Menu
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
Next in the queue
58
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
63/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Joseph Henrich
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
September 8, 2020
An epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that has profoundly shaped the modern world.
What The Reviewers Say
According to Joseph Henrich, some unknown early church fathers about a thousand years later promulgated the edict: Don’t marry your cousin! Why they did this is also unclear, but if Henrich is right — and he develops a fascinating case brimming with evidence — this prohibition changed the face of the world, by eventually creating societies and people that were WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.
...[an] ambitious theory-of-everything book.
... fascinating.
Henrich was trained as an anthropologist but now describes himself as a 'cultural evolutionist'. In the same way that Darwin’s theory explains how life follows pathways of adaptation via natural selection, cultural evolution proposes that human cultures develop and transmit deep understandings and values across generations. There are many pathways of cultural evolution, Henrich contends, and no single human culture. To better understand the world and Europe’s influence on it, we need to recognise that European culture is, in Henrich’s key acronym, 'weird': western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic.
