Joseph Henrich

Henrich’s premise is that people in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies have undergone cultural evolution so that they are psychologically unusual. We are individualistic, self-obsessed, and analytical. We tend to be trusting of strangers and we tend to rely on impartial rules of law. We may feel guilty, but we are less likely to feel shame. In these and other cultural features, we are different from people who live in non-Weird societies. Using a step-by-step explanation of the contributing aspects of his theory, involving a tsunami of linear regression charts, Henrich leads us through the findings that support his idea. Much of it seems to stem from the peculiar Marriage and Family Plan of the Catholic church that Henrich says is the reason that we are likely to be monogamous and not marry our cousins, unlike some non-Weird peoples. The argument is impressive in the amount of data presented and in its overall novelty.

Controlled studies are often not possible in the social sciences, but there are so many correlation coefficients here that it was difficult to keep from thinking that correlation does not prove causation. This caveat is addressed to some degree by the discussion of many cleverly controlled psychology studies. Protestantism is a key factor in the author’s theory of WEIRD development, and although it is addressed here and there, I did wonder about how some other peoples who seem WEIRD to me (Jews and Asians in particular) fit into his big picture. Also, I am no social scientist, but I was surprised that shame and guilt are so easy to differentiate from each other.… (mehr)

I usually have a problem with these grand-scope books because they tend to stray from the author's area of expertise and become speculative. You tend to learn lots of interesting information along the way, and they're a lot of fun, so I'll keep reading them, but I've always got the hackles up.

For the first half of this book, I think this isn't so much of a problem, although the other issue here is I'm not exactly in a position to evaluate that as a non-expert myself. This section sticks to revealing the huge discrepancies between the responses of Westerners and the rest of the world to a range of psychological tests.

The second section aims to show how these differences led Western nations to have outsized influence on the world. Henrich does close by saying that the psychology is just one piece of this puzzle, which I appreciate, but I did feel at times that that nuance was lost while building the case.

Anyway, very eye-opening and worth thinking about.… (mehr)

Books that influence me most tend to do so by giving me new glasses to see the world through: [b:Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies|1842|Guns, Germs, and Steel The Fates of Human Societies|Jared Diamond|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1453215833s/1842.jpg|2138852] for seeing the impact of environments on history; [b:The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York|1111|The Power Broker Robert Moses and the Fall of New York|Robert A. Caro|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403194611s/1111.jpg|428384] for seeing how power operates; [b:The Death and Life of Great American Cities|30833|The Death and Life of Great American Cities|Jane Jacobs|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1168135326s/30833.jpg|1289564] for seeing how cities work; [b:The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention|262579|The Unfolding of Language An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention|Guy Deutscher|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386925063s/262579.jpg|254521] for seeing how language changes. This book promises to have a lasting influence on me by giving me new glasses for seeing how culture impacts human beings and their societies.

It synthesises insights from physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, experimental psychology and economics into an inter-disciplinary evolutionary analysis: what makes human most special among animals is that we learn and teach culture; our cultures are what allow us to dominate the globe, rather than our individual faculties; culture changes the human body over evolutionary timescales by standing in for biological functions (e.g. cooking for high-power digestion); culture can be good for human beings even though they do not know why (his main example is manioc processing that removes poisons which would only be damaging in the very long term); culture proliferates among individuals by means of evolved learning processes biased towards copying success; humans instinctively seek out, follow, and punish deviation from cultural norms; and culture proliferates among social groups by differential success in sustaining and expanding those groups. Henrich doesn't give it a name but perhaps Evolutionary Functionalism would be appropriate (Functionalism is the anthropological theory that culture tends to integrate societies and promote cooperation).

Taken individually, most of the individual insights were familiar (which was why I put the book down when I first flipped through it), but coming back to it I realised that what makes this book special is the way in which it brings them all together into a unified perspective on human culture that is a new way of looking at it. For example, take bonding practices in hunter-gatherer bands. Henrich brings up evidence that a member of a band is typically related closely only to a minority of band members. So how do bands form as cooperative units? The standard answer derived from biology and economics is that if kin-altruism does not suffice, then it must be reciprocity. But, of course, hunter-gatherers do not merely reciprocally exchange with each other; they practise naming traditions, fictive kinships, initiations, collaborative rituals, and so on, which produce social bonds that go way beyond what economics predicts. Why then do such seemingly functional, pro-social practices prevail? Henrich's answer is that such practices give an advantage in cultural-evolutionary terms to groups that practise them: they are more likely to win wars, conquer territory, maintain common identity and wider-spread inter-group cooperation when they grow and fission, and hence out-compete groups whose cultures do not promote cooperation so strongly. Nearby groups will preferentially adopt cultural forms from the dominant group, whether by force, emulation or inter-marriage (even non-adaptive culture might get included along with adaptive). The same principles go for technology or any other cultural form that drives differential group success, and the bigger the socialising group the better the technology becomes, simply by the greater frequency of invention and sharing.

