I lived in three countries in the first three decades of my life, and I often thought: how come some places are "backwards" and some places prosper? How come GDP per capita can differ up to 100x in different places in the world? How come corruption is so much worse in some places? Why do people often get into fights in one place but not in another? In a lecture by Dan Ariely, I remember him posing: "Alice asks Bob if she can copy his homework. Bob says no. Who is the immmoral party here?". Israelis will say Bob, Americans Alice, each will be quite shocked by the other. Turns out, all those questions are related, and they connect to cultural psychology. Our brains are wired differently due to centuries' worth of cultural evolution. We don't feel it any more than a fish feels the water it swims in, and it's hard for us to even comprehend how others think. Heinrich will take us on a glorious, if tiring, journey to explain all of it. It will complement the Gun, Germs and Steel account of why some peoples are more fortunate than others. And it all boils down to **some monks banning cousin marriage.** ## Passenger's Dilemma You are riding in a car driven by a close friend. He hits a pedestrian. You know that he was going at least 35 mph in 20 mph. There are no witnesses, except for you. His lawyer says that if you testify under oath that he was driving only 20 mph, it may save him from serious legal consequences. What would you do? If you're reading this, you probably would not testify, like 90% of participants in Canada, Switzerland, and the US. This is called the universalistic response. In Nepal, Venezuela, and South Korea, most people pick 2 (relational response). This is called Passenger's Dilemma. It reminds me of the student's dilemma, and it's about how much you favor "the system" compared to your friends. ## We're the Weird Ones WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. As WEIRD people, we are highly individualistic, self-focused, analytical, control-oriented, nonconformist. We break down complex systems into discrete parts, seek universal rules, and prioritize self-consistency across contexts. We show less favoritism toward family and friends than other cultures. We view nepotism as wrong and prefer abstract principles over practical relationships. We are driven by internal guilt rather than social shame and self-imposing standards rather than societal ones. We evaluate ourselves against personal metrics rather than public judgment. It's hard to overstate how this WEIRD psychology is **not** universal. This is the opening quote: > The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe; a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures. > —anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1974, p. 31) It's really hard to truly grok this: the rest of the world does **not** think like this, and for the majority of human life, no one thought like this. It's like we have an alien brain. Heinrich takes care to always remind us that we're the WEIRD ones, and the different ways of living and thinking are the more normative ones. This isn't some wishy washy usage of [[Forer effect]]. Heinrich goes into excruciating detail about those properties of the WEIRD psychology and how they appear in various experiments. He has 700 (!!!) citations in the book. Passenger's Dilemma above is one example for such an experiment. Another example is a simple survey asking people how much they trust: 1. their families, 2. their neighbors, 3. people they know, 4. people they’ve met for the first time, 5. foreigners, and 6. adherents of religions other than their own. Average of (1+2+3) minus (4+5+6) is called the "in-out group delta". And you can see it's highly correlated with percentage of people married to their first cousin! ## Culture as Firmware The analogy of hardware as your genetic brain circuitry ("nature") and software as your learned life experiences ("nurture") is common. The [Baldwin effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_effect) suggests we should expect this from evolution. Heinrich breaks down the rule of culture here: > these genetically evolved learning abilities aren’t simply downloading a cultural software package into our innate neurological hardware. Instead, culture rewires our brains and alters our biology—it renovates the firmware. The firmware analogy is a good one. Updating it is a lot like moving to a very different country - it's tough. And it changes you at a deeper level than just learning something new, like a skill or a fact. Remember how hard it is for us to understand how someone with a non-WEIRD mindset thinks. Heinrich shows us how we were "built for culture", the same way Wilson does in [[Darwin's Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson(annotated)|Darwin's Cathedral]]. > norms are stable, self-reinforcing sets of culturally-learned and interlocking beliefs, practices, and motivations that arise as people learn from each other and interact over generations. Norms create social rules or standards that prescribe, forbid, or sometimes endorse some set of actions. These actions are incentivized and sustained by their reputational consequences—by the evaluations and reactions of the community. Notably, norms