Evolution, Psychology, Monogamy & Culture - Dr Joe Henrich

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.

(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 your thoughts on that cultural conditioning masquerading as human nature?

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.

What is the boundary of Western?

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.