The Joe Walker Podcast - The Indiana Jones Of Anthropology On The Origins Of Western Psychology — Joe Henrich

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Joe Henrich is Professor and Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Secret of Our Success and The Weirdest People in the World.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to the Jolly Swagman Podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Swagman and Swagettes, welcome back to the show. It is great to have you here. If you're new to the show, welcome especially. Please make sure you do subscribe to or follow the podcast, depending on which app you use, to ensure that you never miss new episodes. We release them every Monday, Australian Eastern Standard Time, which is Sunday afternoon and evening for the Brits and the Yanks, respectively. My guest for this episode is Joe Henrich. Joe is Professor and Chair of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

He is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on how genes and culture interact. Joe is the author of two exceptional books, The Secret of Our Success, How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species and Makingating our species, and making us smarter, and the weirdest people in the world, how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. The latter was probably the most important non-fiction book of 2020. In this conversation, Joe and I discuss gene culture co-evolution and the origins of Western psychology.

This is an episode that is as fascinating as it is enjoyable, and I do hope you enjoy. So without much further ado, please enjoy this chat with the great Joe Henrich. Joe Henrich, welcome to the show. Good to be with you. It's so great to have this opportunity to speak. I'm a huge fan of your work. I think you're one of the most brilliant and interesting people working in evolutionary biology at this moment. And we're going to talk about all of your work, in particular, your work crystallized in two books, The Secret of Our Success, and most recently, The Weirdest People in the World.

But Joe, before we kick off, I was hoping you could tell me the story of how an aerospace engineer became one of the world's leading authorities on cultural evolution. Okay, sure. It's a little bit of a long story. I'll try to trim it down to its key, key elements. When I was in undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, I was studying aerospace engineering and I took an anthropology class and I really enjoyed it. So I ended up, Notre Dame had a dual degree, so you can get both a BA and a BS. And so I picked up anthropology and went an additional year to finish both an anthropology degree and an aerospace engineering degree. And my last year, I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I actually had two stacks of graduate school applications, a set for study space propulsion

and a set to study anthropology. And I figured it didn't make sense to apply to two different graduate programs. So I got a job in Washington, D.C. as an engineer, and I went and did that for two years while I made a final decision. And then after two years, I quit my engineering job and drove to California, enrolled at UCLA, and went on to go through graduate school. And then after my first summer of field work in the Peruvian Amazon, I began to get disenchanted with what anthropology had to offer in terms of my ability to explain what I was seeing, people's decision making and cooperation and a lot of other elements. So I began to read widely and I read behavioral economics and psychology. I also began to work with anthropologist named Rob Boyd, who was building mathematical models of cultural evolution. And for most anthropology students, this was very

difficult to understand because they didn't have any math background. But with my engineering training, I was able to easily understand the models and then begin to use them to orchestrate my thinking. So as I went through graduate school, I began to incorporate more and more elements from economics and psychology. So I read Kahneman and Tversky back then, and a political scientist called Eleanor Ostrom, who went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics, as well as lots of behavioral economics. So yeah, so I became more interdisciplinary as I went on. And I got I ended up taking my initial job in anthropology as a cultural anthropologist at Emory University. But I was still working across different fields. And I ended up getting recruited to the University of British Columbia. And there, the anthropologists weren't

interested in me. But the dean thought I was worth recruiting anyway, so shopped me to economics and psychology. And they ended up saying, we'll take any piece of them that you want to give us. And so I split my position between psychology and economics. And that was really important for my latest book, because my teaching in economics was the wealth and poverty of nations. So I started with Jared Diamond's book, but I began learning more and more about what economics had to say about that question. And at the same time, I was hanging out with these social psychologists who had been comparing different societies and looking at some of the cultural differences. And that led to our paper called The Weirdest People in the World, where WEIRD is an acronym that stands for Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic. And then later I got recruited to Harvard, where I'm now the chair

of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. I want to jump back to one period in particular during that journey, and that was your year of reading. Can you tell me about that? How important was it to your intellectual development? Did you read books and articles systematically or opportunistically? Well, I knew, so this was after I finished my master's thesis. So my master's thesis was published in the journal Human Ecology. And if you look at it, it's very different than everything else I wrote in my career, because in some sense, I was trying to be an economic anthropologist. And so I wrote

in a style that I thought would look like economic anthropology. But then after that, I decided to do this reading year, which just meant in my own mind, I didn't do anything else but read. And fortunately, my funding and stuff allowed me to do that. They don't really pay much attention to you when you're in grad school in anthropology. Lots of people are at the field and whatnot. So yeah, I was reading systematically, but focused on trying to understand how I can explain differences that I was seeing in Peru, explain people's decision making, the kinds of the ways they were responding to my questions.

I ended up doing some behavioral experiments. So I did something called the ultimatum game, which is a simple division of money between two people. And the Machiganga behaved very differently. So how can I explain that? What's going on here? And so I was just taking stacks of books in different fields i had like textbooks in cognitive psychology uh like i mentioned eleanor ostrom's books in political science and just you know spend the whole day reading one book after another were you taking notes while you were doing this yeah yeah so i had So I had notebooks on different topics. And so it wasn't

a very good system thinking back on it. But I would like write under, I'd find things as I was reading, and then write in different notebooks. What was your first impression of Kahneman and Tversky's work? Well, in some sense, the critique that I now have of that work, I didn't have at the time, I hadn't fully appreciated the degree to which psychology hadn't confronted this problem of cultural diversity. So I assumed when I was reading their books, that they were finding all these errors in decision making. So one of the things I had to explain was that how it was that humans could have such adaptive cultural practices, but yet have such poor rationality and poor decision making. So Kahneman and Tversky show all these errors that people make.

But yet when you look at cultural practices, there's this subtlety and nuance and fit with the environment that you sometimes find. So how could you get to those subtly adaptive practices if people are not that good at processing information rationally? So some of my early work is trying to say that these unconscious learning biases, so people tending to learn from healthier, rationally. So some of my early work is trying to say that these unconscious learning biases,

so people tending to learn from healthier, more successful people, can lead to adaptive practices, even if individuals' decision makers themselves aren't very good. Three books that influenced you in particular were Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, Steve Frank's Foundations of Social Evolution, and the classic Culture and the Evolutionary Process by Boyd and Richardson. Could you take me through each of those books and how it influenced you, starting with whichever you like? So, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Foundations of Social Evolution, and Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Well, I think I like most about Guns, Germs, and Steel. So, I had been working in the Peruvian Amazon, and for one episode when I was in the most remote of the Machu Picchu communities

that I would go to, people started asking me questions. And one of the questions they asked me besides finding out, you know, they heard that Americans had been to the moon, so they asked me questions about the moon. They also asked me why it was that, you know, people from my country were able to come visit them, but they couldn't go visit our country. And why there is this inequity and differences in wealth. And I didn't have a very good answer. I mean, I knew it had something to do with history, but it wasn't completely clear in my mind why that would be the case.

