One of the concepts I still want to do more inquiry into is that of scarcity. As an experience, it certainly is very real. Feeling like "not getting enough" or "not having enough" or "not being enough." And yet, I believe that it is the Western mind's linkage of this experience with "something good" (how many conservative economists might define economy as related to the study of dealing with scarce resources) that both has created a lot of wealth (conscious care for scarce resources) and a lot of trouble (forgetting about resources we cannot commoditize, like family, friendships, and relationships in general).
Our civilizational history as WEIRD people has given us an incredible tool for making the most of very little (resources), but it also has created a particular blind spot, which can be easily exploited by those who have understood enough of reverse engineered human psychology to appreciate that fear of other people *CAN* be commodified.
Social media algorithms are doing exactly that, and unless we have something like strong interpersonal bonds and trust in others to set against that commodification of our fears, I think we will come to a place in history where our blind spot eats us alive...
Is anyone getting increasingly suspicious of drawing conclusions from social experiments like exchanging lighters? Connecting a willingness to exchange lighters to the "endowment effect"... I don't know. I just don't see how you get there. There are way too many other explanations. Maybe the WEIRD are more suspicious: "why do you want to trade lighters? They're exactly the same. Something must be better about the one I have." Maybe non-WEIRD are more deferential to authority. "You're a scientist and and you want to swap lighters, so let's swap lighters." Maybe non-WEIRD are more friendly or more eager to please. "You seem like a nice enough guy and the lighters are the same, so sure." This just stinks of overfitting. If that's the right term.
Why are we so dependent on experimental stand-ins when these traits could be reasonably observed? I used to work with a guy from Nigeria who told me once that he could never have opened up a convenience store in his hometown. Everyone from his extended family would have been super proud of him, but also would have assumed that they could have taken anything out of the store for free. It just wouldn't have occurred to them to pay, the same way it wouldn't occur to you to pay for a drink when visiting a friend. Because of that his store would have been out of business in no time.
It seems like THAT, if true, tells you something about differences in culture. Running these strange experiments far removed from everyday life doesn't feel like that.
It's wise to be wary of any individual study to support a general idea. Though be aware that the lighter experiment was not a one-off invented by the researchers who performed it but is an example of a large body of research. I linked it in the piece and you can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect
I think that the exchanging lighters experiment may indicate a rather severe lack of imagination on the part of experiment designers. They design the experiment to demonstrate the reason they already had in mind and totally miss other possible explanations. For instance -- 1. I already know that my lighter works well. I'm sticking with what I know. 2. -- in general I don't like change. I don't want a new experience, I want one that is familiar and comforting. 3. -- what makes the lighter special is the fact that _you_ gave it to me. It's gift value is much greater than its intrinsic value. 4. -- if I don't act as if I care about the lighter that you already gave me, I am not being properly appreciative of your gift. You might be offended, or consider me ungrateful if I swapped it.
I can roll these sorts of ways to look at a solution all day long pretty effortlessly. But I notice that many people aren't doing this. (Of course, it may not be lack of imagination. It could be 1. inexperience in experiment design 2. laziness 3. dishonesty 4. love of simplification.)
I am not sure how we can encourage this sort of open-mindedness. Got any ideas?
I don’t know. I think the big thing would be that you’d need to raise the stakes. Who cares about a lighter or a pen? Literally everything else about the experiment is going to be more important to the participant. How good looking is the researcher?
WEIRD people are probably going to have a greater innate understanding of the nature of psychological experiments and will be inclined to search for the “best” answer instead of acting naturally. And since nobody naturally cares about pens it’s going to be easy to default to that.
I’m reminded of that dumb experiment with kids, delayed gratification and marshmallows. Marshmallows suck. Might as well have offered them bird seed. It’s not going to result in a test of who is better at “waiting” for a marshmallow. It’s going to be a test of who can suss out what the researchers want to hear.
