WEIRD Indeed, but there is more to the story: anthropological reflections on Henrich’s “The Weirdest people in the world”

Abstract

In this massive tome Joseph Henrich’s goal is to explain how understanding patterns that shape global psychological variation can assist in understanding why contemporary WEIRD populations are so peculiar relative to other populations. In doing so he seeks to offer insight into how these WEIRD peculiarities facilitated WEIRD nations becoming “particularly prosperous.” Henrich’s conclusion is that a specific suite of social, historical, perceptual/ideological and institutional processes and patterns came together in Western/Northern Europe to create a distinctive cultural context with substantive, and evolutionally relevant, structuring impacts on the populations residing there. He asserts that it was the sequential processes of social, economic, and institutional changes related to widespread adoption of, and control by, the Christian church that shaped Western/Northern Europe populations’ worldviews, beliefs, and psychologies post 1200 and created those groups of humans he calls WEIRD. The flowchart in figure 14.1 on page 472 of the book does a nice job of laying out his argument for the trajectory of these psychological and structural patterns. Henrich’s overall theme is robust and the core theoretical and structural layout admirable. Few scholars have the capacity, community, and collaborative energy to carry something like this to fruition. One has to acknowledge Henrich’s book as a substantial amount of effort, insight, investigation, and analyses. Regardless of my critiques below, this is first and foremost a major contribution and sure to stimulate discussion, debate, and further research. To set the stage Henrich argues, and offers examples in support of, the assertion that the human mind is the product of coevolutionary forces. Psychologies vary across the globe due to the interfaces between the products of human evolutionary histories and distinctive historical and structural mixes of institutions, technologies, languages, and belief systems across the planet. This is reasonable well-trodden ground and resonates with anthropological, social psychological and evolutionary assessments and proposals across much of the last century (e.g., Geertz, 1973; Han, 2017; Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952; Laland, 2017; Lende & Downey, 2012; Read, 2011; Tomasello, 2014, and of course Henrich’s previous work (Henrich, 2016). One can quibble as to whether or not Henrich includes enough variables and interaction/systemic dynamics in the overall model, and whether there is sufficient ethnographic depth in his examples, but his general conclusion is cogent. The major focus of the book concerns proposing and assessing assertions, drawing on the work of Jack Goody (Goody, 1983) and others, that certain threads of medieval Christianity gave rise to a collection of social norms and practices (in parts of Europe) that Henrich refers to as the Marriage and Family Program (MFP). Henrich argues the MFP redesigned kinship structures and the meaning of kinship, restructuring marriage and residence patterns, breaking down intensive kinship and community networks, increasing relational and residential mobility and reliance on the Church as central unifying factor replacing previous broadscale kinship networks. Such changes opened the