#The weird west series

In a number of places, it looks like Henrich is shoehorning facts into his theory. Henrich goes to great pains to back up with a huge variety of 'data points' and statistics.' Andrew Wilson of The Gospel Coalition dubbed the book 'sweeping, polymathic, counterintuitive, and provocative. In The Week, the book was billed as 'a work of dazzling ambition. Henrich has been described as espousing 'macro- cultural relativism' with the book. While accounts of modern history frequently argue that the Protestant Reformation created individualism and a belief in rule of law, Henrich argues that edicts by the Church that he calls the 'Marriage and Family Program' (MFP) reduced clannishness, making Western Europeans more analytic and individualistic, leading to various intermediating institutions and trust in abstract rules thus, as Henrich argues in the fourth section, 'Birthing the Modern World', the Marriage and Family Program opened the doors for the Reformation, with Protestantism being simply a 'booster shot' (in the author's words) for a process the Catholic Church set in motion. The third section, 'New Institutions, New Psychologies', is about how the Catholic Church and its offshoot, Protestantism, shaped early institutions and psychology, paving the way (in the view of the author) for modern institutions. Uniquely, the author both discusses how present-day institutions shape psychology and seats these processes in an account of the past. More specifically, the author draws on an array of qualitative and quantitative evidence to argue that religious beliefs, impersonal markets, urbanization and competition among voluntary associations like guilds, charter towns, universities and religious orders shifted people's psychology and social lives. The second part of the book, 'The Origins of WEIRD People', provides a comparative political account of how societies have used religion to scale up from families to states. Westerners, according to reviewer Judith Shulevitz, 'identify more as members of voluntary social groups-dentists, artists, Republicans, Democrats, supporters of a Green Party-than of extended clans.”

Henrich also presents a large body of evidence that WEIRD people are more trusting of strangers and more likely to give blood than most humans. Non-Westerners will emphasize family connections and allegiances. Henrich discusses the research of Richard Nisbett suggesting that people in WEIRD cultures think reductively with a focus on personal attributes and intentions, while Asians think holistically with a focus on relationships and situations.

The first part, 'The Evolution of Societies and Psychologies', describes WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) populations 'in broad strokes', according to reviewer Pauline Grosjean. The WEIRDest People in the World has been described as a work of Big History and compared with works such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016).

#The weird west series

More specifically, he argues that a series of Catholic Church edicts on marriage that began in the 4th century undermined the foundations of kin-based society and created the more analytical, individualistic thinking prevalent in western societies. In the book, Henrich explores how institutions and psychology jointly influence each other over time. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous is a 2020 book by Harvard professor Joseph Henrich that aims to explain history and psychological variation with approaches from cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology.