JOSH: Hello and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, a podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Joe Henrich about Joe's concept of WEIRD cultures and the differences between WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures in terms of reasoning, morality, risk, and religion.

SPENCER: Joe, welcome.

JOE: Good to be with you.

SPENCER: So what is a WEIRD culture?

JOE: Well, WEIRD is an acronym that stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Two of my collaborators, Steve Heine and Ara Norenzayan, who are social psychologists, coined this acronym as a consciousness-raising device to tell researchers and others about the psychological and cultural variation around the world that makes a big difference. They typically studied Americans and Canadians, and to a larger extent, people from Europe and Australia. These populations turn out to be psychologically peculiar along a number of dimensions.

SPENCER: It's such a brilliant rhetorical device. By calling it WEIRD, it's the thing that we normally would say as Westerners, "Oh, this is a normal culture," but you highlight how it's actually really different from a lot of places in the world.

JOE: I've been surprised over the years about how much people tend to assume the world they live in is the quintessential world or the world that people live in. Humans didn't have hospitals or police forces or judges or juries or technology for most of human history. It's really a strange and unique world that we live in today.

SPENCER: Now, how much of the world is WEIRD by your definition?

JOE: Well, remember that it's a consciousness-raising device, but if you just count the countries where a lot of the population is highly individualistic, inclined towards analytic thinking, inclined to trust strangers, and has this cluster of traits, it's mostly the US, Canada, certain countries in Europe, New Zealand, places like that. It comes out to be about 12% of the world's population.

SPENCER: Oh, wow. So the vast majority of the world is not WEIRD, you would say?

JOE: Yeah. Again, you don't want to take it too seriously. What I do in my book, The WEIRDest People in the World, is try to explain that variation. It's just a place to start, a kind of heuristic for thinking about the world.

SPENCER: Does this idea suggest that much of what we claim to know about human psychology is really just information about WEIRD psychology?

JOE: Yeah, that's certainly the case. We published this paper in 2010 where we tried to summarize the available evidence from psychological studies and studies in economics. We were able to make the case that whether you're dealing with visual illusions or memory or the kinds of things like trust and cooperation that social psychologists study, you see a lot of variation around the globe, and WEIRD people are outliers on a bunch of dimensions.

SPENCER: Before we dig into the specific examples of how WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures differ, how do we know these differences exist? What sort of studies is this coming from?

JOE: Well, there are a bunch of different kinds of studies. Psychologists do experiments and develop questionnaires to measure things like individualism. Economists use behavioral game-type experiments, where they give people money and have them divide up real sums of money among other people to measure things like honesty, trust in strangers, and cooperation. I like real-world data, like blood donations to strangers or inclination to get parking tickets when you don't have to pay, things like that. In the book, I try to put together lots of different sources of information. Another good one is vignette studies, where you give people scenarios and have them say how they'd respond.

SPENCER: How strong do these differences tend to be? Is it more that there's a heavily overlapped distribution between WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures, but there are slight average differences, or are we talking about really substantial differences that separate the distributions pretty thoroughly?

JOE: Well, there's always overlapping distributions, and one of the things that I'm studying these days is variation within the United States. I've been looking at variation among US counties, which has lots of interesting variation. The point I try to make in The WEIRDest People in the World is that these differences, although they're overlapping, and there's lots of interesting variation within countries and between communities and individuals, do seem to cash out in things like economic performance. I'm interested in innovation, and I can use facts about the deeper history of Europe to explain which small regions of Europe are more likely to patent and are more innovative than others. So it matters for economic prosperity.

SPENCER: That's really interesting. In terms of these differences, one of them that you mentioned is analytic thinking. What's the difference that you see there between WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures?

JOE: Yeah, psychologists, going back decades, have characterized two kinds of thinking along a continuum. At one end, you have more analytic thinkers who tend to use a reductionist approach. They break things down into smaller parts. When they're solving a problem, they assign properties to those parts, and then they try to explain the overall behavior of the system using the properties of the parts. A simple example would be the way physicists do business. They break things down into atoms and molecules, assign charges or other properties to those parts, and that explains the system. Psychologists do it by assigning people personalities and suggesting that people's behavior depends on their personalities. Economists assign preferences, so that's an analytic approach, and they also tend to see things moving in straight lines. If things start to go up, they tend to think they're going to continue going up. More holistic thinkers tend to focus on relationships, and they take into account more of the interconnections between things, and they see things as going both up and down. A simple example: if you see one person hitting another person, an analytic thinker would say that person's aggressive, assigning a characteristic to that person. A holistic thinker would say there's a problem in their relationship. In other words, it's not about the individual, it's about the relationship. Does that make sense?

SPENCER: Yeah, it does. Are these truly in contrast to each other? The more you are one, the less you are the other, or could someone be both at the same time?

JOE: Yeah. Psychologists have a number of different ways of measuring these things, but a lot of it is about how you initially approach a problem and what the strength of your inclination to approach a problem is. For example, one thing I use in the book is called the triads test. There, they give people a picture of a rabbit as the focal picture, and then you have to say, is a rabbit more like a dog or more like a carrot? Or is it connected to a carrot? Analytic thinkers like to create clean and neat categories, so they put it with the dog, whereas holistic thinkers look for relationships. Rabbits like to eat carrots, so the rabbit goes with the carrot. You give people a whole bunch of those, and people will score somewhere in the middle. Not too many people will do 30 in a row, all analytic, but they can be pretty high, whereas holistic thinkers tend to go the other way. Everybody gets a measure based on that, and then you can see these interesting differences among populations. Importantly, you can see this cash out on some kinds of intelligence tests. A lot of times, the intelligence test's correct answer is the analytic answer.

