Evolution, Psychology, Monogamy & Culture - Dr Joe Henrich

Joe Henrich 0:00 That's what evolutionary biologists have argued, that if you give females the choice and there's high inequality among men, say, in wealth, it would be fitness maximizing for them to allocate according to the available resources. But what it does do is that it'll inevitably create a pool of low-status unmarried men if there's too much polygyny. And those are the guys who cause problems, because they're faced with possibly being zeros in the evolutionary race, and so they are willing to take big risks in order to catapult themselves up the status hierarchy and have a chance to get into the marriage and mating market.

Chris Williamson 0:31 (wind blowing) I had a conversation with a friend, Daniel, a couple of months ago on the podcast. And on it, he explained to me that a lot of the traits that we associate with human behavior, the sort of, um, unwritten rules that govern the way that we go about our, our lives, he summarized it as "cultural conditioning masquerading as human nature". Because the only time that we've been able to do, uh, psychological experiments which have been sufficiently robust and well-practiced using the scientific method has only been during this time, this time period. What's

Chris Williamson 1:09 your thoughts on that cultural conditioning masquerading as human nature?

Joe Henrich 1:14 Yeah, well, I think there's a lot, a lot of reasons to be concerned about that, because, uh, so much research ... I mean, if you look at the percentage of subjects in psychology experiments that come from modern Western societies, it's about 95 or 96%. So my colleagues and I raised, uh, concerns about this in a paper we published in 2010 called The WEIRDest People in the World, where WEIRDest is an acronym that stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. And if you think about, you know, the origins of human nature, humans e- evolve in relatively small scale, primate societies, uh, hunting and gathering. So that's m- very much the kind of environment that a lot of human nature has, has evolved for. And then you put them in a society with hospitals, lots of interaction with strangers, police forces, judicial stuff, and I mean, you can expect you're going to get a very different phenotype when you do that.

Chris Williamson 2:03 What is the boundary of Western?

Joe Henrich 2:08 Well, so the important thing about the acronym WEIRDest is that it's really a consciousness-raising device. And so what I really do in the book is, um, is try to g- get rid of the need to define something like Western, and we try to explain the cultural evolutionary processes that lead down this particular path and cause people in this society to have, uh, unusual psychology. But one of the exercises I do in the book is to explain variation among European regions, so I can tell you why Southern Italy is different from Northern Italy, and try to explain variation among different Italian provinces. You know, I try to explain why Eastern Europe is different than Western Europe, and tag that to events in European history that led to the diffusion of some institutions versus other kinds of institutions.

Chris Williamson 2:50 I'm going to guess that there's a particularly stark difference between Italy and China, though.

Joe Henrich 2:56 Yeah. So I mean, you get these global-level differences, but in one of my chapters, I look at variation within China and try to show why more wheat or more rice-growing parts of China are different from more wheat-growing parts of China.

Chris Williamson 3:08 Dig into that.

Joe Henrich 3:08 So again, you can, you can tap the, the, the variation within each of these countries. We can show the same thing with India.

Chris Williamson 3:13 Dig into wheat versus rice.

Joe Henrich 3:16 Yeah, so, uh, the ... One of the key ideas that I develop is that our psychology, the way we think about lots of things, whether we're individualistic, whether we think analytically versus holistically, whether we trust strangers or are more nepotistic, um, depends on our kin-based institutions, so our family structure. And, uh, that can be affected by lots of things. And I think one of the i- important things that mattered in Europe was actually religion had a big impact on this. But in China, uh, ecology and the kinds of things you can plant affect this. So in places in China where you can grow paddy rice, you need an fairly intensive large groups to engage in sustained cooperative labor, and so this favors more intensive clans. So in China, you can show that certain ecological conditions led to stronger clans, and that leads to more holistic thinking, greater nepotism, and then, you know, some other downstream effects of that. More holis-

Chris Williamson 4:06 So human social psychology responds to its local ecology, in a way?

Joe Henrich 4:13 Yeah. And, and one of the, one of the things I ... I mean, it can respond directly to, to environments, but in this case it's responding through the institutions that are favored. So you could imagine that there could be other institutions that aren't based on patrilineal clans, which is what emerged in China, that would lead to a different psychology even though the ecology was the same. 'Cause there's, there's more than one way to, to skin a cat, so to speak.

Chris Williamson 4:33 What would be an example of that? What would be an alternative?

Joe Henrich 4:35 Well, so for example, um, the kinds of societies that existed in California prior to the European expansion were, you know, hunter-gatherer societies that had, you know, fairly intense kinship, but now Los Angeles doesn't have very intense kinship. And that's exactly the same ecology, just with different, different approach to it.

Chris Williamson 4:54 There must be some fundamental features of human nature, I'm guessing. There must be some things that are like the building blocks upon which institutions and culture and rice and wheat can have their impact.

Joe Henrich 5:07 Yeah, so I wrote a lot about that in my book called The Secret of Our Success, c- which came out in 2016. And one of the key ideas ... So I was just mentioning these kin-based institutions and family structure, but there's a reason why I think that's the oldest and most fundamental of human institutions, and it's because we do have instincts that we share with other primates and other animals. So our tendency to be particularly altruistic, uh, and giving to members who, uh, individuals who we're closely related to genetically. Uh, we also have incest aversion towards, you know, brothers and sisters, but that can be extended via incest taboos to shape our social structure and shape our families. We have a pair-bonding instinct, which is the foundation of lots of marriage systems, but of course there's lots of ways to use that pair-bonding instinct. Some societies have polygynous marriage, some societies add some polyandry, and others have just normative monogamous marriage.

Chris Williamson 5:58 Are you familiar with the Westermarck effect?

Joe Henrich 6:01 Sure. That's just- that's just incest aversion, essentially.

Chris Williamson 6:03 Yeah. Would you be able to explain how that sort of comes about or how that manifests usually?

Joe Henrich 6:08 Yeah. So the- the idea is that, you know, like other animals, humans have to avoid inbreeding, so breeding with close genetic relatives. And the reason is, is that in all of us we contain recessive alleles that can cause disease. And if you mate with a close sibling, they're likely to have the exact same recessive. And if you bring two recessives together, then that leads to the disease phenotype. So you have to avoid individuals who share this common descent 'cause they're likely to have the same bad recessives. And one of the things that evolution has done to allow us to do that is when we're co-reared with members of the opposite sex, we develop a disgust reaction to the idea of having sex with, uh, with them. And this is really interesting and it kind of shows the- the texture of evolution, because at the same time we feel really close to those people and we want to help them and support them, we're disgusted at the idea of having sex with them. So you might have- be having a warm evening with your family playing Monopoly or something, but then the- never- that never breaks into having sex because-

Chris Williamson 7:04 (laughs)

Joe Henrich 7:04 ... that's disgusting. And there's- there's good evolutionary reason for that. That's actually a- a way I get my students thinking about this in human nature when I teach that.

Chris Williamson 7:12 (laughs) The interesting thing from that, it was an example in, I want to say Steve Stewart-Williams' book, where he says a lot of the time if you have a family that breaks up when the children are young and the children don't get to spend time together, you get situations where brother and sister perhaps, or, um, daughter and father, a lot of the time if the father hasn't been a part of their life, come back together in later adulthood and you have quite awkward situations that can come out of that because you haven't had this, whatever you want to call it, Westermarck window, uh, of- of imprinting-

Joe Henrich 7:46 Right.

Chris Williamson 7:46 ... where, uh, the disgust mechanism has been activated. And then you loop back around and some pretty-

Joe Henrich 7:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:53 ... stodgy stuff happens.