And the ones who think that what is being tested is 'Don't be Greedy' or 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' or 'He who hesitates is lost' end up with the 'poor impulse control' label, whether they deserve it or not. Somebody in Sweden made that experiment again, but not as a one-shot but as an interative experiment as part of a tv special about 'the secret life of children'. If you pay out the reward (and yes, not a yuccky marshmallow!) and are shown the be trustworthy, the next time around many more children will wait now for more later. Seems their problem was that they didn't trust the adults to keep their promise -- because in their world, adults lie a lot. And circumstances in life have a nasty habit of ruining the best laid plans of mice and men. One non-waiting child, asked by the tv host about why she didn't wait, answered 'my mother doesn't let me eat sweets except on Saturdays'. The television person thought that this was an amusing answer, but insisted that she would allow such things. The child shook her head. 'You don't know my mother' she replied.
This is quite interesting but also linking this to religion sounds weird to me. There are cultures that are non-WEIRD but devoted to the Christian god. For example, the Philippines. Also, the USA is not a 2'000 years old country, they were mostly a Spaniards colony just like the Philippines became in the 16th century.
Also what's the explanation of the differences within Europe, for example Italy, literally the bedrock of Roman catholicism, vs Nordic countries?
Marriage? Sumerians were already celebrating it, as well as Indians and other non-WEIRD cultures. India is also a particularly religious culture, but not WEIRD?
Monogamy has been increasingly more prevalent since 10k to 5k BC. No Christianity involved here.
Will have to read the book but so far I'm not convinced by this argument. Instinctively, I'd say farming, harsh winters, and sedentarisation had more effect on the forging of WEIRD countries.
WEIRD is the neutral term for "whiteness" as I see it, and it is the ocean all modern westerners swim in - whether we see ourselves as the resistance or not.
The book goes to great length to justify and quantify something not intuitive, namely that European Christianity, particularly Protestantism with its focus on the individual relationship with God, without knowledge or intention, dissolved clan relationships in a way that other religious practices around the world have not done. And it shows that even within Europe, there are differences, and why.
The ingredients of the cocktail that propelled the advance of the western world surely is worth contemplation, and this is one of the most compelling contributions I have read.
The part about societies being held together by dynamics not seen at the time - or even in retrospect if they don't fall cleanly into slots in critical minds - is sobering, as Rob points out. This highlights the importance of not seeing social critique solely as an exercise in negativity bias.
“Henrich describes how it was in fact the social bonding resulting from the activity, rather than pleasing their gods, that resulted in improved cohesion.”
Perhaps their gods knew that the rituals would give rise to social bonding, and so improve social cohesion.
The trust part of a high trust society is hugely important, easily broken, and difficult to repair.
Promiscuity reduces trust, if not killing it. Children being born & raised without married parents is an important problem, and the biggest for those kids whose parents are sluts & slut-jerks. Yet almost all consensual sex outside of marriage leads to feelings of betrayal, and distrust.
I speculate that sexually active college girls who don’t get married often have trouble trusting guys, who then treat later women worse, while those young women with less trust in men give more trust to government. & vote Dem.
Sex avoidance by more young folk is partly due to avoiding the expected betrayal/ letdown of casual sex. Sex habits dominate evolution.
Fascinating, thank you. I am still intrigued as to why the Church in the early Middle Ages thought to promote strict marriage laws. I assume no one thought this one out and set down a rule, rather in a time in a Game of Thrones World, it sort of worked in the Church's interests.
Saint Augustine -- arguably the most widely read author of the middle ages -- wrote
_On the Good of Marriage_ about the year 400. So, yes, there was a lot of thinking about this going on. Also, in kin-based non-individualist societies, there is enormous room for the brutal and cruel exploitation of all members of the clan by its leader or leaders. A great many people joined the church in order to escape such bondage, which meant that the church was acutely aware of the problem.
I suppose as well careers in the Church itself offered a way out for all sorts of people escaping (or surplus to) the clan-based structure. You could stay and look after the family farm or fight for the local warrior or go off and learn to read and write, and study abroad and see the world - ways of life, even if for a minority, that were seen as high status.
