented, or maybe even if I can be bolder, more willing to extend their self-hood to other places in time. and take actions accordingly to try to do things now that will benefit my future self. Right, right. So there are these experiments. One is the famous marshmallow test where you give children a choice between one marshmallow now or two if they wait.

And they actually end up in the experiment. There's a little bit of deception. The children are waiting to see if he caves in and eats the marshmallow. And there's some limited time, like 15 or 20 minutes. And then another one is where you give people choices between, you know, $100 now or $130 in a year and have people make a series of binary choices. And that seems to vary a lot around the world. And I suggest, and there are various amounts of evidence to support this, that it says, you know, the ability to cultivate that deferring of gratification was fostered by these institutions that were developing in Europe in 1500, 1600, in which you could save money. you could individually own things.

And so there were real incentives for cultivating this kind of long-term savings and this particular way of thinking about money. And then Protestant, things like Protestant thinking and whatnot, even encourage that more. So there's a relationship between Protestantism and this deferring gratification. This is a Baybarian idea. And yeah, so I think that – and so there's probably a bunch of these little ratchets that help push up our patrons that are built into our institutions. Yeah, I mean the origin of it, I want to –

definitely get to that. I'm sort of biting my tongue about why we became weird because it's so interesting and I want to get all the weirdness on the table first before we ask where it came from. But because there's so many different aspects and I wonder if there is a grand unified theory of it all. I mean, another aspect is this idea of authenticity and presenting different selves or faces to the world. Like we weird people think that there is a virtue in being the same when we talk to different sets of people. Whereas non-weird societies apparently, from what I read in your book, just take for granted we would act differently in different circumstances.

Yeah. And the key to, I think, understanding that is there's lots of relationships that are prescribed to be certain ways. So how you treat elders or how you treat parents. And a lot of times you'll call multiple people father or mother. And there might even be people who you'll have a classificatory relationship. So you'll call them uncle, even though they're not really your uncle. And part of what that's telling you is how you're supposed to treat them like you would

treat an uncle and you have a whole series of rules and prescriptions about how you treat different kinds of relatives. So for example, famously in lots of societies, there are these cross-cousin relationships. So this, for example, would be your mother's brother's son would be one of your cross-cous. And you have a joking relationship with them. So constant practical jokes, making fun of each other is just a normal way to behave. But you never behave that way to your grandfather. And so these very different ways of behaving. And, you know, of course, that, that, we can understand that. Weird psychology can understand that.

But there is a much bigger premium on being consistent across. So if you have certain attitudes, you're supposed to have those attitudes as you meet different people and appear in different situations. And if you don't, you know, people can think of you as two-faced or hypocritical. So we have these very critical terms. Whereas in other traditions, it can be thought to be wise and sensible to not always present the same face in a different situation. 2020 was full of unique challenges that made us change our whole way of life,

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I do question whether or not this valorization of having a single unified self that behaves the same way to all different people in all different circumstances is something that we should hold up as a good thing. You know, I guess that's a little bit of sympathetic towards a non-weird side for me. And, you know, but nonetheless, there is a kind of popular discourse about, you know, finding your true self. Oh, yeah, right, right, right. People are always trying to kind of look for that thing down there. It's somewhere in there if I can just find it. I'll be happy. And just to sort of finish these, you know, ticking off some of the weird boxes, there's the idea that maybe stems from our individuality of that we have free will, right?

That we can make choices that are rooted in our personal volition that then affect the rest of the world. And I was surprised to hear that this is a weird trait as well. Well, yeah, so I think it begins, you can see it with these moralizing religions. So it's more than just weird, but it just gets accentuated in the Western tradition where a great deal of emphasis is placed on these making of these individual choices. But it probably has seeds that go back into the moralizing religions, which have spread to lots of places. Because you have to make choices that will affect where they get into heaven and things like that in other traditions. I see. Okay. That's, I mean, so how do we, how do we experimentally test when free will came on the scene? I mean, how do we, is that this is a job for cultural anthropology, I guess?

Well, so, I mean, there's, I mean, it's no, there's a lot of research to be done on this, but there is a historical literature where they try to look, you know, at different religious texts and back into time to try to find discussions of free will. So St. Augustine in the Western tradition, you know, spends a lot of time on this. Anthropologists, of course, have provided lots of data from diverse societies and some of this provides insights into whether there's free will. And then you can run experiments, and the way they do, psychologists have done experiments on this is actually with a technique called priming. So they have subjects read philosophical arguments that either argue for the existence of free will or argue against it. And then they have to make decisions or do some psychological task after they've been primed in favor of free will or suggested that free will doesn't work. Like, you know, do you want to have cookies after it? How many cookies are you going to take?

You have to make a decision about allocating money to charity or to yourself. And how does believing relatively more or free will or less affect those decisions? And sorry, so what is the answer? Well, at least when you do it with Western subjects, when you prime them with free will, they give more to charity. So they're more generous. So it's, yeah. Because they're giving themselves credit, right? I mean, sort of fits in with a, yeah.

