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.


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100 | Solo | Life and Its Meaning

100 | Solo | Life and Its Meaning

A podcast only hits the century mark once! And for Mindscape, this is it. There have been holiday messages and bonus episodes and the like. But this is the 100th officially-numbered episode. To celebr...

8 Kesä 20201h 33min

99 | Scott Aaronson on Complexity, Computation, and Quantum Gravity

99 | Scott Aaronson on Complexity, Computation, and Quantum Gravity

There are some problems for which it's very hard to find the answer, but very easy to check the answer if someone gives it to you. At least, we think there are such problems; whether or not they reall...

1 Kesä 20201h 52min

98 | Olga Khazan on Living and Flourishing While Being Weird

98 | Olga Khazan on Living and Flourishing While Being Weird

Each of us is different, in some way or another, from every other person. But some are more different than others — and the rest of the world never stops letting them know. Societies set up "norms" th...

25 Touko 20201h 1min

97 | John Danaher on Our Coming Automated Utopia

97 | John Danaher on Our Coming Automated Utopia

Humans build machines, in part, to relieve themselves from the burden of work on difficult, repetitive tasks. And yet, despite the fact that machines are everywhere, most of us are still working prett...

18 Touko 20201h 22min

96 | Lina Necib on What and Where the Dark Matter Is

96 | Lina Necib on What and Where the Dark Matter Is

The past few centuries of scientific progress have displaced humanity from the center of it all: the Earth is not at the middle of the Solar System, the Sun is but one star in a large galaxy, there ar...

11 Touko 20201h 21min

95 | Liam Kofi Bright on Knowledge, Truth, and Science

95 | Liam Kofi Bright on Knowledge, Truth, and Science

Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk about truth — what it is, and how to get there — can be a little sloppy at times. Philosophy to the re...

4 Touko 20201h 35min

94 | Stuart Russell on Making Artificial Intelligence Compatible with Humans

94 | Stuart Russell on Making Artificial Intelligence Compatible with Humans

Artificial intelligence has made great strides of late, in areas as diverse as playing Go and recognizing pictures of dogs. We still seem to be a ways away from AI that is "intelligent" in the human s...

27 Huhti 20201h 27min

93 | Rae Wynn-Grant on Bears, Humans, and Other Predators

93 | Rae Wynn-Grant on Bears, Humans, and Other Predators

Human beings have a strange fascination with dangerous, predatory animals — bears, lions, wolves, sharks, and more. The top of the food chain is an interesting and precarious place to live; while you ...

20 Huhti 20201h 2min

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