SPENCER: One of the very strange things about IQ tests, in my view, is that the answers are often not objective, in the sense that maybe you have a sequence of numbers and they say what number comes next, or you've got these Raven's progressive matrices where there's a sequence of symbols you have to say what comes next. There isn't really, truly an answer to that. And yet we grade it as though it has an answer. Grading it as an answer, that score does correlate with many known things. It correlates with education, it correlates with income, and so on, but I wonder if it would break down if you were to give it to people from other cultures. What do you think about that?

JOE: Yeah, and that's one of the things we've been doing in my lab. We went to Northern Namibia and Southern Angola, where there's a natural experiment with the same ethno-linguistic groups who are mostly herding populations. Some of the communities have formal schools, and some don't. We've been giving things like the Raven's progressive matrices and other kinds of cognitive tests to these communities, and we find that it's pretty much all about whether you live in a schooled world or not. If you live in a schooled world, your IQ, your measure on the Raven, starts going up as you get older, past about age five. But if you never do any formal education at all, it pretty much stays flat. There's no reason to think these are not very competent individuals who solve all kinds of interesting problems all day long. They just don't get the abstraction. It depends on a certain cultural frame you have to bring to these things.

SPENCER: I've heard of other examples where they'll try to get people from non-WEIRD cultures to engage in hypotheticals. They'll say, all bears are dangerous. You encounter a bear, will it be dangerous? The person will say, well, there are some non-dangerous bears I've seen. Something about the frame that the test taker wants them to adopt is not natural for them. Is that something you've encountered?

JOE: Oh, yeah. I mean, getting people to respond to hypothetical examples, I found that from work I did in the Peruvian Amazon to work I did in Fiji, where something about schooling trains you to accept the frame. Essentially, you're given a hypothetical frame, and you can make conclusions within that. But in lots of places, if you say all bears are white as the frame problem, people will say all bears are not white. I've seen a bear that's not white, so it can be kind of funny.

SPENCER: Now, how can we tell the difference between schooling actually improving your thinking along this dimension, making you much better at certain kinds of problems, versus schooling just giving you this frame that lets you answer IQ questions, but not actually making you smarter?

JOE: Yeah. I mean, I've worked on this a little bit, and I'm thinking about it all the time. The biggest dimension that is important here is to recognize that different kinds of socio-cultural environments demand different kinds of cognitive abilities. Rather than thinking, as we often do as analytic thinkers, that there's a single dimension of intelligence, we can imagine having a certain set of cognitive skills that are well-suited for the world you have to navigate. A lot of what we think of as intelligence, what the IQ test measures, for example, is actually the set of cognitive skills for succeeding in the particular world we live in. When we do experiments with these populations in Namibia that we've been working with, when kids go to school, they start to lose certain cognitive abilities too. A simple one is absolute dead reckoning. In lots of places, I had a former postdoc named Helen Davis, and she and her collaborators would test kids and adults and ask them to just point to various towns that could be 100 miles away or 10 miles away, and they were remarkably accurate in their ability to tell you which direction you had to start walking if you wanted to go to the town. If you did that here in Brookline, people would point in all kinds of wild directions. I don't even know which direction New York City is.

SPENCER: I come out of the subway in Manhattan and I have no idea which way to go. I find that very impressive. I've also heard about cultures where they just always know the cardinal directions at all moments, in a way that people in the West don't seem to.

JOE: The interesting thing is those languages often only have north, south, east, and west, or something like absolute cardinal directions, and they don't have equipment for left and right, and the sort of relative coordinate systems that many of us use. If you have to use absolute coordinate systems all the time, you get really good at it. That's probably the natural state, in the sense that over time, societies and languages have accumulated an increasing number of these coordinate systems, which give us extra tricks. But when we have the extra tricks, we sometimes lose some cognitive abilities, like this absolute dead reckoning.

SPENCER: What this discussion makes me think about is, if you try to compare animal intelligences, and you look at, let's say, fish living at the bottom of the ocean, and you compare that with, let's say, some kind of ape living in the jungle, it's very hard to compare, because each species is incredibly good at surviving in what it needs to do. It's optimized and smart in a certain way at all the different activities required for survival. It makes you want to say, well, you just can't compare. But then, on some other level, you look at it and say, well, maybe there is a real sense in which apes tend to be smarter than fish that is not just about what environment they're in. Maybe, in some sense, they're more adaptable to a wide range of environments. What do you think about that kind of argument?

JOE: Yeah, I think there's something to it. That's why, when I started to tell you about intelligence, I think a lot of it is adapting to your particular cultural milieu. But there do seem to be this accumulation of cultural tools, things like a numbering system and things like left and right, which just have so many different uses. Once you get them, you're able to solve more new problems. Left and right and numbering systems are going to be useful in just about any environment. They might be relatively more or less useful, but nevertheless, they're useful. I think there are two stories to be told that aren't really opposing.

SPENCER: I see, there's this accumulation of cultural knowledge, and that genuinely does make people more intelligent, in a way, because it's giving them these powerful tools that unlock many different problem-solving capabilities.

JOE: Yes. Some of what we've accumulated in terms of cultural knowledge is useful across many different environments. I think you can sensibly say that people can solve novel problems across many different environments. But a lot of what it is, is actually trade-offs in the kinds of cognitive abilities we focus on. One of the thought experiments I've done in The Secret of Our Success and actually in The WEIRDest People in the World, is to imagine, or in some cases, offer examples of cases where people with high levels of education get dropped into the environments that hunter-gatherers survive in. Of course, they can't survive. They don't know how to find food, make shelter, avoid dangerous animals, or avoid toxic food. The only way they survive is if the locals are positively inclined towards them. No matter how smart you are, you can't do basic human survival.

