How WEIRD Are We? How the Adoption of Certain Social Norms Altered Both Our Biology and Social Behaviour and,Ultimately,the Wealth of Nations

Joseph E. Henrich

The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 704 pp. ₹899.

The re-examination of human economic motivations with more realistic models of decision-making under uncertainty, like prospect theory by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and the model of social preferences proposed most notably by Fehr and Schmidt (1999) at the turn of the 21st century has revolutionized how we depict the earlier hyper-cognitive representative economic agent. The main ingredient in this reformulation is context. In a departure from being a rational maximizer of expected material wealth as espoused by traditional microeconomic theory, the agent is modelled in these new theories to be driven both by reference points with respect to their own starting wealth position and those of other agents around him. However, even here, the human experiments that were used both to label departure from traditional theory and define new theories primarily considered data from industrially advanced countries. Very few social or economic experiments on behaviour were run in the context of the global south, particularly on field populations from rural and less market-integrated societies. Around the same time, as motivations other than self-regarding behaviour started to be modelled in economics, a set of artefactual field experiments were conducted by a multidisciplinary team of economists, psychologists, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists to study behaviour in games and decision problems in 15 small-scale societies in Asia, Africa and South and Central America exhibiting a wide range of economic and cultural conditions. The project was led by an Evolutionary Biologist Joseph E. Henrich from the University of British Columbia and included other eminent economists and evolutionary anthropologists. To the considerable surprise of economists worldwide, behaviour from these experiments (Henrich et al., 2001; Henrich et al., 2004) yielded widely different society-specific results on cooperation and the extent of pro-social behaviour. There appeared to be no universally held moral standards regarding acceptable levels of pro-sociality or, indeed, a unified understanding of ethical behaviour as was thought by economists using results from samples collected primarily from Western countries.

DEFINITION OF WEIRD PSYCHOLOGY

Given that the evolutionary history of humans is dominated by non-market integrated tribe and kinship-oriented societies, forms of which are still observed, it seems germane to ask what happened to make individuals from Western industrialized societies operate so differently when making decisions in identical institutions with equivalent incentives as the rest of the world. Furthermore, more unified behaviour is observed from countries that have prospered to increase their wealth, sometimes by a factor of 100 in the last millennium compared to many non-Western societies that have been studied. What, then, are some systematic factors or historical accidents at play to explain the observed psychological differences and economic outcomes? Finally, did these psychological factors contribute to the rapid industrialization and global expansion of Europe over the last few centuries?

These are the three main questions that form the inquiry in Joseph Henrich’s book, which builds on establishing a classification: WEIRD, which he had coined jointly with his colleagues Stephen Heine and Ara Norenzayan, in Henrich et al. (2010). WEIRD societies are western educated industrial rich, and democratic ones, which account for fewer people than the majority non-WEIRD rest of the world. WEIRD societies are characterized by high levels of impersonal trust towards strangers and institutions. The behavioural orientation of WEIRD societies is also largely individualistic, with lower adherence to group norms. Moreover, WEIRD behaviour appears to be guided by universal moral standards and is more sensitive to intentions rather than outcomes, as compared to that of individuals from other societies. Finally, individuals from WEIRD societies are often analytical rather than holistic thinkers and far more capable of field independence or abstraction in their decision-making than their non-WEIRD counterparts.

How did this enormous shift to WEIRD psychology occur, particularly in Northern European societies? For this, Henrich and other researchers look to evolutionary cultural psychology, which posits a testable causal direction: institutions change, and psychology adapts and impacts socioeconomic outcomes. Indeed evolutionary cultural dynamics may be indispensable to our understanding of current economic phenomena. Although institutional norms transform brain functioning only very slowly and often over centuries, by the end of it, they alter brain chemistry and behaviour in powerful and predictable ways, which sometimes renders decision-making insensitive to extant financial incentives. What then are these institutional innovations that changed the psychology of a certain slice of humanity, making them both WEIRD and wealthy?

GENESIS OF WEIRD PSYCHOLOGY: REFORMATION OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

The pre-WEIRD groundwork occurred about 20,000 years ago when atmospheric conditions started favouring the farming of enclosed areas. The change in food production from hunter-gatherer to pastoral agriculture generated institutions related to organizing kin groups into sets of interconnected clans and an associated norm package that prioritized inheritance and ownership, marriage protocols including the prohibition of incest, systems of authority and control and a belief in paranormal forces, usually ancestor gods, who watched over individuals and their actions. This emergence of collective imagination, where humans (particularly Sapiens) conceptualized the idea of a supreme force or god, has been documented from about 70000 bce as a cognitive revolution by Harari (2011). The scaled-up agglomerations created by the formation of clans would grow into pre-modern societies over the next few millennia.

REFORM MOVEMENTS IN CHRISTIANITY

According to Henrich, the genesis of WEIRD psychology corresponds to the dismantling of kin-based institutions by a reform movement in Christianity, which began in the 4th century ad, just before the fall of the Roman Empire. An important weapon in this destruction came through what he calls the marriage and family program (MFP) of the Christian Church. The MFP prohibited polygynous unions arranged marriages and all marriages between blood and affinal kinfolk. These diktats, over the rest of the millennium, completely broke down traditional kin-based authority structures in Europe. The banning of incest in Christianity was a draconian reformulation of beliefs dating back to early Jewish and Middle Eastern theologies that marriages between individuals who shared the same lineage were impure and the cause of plagues that had devastated populations in Europe earlier in the millennium. Henrich’s reasons why the church came upon the MFP and pushed incest taboos so firmly from around 600 ad are the only arguments in this otherwise compellingly argued book that appear to me to be advanced conjecture, where the reader comes away with the notion that the author did not find enough of an evidence base to reach any definitive conclusion, resorting to saying on page 176 that it exploited “our innate aversion to inbreeding,” which is surprising since most of the world (except for a few earlier “competing” religious groups from the middle east that promoted a more limited version of such taboos) did not seem to be so polarized against cousin-marriage. In continuation of this argument, Henrich says that the Christian Church was just lucky and “bumbled across” an effective marriage norm package, indicating that this was some historical accident. To the author’s defence, as these events and their nuances were not codified in a way that we modern social scientists can interpret as systematically analysable data, it may never really be possible to precisely determine why the Church prioritized this strategy over many other potential routes forward to expand its influence.