Joe Henrich 7:54 So that's- and that's one of the interesting ways that, uh, that scientists have been able to figure this out is 'cause there's things like in Taiwan and actually in China, they have minor marriages. So you'll get, um, babies essentially, or betrothed, and they'll bring the- the- the- the future bride baby in and be co-reared with their- her future husband. And that's a big mess in terms of marriage, because the- it activates the Westermarck effect, even though they're not genet- technically genetic relatives. And so those minor marriages, they end up having fewer children and they're more likely to divorce, all the things you might expect.

Chris Williamson 8:27 Yeah. I wouldn't have imagined that that would've stuck about, given that it'll have pretty poor outcomes. You're literally working against a pretty ingrained, uh, evolutionary system.

Joe Henrich 8:36 Yeah. A- and one reason why it might stick around in these particular situations is that, you know, uh, China, uh, and India have a long history of having a male bias. And so they end up having a lot more boys than girls. And so if you want your son to definitely have a wife in the future, you can lock in that wife if you get him early.

Chris Williamson 8:53 At six months old.

Joe Henrich 8:54 Uh, so, yeah.

Chris Williamson 8:54 Yeah. I mean that's- that's about as soon as you can.

Chris Williamson 8:57 So I want to talk about monogamy in male psychology. You say that, uh, monogamous marriage norms constrain the darker aspects of male psychology. Talk me through that.

Joe Henrich 9:07 Well, um, uh, do I say darker? I hope I don't say darker. Um...

Chris Williamson 9:11 No, that was- that's my, uh-

Joe Henrich 9:12 Okay.

Chris Williamson 9:13 ... summary.

Joe Henrich 9:14 So, uh, yeah. So the idea is, is that, um, because of the differences in male and female biology, human males can benefit from multiple matings. And there's nothing about a pair-bonding instinct, so gorillas have a pair-bonding instinct, that prevents you from having multiple pair bonds. And this is true of men and women, except men can benefit, uh, because they can- you can think of, uh, serial versus parallel. So men can have babies with multiple women at the same time, whereas women can only have one baby at a time, right? And so there's few- there's less benefit for a woman having multiple husbands than a man having multiple wives. And polygyny turns out to be pretty common across human society. So in the largest anthropological database that we have, 85% of human societies allow elite and high-status men to take additional wives. So-

Chris Williamson 10:01 What was- how was that study conducted? Like, who was the sample size?

Joe Henrich 10:06 Well, so back in the 1950s, anthropologists began putting together a database called the Ethnographic Atlas, um, which contains over 1200 different societies. So it's- it's, you know, and they're societies from all different continents, basically all the places where anthropologists had collected data.

Chris Williamson 10:22 And that was elite and high-status males were permitted to take more than one partner?

Joe Henrich 10:28 Yeah. But even if you look at hunter-gatherer societies, so 90% of hunter-gatherer societies allow, uh, prestigious men to take additional wives. And they don't typically take many, but they might have two or three. You don't s- very rarely do you see more than four wives in hunter-gatherer societies.

Chris Williamson 10:42 Why do you think that is? Just difficulties for the male to support more than four females?

Joe Henrich 10:45 Yeah. Yeah. And so, and- and the societies that do have monogamous marriage, uh, it's typically because the men are too similar, right? So there's no benefit to-

Chris Williamson 10:53 Oh, if there's a flat hierarchy.

Joe Henrich 10:55 ... four men. Yeah. So if the men are more or less the same because of the nature of the economy, then- then- then polygyny doesn't appear.

Chris Williamson 11:02 Is polygyny just, uh, more efficient resource allocation, then?

Joe Henrich 11:08 Well, uh, I mean, y- that's what- that's what, uh, evolutionary biologists have argued, that if you give females the choice and there's high inequality among men, say, in wealth, it would be fitness maximizing for them to allocate according to the available resources. So if you have a choice between being the second wife of a guy who's three times richer than your- your number two choice, then that- that's an easy choice. Um, I mean, there's things with paternal investment and stuff, 'cause th- you know, there's only one male and he can only do so much paternal investment. But if resources are the critical thing, having enough food, say, then- then that logic makes sense. But what it does do is that it'll inevitably create a pool of low-status unmarried men if there's too much polygyny. Uh, and those are the guys who cause problems, because they're faced with possibly being zeroes in the evolutionary race. And so they c- are willing to take big risks in order to catapult themselves up the status hierarchy and have a chance to get into the marriage and mating market.

Chris Williamson 12:05 Are there any examples from history of times where there's been large swaths of-... sexless men at the bottom of this underclass?

Joe Henrich 12:13 Yeah. It, it appears lots of times. Um, uh, I mean the places that we know best ethnographically are in these gerontocracies that appear in Africa.

Chris Williamson 12:22 What's that?

Joe Henrich 12:22 And these are-

Chris Williamson 12:22 What's a geron-

Joe Henrich 12:23 So there's ... So the, the gerontocracy is ruled by the old, essentially, and so ... And really, it's old men. So what, what some societies have figured out is they put men through a series of, of initiation rites. And at various initiate, you c- you have to be, you know, say, you might have to be in your mid- to late 30s to get through the final initiation rite, which allows you to finally take a wife. So that means you got this big pool of 20-, 30-something men who are basically the warrior cast- the warrior class. And eventually, they're gonna pass through the rite, assuming they survive, and get to be old men, and then get to be polygynous. But the older men are basically taking the younger women, so as soon as they're old enough, um, to have babies essentially, they me- get married off as wives to these older men, and then there's all these young guys roaming around. And this, this leads to a lot of conflict because you need to accumulate enough bride price, um, and y- you know, and so there's a lot of raiding and things like that. But lots of societies have had that. So places where the elite ... you know, in the Inca empire, Aztec empire, the elites all maintained large harems. And so, um, if you look at the early descriptions from the friars, for example, that, that showed up in the Aztec empire, they talked about how your average Indian, uh, or, you know, average A- Aztec man had trouble finding a wife because the elites had basically taken all the available women.

Chris Williamson 13:44 Yeah, you talk about the, the math problem, right?

Joe Henrich 13:48 Yeah. Yeah, so this is this idea that when, when ... you know, because males and, you know, humans tend to have one male and one female, uh, you can end up with this huge, you know, huge pool of males when the elite males take all the wi- all the, uh, all the women as wives.

Chris Williamson 14:04 It's not a ... It's not too far from what we're seeing in the modern world, though. I, I'm aware that it's not because polygyny is happening all over the place. In fact, even though marriage as an institution and religious rites and stuff are declining, and you can say that, uh, contraception and looser rules and norms around premarital sex, and casual relationships, and stuff like that, um, there is a currently an asymmetry. I think the number of men reporting no sex between the age of 18 and 30 tripled since 2010. So in the last 10 years, that number's tripled. You also have women between the ages of 40 and 45 are the ... White women are the highest users of antidepressants at the moment, and that is sometimes pointed toward women who may have hit the wall and are l- looking at a future that is potentially childless without a family because they haven't been able to find a partner that they feel attracted to. So you have kind of two big swaths of, uh, both genders that n- n- aren't ... Neither of them are particularly happy with the situation. Both of them are single, uh, but you end up ... Even though those women haven't been tied up by high-status man at the top of the tree, you still get the sexless underclass of men. And presumably, whether it's because women have been captured by another man or women haven't hypergamously found somebody that they're fundamentally attracted to, um, the sexless underclass of men are, are probably n- not fantastic no matter why the women aren't interested in them.