And so Jared Diamond is a kind of a big history book where he takes a serious effort to try to explain why history unfolded so differently on different continents. And so, you know, that gave me the picture that this kind of thing is possible. And like I said, I went on to use it in my teaching. So I know that book pretty well. Boyden Richardson's book is, of course, probably the most important in terms of my own thinking, in that's the first book to say, it does a couple of things, but the first of the key insights in that book is that we can take the logic of natural selection and use it to think about learning. So we can build models that explain how natural selection would have shaped our

minds. So as to best extract ideas, beliefs and values from the minds and behaviors of others. So it dissolves in nature, nurture dichotomy in that way. So it's not, to best extract ideas, beliefs, and values from the minds and behaviors of others. So it dissolves in nature-nurture dichotomy in that way. So it's not, it's where our nature is to nurture in a sense. Our nature is to learn from other members of our community to transmit cultural information. So that turns all questions that have, that the answer is it's culture into an evolutionary question, because you've got to figure out how that happened, how could that evolve given our adaptive learning mechanisms, that kind of thing. And the second thing that book does is it shows you how to think rigorously and systematically

about cultural evolution. So rather than being this amorphous thing that some social science disciplines talk about culture, it becomes a thing resident in individual minds, ideas, beliefs, and values, information in general, that gets into people's heads and shapes how they think and feel and make decisions. And you can build models of that. You can use kind of lots of different mathematical tools from epidemiology or population genetics to think about that systematically. So you can build models of the evolution of cooperation or social structure, or of religion or ethnic groups, things like that. And then finally, Steve Frank's book,

I mean, what I really liked about Steve Frank's book is he gives, he's very good at building simple models that give insight. And so from Steve Frank's book, I learned how to use what's called the price equation, which is this very general equation for thinking about evolutionary change. And it's equally applicable to genetic evolution and cultural evolution, and can be modified to think about all kinds of problems. So if you look at the last 20 years or so of my research, you'll see that price equation popping up in various ways. And that comes from Steve Frank's book, which I read in the late 1990s. You're one of the most interdisciplinary thinkers that I know. What does interdisciplinarity done wrong look like? And what does interdisciplinarity done right look like? Yeah, so great question. I've spent a lot of time doing it both right and wrong.

And I think what happens, you need to, everyone has to agree on kind of the underlying epistemology. So you can get into problems if you try to mix people who have, say, a scientific epistemology with or with the kinds of epistemologies you might find in the humanities. Because you're really not speaking the same language, you don't have the same goals. You might not even share agreement about whether reality exists or something like that. As long as you keep everybody on the scientific side of epistemology, then you're just bringing different expertise. And this can include different approaches, different ways of thinking about problems. But ultimately, you're trying to explain the world. You can mostly agree on the kinds of data that would would adjudicate one thing or another

so you can really combine your expertise one of the things that i've become interested in is how to apply cultural evolution understanding history uh and so trying to work with historians and so we're building this database of religious history and it's really quite you know mixed in terms of how well we've done getting historians to play ball and understand the program. But we really want to work with historians because, you know, they have the basic skills and access to the basic corpora and kind of the source of so much historical data. So the intellectual bedrock of much of your work is dual inheritance theory, which we've sort of alluded to in speaking about Boyd and Richardson,

the intellectual authors of dual inheritance theory. So what should we know about the basics of dual inheritance theory? Yes, very much the basics are what I suggested earlier, is that the first principle is that you can think about human learning, both individual learning and social learning, as itself a product of natural selection acting on our minds, choosing, say, between evolved instincts or whether to rely on information from others or rely on individual information. And if you're going to rely on information from others, do you pay attention to more prestigious or successful people? Do you use a conformist algorithm to look at a bunch of different people and kind of do the average? So there's different ways to approach that. And the next thing would be build models of cultural evolution. So you can take what we

know theoretically and empirically, so lots of psychological studies to ground how people actually learn, and then build models of cultural evolution where information, behaviors, beliefs transmit across generations and groups can compete and lots of different forces can shape cultural evolution. So that allows you to have kind of general processes, things you might see recurrent in different historical times and epochs or emerge in different ways. So it's similar to the genetic evolution and the ability to explain different species, but it allows us to apply to human cultural phenomena. And then the last step, which I didn't mention, is gene culture co-evolution. So the idea that much of our species' genetic evolution has been shaped by

cultural products. So the classic example, I hope, is fire and cooking. So most of us don't know how to make fire. We can't instinctually make fire. But it's quite clear that our stomachs and teeth and even our large intestines have been shaped by the fact that we eat cooked and processed food. So much of our digestion is external. And so we've done our digestion through cultural means, which means we free up a lot of energy for other things like brain building and invest less in our guts and digestive tissues. For people who want to learn more about Boyd and Richardson's work, would you recommend Culture and the Evolutionary Process? Or would you recommend they start with Not by Genes Alone, their more recent book? Yes, definitely.

You don't want to start, well, unless you're mathematically inclined. If you're mathematically inclined, start with Culture and the Evolutionary Process. I mean, the math in that book is not super hard, but if you don't know some population genetics, you're not comfortable with solving for equilibrium or something like that, which probably a lot of people aren't, start with not by genes alone. Rob Boyd has another book out that's more recent called A New Kind of Animal, I believe. And I provide a review of all this too in The Secret of Our Success. What is The Secret of Our Success?