It's not so much having a career in the church as joining a community whose members will defend you when you refuse to do something your kin-lord demands. Having a community source of welfare that is outside your kin group, means that your kin-lord cannot starve you or your family into submission. Perhaps more significantly, non-kin based trade groups, provided that the members are trustworthy, will nearly always be more prosperous than the kin-based ones because they are larger and more diverse. So Christianity teaches you how to be a trustworthy trade partner, values industriousness, and then gives you access to the Christian trade market to prosper in. 'Raise more vegetables and sell them in the market' only works to generate local prosperity if some clan elder isn't going to come by and confiscate any surplus you produce because what is yours is his. Or to make an example of you.
There is a lot to take from this! When the Roman Empire fell apart, the default model for most of society was the kin-based group, and we would probably still be there if not for the church, which provided an alternative structure that worked on its own terms. That allowed trade and law to develop and create their own domains over time.
When it came to marriage, perhaps being told who you can marry is a sort of litmus test of power. The clan chief asserts his authority, the priest says 'no' to assert his authority. The priest won in the end, but is no longer thanked for his efforts!
If this stuff interests you, James Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, Icon Books, Allen & Unwin, 2009 is worth a read as is Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, Yale University Press, 1997. If you aren't reading Lorenzo Walby's substack and the series of essays he is producing on Helen Dale's substack then
I see what you are saying. The main thesis, and the main theoretical contribution concerns exposure to Christianity in general. On the other hand, as stated on p.418, Protestantism "acts like a booster shot for many of the WEIRD psychological patterns.." , and that notion is then developed further from there on.
Amazingly good article! This book referenced in the article does not look at the huge implications that the propaganda perfected by Edward Bernays had on the western countries. That made the individual to act based on mediated impulses and manipulated the masses. To make things more complicated this new type of thinking came on a tangent with the Socialist ideas and ideals which are continually growing from 1848 on. The Chinese experiment has led to the forceful dissolution of the kin relations in the favor to the abusive Collectivism. The Union of the Soviets was not far from that too. However, the mission was accomplished with severe losses of many innocent lives but, due to coercive-punitive measures based on crude lies, has led to the lack of trust between individuals. The individual had to develop two pathological personalities, one for the society, being fearful of shaming, and one for the self to maintain some level of personal sanity. On the other hand, the individual is invited to succeed as long as he will serve the system and the group. This hybridization of the WEIRD and non-WEIRD concepts are nowadays more and more prevalent in the Western countries and are being promoted at the global level.
For most of the time, it seemed to me like the cultures across the globe are divided into either individualist/progressive/secular or collective/traditional/religious. I never thought about how the Western Church was the driving force behind the individualism.
Maybe one reason for that is that WEIRD as described here (with Western Church supporting the nuclear family) seems to be a thing of the past. The formerly WEIRD cultures are now post-WEIRD -hyper-individualistic, with no support for religion, family and monogamy.
Understanding this might be crucial to solving the fertility crisis. Until the end of the 20th century, both WEIRD and kin-based cultures supported fertility. The idea to become more like the currently still fertile kin-based cultures is sometimes proposed as a solution for the post-WEIRD cultures, but given the above, it seems like going back from post-WEIRD to original WEIRD is a way better idea that's not discussed enough.
Do you have data on how fast and to what degree do immigrants from non- WEIRD societies to WEIRD societies adopt WEIRD ways?
Similarly, is it factually true that immigrants from less- WEIRD societies to more-WEIRD societies are WEIRDer than average in their initial home society?
From the classes on Sociology in the college, I learned that a smaller mass of immigrants will be absorbed by the larger mass of locals. They will adapt and adopt the rules and laws of the new country. For example, after the WWII, that was the case, of the Turkish population in Germany. In case when the mass of immigrants goes beyond a critical number, they have an impact on the mass of locals because it is a much harder process to integrate them. The example of Europe and US in the recent years is significant. For people like our family going, many years ago, thru a rigorous protocol to be admitted in this country, it is painful to see the legal difference in just few decades.
One of the concepts I still want to do more inquiry into is that of scarcity. As an experience, it certainly is very real. Feeling like "not getting enough" or "not having enough" or "not being enough." And yet, I believe that it is the Western mind's linkage of this experience with "something good" (how many conservative economists might define economy as related to the study of dealing with scarce resources) that both has created a lot of wealth (conscious care for scarce resources) and a lot of trouble (forgetting about resources we cannot commoditize, like family, friendships, and relationships in general).
