Joseph Henrich: belief

Transcript context

…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. Right. The case that I’ve made for this particular is that in order to make markets work, we need particular social norms for how to deal with strangers and interact with them in a mutually beneficial way. In the smallest-scale human societies, you have social norms for dealing with different kinds of relatives and people you have a certain kind of relationship with. But this kind of general-purpose norm for how you’re going to treat anybody is a product of cultural evolution. Much of what I think we measure in behavioral economics, experimental economics is actually just a measurement of a culturally local social norm. Culturally local. If I try to tie this to other areas of psychology — we all know about the Flynn effect, that measured IQ each generation, at least in the West, probably many other places. It goes up consistently just by having a new generation. It goes up a surprisingly large amount. Is this the same as the Flynn effect? Is it operating in parallel? Is it explaining the Flynn effect? Is the Flynn effect explaining this? Is the Flynn effect real or artifact? What’s your take on how the big picture fits together?…

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