It's our capacity to learn from the experience of others and pass that down across generations in a way that is cumulative. So this is what gives rise to increasingly complex tools, even including mental tools, things like counting systems that allow us to extend our brains and solve more difficult problems over generations. Can you tell me the anecdote of the Burke and Wills expedition? It's relevant, obviously, to Australian audiences, but most people probably wouldn't recall the details. Right. So this is an example of what I call the lost European explorers. And so these are cases in which some group of explorers gets lost in a place where hunter-gatherers routinely live and survive. And then we get to see how they do trying to live and survive in an environment that humans can clearly survive in, but for which they lack this large body of cumulative cultural knowledge. So it's 1860, and there's a public-private effort to send an expedition across the continent from Melbourne. And let's see, so it's a little bit complicated

in how things start off, but Burke and Wills end up with a party of four at a place called Cooper's Creek, and a resupply mission is coming behind them. And so they've got 12 weeks worth of food, and they head north for the Gulf of Carpentaria. Now, at about eight weeks, they get to the Gulf. They've had a lot of problems along the way, but you can see that they only have 12 weeks of food, so they're going to run a bit short of food. They run out of food, you know, after a little more than 12 weeks, and they have to start eating their camels, and they're trying to live off the land, but they're starving. One of the party gets killed, he might have been murdered by the party's leader, Burke. And they're kind of having a terrible time

starving, kind of dragging along. And they finally get back to where their, their launching place was at Cooper's Creek. And the resupply party has waited, you know, a month past when the drop dead date was. So they've, they've disobeyed Burke's orders and, and stayed, but they left early that morning and the party, Burke and Wills, King, drag into camp, you know, later in the morning, like 11 p.m. near lunch, and they just miss these guys. And they managed to find some food and so they're okay and they see that the party's just left. But they decide they can't catch them in their current condition, they need to rest up. So they rest up

and then Burke makes the command decision to not try to follow them, but to head to the closest outpost of Western civilization. So there's a ranch and a police post at a place prophetically known as Mount Hopeless. So they head for Mount Hopeless along the Cooper's Creek and they get stranded. Their last camel dies in the mud, and then they're effectively stranded along this creek, because without the camel, they can't carry enough water to trot across the last stretch of desert that would get them to the ranch and police post. So they start trying to survive and live off the land, and they're encountering the Yawantru tribe, I think. And in the process, they're getting some gifts of fish. So they're just really short on

carbohydrates. And when they're in the camp, the aboriginal camp, they notice the women processing what they think is a seed. So they kind of take notice of this, and they start trying to find the seed, which turns out to be a sporo carp called Nardu. And eventually they find this, and they're able to make lots of it, and they lots of it and they can make it into this gruel. And they started eating it. So they're, they're living off it. Things like,

seems like things might be okay and they might be able to wait until a party comes and rescues them. But what they didn't know is that the Nardu is processed in a way that removes what's essentially a poison. So it's something that takes out, takes the B1 out of your body and gives you a horrible disease called beriberi. So they're gradually poisoning themselves and starving to death as they, as they wait.

And they, they both end up dying. King stumbles into the desert delirious, but he eventually gets rescued by the Uantru tribe. And then, and then brought back to Melbourne. So, I mean, the moral of this story is they had great efforts to try to survive. They couldn't hunt.

They couldn't find food. The one food they did find, which they learned about from the locals, they didn't know the details, so they ended up poisoning themselves. So it's meant to illustrate the degree to which humans, unlike other animals, can survive in these environments that hunter-gatherers humans can survive in. One interesting fact about this expedition is they had camels, and some of the camels escaped. And as you no doubt know, there's feral camels in central Australia. So the camels survive the lost European explorer's adventure, but the humans don't do so well when they're

faced with that. So that's one of the interesting bits of that tale. So how did we become a cultural species? Well, in the book, I make the case that, you know, a couple million years ago, the weather conditions were such that they favored greater social learning, the climatic conditions. And we were a primate. We were probably living in savannas or at least mixed habitats. And this would have meant we lived in larger groups. There's some other details to

that. But essentially, we get pushed just past this threshold of cumulative cultural evolution. And then once you're in that realm, and you can get this cumulative body of know-how, you can create this autocatalytic feedback system where you accumulate cultural knowledge, and then that allows you to have bigger brains. So you develop fire and cooking or cutting tools or something like that. And then the more cultural, the more you're dependent on cultural information, the more you need big brains capable of learning from others and storing all that information. But then the more that you have, the more you can make fancy tools and get all this non-genetic information

that gets stored up culturally until you get this runaway process. So human brains expand by three times over a period of 2 million years, super quick in evolutionary timescales. And so the argument I make is that this auto-catalytic feedback is what drove brain expansion.

And then in many ways, what our brains are for in the evolutionary sense is acquiring, storing, and organizing all this information we have to learn from others. So information about finding food or social norms or speaking a language, grammar, medicinal plants, all the kinds of things that Burke and Wills didn't know because they didn't grow up in this environment, in the environment of the Estranzo Australian desert. One of the things I dislike about Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens is it seems to portray what he calls the cognitive revolution, which occurred around 70,000 BC,

as the big first threshold moment for our species where we evolved or we somehow gained the ability to use language. But that doesn't seem like a great candidate for our Rubicon crossing for the reasons you sort of identify. It seems like the development of cumulative culture was the real Rubicon crossing because without that, you can't have language. Is Homo heidelbergensis the best candidate

for roughly timestamping the emergence of culture or did it happen earlier? Well, that's an area I think of much debate. I tend to be, I mean, if you had to categorize people holding different positions, I hold the culture is old position. Because I think that there's evidence that we had cumulative culture, surely by, say, 800,000 years ago. So there are sites in Israel, where humans are, we have home bases, we have fires, we're importing stone tools from far away. The stone tools are processed in complex ways. The diet consists of lots of different food sources, including food sources that can only

be obtained from the middle of a lake. So there's boats or some kind of swimming or something like that to get out to the middle of the lake. There are other even older sites which suggest that fire goes back before a million years. Tools get increasingly complex in some cases. It seems like they'd be hard to learn in a single lifetime, especially given all the other things you have to do when you're surviving as a forager. So I think there's a case to be made that cumulative cultural evolution goes back much further. It's just that what we may have been seeing was fits and starts. So you may have had a period of cultural,

increasingly complex tools, say, and knowledge, but then a shock or weather pattern or some eruption, something hits, and then the group breaks down and loses a lot of cultural information. So I think there was a lot of up and down. And paleoanthropologists have tended to draw a straight line through the noise and just assume not much was going on, rather than assuming that things went up and down for a while. And there were flourishings and then declines and then flourishings and then declines. So when the data is patchy, it's easy to kind of do that. I don't think that anybody, well, maybe somebody, but very few scholars take the cognitive revolution that

Harari talks about now. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, that's been, you know, dead as a doornail since 2001, when Brooks and McBrearty put together a massive paper showing that these complex tools and whatnot go well back before that date in Africa. And it's just kind of a Eurocentric bias that there's a lot more research in Europe that led some people to speculate that at one point. He really kind of runs with that idea at a time when it was already dead amongst the people who were in the know. Yeah, that strikes me as odd because, I mean, he did a lot of research for that book and the 2001 paper was pretty well known. I agree. But I mean, it did make for a good story and a neat organization of the book. So I mean, the other thing is that people assume that language is some, you know, suddenly you have language. But, you know, I try to show in The Secret of Our Success,

that's not how languages work. You can have languages of any complexity. And even contemporary languages vary in their vocabulary size and the number of phonemes they put to work and the number of different grammatical structures they have. And the size and interconnectedness of population seems to explain at least some of that variation. So contemporary languages are under the same pressures as tools and technology and other parts of culture. Right. So what are some factors that lead to a language being more complex, like the English language, for example? Well, certainly one is writing.