And they, I think they eat less cookies, too. Yeah, I don't know. My dietary habits have become worse in the pandemic. So I blame the world, not my individual choices whatsoever. Of course. But in another crucial aspect of this, I mean, maybe I should pause here to ask, how well have we done in sketching out the attributes that we associate with weirdness? Is there anyone that we're missing or have we given the people the basic picture?

I think we've given a good overview. One thing that I think is interesting, you mentioned you're interested in time. So how we think about time, I think was shaped over this cultural evolutionary period. And so we tend to think about time in absolute sense. And many of us were trained in a world where we watched a clock, right? So a clock with numbers where the hand moves around the clock. And that's actually a number line, a linear number line that's been wrapped around in a circle. And it kind of teaches us that time is linear.

But when you look at past practices, it's not clear that, people saw time as linear the way we do because the seat you know the day would would change the length of the day would change assuming you know depending on what latitude you're at and that the day would flex so like the length of hours actually varied in lots of societies where at some point in europe they developed a constant hour right it's always 60 minutes and they began even before the mechanical clock kind of spread rapidly throughout europe uh people were using candlesticks and hourglasses and things like that to measure time. And there seemed to be almost an obsession with measuring time and a real concern with it. So wage labor became hourly, right? So suddenly

you're measuring money and time can be put together. And of course, Ben Franklin coins the time is money. And then we talk about time like it's money. Like we're always trying to buy time, save time, or money out of time, those kinds of things. Well, actually, it only now occurs to me that you say that when I had a conversation a few months ago with Lara Boroditsky, who studies language and metaphors for time, usually spatial metaphors, right? Like time is going up or down or forward or backward. I don't think we talked about time as money as a metaphor, but yes, of course, it's valuable. You know, we spend it and so forth.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you're saying that we can sort of look to pinpoint when that became a cultural metaphor? Yeah. Well, so we know that Ben made it up. But Ben is, of course, in a much longer cultural tradition where it looks like people became increasingly concerned with time. And one simple marker of this is just the diffusion of the mechanical clock. So kind of 13th, 14th century mechanical clocks start diffusing. They start in Italy.

But they rapidly go from city to city. And towns were trying to one up other towns. And they would ring bells. And it led to the city kind of literally running like clockwork. Like they ring the bell and everybody wakes up and then has breakfast. and then, you know, there's the lunch bell. And so the city begins to run like clockwork. But the clock doesn't diffuse into the Middle East.

And other cultures didn't seem to have the immense interest in getting a clock the way the Europeans do. Huh, that is very interesting. Have you ever read Einstein's clocks, Poncarais, maps by your Harvard colleague, Peter Gallison? It's on my list. I haven't read it. Very worth reading, yeah. And one of the points he makes a little bit past the eras you're talking about, but he makes the point that Einstein never would have invented relativity

if he hadn't been a patent clerk who was a patent clerk at a time when clocks were a big deal. And he was thinking about, you know, synchronizing time over different cities. And that helped him to think about what it meant to synchronize time. Yeah, that's a great example. So this business about time is very, very good and important because it is hard to break out of how we think about the world and to realize that, you know, there are other ways of thinking about it,

not only in cultures in different parts of the world, but even in our ancestral cultures, the idea that we de-emphasize being individuals, having free will, keeping track of time, is just a hard one for us to do. One of the things you emphasize is the co-evolution of genes and culture, right? The fact that these shifts in ways of thinking

play back and forth with shifts in our actual genomes. Yeah, so in my previous book, The Secret of Our Success, I argue that lots of the features of humans has been shaped by culture. So things like the way tools and fire have shaped our hands and our intestines and our digestive systems. And then I think a lot of our big brains expanded as a response of having to learn lots of cultural information about how to make tools and shelters and arrow poisons and things like that. So this complex body of knowledge that transmits non-genetically. In many ways, I think our brains have evolved to be good at acquiring all that information.

And one of the interesting differences between weird and non-weird cultures is shows up in the hemispheres of our brains. I mean, maybe this is not a physiological difference, but the idea that we're not as good at recognizing faces, for example. So, yeah, crucial distinction. So it is a physiological difference. it's just not a genetic difference. Ah, right. So there's a lot more to biology than just genetics. And so as a consequence of learning to read as we grow up,

there's a bunch of changes that we can see in people's brains. And so neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have done a lot of work on this. And you can study illiterate populations. And they seem to see faces, for example, equally. So if you look at the brain activation, you get equally in the left and right hemispheres. It's only when you learn to read that, the facial recognition is driven somewhat out of the left hemisphere so that we so that neuroscientists thought that humans you know humans the species were right hemisphere bias for facial

recognition but it seems like that's all or mostly a product of the fact that they studied mostly literate populations and of course throughout most of human history people have been illiterate so it's only recently that we became right hemisphere biased and facial recognition and that's because there's a lot of neurogeography used for recognizing words and processing words quickly. And of course, and we also have things like a thicker corpus callosa, so the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres. We have other psychological patterns for literate populations where when we hear speech, we get more whole-brained activation, maybe because parts of our brain are kind of turning it into letters. And that's another way to store it

