Will I love The WEIRDest People in the World?

I am an academic economist (retired) whose career always has had a strong interdisciplinary orientation. Among other fields, I have long been interested in psychology, especially social psychology, but also been skeptical of the tendency among its practitioners to use convenience samples of handy crowds of U.S. (or otherwise "western") undergraduate students to draw grand conclusions about human behavior. Prof. Henrich, a cultural anthropologist (and aerospace engineer!), shares this skepticism. In particular, he presents in this book theory and evidence of how WEIRD people in the Western world are relative to the majority of peoples elsewhere. (WEIRD = people in… show more.

This is one of the most important recent books in social science, written by a leading evolutionary theorist and psychologist. Its starting point is that much of experimental social science has been confined to subjects who are educated westerners. Experimental evidence from other cultures presents a different perspective. Another relatively unique feature of western culture is its lesser reliance on extended kinship transactions. Another important narrative in the book is how culture can mold individual preference functions and change our choices and dispositions. Joseph Henrich is critical of mainstream economics for often taking preference functions as given. This is a… show more.

This one does not follow children from childhood to adulthood, but rather reveals how 100s of years ago events occurred that radically changed who people interacted with, married and spent their lives relating to.

It is a bold, strikingly original, and epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that profoundly shaped the modern world. While Nature matters, what this volume made clear to me is how “big Nurture”, meaning cultural practices, have changed over the past 1,000 years and the dramatic implications of such change for the world we live in today.

Don’t be by the weirdest title in the world, this is another landmark book and it perfectly complements The Upswing. Combining deep social history, - Europe in the Early Middle Ages – with revolutionary research on evolutionary biology, it shows how a distinctive inflection point fortuitously broke the otherwise universal practice of kin-group mating. This gradually released parts of Europe into forging the purposive social capital that Putnam celebrates. Nor need you be deterred by Heinrich’s polymath credentials – he currently heads Harvard’s Department of Evolutionary Biology, but could equally hold chairs in Anthropology or Economics – he writes beautifully… show more.