128 | Joseph Henrich on the Weirdness of the West

128 | Joseph Henrich on the Weirdness of the West

We all know stereotypes about people from different countries; but we also recognize that there really are broad cultural differences between people who grow up in different societies. This raises a challenge when most psychological research is performed on a narrow and unrepresentative slice of the world's population — a subset that has accurately been labeled as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Joseph Henrich has argued that focusing on this group has led to systematic biases in how we think about human psychology. In his new book, he proposes a surprising theory for how WEIRD people got that way, based on the Church insisting on the elimination of marriage to relatives. It's an audacious idea that nudges us to rethink how the WEIRD world came to be.

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Joseph Henrich received his Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Among his awards are a Fulbright scholarship, a Presidential Early Career Award, the Killam Research Prize, and the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize. His trade books include The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smart, and the new The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.


Jaksot(416)

218 | Raphael Bousso on Black Holes and the Holographic Universe

218 | Raphael Bousso on Black Holes and the Holographic Universe

Stephen Hawking's discoveries of black hole radiation, entropy, and the information-loss problem have both taught us an enormous amount about the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity, an...

21 Marras 20221h 21min

217 | Margaret Levi on Moral Political Economy

217 | Margaret Levi on Moral Political Economy

Why do people voluntarily hand over authority to a government? Under what conditions should they do so? These questions are both timeless and extremely timely, as modern democratic governments struggl...

14 Marras 20221h 21min

AMA | November 2022

AMA | November 2022

Welcome to the November 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

7 Marras 20223h

216 | John Allen Paulos on Numbers, Narratives, and Numeracy

216 | John Allen Paulos on Numbers, Narratives, and Numeracy

People have a complicated relationship to mathematics. We all use it in our everyday lives, from calculating a tip at a restaurant to estimating the probability of some future event. But many people f...

31 Loka 20221h 10min

215 | Barry Loewer on Physics, Counterfactuals, and the Macroworld

215 | Barry Loewer on Physics, Counterfactuals, and the Macroworld

The founders of statistical mechanics in the 19th century faced an uphill battle to convince their fellow physicists that the laws of thermodynamics could be derived from the random motions of microsc...

24 Loka 20221h 34min

214 | Antonio Padilla on Large Numbers and the Scope of the Universe

214 | Antonio Padilla on Large Numbers and the Scope of the Universe

It's a big universe we live in, so it comes as no surprise that big numbers are needed to describe it. There are roughly 10^22 stars in the observable universe, and about 10^88 particles altogether. B...

17 Loka 20221h 15min

AMA | October 2022

AMA | October 2022

Welcome to the October 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pat...

10 Loka 20223h 1min

213 | Timiebi Aganaba on Law and Governance in Space

213 | Timiebi Aganaba on Law and Governance in Space

With communication satellites, weather satellites, GPS, and much more, what happens in space is already important to our lives here on Earth. And the importance of space is only going to grow as we in...

3 Loka 20221h 16min

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