Joe Henrich 15:37 Yeah. No, it's, it's the exact same logic, except here, what's happened over the last half century is that, uh, increasing female choice and female labor partic- participation, female labor market participation means that it's now an option for women to not get married. And there's strong evidence that women prefer males that are high-status, higher-status than they are. And so, that means that women wo- were increasingly willing to just opt out of the ma- the marriage market entirely, um, if they can't get a higher-status man, which means you got this pool of men who are ... who can't get a date, basically. And apparently, you can see this, uh, in da- uh, data from dating apps. Like, there's a relatively small group of men who get all the interest from the women, and there's a whole bunch of men who never get a single message.

Chris Williamson 16:25 You said that getting married reduces a man's odds of committing a crime, then when the man got divorced or their wives passed away, the likelihood of committing a crime increased again after that.

Joe Henrich 16:38 Yeah, so w- what the data looks like, it looks like monogamous marriage ... now, polygyny's a separate thing. Monogamous marriage domesticates males and probably even has a hormonal effect of reducing testosterone.

Chris Williamson 16:48 Yes, reduce testosterone when you get into ... get married and then again when you have children, I think.

Joe Henrich 16:52 And when you have children. And that's in ... we ... there's ... this happens in lots of animals where you basically, if the male's gonna invest in the offspring, you have to lower his testosterone, probably make a few other adjustments so that he's willing to protect the nest, stick around-

Chris Williamson 17:04 Oh, he's less disagreeable, he's less likely-

Joe Henrich 17:07 Right.

Chris Williamson 17:07 ... to get into risky behavior and get into a fight with someone and then be dead, and then the child doesn't have a father anymore.

Joe Henrich 17:12 Right, right. So he's, he's not doing things to kind of show off and impress the girls. He's doing things like a father would do, (clears throat) where ... And so what happens when they get divorced is (clears throat) they have to go back on the marriage and mating market. So T levels go up, and that means the risks of c- things like crime, things that would raise your status, you know, you want to get some more money so you can buy a fancy car or whatever, a relevant, uh, currency is for impressing-

Chris Williamson 17:37 (laughs) The status display you want it to, yeah, exactly.

Joe Henrich 17:38 Yeah, whatever your status display is. And, uh, and yeah, so, so that's, that's the consequence.

Chris Williamson 17:44 Rolling the clock forward, seeing this imbalance that we have in the sexual marketplace at the moment, and, and it doesn't really feel like either gender's fantastically happy with it, um, I'm not asking you to, uh, come up with like an applied solution, but what's your prediction if you were to roll the, the clock forward from here with regards to this imbalance, this sort of gender imbalance that we have in the sexual marketplace?

Joe Henrich 18:08 Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. There could be, um, a variety of technological solutions. So it could be the way, for example, a lot of people find their mates now on these dating apps. It could be the dating apps could be adjusted so there would be more chance for diverse matches.Um, and you know, maybe that's gonna happen through competition amongst different apps. Uh, another thing is, we don't know what's going to happen with sex robots and other kinds of fantasy play based on technology. So that seems... I mean one place to look is Japan, where there seems to be a lot of use of that kind of thing. And there's whole, there's a whole class of males that have opted out of kind of the dating in America.

Chris Williamson 18:45 What's the name for those guys that live in apartments together?

Joe Henrich 18:48 Yeah. Well, there's herbivores. I don't know if that's the one you're thinking of.

Chris Williamson 18:52 N- No. Well, it's a Japanese word for it. I can't remember what it is.

Joe Henrich 18:54 Oh, okay. Yeah, I don't know.

Chris Williamson 18:56 Um, there's like this (sigh) it's not ikigai, but it's something like that. Um, but yeah, they call them... Don't the Chinese call them, like, herbivore men or, or plant men, or something like that? Because the Chinese are going through this, "We need to make Chinese men manly" thing right now.

Joe Henrich 19:12 (laughs) Right.

Chris Williamson 19:12 Uh, they, they don't want them... anybody to look like K-pop stars, so they've restricted the amount of time that kids can play video games. Do you see this? Yeah, so they-

Joe Henrich 19:20 Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:21 They're only allowed to play video games between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Uh, they're trying to sort of re-masculinize Chinese men, uh, and they look at the, the K-pop stars and... I, I'm sure it's called like plant men or vegetable men or something. Herbivore men might be it. And, um, yeah, they don't want that. Yeah, it's, um... It's a, it... I don't know what it is. I, I would like to hope that we could reinvigorate marriage as an institution. Um, I don't know whether you saw today, but the Pope got in trouble, or the Pope trended on Twitter for saying that people who get pets instead of having children and building a family are basically not doing their, uh, civic duty as a human, uh, human being.

Joe Henrich 20:07 Huh, that's true. Okay.

Chris Williamson 20:07 Which was a... I don't know, I guess a pretty outlandish thing for the Pope to say, but-

Joe Henrich 20:13 (laughs) Right.

Chris Williamson 20:13 (laughs) It's like enforced child-rearing coming from the Pope. Someone did make a joke around the fact that if there's anybody that shouldn't be encouraging more children to be around, it's the Roman Catholic Church.

Joe Henrich 20:25 Hm.

Chris Williamson 20:25 They haven't got a fantastic record with that.

Joe Henrich 20:27 Yeah, they've got to work on their track record there.

Chris Williamson 20:30 (laughs) Yeah, I don't know, man. The sex robots thing's an interesting one. Um, if you can-

Joe Henrich 20:35 Yeah. Yeah. No, and, and it's got no easy... I mean there are some potential solutions, but it doesn't have an obvious one. I mean, you know, clearly gender equality is not something we want to relinquish. So, whatever the solution, it's got to be... involve gender equality and... But that's going to lead to this problem.

Chris Williamson 20:49 Yeah. It's... It's so strange to think back at the fact that there is absolutely no reason that women shouldn't have equal access to employment, to education, to the ability to gain status and prestige, and all of those sorts of things. But bizarrely, the fact that women were held back over the last, you know, post-Industrial Revolution, but pre-, what? The last 40 years, let's say, something like that, 30 years, um, that made it easier for women to find a relationship with a man that they were fundamentally attracted to, because they weren't competing themselves out of the overall dominance hierarchy by rising up it. It's, it's so weird, that dynamic's so fascinating, and, and sort of stark and brutal as well.

Joe Henrich 21:30 Right. Right. And then the tricky part is, if you're a woman, the higher you go up the status hierarchy, the, the less attractive most men get, right?

Chris Williamson 21:38 (laughs)

Joe Henrich 21:38 'Cause you only like men that are, you know, at least your equal, right? You'd really like higher, but equal's probably okay. Lower, that just seems lame, right?

Chris Williamson 21:45 Well, dude, think about how brutal it is that you can spend a decade building up your career or getting a PhD or doing a startup or whatever, some super high-performing woman, and then you think, "Right. I would also like to have a family. Let's look at the potential dating pool that I have." There's like three guys.

Joe Henrich 22:05 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 22:05 There's three guys out of seven billion people that are above and across from where you are.

Joe Henrich 22:10 Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's tough.

Chris Williamson 22:12 It's nuts. So let's go back to the, the weird characteristics and stuff. The... You had some- something about conformity was one of those?

Joe Henrich 22:21 Yeah. So one of the package of, of weird traits is relatively low conformity. So conformity varies a lot around the world, and you can predict it with this kinship data. So when you have small, monogamous, nuclear families, you tend to have low conformity. Now, of course, there's probably lots of other things that affect this, but that's one of them. And then you can imagine, that's going to affect things like, uh, innovation. So in order to have, you know, robust innovation, creativity, people have to be allowed to go outside the rules and think it's okay to go outside the rules. Um, individualism is associated with greater innovation, at least based on patenting and things like that.

Chris Williamson 22:57 What is it... So there's a homogeneity, right? A- around this particular group of people. But within this, we have different subcultures. You know, Silicon Valley is an example. Like, that's this hotbed of innovation and stuff like that. How do you see it? Do you see it as, um, a predisposition for people that are within this WEIRD group, the Western duh-duh-duh group? Or is there a glass ceiling? How do you see it?

Joe Henrich 23:23 Well, no. I mean, it's... At least... So we've studied the US patent data from, uh, basically 1800 until about 1940. And we can predict the amount of patenting in a county by knowing the distribution of last names, 'cause we can use the distribution of last names to tell us how clumpy people are in terms of kinship. So-

Chris Williamson 23:42 No way.

Joe Henrich 23:43 Yeah. Yeah. And we can actually trace... We're using newspapers to actually trace it to, um, features of psychology. So there's this, uh, the psychologist Michelle Gelfand has talked about norm tightness versus norm looseness, and if you're too tight with the norms, that's kind of like conformity. And so people aren't good innovators in tight societies. And-

Chris Williamson 24:03 What's a... What, what do you mean by tight norms?

Joe Henrich 24:05 Uh, tight norms. So people who are from nor- societies with tight norms will report, "Yes, people are watching my behavior. I don't feel like I can, you know, take my own actions. I worry a lot about how people judging me," things like that. I mean, of course... You know, that's a feature of being human, but it does vary across societies and communities.... so places that are relatively looser tend to produce more patents. You know, cities, of course, are tend to be looser because you're not grow... You know, you're still not living with basically the kids you went to high school with, which if you're in a small town, you know, there's kind of this permanent community, right?

Chris Williamson 24:37 Oh, yeah, there's-

Joe Henrich 24:38 Um, in any case, we're getting to the point where we can connect the dots between the, you know, the number of immigrants flood into a place, it gets looser, more innovation is generated, uh, and you can see this psychological shift that goes along with it, at least based on the newspaper data.

Chris Williamson 24:51 That's wild. What does the newspaper actually have to do with it?

Joe Henrich 24:54 So what we can do is... So there are new techniques developed, you know, basically in the field of cultural evolution, where we can try to measure psychology by looking at the text. And so in the simplest versions of this, you just look at, like, collections of words. So people in tight societies tend to use certain kinds of words. Um, or you can look at individualism. So when you describe individuals, do you tend to describe them according to traits and characteristics and attributes, or do you tell me who someone's father is and what their social group is, and things like that? Uh, so one's more individualistic, and one's more collectivist. So you can use these to get psychological measures from text, and then you can apply those to newspapers and books and, you know, fi- fictional corpora and things like that. So this is allowing us to look at change in psychology through time and across space.

Chris Williamson 25:42 What is the least conforming society that you found?

Joe Henrich 25:48 Well, uh, cross-nationally, it's definitely, you know, places like Australia, the US, places like that. I mean, pl- places you'd expect.

Chris Williamson 25:56 Australia being non-conforming does not surprise me at all. I've seen some videos coming out of there recently, and they, they, they have scraps with each other. They don't need to go up against the police.

Joe Henrich 26:05 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 26:05 They, they, they have a problem with each other. What about loss aversion? That was another one.

Joe Henrich 26:09 Well, I ha- I mean, there is some data on cross-national loss aversion, although I don't think we put that to the test yet to try to see if we can explain the variation. But in the US, you know, generally somewhere like California is more individualistic and non-conformity. A lot, a lot of trends in the US start in California, and then spread east. So something like Silicon Valley tends to be more non-conformist and more individualistic.

Chris Williamson 26:32 Mm.

Joe Henrich 26:32 As well as places like New York City, you know, urb- urbanization is... correlates with this.

Chris Williamson 26:36 I would guess that loss aversion, h- having high loss aversion, would correlate with lower creativity also, because people are prepared to take fewer risks.

Joe Henrich 26:44 Right, right.

Chris Williamson 26:45 Interesting.

Joe Henrich 26:45 Yeah. And something like overconfidence, you know, also tends to generate innovation, 'cause really most innovations, you're probably going to fail for a variety of reasons. So being overconfident, if a population is more overconfident, it tends to produce more innovations because someone gets lucky, right? So if everyone thinks they're, they can do it, they all try, and one of them succeeds, and then the society gets an innovation.

Chris Williamson 27:08 That's cool. What, uh... Where, where are the most overconfident people?

Joe Henrich 27:12 Well, Americans are very overconfident-

Chris Williamson 27:14 That doesn't surprise me-

Joe Henrich 27:15 ... you'd be happy to know.

Chris Williamson 27:15 ... in the slightest.

Joe Henrich 27:16 And, and so we're still mapping the variation kind of within the US.

Chris Williamson 27:20 Yeah. I, I, I've noticed this. I went to Austin. I spent five weeks in Texas, uh, just before Christmas, and it really is a stark difference between... I, I would say confidence and sort of blue sky vision to a degree as well, and the way interpersonally that people deal with the potential of success, even for their friends. So as an example, I got invited on a really big show, and I had an hour and a half before I was going to leave to get picked up, and I went on a little walk. And during the time that I did this walk, three of my friends from America that I'd met within the last... I'd only been there two weeks. Three of my buddies either texted me or rang me, said, "Hey, man, just wanted to let you know, I know that you're going to be nervous for tonight, but I'm gonna be watching. You're gonna crush it. Uh, I'm really, really rooting for you." I'm thinking, "Have these, have they coordinated between..." They don't know each other, but it was just so alien to me as a stuffy, tall poppy syndrome, stiff-upper-lip Brit.

Joe Henrich 28:24 Ah, okay.

Chris Williamson 28:25 Um, that was very-

Joe Henrich 28:27 Great. Great.

Chris Williamson 28:27 ... that was very... It was lovely, um, but really stood out to me.

Joe Henrich 28:32 Yeah. Well, I don't know if it's related to this, but there is a, um, another factor that I talk about in The Weirdest People in the World, is non-zero-sum thinking. So if you view the world as zero sum, if you get more famous and more successful, that means there's less success for me, you're crowding me out. But if it's a non-zero-sum world, you can be super successful and I can be super successful, 'cause we're not, we're not in competition. So the more you think of the world as non-zero-sum, the less you're bothered by the success of others. In worlds that are really, um, zero-sum thinkers, you get things like witchcraft accusations, jealousy, people sabotaging each other, undercutting each other, all that kind of thing.

Chris Williamson 29:09 Do you get... Is, is zero-sumness associated with population density?

Joe Henrich 29:17 Well, I mean, urban areas, for example, tend to have, uh, larger division of labor, uh, more innovation going on, more economic dynamism. So they actually are less zero-sum. Whereas if you're, you know, if you're in a small town with a finite or shrinking population, you know, how many dentists can you have? So if, if, if someone sets up a second dentist shop, you, you might actually lose customers, right? But in a, in a big city, you know, with growing population.

Chris Williamson 29:42 Do you think, do you think that islands have any role to play here? Is there something psychologically about being water-locked that impacts the way that people and cultures grow?

Joe Henrich 29:53 Yeah, I mean, uh, potentially, but I haven't, I haven't really thought about that, so I don't know any, any interesting relationships with regard to islands.