SPENCER: I recall in one of your books, there was an amazing real example of this. Do you want to tell us about that situation? In 1860, the folks in Melbourne decided they wanted to travel across the continent to the Gulf of Carpentaria and plot a route for a potential telegraph cable. They got two experienced outdoorsmen, frontiersmen type guys, Burke and Wills, to lead an expedition. There were many interesting features to this, but the bottom line is that Burke and Wills and two other guys get stranded out in the middle of the Australian Outback. They actually get marooned on a river because they had imported some camels, and gradually their camels died. When they lost their last camel, they couldn't carry enough water to leave a particular river called Cooper Creek, so they started trying to survive along Cooper Creek. They couldn't make tools and find water and things like that. They had water from the creek, but they couldn't fish, and they were gradually starving to death. At one point, they interacted with some of the Aboriginals and learned how to harvest a sporocarp, a seed. What they didn't notice is that you had to detoxify the sporocarp. They ended up poisoning themselves. One of the guys named King managed to survive, but Burke and Wills died. We have their journals that were later found in the desert, which detail this dark, slow death that they experienced. They basically couldn't learn how to survive in a place where hunter-gatherers have been surviving for 60,000 years because they didn't have the basic knowledge of how to find all the things.

SPENCER: Presumably, that's not because the people that live there are smarter at the individual level. Not to say that they're less smart, but presumably, that's not the difference. The difference is more around a cultural accumulation of knowledge. Would you agree with that?

JOE: Yeah. I emphasize in The Secret of Our Success the cultural accumulation of knowledge, but it's worth realizing that that includes a bunch of cognitive skills. For example, we mentioned this absolute direction thing, the north, south, east, and west. That's something that Australian Aboriginals traditionally have, and that's something that the folks at Burke and Wills would have interacted with. There's also olfactory skills that people develop. Westerners have really poor olfaction. Our languages don't have lots of words for basic smell terms. If you give us sensitivity tests on smell identification, we're not very good. When researchers have done this with populations that engage in a lot of foraging, they have rich vocabularies to describe different scents, which allows them to discuss it and transmit information about it. They're also just better at using the scent to solve various problems.

SPENCER: Do you think of those, like the dead reckoning ability and the scent ability, as skills that people just got good at through practice and training? Or do you think of it as something different about cognitive architecture?

JOE: I think that these things are skills, like reading. We know when kids learn to read, they get specialized circuitry in their left ventral hemisphere, and they get a thicker corpus callosum. That has downstream effects. When they hear spoken speech, they activate areas on both sides of their brain that non-literate people don't. Reading is a cultural skill that rewires our brains, changes the architecture, and leads to different kinds of information processing. I think that reading is just one example that we happen to know a lot about because neuroscientists got interested in it. The same would be true for the kind of spatial navigation we talked about, or figuring out ways to hunt, forage, and track. If you have to track animals, you're tracking dinner based on the spore. You really attend to it. You're interacting and discussing the spore with others. You're picking up new cues, you're developing a sense. It's basically just the same kind of learning.

SPENCER: It seems like there's this fundamental interplay where, if you spend your time doing certain activities, that will change your cognitive architecture over time, which might give you certain basic capabilities that you're just better at, at that point.

JOE: Yeah, exactly. One of the things that's interesting about humans, which I made the case for in The Secret of Our Success, is that we have these large brains, and a lot of it is to develop the knowledge and the information processing that we need to survive in the diverse range of environments, to navigate the environments that we have to move through.

SPENCER: Now we've discussed one difference between WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures, which is around analytical versus holistic thinking. Another that people talk about is individualism versus collectivism. Could you tell us about that?

JOE: Yeah, so in The WEIRDest People in the World, I think individualism is one of the major defining characteristics that emerge, really beginning in medieval Europe, but then it begins to spread across the world as Europeans expand. The idea here is that individualists are focused on themselves, and they're concerned with their own attributes and aspirations. If you ask people to complete the sentence, "I am," you might say, "I am a kayaker," or "I am curious." You might also say, "I am a father," "I am a brother," things like that. People around the world really vary, with Americans being at the high end, giving almost entirely, or in some cases entirely, things like "I am curious," characteristics about themselves as a person separate from others, as opposed to characteristics about their membership in groups, memberships in families, their personal relationships, things like that. That seems to be associated with a lot of different characteristics. It's one of the major dimensions that psychologists and anthropologists have studied that seems to vary around the world.

SPENCER: Do we see these differences manifest in the way these cultures operate?

JOE: Yes, and it goes both directions, but in individualistic societies, people place a lot less importance on their family, and they tend to go out into the world and emphasize their own unique attributes. They cultivate those attributes because it's those attributes that make them stand out from the rest of the crowd, in terms of making friends, finding mates, finding business partners, for example, whereas in what psychologists call collectivistic societies, kinship tends to be very important. People build their networks based on networks they largely inherit from prior generations, then adding people based on their interconnections with the same other people. It just creates a very different logic in terms of what you worry about in the world of intensive kinship. In collectivist cultures, people worry about relationships, and it's the network of relationships that people avoid shame. In the more individualistic world, people are concerned with cultivating their attributes, and they feel guilty when they aren't doing things to cultivate those attributes.

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SPENCER: One anecdotal observation I have is with friends of mine who are Chinese American, how their relationship to their family just seems quite different than families I've seen from people who have lived in the United States for 100 years, 200 years. That difference often seems to be about duty, the expectations of a child regarding what you're going to do for your parents and what your responsibilities are. I'm wondering, is that something that has come up in your research?

JOE: Yes, absolutely. The emphasis on family values and loyalty to family and your responsibility for other members of your family is another feature of that complex. Shame arises when other members of your family do things that people don't approve of. For example, in some societies, you've probably heard about honor killing. Members of a family might kill their daughter because she did something they thought was shameful. Of course, that's a horrible crime, but it fits the logic of intensive kinship in that what the murderer is doing is preserving the reputation of the rest of the family. It's an act that is kind of out of loyalty to the rest of the family, a way of saying to everybody else, "Look, we disavow this person."

