I’m partially being driven by wanting to explain psychological variation and then looking at the ways that different institutions, like religions, culturally shape the kinds of psychologies that develop in different places. I tried to look at how different institutions beginning with the family lead to a greater trust with strangers and more individualistic thinking. The goal of the book is to explain these kinds of psychological variations. GAZETTE: Is that why you focused on and explored topics people are familiar with, like family, law, and religion? Credit: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 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. 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. WEIRD people tend to focus on people’s intentions, beliefs, and desires in judging them morally instead of emphasizing their actions. This patterning extends to mental states. 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. On the other hand, holistic thinkers focus on relationships, context, and interaction. Particles and planets get assigned charge and gravity. Here people get assigned preferences or personality. I’ll give you an example: Analytic thinking places people or objects into distinct categories and assigns them properties to account for their behavior. WEIRD people also rely heavily on analytic thinking over more holistic approaches to problems. This is often accompanied by tendencies toward self-enhancement and overconfidence. Another big one is having high levels of individualism, meaning a focus on the self and one’s attributes. Impersonal psychology includes inclinations to trust strangers or cooperating with anonymous others. Among the most prominent features that make people WEIRD is prioritizing impersonal pro-sociality over interpersonal relationships. Societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic often anchor the extremes of these global distributions. HENRICH: If you measure people’s psychology using the tools that psychologists and economists do, you’ll find substantial variation around the world. GAZETTE: What do you mean when you say someone is from a WEIRD society? The Gazette interviewed Henrich, who is a professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and its chair, on what being WEIRD is all about. About a decade ago, Henrich coined the term after determining that individuals from such cultures tend to exhibit a specific combination of psychological characteristics. Now, he’s put it all in a new book called “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.” In it, he lays out how people from these societies differ psychologically from most other people throughout human history. He means no offense, only that they were raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Joseph Henrich thinks many people reading this are probably WEIRD.
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