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Joseph Henrich uses leading-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics and evolutionary biology to explore how changing family structures, marriage practices and religious beliefs in the Middle Ages shaped the Western mind, laying the foundations for the world we know today.

Joseph Henrich • The Weirdest People In The World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

By “culture” I mean the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people.

Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

innovation in our species depends more on our sociality than on our intellect, and the challenge has always been how to prevent communities from fragmenting and social networks from dissolving.

Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success

innovation in our species depends more on our sociality than on our intellect, and the challenge has always been how to prevent communities from fragmenting and social networks from dissolving.

Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success

Steve wondered aloud at lunch about what Japanese psychology might look like if Japanese researchers had developed their own version of this discipline, without first importing Western concepts, interests, and emphases.

Joseph Henrich • The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

Psychologically, we have come to rely so heavily on the elaborate and complicated products of cultural evolution for our survival that we now often put greater faith in what we learn from our communities than in our own personal experiences or innate intuitions.

Joseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

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 secret of our species’ success lies not in our raw, innate intelligence or in any specialized mental abilities,” writes Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich. Instead, he argues it’s the ability to learn easily from the innovations of others that makes us uniquely capable as a species.

Scott Young • Get Better at Anything

The secret of our species’ success lies not in our raw, innate, intelligence or in any specialized mental abilities that fire up when we encounter the typical problems that repeatedly challenged our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Pleistocene. Our ability to survive and thrive as hunter-gatherers, or anything else, across an immense range of globa