WEIRDest People in the World

* Book: Joseph Henrich. The WEIRDest People in the World.

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Contextual Quote

"Henrich makes a convincing case that the Christian Marriage and Family Plan led to Western exceptionalism. If correct, and I believe it is, his discovery belongs in the top tier of theories that best explain the broad sweep of human history, in the same league with Smith’s division of labor, Darwinian natural selection, and Ricardo’s idea of comparative advantage."

- Richard Hanania [1]

Review

1. Richard Hanania:

(Note that MFP means Christian 'Marriage and Family Plan'.)

"What makes for successful human societies? And what was so special about the Western edge of the Eurasian landmass?

Biology is complicated, but Darwinism is at its heart based on a remarkably simple principle. Various organisms exist. Mutations occur during the process of genes being passed on to offspring. Some of them are beneficial towards the ends of survival and reproduction, while others are harmful. Those that are beneficial spread, and populations change. One doesn’t have to know anything about the specifics of, say, how cells work or the structure of the brains of mammals to understand the basic concept.

Building on the work of Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and others, Henrich’s big idea is to apply a similar principle to human culture. Groups differ on a countless number of dimensions, from the foods they eat to how they raise children. Yet the ones that adopt the cultural preferences that are most successful will see them spread, through some combination of the direct conquest of other groups, outbreeding them, immigration to more successful territories, and imitation by less successful communities. Henrich’s book goes through the steps from hunter-gatherers to agriculture and the rise of chiefdoms, and finally to cities, industrialization, and the modern world. Every step in the process is convincing and seemingly backed up by various streams of research. What’s particularly impressive is the ways in which he connects political developments to biochemical processes at the level of individual psychology. For example, he explains the potency of synchronous movements during rituals to our brains having evolved to use our own movements to predict the movements of those around us, which can create the illusion that others are more similar to, if not extensions of, ourselves.

...

Ultimately, Henrich traces the success of the West back to the sex and marriage taboos of early Christianity. The book highlights how obsessed early Christian leaders were with preventing incest, and just how rare this concern has been historically. An appendix to the book lists milestones in the process, beginning with the Synod of Elvira in 305-306 AD decreeing that a man could not take communion if he married his dead wife’s sister, to bans on marrying family members that started with close relatives like first cousins and nieces and expanded to include sixth cousins by the eleventh century in a system that covered not only blood relations, but affines (i.e., in-laws, step-children, etc.) and spiritual kin (godmothers, etc.). The first documented communication between a Frankish king and a pope is a letter from 538 AD about the incest issue. In the eleventh century, the Duke of Normandy, who would later be known as William the Conqueror, was excommunicated for marrying a distant cousin. While church leaders always had to be cognizant of political realities, European history shows that they did exercise power in their own right, even over the lives and behavior of some of the most powerful figures of late antiquity and the Middle Ages.

A fascinating line of evidence documenting the development of changing family norms can be found in the linguistic record. Earlier in their history, European languages had terms for things like “mother’s sister” or “male cousin on my dad’s side” instead of just saying “aunt” or “cousin.” Such distinctions matter in societies in which clans and extended family relations are important and descent is traced through either the male or female line alone, and so these kinds of words are still used in modern languages such as Arabic. They would disappear across Europe, first in the Romance languages like French and Italian around 700, and then German and English by around 1100. Usually, it takes languages a few centuries to catch up to cultural changes that have taken place in people’s daily lives, so the timeline is consistent with the decrees of the Catholic Church having had a major effect on society. Yiddish, however, which split from German in the Middle Ages, would continue to use highly specific terms to refer to extended family members, thus reflecting different marriage and reproduction norms among Jews.

What Henrich calls the Church’s “Marriage and Family Plan” (MFP), which included features like monogamy in addition to an obsession with preventing broadly-defined incest, had important downstream consequences in practically every aspect of life. Young men would be more likely to find marriage partners since a few high-status leaders could not claim a disproportionate share of women, creating incentives for individuals to be more hard-working and less violent. The power of elders was further reduced by an inability to arrange marriages in ways that would keep wealth and resources within the same family, unlike in Muslim societies where the son of one brother would often be wedded to the daughter of another. When incest taboos extended to sixth cousins, Henrich estimates that an individual may have had 10,000 total relatives that were off limits in the marriage market. This wouldn’t be a big deal in a modern city, but when most people lived in small villages it would have created major difficulties for anyone trying to find a spouse. This led to a population that was more mobile, less embedded in kinship networks, and ultimately more individualistic.

