Joseph Henrich

Along the lines of Jared Diamond's GUNS, GERMS, & STEEL, this is a big-picture book with a big-picture answer to the basic question: Why did and does Europe rock so much?

In one of the final sections he answers Diamond directly: GG&S is a great theory to explain why Europe was so far ahead circa 1000 AD. But then, why England? Why the Netherlands? TWPITW purports to be The Explanation for why Europe continued to rock so much.

To recap Diamond (and GG&S has always been one of my all-time show more favorites): it's agriculture. Eurasia got all the good crops and domesticatable mammals. If you're stuck eating cassava with nothing to pull a plow, why invent the wheel?

And to summarize TWPITW's 489 pages of content (there's a couple hundred more pages of appendix & index)... it's what the Catholic Church (back then simply the Church) did to the family.

I should probably back up: WEIRD people are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. (Just double-checked myself - yup, 5 out of 5.) And we got this way because our psychology was altered when our vast kinship networks were destroyed by what he calls the Church's MFP - no, not Maximum Fluoride Protection, but Marriage & Family Program. The Church's rules said: no more marrying your cousin. No more staying within the husband's or wife's parents' house after marriage. No more arranged marriage. No more polygyny, "or even moderate bigamy" as THE KING AND I song goes. No more marrying your former in-laws.

And this was all a tremendous shock, and a heck of a lot of work to get people to go along with - it took centuries for it all to really gain a foothold. And that's because being proto-WEIRD is truly weird - we, meaning humans, have always lived within vast kinship networks. Marrying cousins or in-laws kept everything in the clan. Polygyny and arranged marriage cemented patriarchal power. Family/clan/tribe has always meant everything it was to be human. Now, disassociated from that source of meaning, protection, and power, individuals had to look elsewhere - to strangers, voluntary organizations, the Church (how convenient) - and within. This made us more trusting of strangers, and more literally self-centered, than we were when were all Family Guys.

It played a lot of other psychological tricks too. 400 pages worth. Yes, this was a difficult book to read, physically - every night was a weight-lifting exercise. In the end I do like the theory; definitely a fascinating way to look at things. But I guess I have two faults to find.

a) It wasn't the book I thought I was going to read. It starts out with in-depth looks at non-WEIRD societies, and contrasts with our own - but I thought it was going to be mostly, or more of, that. It's actually a lot more rah-rah cheering for how great us WEIRD societies are, and less about how, well, weird we are.

b) Why exactly did the Church do all this, fight for centuries to come up with weird new rules for who and how and how many to marry? The reasons were "many and varied." I kid you not. That's the extent of the explanation.

So just keep in mind, next time you're reading a blithe statement about human psychology - it may very well apply only to WEIRD human psychology. Things we think of as rational "givens" aren't givens. The ideals of democracy, human rights, etc. - these are not self-evident, with apologies to Thomas Jefferson. They are ideas cooked up by WEIRD minds.

Great food for thought - WEIRD thought. show less

In The Secret of Our Success Joseph Henrich makes a detailed argument that cultural evolution has been a key force shaping humanity. This force has been around longer than homo sapiens and has shaped our bodies, our minds, and our societies.

Cultural evolution is the idea that culture — the accumulation of knowledge across generations —has been a key influence in the biological evolution of humanity. Cultural learning, not intelligence, is the secret of our success.The book gives a show more number of examples how, unlike most animals, if you put people in an unfamiliar-but-livable environment, our intelligence alone is not enough to help us survive. Our culture is a critical part of our ability to survive and thrive

Because of this, there are many ways in which humans have evolved to learn. We seek out people to imitate. We form mental models of their goals, techniques, and motivations. We live in large groups where there are many people we can learn from, and we have kinship ties which help others around us tolerate our initial incompetence.

To illustrate that culture has really evolved us and is not merely a layer on top of an evolved substrate, the book spends quite a while discussing specific ways in which culture has interacted with genetic evolution, including changes in the structure of our bodies, our digestive system, and various genes that control our physiology.

Groups are key to cultural evolution. Groups can be more innovative than individuals because there are more people to learn from, leading to more effective accumulation of cultural innovations. The innovative ability of groups is the key factor leading to accelerating cultural evolution. Group innovations include things individuals can use on their own, such as learning a particular hunting technique. However, cultural evolution goes beyond the individual. It also drives the emergence of procedures, techniques, and social norms which embody knowledge that has been learned over time. This knowledge is often not explicitly visible to those who use those procedures. For example, food preparation often has many elaborate steps which reduce toxins, although it isn't always clear how. Social norms and taboos often work to increase sharing and cooperation even when they are driven by concerns about reputation or evoking negative supernatural effects.

Group norms spread through intergroup competition. This can include violence, but often does not. Effective group norms also spread through imitation, higher survival rates, higher reproduction rates, and migration patterns which favor successful groups.

