The WEIRDest People in the World

How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

by Joseph Henrich

When this book first came out, I was really excited about it; god-knows-where I heard about it first! Had to wait a while for it to filter into my reach. In the meantime, I read reviews about it and even watched the author speak on PBS or some ‘highbrow’ public channel like that. Very strange behavior for me, someone who normally only gets excited about books while reading them, or after.

In any case, I am a lover of Jared Diamond’s ideas espoused in “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” and I see this book as a sort of complement to Diamond’s. Henrich goes a step further than Diamond’s bio/geographic determinism though and brings us from around 1000 AD to the present. He also offers convincing explanations of why it was Europe instead of the Islamic World, India, or China which rose to the forefront of scientific, militaristic, financial, and technological advancement in recent centuries. All societies which according to Diamond should have equally shared in Eurasias’s extended latitudinal opportunities for plant and animal domestication, and therefore similar chances for world domination.

Henrich argues that it was first the Catholic Church’s strange practices of reducing the power of extended kin-groups in Europe and then various other protestanty-based ideals which further changed the social psychology of Europeans. And then how the habits of European social psychology bore fruit by encouraging higher rates of education, technological advancement, sharing with strangers, and trust in non-related others. I love how he repeatedly uses the word ‘stumbled’ to explain the Church’s practices because it is hard to see how this could have possibly been a concerted effort centuries before the practices could even begin to be shown to shape society. It reminds me that for most of human history various organized religions have been the major meme-bags from which people advanced or distinguished themselves from others. So stumbled-upon seems justified here. So glad we don’t have to find a new religion in order to justify playing with a new meme at present! Thoroughly a book to read for the ideas within.

As for the writing style, it’s a bit janky and hard-to-read. One chapter gives a summary of group psychology experiments on ‘WEIRD’ people vs more ‘average’ (historically as well as numerically speaking) people, and the next chapter is a broadly-viewed historical narrative spanning continents and/or centuries at a time. I know the basis of the book is the group psych. experiments and the resultant differences they uncover – compared to customary psychology experiments which assume that human psychology is universal and that WEIRD people can be stand-ins for whomever. But damn, my eyes glossed over on a lot of that! I’m not a statistician, nor a psychologist, and I wish I didn’t have to dig through all that to get to the ideas within Henrich’s book. The gross historical summaries were much more my style, they even had a good flow. I should note too, that Henrich’s humor and humility come out in his end-notes. They frequently gave me a chance to regroup and re-energize.

I did like the book, and I’ll be chewing on Henrich’s ideas for a good while now. I’ll also be spending my free time looking up maps of where Huguenots were thickest in France, what it means to be a Unitarian, and maybe even juicy, over-long sociology articles on East-Asia’s recent wholesale adoption of Western kin-bashing practices. Who knew monogamy could be so interesting?

Did you read this book? What do you think about “Western Civilisation?” Could marriage really be responsable for all this?