SPENCER: You mentioned you study innovation, and individualism is often brought up with regard to innovation, with the idea being that if people are more individualistic, they're going to want to go out and achieve great things and maybe do something different than what everyone else has done. Maybe this is good for innovation. Do you think that's true?

JOE: Yes, I think there are two reasons why individualism tends to lead to innovation. The first is the one you suggested, which is that there are incentives in an individualistic society to set yourself apart, to do something different. There's much less inclination to conformity. Conformity is not admired. Being different, being novel, is more admired. That's something we see strongly across cultures. The other thing that individualism does is it forces you to go out and interact in mutually beneficial ways. When you look for a business partner, you might look for the best person, including traits like honesty, as opposed to looking for someone who is your brother-in-law's friend or someone you're connected to through your larger social network. That just allows for greater recombination of ideas. I've argued that it's that fluid flow among diverse minds that really fertilizes a lot of innovation and creativity.

SPENCER: Based on that idea, would you expect that non-WEIRD cultures would be less innovative on average?

JOE: Yes, and the data is pretty strong on that. Economists have examined this pretty thoroughly. Individualism is strongly correlated and probably causal of things like more patents per capita.

SPENCER: Do we see this at a micro level as well? If you look at the United States, and you look at where innovation comes from, it's extremely not uniformly distributed, right? You have certain centers of it. Do we find that there's more individualism in those specific cities, for example, like San Francisco or New York?

JOE: Yes, it's funny you should ask because we just sent a paper off for review at an economics journal in which we analyzed U.S. innovation from 1850 to 1940. We obtained the complete patent record for U.S. patents and combined it with detailed measures from the U.S. Census. What we're able to show is that U.S. counties that are more diverse — here we measure diversity by surnames — generate more patents. We argue that this is a causal relationship and not just a correlation because various immigrant shocks to different counties at different times over that almost 100-year period provide kind of an exogenous shock, almost like a randomized treatment, which increases innovation when you get a shock of cultural diversity into a county. So, yes, I think there's quite good evidence of that.

SPENCER: Could you draw those two things together, this idea of diversity versus the idea of individualism and how they connect?

JOE: Yes. The picture here, the collective brain picture of how innovation occurs, is that you need diverse ideas to come together. The things that will fuel that are a large population and social interconnectedness, so people have to freely interact and swap ideas. The more diverse your minds are, the more chances you have that when two individuals meet to swap ideas, they have something useful to exchange. Diversity, social interconnectedness, and population size are going to power things. There are big differences across U.S. counties over time in the diversity of surnames they have, which gives us a measure of diversity. The same analysis shows that overall population size matters independent of diversity. Interestingly, at least in the U.S. case, as you add more diversity, people become more willing to engage with people very different from themselves. You can measure this with trust questions, such as, "Do you trust most people around here?" You can measure it from things like newspapers by analyzing the texts, and you can also analyze it by looking at who actually collaborates on patents. Many patents have multiple co-authors, and what we're able to show is that when a county has more diversity based on surnames, the patents have more diversity based on surnames, and patents with more diverse surnames are more likely to be highly impactful.

SPENCER: When you talk about diverse surnames, are you talking about the diversity of the country of origin of those surnames?

JOE: No, well, we did. There are different ways to do this. We actually just said there are cultural differences among surnames, and I can cite a bunch of evidence suggesting that. So, you know, when you have the Schultzes, Henrichs, Poches, and Johnsons in a county, each learn different things from their families. The parents, uncles, and grandparents have variations in knowledge, how they approach problems, and the languages they speak across different families. Those are captured by the surnames. That creates a kind of container of knowledge, and the key is to get those different containers to come together and swap.

SPENCER: So, you mean literally, they don't have identical surnames. That's how you're grouping them, by saying if they have the same exact surname, there's a cultural connection there.

JOE: Exactly. So, we just group all the Smiths and Johnsons together. What's interesting is that we had to test the idea as to whether this was true. One of the things we have is occupation. Even a name as common as Smith still predicted being a steelworker in the 19th century, long after people had stopped being blacksmiths. The same thing is true of other names, where they tend to clump by occupation, and of course, they clump by language. We were able to provide a lot of other evidence that many other things clump within families.

SPENCER: In the model of innovation, you mentioned population size, social connection between people, and diversity. But how does individualism fit into that picture?

JOE: Individualism causes you to seek mutually beneficial relationships, and you're concerned about the properties of an individual and less concerned about their group membership. People don't realize that collectivists or people from societies with intensive kinship do not tend to look as widely for employees, potential collaborators on projects, or mates. They tend to look for people one degree away from their current social network, someone they have multiple other connections to but may have never met, rather than casting a wide net and looking for anybody out there.

SPENCER: I see. So, individualism feeds into that social connection variable. That's where it fits in the equation.

JOE: You have to look for ways to build this unique set of characteristics about it. At the core of individualism is approaching people as individuals, right? You're not approaching someone as being German. You're approaching them as Joe.

SPENCER: What about ambition? It seems that if you look at people in New York and San Francisco versus Middle America or in many other cultures where there's just not as much of an innovation culture, people seem less ambitious. They seem less likely to think, "I'm going to take on the world and change things, and everything's going to be different because of me."

JOE: That's interesting, and it is hard to disentangle what exactly could explain that difference. One reason is simply that larger, denser populations generate more competition. A simple example I use in the The WEIRDest People in the World is that people in individualistic societies walk faster, and that's also true of city size. People in New York City walk a lot faster than people do in Des Moines, and you can measure that around the world.

SPENCER: Okay, so we've talked about a couple of different differences so far between WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures: analytic versus holistic thinking, individualism versus collectivism. Another one I wanted to ask you about is moral reasoning and how that differs across these cultures.