For most of those unfamiliar with the anthropological literature, what is sure to be one of the most surprising findings discussed in the book relates to how rare the individual components of the MFP have been throughout history. According to one database looking at 1,200 societies before industrialization, only 5% had newlywed couples start their own households, 8% organized domestic life around nuclear families, 15% had only monogamous marriages, 25% had little or no cousin marriage, and 28% had bilateral descent, meaning that lineages are traced through both the mother and father. Christian Europe under the MFP had all five, which wasn’t true for over 99% of other societies. Today, after the rest of the world has been heavily influenced by Western culture, given its success, it’s easy to lose sight of how unique its mating and familial practices have been in the larger historical context.

People prone to individualism would go on to achieve high rates of urbanization and form guilds, universities, marketplaces, and other voluntary institutions that were based on principles of mutual self-interest and competed with one another. Ultimately, Western Europe would conquer the world on the back of the strengths of these institutions, with democracy and capitalism being arguably the most important among them.

One can synthesize Weber and Henrich by understanding that while Protestantism was important for the Industrial Revolution, it was the MFP that created the psychological conditions for a faith that emphasized the individual’s relationship with God to conquer much of Europe. Henrich goes as far as in effect arguing that if Martin Luther had never existed, larger trends ensured that movements with many of the same characteristics of what became Protestantism would have gained adherents, even if they never officially broke with Rome.

It is important to note that the Church did not have any idea about what the long-term consequences would be when it began enforcing the MFP, any more than a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Australian outback understands that its traditional cooking methods are what make a particular seed digestible. Henrich argues that breaking down kinship ties was potentially a great way for the Church to seize large estates upon the deaths of individuals, and it therefore ended up as the largest landholder in Europe. So while individuals and institutions found certain aspects of the MFP appealing for reasons related to their own interests, no one could foresee the ways in which monogamy, incest taboos, and other Christian familial practices would eventually create the modern world."

(https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/how-monogamy-and-incest-taboos-made)

2. Kevin MacDonald:

"Despite its many strengths, Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World has several weaknesses:

1.) It conceptualizes the uniqueness of the West as solely the result of cultural evolution set in motion by the medieval Church, thereby ignoring the strong tendencies toward individualism in the Greco-Roman world of antiquity, the Indo-European groups that conquered the continent in pre-historic times, and the primordial northern European hunter-gatherers.

2.) It conceptualizes analytic thinking and representative government typical of the West as resulting from the cultural shift brought about by the medieval Church, whereas analytic thinking can be found in the ancient world, particularly among the Greeks, and representative government can be found in ancient Greece and Rome, and in pre-Christian Germanic and Scandinavian cultures.

3.) Henrich’s portrayal of Westerners as non-conformists is overdrawn. Although Westerners are more likely to dissent from a group consensus compared to kinship-based cultures, moral communities based on a variety of psychological mechanisms are a powerful force for conformity in individualistic Western societies, with dissenters subject to guilt, ostracism, and altruistic punishment.

4.) Henrich analyzes the accomplishments of the West solely in terms of social learning and culturally constructed personality variation in traits related to conscientiousness, thereby ignoring data on the biological basis and adaptive significance of variation in personality and general intelligence."

(https://mankindquarterly.org/archive/issue/61-3/20)

Interview

“GAZETTE: What do you mean when you say someone is from a WEIRD society?

HENRICH: If you measure people’s psychology using the tools that psychologists and economists do, you’ll find substantial variation around the world. Societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic often anchor the extremes of these global distributions. Among the most prominent features that make people WEIRD is prioritizing impersonal pro-sociality over interpersonal relationships. Impersonal psychology includes inclinations to trust strangers or cooperating with anonymous others. Another big one is having high levels of individualism, meaning a focus on the self and one’s attributes. This is often accompanied by tendencies toward self-enhancement and overconfidence. WEIRD people also rely heavily on analytic thinking over more holistic approaches to problems. I’ll give you an example: Analytic thinking places people or objects into distinct categories and assigns them properties to account for their behavior. Here people get assigned preferences or personality. Particles and planets get assigned charge and gravity. On the other hand, holistic thinkers focus on relationships, context, and interaction. For example, if person A is yelling at person B, an analytical thinker might infer that person A is an angry person while a holistic thinker worries about the relationship between persons A and B. This patterning extends to mental states. WEIRD people tend to focus on people’s intentions, beliefs, and desires in judging them morally instead of emphasizing their actions. In many non-WEIRD societies, for example, the penalties for premeditated murders and accidental killings were the same while in many WEIRD societies they came to depend on the killer’s mental states, on his intentions and beliefs. These differences all have to do with the kind of worlds we grow up in, the kind of institutions we have to adapt to, the ways our families are structured, and the social and economic world we need to navigate.”