Group-selection theory usually falls down (this is Richard Dawkins' critique in regard to genetic evolution) because of the free-rider problem: somebody who selfishly benefits from group cooperation without contributing to it will do even better than those who cooperate, and so the genes for cooperation will fail to spread preferentially. But, as Henrich shows, human beings are powerfully drawn to punishing the violators of cultural norms, even those which are entirely arbitrary. Cooperation according to cultural norms plus punishment of defectors mean cultural forms really can be objects of group-selection pressure. He gives empirical examples from experimental psychology and, indeed, from some history of traditional societies.

Most impressively, Henrich takes the penultimate chapter to synthesise a lot of knowledge about archaic humans so as to lay out a speculative theory of how a variety of aspects of human evolution, biological and behavioral, came together to enable and promote cultural learning.

As I say, little here is brand new when looked at piece by piece, but to put it all together like this, from human instincts through a theorised pattern of culture-enabling evolution all the way to inter-group politics, is certainly new to me: the analysis of human beings as the species in a unique cultural niche, and of their societies as under group-selective pressure for adaptive culture. It's impressive.

The book's limitations prompt further questions:

1. How does the functional or group-selective theory of cultural evolution jibe with work by Pascal Boyer ([b:Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought|786153|Religion Explained The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought|Pascal Boyer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1414350823s/786153.jpg|772151]) and Dan Sperber on the way in which cultural forms tend to spread not by strict imitation, but with a constructive bias in content towards certain, potentially instinctive, psychological "attractors"? Sperber in that article wants to subsume Darwinian selection pressure as just one form of cultural attractor. How does cultural evolution change when there are cultural producers determined to exploit our biases and attractors for their own financial or politcal interests?

2. If humans are as conformist as Henrich argues them to be, then what explains the common phenomenon of adolescent rebellion? Henrich discusses adolescence only as a time of cultural "apprenticeship" but this is clearly inadequate. What explains the proliferation of subcultures wherever they are free to express themselves?

3. How, if at all, does functional group selection of culture apply in agricultural societies characterised not by small-group consensus but by large-scale inequality and internal conflict: for example in the first coercive resource-extraction civilisations such as the ancient silt-based Sumer, Egypt and Indus? Is exploitation a favoured strategy in group selection? Does group-selection theory have anything to say about historical transitions in modern times from the moral economy, to capitalism, to the welfare state? Is capitalism functional in the group-selective sense despite producing deep conflicts of material interest between classes which would seem to militate against social integration? Is there a relationship between cultural norms and the cycles of boom and crisis identified by Jack Goldstone, such that societies which develop more egalitarian norms find it easier to stabilise conflict and ward off state collapse?… (mehr)

I first came across Jack Goody's thesis that the medieval European Catholic Church's family policies (opposing cousin-marriage, marriage without consent of the partners, remarriage to in-laws, adoption, levirate marriage, and polygyny, and promoting the stigma of illegitimacy) killed off tribalism and inaugurated individualism in Francis Fukuyama's excellent "Origins of Political Order". Fukuyama essentially accepted Goody's theory without criticism as an essential component of Western European uniqueness. Goody in his 1983 "Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe" didn't know why the Church promoted these policies, and nor does Joseph Henrich know today. Goody suggested, though he admitted he lacked evidence, that the Church deliberately pursued policies that would make it harder to marry and produce heirs, so that more land and wealth would end up donated to the Church. Henrich simply says the reasons are complicated, and leaves it at that. It's not very satisfying to posit that a policy caused the rise of the modern, liberal, capitalist, individualist world, without being able to explain why the policy was developed, but we apparently simple don't know. It's also unsatisfying not to have actual data on historical rates of cousin marriage, etc., to show when they actually declined, although Henrich alludes to some clever work on historical relationship terminology. Perhaps historical genetics will tell us. The main thing Henrich adds to the argument is a heap of inverse correlations between tribalist family practices and indices of psychological and social individualism. I do believe something went on in Western Europe to make it "WEIRD" early on. England, especially, had developed an unusual level of individual rights and market commerce by early modern times, and was seemingly bereft of the tribalism of the extended family, outside royal and noble elites. Henrich has very gamely tried to apply the cultural evolution model he developed in his superb "Secret of our Success" to explain why this happened. I'm just not convinced yet that it was a Church policy of uncertain reach and impact that did it, rather than some lucky mix of a balance of power between king and nobility, a royal legal system that protected individual rights, ease and prevalence of trade, and the economic consequences of the Black Death.… (mehr)