In Episode 4 of the series Joseph Henrich and Rufus Pollock continue on the Culture Evolution conversation.

In the second part of the conversation, continuing on directly from episode 3, Rufus Pollock and Joe Henrich discuss the implications of cultural evolution for modern challenges. They explore the potential for intentional experimentation in creating cultural norms that promote trust, cooperation, group cohesion and a sense of community and belonging. 

Rufus and Joe touch upon the idea that Western societies might be running on the fumes of values and norms that were cultivated by historical religious practices. They discuss the need to find ways to renew and revitalize these values, potentially by experimenting with intentional communities that incorporate elements of shared meaning, trust-building, ritual and cooperation. The talk moves on to discuss intentional communities and suggest that by allowing a variety of intentional communities to form and observing which ones thrive, societies could potentially find ways to address challenges and promote positive cultural evolution.

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About Joseph Henrich

Joseph Henrich is a Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is author of several books, most recently 'The Weirdest People in the World' and 'The Secret of Our Success'. His research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making and culture, and includes topics related to cultural learning, cultural evolution, culture-gene coevolution, human sociality, prestige, leadership, large-scale cooperation, religion and the emergence of complex human institutions.

About Rufus Pollock

Rufus Pollock is an entrepreneur, activist and author. He has founded several for-profit and nonprofit initiatives including Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Datopian. His book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age. Previously he has been the Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Shuttleworth and Ashoka Fellow. A recognized global expert on the information society, he has worked with G7 governments, IGOs like the UN, Fortune 500s as well as many civil society organizations. He holds a PhD in Economics and a double first in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Find out more about his work on his website: ⁠rufuspollock.com⁠.

Further Reading

The WEIRDest People in the World - Professor Joseph Henrich, Korey Jackson, et al.

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter - Professor Joseph Henrich

Transcript

Taken directly from Otter.ai with only minor edits. If you would like to support with editing the transcript get in touch

SUMMARY KEYWORDS societies, trust, group, cultural evolution, world, survey, create, people, norms, community, question, culture, big, kinds, happen, competition, cultural, sense, tracking, today

SPEAKERS Rufus Pollock, Joe Henrich

Rufus Pollock 00:00 I want to know, one quote from your book, I think this really struck me, which is that I think I want to come back to you now, which is this term, even ontogenesis for the dynamic between culture entrepreneurs and, and institutions, and the science group. So in considering this, I'm quoting you, but you said, keep in mind that intergroup competition and cultural evolution act on the entire psychological Institute's Package, which includes all these avenues into our heads. Strong food sharing norms, for example, may guarantee that fewer people experience acute food shortages as children or infants, thereby avoiding the long term psychological shifts induced by that such shocks. That is, the evolution of social norms that create well functioning social safety nets ensures that a smaller percentage of children will experience the stressful nutritional deficits that trigger changes in their lifelong impulsivity, self control and response to stress. At the level of the community, these induced psychological shifts may improve the functioning of certain kinds of institutions such as banking credit organizations, that some institutions make that may spread, in part because they aren't genetic, the shape of populations, psychology. So I'm just trying to trace the richness of this thinking through which is I got some kind of cool norms, which were cultural innovation. Maybe not even a deep genetic level, but you're saying that the what I want us to say like genetic change, but like ontogenetic change, which is eyes, when Rufus came into the world, I was a tiny baby, maybe I've got my genes, but if I experience for example, severe food shortage in my early childhood, my childhood that we now know, that affects how I will be for the rest of my life, my being rooted From my Auntie genetic coming into the work being is influenced by that. And so what you're saying is that this by having these cultural norms, you have a population, not even genetically different, in this case, but Auntie genetically different, who are more safe and secure, they haven't experience stress, therefore less impulsive, just to summarize that paragraph, I'm just trying to follow it through, and therefore they're more trusting. And this will create a more fertile ground for like banking and credit institutions, which are classic, massive public good, that allow us to finance organized create enterprise and so on. So this kind of this kind of these kinds of loops. are, I mean, where are we inside to explore these kinds of chain that those kind of rich onto genetic pathways of where like cultural norms change the way of being of a group, which then allow new kinds of organization

Joe Henrich 02:45 to happen? Right, right. And then that can affect the success of the of the groups that adopt that. So you might adopt sharing? I think, well, that's not gonna have a big effect. But because it shifts people's psychology allows you to develop better institutions than you would otherwise, then you can out compete groups that, that don't do that that don't have, for example.

Rufus Pollock 03:06 Right. And that's like one example. I mean, I think one I just want to bring up also, I don't know whether it's seen in the book, which we haven't touched on, I thought was the effective polyandry. You also mentioned quite a bit in the book that when people have multiple wives, this as a whole, this creates a whole like, group of have nots, basically men who don't have partners, and that affects their risk taking violence and other kinds of behavior versus other society. Could you say a bit about that example as well?