and represent it and interact with it. I have to ask, is there some knowledge about what breaks the symmetry between the right and left side of the brains? I mean, you know, I would have expected that half of the children who become literate have that those parts of their brains that do that on the right half and half have it on the left half, but there's something systematic. Well, yeah, that's good. So it's building on a, I mean, I'm not a neuroscientist, but my reading of this work is that there's already an asymmetry in humans' brains that we have language centers on the left. Okay. And so neurogeographically, you've got to seat the reading near the language because obviously they're connected. And then there's also object recognition

and that's where you start impinging on the neurogeography usually used for faces. But yeah, it's the left bias because that's where language is. I see. So the difference between left and right brains is there even in preliterate societies, but basically literate societies have this whole extra thing that they need to associate with language, namely reading, and that sort of grows in the brain and pushes facial recognition to the other side. Yeah, yeah. And one of the fascinating parts of it is, of course, scripts that we use for reading. You know, you can think of Chinese characters or kanji characters or Arabic script or Hebrew. They're all very, they're different. I mean, they're the same in many ways, but they're different in certain key and interesting ways. But yet the area of the brain that gets transformed for reading is more or less in the same place. It's not exactly in the same place, but amazingly, it doesn't pop up anywhere. It pops up within this certain area in the brain. And of course, it can't be genetic, right? Like we haven't been reading that long to evolve a new part of our brain.

Yeah, and so this is one of the points that I try to get across in my last book and this book is we have to get beyond this kind of dualistic way of thinking, where there's genetic things that we think of as biological, and then there's cultural learned things, which seem to be almost, you know, ethereal. When we learn culture, that wires things into our brains. And, you know, whether we're learning a language or we're learning to juggle, if we're learning the complexity of streets in London, we know that this alters, for example, our hippocampus. And so you get physical changes in the substructure, which means that cultural evolution is a kind of biological evolution. It's just not a kind of genetic evolution.

Right. So to be clear on what that means, it's something that can affect our ability to reproduce and pass things down to further generations, but it's just not encoded in our DNA. Exactly. And it's actually transmitted. So something like the Protestantism or values in education and teaching kids to read is something that's passed from one generation to the next. And that then affects how people behave in the world. They learn to read. And that then alters their norocircuitary in their left hemisphere.

Right. And okay, good. So speaking of Protestants, this is probably the time we should talk about where all this came from. I mean, you've convinced me. I think it's a pretty easy target for the claim that weird population. are different and the specific ways in which they're different make perfect sense to me. It seems to be much harder claim to make to really understand where that came from, but you're boldly doing it as a good scholar is supposed to do.

So should we start even very early in societies with how societies scale up back in the early days of the switch from hunter gathering to agriculture? Yeah. So, you know, I'm here I'm mostly drawing on work in anthropology and archaeology. I mean, Jared Diamond summarizes some of this stuff in his book, Guns, Shurms, and Steel. But the central idea is that with the beginnings of agriculture, you could have food production, so you could have larger populations. And as populations scale up, they've got to control land and territory in order to do agriculture. So you need to get groups to cooperate on larger scales.

And one of the, perhaps the main way that societies do this when they first begin to scale, up is they switch from what's called extensive kinship. So you're building social relationships the way a mobile hunter gather band would where you have, you're building social links that go far away so that you have this broad network of people you can depend on depending on whether there's shocks or other kinds of things. You can move around the landscape to different friends and different places to a really intense group that can defend some territory. So a clan where everybody's related. They all see themselves as owners of the land and they're all going to fight fiercely to control this territory. And so that's kind of how we start getting larger groups.

We get clans and that we can get groups of clans. There's things called age sets with which create bonds between clans. There's another social structure called segmentary lineage, which is another way that clans can get together to control territory and the scaling up process. And so I make the case that this created a certain kind of social network based on kin ties, cousin marriage, structures like the clan where we see ourselves as related to

an ancestor in the past. There's inheritance rules that help bind us together, residence rules about where people live after they get married that sets who you're going to grow up with and who you form these links with.

So all this affects our social structure. And that then affects our psychology and some of the ways we talked about giving this more holistic thinking, concern about clan loyalty or social relationships. more conformity, things like that. Right. So just to be clear, this sort of development of clan structure or in

kinship relations, that's not the weirdness. That's the thing that the weirdness will eventually sort of react against. So early humans around the world develop this sort of clan kinship structure. Exactly. So this is occurring as society scale up, and there's a lot of scaling up that's being driven by the emergence of food production. So animal domestication and agriculture, especially things like rice-based agriculture, or wheat-based agriculture, are particularly strong in this kind of scaling up process. So there's lots of ecological factors that we think are relevant to this. But then you get to the earliest states.