often include beliefs, such as the consequences of taboo violations for hunting success, that help motivate norm adherence, monitoring, and the sanctioning of norm-breakers. [[Groups as organisms|Groups]] that established cultural norms had an evolutionary edge. So did brains that could learn and share culture. This explains tribalism, and it even explains the [[Evolutionary function of divergent languages]]. ## The path to WEIRDness OK, we've established that WEIRD psychology is unique (and weird). We've established that it's a cultural phenomenon that influences psychology in a deep way. Now to the key thesis: how come did WEIRD psychology come to dominate everything? Well, that's easy: ![[weird0.png]] Rather than Charlie Day in the mailroom style of cause-effect, let's simplify it to three steps: * Phase 1 (500-1200 CE): Marriage and Family Program (MFP) causes significant social and psychological changes that are start of WEIRDness (A -> B+C) * Phase 2 (1200-1600 CE): Those changes lead to creation of institutions like towns, markets, law, universities that strengthens WEIRDness in a circular way (B+C <-> E+D) * Phase 3 (1600CE and on): It all reaches escape velocity with Protestantism, enlightenment and industrial revolution (->G) ## Phase 1: Marriage and Family Program (MFP) This is where it all starts. Let's do a quick exercise. Think of a regular, imaginary family. Think about how many kids, where they live, who are their relatives. Odds are that the family you thought of have the following traits: * Bilateral descent: kids think themselves related equally to both parents * Little/no marriage to cousins * Monogamous marriage * Nuclear families - domestic life is organized around married couple ad their children * Neolocal residence - newly married couples get a new house Now, you probably think, "yeah, that's a normal family". You'd be very, very wrong. ![[weird2.png]] Only 0.7% global-historical families exhibit all these traits. More than 77% exhibit zero or one of these traits! The traditional family was more like a clan. You lived in a multi-generational household. You knew all your relatives at some level. Marriages were arranged with relatives, and high-status men often had multiple wives. If you know people from traditional Middle Eastern, African, or Southeast Asian cultures, you know that some these non-WEIRD traits live on today. How was it all upended? It all started from a set of rules that Heinrich dubs as the **Marriage and Family Program (MFP)**, powered by the Roman Catholic Church and the Carolingian Empire. It started from 500 CE and got progressively stronger in the following centuries. He goes into excruciating detail about these restrictions and their gradual rollout, but here's the gist: - No marriage to cousins (up to sixth cousins!) - No polygamy - No remarriage - Inheritance had to pass to biological and legitimate children Those restrictions served as an effective limit on the size/power that any tribe/clan can accumulate, reduced kinship reliance and shifted the psychology and sociology in subtle ways: > "The nature of kin-based institutions affects how we think about ourselves, our relationships, our motivations, and our emotions. By embedding individuals within dense, interdependent, and inherited webs of social connections, intensive kinship norms regulate people's behavior in subtle and powerful ways. These norms motivate individuals to closely monitor themselves and members of their own group to make sure that everyone stays in line. They also often endow elders with substantial authority over junior members. Successfully navigating these kinds of social environments favors conformity to peers, deference to traditional authorities, sensitivity to shame, and an orientation toward the collective (e.g., the clan) over oneself." > > "By contrast, when relational bonds are fewer and weaker, individuals need to forge mutually beneficial relationships, often with strangers. To accomplish this, they must distinguish themselves from the crowd by cultivating their own distinct set of attributes, achievements, and dispositions. Success in these individual-centered worlds favors the cultivation of greater independence, less deference to authority, more guilt, and more concern with personal achievement." Over and over here, Heinrich shows swaths of plots with data on how cousin marriage ratios in a society predict various psychological traits like conformity, analytical thinking, universalism (like in [[Mental Models/Passenger's Dilemma|Passenger's Dilemma]]), and a bunch of others. All backed with data, Heinrich finds that the WEIRD-ness of populations is literally correlative with the amount of duration under Western church! > National populations that collectively experienced longer durations under the Western Church tend to be > - (A) less tightly bound by norms, > - (B) less conformist, > - (C) less enamored with tradition, > - (D) more individualistic, > - (E) less distrustful of strangers, > - (F) stronger on universalistic morality, >- (G) more cooperative in new groups with strangers, >- (H) more responsive to third-party punishment (greater contributions in the PGG with punishment), >- (I) more inclined to voluntarily donate blood >- (J) more