Dr Joseph Henrich | WEIRD Minds-Why the West is psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous

World-renowned biological anthropologist and best-selling author Dr Joseph Henrich presents a Ramsay Lecture titled ‘WEIRD Minds: How religion, marriage and the family made the West psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous’.
According to Dr Henrich, an accumulating body of evidence reveals not only substantial global variation along several important psychological dimensions, including conformity, individualism, moral judgment, guilt, patience, trust, and analytic thinking, but also that people from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) are particularly unusual, often anchoring the ends of global psychological distributions.
Drawing on the principal thesis of his 2020 best-seller, The WEIRDest People in the World, he shows how the most fundamental of human institutions-those governing marriage and family-influence motivations, perceptions, intuitions and emotions.
He also explores how the Western Catholic Church systematically dismantled the intensive kin-based institutions in much of Latin Christendom, effectively altering people’s psychology and opening the door to new forms of voluntary organizations (charter towns, universities, guilds, monasteries), impersonal markets and eventually modern organizational competition.
Dr Henrich is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. In 2004 he won the Presidential Early Career Award for young scientists, and in 2009 the Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions bestowed by the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. In 2016 he published The Secret of Our Success (Princeton), and in 2020 The WEIRDest People in the World.
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About the Ramsay Centre: The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is based in Sydney Australia. It was created with an endowment from the late Paul Ramsay AO, founder of Ramsay Health Care, to promote a deeper understanding of Western civilisation, through scholarships, educational partnerships and events. The Ramsay Lecture series hosts speakers from all walks of life who have important and interesting perspectives relating to the world and our Western heritage.
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[@nowithinkyouknowyourewrong8675]

This is best Henrich talk on youtube, thanks for uploading.

[@enisten]

A lot of what he says is BS (ad hoc, distorted, or underdeveloped). But I agree with the individualism part and a few other things, as someone who was born in Turkey (one of the most illiberal, if not anti-liberal, societies in the world) and lived in the US for 7 years and racked his mind about this very topic for years.

[@MS-il3ht]

I think he is primarily wrong about excluding genetic factors for the Western divergence.

[@enisten]

@@MS-il3ht Maybe. But remember that the West started to diverge only a few hundred years ago, and it's hard to attribute this divergence to a sudden change in its gene pool. And East Asian countries have achieved the same economic success in a matter of a few decades more recently. So other, collectively more powerful factors than genetics are almost certainly at play here, at least when comparing the East and the West. You may be right about the divergence from sub-Saharan Africa, though, which appears to have been going on for a much longer time. Domestic cultural differences may be almost completely attributable to the succesful spread of Christian values in the West, which differ radically from the 'law of the jungle' morality that governs much of the rest of the world, as well as its economic prosperity that followed the Industrial Revolution and its centuries-long colonization experience, which probably contributed to its further civilization, just like the Cold War liberalized the US as it tried to distinguish itself positively from the unfree world. (E.g. flag burning and abortion would not have been deemed constitional rights by today's SCOTUS.) The US also noticed that its moral superiority that resulted in part from its economic prosperity and in part from its Christian heritage allowed it to spread its imperialist hegemony more easily, just like the Northern states before the Civil War could condemn slavery much more easily than the Southern states because they didn't need it or have much use for it in the first place.

[@MS-il3ht]

​@@enisten While there's truth to all these cultural variables, some important insights are missing from modern anthropology, unfortunately. One of them being: gene-culture interaction has hastened the pace of evolution by a fair lot. (cf. Cochran et al) Within the ∼1100-1200 years after the likely itself dysgenic collapse of the Western Roman Empire and before early modernity, European eugenic selection patterns - of which Christian inbreeding avoidance was only a fragment - have almost certainly led to a sharp increase in average Western IQ (there is even a fair bit of aDNA evidence; cf. e.g. Kierkegaard). Nowadays, since the least educated/-able of people are the only ones consistently breeding above replacement, of course, we are on an even sharper decline as well. But general variables traditionally considered more cultural in nature, e.g. overall conscientiousness (cf. Weber's Protestant work ethic), arguably follow an even more pronounced trend. It might have been selected for by an unknown albeit high factor before and is selected AGAINST qua almost double the aforementioned dysgenic fertility (regarding IQ) today (just consider the higher birth rates for people with ADHD; such as for criminals, and in particular those among them with the most heritable of antisocial pathologies; cf. Richard Lynn's work). By the way, very similar processes can be observed throughout South-East Asian history; e.g. significantly less child mortality for the offspring of high-SES men (like Japanese Samurai) than for kin of low-SES commoners. The cultural divergence initially favoring the West was arguably mostly due to the geographical isolation of places like Japan and Korea. After all, in contrast, the ever-so-slightly less afflicted China (not to forget about the whole "center of the world" narrative) was an impressively stable and innovative entity in the region for some 5000 years.

[@squatch545]

What's "BS"? What's "ad hoc"? What's "distorted?" What's "underdeveloped"? Any idiot can make any assertions on the internet. Please back them up with examples and argument.

[@squatch545]

@@MS-il3ht Gene-culture interaction has been part of modern anthropology for decades. Not sure where you're getting your information from.

[@enisten]

22:44 Our minds evolved to be plastic in order to adopt to the diversity of cultures and languages in the world? This is so anachronistic, it's just stupid.

[@upvotecomment2110]

It's but does that mean it's wrong? You don't really provide any proof not even context that disputes his claims

[@enisten]

@@upvotecomment2110Yes, it's both stupid and wrong.

[@enkh-uliraldechin7071]

@@upvotecomment2110 exactly

[@squatch545]

What's stupid about it?

[@arnebruland73]

@@upvotecomment2110 I may be wrong, as the lecture was a bit cursory, but that part sounded lamarkist to me. Is he implying that acquired characteristics are inherited across generations? Or maybe cultural evolution was the idea?