WEIRDest People in the World

Product Description
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020A Bloomberg Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2020A Human Behavior & Evolution Society Must-Read Popular Evolution Book of 2020A bold, epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that has profoundly shaped the modern world.Perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. If so, you’re rather psychologically peculiar.Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves―their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations―over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries?In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition―laying the foundation for the modern world.Provocative and engaging in both its broad scope and its surprising details, The WEIRDest People in the World explores how culture, institutions, and psychology shape one another, and explains what this means for both our most personal sense of who we are as individuals and also the large-scale social, political, and economic forces that drive human history. Includes black-and-white illustrations.
Review
"Henrich presents a dazzling array of evidence to explain why variation exists among societies and why Europe in particular has played such an outsized role in human history. The “WEIRD” from his title is an acronym meaning “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic,” as well as a convenient reminder that people from such societies are psychologically different from most of the world, and from most humans throughout history."― Robert Henderson The City Journal"Engagingly written, excellently organized and meticulously argued . . . This is an extraordinarily ambitious book, along the lines of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel,” which gets a brief and respectful mention, but going much farther, 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 biology, all knit together with “statistical razzle-dazzle” when everyday statistics is unable to distinguish signal from noise."―Daniel C. Dennett, The New York Times"Henrich brings to the argument the same intensity of detail that made the WEIRD article stand out like neon among its peers . . . these days, few anthropologists are willing to put their data on the table, make a claim, and welcome challengers. We need more big books like this one. It is very much worth reading."―T.M. Luhrman, The American Scholar"[The WEIRDEST People in the World] is a landmark in social thought . . . read it in a state of such excitement that I did nothing else for two days. It amounts to nothing less than a reinterpretation of human history, based on the psychological differences between societies discovered in Henrich’s field work."―Matthew Sayed, The Times"Henri