And what they seem to be is, you know, groups stratify. So you get one set of kin relations that are the elites. And then lower strata, which could go all the way down to slaves. And aside from the slaves, everybody is linked together through these kin-differies. ties. So kin ties take care of when you're injured. They determine who you're going to marry or at least have a big influence on it. And they take, you know, take care of, take care of you when you're old. So they're, you know, you're really woven into a tight social fabric there. But states begin to have these bureaucracies. So they could be military bureaucracies or judicial bureaucracies. They're often

religious elements to all this that allow these larger groups of the first states merge. And the case that I make in the book is this creates a kind of path dependence because so much of these early states were dependent on these tight kin bonds that it was there was no pathway essentially from an evolutionary perspective to the kinds of societies to modern societies today which are based on these small families where the economic and political institutions aren't interwoven with these big kinship bonds and whatnot and you know those are those got to be kept suppressed and so then the question is how did you ever get to the point where you could build this other, you could go down this other trajectory.

I mean, is this something we can compare in any useful way to primates, to gorillas and monkeys and so forth? Are they, are they weirder than most human beings? Well, I guess they're, they're weirder. I mean, the thing about other non-human primates is that they don't have culture, so they're not going to have social norms and institutions. I mean, you know, you could say that guerrillas have a kind of despotism because they have these silver-backed males who control this harem of females. So, I mean, there are some parallels like that. But what I think is interesting is that, you know, in mobile hunter-gather societies, they're sort of weirder in the sense that they don't have these clans or other kind of tight bonds. So when psychologists have done experiments, like simple perception experiments, a famous one measures field independence.

they look more like weird people. So they're field independent, just like weird people. And it's really the agriculturists who are field dependent. And this has to do with your ability to see things independently moving in space aside from the background. So it has that kind of analytic versus holistic feel to it. Right. I wonder this is probably too far to go, but I do wonder if this has theological implications for the difference between, you know, Judeo-Christian ways of thinking about humanity versus Buddhist or Confucian or, or,

Taoist ways of thinking about who we are and how we fit into the universe. Yeah, and I certainly, I mean, it turns out that in the modern world, 90% of Christians are cultural descendants of this Western European tradition. So this wasn't true when things started. So the branch of Christianity that eventually evolves into the Roman Catholic Church was, you know, just one branch among many. There were Syrian Christians and Armenian Christians and Ethiopian Christians, Caldean Christians, but there's such an explosion of this one particular branch rooted in the Catholic Church that that dominates much of what we think of as Christian thought today. Right. And you in particular, this is sort of the major point, I guess,

at least that people seize on, you want to put your finger on the very specific idea that the church tells you not to marry your cousin as a real turning point in the makeup psychologically of weird people versus the non-weird? Well, I'd want to expand a little bit beyond that because I think that the key element is the way that the brand of Christianity that eventually becomes Roman Catholicism, they did a whole bunch of things to the family. So they banned cousin marriage, they altered the inheritance system, in ways that would have ended clans, they ended polygyny,

they had, they preferred neolocal residents, they tried to end a range, marriages and all of these things kind of point in the direction of creating monogamous nuclear families. So, you know, I was making this case earlier about how there's this path dependence problem. So the early states are all interwoven with these dense kinship networks that grew up during the agricultural period when we're completely dependent on agriculture and had to control territory. So how do you get around that? Well, the church is what, you know, allow this other path to spring up because it broke all that stuff down into monogamous nuclear families, even less intensive kinship than we see amongst

Hunter-Gathers. And then the question is, well, how do we create a world where we can only have monogamous nuclear families because there are taboos on marrying our cousins and we can't have unilineal dissent systems? And you get these new institutions, these voluntary institutions and these representative governments that pop up in the high Middle Ages. One of the things about the modern world is that life is becoming less predictable. We don't live in the same house generations at a time anymore. Our jobs might change from when we're 20 and 30 to when we're 40 and 50. Costs are rising, the cost of living, student debt, buying a house, and so forth.

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over and over again, but you still need social relations and therefore you're sort of nudged towards making social relations with people who you are not kin with. Is that an oversimplification, but okay? Yeah, no, I mean, that gets at the major thrust. And the key to remember is

the degree to which, as an individual in these worlds of intensive kinship, you're dependent on this kin network for your, you know, it's the people who you cooperate with economically, it's You know, your political power. In Rome, of course, there is a patriarchal society, so only the head of the family had any legal rights. So, you know, even if you're an adult, you could be a 40-year-old man.

If your father's alive, you're under his, you know, you're under his legal umbrella in some sense. And so there's no individual rights or anything like that in this other world. But then because everything gets broken down into binogh's nuclear families, people need to figure out ways to create mutual insurance and to, you know, have, some security when they're old and when they get injured. And then, you know, who are my allies? Like, who am I, I don't have this network of kin I can tap if I need to defend my honor or, you know, I'm being harassed by someone. And so they built these voluntary associations.

