The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
Joseph Henrichamazon.com
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
innate psychological components like regret. The feeling of guilt emerges when one measures their own actions and feelings against a purely personal standard.
Joseph Henrich • The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
Guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation, while shame depends on societal standards and public judgment.
Joseph Henrich • The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
Throughout most of human history, people grew up enmeshed in dense family networks that knitted together distant cousins and in-laws. In these regulated-relational worlds, people’s survival, identity, security, marriages, and success depended on the health and prosperity of kin-based networks, which often formed discrete institutions known as clans
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If you unwittingly study these peculiar modern populations without realizing the powerful impact that technologies, beliefs, and social norms related to literacy have on our brains and mental processes, you can get the wrong answers. This can happen even when you study seemingly basic features of psychology and neuroscience, like memory, visual pro
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Individualism is best thought of as a psychological cluster that allows people to better navigate WEIRD social worlds by calibrating their perceptions, attention, judgments, and emotions. I expect most populations to reveal psychological packages that similarly “fit” with their societies’ institutions, technologies, environments, and languages, tho
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WEIRD people usually lie at the extreme end of the distribution, focusing intensely on their personal attributes, achievements, aspirations, and personalities over their roles, responsibilities, and relationships. American undergraduates, in particular, seem unusually self-absorbed, even among other WEIRD populations.4
Joseph Henrich • The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
social interdependence breeds emotional interdependence, leading people to strongly identify with their in-groups and to make sharp in- group vs. out-group distinctions based on social interconnections.
Joseph Henrich • The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
WEIRD people report behaving in more consistent ways—in terms of traits like “honesty” or “coldness”—across different types of relationships, such as with younger peers, friends, parents, professors, and strangers. By contrast, Koreans and Japanese report consistency only within relational contexts—that is, in how they behave separately toward thei
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This is a shift. Identity fluidity and code switching bring us closer to non weird modes
see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time.