This Thursday at 4:30pm in Ruane 105, the Humanities Forum will be hosting Joseph Henrich, Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University
Over the last few decades, a growing body of research has revealed not only substantial global variation along several important psychological dimensions, but also that people from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) are particularly unusual, often anchoring the ends of global psychological distributions. To explain these patterns, I’ll first show how the most fundamental of human institutions—those governing marriage and the family—influence our motivations, perceptions, intuitions and emotions. Then, to explain the peculiar trajectory of European societies over the last two millennia, I lay out how one particular branch of Christianity systematically dismantled the intensive kin-based institutions in much of Latin Christendom, thereby altering people’s psychology and opening the door to the proliferation of new institutional forms, including voluntary associations (charter towns, universities and guilds), impersonal markets, individualistic religions and representative governments. In light of these findings, I close by arguing that the anthropological, psychological and economic sciences should adopt a unified evolutionary approach that considers not only how human nature influences our behavior and societies but also how the resulting institutions, technologies and languages subsequently shape our minds.
Joseph Henrich is currently the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Before moving to Harvard, he was a professor of both Economics and Psychology at the University of British Columbia for nearly a decade, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution. His research deploys evolutionary theory to understand how human psychology gives rise to cultural evolution and how this has shaped our species’ genetic evolution. Using insights generated from this approach, Professor Henrich has explored a variety of topics, including economic decision-making, social norms, fairness, religion, marriage, prestige, cooperation and innovation. He’s conducted long-term anthropological fieldwork in Peru, Chile and in the South Pacific, as well as having spearheaded several large comparative projects. In 2004 he won the Presidential Early Career Award for young scientists, and, in 2009, the Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions bestowed by the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. In 2013-14, Dr. Henrich held the Peter and Charlotte Schoenenfeld Faculty Fellowship at NYU’s Stern School of Business. In 2018, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology awarded him the Wegner Prize for Theoretical Innovation. From 2010 to 2019, Dr. Henrich was a senior fellow in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in the Institutions, Organizations and Growth group and he became a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2021. In 2016, he published The Secret of Our Success (Princeton) and in 2020, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous (FSG).
