The Weirdest People in the World? Summary Critical Analysis Review
Nonfiction
Why Are Nosotros in the West And so Weird? A Theory
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THE WEIRDEST PEOPLE IN THE Earth
How the Due west Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
By Joseph Henrich
According to copies of copies of fragments of ancient texts, Pythagoras in about 500 B.C. exhorted his followers: Don't eat beans! Why he issued this prohibition is everyone's judge (Aristotle thought he knew), but it doesn't much matter because the idea never caught on.
Co-ordinate to Joseph Henrich, some unknown early church fathers about a thousand years afterwards promulgated the edict: Don't ally your cousin! Why they did this is also unclear, but if Henrich is right — and he develops a fascinating case brimming with evidence — this prohibition changed the face of the world, by somewhen creating societies and people that were WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.
In the argument put frontward in this engagingly written, excellently organized and meticulously argued book, this simple dominion triggered a cascade of changes, creating states to replace tribes, scientific discipline to supervene upon lore and law to supersede custom. If y'all are reading this you are very probably WEIRD, and so are almost all of your friends and associates, but we are outliers on many psychological measures.
The world today has billions of inhabitants who have minds strikingly dissimilar from ours. Roughly, we weirdos are individualistic, think analytically, believe in costless will, take personal responsibleness, experience guilt when we misbehave and think nepotism is to be vigorously discouraged, if not outlawed. Right? They (the not-WEIRD majority) place more strongly with family, tribe, clan and ethnic group, remember more than "holistically," have responsibility for what their group does (and publicly punish those who asperse the group's honour), feel shame — not guilt — when they misbehave and remember nepotism is a natural duty.
These differences, and more, are manifest in surveys of attitudes and many other data sources, and more than impressively in hundreds of psychological experiments, simply the line between WEIRD and not WEIRD, like all lines in evolution, is non bright. There are all way of hybrids, intermediates and unclassifiable variations, only there are likewise forces that have tended to sort today's people into these ii kinds, genetically duplicate only profoundly different psychologically.
WEIRD folk are the more recent evolution, growing out of the innovation of agriculture virtually ten,000 years ago, the birth of states and organized religions well-nigh 3,000 years ago, then becoming "proto-WEIRD" over the final ane,500 years (thanks to the prohibition on marrying ane's cousin), culminating in the biologically sudden arrival of science, industry and the "modern" world during the last 500 years or so. WEIRD minds evolved by natural option, but not by genetic selection; they evolved by the natural selection of cultural practices and other culturally transmitted items.
Henrich is an anthropologist at Harvard. He and his colleagues get-go described the WEIRD mind in a critique of all the work in human psychology (and the social sciences more than generally) congenital on experimental subjects almost exclusively composed of undergraduates — or the children of academics and others who live near universities. The results obtained drawing on this conveniently available set up of "normal" people were assumed by most all researchers to be universal features of human nature, the human brain, the human being emotional organisation. But when attempts were made to replicate the experiments with people in other countries, non just illiterate hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers only the elites in Asian countries, for instance, it was shown in many cases that the subject area pool of the original work had been hugely biased from the outset.
I of the offset lessons that must be learned from this important book is that the WEIRD mind is real; all future investigation of "human nature" must be complicated by casting a wider internet for subjects, and nosotros must cease bold that our means are "universal." Offhand, I cannot think of many researchers who haven't tacitly adopted some dubious universalist assumptions. I certainly have. We volition all take to change our perspective.
Many of the WEIRD ways of thinking, Henrich shows, are the effect of cultural differences, not genetic differences. And that is another lesson that the book drives home: Biology is not just genes. Linguistic communication, for case, was not invented; it evolved. So did religion, music, art, ways of hunting and farming, norms of behavior and attitudes nigh kinship that leave measurable differences on our psychology and even on our brains.
To point to simply i striking case: Normal, meaning not-WEIRD, people utilise left and right hemispheres of their brains about equally for facial recognition, but nosotros WEIRD people have co-opted left-hemisphere regions for language tasks, and are significantly worse at recognizing faces than the normal population. Until recently few researchers imagined that growing up in a particular culture could have such an outcome on functional neuroanatomy.
The centerpiece of Henrich'south theory is the role played by what he calls the Roman Catholic Church building's Marriage and Family unit Program, featuring prohibitions of polygamy, divorce, wedlock to first cousins, and even to such afar claret relatives every bit sixth cousins, while discouraging adoption and arranged marriages and the strict norms of inheritance that prevailed in extended families, clans and tribes. "The accidental genius of Western Christianity was in 'figuring out' how to dismantle kin-based institutions while at the same time catalyzing its own spread."