JOE: Yeah. The big dimension, or at least the one we have the best handle on, is moral universalism versus moral parochialism. One is whether you think that everybody should be governed by the same morals and treated the same, or whether you think you should give priority to people within your family network or local town, and the degree to which you emphasize loyalty and hierarchy as important moral values versus fairness and equality. You find this variation within the US, for sure, but you also find quite big variation around the world. In the book, I give one example of the passengers' dilemma, a vignette study where you ask people this question: you're riding in a car, your friend is driving recklessly, and they hit someone. Their lawyer tells you that you can testify that they were going under the speed limit in court, and they'll probably get off with no problem. If you tell the truth, then they're facing jail time. What do you do? The percentages vary from over 90% of people saying they would tell the truth in somewhere like Canada to places where people think that would be immoral, and almost nobody says you should tell the truth in court because you should be a good friend.

SPENCER: This seems like a values conflict. On one hand, there's the value of connection to your friend or family member. On the other hand, there's the more universal value of being truthful or honest.

JOE: Exactly. It's a competition between the impersonal institution of not lying in court and a general notion of honesty versus your personal relationships. You can substitute family members for the friend and make it even closer. Yes, this trade-off between particular relationships and general impersonal social norms.

SPENCER: Does this map onto the idea of a moral circle, where different people place different things in their moral circle? For some people, it's just their family. That's all they care about. For others, it's all human beings, and for some, it's human beings and also animals, and so on.

JOE: Yeah, I think it does. My colleague here at Harvard, Ben Enke, is an economist, and he has done experiments where he tries to connect this research done by people like Jon Haidt on the foundations of morality with a set of simple experiments in which you can share money with people at varying social distances from you. He finds a pretty good mapping between those two. It does seem that there's a connection between this sort of morality and this expanding social circle.

SPENCER: You mentioned Jon Haidt's work on moral foundation theory, and he talks about these five moral foundations that you tend to find among conservatives, whereas progressives tend to mainly rely on two of the five. What do you find in those dimensions when it comes to WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures?

JOE: Yeah, I mean that description more or less fits what I was talking about in terms of moral universalism. So that's fairness and care. At the other end, you have people who emphasize hierarchy and loyalty. That creates this difference between moral universalism and moral parochialism, and that seems to be a WEIRD trait. You can look within the US and find variations, and those correspond to the same differences we see globally. In other words, counties with stronger families and less surname diversity tend to be more at the moral parochial end of the scale.

SPENCER: That suggests that, at least in this way, conservatives in the U.S. might be more similar to non-WEIRD cultures than progressives. Is that actually more generally true? Is that just a fluke? Yeah, I mean, I've only seen that we have good research from the U.S. and then we have global research, but I haven't seen anybody drill into that distinction in other countries. I have no idea what it would look like in Japan, for example.

SPENCER: But do conservatives resemble non-WEIRD cultures more than progressives in other ways, besides just along those moral foundations?

JOE: Hmm, my inclination is to say yes, but I would have to dig into the data. I don't think I've ever seen what you would need, which would be a data set that had a whole bunch of measures for the same people, and then you would need to know their political preferences. I can't think of a data set that has that offhand.

SPENCER: I see. Another way to look at this idea of universalism and parochialism is with games where people play games where they can give money to others and so on. What does that tell us about how people make decisions in these different cultures?

JOE: Yeah. In these kinds of behavioral games, which are popular among economists, the standard approach is that the other person is an anonymous stranger who you don't know, won't see again, and can't interact with in repeated games, except within the context of the game if they want that. So that's very close to your moral universalism or your impersonal norms that I've talked about being relevant for markets. It is the case that the WEIRD societies, the most individualistic, are the ones who are most fair and cooperative in those kinds of experiments. You can reverse it if you are looking at things like the inclination to cooperate within your local village, town, or family. Something like that will correlate with willingness to make blood donations, for example. There are two measures: one is blood donation to strangers and blood donation to family members. You find that the measures of kinship that I discussed, the public game measures, and the willingness to donate blood to strangers all kind of move together across groups.

SPENCER: I see. At first, it might look like these non-WEIRD cultures are kind of less generous, but that's just because you're framing it in a way that favors universalism, where you're giving money to, let's say, a complete stranger. If you were to rejigger the experiment, you could actually show that they're more generous if it was more towards someone they're connected to.

JOE: Yeah, that's a crucial point, and I think the way to think about that is what I call impersonal prosociality, which is prosociality towards that stranger who you don't know and won't see again. Are you fair with the cashier or whatever? Versus interpersonal prosociality, which is, do you drive your neighbor to the airport? Or do you help your friend? That kind of thing is, if your cousin needs money, do you loan him money?

SPENCER: WEIRD cultures have such influence around the world; it makes me wonder whether these ideas have been spreading and this culture has been growing. You mentioned that it's a relatively small percent of the world, but it should be expected to be a larger and larger percent of the world that thinks in this more WEIRD way.

JOE: Yeah. There's definitely a spread for a few reasons, but the big reason is that a lot of the institutions that evolved in Europe began spreading around the globe after 1500 and then, especially after 1800. Things like universal schooling, that's actually a WEIRD institution; democratic governments --- WEIRD institution. All of these things have spread globally. People who grow up in urban areas are heavily exposed to this and the values that fit best with these institutions or these impersonal prosocial norms and ways of thinking, things like analytic thinking. That has definitely WEIRDified the world, or parts of the world, in any case, but there also seems to be something else afoot. One of the things we have to resist is our analytic thinking, our tendency to think about things along a linear dimension. What's happening as WEIRD institutions are getting imported into places like Korea and Japan and lots of other places is that they're interacting with and synthesizing with the local ways of doing things, of thinking in existing institutions, and they're creating new dimensions, third avenues that are kind of WEIRD in some ways, but not WEIRD in other ways. We're just beginning to see this in some of the global surveys.