Joe Henrich 03:38 Yeah, yeah,

Rufus Pollock 03:39 it's polygyny. And so ology, sorry, pulling up, polyandry. polygyny, pardon me.

Joe Henrich 03:44 So the easiest way to think about this is imagine a world where you have equal numbers of men and women. And if you know, if one, if there's one man, one woman, then you end up everybody gets a mate. But if you imagine now, some of the women prefer or forced to either way works to marry higher status males, then you end up with this growing pool of low status unmarried men who can't get into the marriage and mating market, or they have to take big risks in order to get into the game, they have to generate enough wealth and this could involve crime, or it could lead them to substances or other kinds of personal abuses. So by enforcing monogamy, you actually and people don't like the economic language, but you effectively redistribute women so that men who otherwise wouldn't have a chance to be fathers and husbands can get into the marriage and mating market. And there's good reason to think that this has hormonal effects, in the sense that when men marry and then when they have their first children in monogamous societies, they have declines in testosterone. I mean, they had now have a stake in the future with a with a child right? So they have a reason to kind of stay around and make sure they can can be a father there have high paternity certainty, because it's a monogamous society. Whereas in the world where you have polygyny, you have These guys taking risks in order to get into the meeting and marriage market. And you essentially don't even enlist a big chunk of your men as fathers and husbands. So they just do this this pool which caused problems.

Rufus Pollock 05:13 And so the point this to go to the story, so a cultural norm about monogamy versus polygyny shifts the well, it has this big effect on the outcome of people who have partners or don't have partners, which leads to a basically a more stable, more harmonious society in a way where people have more of a stake in the future, or at least more of everyone has a stake in the future. And we think that that could have significant effects, again, on the functioning of societies in a variety of other ways. Yeah,

Joe Henrich 05:49 yeah, that's the idea. And so I mean, there's lots of interesting correlational data and kind of ways to look at that. One data set that I really like is doesn't come from a polygynous situation, but it's a, it's a different situation that creates a similar effect. And that's the one child policy in China. So China begins limiting families to only having one child. And in China, there's a bias to have males because of the patrilineal patriarchal system. So this means that beginning in the late 70s, different provinces of China begin increasing their sex ratio of males, they're basically creating that excess pool of males that are going to have trouble finding mates because there's more males than females. And then what you see is that later, 18 years later, China's crime rate begins going up, as in the provinces that first implemented the policy, because they were the first ones to have this excess of males. And then those guys cause problems, because they are not fathers and husbands and don't have a stake in the future. Haven't had the psychological shift that goes along with that. So it's an interesting way of testing me.

Rufus Pollock 06:57 So they keep going round this way. But I now when it comes to section, we talked a bit about potential implications, and particularly about I guess, we could say conscious cultural evolution, or, like cultivating cultural evolution. So a lot of these things happen by chance. What clearly we're saying like in the story is like, maybe there's cultural evolution that even forms being that forms, institutions that then form in a big loop, start forming culture, and so on again, and one example, here is the West. So I just want to maybe work something through actually, that we'd haven't emphasized about that is one of the things that came out in the west, it's really unusual for the level of kind of Stranger trust is, I mean, how would you put it like outgroup? Trust? Is that correct? Could you just tell listeners, what is what is that? What does that feature? How is the West unusual in that school?

Joe Henrich 07:48 Yeah. So I mean, the idea the way I like to think about it, is this the trust in that you would have in somebody you meet for the first time who you don't have any, any particular affiliation with or not of your ethnic group? How much would you trust them? And, you know, what we find around the world across all societies is not surprisingly, people tend to trust members of their family members, that or ethnic group, people from the same neighborhood more than they trust these more distant foreigners, people from another religion, people from another country. So the real question is, is how close are those so can you know, Can Can you make that smaller? And what we find is that, you know, the societies, the Western descend societies tend to have less distrust of these more socially distant individuals than societies with intensive kinship, where there can often be a really large divide between, you know, this, this in group and the out group, the people you meet, you know, you've met for the first time. And so then this just varies around the world and how much the out group is distrusted, essentially,

Rufus Pollock 08:47 I think in your in your book, like Germany comes like, number one of the world like or close to you for the number of the rate at which they trust outgroup people? And just to check, does this does this involve a reduction in in group trust? Or is it more just it's leveling up? Of like trusting strangers leveling

Joe Henrich 09:04 up? Yeah. You're just trusting the strangers more, you're not trusting your fan and stuff less? Right? Small down, and it knows that,

Rufus Pollock 09:13 but it's mostly up. And one just want to emphasize this, maybe for myself and for the listeners. And I kind of ask you, Joe is that example where outgroup trust is just kind of massive for building like markets or trade. I mean, you talk about this quite a lot in your book. But I mean, trade is really hard by default. Right?