impersonally honest (toward faceless institutions) >- (K) less inclined to accumulate parking tickets under diplomatic immunity >- (L) more analytically minded ### Monogamy is great for society (aka incels are the worst) Heinrich observes first that historically, all polygamy turns into polygyny. All the myths and fancy ideas of free love in tribal society devolve to higher status men taking more women. You can intuitively gather that if there's polygamy there will be incels. But, counter-intuitively, even moderate polygyny (20% of men have multiple wives) destabilizes society: ![[weird4.png]] Heinrich shows how this simple change to absolute monogamy affects many areas. It impacts testosterone levels, crime rates, and cooperation. So out of all the changes, monogamy created the biggest one. ## Phase 2: WEIRD psychology <-> WEIRD institutions So MFP caused big changes and created what Heinrich calls "proto-WEIRD" people. Sociologically, they had weaker family ties and less intense kinship networks. They moved more often and relied on the Church and other safety nets for support. Psychologically, they became more individualistic and analytical. They shifted from a shame-based to a guilt-based morality. They conformed less to norms. They developed an intentional, rather than outcome-based, morality. They also showed less zero-sum thinking and risk-seeking behavior. These shifts, alongside with the vacuum of clan-based institutions created a fertile ground for birth of new institutions. Universities emerged where status came from knowledge rather than lineage. Guilds formed, because if you wanted to get into a trade, being relatives with the respective clan was no longer enough. Impersonal prosociality (the universalist view in [[Mental Models/Passenger's Dilemma|Passenger's Dilemma]]) grew stronger as you had to trust strangers in MArkets. Heinrich shows this through plethora of ethnographic studies, field experiments and quantitative analyses. He shows the evolution of "time thrifty" mindset: he gives Fijians a bunch of clocks, and they still don't really care about the time. He shows that time spent under Church predicts adoption under parliamentary government. He shows how BaYaka communities are more likely to pass the equivalent of the "marshmallow test" if they come from a town, but even if they do, they're expected to share it. Bottom line, proto-WEIRD psychology and sociology created institutions (Markets, Guilds, Universities, strong Churches), and then those same institutions reinforced the same psychology and sociology. ## Phase 3: Takeoff By the 1600s, the stage is set for the final takeoff. Protestanism, which Heinrich calls the WEIRDest religion has a big part in it: > Protestantism is a family of religious faiths that place individuals’ personal commitments and their relationship with the divine at the core of spiritual life. Fancy rituals, immense cathedrals, big sacrifices, and ordained priests typically play little role and may be openly condemned. Individuals, through the power of their own choices, build a personal relationship directly with God, in part by reading and pondering holy scripture on their own or in small groups. To connect with God, adherents needn’t defer to their ancestors, great sages, a religious hierarchy, or Church traditions. In principle, the only thing Protestants defer to is scripture. In many denominations, anyone can become a religious leader and no special training is required. These leaders are formally equal with their congregations, though of course their prestige may permit certain privileges. Salvation—a contingent afterlife—is generally achieved based on people’s own internal mental states—their faith. Rituals and good deeds play little or no role. Intentions and beliefs, or what’s in a person’s heart, are most important. Thinking about murder, theft, or adultery is often a sin in and of itself. Leading denominations also emphasize that all people have a calling—a freely chosen occupation or vocation—that uniquely fits their special attributes and endowments. Working hard to successfully pursue one’s calling with diligence, patience, and self-discipline is doing God’s work. Sometimes this helps individuals get to heaven, but other times it just publicly marks them as one of the chosen. Ring any bells? Through experiments, you can see that protestants are (compared to similarly situated Catholics): * Less tied to their families * Less tolerant of tax fraud * More trusting of strangers * Likely to work harder (extra 3h compared to Catholic people) * More likely to commit suicide Enlightenment, the second big transformation is not a sudden discovery of reason Hume, Mills, Montesquieu and Rousseau (all at the same time?), but the reflection of the WEIRD thinking reaching the nobility. The results are representative governments, individual rights, scientific revolution, economic innovation > People didn’t suddenly become rational during the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, and then invent the modern world. Instead, these institutions represent cumulative cultural products—born from a particular cultural psychology—that trace their origins back over centuries, through a cascade of causal chains involving