But, I mean, we're able to show in a number of different ways that languages that are larger and come from more interconnected populations, at least there's data that suggests that they have more phonemes. I mean, there's some complexities there because there's other important reasons why they have more phonemes. Probably larger vocabulary. So English has a, you know, it's the worst example of a language for a number of reasons, but it has a super large vocabulary. So if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary, it can have 400,000 words, whereas other European languages have 50 to 70,000 words in their typical dictionary.

And, you know, a professor would have about 70,000 English words in his vocabulary, undergraduates probably 60,000. And meanwhile, if you look at the languages of small scale societies, they might have 5,000 words total. So there's just big differences. And it's because of writing and complex society and the division of labor where different occupations can have different amounts of specialization that include terminology and things like that. I'm not sure if this is like a facile question, but how would that change your subjective experience of reality, living within a limited vocabulary? Well, I don't know if it would change your subjective experience,

but in some sense, so I'll give you two examples. So one is the language, English. So we both learned English and it comes equipped with a counting system that allows us to count without bound. So if we have to distinguish 36 from 37 cherries, we can do so just by counting up the cherries in each pile. But lots of languages will count one, two, three, many, including Aboriginal Australian languages.

So there you need some other approach, some other cultural technology to deal with that. And you don't have this ready tool of an unbalanced counting system to deal with that. So that's a potentially useful tool. Another one where actually a lot of this research was done in Australia is English speakers have three different coordinate systems so we have north south east and west uh object-centered ones like left and right and a relative one i might say that the tractor is to the right of the barn and then i'm drawing a line between myself and this barn and then then you can get the right because it's it's it's about the line between me and the barn uh but other languages will just have primarily one. So people will refer to everything

with absolute coordinate systems, north, south, east, and west. And this leads to amazing cognitive abilities, where people raised in those worlds are clearly tracking north, south, east, and west cardinal directions all the time. And they're tagging locations of things based on that. Whereas if you have these other systems, you know, you don't do that as much. And you're using more relative coordinate systems or these other systems. So those are two. A third one would be colors. So there's been a lot of research on colors.

Lots of societies studied by anthropologists have basically black and white. But it's an expanded version of black and white. So it includes more than just the English term. And then if you have a third color, you have red. English has a lot more 11 basic color terms. Korean has 13. So there's this variability and this affects not whether people can see color. People thought that initially, but that didn't turn out to be the case. But how you partition and categorize is affected by whether you have a color term at a particular point in the color spectrum that calls for a differentiation.

And that can affect perception either in positive or negative ways. It can cause you to separate things that are more similar or not, depending on whether you have the color term. Boyd and Richardson show that social learning implies that group selection is almost inevitable in cultural evolution. And I don't think you dispute that, although you're certainly welcome to comment on that if you like, but you are skeptical of genetic group selection. Can you explain why you are skeptical of genetic group selection? Sure. So the classic concern with genetic group selection is that in order to make group selection run, your groups have to stay different.

And if there's gene flow between the two groups, so some kind of migration or mating between the groups, that's going to create a force that's going to tend to homogenize the groups with respect to the genetic traits. So, and in the case of humans, when you have intergroup competition, what we know is that that often leads to massive amounts of gene flow between the groups. So in a simple, you know, kind of stark and kind of unpleasant example, groups will compete and the group that wins will kill all the men except for the young boys, raise them to be members of their own cultural group and take all the women as sex slaves, wives, concubines, that kind of thing. So that creates massive gene flow and those groups are well mixed genetically. So that can't operate. I mean, it makes it really hard

for genetic group selection to get off the ground in humans. But in the case of cultural group selection, you could have migration between groups. But human social learning and norms mean that the migrants or the people who find themselves in another group adopt the traits of the new group. So they're not carrying the traits. It's as if you could overwrite the genes, right? So you can just overwrite the cultural traits and especially the offspring. So if you're captured as an adult or you're migrated as an adult, you may never really fully internalize the norms in the new group, but your children will. So that's a property that genes don't have because if I move and my children will have my same genes and there's no way to overwrite that.

So it's different than culture in that way. So that's the main reason why I'm skeptical of genetic group selection models, but think it's quite likely with cultural group selection. How strong is the empirical evidence for the claim that at the end of intergroup conflict, there's like a lot of like intergroup mixing? Yeah, so we have, there's two kinds of evidence for that. One is you can look around the world and you can look at cases where we have competing,

say hunter-gatherer groups. And that seems to be a recurrent qualitative ethnographic observation, ethnohistorical observation. The other kind of evidence that we have now is genetic FST values. So Sarah Matthew and Carla Handy have a great paper. I think it's in Nature Communications or Science Advances. And there they actually calculate the cultural FST of these groups in Kenya, a number of different tribal groups. And they calculate, well, you can look at the genetic FST from other data, and the genetic FSTs are tiny. So there's no way you're going to get genetic group selection going. And the cultural FSTs are quite large. So it's supportive of cultural evolution. So the genetic data basically tells the story there. Now, we may find out in the future that ancient DNA may teach us

that in the past, the genetic FSTs were bigger and that, you know, the current data is misleading us. So we'll see, we'll find that out, I think, at some point. My colleague, David Reich, is hard at work. Social learning isn't unique to Homo sapiens. There are a number of other species which exhibit social learning, but what's so special about our brand of social learning well uh a number of things the first thing is that we are much better at imitating so we can imitate motor patterns better we can infer underlying goals and strategies and beliefs um we apply it to many different domains so there are species that are good at social learning but

it's usually confined to some narrow domain and we can't we're able to do it across lots of different domains and we do it often we rely heavily on on social learning so for example a lot of the experiments on social learning the animals get rewarded the non-human animals human children and adults will copy others even when that's the costly choice, even when it costs them something in money or food or time or effort or something like that. I guess the other thing is we also teach each other. Yeah. So I think that teaching is potentially important. The only caution I would have there is the societies that we've all grown up in are sort of hyper teaching oriented. So I think we teach so much. This developmental psychologist Christine Laguerre has argued that there's so much pedagogy

and teaching in western societies that the kids actually get worse at observational learning than when she does work in, say, Vanuatu. There, she finds that the kids are better at observational learning and copy more exactly. And that's considered a smart thing to do by the parents. And that's a place where there's less of this kind of active, engaging pedagogy. Although recent research has shown that, you know, we do find sometimes a pedagogy in all the societies that we've studied. There was claims early on, or at one point, say about 20 years ago, that there were societies with no teaching. But I'm not sure that that data has held up very well, or that evidence has held up very well. What does rationality mean to you?

