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)

108 | Carl Bergstrom on Information, Disinformation, and Bullshit

108 | Carl Bergstrom on Information, Disinformation, and Bullshit

We are living, in case you haven't noticed, in a world full of bullshit. It's hard to say whether the amount is truly increasing, but it seems that everywhere you look someone is trying to convince yo...

3 Elo 20201h 24min

107 | Russ Shafer-Landau on the Reality of Morality

107 | Russ Shafer-Landau on the Reality of Morality

Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There's much less agreement about why we should be moral, or ...

27 Heinä 20201h 30min

106 | Stuart Bartlett on What "Life" Means

106 | Stuart Bartlett on What "Life" Means

Someday, most likely, we will encounter life that is not as we know it. We might find it elsewhere in the universe, we might find it right here on Earth, or we might make it ourselves in a lab. Will w...

20 Heinä 20201h 25min

105 | Ann-Sophie Barwich on the Science and Philosophy of Smell

105 | Ann-Sophie Barwich on the Science and Philosophy of Smell

We gather empirical evidence about the nature of the world through our senses, and use that evidence to construct an image of the world in our minds. But not all senses are created equal; in practice,...

13 Heinä 20201h 17min

104 | David Rosen and Scott Miles on the Neuroscience of Music and Creativity

104 | David Rosen and Scott Miles on the Neuroscience of Music and Creativity

Creativity is one of those things that we all admire but struggle to define or make concrete. Music provides a useful laboratory in which to examine what creativity is all about — how do people become...

6 Heinä 20201h 26min

103 | J. Kenji López-Alt on Cooking As and With Science

103 | J. Kenji López-Alt on Cooking As and With Science

Cooking is art, but it's also very much science — mostly chemistry, but with important contributions from physics and biology. (Almost like a well-balanced recipe…) And I can't think of anyone better ...

29 Kesä 20201h 15min

102 | Maria Konnikova on Poker, Psychology, and Reason

102 | Maria Konnikova on Poker, Psychology, and Reason

The best chess and Go players in the world aren't human beings any more; they're artificially-intelligent computer programs. But the best poker players are still humans. Poker is a laboratory for unde...

22 Kesä 20201h 20min

101 | David Baltimore on the Mysteries of Viruses

101 | David Baltimore on the Mysteries of Viruses

I recently saw an estimate that if you took all the novel coronaviruses in the world (the actual viruses, not patients), you could fit them into a bucket no more than a couple of liters in volume. A h...

15 Kesä 20201h 14min

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