Chris Williamson 30:00 Yeah, I'm just thinking about the UK. Um, there is, there is definitely a... I can't define them perfectly, but there's a, a zero-sumness to parts of UK culture, um, and I was wondering whether that is because we have such high population density. You know, you have relative... We have a lot of people on quite a small bit of land compared to America that has tons of people-

Joe Henrich 30:21 Right.

Chris Williamson 30:21 ... on a ridiculously huge amount of land. And-... I wondered as well-

Joe Henrich 30:26 Well-

Chris Williamson 30:26 ... whether there's a, there's an insulated mentality perhaps that comes from being surrounded by water.

Joe Henrich 30:32 Right. Well, one place you can get a zero-sum mentality cropping up is when you're in, say, a city that is declining. Say it was a, an industrial city and the industrial age has passed, so the population's moving out, there are no new jobs. Then it actually is a zero-sum, I mean, it is a zero-sum world. There's, there's not a growing pie, there's a shrinking pie.

Chris Williamson 30:51 Ah. So that's why you get a proliferation of people helping people in cities that are on the up, and it's much more post-apocalyptic Mad Max wasteland when-

Joe Henrich 31:03 (laughs) Right.

Chris Williamson 31:03 ... a city-

Joe Henrich 31:04 Right.

Chris Williamson 31:04 ... is on the-

Joe Henrich 31:05 I want all the gasoline, right.

Chris Williamson 31:06 Precisely. Uh, confirmation bias. What about that?

Joe Henrich 31:10 Um, let's see. I don't think there's good data. Well, I mean, there is some cultural variation in confirmation bias, but I don't know if anybody's tried to tackle it to see if they can explain the variation in it.

Chris Williamson 31:21 All right. Was delayed gratification one of them as well?

Joe Henrich 31:24 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:24 Is that in there?

Joe Henrich 31:25 So there's good data on that, uh, and that clearly varies across societies and is associated... Like, so individuals who have, are more willing to defer gratification are healthier, they save more money, they get more education. Um, we know this can be culturally transmitted. We can transmit it in the laboratory. Um, varies across societies by a lot. One of the arguments I make is that, um, uh, Protestantism seems to be associated with greater deferral of gratification. So if you compare Europeans, Catholics and Protestants, you can show that they tend to work harder and, uh, are more willing to defer gratification.

Chris Williamson 32:00 So the Protestant work ethic is a genuine cultural phenomenon in your eyes?

Joe Henrich 32:03 Yeah, yeah. There's, there's a growing body of evidence to say there's something to that. Now, it gets complex 'cause a lot of people who claim to be Protestants are kind of borderline atheists. So y- you know, you, we, we look for it more as a kind of historical legacy. So you look at the Protestant parts of Germany, say, and compare it to the Catholic parts of Germany. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:21 So it's where does the Protestant work ethic finish and where does, uh, Gary Vee hustle culture get up-

Joe Henrich 32:28 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:28 ... and grind at 4:00 AM begin? That's the difference that we need to-

Joe Henrich 32:30 Yeah, that's the tricky part, yeah.

Chris Williamson 32:31 Okay.

Chris Williamson 32:32 Um, what was that story about parking tickets?

Joe Henrich 32:35 Yeah. So one of the, uh, kinds of data... So we were trying to compare psychological differences among countries to see if we could explain them with some of this kinship structure and, and other stuff. And so there's lots of interesting psychological data, but we found this dataset, uh, from Ted Miguel and Ray Fishman, two economists. And what they did is they got data on parking tickets received by diplomats who come to the United Nations in New York City from around the world, and what we were able to do... So then each diplomat or each diplomatic delegation will accumulate some number of parking tickets, and they have diplomatic immunity. So this is a case where they can park, um, and not have to pay or receive any penalty. The NYPD still issues the ticket, so this creates a database of people willing to, you know, park in front of fire hydrants or block driveways or double-park or all those kinds of things. And so, um, if you tag the, uh, the kinship intensity, the kind of how complex and intertwined families are of the diplomats' home country to the diplomats, you can explain a lot of the variation in, in the willingness to, to get parking tickets. So the Canadian diplomat got zero parking tickets-

Chris Williamson 33:39 No way.

Joe Henrich 33:40 ... and the diplomat from Sweden-

Chris Williamson 33:41 (laughs)

Joe Henrich 33:41 ... got zero.

Chris Williamson 33:41 (laughs) Who got the most?

Joe Henrich 33:46 Um, good question. I don't remember exactly. Um, I'm not sure.

Chris Williamson 33:52 Well, the fact that it's the Canadians that didn't get any is-

Joe Henrich 33:55 Kinda fits, right?

Chris Williamson 33:57 ... pretty funny. Um, what about this passenger's dilemma? Can we do this as an experiment for everyone that's listening?

Joe Henrich 34:03 Sure. So, uh, it's just a question. So you're, you're riding in a car with your friend and your friend is driving recklessly, and they hit a pedestrian who's crossing the street and kill them. And, uh, so then, you know, there's a legal case and you're asked to testify, to lie in court essentially, that, that your friend was driving under the speed limit, uh, and, and not recklessly. And so the question is, do you, you want to support your friend, friend loyalty is a good thing, uh, or, um, or tell the truth in court? And then, uh, you're told by your lawyer that your friend will get convicted then, and probably do jail time.

Chris Williamson 34:37 It's one of those weird questions because both of the outcomes are things that are supposed to be valued. Right? You're supposed to-

Joe Henrich 34:45 Right. Loyalty to friends.

Chris Williamson 34:46 Yep.

Joe Henrich 34:46 Everybody likes loyalty to friends. Tell the truth in court, sounds like we should do that. Uh, but then the question is which one do you pick, right?

Chris Williamson 34:52 What did you tease out to do with that?

Joe Henrich 34:56 Well, there's quite a bit of variability. So, um, this will vary across populations and, you know, this was all part of an effort to see what we could explain using this, these measures of family structure. So we find that, you know, there's places with small, monogamous nuclear families, people are much more likely to say, "Uh, I would tell the truth in court." Whereas places with big families where people depend on relationships and you get jobs through relationships and you'll keep the same friends for your whole life, people say, "Of course I'd be loyal to my friend." Uh, you know, it's not even a question.

Chris Williamson 35:24 How significant-

Joe Henrich 35:25 I mean-

Chris Williamson 35:25 ... was that difference?

Joe Henrich 35:25 ... I remember I, I asked this question in a, in a seminar once, and I, I... there was a... it was mostly for undergraduates, but there was a post-doc there who was working with me from Columbia. And he was just stunned that so many of the Harvard students would, said they would, uh, tell the truth in court 'cause he was like, "In Columbia, we would go with the friend."

Chris Williamson 35:43 No way.

Joe Henrich 35:44 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:45 What, what was the, uh, group of people that was the most ruthless that you found?

Joe Henrich 35:53 From the most-

Chris Williamson 35:53 The one that was just prepared to throw their friend under the bus?

Joe Henrich 35:57 Uh, well, I, I mean, Ca- Canadians were up there. Uh, I think Australians and, and Americans were up there. Brits too, probably.

Chris Williamson 36:05 Good. Good. Keep it...... safe in court. What about shame and guilt? What's the difference between those two?