So guilds begin as a kind of mutual insurance network. And you get universities and monasteries and a whole variety of different institutions that are all doing the same thing. They're creating, they're doing the social functions that kinship groups used to do. Yeah. And this whole idea of sort of kind of. cosmopolitanism and the idea that you could like move to other places and and start a life and and associate with people who are not in your family. You're saying that all sort of comes from

this idea that the church wants the family unit to be relatively tiny. Yeah. And you know, it's not the key here is that the as best I can tell, there's no intention right in the church. They're just kind of following what they think God wants and it has this unexpected byproduct effect. And a key one is the one you mentioned there, which is this residential. mobility. So you find in lots of places, people are still tied back to the rural farms and stuff. So I see this in Fiji. I've seen it described in China, in Africa. So they still have responsibilities and obligations back home, but they go to the city maybe to make money or, you know, for some short period. When they're there, they're probably living with relatives or at least people from the region

where they come from. And they're just spending some time there. Whereas when you break everyone down to nuclear families, there's nothing to go back home to. Like there's not some big network of kin. You're not tied to ancestors who were buried in your land, so you have ritual responsibilities. You can just move to the town and become a citizen of that town. So what you get are new town sprouting up all over Europe, where people would join and they'd be members. And this is, you know, this is where the idea of citizenship comes from, citizen of a town. And by joining, I sign a contract, I swear an oath to God that I'll fulfill my responsibilities and obligations to this town, to this group of strangers that I'm joined. And since many of our

listeners are probably in this weird group. Do you mean to imply by this that in non-weird societies, that wouldn't happen? This idea of like going to a town and becoming a citizen of it is just much less common? Well, so today, things have changed, of course, because a lot of these institutions have been exported around the world. But in, you know, in former times and kind of, you know, think about the medieval period, it certainly wouldn't have worked where you'd kind of, where you're joining like a voluntary association.

So, for example, I looked at the spread of representative governments, and one of the chapters in my book shows how that the more years a region of Europe had under the church, the more likely you're likely to see representative governments pop up in a town. During that exact same period, the frequency of representative governments popping up in the Islamic world is zero. Like, there's not a single case of representative government popping up. So it's just a different way of thinking about the world. I want to actually give you a chance to expand on these data because they really are wonderful. have all these plots about how long a certain culture has been exposed to the ideas of the Western Church versus various measures of individuality in cosmopolitanism, et cetera. It's actually quite nice to see that kind of quantitative evidence.

Yeah, so what we did, and this is working with three economics colleagues, is we put together all the data we could find that measured psychology. And then we put together data from anthropological databases on kinship structure. So we're able to show the places that have more of this intensive kinship, as I've described, that has a bunch of the psychological patterns that we've been talking about. And often they're pretty strong correlations. And then we try to figure, well, how can we measure church exposure? So we built a database of the diffusion of the Catholic Church across Europe.

So for each bishopric, so that's kind of an administrative hub within Catholicism, We know it's GPS coordinates and it's data founding. And so then we can take a person who's in a survey and tag them in space and tag him in space and then say how long that region has been under the Catholic Church. And then we can use that to predict these features of psychology that we can get from survey measures or when we go globally we can get from other kinds of measures. I know that you already sort of demure the question of why the church took this policy, you know, said that's what they think God did.

Do we know anything more about specifically why this was a choice that was made particularly in the Western Church and not, you know, in the Islamic world or China or India or any place like that? Yeah. So there's a couple different ways of looking at that. So first, you know, it's a bit of a complex picture. So there's certainly some early church fathers who seem to recognize what they would have, what you could describe as the social benefits or the way of expanding the circle of society by. preventing cousin marriage. So St. Augustine writes about this a bit. But then when you read, you try to read up on what the actual was happening at these councils and the debates, it doesn't seem to have come up very much that social benefits. People are more concerned about, well, there's a plague hitting and God's

angry with us for not adhering. You know, there's too much incest, by which they mean too much cousin marriage. And we've got to really crack down on this cousin marriage. So they would increase the penalties and expand the circle and do things like that. And so there's that feature. The other thing that the Jack Goody has argued is that this benefited the church financially. So the church gets a lot of revenue flows from simple things like selling the chance to marry your cousin, but also from bequests. So leaders, lead Christians became convinced that if they wanted to get into heaven and they were rich, they had to give to the poor. And of course, if you give to the poor while you're living, that can be inconvenient.

but if you give it on your deathbed, then that's a lot more convenient. So a lot of people were making massive deathbed bequests of land to the church, and the church became the largest landowner in Europe. So, you know, this was at least a profitable thing to do. Now, whether, you know, it's a debate among historians, and there's a lot of critics of Goody because there's no smoking gun evidence where the church is like, yeah, yeah, we're going to get a big wealth flow if we just implement this.

So, you know, it's easy to believe that various bishops may have noticed that this is This fills their coffers. So maybe they're more likely to go along with the policy. They're more likely to implement it. But I think that really the deeper and more important point, which is often missed in how we think about things, we tend to want to look for the kind of rationalization or justification when we see someone do something that ends up being successful. And so certainly the Catholic Church is successful, whatever else you think about it. But yeah, it's important to realize that other groups were trying other kinds of experiments.

So over in Persia, Zoroastrians were in character. cousin marriage and even encouraging brother-sister marriage and incest at the elite levels. And Islam was trying to constrain polygyny but just to four wives. But they had an inheritance custom that said that daughters had to inherit half of what sons inherit, which led to a very unusual practice of parallel cousin marriage. So daughters would marry their father's son, their father's brother's son, which is otherwise quite rare in the anthropological record. And that would cause a very different social structure to emerge.

So if you just think about different groups, different religious groups as coming up with different notions of what they think God wants. And not really random, but a lot of randomness in that process. Then, you know, some groups are that they might pick traits just by chance that end up leading to long-term success. And so it's not always fruitful to think that we can look back into the minds of the people in the past and assume that they saw the wisdom of what they were doing rather than just being, you know, sometimes you get lucky. Yeah. And it does, the bright side of this way of thinking about it, I think, and one of the bright sides would be to say that this might be an example where, you know, we're always looking for explanations in a very materialist way, right? You know, here is the reasons why the conditions would have led to this no matter what. But maybe here ideas, whether the ideas were right or wrong, actually had a huge influence on how society developed.

Yeah, and I think that's a really important idea, because I'm certainly have much of the way. my work actually looks at how the economic or ecological conditions favor this or that cultural practice. But the interesting thing about religion is that it, you know, it forces people to do stuff or it motivates people to do stuff they wouldn't otherwise do, right, do crazy things that would otherwise seem not very economically smart. And that can then, because of that, it can have these big knock-on effects because people are sort of going out of the normal modes that you would operate. And it's also, it's the parallel with how we think, think about natural selection in the biological realm is very clear when you talk about how

different societies were experimenting with different ways of doing things and sort of whatever the motivation was, the Western Church hit on a system that really encouraged competition and the free market of whatever, both money and ideas. Right, right. And yeah, I think this is a really important way of thinking. And it's, it runs a little bit contrary to how people typically think about social science and think about things. We have a kind of very cognitive, heavy, you know, individuals doing smart and sensible things based on their appraisals of the situation, rather than, you know, people are sort of groping around myopically, and this was just one particular path that these populations started groping

their way down. Yeah. But, I mean, this is how evolution works, right? It is really random, I mean, natural selection works. There's random mutations, and the ones that work will catch on. And so in some sense, that's a way we can think about why weirdness took over the world. Right. Yeah, that's exactly. And you say the Western Church, I think that's the very specific choice because, of course, we think of the Catholic Church, but the Protestant churches

count also. And in fact, I think you tried to make the case that the Protestantism accelerated this trend. The Protestants were even more weird-friendly than the Catholic Church was. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that I had in my mind when I got started is, you know, famously there's this German sociologist Max Weber, who had emphasized the connections between Protestant's face Protestant beliefs and the emergence of capitalism and markets and the kind of big economic expansion you see after Protestantism after 1500. But Protestantism is such an individualistic religion where people are kind of alone. The only thing that matters is your mental states, so your faith, your good works don't matter. You know, the big debate. People work super hard. They're

very frugal, you know, at least this is the aspiration. The work ethic. And Protestant work ethic. Yeah, the work ethic, exactly. But how do you get to a world where that is a is a kind of religion that can spread? And so I think that the world, at least where Protestantism was successful, was already pretty individualistic and where mental states already mattered a lot. So this was very much just wrapping the kinds of intuitions people had from their psychology, wrapping them in sacred garb and, you know, kind of making them even more powerful by doing that. So, I mean, we talked about reading before. And to emphasize this point about Protestantism is, you know, the notion was that every individual, men and women, should learn

how to read so they can read the Bible for themselves and understand it enough to improve their personal relationship with this supernatural being. And that's just so arrogant from the point of view of most religions where, you know, I should every person have to do this? You've got to be a specialist. You've got to be a scholar. You've got to read some ancient language. But Protestant had them, you know, we're going to write the Bible in German, and we're going to teach all the girls. And just because women are oppressed at this period, you know, we're going to teach them all to read the Bible. And, you know, they've got to do it too. So female literacy begins spreading with male literacy.

It's just a very unusual, from the point of view of lots of other societies, just a very unusual way to think about things. But you can see why it would catch on. I mean, I don't want to run ahead of the data. But it seems natural that if the story is on the right track, then it would nudge us in the directions of things like capitalism, democracy, the scientific revolution, all of these things that we think of as being fundamentally based in individuals trying their best to do something and both competing and cooperating with each other to do it. Yeah. And that's kind of my case, that Protestantism was a kind of accelerant on the kind of psychological and economic processes that were underway. And is there, how much do we know, I sort of asked this already, but maybe I can ask it in a different way, how much do we know about the comparative what was going on a thousand years ago or 500 years ago in China or the Islamic world? I mean, they had very advanced societies, but are you going to say that it's because they didn't quite catch on to this individualism idea that Europe leapt ahead a little bit?

Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, I make the point, a big point of the book is that, you know, Europe was a very unlikely place to see, to find this, you know, if you had been in, you know, I have an alien appearing at the Earth from orbit at one point in the year a thousand and, you know, noticing all this activity in China, in the Middle East and Central Asia and places like that where there's lots of impressive science being done and impressive monuments being built. and Europe seems to be a relative backwater in the year of thousand. And there's also some Muslim scholars who were making similar observations. And so, you know, then the question is, why did this happen? And I make the case that it's, you know, the change in psychology initiated by the church and the change in the social world led to these new institutions, led to things like representative government, gave a boost to things like science, and then eventually led to more

rapid innovation. Because I make the case for the collective brain, which is this idea. that innovation is driven by the recombination of ideas. So the larger a population you have and the more interconnected it is, the more ideas can flow among diverse minds and create baby ideas. And so, you know, I have various lines of evidence in this penultimate chapter, making the case that there's, you know, apprentices moving around Europe and masters, get taking jobs in different cities and just lots of opportunities for different ideas to be combined.

More people are becoming literate. so they're reading books written in the past or written by someone who lives very far away, just swapping ideas. I mean, it resonates. Let me be self-indulgent here just for a second because it resonates with two previous podcast guests that I've talked to. One is Jeffrey West, who in his book, Scale, tries to make this case that just getting a bunch of people together in the same place talking to each other is a huge accelerant to new ideas. And that sounds like it's part of your larger story. Yeah, and so you see urbanization, it starts going up. I describe this process where people are moving from the hinterlands because they're not tied to their kin groups anymore. And the cities and towns are, you're both getting new towns where they're adopting these charters of rights and privileges for individual citizens.

And you're getting cities growing. So rapid urbanization, passing China in about 1,200 probably doesn't pass the kind of circum Mediterranean until after 1,500. But just larger cities, lots of trade. between the city, so ideas flowing between the cities. For the most part, one shared religion, so people can flow. Universities have scholars moving from town to town. So just lots of things energizing that flow of ideas. And at the risk of stepping on a third rail here, another podcast I did was with Will Wilkinson, who is a policy analyst who talks about the polarization divide in the United States, which he claims is mostly, for,

many, many good, very empirical reasons is mostly an urban rural divide. And he actually relates psychological tests, the Big Five personality inventory, to the choice to live in an urban area versus a rural area. And again, you see that people who are open to new ideas are going to be driven to the urban areas where things are exciting and not necessarily comfortable, whereas people who are more traditional but maybe also more conscientious will be happier in a more stable rural environment. Right. And within that kind of basic way of thinking, so he's making an argument for self-selection there, and I'm sure that can play an important role in the U.S. today.

But of course, in the past, it used to be that 95% of everyone was in a rural society. So a lot of people over the last few hundred years, you know, in general, everybody's much more urbanized. So there's been this dramatic change over centuries in the amount of urbanization. And in the book I touch a little bit on, you know, the differences between cities that are on rivers and are port cities and they tend to be more cosmopolitan, more open to strangers. Immigrants, of course, are a massive boost to invention because they bring fresh new ideas. They actually make the locals, the native borns, more innovative when they come in from other places. I mean, you say, of course, but there are people who don't quite perceive this. Right.

I just wrote, so it's, of course, to me, because I've been actually writing a review of this evidence. Yeah, well, or of course, to anyone who hangs out in universities, you know, that immigration, you know, getting smart people from all over the world is the best thing that we can do. Okay, final previous podcast guest, I will ask you to comment on. I recently had David Stassavage on, who has written a wonderful history of democracy. And I learned a lot from it, and if I can boil his story down to a very simple idea, he argues that if you go a thousand years ago and compare Europe to the Islamic. World or China. The irony is that technology and state institutions and bureaucracy were weaker in Europe than they were in the Islamic world or China. Just like you said, if an alien were looking down on the year 1200, Europe was a backwater. And because of that weakness, the governments were

weak. The kings didn't know how many taxes to collect or have an efficient way to raise an army. And that made it easier for democracy to develop. And then when democracy developed, it made it easier for science and technology to take off. So that sounds maybe complimentary, but not quite the same as the story you're telling. Yeah, I mean, I think it can be consistent with it. The interesting thing is, though, one of my co-authors, which I summarize his work in the book, is that an account like that doesn't explain why even today you can take immigrants, say you take immigrants to Europe from around the world, and you look at the intensive kinship of where their parents came from. So these are second generation immigrants. You can predict whether they vote, their participation in

demonstrations, all kinds of things that make democracies run based on the kinship system of where their parents came from. So there really is a kind of psychological element in which kinship alters people's minds in a ways that makes them more willing to do the things or more interest in doing the things that make modern democracies run. Yeah, I mean, this is why this is how we started the conversation, but of course psychology is important, of course bureaucracy is important, of course technology is important, of course religion is important. Do you ever like it when you're falling asleep at night just think, oh my goodness, I will never figure this out? There's just too many things going on. Yes, I mean, I do think that. But I mean, I guess, you know, part of my, I guess I'm trying to get a big idea on the table and try to convince other people that it's an interesting idea. idea, which is that so much of social science, so thinking about economics and psychology, but also other disciplines, have assumed that psychology is something fixed in humans, and that we can

assume that constant, and then they try to figure out the economics or the institutions or something like that. Now, maybe I'm just making the problem harder because they could, I'm saying you can't assume that's fixed, right? That's not a parameter now. It's a state variable. And so you can say you got to measure more things and it's going to take a bigger data set and whatnot to figure it out. So, and then the key idea is that our minds actually adapt to the institution. So, you know, I have emphasized this kinship stuff, but that's really just one part of a much larger story where things like markets and this competition among societies and religion can affect how we think and what we pay attention to, how long our memories are. So, you know, so if you want to tell, if you want to understand psychology, you got to understand history. and do you understand history, you got to understand psychology.

