The WEIRDest People in the World

Henrich starts from an awkward fact about psychology: most of its findings come from people who are Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic, and on many measures those people are unusual rather than typical of humanity. His book asks how they became unusual, and the answer he proposes is historical and specific. A series of Catholic Church rulings on marriage and kinship beginning in the fourth century, prohibiting cousin marriage and polygamy among other things, dissolved the dense extended kin networks that organised most human societies. What replaced them, over centuries, was a social world of voluntary association between strangers, and with it a psychology to match: more individualistic, more analytical, more trusting of strangers and less loyal to relatives, along with the institutions and eventually the prosperity that this made possible. It is a large claim joining cultural evolution to history, argued with a great deal of evidence and disputed on the strength of the causal chain.

Written from the public record for the book.

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People

• Joseph Henrich