I’m writing today about a podcast I listened to earlier this week. The podcast is called The Ezra Klein Show, and the episode I listened to was broadcast on May 26. It featured an interview with author Joseph Henrich, who published a book a couple of years ago called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. I have the audiobook ready to listen to on future walks or car trips, and I put a copy of the book on reserve at the library; I’ll pick it up later today.
NOTE: I usually write out international relations on Thursdays, but this podcast is, I think, broadly global in focus, and it impacts international relations in very fundamental ways. So I hope you’ll forgive me.
I found the transcript of the podcast online, and I want to share the introductory paragraphs with you to give you the flavor of this podcast.
So here’s the thing. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re pretty WEIRD. You’re probably very weird, and not just for all the obvious reasons you’re thinking of [emphasis added]. In social science, or at least certain corners of it, WEIRD is now an acronym. It stands for a certain kind of person: western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.
And WEIRD people, who have been the people we’ve been surveying and studying for a lot of research on psychology, they actually turn out to be different, much more so than they, than we often realize or admit. There are all these things we take for granted as basic elements of human psychology and ethics that are actually peculiar to the WEIRD psychology.
We take them for granted because we feel them. We take them for granted because we study ourselves and then use that to extrapolate to human nature, but we shouldn’t. The idea that we have a stable self that exists across all contexts, that a person’s intentions should be central to any evaluation of their actions, that guilt is a widely felt emotion, that self-esteem is crucial for happiness, we treat all these as truisms, but they’re not.
At least that’s the argument made by Joseph Henrich. Henrich is an anthropologist at Harvard who has done really deep, rich cross-cultural research in how different forms of human culture shape our psychologies, and into what those psychologies actually are. His 2015 book “The Secret of our Success” argued that what sets human beings apart from other species is our capacity for cultural learning.
His 2020 book “The Weirdest People in the World” takes that argument and extends it, arguing that beginning sometime in the Middle Ages, certain cultural and, really, religious shifts radically transformed the psychologies of individuals living in Europe. And that, then, the emergence of this WEIRD psychology was a prerequisite to everything from the development of market economies to representative government to human rights.
It’s a really fascinating argument. And if you take it seriously, it says something really quite profound about the indirect and unusual ways that human beings and human cultures evolve.
As I listened to this podcast, I found myself picking up ideas I had never thought about before. Here are some snippets of the conversation Ezra Klein had with Joseph Henrich:
The main thing is that a lot of what you read in a psychology textbook or any of your typical psychology papers come from sampling one particular population. And as psychologists, and anthropologists, and economists began to measure psychology around the world, we found a great deal of variation along things like individualism, the relevance of shame versus guilt, the importance of analytic versus holistic thinking, the role of intentionality and things like moral judgment, and a number of other areas — time thrift, temporal discounting, and I could keep going. But there’s this interesting pattern of global variation in how people think about the world.
They went on to have a deep conversation about the very nature of humanity, and how our understanding of it is culturally dependent. We think about things the way we do because we have been brought up to think about things that way. People who are brought up in different cultures don’t simply have different opinions about things – they fundamentally see the world differently.
The argument is complex and I can’t do justice to it here. But they introduce the idea of cultural evolution – that cultures evolve through a process of natural selection in the same ways that species evolve physically. The development process “selects for” traits that make success in the environment more likely, and “selects against” traits that don’t lead to success.
What they talk about focuses on the sense of self versus a sense of community, and how an individualistic focus is only successful under certain circumstances – that tend to be what we find in WEIRD societies. And the anthropologists and sociologists, who congregate in and emerge from WEIRD societies, define their way of thinking as “developed” and other ways of thinking as “less developed” or “underdeveloped.” We think WEIRD is the norm, and we counsel, medicate, or marginalize people who are not WEIRD.
For example, we raise our children in the hopes that they will have high self-esteem. We want them to be confident in their abilities and to feel good about themselves in general. And if our children don’t meet these expectations, it’s hard not to feel that we have failed them to some degree. But here’s what this podcast had to say about this.
I was really struck by this that you write that, quote, “In the few non-WEIRD societies where it has been studied, having high self-esteem and a positive view of oneself are not strongly linked to either life satisfaction or subjective well-being.” And I want to hold on that for a minute because it gets at something that I think is really profound inside of your work, which is not just that in different cultures, people act differently, or rate different things, or have a different answer to the question of “I am” [identity], but that when you do shift them along these dimensions, the way you experience the world actually might be pretty perceptually different.
They go on to talk about this a bit more:
I think that there’s a way we can get inside of this. There’s a lot of talk in our society about cultivating your true self, and finding your passion, and this kind of thing. And if you grow up in a world where the real emphasis and the thing that everybody was supposed to do was cultivate their family, care for their elders, and people took real pride in child rearing, and social connections, and strengthening their family over time, the things that might make you happy would be fulfilling all those culturally acquired goals as opposed to achieving some kind of personal state of being unique, and special, and having set yourself apart from others. So I just see it as having gotten different kinds of goals early on.
I’m not doing a very complete job of conveying the way this podcast has impacted my thinking. I find myself pondering the things they had to say, and then wondering what else I may have simply not thought about because I’m WEIRD.
They extend the conversation to talk about how political systems, judicial systems, religions, and societal norms all evolve in the context of how WEIRD or non-WEIRD societies are. They take a deeply philosophical look at this, but I can think of one practical result. We know that the parts of the world that are least stable (politically and economically) are the ones where WEIRD culture is either newly introduced or doesn’t exist at all. To fit into the modern world, these societies are adopting the trappings of all things WEIRD, but it doesn’t fit their view of how the world works or how people work together.
Their discussion went far afield, into brain structure and neurochemistry as well as psychology and medicine, and I can’t tell you about all of this here. But I strongly encourage you to listen to this podcast and see what you think about it. Here’s the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-joseph-henrich.html. It’s only a little over an hour long, and I think you’ll find it interesting. I have found it stimulating enough that I’ve gotten access to the book and plan to mull it over off and on this summer. I’ll let you know the results of my mulling.
I’d be interested to hear from any of you who listen to this podcast and have any reactions to what you heard. I think collective mulling can be very productive.
I will listen asap. When will you be in Chautauqua?
Ha! OK. Will do.