(https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henrich-explores-weird-societies/)

History

“How did WEIRD societies originate?

HENRICH: It goes back medieval European history and to a set of prohibitions, taboos, and prescriptions about the family that were developed by one particular branch of Christianity. This branch, which evolved into the Roman Catholic Church, established, during late antiquity in the early Middle Ages, a series of taboos on cousin marriage, a campaign against polygamous marriage, and new inheritance customs, where individuals could inherit as individuals rather than after someone dies having a property divided among a network of relatives or going laterally out to cousins. As a result, all of these restructured European families — from kindreds, clans, and other formations that anthropologists have documented around the world — formed into monogamous nuclear families. In the book, I provide evidence suggesting that it’s this particular family structure and variation and the variants of it that lead to particular ways of thinking that are more individualistic, analytic, and impersonal.”

(https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henrich-explores-weird-societies/)

Did WEIRDness generate from Christianity, or from the prior Germanity?

Peter Frost:

"Most authors see WEIRDness as a legacy of Western Christianity, the form of Christianity that arose in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of barbarian kingdoms. According to this theory, northwest Europeans became less clannish and more individualistic because cousin marriage was increasingly restricted by the early Western Church:

• Roman times: only first-cousin marriages were banned.

• 7th century: the ban was extended two degrees further when the Western Church adopted the anti-incest prohibitions of the Visigothic Code.

• Early 9th century: the Western Church began to calculate degrees of kinship through the so-called “Germanic system,” thus doubling the number of forbidden marriage partners (Chandelier, 2021, p. 224; see Note).

The last measure forced almost everyone to marry outside their clan, causing clans to disappear and making people more individualistic and less concerned about kinship ties (hbd chick, 2014; McCann, 2010, pp. 57-58; Schulz et al., 2019).

Others, however, have argued that the cousin marriage ban was simply a Christianization of existing norms, specifically Germanic ones (Frost, 2020; Kirkegaard, 2025; MacDonald, 2019; Policy Tensor, 2021). As the Christian faith spread north and west, it absorbed local customs, including those relating to marriage:

During the period preceding the Teutonic invasion, speaking broadly, the church adhered to the Roman law and custom; thereafter those of the Germans, even when the marriage consisted in the formal sale and tradition [i.e., transfer] of the bride, were accepted. (Howard, 1904, p. 291).

Germanic provenance is evident in the bans themselves. The 7th century ban was taken from the Visigothic Code, and the new kinship calculation method, adopted in the 9th century, was referred to as “Germanic” (Chandelier, 2021, p. 224; Frost, 2020; McCann, 2010, pp. 57-58; see Note).

Moreover, as shown by data from early medieval estates, northwest Europeans were already WEIRD in the 9th century, when the Church’s most extreme ban on cousin marriage came into effect. French households were already small and nuclear, with 12% to 16% of adults not yet married and adults usually marrying in their mid to late twenties (Hallam, 1985, p. 56).

High rates of delayed marriage seem to have long been common among northwest Europeans, as suggested by the writings of Julius Caesar and Tacitus on the Germanic tribes of Antiquity:

Those who have remained chaste for the longest time, receive the greatest commendation among their people: they think that by this the growth is promoted, by this the physical powers are increased and the sinews are strengthened. And to have had knowledge of a woman before the twentieth year they reckon among the most disgraceful acts.

—Caesar, De Bello Gallico 6:21

Late comes love to the young men, and their first manhood is not enfeebled; nor for the girls is there any hot-house forcing; they pass their youth in the same way as the boys.

—Tacitus, Germania 20 "

(https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/did-christianity-make-europeans-weird)

Typology

WEIRD

Alexander Beiner:

"WEIRD. This acronym (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) has been popularised by Harvard psychologist Joseph Henrich and informed the work of scholars like Jonathan Haidt. In his new book ‘The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous’ Henrich performs a kind of reverse anthropology to look at Western psychology and how it arose from our geography and history.

