The Secret of Our Success
Measured over body surfaces, no other animal can sweat faster than we do.
Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success
What a dubious yet critical honor
As individuals go about their business of learning from others in their group, the overall body of cultural information contained and distributed across the minds in the group can improve and accumulate over generations.
Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success
The central finding of this experiment, that people are inclined to copy more successful others, has been repeatedly observed in an immense variety of domains, both in controlled laboratory conditions and in real-world patterns.8 In experiments, undergraduates rely on success-biased learning when real money is on the line—when they are paid for
... See moreJoseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success
Key idea: people rely on skill cues and success cues when deciding who to learn from. Success bias is common and tends to cause copying of behavior. Sometimes it leads to convergence on optimal result; other times, when early success was high risk or luck based it leads groups to poor performance
Automatically and unconsciously, people also use cues of self-similarity, like sex and ethnicity, to further hone and personalize their cultural learning. Self-similarity cues help learners acquire the skills, practices, beliefs, and motivations that are, or were in our evolutionary past, most likely to be suitable to them, their talents, or their
... See moreJoseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success
This seems observable in the modern environment
Making fire is so “unnatural” and technically difficult that some foraging populations have actually lost the ability to make fire. These include the Andaman Islanders (off the coast of Malaysia), Sirionó (Amazonia), Northern Aché, and perhaps Tasmanians. Now, to be clear, these populations couldn’t have survived without fire; they retained fire
... See moreJoseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success
hunters do not produce enough calories to even feed themselves (let alone others) until around age 18 and won’t reach their peak productivity until their late thirties. Interestingly, while hunters reach their peak strength and speed in their twenties, individual hunting success does not peak until around age 40, because success depends more on
... See moreJoseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success
Yes, we are intelligent, as earth creatures go; nevertheless, we are not nearly smart enough to account for our immense ecological success. Moreover, while we humans are good at certain cognitive feats, we are not so good at others. Many of both our mental skills and deficiencies can be predicted by recognizing that our brains evolved and expanded
... See moreJoseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success
The key to understanding how humans evolved and why we are so different from other animals is to recognize that we are a cultural species. Probably over a million years ago, members of our evolutionary lineage began learning from each other in such a way that culture became cumulative. That is, hunting practices, tool-making skills, tracking... See more
Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success
This imaginary ancestral primate crossed a crucial evolutionary threshold as it entered a regime of cumulative cultural evolution. This threshold is the point at which culturally transmitted information begins to accumulate over generations, such that tools and know-how get increasingly better fit to the local environments—this is the “ratchet
... See more