Joe Henrich 09:34 I mean, and you know, we, we have to trust strangers all the time. And I think people often don't even appreciate how often we trust strangers, and even just, I mean, I was just traveling and in some in lots of places, they have built a wall around their house, because they don't want outsiders to come in. Whereas I'm sitting in a house where, you know, I have glass windows all over my house, and those are very easy to break if someone wanted to come in. So there's kind of even a trust in this just The basic way you organize a neighborhood,

Rufus Pollock 10:02 right? I mean, I remember the example I felt was even extreme for Europe was I went to Finland, which I think is very interesting society generally in that regard. And, you know, I was like interviewing them about events, they were like, there's a big lake in central Helsinki. And they're like, oh, there are all these, you know, games, you know, like a, you know, tennis rackets or bats, you know, and balls and things and things that go on the water, and these things, and they're like, they're all unlocked, that you can anyone could go in and just use them and no one takes them away or vandalize whatever the thing is. And that's obviously just to emphasize that to ourselves, is this a huge public good, if you don't have that, either those things don't exist, or you have to spend a lot of resources protecting, locking up restricting those things. And there's huge gains, societally, when those things happen. But they're vulnerable to the kind of Prisoner's Dilemma. So why I'm mentioning this is that, that growth in our in our group Trust, which is related to being weird to the psychological differences to the way you see others, the fact that they feel guilty before God, you know, like, you're going to trust someone, if if, you know, if they steal your staff, they're going to have, you know, they're gonna have to be tortured, you know, recurrent rush calendar calls, you know, in Crime and Punishment, only really exist in him. And he's weird. I mean, I know he's in Russia, but he's obviously tormented by guilt about murdering the woman. This, you're going to be a lot happier in a society where, you know, recursion, akov is going to be so tortured by Gil, that he's going to go turn himself in, then in society where people, you know, don't feel that they made me feel shame or so there may be other sanctions. But I'm just saying, if I understand it, this was, by complete chance and accent, something that potentially explains a lot of why the West had markets, the scale they did when they had trade, the scale they did, why a lot of these things that were there to allow, like early capitalism, early democracy to flourish. Is that is that my reading corrective? Like some of what you?

Joe Henrich 12:00 Absolutely, absolutely, I mean, there's lots of institutions like financial markets, where you make investments, say in a joint stock company, that really seems to be influenced by the amount of impersonal trust that societies have. So even if you look at Italy, right, the provinces in Italy that have high levels of impersonal trust, people just holding income constant, invest more in stocks, and less and other kinds of things. Just because you have to have trusted innocent strangers, or you're just putting your money into the ether, sometimes it feels like

Rufus Pollock 12:29 so my question now is, we're at a moment in human history, humans, civilization on this planet, where we obviously face some very big, collective action problems and public goods, when we have faced the climate crisis. We face challenges, in a way because we encounter the other where we need to trust both across countries, but even within countries in a way, maybe that we that we haven't before. What do you think that we could learn from any of this in terms of, if we were, if we were design, if we were going back? You know, we were, we were like the church elders, and they had actually had all this intention, they were like, we're going to create this whole program that will, you know, influence the way of being and seeing the world that will be 1000 years later, what would we what kind of things would be encouraging? What kind of things do you think we know about that encourage, you know, maybe even greater trust or compassion, or understanding or whatever, what features would enable us to, to address the kind of challenges that we face in the world today?

Joe Henrich 13:33 Yeah, um, well, so I've been trying to look at this in my lab, at the variation, say, among us counties in this stuff, and consistent with the ideas that are in the weirdest people in the world, something like mitigating shocks seems to be important. So places in the US that have been hit by more shocks tend to be tighter in terms of their trust circle, and less moral universalistic, which is one of the psychological features of weirdness and seeing morals as applying to everybody as opposed to some small subgroup. And so if you're able to mitigate shocks, you can just like we're talking about with the, with the food, you know, the social safety nets, but also you have to mitigate climate shocks and mitigate economic shocks. Because these things seem to have this tightening effect on trust and more universalism. Another one, which is non intuitive for people is in the book, I talk about the effects of intergroup competition. And this is an interesting study by Patrick Francoise and his colleagues economist from the University of British Columbia, in which one of the ideas in cultural evolution is that groups compete and you need to be more cooperative in order to survive and at the level of companies or firms. This might be facts about your corporate culture or how you motivate people to cooperate, things like that organizational structures, but in places where there was more competition amongst firms, people actually got more were trusting over time. Because the you know, the companies were doing things, they had to be more cooperative in order to compete. So they were generating more cooperative employees. And so their interest that and other data suggests that there is this effect of making sure you have some competition amongst firms. And that's something to be wary of, like in the US today with these, you know, really large companies that often don't have that much competition. So that could be a non intuitive way to increase trust, have a bit more competition, you mean, in a way yeah,

