The WEIRDest People in the World (2020)

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous is a 2020 book by Harvard University professor Joseph Henrich that aims to explain history and psychological variation using approaches from cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology. In the book, Henrich explores how institutions and psychology jointly influence each other over time. More specifically, he argues that a series of Catholic Church edicts on marriage that began in the 4th century undermined the foundations of kin-based society and created the more analytical, individualistic thinking prevalent in western societies.

Summary

The first part, "The Evolution of Societies and Psychologies", describes WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) populations "in broad strokes", according to reviewer Pauline Grosjean. Henrich discusses the research of Richard Nisbett suggesting that people in WEIRD cultures think reductively with a focus on personal attributes and intentions, while Asians think holistically with a focus on relationships and situations. Non-Westerners will emphasize family connections and allegiances. Henrich also presents a large body of evidence that WEIRD people are more trusting of strangers and more likely to give blood than most humans. Westerners, according to reviewer Judith Shulevitz, "identify more as members of voluntary social groups—dentists, artists, Republicans, Democrats, supporters of a Green Party—than of extended clans."

The second part of the book, "The Origins of WEIRD People", provides a comparative political account of how societies have used religion to scale up from families to states. More specifically, the author draws on an array of qualitative and quantitative evidence to argue that religious beliefs, impersonal markets, urbanization and competition among voluntary associations like guilds, charter towns, universities and religious orders shifted people's psychology and social lives. Uniquely, the author both discusses how present-day institutions shape psychology and seats these processes in an account of the past.

The third section, "New Institutions, New Psychologies", is about how the Catholic Church and its offshoot, Protestantism, shaped early institutions and psychology, paving the way (in the view of the author) for modern institutions. While accounts of modern history frequently argue that the Protestant Reformation created individualism and a belief in rule of law, Henrich argues that edicts by the Church that he calls the "Marriage and Family Program" (MFP) reduced clannishness, making Western Europeans more analytic and individualistic, leading to various intermediating institutions and trust in abstract rules.

In the final section, "Birthing the Modern World," Henrich specifically challenges the "rationalist" view that modern Western institutions resulted from reason triumphing over religious dogma. Instead, he argues that these institutions are the accidental byproduct of specific policies of the Catholic Church that dismantled Europe’s kin-based institutions. Without clan backing, the Church left nuclear families isolated and vulnerable, forcing them to innovate to survive and, ultimately, create the modern world.

Reception

In The Week, the book was billed as "a work of dazzling ambition ... Henrich goes to great pains to back [his arguments] up with a huge variety of 'data points' and statistics." Andrew Wilson of The Gospel Coalition dubbed the book "sweeping, polymathic, counterintuitive, and provocative. In a number of places, it looks like Henrich is shoehorning facts into his theory ... but he hits far more than he misses ... the splutters of incredulity you experience are more than made up for by the breadth and chutzpah of the narrative." Wilson compared it with the work of N. T. Wright. Wilson had also discussed the Philip Jenkins book Fertility and Faith (which makes a different argument), and described it as "more focused" than The WEIRDest People in the World.

In Kirkus Reviews it was praised as a "fascinating, vigorously argued work that probes deeply into the way 'WEIRD people' think."

Hilton Root, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, said that despite "jumping from the fifth century to the High Middle Ages ... the book makes a significant contribution to the study of what makes the West unique and will be a landmark of early twenty-first-century social science." He further argues that Henrich's application of social science to uncover universal laws of social science was methodologically original and that there is strong evidence for limiting kinship in the development of modernity, but notes that a reader would not learn about more general context of European society, citing as an example that the Henrich's merely noted in passing that marriage rules did not apply to elites. They also argue that tracing the psychology of Western society to a Church ban on cousins weddings is "itself WEIRD".

Judith Shulevitz of The Atlantic was skeptical of the claim that WEIRD and non-WEIRD people possess opposing cognitive styles, saying differences in subjects' personal experience may be the reason for differences in Triad Task responses. She also said the author's "indifference to individual and institutional intentions is guaranteed to drive historians nuts." However, Shulevitz argued that through this "macro-cultural relativism," Henrich provides a "big-picture approach [that] soars above the reigning paradigms in the study of European history ... Henrich offers a capacious new perspective that could facilitate the necessary work of sorting out what's irredeemable and what's invaluable in the singular, impressive, and wildly problematic legacy of Western domination."