Joe Henrich 36:10 Yeah, so anthropologists have long noticed that, uh, there are shame-based societies where shame is really the governing emotion. And that's the emotion you feel when you violate a social custom or a rule or a, a ... y- you do something that gets you a bad reputation, and you're worried about how other people perceive you. So in humans, there seems to be a stylized display. So people feel like they want to be small, they want to disappear from view and not be seen. And this contrasts with more guilt-based societies, where there's lots of different, uh, rules around. And you might do something like, for example, you might plan to go to the gym on a particular day, and instead you eat a big pizza and take a nap. So you might feel guilt for that, but really your neighbor's not judging you. It's just you have set some standard for yourself for which you're not achieving this self-imposed standard, so you feel guilt. And so couple different ways to measure this, but it seems like there's a lot of variability in the degrees to which society is guilt-oriented. So the Dutch are very high on guilt, and there's hardly any shame. Uh, whereas in lots of societies in Africa and the Pacific and stuff, really shame is the main thing, and i- it's hard to find guilt. You have to search around to find, find evidence of guilt.

Chris Williamson 37:17 The same action cause either guilt or shame?

Joe Henrich 37:22 Yeah, so I mean, you can... These two things can come together, but, like, in experiments, you can pull them apart by saying, you know, either people do something and no one will never know, or you make something public. Um, you make something, someone do something that's a personal standard versus a communal standard. So in shame societies, there tend to be lots of norms, and so you have to spend a lot of time in cognitive effort making sure you do the right greeting and that ya, you know, you're behaving in just the right way. So there tend to be more rules. In guilt societies, there's fewer rules, but people have more of this self-aspirational goals and stuff. So they spend more time thinking about what makes me special rather than, uh, trying to, you know, see if that, that should be imposed upon everybody else.

Chris Williamson 38:02 I imagine that you must have big clumps of traits that just bundle together like this, that most of these are going to be correlated with each other.

Joe Henrich 38:12 Yeah. So a lot of the stuff I'm talking about, um, at the cross-national level, so across countries, uh, this is dominated, this is really... A lot of these things we've been discussing are kind of one dimension. Now I don't think they have to be one dimension. I think there's a partic- particular set of institutions and historical processes which have brought all these together. 'Cause every now and then, we find some outlier society which is high on these dimensions, but not high on this one or something like that. So it's not that there are some underlying dimensions. Sometimes when psychologists study this, they see th- saw psychological measures correlate, and they declare that this is 'cause it represents some underlying thing in the brain. That could be true, but it doesn't have to be true.

Chris Williamson 38:50 So everyone

Chris Williamson 38:51 on the planet has the same biology, pretty much, right? The im-

Joe Henrich 38:56 I have to object to that.

Chris Williamson 38:57 We don't have the same biology?

Joe Henrich 38:58 S- well, so here's the, here's the thing though about biology. So a lot of times when people say biology, they, they mean genetics.

Chris Williamson 39:05 That's what I mean.

Joe Henrich 39:05 And so one of the, one of the big points that I make is that culture changes our biology. So we just talked about how marriage systems affect our testosterone. Testosterone is our biology. So monog- so if you move from a monogamous to a polygynous society, it changes your biology. The exact same genetic program, you know, in a, in a, in a polygynous society, when men get married, their testosterone doesn't go down, 'cause they're still on the marriage and mating market.

Chris Williamson 39:28 No way.

Joe Henrich 39:30 So, so the marriage system affects the technology. When you learn to read, which is a relatively recent skill, it thickens the corpus callosum in your brain and gets, gives you specialized circuitry for recognizing letters in your brain. So it changes your brain biologically, just not genetically.

Chris Williamson 39:45 Wow. So not only is our psychology responding to our local ecology and the society and the culture and stuff like that, but it's a two-way street between what we are around, how that impacts our own biology, our physiology, and then that subsequently predisposes us to more types of actions, which then bleed back into culture and society, and this feedback loop continues?

Joe Henrich 40:12 Right.

Chris Williamson 40:13 Fuck, that's interesting.

Joe Henrich 40:15 So I mean, so cul- cultural institutions, these kinds of things across societies, technologies, something like just having a phone in your pocket may be actually hurting our memories. So, uh, all of these things affect our biology. It's just that they don't affect our genetics.

Chris Williamson 40:29 What were the biggest, um, not impositions, but the, the biggest impacts on, um, the people's personality? Was it the rates of religiosity? Was it the family structure? Was it kinship? Was it... Did you find out what the, the main, um, impacts were?

Joe Henrich 40:50 Well, it's hard to figure out what the relative weight of these things is. So in the case of religion, I, I have a whole body of research showing that when people beli- believe in powerful moralizing gods, they are more likely to, uh, you know, be pro-social or cooperate with strangers even when nobody's watching and they're by themselves. So, you know, 'cause the god is omniscient, that seems to have some effect on people's pro-sociality. But some religions say, you know, you can't marry polygynously and you can't marry your cousins. And so those are changing the family structure. So the religion is having an indefect- indirect effect on peoples' psychology through that. And then in The Weirdest People in the World, I make the case that these two factors lead to rising urbanization in Europe beginning in about the 10th century. And in a, in the 12th century, Eur- Europe passes China in terms of urbanization. And having cities with a complex division of labor, with lots of different jobs that people can do, seems to actually have changed the structure of personalities. So, you know, psychologists have long told us that there's a five, five factors in personality. So things like neuroticism and conscientiousness, uh, extraversion. And, um, but it turns out when you go to small-scale societies like Amazonian populations in Bolivia, uh, you just find two factors. So there's a good case to be made-

Chris Williamson 42:06 Which two?

Joe Henrich 42:06 ... actually.... are, well, n- none of the two in the original five. There's like an industrious-

Chris Williamson 42:11 (laughs)

Joe Henrich 42:11 ... industriousness and prosociality seem to be the two important dimensions.

Chris Williamson 42:16 Wow. So that's something which is seen by a lot of psychologists as the fundamental, um, parameters that you're playing with for someone's personality. And you can-

Joe Henrich 42:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:26 ... you can go to a place where not only do you not have any of them, but you also have two more.

Joe Henrich 42:31 Y- you have two different ones.

Chris Williamson 42:33 Yeah.

Joe Henrich 42:33 So, and, and that's a case where a psychologist did a completely inductive thing, right? They just started giving people questionnaires, and, uh, and then they got this result. And they could do it amongst lots of different undergraduates, so it seemed like it was pretty robust. But as soon as you take it to a society very different from a WEIRD society, just like this is the conversation that we started off with, uh, you get a completely different answer. Which means the nature of personality, I think, is an adaptation to all the different socioecology and occupations. So, you can imagine if you have some genetic proclivity to want to be by yourself, um, if you live in a society where you don't have a choice to become a librarian or a computer programmer, then you're sort of forced to cultivate some degree of public speaking or some degree of social interaction, because you need to engage in trade, or you need to get a cooperative work group for your farm or something like that. But if you can get a job as a librarian and just sit and, you know, shuffle the books around, um, then y- then you can just ... you become even more introverted, and you go down a particular trail.

Chris Williamson 43:31 Presumably, as well, that will have a selection effect for the people that are likely to be successful in that society. So the ones that are higher status, that have more resources, that have a, a stronger group around them. If you're the super introvert in the society that requires you to be extroverted, and you are, um, your predisposition is so s- so tight that you're not able to step into that, um, you're going to be competed out of the gene pool.

Joe Henrich 43:58 Right.

Chris Williamson 43:58 So you end up presumably with societies which, over time, w- what, do they begin to look more like themselves? How does that work?

Joe Henrich 44:06 Yeah. I mean, I haven't seen any research at the genetic level, but I do have a graduate student who's working on this idea that one of the things that modern societies, where you have lots of labor market choice and mobility, is, is it better harnesses the available genetic resources. So imagine people vary in, like, how good a, how suited they are for computer programming or how suited they are for being a physician or for being an economist or whatever the various things are. And y- what you want to do is effectively shuffle the b- the genes that are best for those different things into the right categories, as opposed to a caste approach where, you know, you're born into the sandalmaker caste, and you're gonna make sandals. Like, it doesn't matter what you like, right?