It seems fairly clear that once the cycle of cultural evolution starts, it can keep building on itself, but how and when did it start? For when, Henrich looks at archeological evidence. The spread of tools indicates that imitative cultural learning existed millions of years ago. By 750,000 years ago, we see archeological evidence of technology which implies cultural evolution and we see physical change to human predecessors which imply the influence of culture evolution (e.g., food processing methods changing our jaw and digestive systems). Somewhere between the emergence of cultural learning and 750,000 years ago, cultural evolution kicked off.

How did this happen? As noted above, groups were a critical part of this. Henrich hypothesizes that human predecessors lived in larger, more stable groups than other primates. They were terrestrial which may have encouraged them to live together. They also may have had more stable social groups because of pair bonding and kin networks which arose from the need to take care of offspring with long developmental periods.

Overall, Henrich makes a compelling case for the role of cultural evolution as the key factor which drove human society to a complexity not matched by any of our fellow creatures. show less

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. show more 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? show less

WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. This is a long and fascinating book with tons of references to interesting research that I could only gesture vaguely at even in a long review. Basically, Henrich argues that a society’s organization can change individual brains, which then can change the society further. These changes mean that memory works differently for different groups, as does visual processing and facial recognition, and he argues that they show more can also explain big differences in moral reasoning, such as the relative importance of guilt v. shame in controlling behavior. Westerners are more likely than non-Westerners to participate in punishing someone who has broken norms but not personally harmed them, and less likely to seek revenge against someone who has personally harmed them. Also, fundamental attribution error—attributing behavior to character rather than circumstance—turns out to be fundamental only to the WEIRD; non-Westerners are more likely to explain behavior by pointing to an individual’s circumstances. We are more subject to the endowment effect (valuing things more because we deem them ours), we value having choices more, and we overestimate our own talents more.

Why? The book argues that the West, for whatever reason (Henrich doesn’t speculate), largely adopted a particular kind of monotheism that promoted monogamy; discouraged concentration of power in kin groups because they stood as counterweights to Church power; enforced monogamy so that powerful men couldn’t have multiple wives; and ultimately promoted individualism, which led to things like literacy and non-kin affinity networks such as coreligionists and political parties. “How many people do you personally know who married their cousins? If you know none, that’s WEIRD, since 1 in 10 marriages around the world today is to a cousin or other relative.” (A country’s rate of cousin marriage turns out to correlate with a lot of these other things, like generalized trust, rate of blood donations, and even how many parking tickets a UN delegation gets.) Less kin-based societies developed other mechanisms of social control, focusing on individual behavior and punishing defectors without getting into revenge cycles.

As a result, Westerners became psychologically distinct from other groups. Among other things, we are more likely than non-Westerners to be trusting of strangers, to favor testifying truthfully that our friends committed a crime over lying to protect them, and otherwise to favor large structures over close kin groups. There are similar differences within Western society, so areas that became Protestant early on are even more WEIRD in these ways than areas that were or stayed Catholic, and so too with immigrants’ children; “people in North Dakota and New Hampshire are the most trusting, with around 60 percent of people generally trusting others; meanwhile, at the other end, only about 20 percent of people are generally trusting in Alabama and Mississippi.” This dynamic isn’t unique to Christianity; Heinrich argues that similar patterns can be discerned in groups from India and China which developed in more or less kin-oriented directions.

There is a lot of fascinating stuff, including the effect of individualism on walking speed in crowded cities. What there is not is much discussion of the meaning of percentages and proportions. So, Westerners are a lot more likely than non-Westerners to trust strangers … but that means that there are a lot of untrusting Westerners and trusting non-Westerners. (Likewise: Peer pressure is powerful, and studies show that when an experimenter’s confederates give obviously wrong answers to objective questions, a number of people often go with the majority despite being unhappy and uncomfortable doing so—from 20% in highly individualistic societies to 40-50% in highly communal societies—which is a big change, but not a complete one.) This complexity also extends to the race/class/gender differences washed away in much of this discussion—Western trust is often limited to those who match the right profile, which is a very different thing from generalized trust although also a very different thing from “I only trust my close kin.” Because Henrich is interested in dynamic processes, he argues that there is an inherent pressure to trust (etc.) larger and larger groups once the process of leaving kin behind begins, so that’s how you get people who agree that all human people have valid moral claims on one another. But how we get there, and how far we are from there, matters, especially given that it seems that trust is declining in the West and that many people are willing to prey economically and politically on the (often racialized) trust that exists.

I’m not even getting into his discussions of the varying effects of testosterone depending on society/the presence of polygamy; the variances in behavior of WEIRD and non-WEIRD people competing within a group versus competing among groups; the psychological effects of war (which 18th century Europe experienced pretty constantly). He is not a genetic determinist. For creativity, for example, he argues that exposure to different sources of knowledge drives innovation far more than anything we could call “natural” intelligence. And in the key centuries, he argues, European cities were pretty much deathtraps requiring a constant inflow of rural migrants, meaning that natural selection is not a good explanation for WEIRD psychology. show less