So I guess I'm trying to encourage a more interdisciplinary approach to all these questions. Yeah, which I'm very, very sympathetic to do it. It makes perfect sense. And I guess the other thing that, you know, you already said, and I don't want to get lost because it's crucially important and tracks it very well with what David's DeSavage was saying is the idea of the path dependence of these developments. You know, it wasn't inevitable from the start. Slight difference in choices, amplify and brandy.

out and you're not guaranteed to end up in the same place. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a really important point. And it's hard to know exactly how things are going to play out, right? So one of the things that I've suggested in terms of, you know, I think that humans are pretty bad at designing institutions from the top down, but we do know how to design variation and selection systems. So you can have a bunch of people trying different ways to make an institution and then see how they perform over some, you know, reasonable period of time and then kind of take the best.

So we should be more of a, have a population thinking, a kind of natural selectionist thinking, in trying to figure out the best institutions or the best policies to solve problems. Yeah, and it's sort of experimental trial and error kind of attitude toward these things. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even in, so I sometimes highlight these experiments where we have, we give, put students or something in a simple, simple institution where they have to solve a public goods problem. And we have them pick which one they want to go into. most of the time they pick the wrong one. They don't pick the institution that maximizes the public good and gives them the highest dollar payoff. They pick some institution and allows them to avoid punishment or has some of the thing they like.

Right. I mean, you know, yeah, life is complicated and it's good to have a whole bunch of different people trying out different things so we can learn from what they do. You know, it makes sense in retrospect. Okay. I mean, maybe to close things out, this is, you know, a fantastic conversation. And I know, again, you're trying to understand what happens in these societies. But once you talk about these issues, it's almost impossible to not think about what should happen in these societies, right? It's sort of the more moral aspects or normative aspects of these things.

You know, people, everyone knows that Western societies are individualistic and, you know, that's led to great material prosperity. But it's also led to breaking down of the tightness of family bonds and things like that. I mean, can we learn about right and wrong and choices we make for making a good society from this kind of analysis, as well as just a society that leads to universities and psychology classes and experiments? Yeah, I don't, well, so the problem with the normative question is you always got to tell me what is it you're trying to maximize, right? Yeah. So we talked a bit about innovation, and I feel like I have things to say about how to increase innovation, and it's built around the collective. collective brain and the free flow of ideas and more trust and the value of immigrants. And so there's a kind of whole program of what a policy would look like to try to increase

innovation. But then you could say, you know, if you care about religious homogeneity or, you know, lots of other kinds of things. Right. You know, then, you know, it all depends on what you want to do. Yeah. I think, well, I think that's fair. Okay. Good enough. Do you have any, my, my final question, is I'd like to end on an optimistic note on the podcasts. You know, given what we've learned about weirdness and the human brain, does this give us any insight on how we can be even better at, forget about choosing right from wrong on those values that we agree on. We want people to be happy and prosperous and so forth.

What are the lessons that we learn that we can actually put to work making society a better place? Hmm. Well, I mean, I think that this idea of create, I mean, I'll go back to my innovation point, which was that, you know, taking the lessons of all this kind of innovation, the more that we bring different voices into the conversation and people from diverse backgrounds and have egalitarian conversations, non-hierarchical social structures, the more we can develop new ideas and new ways of doing things. So it really is putting together this. large collective brain. And, you know, that's the kind of hope for solving a lot of the big problems we face. There are social problems in the sense that we got to cooperate. But if we can also come up with technological solutions or institutional solutions, that's going to be really important. I mean, I guess, yeah, one of the points you made about weirdness is not that it's antisocial. It expands the circle of the people we can agree with and work with beyond our kin and family

and Klan to large groups, maybe even the world, and that's something that we should, you know, joyfully embrace in a time when the world is kind of in trouble in various ways. Right, right. So, you know, one of the things that it, in a weird world, there's plenty of social groups, but usually the groups are defined by what people want to say about themselves or what they want to cultivate in themselves. So if you want to cultivate support for human rights, you know, then you can join human rights groups and get together with other people who were interested in human rights rather than

the other kinds of groups that one could join. Yeah, and good. Lots of good things we should be doing out there for the world. All right. Joe Henrik, thanks so much for appearing on the Weinscape podcast. Oh, great to be with you. Thanks. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals? At LPL Financial, we offer more ways for advisors and their clients to thrive. So what if you could? Paid advertisement. Investing involves risk including potential Loso Principal LPL Financial LLC member FINRA SIPC.