I mean, I just use that as a kind of way of evaluating, making decisions. So it has to do with the kind of arguments you prefer and what counts as evidence. So one of the things I'm interested in is the cultural evolution of epistemologies or the cultural evolution of rationality in the sense that how do people from different societies, what kind of arguments do they think are good and what kind of evidence do they look for as supporting evidence? So just to give you one simple example of what that looks like is lots of societies would see dream evidence. So if someone had a dream about something that is perfectly sensible justification for action uh societies also vary a lot in how much they would weigh the fact that some ancient sage did something you know did confucius say it did jesus do it you know this

the emphasis that people put on on that kind of information seems to vary a lot hmm well i suppose that leads us nicely into talking about weird psychology. Perhaps we can begin with you telling me about your experiences in Peru with the Matsy Gengar and how that spurred your interest in this new book. Yeah, so I was interested in cooperation and And the Machiganga are actually pretty individualistic in that the individuals are independent. They're not inclined to be bossed around, they're not worried about things like conformity, compared to other populations I've worked with. But then we did this behavioral game called the ultimatum game. So in this experiment,

people are allotted a sum of money. So the amount of money I put on the line was probably like $160 or something like that. And they had to divide this money between themselves and another person. And typically, when this is done with non-student adults in places like Australia or the US or Europe, you'd find the modal offer would be about 50. So people would give half. Some people would try to give less than half, but if they went too low, they would get rejected. So if you reject in this game, both players get zero.

And so what I found among the Machiganga was that people would make very low offers and those low offers would always be accepted or almost always be accepted. And so this got me wondering, you know, what's explaining this difference in this inclinations towards fairness. And so what I, the place I eventually ended up is that these are just tapping norms about how to deal with people you don't have relationships with and monetary interactions. And those turn out to be super important for running large scale, you know, modern economies, because most of our interactions are among, you know, anonymous strangers, but not so important

if you're living in small, isolated family hamlets, and almost you're mostly economically independent at the family level, like the Machiganga. I mentioned before, when I was doing a little bit of biography that I went to the University of British Columbia. And when I was over a series of lunches, these two social psychologists, Steve Heine and Arnor and Zion and I, we were talking about our results and cultural differences. And we each independently realized in our domains of expertise, that not only was there cultural variation, but that the participants most commonly used by psychologists and behavioral economists were not only one

population among many in a spectrum of cultural variation, but that they were often the odd group out, that they occupied the extreme end of the distribution. And this occurred whether you were studying analytic versus holistic thinking, which is some of the stuff that And this occurred whether you were studying analytic versus holistic thinking, which is some of the stuff that are worked on, or concepts of the self, and things like cognitive dissonance that Steve Heine was studying, or the kind of impersonal pro-sociality, the behavioral game stuff that I was doing. So we spent four years doing a review of all the literature we could find, mostly in psychology, but also in economics and a few other places. And we found this pattern consistently in lots of domains. And then in fact, the people most commonly tapped by the experimental disciplines were the psychologically unusual population.

So we wrote this paper called The Weirdest People in the World, where we coined the acronym WEIRD. How do you know if you're weird what are some of the hallmarks sure so high levels of individualism so if i give you the um uh who who am i test and you give me some characteristics of who you are or the i am underlined test so you got to say am, and then finish that sentence. Weird people will tend to say I am, you know, curious, I'm a kayaker, I'm a scientist might be things I would say. Now, if I was more, if I was less weird, I would probably say things like, Josh's dad, or Natalie's husband, or, you know, Joe's son. And, you know, that would seat me in

some kind of network of my, you know, recurrent partners and family and friends and things like that. So it's whether it's about relationships, or about these individual attributes and characteristics that we're cultivating. So that's one example, concepts of the self individualism. Another is analytical. So you tend to think about things in terms of their properties. When you're solving a problem, you break complex things down into individual objects and assign them properties. And this contrasts with a more holistic thinking, where you focus on relationships and contexts. And this has been shown to affect memory, reasoning, preference for different kinds of arguments.

And another one is your inclination towards cooperating with more close family, friends, social network type people versus principles of fairness that apply to strangers and anonymous others, cooperating with anonymous others, things like that. Let's see. Another one is your focus on mental states and making moral judgments. So weird people tend to focus a lot on intentions. So we're very worried about whether you meant to hurt that guy or you did it by accident. Whereas lots of other people are like, well, really, it matters that you hit him with your car and not so much about whether you meant to hit him with your car. Because you're either careless or a jerk, but either way, you should be punished the same.

So those are some examples. So when did we start becoming weird? Well, it's a long process taking about 1,500 years. But I try to seed it in time. And the key elements begin to occur in late antiquity. And what I lay out in the book is that one particular religious, one particular brand of Christianity, which eventually becomes the Catholic Church, for interesting reasons, becomes obsessed with what I call the marriage and family program. So they're very worried about things like cousin marriage, or people marrying in-laws. They're worried about polygamy. They're concerned about

inheritance being individual, as opposed to corporate inheritance, which is common in many groups. And so they're gradually imposing this marriage and family program on the tribal populations of Europe. So it begins kind of gradual and easy. It's only first cousin marriage is banned in the fifth century and the sixth century. But then it expands and eventually goes out to six cousins. And the church is getting more powerful and more pervasive during this period. They team up with the Carolingian Empire, so around 800, Charlemagne is crowned Emperor of the Romans. And, you know, he begins to use the power of the state to enforce this marriage and family program.

