Evolution, Psychology, Monogamy & Culture - Dr Joe Henrich - #422

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Joe Henrich. He's a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University and an author. Humans like to think that we're sovereign individuals with agency over our preferences and actions, but we are also a part of our social environment. And Joe has teased apart some fascinating trends, which explain how our location and culture have huge impacts on the way that we behave and our preferences on everything, from dating to work and family life to religion. Expect to learn why the things we consider to be human nature could just be cultural conditioning, the dangerous future if there's lots of sexless men, how the choice between growing rice and wheat impacts family life, what having diplomatic immunity from parking tickets can teach us about human nature, how Joe's lab can use language to archaeologically tell us about social trends from history and much more. Don't forget if you haven't already joined the Modern Wisdom Locals Community, you can go there right now for free and I will be putting up some live stream Q&A's over the next week. That is modernwisdom.locals.com. Come and connect with me and thousands of other listeners to the Modern Wisdom Show, modernwisdom.locals.com. But now it is time for the wise and wonderful Joe Henrich.
I had a conversation with a friend, Daniel, 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 unwritten rules that govern the way that we go about our lives, he summarized it as cultural conditioning, masquerading as human nature, because the only time that we've been able to do 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?

**Joe Henrich** (2:26)
Yeah, well, I think there's a lot of reasons to be concerned about that, because 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 percent.
So, my colleagues and I raised concerns about this in a paper we published in 2010, called The weirdest People In The World, where weird is an acronym that stands for western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. If you think about the origins of human nature, humans will evolve in relatively small scale, primate societies, hunting and gathering. So, that's very much the kind of environment that a lot of human nature has evolved for. Then you put them in a society with hospitals, lots of interaction with strangers, police forces, judicial stuff. I mean, you can expect you're going to get a very different phenotype when you do that.

**Chris Williamson** (3:16)
What is the boundary of western?

**Joe Henrich** (3:20)
Well, the important thing about the acronym, weird, is that it's really a consciousness-raising device. What I really do in the book is try to get rid of the need to define something like western. We try to explain the cultural evolutionary processes that lead down this particular path and cause people in this society to have 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. 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** (4:03)
I'm going to guess that there's a particularly stark difference between Italy and China, though.

**Joe Henrich** (4:09)
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** (4:20)
Dig into them.

**Joe Henrich** (4:21)
So again, you can tap the variation within each of these countries. We can show the same thing with India.

**Chris Williamson** (4:26)
Dig into wheat versus rice.

**Joe Henrich** (4:28)
Yeah. So 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 a more nepotistic, depends on our kin-based institution, so our family structure. That can be affected by lots of things. I think one of the important things that mattered in Europe was actually religion had a big impact on this. But in China, ecology and the kinds of things you can plant affect this. In places in China where you can grow patty rice, you need fairly intensive large groups to gauge and sustain cooperative labor. So this favors more intensive clans. In China, you can show that certain ecological conditions led to stronger clans, and that leads to more holistic thinking, greater nepotism, and some other downstream effects of that.