Joe Henrich 15:27 have more competition, you're generating intergroup competition, you can generate too much, right. But so there's a there's an optimal level. But so this is this gets to another basic idea of cultural evolution, which is that it's often difficult to see all the implications for these policy adjustments. So you always want to take what I think of as a Darwinian approach, and do lots of little experiments, and, and pay attention to see what how the outcome is, and then pick the best and go from there. I mean, this this was something that I was always

Rufus Pollock 15:59 wondering about, was, what? What do we know about actually doing those kind of expensive, I remember, like, I think they shine at MIT use, you know, the kind of thought of, you know, corporate culture. But saying that there were one point, experimentally get groups of people together, we obviously were very similar. And then like, kind of allow them be for two weeks, like, have no, they have to kind of norm store and come up with, what do we know about these tweaks? And how, maybe, even if we're not doing it intentionally, but we're just tracking people trying out different staff? How do we know, you know, how, what would a program like that look like? Where we were, like, you know, the example I have in my mind says, is an example we say, one area that you mentioned, the book, I'm very interested, let's say religion, I mean, religions, that kind of has a bad name since the Enlightenment in a way. But in fact, you know, group dynamics, group cohesion, all this stuff, it's kind of fundamental, I always say, Joe, that even we don't have a religion, we have a religion right now, which is like materialism, or, you know, whatever we believe, you know, we have faith of some kind in certain things. And you see that during the COVID pandemic, if people don't trust science, for example, no, don't you trust the science? It's not on, you're able to verify yourself, you have to have some kind of a, my, the example I just coming to is like, there are many, many, like retreat centers, or, or even youth youth, you know, retreats, you know, people go, you know, they might go to the wilderness for a week, or they go out, you know, they go for a month do this, or they, you know, or they're in the scouts, or, and we just have no, you don't really know what happened, like, you know, maybe some of these programs are coming up with little tweaks that are incredibly effective for forming group dynamics. It's so many like, wow, there's obviously huge demand in the business school literature for like, studies of corporate culture. I don't know, I my impression has never been that how systematic is like, we're not at a point, we had like a really systematic set of measures of culture, we go out to like, hundreds of corporations, like almost have like, No, we kind of regularly are able to kind of sample their I don't know, their slack chat and like, be like, Oh, this is how the culture has evolved here. You know, we're really like infancy watching culture, develop or evolve in real time? And seeing what learning what works in the most positive sense, like what, what allows people to feel more safe and secure. What allowed what kind of environments? What what is too much, you just mentioned this point that, you know, that it's like growth as a human being needs safety and challenge. You know, we always think this of kids. So if we just, if we just cuddle all our kids totally and protect them from everything in the world, that they weren't grew up. At the same time, we obviously don't want to know, here you go on the crocodile pen. There's so so what do you think would be exciting in that kind of, you could wave a wand that you had, what what would you what kind of studies would you like to be doing? Or like, what

Joe Henrich 18:52 would you mean? Well, two levels, one at the level of government, state governments or national governments could have explicit experimental programs where different districts or regions or counties, try different variants of organizational structure or property rights or property rules, any number of things, companies could try different managing strategies, different ways to develop cooperative social norms and have different parts of some large company implement these different strategies, potentially, you could crowdsource the strategies, you could say, you know, we're gonna have a competition the way they have programming competitions, you know, suggest ways we can organize this feature of of our corporate life, or this feature of our state law or whatever. And then, you know, you want to try it out and then see if it starts working. And then if one place that seems to be working really well, you know, try it in the next place and see if it changes things there. So you know, we know how to do randomized control experiments now. We just need to use them I think more and we need to crowdsource it because, you know, it's often hard for people who are actually in it to think outside the box but if you You know, these competitions seem to be people seem to be interested in like to do them, you know, have people design, you know, a different way of doing something.

Rufus Pollock 20:09 And, in particular, I mean, this question, I guess, is one of the things that

Rufus Pollock 20:18 is noticeable about the past was it was highly connected to religion, this example the way, you know, the weirdest people that Well, I mean, many of these features came from religious, even today, things that we might need, which is to feel fellowship with someone all across the world, or someone else who's dealing with climate, the impacts very directly of climate crisis, but I'm not, you know, I don't know, I live in, I live in Scotland or whatever, I live in Canada right now, and Canada is being affected now. But, you know, there's how those kind of things that like nourish compassion or deep connection with others, these do go back often things that were cultivated in spiritual religious traditions. Do you do I mean, do you think? I mean, I guess, this provocative way, but you know, there's something that happened, obviously, in the West and trajectory, maybe deeper, but famous, you know, Weber, like, you know, the magics, getting out of the world with the credible scientific successes, there was also this kind of materialism. Do you think there's an aspect where we somehow need to find, you know, something, again, if we're going to, like rise up to the challenges that we face now of? So it might not be a religion, a traditional sense, but something that, again, speaks to these deeper aspects of our human connection?