SPENCER: Is the idea that they don't adopt each piece of it at the same rate? That's where you get this variation. Maybe in this experiment they seem WEIRD, but in this other experiment, they seem non-WEIRD.

JOE: Exactly. It doesn't all have to move in one solid package. Now exactly which parts can move separately, we're still figuring that out.

SPENCER: We've talked here about WEIRD and non-WEIRD as though it's sort of a binary, and obviously that's an oversimplification. One thing I wonder about is whether non-WEIRD is actually a huge collection of unrelated things, and that really what groups them is just that they're not WEIRD, or do they actually have that much in common culturally?

JOE: Yeah, that's a really good point, and I really try to emphasize that in various places. One of the ways I try to get people to think about that clearly is that it's kind of like if you made a category "penguin" because you wanted to study penguins. As soon as you make a category "penguin," that creates a category "non-penguin." If we think about animals that are non-penguins, they don't have a lot in common. Knowing it's not a penguin doesn't really tell you a lot about it, right?

SPENCER: Presumably, WEIRD cultures really do have a ton in common, right? There's a lot of homogeneity there, whereas non-WEIRD cultures could be like complete opposite ends of the world and never have even come in contact with each other.

JOE: Yeah. One of the points I make in The WEIRDest People in the World is that mobile hunter-gatherers are actually kind of individualistic and have tendencies towards analytic thinking. It's really the farming, kind of the pre-industrial farming populations that in many places, like with paddy rice agriculture, were the most collectivistic and holistic. There's no sort of single unilineal trend here; different societies, different environments call for different kinds of things. Hunter-gatherers are individualistic and analytic in some ways, but they don't have any impersonal prosociality, right? It's just some of the subtraits, but not others.

SPENCER: Why is that? What is it about hunter-gathering versus farming that seems to impact these traits? What's the theory there?

JOE: Well, hunter-gatherers need to maintain mobile kinship networks. They develop relationships with people in lots of different places, and they move around a lot, interacting with different people. The composition of the band is fluid. There's a lot of non-relatives moving through the band. They don't always do great without groups. If you're a rice paddy-owning population, your clan controls a rice paddy; everything is about your clan. You don't move. All your relationships are fixed. It's just a quite different situation. You'll have marriage rules about arranged marriage, whereas in the other one you might have love marriages.

SPENCER: I see. I imagine the introduction of markets, where you're trading with strangers that you've never met before, would push more in the WEIRD direction. Is that right?

JOE: Well, it'll certainly give you more of the impersonal prosociality. There's enough evidence, I think, that we can say with increasing confidence that markets tend to encourage fairness with strangers because they don't really work very well if you don't have fairness with strangers. The more you have these impersonal-style markets, the more that you get. We can see that even if you study different communities of herders in Ethiopia. Devesh Rustagi, the economist, famously studied this, and there, the closer you are to the market, the more you're willing to cooperate with strangers, and you can set up voluntary associations and stuff. If you're very far from that, then you don't see that. The market seems to have an effect, and it's an institution, right? It affects how we think. Now, whether it does other things remains to be seen. Again, these things can move independently.

SPENCER: Recently, a friend came to visit New York, and they were really shocked that someone quoted them a price, and then when they said, "Oh, that's too expensive," the person then said, "Oh, okay, I'll sell to you at 30% less." That was very galling to them, and they felt it was very unfair and, you know, immoral. It is unusual in New York; that happens. It's not the typical norm. It just made me think about how in some cultures, that's absolutely totally normal behavior, and it would never be considered immoral. I wonder, does that connect to what we're talking about here?

JOE: Yeah, that's a good question because as soon as you have that kind of system, it means that you can take the relationship into account, and that kind of violates the norm. I think that does fit with a kind of impersonal prosociality. Everybody gets the same price, right? In some of the places I've lived, everybody gets a different price depending on how well you know the guy selling the stuff, right.

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SPENCER: Another difference that's sometimes talked about is risk-taking. What's the evidence there with WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures?

JOE: Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's a general pattern there, actually. So I looked for that, and there is lots of variation around the world in risk-taking, but it doesn't seem to fit the basic dichotomy. In The WEIRDest People In The World, I lay out this historical process that involves the dissolution of complex kinship groups in Europe and the creation of monogamous nuclear families. Risk varies, but it seems to be associated with other factors besides kinship, such as voluntary associations.

SPENCER: So it's real variation across cultures, but it may be mapping something else, not this kind of WEIRD, non-WEIRD dichotomy.

JOE: I mean, I've seen some papers trying to explain it, but I don't think a really coherent story has emerged.

SPENCER: Would you say the same thing about loose versus tight cultures? In tight cultures, people tend to follow the rules and enforce the rules on others. In loose cultures, people are more relaxed about rules. Is that another cultural variation that's not connected to WEIRD versus non-WEIRD?

JOE: That is partially explained by the stuff we've been talking about. So societies with higher kinship intensity, these tight kin networks, tend to be tighter. They have more norms and are more concerned about them. One thing that's interesting about tightness and looseness, though, is that it's also affected by a society's history of shocks. If you've been hit by a lot of weather shocks, volcanic eruptions, or war shocks, you're going to tend to be tighter.

SPENCER: Oh, interesting. And is that because it's a more scarcity mindset or danger mindset? It's more important that everyone follows the rules and cooperates?

JOE: Well, one idea, actually in chapter 10 of In The WEIRDest People In The World, is that we have an evolved psychology so that when things go wrong, we need to cooperate with those around us, and that means adhering to our social norms more tightly. So when we experience shock, that causes us to tighten up our social norms. We police others, but we also obey the norms more. The idea is that helps us share food more, so it has a bunch of effects that can help you survive a shock.

