Jason Furman's Reviews > The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

The WEIRDest People in the World is among the best books I have read in the last five to ten years. In his earlier book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (also an outstanding book), Joseph Henrich chronicled the success of the human species, grounding it in our ability to learn from each other and the co-evolution of culture and genes, a story that takes place over hundreds of thousands of years. The WEIRDest People in the World is effectively a sequel (but you need not read The Secret of Our Success first as the ideas are repeated/summarized in the new book) that zooms in on the last roughly 1,500 years to understand why the West was so successful in its rapid growth and conquest of much of the rest of the world. Henrich’s explanation over-simplified: the Catholic Church banned cousin marriage which broke up kinship networks, then Protestant churches emphasized reading and individual interpretation. The combination led to a new “WEIRD (i.e., Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic)” psychology that helped lay the foundation for individual rights, democracy, markets, innovation, and the success the West enjoys today. Aspects of this have been imitated elsewhere helping to spread prosperity.

Some big think grand explanations for everything books take wild and creative stabs backed up by intuition but not much evidence. This book is creative (although maybe not “wild”) but is grounded in meticulous research, much of it done by Henrich and his team but also drawing on a wide range of other research by economists, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and others. Henrich can do page after page after page of evidence, scatterplots, descriptions of natural experiments and regressions, etc. It also has both fox-like qualities (summarizing everything around a single theory) but also hedgehog-like qualities (lots of causal arrows pointing every which way and bringing a lot of different explanations together). It also draws on such a wide range of material, criss-crosses so many places, that it shows Henrich as an impressive polymath, but not one who is out to impress but to prove, often with a list of eight arguments to make his proof.

The core point and the one that I found completely persuasive in the book is that psychology varies across cultures and that for years Western psychologists made the mistake of studying WEIRD university students and thinking their psychology was universal. Instead, Henrich argues that there are lots of psychologies but broadly speaking they can be grouped into two sets of characteristics. WEIRD people are individualistic, self-obsessed, analytical, and see ourselves as unique beings that try to stick to impartial rules that are enforced by an internal feeling of guilt. In contrast, in many other cultures people are more focused on the group (often a kinship group), do not focus on their self realization, and try to do right by the people around them—a feeling enforced by shame in front of others more than internal guilt. Many other traits vary across these two types including patience, timeliness, whether morality is judged by intentions or outcomes, and much more.

Henrich advances a wide range of evidence for this core point including laboratory experiments played across countries, within countries, and with different immigrant groups within countries, data on actual behavior like parking tickets and blood donations, observational studies, and more. Any given study by itself might not be completely persuasive but the large mass of them, many extremely careful, leaves relatively little doubt in my mind about this argument.

Next comes Henrich’s explanation of the rise of WEIRD psychology as the consequence of the breakup of kin networks by the Catholic Church and the rise of protestantism and reading. I found this very plausible but far from a certainty, which is not Henrich’s fault but the difficulty of being completely certain about any aspects of historic causation, especially when everything moves together and causes everything else. Henrich, however, is not just making an assertion, he has a lot of evidence in the form of the history of banning cousin marriages, the correlation between the degree of cousin marriage and various psychological traits, and a number of different natural experiments that involve comparing areas that historically were under different religious rules.

Finally, Henrich links all of this to the rise of western Democratic and market institutions, something I found highly plausible—and was completely persuaded that we over-emphasize the individual thinkers we credit with the modern world (Locke, Hume, Smith, Montesquieu) and underemphasize the deeper and more slowly evolving cultural and psychological roots of these institutions.

I do have my worries about the argument. Psychological explanations of differences in growth have a long and sorry history, often fitting an explanation after-the-fact that was invalidated subsequently (e.g., the idea that Korean culture is incapable of generating growth which was dramatically disproven after 1950). Some of the “natural experiments” are so remote it is hard to know what to make about them, like some Swiss lord that died around 1,200 and then differences centuries later. This raises another issue with the timing of the psychological changes, which are sometimes portrayed as very deep and the result of factors centuries before and in other cases seem to change very quickly (see, again Korea). Some of the functionalist explanations for why different cultures/institutions evolved beg the question of why in some places but not others and the role of contingency. All that said, these are all sources of my uneasiness with unqualifiedly embracing the argument in the book and none of them really find fault with any of the empirical evidence or claims--all of which moved me a lot in Henrich's direction.

The WEIRDest People in the World is definitely a long book. But it is really worthwhile. It does not just provide a new and compelling explanation of the rise of the West, it also makes one think about how many aspects of psychology that seem universal are really contingent and how these can change and adapt over time. Ultimately, the book left me with a profound awe for the human species that can understand so much about itself both by working collaboratively with a wide variety of intellectual tools and also by single individuals with enormous creativity and ability to synthesize evidence.