Joe Henrich 21:36 Yeah, I mean, I, I do think that is missing. And I especially think related to that, that these successful societies seem to have, they seem to be hierarchical in the sense that their people often feel bonded to a smaller community, of face to face individuals that are embedded in some larger community. And they, you know, you can have trust in strangers, but you still have this local community where you know, people know your name, and you know, you really have a sense of community, right? This small group, this interdependent group of people who you can rely on to babysit your kid if you need it, or something like that. I think we need to find ways to cultivate those and figure out and religion might provide some tools for doing that. So things like rituals, shared sense of meaning, those kinds of things can really bring people together, you know, the thinking of kind of community. Yes, yes.

Rufus Pollock 22:32 I mean, the joke is I sometimes have is that in the West, sometimes we're running on fumes, you know what I mean? There's, there's an aspect where we, we are training on a very high trust, actually very moralistic a very high morality, attitude, but without the thing that created it. No, it's like the tanks empty. And I mentioned that just simply, you know, growing up and just seeing nihilism, you know, sighs my failure, people would do things, you know, be like, I remember once a friend of mine, just ripping apart a rose when I was a teenager, and I was like, to him, I said, Why are you doing that? You know, it's like, why not? The rose as a whole is more beautiful. Well, there's no right or wrong anymore, you know, and if you've read Bret Easton Ellis, there's this less other viewer like less than zero, even American Psycho, I think it's a very compelling story about a lostness, or David Foster Wallace, who's a more famous, I don't know if you know, like, infinite Jesse died, tragically died as he killed himself. But I think one of the great writers of recent American Memory in this kind of sense of lostness, right, of, you know, where is the moral value anymore? You know, what, what's the what's the meaning of things, that there's no purpose to life? I mean, obviously, you know, that there's this very strong sense of that. And I always say that, we, there's, the funny thing is that in underneath as a very strong morals, you know, I think of my father when my father was an atheist in the enemy growing up as a kind of Christian, his parents were very strong Protestants, whatever. And, yeah, he was incredibly moral and like, you know, but in a way, he was like, I can't I don't know why anymore. You know, it's, I'll do all these things. I think we should be like this. But there's no, you know, what's the purpose of life? I don't know. And I think that there's a thing where sometimes the wheels will come off much later than you think just like things have low, slow burn that famous comment of Weber that the magic or that, you know, the magic has gone out of the world, you know, there's an aspect where you feel that in some parts of our psyche, this craving for meaning, or craving for a moral sense, and some of that, unfortunately, I guess, I would say I'm just gonna say first off can get channeled into a kind of reactionary direction, just as I think the lostness that Germans felt after the Second World War. After the First World War, sorry, got channeled, you know, there was a huge loss nurse you know, basically preeminence was getting broken down into that vacuum. We know what when. I just think that this there's something that this point of running on fumes that some of the things that you talk about in your book, we are still benefiting from those. But it's like, you know, yeah, or Looney Tunes, we're running over the cliff. And there's an aspect where something needs to come back in that world to renew ourselves. And I think this point about what's so incredible in the book is, well, it was, and it probably will happen again, my accent, we can maybe be more conscious about seeing what comes in our garden. You know, and I wonder what, you know, or, you know, the other example I had was the I just wonder about is, you know, as the end my point is Taiwanese, you know, is it easier to add individualism into a collective society, or to bring more collectivism back into an individual? So it is, if there's a point where maybe individualism has swung too far, you know, Bowling Alone? What do you think when those kinds of fun, you know, do you do?

Joe Henrich 25:44 So I guess the thing that I think that would be a productive line would be to try to use a selection variation with lots of different intentional communities, you know, trying different ways to bring people together well, or whether it's the shared meaning, harvesting elements of religious ritual, using meditation, and why don't know which of these variants is going to work? I know, they all seem to have reasons to think they might, and just let a lot let 1000 Flowers bloom and then, you know, see which ones spread and which ones people like being a part of and build that kind of local sense of community that doesn't that still morally universalistic, but gives people that kind of warm hug feeling that you get from being in a community where everybody knows you, and some people have your back. And

Rufus Pollock 26:28 so with that, just to say, if you're doing a research group, this is absolutely fascinating, when we'd start like tracking the practice, what I call the what we could call the ecology of practices. I think that's, I don't know, what do you call alone in the actual discipline? Like, because obviously, culture, that means the classic challenge, right culture, there's culture at multiple levels, right? There's the culture of a town, there's a culture of a nation and so on. But or, you know, people could call it a mean Plex. But this I like this, the set of practices, rituals, or beliefs, views and values, would that be a thing to start looking at different intentional communities around the world or different regions and actually tracking that? Because we could kind of learn what works maybe in a way that would be as you're saying, I think it's not that maybe we would design anything, it would be more about like looking at a garden and being like, oh, that plant is doing really well, let's give it more water, maybe we can learn what it was about that plant or the soil there, that was really great. Would that be a project where you started to like survey, those kind of more tentative communities, where that's things will, will bubble up just like the Christians were the alternative community of the Roman Empire.