SPENCER: It reminds me of wartime powers of a president, where suddenly in war, people are willing to follow orders and have a stricter hierarchy, whereas maybe in peacetime, they're much less amenable to that.

JOE: Yeah, exactly. And this is strikingly clear. One of my postdocs, Max Posch, has analyzed US newspapers across time and space, going back into the 19th century. You can look at when wars hit the US at different times, and some counties are more affected by wars than others based on how many soldiers they sent to the war. You can see the kinds of words they use suggest more tightness after the war hits. You can see the psychological change in how people write.

SPENCER: It's interesting to think about that because it suggests that there are different competing forces that determine culture. One being the activities that are actually useful in that culture. If you're a hunter-gatherer versus a farmer versus you live in a market culture, there are going to be different sets of activities that are really useful. Another force is culture, where you're learning ideas from the people around you. A third one is these external forces, like a threat or a war. How would you map the space of what determines how a particular culture differs from another one?

JOE: Yeah, I totally agree with that characterization. There are lots of different forces operating, and sometimes there are causal chains. One of the things I've argued for, building on the work of Thomas Talhelm, is that rice paddy agriculture is particular and has traditionally favored patrilineal, patrilocal kinship systems, which are very tight, and that led to a lot of what we call collectivism in parts of Asia. You can actually explain variation just within China by knowing how ecological factors affect the likelihood of paddy rice, and that then affects clans. Interestingly, most Chinese now aren't involved in paddy rice anymore, but because of the social structures embedded in families, these ways of thinking have persisted long after paddy rice became much less important, at least to the average person's daily life.

SPENCER: Where does religion come into play? Because it seems to me that religion is a very long-lasting kind of memetic bundle that influences culture.

JOE: Yeah. I've made the case that religion can affect things in a couple of different ways. The first is that over longer stretches of cultural human evolutionary history, we've had the emergence of powerful moralizing gods or moral systems with things like karma that affect people and cause them to behave more pro-socially towards their fellow co-religionists. We did a project a few years ago where we went all over the world and gave people those behavioral games we talked about earlier, and in those experiments, we see that people are more pro-social towards their co-religionists when they believe in a God that is more monitoring and more willing to punish norm violators. You can unconsciously remind people of God, and they become more pro-social if they're religious; if they're atheist, it doesn't affect them. All of this looks like religion can matter for this pro-sociality side of things. The other thing I think is really affected is that religions are often very opinionated about family structure. In The WEIRDest People In The World, I argued that one branch of Christianity, the Catholic Church, had a huge effect on kinship structures in Europe and broke everyone down into monogamous nuclear families, eventually leading to individualism. Meanwhile, in Islam, there is a rule that daughters have to inherit half of what sons inherit. As Islam spread through agricultural communities, a lot of times the wealth was almost entirely in land. If you married off a daughter and sent half of the wealth that a son would get with her, you're gradually depleting your land. Those communities adopted a unique form of marriage where you marry your father's brother's daughter, which keeps the land within the community. This had a big effect on creating endogamous social networks instead of the broad, sprawling networks you see elsewhere.

SPENCER: I've noticed people have really extreme negative reactions to first cousin marriage. It seems appalling to a lot of people, but I've also heard that for many cultures, that was extremely typical.

JOE: Yeah, lots of societies have cousin marriage, and first cousin marriage wasn't uncommon. In many places, the highest rates have 50% cousin marriage, including first and second cousin marriage. It was probably the norm to have 10% to 20% cousin marriage.

SPENCER: So what was it that the church did that broke this up and caused more individualism?

JOE: Yeah, the church gradually developed a package that included taboos on cousin marriage that began with first cousin marriage, but by the year 1000, it had expanded out to six cousins. That would prevent all that cousin marriage. It also ended levirate marriage, which is common in lots of societies. If your husband dies and you're a woman, you marry the brother, which keeps the relationship between the families strong. Another thing that most human societies have had is polygyny. The church was very much against polygynous marriage, so it ended that, which again created more of these monogamous nuclear families. There were a few other things related to inheritance that the church did as well.

SPENCER: Is it known why the church did this, or do we just think of it as what the religion said at that time?

JOE: Yeah. The way I like to think about that, I mean, there are debates among historians about what the reasoning was, but I wonder how fruitful an enterprise that is because lots of different religions, including different branches of Christianity, came up with very different beliefs about family structure. If you go to Islam, it had those inheritance beliefs I mentioned. They also believed that you had to limit polygyny to only four wives per man and a number of other beliefs. Zoroastrianism actually encouraged cousin marriage. The God there wanted you to marry your cousins, to the point where the elites were marrying brothers and sisters, which is rare in the record but does pop up in royal elite circles sometimes as a way of keeping the blood pure. Religions come up with all kinds of different beliefs. I like to use the example of the Shakers. There were a bunch of movements in the United States at the beginning of the 19th century, and one was a religious group called the Shakers, who decided that you shouldn't have sex at all. The group could only grow by getting people from outside. So, yeah, there's a lot of variety across religions in what they believe about this, and then history sorts it out.

SPENCER: I don't know how much you know about this, but does the Bible, does the Christian Bible actually talk about cousin marriage being bad, or is that more of a cultural phenomenon within Christianity?

JOE: That's a Christianity thing. The Old Testament, the Torah, has all kinds of intensive kinship. There's polygyny in there, there's cousin marriage in there, there's levirate marriage in there. Traditionally, Jesus was the product of a cross-cousin marriage by church tradition. This was something the church came to later, and they called it incest, but they weren't concerned about brothers and sisters. They were concerned about cousins. It included spiritual kin, and even in-laws where the reason in English we refer to your sister-in-law and your brother-in-law was actually an imposition of the church. It's a part of canon law, and it says your husband's sister should be treated like your sister. So she's your sister-in-law, where the "in-law" is in canon law.