In doing so, I believe he inadvertently sheds light not just on our relationship with social media, but on the cultural fragmentation and the wider crisis of meaning we’re experiencing in the West.

Henrich’s research was inspired when, around a decade ago, he and other scholars began to notice that most published papers in psychology used educated undergraduates in Western countries as samples. As they dug into this imbalance, they uncovered something interesting; people in WEIRD countries are not representative of the psychological make-up of the rest of the world. They are outliers.

Henrich explains:

WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be “ourselves” across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility. Like everyone else, we are inclined to go along with our peers and authority figures; but, we are less willing to conform to others when this conflicts with our own beliefs, observations, and preferences. We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time. When acting, we prefer a sense of control and the feeling of making our own choices. (‘The WEIRDest People in the World’ p.21)

WEIRD psychology is best understood in relation to cultures that hold different values. It’s important here to point out that WEIRD and other psychologies aren’t better or worse than one another — they are adaptations to particular cultural, geographical and historical realities." (https://medium.com/rebel-wisdom/indigenous-narcissism-social-media-belonging-weirdness-6063ac6f9aa)

Non-WEIRD

Alexander Beiner:

"So what are non-WEIRD cultures like? Many of them — including European society before the Protestant Reformation and other cultural shifts — were and still are held together by complex web of familial relationships. Individuals belong to a wider group or land, and enjoy the cohesion of tight, supportive in-groups (though these in-groups often compete with others)."

Characteristics

Peter Frost:

"Northwest Europeans are so distinct because they have adapted to an atypical environment of weak kinship, strong individualism and “impersonal pro-sociality,” i.e., social interactions that are less personal and less emotionally intense but extend much further than friends and family.

For at least a thousand years, this behavioral environment has prevailed north and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg (known as the Hajnal line). It is characterized by certain longstanding patterns of behavior:

• Solitary living for at least part of adulthood, with many individuals remaining single their entire lives.

• Departure from the home upon reaching adulthood, either to form a new household or to circulate among unrelated households, typically as servants.

• Less loyalty to kin and greater willingness to trust strangers."

(https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/did-christianity-make-europeans-weird)

Trust

Alexander Beiner:

"web of in-group relationships, obligations and roles, people tend to be more suspicious of those outside the group. It makes sense; outsiders aren’t part of that web of embedded obligations. They don’t face consequences for not playing by your rules, and are therefore riskier to interact with.

WEIRD people are different. Henrich argues that our cultural evolution selected for impersonal prosociality.

He explains:

- “As life was increasingly defined dealing with nonrelations or strangers, people came to prefer impartial rules and impersonal laws that applied to those in their groups or communities (their cities, guilds, monasteries, etc.) independent of social relationships, tribal identity, or social class.” (‘The Weirdest People in the World’ p. 397)

While we are uncharacteristically focused on ourselves and our own success, we are also more generous to strangers, and more willing to engage with those different to ourselves. This is in part because, instead of trusting our in-group, we outsourced our trust to large institutions — the church or the state, for example — and hoped that, on the whole, others would be following the same rules as us."

Associationism vs kinship

"Moving away from allegiance to kin-groups didn’t just lead to increased impersonal prosociality, but also created a culture in which voluntary associations became increasingly important. As people began moving from the countryside to work in the cities, they needed to join other social groups outside of their family or tribe, like a university, a guild, or a political party.

This combination of voluntary association and impersonal pro-sociality reliant on foundational institutions is hugely significant. It isn’t just something we do — it’s who we are, embedded deep in our cultural wiring. And it creates enormous pressure, both on the individual — who must be a sovereign agent in the world and choose where to belong — and on the cohesiveness of our institutions — which must remain trustworthy for our pro-sociality to work. All the multicultural, inclusive values our societies now strive for rely on these."

Guilt vs. Shame

"Henrich argues that guilt forms a core aspect of WEIRD psychology. It’s different from shame, another human universal. Shame is about what others might think of your behaviour (and particularly strong in kin-based societies). Guilt is the feeling we have when we don’t live up to our own values, and it’s particularly prevalent among WEIRD people. Understanding the role guilt plays in the various ‘change the world’ tribes can be revealing."