Joe Henrich 27:29 And then, I mean, the one thing that I think could potentially be a service would be to, once that data begins to accumulate, and then groups could look at that data and see and get ideas, basically. So there could be cross fertilization. So group was pretty successful, but is looking for ways to, you know, build a bigger sense of meaning or get people to cooperate more notices that some other group is doing this practice. And then they they pull that practice into their

Rufus Pollock 27:55 approach, that kind of thing. And what we just asked what kind of if you were thinking about this? What kind of things would you like? What kind of what kind of features? Would you track of culture? And what kind of standardized? I don't know, surveys or tools, like how, you know, it doesn't need to be an ethnographic survey? Or are there now like, more things where we could be like, okay, you know, here's a checklist of, you know, how would you go about this kind of, you know, effort? Yeah, I mean,

Joe Henrich 28:27 well, I would look at different while one would be the organizational forms, governments governance in the community, recruiting strategies, norms about interaction. So you're looking for things that give people a shared sense of meaning, or give people the sense that they're in the same boat norms for you know, about how they treat each other underlying ideological beliefs, of course, any supernatural beliefs, shared practices, so if they're, if they're meditation, or they have dances, or they share food together, all of these things have already been associated with sort of internal process reality.

Rufus Pollock 29:06 The reason I'm also asking is I also wonder about whether this is something of a U shape here. Problem. What I mean by that is, so this is an area I mean, there's some study right this I mean, this this work on kibbutz is by the the gentleman at heart at Stanford, right? This is economist at Stanford, I think you probably remember it's I think it's this

Joe Henrich 29:27 call the name but yeah, yeah.

Rufus Pollock 29:30 Because I was very interested converters as a good example, right? Which ones made it which ones didn't? What can we find out? The question I have is one of the challenges that we have at the moment. The icon is like I want to play my music when I want problem. Know that the challenge that you have is that let's study let's be intentional communities and religious it's what they do is they kind of you either quite individualistic essentially, or you're quite collectivist, if you will, I mean It's trying to be in the middle is hard, but we kind of want to people want to be in the middle. This is one of my questions. Is it? Is it actually possible? Or are there just like two equilibrium states where you're either pretty hardcore, like we really are like we do. You know, we're really quite religious, for example, you know, we all do these practices, we believe in this quite strong thing. Or like, everyone does their own thing, which is kind of the other end of the spectrum. You know, yes, I live, I live in a tract house next to you. And we need to mow the lawn. And there's like some, maybe stuff about how we maintain the drive, but kind of I do my own thing, I paint my house the way I want to paint it. What what stable equilibrium and they're in in between?

Joe Henrich 30:35 Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. And I would love to see some research on that. But I mean, so I think the U shape is one plausible hypothesis. But it could be that there are particular configurations, maybe, maybe most of it doesn't work. But there's a couple of configurations that do work. And the key would be finding, finding that plus that small plateau.

Rufus Pollock 30:54 Exactly, that would be really fascinating. Write something that would appeal if it was on the steps to somewhere or to something new, because the sense that it is simply someone else, you know, I I have you to put about this sentence into the great success of the West, you put it as individuation becoming individuals, this was this incredible victory that people don't really understand if they live in the West, please take it for granted, but in a way, and at the same time, we there's also a great value in kind of the more collectivist, you know, thing. I mean, again, you know, the example I have to have was, again, as I mentioned, Taiwan, but you know, Taiwan had no problem enforcing a lot of rules about vaccination. I was there right before the pandemic, it was incredibly inefficient. Whereas compared to like, I'm from the UK, and somebody said, France and others say it's much more complicated. But what we want is we're looking for something that somehow is novel, it isn't like, we want to go back to a tribal society, per se, we want to learn we want to take things from learnings or things that might inspire us, but we're trying to, in a way to transcend and include take something from many sides, just as the Catholic Church somehow did something kind of almost novel. The problem is, you don't know what that is, but we can be we can be looking for it.

Joe Henrich 32:08 I think that I mean one of the it's the collectivism thing, I think, shields things, most existing approaches to collectivism are really kin based collectivism, yes, one is non kin based collectivism, where we were voluntarily joining the group because we, we want to, and we, there's something about that group we like, and you know, then we can mutually ensure each other, and we can have a lot of the benefits of collectivism without creating something that essentially becomes a clan, right?

Rufus Pollock 32:36 Yes, yes. So I mean, in a way, we should be very fair, you're saying the West as well, actually there was it was incredibly collective relative to human history. monasteries, but even even like MASH conscription, I mean, we had people in the first one in England, it I think conscription was bought in in 1916, I will get my dates wrong at this point. But for two years, you know, Britain for the first world war on pure volunteers, in theory going off to serve because they should because of King and Country, for good or ill, but it's like, that's an incredible level of collective self sacrifice. And the question, so what you do is, if you were, you'd be on the lookout for, you know, novel, it could be novel companies, it could be novel things. And you know, of any early early warning system, I think, early early cultural innovation system we caught, I don't know, is there anything out there like this yet, like some kind of survey or like infrastructure for serving these kinds of things, and like sharing learnings that might be coming in from the kind of from the kind of frontier of cultural innovation?