Now, not too long after him, the Carolingian empire collapses, but the church continues. And there's this power system that was set up that's imposing it. And it's breaking people down into monogamous nuclear families and take him out of these kindreds and clans

and large interconnected networks of relatives and alliances between families and whatnot. And it's these monogamous nuclear families that I think are the fertile grounds for the rise of individualism. And you can see this in the high middle ages with the first notions of sort of citizens' rights in these small towns that are proliferating around Europe. And people begin forming voluntary associations because they've lost the functions of these kin groups. So kin groups provide you with security and social safety net and care. And this is all gone when you're broken down to monogamous nuclear families. So they start forming the sort of the second best option, which are these guilds and universities and other organizations which fulfill these functions. And these start proliferating

through Europe in the high middle ages. So between say 1000 and 1200, you have this process starts. And the development of law during this period becomes increasingly individually centered. So people are, you know, there's these treatises written that are concerned about the mental states of people. You ought to evaluate the mental states, which is kind of a non-thing, right? I mean, we think it's very sensible and simple to just, you know, did he intend to murder the guy or was it an accident? But you're asking a lot. You're asking people to see into the minds and make inferences about invisible mental states. But this really takes off and becomes important at that point. Do we know why the early church fathers wanted to ban cousin marriage? Well, there's different layers to that question. So certainly one thing that was going on is they

thought that God wanted people not to have these incestuous relations, which in this case, they're thinking about relationships between cousins. And so you have cases where plagues would hit. And the explanation would be, well, there's too much of this incest going on, God's angry, and he's punishing us for the incest. So we've got to stomp out this incest. So it's kind of like a public health program to try to, you know, stop these plagues with, you know, different theory of causality. But the anthropologist Jack Goody has also noted, and other people have provided substantiating data that the church also, this led to the church getting rich. So a lot of these things allowed individuals to bequest their land and money

to the church. And this was seen as a way of getting into heaven. So beginning with the St. Ambrose in Milan, he figured out, you know, there's this parable about Jesus and where Jesus says, it's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than to get a camel through the eye of a needle. So this is a big problem for the rich. But Ambrose begins to convince people and others followed up on this, that the rich could get into heaven if they would just give to the poor. And it's very inconvenient to give all your money away to the poor while you're living. But if you give it on your deathbed, then this would provide treasure in heaven. And so this allowed the church to raise huge amounts

of money, but they couldn't do that unless the wealth was tied to individuals. And so Goody makes the argument that the church got rich, but I'm not aware of any evidence suggesting that this was an explicit or stated anywhere goal of the church. I mean, individual bishops and people may have noticed that when they impose this stuff, the coffers get a little bit more full over time, but it seems to have been very, you know, something that was gradual and extended over a long period. And other religious groups didn't figure this out. So there's the Orthodox Church that went partially down this road, but never went very far. There's Coptic Christians and Syrian Christians, and none of them seem to have adopted this extensive program. So the way I think that we should think about this is as a cultural evolutionary process, what you should do is zoom out and realize that

there's different religious groups in different parts of this region who are all experimenting with different ways of modifying the marriage and the family. So over in Iran, Zoroastrianism is encouraging close kin marriage, and even brother-sister marriage at the extreme among the elites. Meanwhile, Islam, which of course comes along later, is saying, well, you can't have polygyny very much of it, you can only have four wives. And they have an inheritance rule that says daughters have to inherit half of what sons inherit, which ends up having a big impact on, you know, the development of social networks between families and Islam. So, you know, different religious groups are just experimenting with different stuff. And so it's kind of history

that sorts this out. So this is the kind of multi-level selection view here, that the Catholic Church was just the one that happened to come up with this peculiar combination that had big long-term impacts. Tell me why not all gods are created equal from the perspective of cultural evolution. Yeah, so my colleague Arnor and Zion and I have done all, you know, we've been part of this large group involving lots of people. But we've been interested in the variation among societies

and the kinds of supernatural agents they believe in. And one of the things that comes clear from the anthropological record is that the big powerful and moralizing gods that are so common in religions today, the big kind of the big god religions, are not probably the way most humans have lived over most of human history. All societies seem to have supernatural agents of some kinds, but in lots of small scale societies, the gods are smaller. They're weaker, they're less powerful, they don't have universal morals they're worried about. They might punish people and they might care about local morality, but they don't have a kind of expansive human morality. They also might not punish people and they might just be mischievous and can be bought off and bribed. And it's only over time as societies

scale up that gods seem to become increasingly moral, increasingly powerful, more omniscient. And we make the case that it's the competition among religious groups that favor gods that were more powerful and moralizing and morally concerned because this gave an advantage to those groups. It allowed a kind of policing mechanism so people would behave well even when no one was looking or they thought they could get away with it or they might not get punished by mortals. There was another element in the incentive structure. You can think of it as an expanding scale. The further you get from yourself socially, the more incentive there might be, or the harder it

is to constrain people's behavior. So, you know, transactions with anonymous strangers, the society benefits if we all engage in fair trade and exchange, because we can have a division of labor, and we can have different expertise and all these advantages that come with trade. But of course, on any given transactions, you know, I haven't, I could just steal the guy's stuff and run away. And that's, I have a short-term advantage there. So, you know, there's always that threat. So one of the things, I mean, one of the things we see in the Mediterranean

is long distance trade. It was probably facilitated by these trading societies that would swear oaths to their shared God. And there were altars in the trading centers where, you know, we're going to go to the altar of Mercury and swear a pact that, you know, do what you said, you'll fulfill the contract that we've agreed upon. So there's a supernatural bargain that we struck to help facilitate our trade. Given that we, or at least we in the West have,

or given that we all have asymmetric utility functions, does that suggest that hell is more important than heaven? Yeah, I mean, that seems to be the evidence. suggest that if you look at what predicts what people will do, it's the concern with punishment, divine punishment, and the belief in hell that propels economic growth in the case of the comparative cross-country analyses, and not cheating in the case of experimental evidence that psychologists have created. Believing in heaven or believing your God is rewarding either has no effect or has a negative effect. I mean, if you believe your God is rewarding but also punishing, then you're okay. But just rewarding doesn't seem to do any pro-social work.

Yeah. So given that the Judeo-Christian gods, for example, are omniscient and omnipotent, we've kind of like reached the limit of that scale. We could become like an interstellar civilization off the back of those gods? Yeah, I mean, so we don't have any great, any serious research on this, but Ara and our collaborators may have speculated that really what happens in Europe is, you know, societies were able to build sufficiently strong secular institutions that a lot of the functions that religion would normally operate get replaced by government social safety nets and government ideologies and things like that. So that's when you get the kind of ebbing away of the fire and brimstone type God and you get increasingly kind of rewarding, loving gods that make people feel good,

but might not be doing a lot of kind of pro-social work. So, yeah, so modern institutions may be having an interesting effect on religion that is kind of another piece in this longer story that we haven't quite figured out. So, using the weird theory in the book, you're able to make all these sort of striking predictions or offer striking explanations for cultural variations that we observe across planet Earth. I just want to dip into a couple of examples with you. The first is difference in blood donation between the north and south of Italy. Tell me about that.