The genius was accidental, according to Henrich, because the church authorities who laid downwardly the laws had footling or no insight into what they were setting in motility, bated from noticing that by weakening the traditional bonds of kinship, the church got rich fast. One of Henrich's goals is to cheapen the residual traces of "Great Human" history, so he would be reluctant to rely on any aboriginal documents that came to low-cal recounting the "real" reasons for the church building's embattled stand up on these bug. As a good evolutionist, he can say, "The church building was just the 'lucky i' that bumbled across an effective recombination of supernatural behavior and practices." But as for why the church building fathers enforced these prohibitions then tenaciously confronting resistance over the centuries, this is still a bit of a mystery.
Around the earth today in that location is still huge variation in the societies where cousin marriages are permitted and fifty-fifty encouraged, and societies in which information technology is shut to forbidden. There are practiced reasons for supposing that our early hominin ancestors were organized for tens of thousands of years by tight kinship relations, which still flourish today in most societies. And then what happened in Europe starting in the middle of the start millennium was a major development, largely restricted to or at least full-bodied in certain cultures where positive feedback turned small tendencies into large differences that then turned farther differences into the nascency of WEIRD culture and WEIRD minds.
This is an extraordinarily aggressive volume, forth the lines of Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel," which gets a brief and respectful mention, but going much further, and bolstering the argument at every point with evidence gathered by Henrich's "lab," with dozens of collaborators, and wielding data points from world history, anthropology, economics, game theory, psychology and biological science, all knit together with "statistical razzle-dazzle" when everyday statistics is unable to distinguish signal from noise. The endnotes and bibliography take up over 150 pages and include a fascinating range of discussions.
The book bristles with apologies for not having gathered quite enough data on various questions and hence settling for somewhat tentative hypotheses, warnings about not disruptive correlation with causation, and occasionally tart admonitions, like "Some critics will ignore these points and pretend I never made them." Ane tin can often find a lot about an organism'southward predators past seeing what defenses it has put in identify. Henrich is expecting a boxing, and well he might.
There has long been a hostile carve up betwixt physical anthropologists, who take labs and report hominid bone fossils, for instance, and cultural anthropologists who spend a few seasons in the jungle learning the linguistic communication and ways of a hunter-gatherer tribe, for instance, or today, spend a few seasons studying the folkways of stock traders or baristas. Henrich is a cultural anthropologist only he wants to do it right, with controls, experiments, statistics and factual claims that can exist shown to be right or wrong. In 1960 the field of cliometrics was born, history done with large data sets and statistics, and Henrich wants to bear witness only how far this approach can be pushed. Traditional historians and the more breezy cultural anthropologists volition see themselves existence confronted with a methodology few of them use and challenged to defend their impressionistic hypotheses against his lab-based results.
The virtues of having a theory to guide investigation are vividly displayed. Who would have thought to ask if the prevalence of rice paddies in different small regions of China played the same causal part that distance from a monastery played in Europe? Or why blood donations are strikingly lower in southern Italy than in northern Italy today. Or how testosterone levels differ dramatically during the life histories of men from WEIRD societies and men from kin-intensive societies. Henrich has found dozens of means of testing aspects of his theory, and it stands upward remarkably well, yielding many surprising predictions that find multiple sources of confirmation, simply that is not enough.
He admits that his research overlooks (then far) large portions of the world'due south population, and when he counts societies instead of people to go his measure of how abnormal we WEIRD people are, 1 can wonder what percent of the world's population is WEIRD today. The normals are turning into WEIRDs in droves, and almost nobody is going in the other management, so if we WEIRDs aren't the bulk yet, we soon will be, since societies with loftier Kinship Intensity Indexes evolve or get extinct almost every bit fast as the thousands of languages nonetheless in existence.
A good statistician (which I am not) should scrutinize the many uses of statistics made by Henrich and his team. They are probably all audio but he would want them examined rigorously by the experts. That's science. Experts who don't have the technical tools — historians and anthropologists particularly — take an important role to play as well; they should scour the book for any instances of Occam'south broom (with which one sweeps inconvenient facts under the rug). This can be an innocent movement, since Henrich himself, in spite of the amazing latitude of his scholarship, is not expert in all of these areas and may simply exist ignorant of of import merely little-known exceptions to his generalizations. His highly detailed and confident relaying of historical and anthropological facts impresses me, merely what do I know? You can't notice what isn't mentioned unless you're an adept.
This book calls out for respectful only ruthless vetting on all counts, and what information technology doesn't need, and shouldn't provoke, is ideological condemnations or quotations of vivid passages by revered authorities. Are historians, economists and anthropologists up to the job? Information technology will be fascinating to meet.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/books/review/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-joseph-henrich.html
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