SPENCER: So we've covered a lot of different differences between WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures, but one that we haven't talked about yet is the role of intentionality in moral judgment. What's the difference there, and what does that really mean?

JOE: Yeah, it's really surprising to many people in WEIRD societies that there's a lot of variation across societies in how important it is to consider someone's internal mental states in making judgments about how guilty or how punishable they are. We've done vignette experiments across a large number of societies, and we find that Westerners are the most extreme in wanting to consider the intentions of the actor in, say, a theft or murder or battery in terms of assigning punishment and guilt. In lots of societies, they only worry about whether you took it or killed the person, and then the intentions may play a little role, or they may play no role. Many traditional law codes also don't make this distinction about the role of intentionality or false beliefs. You might have killed them because you thought they were going to kill everyone else, things like that. It just shows that Westerners pay an extreme amount of attention to internal mental states, which plays a big role in the legal system, of course. It's interesting because mental states are essentially unknowable, so any inference is just that — an inference — and you have to guess what their mental state was. Lots of societies think that's less important.

SPENCER: Do you have a theory of why that difference in particular exists?

JOE: Well, it has to do with assigning properties to individuals. These internal properties inside of you are what determine your behavior. That relates to this tendency towards analytic thinking, where you try to explain behavior by assigning properties, and it also relates to this disposition we have where we want to assign personalities or other characteristics to individuals to explain their behavior. Then, of course, it gets laid out in the legal system, which has downstream consequences.

SPENCER: When I think about a legal system that tries to infer your mental state versus one that doesn't, the one that tries to infer your mental state seems softer, less harsh to me, because it says, "Well, okay, that person did this bad thing, but they had these genuine circumstances, and they didn't intend to do it," whereas one that just says, "Well, you did the thing. It doesn't matter why," seems very harsh. I'm wondering, do we actually see a difference in the severity of punishment across these cultures?

JOE: I mean, it's definitely the case that the severity of punishment has declined over historical time, particularly in the West. I can't think of a systematic comparison between those places, but that's true of all crimes. Even when it's decided that it was first-degree murder, only some states still have the death penalty, but in lots of places, the death penalty would have been automatic.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask about how you think your work should influence the way academics practice the study of human psychology today. There's an obvious takeaway, which is to do more studies that involve people around the world. But are there other takeaways that you would wish academia would take on?

JOE: Yeah, the biggest thing, the two big things are, one is there's not a lot of effort to theorize the psychological variation, so the discipline of psychology has always tried to ignore it, and then, to some degree, they want to do a study in some strange or exotic culture as a kind of confirmatory evidence for their effort to understand the basic features of human psychology, rather than saying a lot of these features are going to vary across societies. So let's develop ideas and theories that help us understand how and why there's variation across time and space. I've been trying to start this field of psychology called historical psychology, where we can use texts and other kinds of data sources to infer mental states of people in the past. We can track psychology through space and time. Some psychologists are interested, but it's still really hard to move the field off of its basic foundation. The other thing is, psychologists and other economists, too, don't spend enough time studying how people actually live their lives. So much work these days is done through the internet, and people collect data on psychology through the internet or these large questionnaires that people do, but to really understand how and why our minds are shaped in particular ways, I think you need to do a lot of observational and ethnographic data by living with people and seeing what the challenges of their lives are, what they spend time on, and what problems they need to solve. There's very little of that.

SPENCER: With regard to direct observation, do you think of that as the initial phase of research, and then you go from there eventually to doing experiments? Or do you think of that as the key research itself?

JOE: Yeah, I think both. I think you need an ongoing conversation between those two because observation helps you to do your planning, and you might plan experiments or other kinds of ways of collecting data. But then that phase is probably going to send you back and say, what we really need to look at is x, what are children doing, or something like that. So you're moving back and forth between those levels.

SPENCER: One challenge I think with online research is a question of generalizability. Maybe you show an effect in some little online experiment, but does that actually affect people in real life in the way that it does in the experiment?

JOE: Yeah, I think that's crucial, and the way I've tried to deal with that is by connecting it to these economically or politically important things. I was mentioning some of our newspaper measures of psychology. We can connect those to things like patents, and we talked about those or things like voting patterns. We talked about moral universalism. That turns out to be a very good predictor of not voting for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Counties that were high on moral universalism didn't tend to go for Donald Trump. These things really do cash out and matter. But it should be part of the enterprise of psychology and other behavioral disciplines to keep making that ecological validity connection because we care about the stuff that matters.

SPENCER: When I look at your work, your body of work, one thing that strikes me is that it seems to use many different types of evidence, whereas a lot of researchers tend to focus much more specialized on specific types of evidence. You bring in things from anthropology, psychology, economics, and so on. Do you view that as a guiding principle of your work?

JOE: Yeah, I think the reason why that emerges, and people mention that a lot, is that I'm a theorist first. I'm starting with an idea, a theory about why something varies. It could be something about human nature. I have lots of ideas that are features of human nature, but other ideas are about cultural variation and aspects of psychology. When you're trying to test a theory, you're just looking for any kind of way of getting data to support or refute that theory that you can find, rather than saying, I'm a social psychologist, experimentalist, and I have to run everything through that machinery.

SPENCER: That's really interesting because if you think about testing a theory that you have, you really just need any kind of evidence where you're much more likely to see it turn out one way if a hypothesis is true than if the hypothesis is false. So whether it comes from economics, anthropology, or psychology, doesn't really matter at the end of the day.

JOE: Yeah. I mean, that's certainly how I view it. I think when you have multiple lines of evidence from those different fields, it really strengthens the case.

SPENCER: Joe, thank you so much for coming on.

JOE: All right, good to chat with you, Spencer.

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