wars, markets, and monks, to a peculiar package of incest taboos, marriage prohibitions, and family prescriptions (the MFP) that developed in a radical religious sect—Western Christianity. Protestanism, increased literacy, printing press, enlightenment, industrial revolution, colonialism, and modern age are all very tightly coupled and are a result of this WEIRD psychology which evolved over time. It's important to call out a couple of things here: * WEIRD psychology isn't good or bad in an absolute way, but it *does* more societies more prosperous (yet less happy?) * The church didn't set out to create WEIRD psychology with MFP. It was a byproduct. * Both WEIRD and non-WEIRD psychology are in an Nash Equilibrium in a society. If everyone around you is WEIRD, being WEIRD yourself is the dominant strategy, and vice-versa. The WEIRD characteristics actually line up really well with the Tema Okun et al [thesis](https://scholarworks.smith.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2775&context=theses) of "sense of urgency" and "punctuality" being part of the "White Supremacy Culture". So in a way, she is right that those are not the only way for humans to be, but these are *cultural* and not *racial* traits, and traits that are OK for the WEIRD culture to expect assimilation into, especially in the professional sphere, because it's the very thing that's creating prosperity! ## It's hard to import WEIRD This also explains why you can't just skip the whole set of cultural transformations, and transplant democracy to Afghanistan. > I met a man who said he had voted in the [Afghan] elections … he looked like the traditional rural villagers I had known in my youth, with the standard long shirt, baggy pants, turban, and beard, so I asked him to describe the voting process for me—what was the actual activity? “Well, sir,” he said, “a couple of city men came around with slips of paper and went on and on about how we were supposed to make marks on them, and we listened politely, because they had come a long way and we didn’t want to be rude, but we didn’t need those city fellows to tell us who our man was. We made the marks they wanted, but we always knew who would be representing us—Agha-i-Sayyaf, of course.” “And how did you settle on Sayyaf?” I asked. > > “Settle on him? Sir! What do you mean? His family has lived here since the days of Dost Mohammed Khan and longer … Did you know that my sister’s husband has a cousin who is married to Sayyaf’s sister-in-law? He’s one of our own.” This summarizes the dilemma for a society that gets institutions layered over existing kin-norms instead of replacing: > unless people’s kin-based institutions and religions are rewired from the grass roots, populations get stuck between “lower-level” institutions like clans or segmentary lineages, pushing them in one set of psychological directions, and “higher-level” institutions like democratic governments or impersonal organizations, pulling them in others: Am I loyal to my kinfolk over everything, or do I follow impersonal rules about impartial justice? Do I hire my brother-in-law or the best person for the job? There are cases like Meiji Restoration in Japan (1880s), Chinese government plan (1950s) and South Korea (1957) to abolish clans, polygyny, cousin marriages. Coupled with the copying of Western institutions, over the course of multiple decades they were able to have economic success that put them closer to the West. However, in cases where top-down institutions are copied without the sufficient weakening of the bottom-up clan-based institutions, those are doomed to fail. ## Guns, Germs, and Culture As I was reading the book, I had an unsettling feeling. Didn't I already read [an Anthropologist's account]([https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552](https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552)) of how the West became dominant? Heinrich addresses this concern deftly and proactively, without throwing shade at Guns, Germs and Steel (GGS). The TL;DR is that: * GGS compares Eurasia and the Americas. WEIRDest compares differences within Eurasia. * GGS explains the first ~9000 years since the Neolithic Revolution well (up until 1000 CE), and WEIRDest explains the last 1000 years well. WEIRDest gives first-pass answers to some questions I thought about before but weren't answered by GGS: how come the European South is more "backwards" than the North? How come Islam, which was more enlightened in the 1200s, became what it is today in comparison to the Western world? How come fortunes evolved so differently between the US and Mexico? ## Opportunity for next Sapiens I read GGS 15 years ago. At the time I thought, "This book is great, but I could do without a full accounting of every grain that grew anywhere on the planet." Ten years later, reading Sapiens, I thought: Diamond walked so Noah-Harari could run. This feels the same. It's full of delightful stuff, but it's not approachable. I hope that somewhere out there is a gifted pop-anthropology writer who can transform Heinrich's magnum opus in the style of Harari. Fewer charts, more flair, so I can talk about this book with friends who prefer an easy-to-listen audiobook rather than poring over charts. #published 2025-01-25