Joe Henrich 33:35 Yeah, you know, I don't know of anything. I would love to know about anything. But yeah, that sounds like a great. I mean, if it doesn't exist, it sounds like a great thing to build.

Rufus Pollock 33:44 Yes. I mean, right. My other job is that me because I did stuff in medicine is that, you know, there's this huge untapped potential for randomization, in a way, like many people go to the doctor and they get it, you know, they maybe they get prescribed something very simple, that that is the safe way around, we could randomize a lot more in life than we do, and learn a lot from like mass randomization at the level of the primary care doctor. And my point was here is that we have, as far as I can tell, you know, I live in very close to one of the largest monasteries in Europe. And I asked them, you know, have you ever administered an in an in and out survey? Or like, just impact? No, I think there's this huge untapped potential for us to learn from these kinds of communities that we that we, you know, that we don't we are not doing at the moment in any way, because we don't have any data. What as we come to, and is there anything else you'd like to get to share about where you think maybe your research? Where's your research going? You hope in the next five or 10 years, that's last, but I'd like to ask you, Joe. It's like, what do you see as the kind of next frontier but what's your what's your focus of the research, your and your research team and others in the field? At the moment? What do you think are the like the big unsolved or what open questions that you want to examine at the moment,

Joe Henrich 34:57 or that? I mean, one of the big things to work on my lab is trying to figure out ways to measure that dark matter we talked about better. So you know, there's a growing body of digitized texts. And so in my lab, we have US newspapers going back a couple of centuries. And then we're also compiling a repository of Latin texts. And if we can figure out ways to analyze the text, using large language models, or a variety of looking at the way words are embedded with, among other words, we might be able to measure features of psychology like trust and analytic thinking and individualism from these texts. And if we can get that, then maybe we can see more of the of the dark matter, across history, I want to be able to plot changes in features of psychology across centuries. So that's kind of the big game there. And then the other thing that I'm working on is innovation. So pursuing this idea of the collective brain, and looking at all the different ways that you can get people to come together to share ideas and create recombinations. And the way that in different historical periods, you've had these flourishing of innovations, trying to figure out why you get these flourish things. And then why they peter out inevitably, how do you get sustained growth that doesn't require the constant moving around different innovation centers? I think at the core of that, is this question of recombination trust, getting the right level of competition, those kinds of things? Okay, and what

Rufus Pollock 36:26 what other questions are asked, which related to the innovation, also a culture innovation environment? is we have these kinds of surveys now of that, you know, the European Value Survey or the world, so the world value or social social survey, or the GSS? I think in the US, are there any like, Mike, you know, surveys, whether it be my volunteer to participate in them, but where we could connect large scale data on a much more individuals over time, and see value change? So for example, you know, what, you know, what happened over the next 10 years? You know, is there any, are there any projects like that around the world where people are saying, okay, you know, what can we see always, always at some small area of Stockholm, where we notice that like, Oh, my God, everyone's thinking differently in this way, or they're talking? That kind of thing? Maybe I'll totally opt in, it could be, which would obviously create selection bias, but you know, is there anything like that out there, where we're able to see kind of large scale cultural evolution in real time or values change and, and how they diffuse? Because the obvious point that it was making me thing when you talked about these Latin texts is to see the diffusion of an idea that's already been done in some of these large corporate attacks. But value diffusion, you know, there's famous a smoking diffusion or whatever in networks. Is that something that people look out, you're interested in what other people you know, look at

Joe Henrich 37:47 definitely interested in. And they're the datasets that you mentioned, there are some datasets in Europe, which are panels in the sense that the same individuals are, yes, could be useful. In fact, that's one of the datasets that Patrick Francoise and his colleagues used to look at how trust changes when people change jobs, and went from more competitive jobs to less competitive jobs and less competitive sectors, and vice versa. So that's an example of looking at how competition affected a bank affected your trustworthiness. Unfortunately, most of the large scale surveys aren't of the panel structure, they don't track the time, they just sort of resample from the same geographic locations. So I mean, that gives you something but it's not as good. So we good to have more panel datasets.

Rufus Pollock 38:31 And would that that would always require a statistical edge, you know, you can have imagine a world where maybe Now there might be some people who opt in to be over time, seen over a decade. Because I mean, that was just to come back to this point, you said about alternatives. And if you're looking for where the culture of tomorrow is coming from, you'd imagine it will pop up in some small area unexpectedly. And then And then, and then somehow spread, right? Because it's successful.

Joe Henrich 38:58 Right, right. And so and you might be, you might be watching several different centers where different stuff is happening. And then the way you get ahead of it is say, well, we can take some stuff from this guy and some stuff from these these populations and put it together, right? Yeah, just so you can speed up cultural evolution by keeping an eye on the entire space.

