Skip to content
Great Divergence

Henrich (2020) — The WEIRDest People in the World

Citation. Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Summary

Section titled “Summary”

Henrich’s book-length development of a cross-cultural-psychology / cultural-evolution argument with substantial historical content. Populations descended from medieval Western Christendom score as outliers on a wide range of psychological measures — individualism vs. collectivism, analytic vs. holistic thinking, impersonal trust, willingness to punish free-riders, guilt rather than shame orientation. Henrich argues this is caused by a specific historical event: the medieval Catholic Church’s Marriage and Family Program, which over roughly 500–1500 CE dissolved kin-based institutions in Western Christendom by prohibiting cousin marriage, polygyny, arranged child marriage, and other practices that had held extended-family societies together. With kin networks weakened, Europeans had to rely on impersonal institutions; over generations, this selected for an individualist psychology capable of sustaining markets, formal law, representative institutions, and the rest of the modern economic and political apparatus.

The book integrates experimental psychology, anthropology, cultural evolution, historical demography, and economic history. Its most load-bearing empirical support is the Schulz et al. 2019 Science paper, which documents sub-national correlations between medieval Church exposure and contemporary WEIRD-ness.

Key claims

Section titled “Key claims”
  • Modern Western (and especially Northwestern European) populations are psychologically unusual relative to the rest of recorded human history.
  • The psychological difference is a downstream consequence of the medieval Catholic Church’s Marriage and Family Program dissolving kin-based institutions over 500–1500 CE.
  • Kin dissolution required and selected for impersonal-institution-capable psychology: individualism, analytic thinking, guilt orientation, impersonal trust.
  • This psychological substrate is a precondition for the formal institutions (markets, corporations, representative bodies, rule of law) that the institutional-advantage literature credits with the European rise.
  • The Great Divergence is substantially a downstream payoff of this multi-century psychological transformation.