Chris Williamson 44:42 Yeah. Um, you said that an alien visiting Earth in, around about 1000 AD would struggle to predict that the West would end up being so dominant. Why do you think that is?

Joe Henrich 44:51 (smacks lips) Well, because if you look at the world around 1000 CE, you know, the, the most sophisticated urbanized societies are in China and the Middle East. Um, you know, it's kind of th- the Islamic world with r- a real center in Persia, in Central Asia, um, is producing science, and the experimental method is developed, and the, what becomes algebra is developed, and all these things eventually, the numbers, the, there's the symbol for zero, all these eventually move into Europe. But at that point, you know, Europe looks like a backwater. And so I have a quotation from a scholar in Toledo, an Islamic scholar who talks about the Black barbarians to the South and the White barbarians to the North, and then he goes through and he lists all the contributors to civilization, the Persians and the Egyptians and, um, the, the folks in the Fertile Crescent. Uh, and, a- a- and the, you know, the Europeans are, are classed with

Chris Williamson 45:43 The French and the Danish, they don't feature.

Joe Henrich 45:45 They're the, they're the White barbarians in the North.

Chris Williamson 45:47 Wow.

Chris Williamson 45:49 So what happens? What, wh- how is it that Europe ends up being so dominant if we were these backwards, hairy barbarian people only-

Joe Henrich 45:57 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 45:58 ... a thousand years ago?

Joe Henrich 45:59 Right.

Chris Williamson 45:59 What is it that we do that makes us so special?

Joe Henrich 46:02 Well, the, the case that I make for why, you know, from 1500 to, to current times, uh, European institutions and European populations spread around the world, uh, I lay out a, a, a, a narrative that takes about a thousand years to unfold. But it begins with a particular brand of Christianity, that brand of Western Christianity that eventually evolves into the Roman Catholic Church. And one of the unique things that that church did was it adopted this peculiar set of taboos and prohibitions around marriage in the family. And I make the case that this transformed European families from the kind of kindreds and polygynous, um, clans and stuff that we find, anthropologists have documented around the world, including in places like China and in the Islamic world, into small monogamous nuclear families. And this was, you know, the church didn't intend to do this, but this opened the door for things like charter towns, which had constitutions, or you had voluntary groups of strangers getting together out of mutual need because all they had were these little monogamous nuclear families. So if you need a production group or you need a group for security or s- uh, social insurance, you had to form these groups. And sometimes they were monasteries. Sometimes they were charter towns. Universities actually started as labor unions, either for students or for professors. And so universities begin spreading all these different voluntary institutions. And that eventually, over centuries, gives rise to our notions of individual rights and democratic government and stuff, which form the institutions which have now spread all over the world.

Chris Williamson 47:33 So does a more, uh, atomized monogamous society, is that better for specialization within a workforce?

Joe Henrich 47:41 Well, it allows you to move. So typically clans would specialize, and clans often will maintain whatever knowledge they've had and only pass it on to other clan members. But if you have the occupational system that developed in Europe, you could, as a stranger, just sign on to be an apprentice of a master blacksmith, and you would learn his things, as learned from him, and then you would have to be a journeyman. So now you're an official blacksmith, but you have to go do essentially what's a postdoc. So you go to find another blacksmith in another town.

Chris Williamson 48:09 Mm-hmm.

Joe Henrich 48:09 You got to do some years with him. And, you know, then you're learning from all the other journeymen who show up there. Plus, you're saying, "Well, how does what he do compare to my previous master?" And you're recombining different ideas. Where if you pass things down in family lineages, the only recombining is theft, basically. You, you know, families are trying to sneak and, you know, peek and see what others are doing.

Chris Williamson 48:28 I also guess that-... if you have a big group and you decide that you want to go off and t- live your life as a superstar blacksmith, the ability to pick up your family and move them with you when the family isn't four people, it's 20 people-

Joe Henrich 48:43 Right.

Chris Williamson 48:44 ... it's a multi- a pan-generational commune somewhere, uh, that's-

Joe Henrich 48:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:48 ... basically not g- it's not gonna be-

Joe Henrich 48:49 And the, and the-

Chris Williamson 48:50 Grandma's not coming with you so that you can fulfill your blacksmith dreams.

Joe Henrich 48:53 And the problems are really non-intuitive for, uh, for someone from, with, from a society with monogamous nuclear family, 'cause these c- societies with intensive kinship, you have lots of really important responsibilities to all kinds of relatives. So, you know, you're responsible for burying your uncle, you have to do, uh, rituals to the ancestors to make sure that the land, they, they'll keep the land continuing to be fertile. You know, if one of your cousins gets injured, you may have to avenge their, their deaths or their injuries or something to make sure blood money is paid or things like that. So when you leave, you're, you're, you're in a cog in a wheel and you're kind of leaving everybody in the lurch without this, all these important jobs that you have. So you're giving up on lots of obligations, but you're also leaving your social safety net. So as long as you hang around these people, if you get injured, they'll take care of you. If you get old, they'll take care of you. Um, but, you know, and, and to go to a town and not have any of that is, is, is a tough choice.

Chris Williamson 49:46 Did you ever look at Jews, or Ashkenazi Jews and stuff? 'Cause I know they've got some gene pool, um, oddities in there.

Joe Henrich 49:55 Well, they're a fun case becau- Jews in general are a fun case because, you know, I open The Weirdest People in the World with looking at literacy. And I make the case that what we think of now as the, the standards that everybody becomes literate, and the fact that literacy is, you know, schooling to make, make sure everyone's literate, really begins to spread with Protestantism. And it's because Protestants believe that everyone should learn to read the Bible for themselves, girls and boys. This is why there's, uh, led to lots of literacy in, in girls, 'cause they had to read the Bible. And, uh, but the exception to that is, is actually, I only mention it in a footnote in the book, but, um, after the destruction of the Second Temple in the 1st century AD, uh, CE, um, Jews decide that all Jewish boys should learn to read the Torah in Hebrew. And so, so Jews become the, you know, the earliest society with widespread literacy. So almost 100% of Jewish males could read the Torah. And then this opens the door for Jews to spread into urban op- uh, occupations all over the Islamic world. Um, and that's how the Jews end up as a, as a, not as a bunch of farmers, which they were in Jesus's time, but as this, these urban populations that become accountants and, and all these other kinds of things.

Chris Williamson 51:01 You roll the clock forwards a couple of thousand years and you have the highest number of Nobel Prize winners per member of the population by some, like, ridiculous factor, right?

Joe Henrich 51:12 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so, I mean, the, so I'm drawing on this book called The Chosen Few, but the argument there is that once you have a culture of literacy, you get a culture of debate about what the Torah says and a culture of commentary on that. And that just cultivates a way of thinking that you get just from sitting at the dinner table, as well as, you know, other kinds of training that, you know, if you're from the kind of Irish Catholic background that I'm from, you know, we didn't argue about religion or politics or debate, uh, scripture or anything like that.

Chris Williamson 51:39 Looking at the,

Chris Williamson 51:40 um, previous setups for family with regards to this more commune, pan-generational, uh, living on site with the rest of your family, and also what we spoke about earlier on, which is this difficulty we have, this atomization, this individualization of society. I don't think that many people are superbly happy with that, at least existentially or psychology, uh, in terms of the, uh, psychological health. We have rising rates of suicide amongst men and people res- report loneliness, et cetera, et cetera. Do you ever see a time where we could return back to kinship or pan-generational commune houses where you and auntie and grandma and daughters and cousins all live together?

