Joseph Henrich

Quotes From

The WEIRDest People in the World (2020)

• If it was affluence that drove a WEIRDer psychology, then it should have been Europe’s aristocrats who fueled the entrepreneurial engines of the Industrial Revolution. Instead, as we have seen, it was the urbanizing individualists, artisans, and clergy in the middle class.#
• Necessity is certainly not the mother of invention. Over the course of human history, people often ignored life-saving inventions for years, sometimes only realizing how much they needed an invention long after its arrival.#
• What Protestantism did in the 16th century was to sacralize the psychological complex that had been percolating in Europe during the centuries leading up to the Reformation.#
• Intensive kinship—operating through cultural transmission—psychologically inhibits participatory governance, political pluralism, and the quality of democratic institutions.#
• Much of the development of Western law has been about ferreting out and resolving the contradictions that emerge when one tries to isolate a set of principles and apply them more broadly.#
• Modern companies, like ancient societies and chiefly institutions, eventually implode in the absence of intergroup competition.#
• War strengthens people’s egalitarian motivations, but only toward their in-groups.#
• One of the greatest threats to the functioning of voluntary associations was, and remains, intensive kinship.#
• When exchange is risky and rare, you can increase it by building more and better interpersonal relationships. However, when the web of interpersonal relations becomes too dense, market competition and impersonal commerce get strangled.#
• WEIRD people, as well as those from other industrialized societies, were among the furthest from the rational benchmarks predicted by economics textbooks.#
• Throughout human history, rulers needed religions much more than religions needed rulers.#
• Even when kin-based institutions have been suppressed by state institutions, their fundamental grounding in our evolved psychology enables them to readily reassemble themselves—in the advent of a state collapse—to resume the functions previously usurped by the state#
• Once intergroup competition wanes, which often happens when states or empires manage to eliminate their competition, things slowly fall apart. Without the looming threats posed by competing societies, the competition among ruling families within a society will intensify and gradually tear the state-level institutions apart.#
• The manipulation and accumulation of ritual powers and offices has been one of the main ways in which some clans have set themselves above others.#
• The more effectively norms galvanize cooperation within subgroups, the more challenging it can be to unite them and scale up.#
• At the dawn of agriculture, all societies were built on institutions rooted in family ties, ritual bonds, and enduring interpersonal relationships. New institutional forms always built on these ancient foundations by variously augmenting, extending, or reinforcing the inherited forms… Later, once purely kin-based institutions were insufficient to scale up societies any further, additional non-kin-based, nonrelational institutions did develop. But, crucially, these institutions were always built atop a deep foundation of kin-based institutions.#
• The threat posed by violent intergroup conflict may be the most important domain of interdependence.#
• Even WEIRD people, despite their immense confidence in the rational construction of their institutions, have little inkling of how or why their institutions really work.#
• Rituals can be thought of as ensembles of “mind hacks” that exploit the bugs in our mental programs in subtle and diverse ways.#
• By creating affines, cultural evolution has harnessed a shared genetic interest that no other species has managed to exploit. In many societies, these otherwise weak affinal ties are highlighted and nourished by social norms involving gifts, rituals, and mutual obligations.#
• Putting more cash on the line for correct answers only increases people’s reliance on cultural learning over their own direct assessments or perceptions.#
• Kin-based institutions have evolved culturally to create tight-knit and enduring social units by diffusing responsibility, criminal culpability, and shame across groups like clans or lineages, which downgrades and sometimes eliminates the importance of individual mental states in making moral judgments.#