Joseph Henrich: prediction

Transcript context

…We have some cases, like, say, the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It fights a vicious war; not too long before it seemed levels of ethnic conflict were going to prove manageable if you look at measures such as intermarriage or just domestic violence. Then all of a sudden things break loose and you would think at this time people would have had optimistic views about the future and maybe wish to go their own way, but not fight on such a scale. What’s the right conceptual framework for thinking about conflicts like that? Well, I don’t know much about that conflict. I don’t want to speak too quickly on the idea that the zero-sum thing can change. I think it can go from positive-sum to zero-sum relatively quickly, but at least in the studies that anthropologists have done in different parts of the world the zero-sum thinking can get really embedded. Just because things are going good for a little while — external forces can cause economies to grow and people could still have fundamentally zero-sum thinking or at least be able to drop back into it pretty quickly. That kind of thing could help explain this situation. You’ve done a lot of work on religion and the social role of religion and how religion can have a prosocial role, and the costly signaling of certain things through religion can be useful. What is your view on how what seem to be some atheistic societies can be so orderly? Possible nominations would be Japan or Sweden, though those are subject to possible challenge. Is it that you think religion gets replicated through some kind of nonreligious belief? Or you think there’s really some different set of categories of thought where you can in a sense move beyond religion and still cooperate?…

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