Yeah, so in testing some of the ideas I laid out, so there's a couple of relationships that we predict, and we should be able to look for these in lots of different places. But one is that societies that have what we call more intensive kinship, so that means more cousin marriage, more clans, more extended families, more polygyny, should tend to be, there's a bunch of psychological predictions. And one is disinclined to cooperate with strangers if you have higher kinship intensity, less concerned about, you know, universalistic fairness or universalizing morality. Because, you know, your success in life really depends on cultivating, maintaining, and reinforcing these close bonds you have with members of your clan or whatnot and then the other one is that the church should predict differences in these kinship systems because we think the church is what was tearing these things down so we test this in various

places and we test it in italy because we have good data on cousin marriage for india's 93 provinces and so we're like well what kind of data can we get for cooperation with strangers well one classic public goods that economists have long pointed to is your willingness to give blood so you give blood anonymously to some stranger who you're not going to see will never know your name so it's it's very much like a generous cooperative gift we all benefit when the blood banks are full we never know we might get hit by a car and need a blood transfusion. But at the individual level, we'd rather not give blood because it takes time and money and pain. So it's a classic public good.

And we find that Italian provinces that have higher rates of cousin marriage are less inclined, much less inclined, to give blood to these anonymous strangers. There's no effect on giving blood to members of your family, though, so it's not some problem with giving blood. Second example, talk about variations in testosterone levels in men. Okay. So one of the things I detail in the book, I have a whole chapter on monogamous marriage. And there's these pretty well-d documented findings that when men get married,

their testosterone goes down. When they have a child, their testosterone goes down. The more they interact with babies tends to have even bigger effect. And when this has been done in polygynous societies, you don't get this drop. So often in polygynous societies, there's very little handling of infants and stuff. So there's this kind of correlated effect of less childcare, because if you're a polygynous man, when you get married, you really just start looking for wife number two. I mean, if you're in a polygynous society, so you're monogamously married, technically, because you only have one wife. But in a monogamous society, there's norms that are saying you're not supposed to be looking for another wife at this point. Whereas in a

polygynous society, it's even socially encouraged. You should be finding, thinking about wife number two. So you're still on the marriage and mating market socially. And this seems to inhibit this decline in testosterone that we see in monogamous societies. So when you have the imposition of monogamous marriage as a kind of normative thing, it's probably a kind of testosterone suppression system in the sense that, especially when you make men interact with babies, it gets even stronger in keeping testosterone lower. And it may even affect this pattern that we see as men age. It's a common claim that male testosterone goes down as men age, not in polygynous societies.

So that's more of a cultural endocrinology than a genetic feature of men. Interestingly, the same patterns in many bird species. Is positive sum thinking a characteristically weird trait? Well, it doesn't always, I mean, it's not only found amongst weird societies, but in some agricultural societies, you can get into a case where there's a lot of zero-sum thinking. So the key thing to understand is that throughout most of our species agricultural history, wealth is land, right? If your main source of production is agriculture, and you do agriculture on land, then most wealth is in land. And land is really zero sum. I mean, unless you're

an expanding empire, and you're stealing other people's land, you know, either I'm going to have the land or you're going to have the land, there's only so much land. So which is different from technology and trade, where you're in a non zero sum game. So as you shift the society from one based on agriculture to one based on technological innovation and trade, you shift from a world where the biggest game is a zero sum game to a world in which the biggest game is a nonsum game. So you can get rich and I can get rich, as opposed to you either have the land or I have the land. You're either richer or I'm richer. And this changes people's thinking. What would it take to switch Western society, for example, from dominantly positive-sum thinking back into zero-sum or negative-sum thinking? Yeah, I mean, certainly I've come to the belief that this can occur relatively quickly, just because I think I see it happening in the US. So there are groups within the US social strata that have experienced essentially no growth, and your prospects are worse than those

of your parents. So you begin to look like you're in a zero-sum world because the pie is not growing very much for you compared to how it's growing for other groups. So my guess is there's more zero-sum thinking among some segments of the American social strata. Just because of the way wealth is allocated in a society where there's big rewards for being at the top end and knowing how to do information technology and not so many not such great rewards for you know having a manufacturing job so you can have different kinds of inequality right so the the key is you could have lots of inequality and growing inequality but the pie of the people in the bottom strata could still be growing a lot so you could still have people who are doing better than their parents. So that's the reference point, right? Or you can have a

case where there's relatively no growth, or you can have a case where people, you have growing inequality and people are doing worse than their parents. So it looks like to them, the pie is shrinking. So what I don't know is how much of this is, I mean, there's some portion of that's going to be facultative. And what that means is that people can switch based on the conditions of their lives. But then there's some other portion of it that's going to be culturally transmitted, which means you acquire from the previous generation approaches to the world, ways of thinking about problems. So in Europe, there's mercantilism in the history of European economic thought where people thought that trade was bad because you're giving away your stuff and you should keep your stuff

because you want to be rich. And it took long to shake that off. The conditions in the world had changed and people were still trying to shake off that way of thinking because it was culturally inherited. So what we don't know is what the time lag is going to be on switching to a more zero-sum way of thinking.

How has the ubiquity of the mechanized watch affected how weird people think? Yeah, so one of the more speculative areas of the weirdest people in the world is that i'm interested in time psychology so how people think about time and it looks like when you read the history of time and medieval it looks like people are becoming increasingly concerned with time thrift and clocks are proliferating throughout European cities and they all want to have a good clock and they have bells that keep everybody on schedule.

