Joseph Henrich: belief

Transcript context

…You have a view communicated in a lot of your research, some of your most famous pieces, that people in the West or at least some people in the West, they are what you call WEIRD — that’s an acronym for Western-educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic — and we should not draw general conclusions about humanity on the basis WEIRD people. Most of us here, or possibly all of us, we’re deeply WEIRD. Tell us a little more about that. In around 2006, I arrived at the University of British Columbia, and I’d been in an anthropology department at Emory University, and I met a couple of cultural psychologists. We got to talking over lunch and we realized in each of the areas for which we were experts on, that Westerners were unusual compared to all the other populations that had been studied. We thought this was interesting and we began to compile all the available data we could find where Western populations were compared against some larger global sample. What we found, in not every but a large number of important domains in the psychological and behavioral sciences, that Westerners were at the extreme end of the distribution. This made us wary and I think it ought to make lots of people wary about the typical textbook conclusions that you would find in psychology textbooks. Much of behavioral economics, at least at the time, was based on running experiments on undergrads. It’s actually mostly American undergrads that are studied. For instance, peoples are better at cooperating if they have had many generations in a market economy or needing to do a lot of cooperative hunting. That would be an example of how we’re WEIRD. We have some positive-sum mentality that maybe is relatively rare in the world.…

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