Rufus Pollock 39:17 Yes. And so if you today, what if like, someone someone said to you, here's like, I don't know, probably $10 million wouldn't be enough. But what how would you? I mean, what would be the kind of like, you know, I don't know, the sellotape and string way of tracking that, like, if you're interested the moment like where's cultural innovation happening in the world? You know, would you look would you focus on looking at religions, you look at Would you look at fate, you know, online data, would you look at Twitter, where would you look to kind of see these kinds of things popping up?

Joe Henrich 39:44 Yeah, I mean, if you could get people to take surveys that would be really useful, but I'd want to combine, you know, online behavior with some, some amount of survey panel data. You can you can deduce a lot if you people will allow you to track them on Lions see what they do. Now have to think about other other ways, but those would be the big ones would be tracking people online and getting people to engage in panel animal surveys.

Rufus Pollock 40:13 Our last question, which is what about unusual populations to other like? No, I've often seen if you were looking at cultural examples today, they're on us. You know, I always said, I don't know, Finland, Finland, the Nordics in general, but Finland is this kind of unusual outlier, obviously, Israel, the Basque Country, New Zealand. Are there any other of these examples you've seen, and I mentioned in a previous one. The gentleman who wrote and forget, my name is Marie escaping me. David Hackett, Fischer is the CIO, who wrote Albion seed, which is I think it's an example of cultural transplantation and the long, in a way, the Dark Matter story, but in a much more historical version. But with some good empirical data, this example of New Zealand and the US, the New Zealand is also found that New Zealand us are both founded by English speaking colonists or settlers, voluntary settlers. And yet they have really different political and cultural attitudes. For example, the example here's a book that was done SATs that basically, in the 19th century, liberalism to the New Zealand limit, land accumulation, they explicitly pass laws to basically limit land accumulation, which otherwise had to happen under capitalism, where people just land, you know, particularly in the bad times capital, land gets aggregated, you end up with these huge land barons, and this is a problem. And the US didn't do that, basically. And other examples, like, you know, New Zealand support school kinds of like insurance, Mutual Insurance, that's basically public goods like that works, whereas the US doesn't relatively. And these are two examples of obviously Protestant countries already, you know, similar, you know, Catholic, but yet with these largely different, like political or social outcomes today, and in his story, it's kind of basically the first group were like Liberty seeking, fleeing, like state persecution. So they have a very big obsession with not having too much state interference. And that limits that being the state where New Zealanders were basically obsessed with economic inequality, most of the people who settled in New Zealand and right, essentially, were fleeing

Rufus Pollock 42:14 the Industrial Revolution and the bad aspects of the Industrial Revolution. And they also did a variety of things, but basically was a much more like, lower middle class, if you want to put it that way. Because society was everyone was like, homogenous in this way. I just met, are there any of these? Like, you know, there's this other group called Blue Zones? I don't know, if you know, which is about where people live a long time. But are there these cultural places where you'd be like, Oh, wow, you know, this site, these current these countries are there even in the US, they like some kind of like special zones, which just seemed like really unusual for whatever reason, and highly performing it in some or other way. Where would you think of on that list? If you were like looking at I mean, Costa Rica is another one, which is also the list of people living a long time, but there seem to be unusual region in the world, like the Finns are completely impoverished after the Second World War, you know, invaded by the Russian and the Germans, whatever. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Henrich 43:06 I mean, that's the kind of that would be a fun project to, you know, cut, try to look for places that are, say hi, and trust and generalized trust and high in, you know, moral universalism or something in places you might not expect it or that are discontinuous with surrounding regions or something like that. Right, what's going on there? Like?

Rufus Pollock 43:27 What would you what do you know of any of that? Just that's it? Like, that's kind of where would you Where would you say like, cultural dark matter was particularly dense in the world? In some ways that might be unexpected?

Joe Henrich 43:39 Yeah, I mean, I haven't I haven't done that will be interesting to do it. So I'm not sure I'm not sure where that where we might see that.

Rufus Pollock 43:45 Well, I just want to say, then, at this point, just thank you so much, Joe, for your time, today and others. I think, this area of cultural evolution. Cultural ology is I think it's one of the disciplines of the 21st century. I mean, that's my, my uninformed and are not very, but I think it's really a breakthrough area in the world today. And so thank you so much. He's one of the leaders in that area. I know, there are many colleagues you've referenced. So to acknowledge that we've got to talk to you. And I hope that life itself we will be doing an almost like an online series, we've got this podcast but other material that we'll put up about this, to educate people because I think this is an area that really is underappreciated in in its implication example, for policy making, for for for companies for many others. You know, there's always lip service paid to culture but this is like transformative work in its scientific and empirical underpinning. So I just want to thank you again, for life itself for my for myself for your time today and your contribution