Why Are Modern Americans and Europeans so WEIRD?

According to Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies—and particularly American undergraduates—are some of the most psychologically unusual people on Earth.” In a highly cited article in Nature, these researchers point to a few examples of this weirdness. For one, students from North America are analytical in their reasoning, trying to separate objects and individuals from their contexts, and understand their behavior in terms of general rules. Asians, by contrast, who make up a larger proportion of the human population, are holistic in their reasoning, considering people’s behavior in terms of specific contexts. Here’s another example: When asked to divide resources, North Americans are egalitarian, sharing even with total strangers, and punishing those who fail to be generous to other strangers. But people in other societies, such as African foragers or South American horticulturalists, act in ways that North Americans would regard as selfish, and are not inclined to punish others for acting selfishly.

Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan laid out their case against generalizing from WEIRD samples in a 2010 paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, published along with 28 commentaries, and a response from the authors. In a recent book, Henrich tries to address the broad question raised by at least one of the Behavioral and Brain Sciences commentators: “Why and how did people in the West become comparatively better educated, more industrialized, richer, and more democratic than people in other parts of the world?” Henrich’s book, The weirdest people in the world: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous follows in the tradition of Jared Diamond’s classic, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The fates of human societies.

Henrich's book on WEIRD culture

Source: The cover of book being reviewed here;

Here’s a simple (and probably oversimplified) summary of Henrich’s argument: People living in modern cities in Europe and North America have psychologies shaped by a few policy decisions made by the Catholic Church in the middle ages. In particular, the church’s attempts to break up family alliances led to societal changes that morphed into greater individualism and a democratic spirit. Accompanying the break-up of kinship alliances came increases in geographic mobility and urbanization, which in turn generated relatively more distribution of individual wealth and increasing desire for self-governance. Those developments set the stage for the Protestant Reformation, in which individualism became prioritized, and people were encouraged not to rely on priestly authority, but to become literate. This was first directed at encouraging individual reading of the Bible and a personal relationship with God, but later morphed into a craving for knowledge in general, and coevolved with the development of universities to set the stage for the Enlightenment.

As one of those North American WEIRDOs who values education and unique individual ideas, I could not help but be awed by Henrich’s command of vast literatures spanning history, economics, psychology, and anthropology. He is uniquely well-suited to such an endeavor, since he was trained as an anthropologist, but has since served as a professor in both the psychology and economics departments at the University of British Columbia, and is currently a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

Is Henrich’s analysis correct? As someone with no background in history, I am in no position to answer this question. Here’s a link to a review by an economic historian, who certainly feels that Henrich’s analysis is worth considering. I felt at times that Henrich’s arguments were a bit stretched, and that the causal arrows he posits might well be much more complicated. Considered more holistically, it would seem that the historical changes in religious beliefs in Europe may have been co-evolving with changes from feudalism to mercantilism and the emergence of democratic states, scientific societies, and universal education, and these developments may well have fed upon one another. Henrich is certainly open-minded in considering the various complicated links between different factors, so I suspect he'd not disagree too strongly.

Sometimes Henrich relies on fairly thin data from single non-Western societies to attack generalizations from broader literatures in psychology. Of course, one can easily find individual studies done on Western subjects that fail to replicate other such studies done on other Western subjects. For example, I felt he was too quick to dismiss the generality of the Big 5 personality factors, referring disparagingly to them as the "Weird 5." The same factors do show up in diverse societies around the world, although he notes that the intercorrelation of the different factors varies in possibly systematic ways. Henrich makes a lot of one study done with a traditional South American small-scale society in which the researchers found only two personality factors. Henrich is himself appropriately humble in noting these limitations, and repeatedly observing that some of his conclusions are based on very rough correlational findings. At the same time, he also tries to deal explicitly with particular objections by reference to other data sources.

Henrich doesn’t spend much time thinking about the other side of the coin: the universals in human nature. In some of the cross-cultural research I’ve done—looking at mating relationships between younger women and older men—my colleagues and I found very robust universals. Indeed, we found that the same patterns that had previously been attributed to “American society” were actually somewhat more pronounced in traditional societies (such as a remote island in the Philippines, or among the Tiwi of North Australia) (see chapter 5 of my book, Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life). In his defense, Henrich doesn’t deny there are some universals, it’s just not the part of the story he’s focusing on.

Henrich notes that his quest to understand these issues began when he taught a seminar based on Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel as a graduate student at UCLA, which led the chair of economics at the University of British Columbia to ask him to teach a course on “The wealth and poverty of nations.” Speaking of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Henrich does a nice job of addressing the fact that he comes to very different conclusions from those reached by Diamond.

I read Henrich’s book after a year of reading some excellent books on human history and prehistory (in preparation for a book I am working on, as described here). How does Henrich’s book stand up in the context of books such as Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order, Harari’s Sapiens, and Von Hippel’s Social Leap? Exceptionally well, in my opinion. Henrich’s book is a bit more academically rigorous, replete with data, charts, and not quite as catchy in its prose as Harari’s book, for example. However, I think Henrich presents a profoundly thought-provoking analysis, and the time you’d spend reading it would be well invested.