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.


Episoder(416)

236 | Thomas Hertog on Quantum Cosmology and Hawking's Final Theory

236 | Thomas Hertog on Quantum Cosmology and Hawking's Final Theory

Is there a multiverse, and if so, how should we think of ourselves within it? In many modern cosmological models, the universe includes more than one realm, with possibly different laws of physics, an...

15 Mai 20231h 8min

AMA | May 2023

AMA | May 2023

Welcome to the May 2023 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 Patreon...

8 Mai 20233h 8min

235 | Andy Clark on the Extended and Predictive Mind

235 | Andy Clark on the Extended and Predictive Mind

What is the mind, and what does it try to do? An overly simplified materialist view might be that the mind emerges from physical processes in the brain. But you can be a materialist and still recogniz...

1 Mai 20231h 21min

234 | Tobias Warnecke on Cellular Structure and Evolution

234 | Tobias Warnecke on Cellular Structure and Evolution

Eukaryotic cells manage to pull off a number of remarkable feats. One is packing quite a long DNA molecule, with potentially billions of base pairs, into a tiny central nucleus. A key role is played b...

24 Apr 20231h 6min

233 | Hugo Mercier on Reasoning and Skepticism

233 | Hugo Mercier on Reasoning and Skepticism

Here at the Mindscape Podcast, we are firmly pro-reason. But what does that mean, fundamentally and in practice? How did humanity come into the idea of not just doing things, but doing things for reas...

17 Apr 20231h 12min

232 | Amy Finkelstein on Adverse Selection and Hidden Information

232 | Amy Finkelstein on Adverse Selection and Hidden Information

If you knew exactly when every person was going to die, or require medical care, you could make a killing buying and selling insurance. Nobody knows these things, of course -- the future is hard to pr...

10 Apr 20231h 13min

Ask Me Anything | April 2023

Ask Me Anything | April 2023

Welcome to the April 2023 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 Patre...

3 Apr 20234h 4min

231 | Sarah Bakewell on the History of Humanism

231 | Sarah Bakewell on the History of Humanism

Human beings are small compared to the universe, but we're very important to ourselves. Humanism can be thought of as the idea that human beings are themselves the source of meaningfulness and matteri...

27 Mar 20231h 21min

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