INCREASING WEIRD-NESS

With the destruction of kin-based social organization in Europe by circa 1000 ad, things took a WEIRD-er turn. The new, nuclearly organized societies had much less enforcement. Instead, they used guilt, an internal mechanism triggered by (church) embedded social norms that cause individuals to compare their levels of social conformity with some internally imposed personal standard of what it means to be a human being of high value in society. The earlier organization of clan-based societies were characterized by strong in-group favouritism and out-group hostility. In contrast, in societies more affected by the church’s MFP, individuals were characterized by greater social trust towards strangers and other individuals they interacted with in non-family institutions such as guilds, charter towns and universities for both productive activities and finding a mate. Furthermore, norms of impersonal pro-sociality and punishment led to individuals forming universal loyalties based on commonalities such as religion and trade rather than principles of clan loyalty. Finally, in attributes that are key in social decision-making, that is, analytical thinking and intentionality in moral judgment, WEIRD societies evolved in vastly different ways from the older clan-based ones. In these more modern societies, without strong social motivations, scrutinizing intentionality behind actions became all-important to the survival and functioning of human beings. Additionally, with respect to analytical thinking, kin-based societies displayed more holistic patterns of thinking, using principles which were ecologically sound given the context they were being assessed in, without too much thought given to abstract characteristics that were context-independent. In contrast, WEIRD societies constructed and employed universal social and moral markers of conduct and disposition that were more context or field-independent.

PROTESTANTISM AND LITERACY

Although literacy and reading and writing systems have been around for close to 5,000 years, they spread like an epidemic from the beginning of the 16th century, according to Henrich and other researchers, in the wake of the rise of Protestantism. At the dawn of the 20th century, countries with large Protestant populations like Sweden, Britain and the Netherlands had literacy rates of close to 100% while in Catholic nations like Italy and Spain, it remained close to only about 50%. Why is literacy the final piece of the WEIRD puzzle that allowed these countries to take the lead in generating economic wealth? It is, according to Henrich, because with the church’s MFP in place, literacy greatly aided the creation of an individualistic, analytical economic agent. Agents who used non-violent competition in the new institutions, such as guilds and universities, to create economic value, which was his (and not a common property for his kin) to re-invest in productive enterprise. This ultimately helped institute production innovations in the 18th century that we collectively refer to as the industrial revolution in Europe (see also Becker & Woessman, 2009).

WEIRD VERSUS NON-WEIRD-NESS IN THE CURRENT WORLD

The author’s careful piecing of a large body of interdisciplinary empirical, particularly experimental work really shines, making this treatise a landmark contribution to 21st-century social science. The experiments, too numerous to list in this review, mainly compare samples from different populations over standardized decision problems and game tasks. Some of these populations are distinctly non-WEIRD and non-market integrated (including extant small-scale societies briefly touched upon earlier), while others are standard pools of laboratory and field samples from the WEIRD global North. Among many related themes explored, these novel and innovative experiments illustrate with substantial robustness that compared to WEIRD populations, those from the rest of the world are much more unlikely to have a universal definition of moral and ethical behaviour (Fisman & Miguel, 2007; Gachter & Schulz, 2016), are more likely to provide a relational rather than an abstract non-relational response in a moral dilemma (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1998), are primarily driven by shame rather than guilt (Fessler, 2004) and are seen to not attach differential negative weightage to intentional actions over non-intentional ones, if it led to the same economic outcome (Barrett et al., 2016).

CONCLUSION

It is difficult to precisely list all the intellectual and policy contributions for a treatise like this, which links about a half dozen independent fields and hundreds of literary texts and research papers from this century and earlier because the contributions are too many. Limiting our attention to economic theory and policy, some salient ones among these are listed below. First, along with Bowles (2004) and Henrich et al. (2004), this book offers a very clear message that we need to integrate long-term evolutionary approaches and explicit dynamics in the modelling of human economic behaviour and outcomes and not simply examine short-term economic incentives and bundle everything else into “invisible hand” type systemic black boxes. From the evidence considered here, biological variables (particularly neural substrates) are affected by institutions and norms and do ceteris paribus matter in generating differential behaviour and outcomes by interacting with economic variables. Second, interdisciplinary arguments presented in this book provide a clarion call to policymakers that one-size-fits-all approaches to social and economic development may fail or succeed depending on a whole lot of other evolutionary variables and historical accidents, which are often not related in the first instance to economic theories or frameworks. Finally, as Henrich himself suggests in the prologue, even though empirical arguments presented are largely in terms of inter-country comparisons, there may be WEIRD layers mixed in with non-WEIRD layers generating considerable psychological variation across different social groups in the same country. Post-colonial societies like India may be fertile grounds to investigate these psychological variations, as many disparate cultures and knowledge systems with their own psychological correlates have co-existed in such societies now for several centuries.