Joe Henrich 52:23 Yeah, I mean, uh, this is definitely a problem, right? 'Cause the, the trajectory of society is increasingly bringing us down, not only into monogamous nuclear families, but now with things like social safety nets, uh, and unemployment insurance, really we can operate as individuals, right? We don't even need to get married anymore. And, uh, so, and that leads to loneliness, dislocation, people don't live near their families as they pursue careers and these kinds of things. Um, and that leads to lots of mental health problems and whatnot. Ev- not everyone's well-suited in that. So, I mean, you might think that the trajectory of society has got to figure out a way for people to live in community again. Now, it might not be by building patrilineal clans, uh, but it might, there might be lots of ways in which humans can live in enduring communities and get the kind of warmth of having this group that you know is there to take care of you and being surrounded by, um, a kind of fellowship, uh, that, that... So I, I, I do field work in the South Pacific, and, you know, one of the ways I describe the, the feeling of being in that village where you're related to everybody is, you know, just being wrapped in a warm hug. And I think that's what a lot of people crave. Um, the tricky part is to, to continue to energize economic growth while still getting the warm hug.

Chris Williamson 53:33 Yeah, it's strange, right? Because the, uh, existential void is filled by achievement and accolade and status and prestige. And the byproduct of that is you're probably a pretty good commercial engine, pretty good economic individual. Um, whereas if all you need is a bottle of beer on the, the porch with your grandmother sat next to you and your daughter sat on your knee, you're no longer driving as hard.

Joe Henrich 53:58 Yeah. That's the tricky part.

Chris Williamson 54:01 I don't know. I, I'd be very, very interested to see what happens with that commune style multi-generational living. I think, um, I don't know. I think it'd be pretty cool, but I don't know whether it would just get... I don't know whether you can go back to that. And I've just thought as well, is this a, a potential malignant side effect of UBI that no one's really talking about, that if you increase that social safety net for people at the bottom, you encourage individualization and atomization of people in society? Is that, is that a, um, a side effect of it?

Joe Henrich 54:36 Yeah, so, uh, things like those kind of social safety nets at the individual level is not gonna help this problem. Um, because at least now lots of people do rely on kin, and that does forge kin links, they form long-term enduring friendships where people help others out. But if the government's always gonna step in and, and lay a floor down for everybody, then you're not gonna have to build those enduring human relationships. It's actually also a worry with, um, technology. This is a related worry. So it used to be that as a kind of merchant or something, you would have to cultivate a reputation for honesty. And one, the best way to cultivate a reputation for honesty is to be honest, right? To actually be honest and be trustworthy. And you know, when you sign a contract or when you make a handshake agreement that you're as good as your word. Uh, but now everything is secured by these electronic transactions. Like, you know, the Ubers got my credit card number, so it doesn't really matter if I'm trusting the ... you know, they already got me. So it means that I don't necessarily, I'm not cultivating this sense of that I am a trustworthy guy 'cause everything's fixed by technology.

Chris Williamson 55:36 Oh, so-

Joe Henrich 55:37 It may make us less trustworthy.

Chris Williamson 55:38 Yeah. So the trustworthiness has been externalized. It's been outsourced and, and-

Joe Henrich 55:45 Right.

Chris Williamson 55:45 ... buttressed by technology. I think I read about how, um, there is a concern among linguists and child developmental psychologists that the use of smart speakers is going to cause, um, reduced, uh, speech skills among young children because they won't, you don't ever say, um, "Hey Siri, please turn on the bedroom light." You don't say the please. There's never a thank you. There's never a please. A lot of the normal social graces that you go through, they're just not there.

Joe Henrich 56:19 Right.

Chris Williamson 56:19 Uh, did I just set your phone off when I "Hey Siri'd" it?

Joe Henrich 56:21 You did. You did.

Chris Williamson 56:21 Get in.

Joe Henrich 56:22 You said, "Hey Siri," and Siri responded.

Chris Williamson 56:25 (laughs) I did say please. Um, yeah, I mean, that's another thing, right? You, you associate, you use technology to encourage you. It's so funny thinking about the fact that you said ... Because there is a, a safety net, but it's not so high that you could live without the assistance of your family, uh, people are almost forced together by necessity. Um, and I, I don't know, there's something about this desire for sovereignty that we have at the moment, right, in the modern world to be a sovereign individual who has agency and control over their own trajectory-

Joe Henrich 56:59 Right, right.

Chris Williamson 56:59 ... and so on. It kind of works against it. You want to say, "Well, no, I want to choose to be with my family. I don't want to have to be with my family." You go, well, you say that, but you don't know what's best for you a lot of the time. It may be-

Joe Henrich 57:11 Right.

Chris Williamson 57:11 ... that having to have your family is actually better for you than choosing to not have them. And then the existential loneliness that you don't know how to fix, it was fixed. It was fixed when you needed them.

Joe Henrich 57:23 Right. Exactly. And I think there's a ... So one of the things we study in my lab is the idea that our minds are cued to the group for which we're socially and economically interdependent with. And that we have special bonds with people that we're economically interdependent with. And the more you have these programs, the, it just reduces any economic interdependence at all. And you end up as an island, right? But, you know, at least in nuclear family, there used to be one job for, for the female and one job for the male, and they were dependent on each other. My dad can't make toast, right? Um, so he's dependent on somebody to make his toast for him, is kind of the idea. But now, you know, we don't have that anymore.

Chris Williamson 58:00 You said that belief in an afterlife that depends on one's behavior in life is associated with greater economic productivity and less crime. For every 20% increase in those who believe in hell and heaven, a country's economy will grow an extra 10%.

Joe Henrich 58:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:18 That's wild.

Joe Henrich 58:20 That's, that's, that's research from one of my colleagues in the Harvard Economics Department, just analyzing data that's through time on gross domestic product and data on religious belief and how that changes. And you know, interestingly, it's not heaven, it's the hell, it's the kind of bad side. And the more people believe that there's a hell out there, they behave a bit better. And that, that leads to some economic prosperity.

Chris Williamson 58:42 Hell is what every manager of a sales team needs to be threatening their staff with. That's the-

Joe Henrich 58:47 Right.

Chris Williamson 58:47 ... best motivator. Don't get Tony Robbins in, don't do neuro-linguistic programming. Just bring some theology back in and you're laughing.

Joe Henrich 58:53 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 58:55 Uh, Joe,

Chris Williamson 58:57 we made it. Thank you very much for today. What are you working on next? What, have you got any other cool, cool stuff that you're doing in your lab?

Joe Henrich 59:03 Well, the big stuff we're doing is the stuff I alluded to with the textual data. So trying to extract psychology from texts, and the kind of big game in the lab right now is the Latin corpora. So if we can extract this stuff from Latin, then we can go back a thousand years and we can track it, track changes in psychology.

Chris Williamson 59:19 This is like being, uh, like linguistic lexical archeologists.

Joe Henrich 59:24 Yeah. So I got a team of like, you know, digital humanities guys, Latin scholars, historians, economists.

Chris Williamson 59:31 That's pretty cool.

Joe Henrich 59:33 It's good fun.

Chris Williamson 59:34 Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the work that you do?

Joe Henrich 59:37 Uh, well, so my, I have pretty, pretty good website for both myself and my lab. And if you just Google my name, it should come up.

Chris Williamson 59:43 Sick. Thanks, Joe.

Joe Henrich 59:44 Okay. See you, Chris.

Chris Williamson 59:46 What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.