Our civilizational history as WEIRD people has given us an incredible tool for making the most of very little (resources), but it also has created a particular blind spot, which can be easily exploited by those who have understood enough of reverse engineered human psychology to appreciate that fear of other people *CAN* be commodified.
Social media algorithms are doing exactly that, and unless we have something like strong interpersonal bonds and trust in others to set against that commodification of our fears, I think we will come to a place in history where our blind spot eats us alive...
Great review. Thanks Rob.
Is anyone getting increasingly suspicious of drawing conclusions from social experiments like exchanging lighters? Connecting a willingness to exchange lighters to the "endowment effect"... I don't know. I just don't see how you get there. There are way too many other explanations. Maybe the WEIRD are more suspicious: "why do you want to trade lighters? They're exactly the same. Something must be better about the one I have." Maybe non-WEIRD are more deferential to authority. "You're a scientist and and you want to swap lighters, so let's swap lighters." Maybe non-WEIRD are more friendly or more eager to please. "You seem like a nice enough guy and the lighters are the same, so sure." This just stinks of overfitting. If that's the right term.
Why are we so dependent on experimental stand-ins when these traits could be reasonably observed? I used to work with a guy from Nigeria who told me once that he could never have opened up a convenience store in his hometown. Everyone from his extended family would have been super proud of him, but also would have assumed that they could have taken anything out of the store for free. It just wouldn't have occurred to them to pay, the same way it wouldn't occur to you to pay for a drink when visiting a friend. Because of that his store would have been out of business in no time.
It seems like THAT, if true, tells you something about differences in culture. Running these strange experiments far removed from everyday life doesn't feel like that.
It's wise to be wary of any individual study to support a general idea. Though be aware that the lighter experiment was not a one-off invented by the researchers who performed it but is an example of a large body of research. I linked it in the piece and you can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect
I think that the exchanging lighters experiment may indicate a rather severe lack of imagination on the part of experiment designers. They design the experiment to demonstrate the reason they already had in mind and totally miss other possible explanations. For instance -- 1. I already know that my lighter works well. I'm sticking with what I know. 2. -- in general I don't like change. I don't want a new experience, I want one that is familiar and comforting. 3. -- what makes the lighter special is the fact that _you_ gave it to me. It's gift value is much greater than its intrinsic value. 4. -- if I don't act as if I care about the lighter that you already gave me, I am not being properly appreciative of your gift. You might be offended, or consider me ungrateful if I swapped it.
I can roll these sorts of ways to look at a solution all day long pretty effortlessly. But I notice that many people aren't doing this. (Of course, it may not be lack of imagination. It could be 1. inexperience in experiment design 2. laziness 3. dishonesty 4. love of simplification.)
I am not sure how we can encourage this sort of open-mindedness. Got any ideas?
I don’t know. I think the big thing would be that you’d need to raise the stakes. Who cares about a lighter or a pen? Literally everything else about the experiment is going to be more important to the participant. How good looking is the researcher?
WEIRD people are probably going to have a greater innate understanding of the nature of psychological experiments and will be inclined to search for the “best” answer instead of acting naturally. And since nobody naturally cares about pens it’s going to be easy to default to that.
I’m reminded of that dumb experiment with kids, delayed gratification and marshmallows. Marshmallows suck. Might as well have offered them bird seed. It’s not going to result in a test of who is better at “waiting” for a marshmallow. It’s going to be a test of who can suss out what the researchers want to hear.
And the ones who think that what is being tested is 'Don't be Greedy' or 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' or 'He who hesitates is lost' end up with the 'poor impulse control' label, whether they deserve it or not. Somebody in Sweden made that experiment again, but not as a one-shot but as an interative experiment as part of a tv special about 'the secret life of children'. If you pay out the reward (and yes, not a yuccky marshmallow!) and are shown the be trustworthy, the next time around many more children will wait now for more later. Seems their problem was that they didn't trust the adults to keep their promise -- because in their world, adults lie a lot. And circumstances in life have a nasty habit of ruining the best laid plans of mice and men. One non-waiting child, asked by the tv host about why she didn't wait, answered 'my mother doesn't let me eat sweets except on Saturdays'. The television person thought that this was an amusing answer, but insisted that she would allow such things. The child shook her head. 'You don't know my mother' she replied.
