SBSI seminar
Friday, January 18th
1:30pm – 3:00pm
Claudia Cohen Hall, Room 402
Reception to follow

Joseph Henrich
Professor and Chair, Human Evolutionary Biology Department
Harvard University

W.E.I.R.D.: How Westerners became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous

An accumulating body of evidence now reveals not only substantial global variation along several important psychological dimensions, including conformity, individualism, moral judgment, guilt, patience, trust and analytic thinking, but also that people from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) are particularly unusual, typically anchoring the ends of global psychological distributions. Here, to explain these patterns, I first show how the most fundamental of human institutions—those governing marriage and family—influence our motivations, perceptions, intuitions and emotions. Then, to explain the peculiar trajectory of European societies over the second millennium, I lay out how one particular branch of Christianity—the Western Catholic Church—systematically dismantled the intensive kin-based institutions in much of Latin Christendom, effectively altering people’s psychology and opening the door to new forms of voluntary organizations (charter towns, universities, guilds, monasteries), impersonal markets and eventually modern organizational competition. These psychological and social changes set the stage for the rise of democratic governments, the success of Protestantism and the relentless innovation that fueled the industrial revolution.