So the bells ring and everybody gets up and the bell rings again and they do the next thing. So the city runs like clockwork. And there's actually interesting work in economics showing that those clocks have increased production. Those cities get richer that have those clocks and cities get clocks at different times. You can kind of figure out ways to measure it. And then, of course, eventually wristwatches become a hot commodity and they're rapidly adopted. And I think, you know, one of the things that people are cultivating as individuals is a sense of getting things done, being punctual. And this becomes, you know, one of the things that people think of it, you get a reputation for being late, you get a reputation for, you have long running relationships. You're not trying to impress them with your punctuality

and you're less concerned about getting things done on time. So I think there's a real cultivation of time thrift in people's minds. So, you know, if you look at some of the metaphors we use, we're always out of time or buying time or saving time. So there's a lot of monetary metaphors that we use with time. So it's time and money are equated. So Ben Franklin coins these things and he's a kind of very kind of

weird thinker. How long were you writing this book? About 10 years. So right after we published the weirdest people in the world, my mind began to say, okay, so now there's this cultural variation. Got to be able to explain this how can we explain this and so that's when i started running down the trail of this idea that families and kinship are important what was the biggest change in your thinking during the research process well i think the biggest thing that was guess, a delight during the process was we, through my contact with some young economists, Jonathan Schultz, Ben Anke, Jonathan Beauchamp, Dumont, Barani, Rod, we figured out ways to test these ideas. So we were able to figure out ways to measure kinship intensity around the world in different european regions jonathan schultz was instrumental in creating a database of bishoprics that looked

at that you know we can map this diffusion of bishoprics across europe so we have a time and a gps location for every bishopric and then we can measure the amount that each region of europe has been under the catholic church and then we can see if that explains psychological variation. So the fact that we were going to be able to test the speculation that I was having was the biggest delight in the process. How do your findings on weird psychology affect Kahneman and Tversky's findings? Well, let me ask a more specific question. Which of their so-called cognitive biases are just artifacts of weird psychology, and which are universal in the human species? Yeah, that's an important question. And the biggest and most important answer is that, for the most part, we don't know, because people

haven't tested these ideas across diverse societies and looked at the variation. Instead, the basic assumption was that if we see this bias amongst one population, we can generalize. So if you look at textbooks or even the journal articles on it, there's very little effort to constrain generalization from the species. We do know, for example, that the endowment effect, which lots of people may know about, we don't find it amongst Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania living a traditional lifestyle. It's much weaker among people in Japan who live in industrialized societies, but have a different notion of the self. And so the endowment effect is strongest in the populations that Kahneman and Tversky studied,

at least based on what we know so far, we may find another population. But overconfidence is something that we know varies across societies. And that there are places where people don't have overconfidence in particular domains, whereas it seems to be strongest amongst the most commonly used subjects, so Americans and other weird populations. You can kind of see how overconfidence might be a good adaptation for an individualistic population, because it gets you out there trying things and engaging in things that otherwise you might not try.

And if you're successful, then you end up getting status and prestige and then other people copy you. So it can have these downstream benefits. Going back to Kahneman and Tversky's, you know, their classic original paper, the three heuristics they outlined in that were representativeness, availability and anchoring of those three do you suspect there's like one in particular that might be more characteristically weird than all of the others uh those i can't think of any evidence that uh would push you know could inform that question i do know there is one study, which is cited in the Weirdest People in the World, the 2010 paper, that tries to test prospect theory, which is Kahneman-Tepersky's effort to account for several of these patterns. And they

actually get the reverse of prospect theory. So prospect theory is based on this concave, convex thing, depending on whether it's losses or gains. And they found an African culture where they get the opposite. I've never followed up on that. I don't know if it'll hold up, but it's certainly provocative. Wow. So for this African culture, gains loom larger than losses. Yes.

Could you speculate as to why that would be true? No, I didn't look at the group ethnographically to try to get an idea of what institution or what cost and benefit system. I mean, we've seen this in other African data where, let's see, in the dictator game, if you make it a game where you give away to the guy versus steal from the guy, Americans, I think probably other weird people, will steal less than they deliver. So you can frame it two ways, as a taking or a giving. And you get the opposite of the pattern when you do it in the DRC. This is support by an economist named Nathan Nunn. How canon should your work be used as an organizing framework for behavioral economics?

So the classic critique of behavioral economics is that it's just like a grab bag of different anecdotes that represent departures from the standard like rational model of homo economicus but there's no organizing theory that could explain or make predictions. So are there any lessons or pieces of advice coming from your perspective as an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist that you could offer to behavioral economists? Well, I mean, I think the biggest one is that some, probably not all, but some of these heuristics and biases are going to be kind of cultural psychological adaptations to the institutions that people have to adapt to. So the institutions are going to be, you know, they're going to have affordances. So I mentioned the possibility that being overconfident could be valuable in an individualistic society where

there's a lot of incentives to set yourself apart and distinguish yourself and develop this kind of uniqueness. Whereas in a world where that's not valued, then overconfidence is going to have less value and it's just going to make you the tall poppy that's going to get smacked down. So that's a case where there's a kind of institutional story. I think that's possible for others. So in the book, I speculate on the individualism and the endowment effect about how, so there's this idea in psychology that the endowment effect arises because we kind of think of ourselves as so important and so unique. If something is ours, it makes that thing a little bit special. So my house is extra special because it's mine, right? And so that makes me put more weight on it. But if you're in a place, if you're not in a place where the self isn't so

important, then it's not as important as you don't attach that selfness to your stuff. And so that's why it might be less in Japan. In the case of the Hadza who don't have the endowment effect, people have a hard time holding on to their stuff because people can just ask you for it and if you accumulate too much stuff, you have to give it away. So things are very ephemeral. So in that case, they might not put much and they might not endow their stuff with very much because there's this fluid movement of stuff. Ownership is less firm. Yeah. Joe, final question. In our quest to better understand human life, what is the most important thing that we need to do that we're not doing as well as we should? well i mean the the main thing that i would have to offer on that question is

really thinking about uh human nature and you know this are essential to understanding how our societies function and our lives and stuff is to recognize that we're a kind of ape and so we have lots of things like our status and sex differences and stuff can can be informed by understanding that we're a kind of ape but that we're highly cultural species and that we can shape our mind so a lot of this expansion of the human brain that we've talked about is for kind of creating a mind that can process the information from the culturally constructed institutions that we have. So we, you know, we have these ways of thinking and culturally particular ways. So I

mentioned that even our epistemology, what we count as evidence can vary across societies. And I think that can be useful both for practical things like designing institutions and for just thinking about communication across societies and the kind of possible breadth of cultural differences. Joe Henrich, thank you so much for joining me. All right. Good to be with you, Joe. Thank you so much for listening. You will find the transcript for this episode on my website, josephnoelwalker.com. you're enjoying the show i would hugely appreciate a rating and a review on itunes i know everybody asks but it does help people find us and it does

help us reach the hard to reach guests the audio engineer for the jolly swagman podcast is lawrence moorfield our very thirsty video editor is al fetty i'm joe walker until next time thank you for listening ciao