This is quite interesting but also linking this to religion sounds weird to me. There are cultures that are non-WEIRD but devoted to the Christian god. For example, the Philippines. Also, the USA is not a 2'000 years old country, they were mostly a Spaniards colony just like the Philippines became in the 16th century.
Also what's the explanation of the differences within Europe, for example Italy, literally the bedrock of Roman catholicism, vs Nordic countries?
Marriage? Sumerians were already celebrating it, as well as Indians and other non-WEIRD cultures. India is also a particularly religious culture, but not WEIRD?
Monogamy has been increasingly more prevalent since 10k to 5k BC. No Christianity involved here.
Will have to read the book but so far I'm not convinced by this argument. Instinctively, I'd say farming, harsh winters, and sedentarisation had more effect on the forging of WEIRD countries.
You might find the passages in clannishness and cousin marriage to be particularly of interest.
"Will have to read the book but so far I'm not convinced by this argument. "
Perfection.
WEIRD is the neutral term for "whiteness" as I see it, and it is the ocean all modern westerners swim in - whether we see ourselves as the resistance or not.
The book goes to great length to justify and quantify something not intuitive, namely that European Christianity, particularly Protestantism with its focus on the individual relationship with God, without knowledge or intention, dissolved clan relationships in a way that other religious practices around the world have not done. And it shows that even within Europe, there are differences, and why.
The ingredients of the cocktail that propelled the advance of the western world surely is worth contemplation, and this is one of the most compelling contributions I have read.
The part about societies being held together by dynamics not seen at the time - or even in retrospect if they don't fall cleanly into slots in critical minds - is sobering, as Rob points out. This highlights the importance of not seeing social critique solely as an exercise in negativity bias.
"Particularly Protestantism" is not part of the thesis.
So interesting! I was unaware of this research. Sometimes I feel like a fish introduced to water.
I always take the time to read this author: as you say so interesting.
You are a good writer.
“Henrich describes how it was in fact the social bonding resulting from the activity, rather than pleasing their gods, that resulted in improved cohesion.”
Perhaps their gods knew that the rituals would give rise to social bonding, and so improve social cohesion.
The trust part of a high trust society is hugely important, easily broken, and difficult to repair.
Promiscuity reduces trust, if not killing it. Children being born & raised without married parents is an important problem, and the biggest for those kids whose parents are sluts & slut-jerks. Yet almost all consensual sex outside of marriage leads to feelings of betrayal, and distrust.
I speculate that sexually active college girls who don’t get married often have trouble trusting guys, who then treat later women worse, while those young women with less trust in men give more trust to government. & vote Dem.
Sex avoidance by more young folk is partly due to avoiding the expected betrayal/ letdown of casual sex. Sex habits dominate evolution.
Fascinating, thank you. I am still intrigued as to why the Church in the early Middle Ages thought to promote strict marriage laws. I assume no one thought this one out and set down a rule, rather in a time in a Game of Thrones World, it sort of worked in the Church's interests.
Saint Augustine -- arguably the most widely read author of the middle ages -- wrote
_On the Good of Marriage_ about the year 400. So, yes, there was a lot of thinking about this going on. Also, in kin-based non-individualist societies, there is enormous room for the brutal and cruel exploitation of all members of the clan by its leader or leaders. A great many people joined the church in order to escape such bondage, which meant that the church was acutely aware of the problem.
I suppose as well careers in the Church itself offered a way out for all sorts of people escaping (or surplus to) the clan-based structure. You could stay and look after the family farm or fight for the local warrior or go off and learn to read and write, and study abroad and see the world - ways of life, even if for a minority, that were seen as high status.
It's not so much having a career in the church as joining a community whose members will defend you when you refuse to do something your kin-lord demands. Having a community source of welfare that is outside your kin group, means that your kin-lord cannot starve you or your family into submission. Perhaps more significantly, non-kin based trade groups, provided that the members are trustworthy, will nearly always be more prosperous than the kin-based ones because they are larger and more diverse. So Christianity teaches you how to be a trustworthy trade partner, values industriousness, and then gives you access to the Christian trade market to prosper in. 'Raise more vegetables and sell them in the market' only works to generate local prosperity if some clan elder isn't going to come by and confiscate any surplus you produce because what is yours is his. Or to make an example of you.
There is a lot to take from this! When the Roman Empire fell apart, the default model for most of society was the kin-based group, and we would probably still be there if not for the church, which provided an alternative structure that worked on its own terms. That allowed trade and law to develop and create their own domains over time.
When it came to marriage, perhaps being told who you can marry is a sort of litmus test of power. The clan chief asserts his authority, the priest says 'no' to assert his authority. The priest won in the end, but is no longer thanked for his efforts!
If this stuff interests you, James Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, Icon Books, Allen & Unwin, 2009 is worth a read as is Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, Yale University Press, 1997. If you aren't reading Lorenzo Walby's substack and the series of essays he is producing on Helen Dale's substack then
these two https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/a-crusading-clerisy
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/a-crusading-clerisy-ii from the middle of the series might be of interest too.
Also Monogamy and Polygyny in Greece, Rome, and World History
by Walter Scheidel https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1214729 is only 17 pages and worth a read.
Thank you very much! More for the reading list now. Lorenzo and Helen are on my list - although struggle to keep up!
I see what you are saying. The main thesis, and the main theoretical contribution concerns exposure to Christianity in general. On the other hand, as stated on p.418, Protestantism "acts like a booster shot for many of the WEIRD psychological patterns.." , and that notion is then developed further from there on.
A fitting epitaph on the grave of the West.
Amazingly good article! This book referenced in the article does not look at the huge implications that the propaganda perfected by Edward Bernays had on the western countries. That made the individual to act based on mediated impulses and manipulated the masses. To make things more complicated this new type of thinking came on a tangent with the Socialist ideas and ideals which are continually growing from 1848 on. The Chinese experiment has led to the forceful dissolution of the kin relations in the favor to the abusive Collectivism. The Union of the Soviets was not far from that too. However, the mission was accomplished with severe losses of many innocent lives but, due to coercive-punitive measures based on crude lies, has led to the lack of trust between individuals. The individual had to develop two pathological personalities, one for the society, being fearful of shaming, and one for the self to maintain some level of personal sanity. On the other hand, the individual is invited to succeed as long as he will serve the system and the group. This hybridization of the WEIRD and non-WEIRD concepts are nowadays more and more prevalent in the Western countries and are being promoted at the global level.
For most of the time, it seemed to me like the cultures across the globe are divided into either individualist/progressive/secular or collective/traditional/religious. I never thought about how the Western Church was the driving force behind the individualism.
Maybe one reason for that is that WEIRD as described here (with Western Church supporting the nuclear family) seems to be a thing of the past. The formerly WEIRD cultures are now post-WEIRD -hyper-individualistic, with no support for religion, family and monogamy.
Understanding this might be crucial to solving the fertility crisis. Until the end of the 20th century, both WEIRD and kin-based cultures supported fertility. The idea to become more like the currently still fertile kin-based cultures is sometimes proposed as a solution for the post-WEIRD cultures, but given the above, it seems like going back from post-WEIRD to original WEIRD is a way better idea that's not discussed enough.
Do you have data on how fast and to what degree do immigrants from non- WEIRD societies to WEIRD societies adopt WEIRD ways?
Similarly, is it factually true that immigrants from less- WEIRD societies to more-WEIRD societies are WEIRDer than average in their initial home society?
From the classes on Sociology in the college, I learned that a smaller mass of immigrants will be absorbed by the larger mass of locals. They will adapt and adopt the rules and laws of the new country. For example, after the WWII, that was the case, of the Turkish population in Germany. In case when the mass of immigrants goes beyond a critical number, they have an impact on the mass of locals because it is a much harder process to integrate them. The example of Europe and US in the recent years is significant. For people like our family going, many years ago, thru a rigorous protocol to be admitted in this country, it is painful to see the legal difference in just few decades.