Joseph Henrich and the Emergence of a (Rigorous) Culturology
In this episode of the Life Itself Podcast, Rufus Pollock sits down with Professor Joseph Henrich to discuss the study of cultural evolution. Joe gives an insight into how the discipline has emerged and the interdisciplinary nature of the field. He discusses some examples of areas of interest within the field, such as understanding innovation and institutional evolution. Rufus and Joe finish with a brief consideration of where on the "cultural evolutionary tree" we are today, laying the ground for a potential future follow up.
About Joseph Henrich
Joe 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.
Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, economics, anthropology, culture, psychology, cultural evolution, economists, cultural, institutions, thinking, practices, ideas, preferences, book
SPEAKERS
Rufus Pollock, Joe Henrich
Rufus Pollock 00:00
Welcome to this new episode of the life Itself Podcast. I have the privilege today of being joined by Professor Joe Henrich. He is the Ruth Moore Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. And he is the author of several books, most recently, two widely read popular books, The Weirdest People in the World, and The Secret of Our Success. He has had a unique career in many ways, because his trajectory has taken him across, as actually being a tenured professor, across multiple disciplines; in anthropology, in economics, in psychology, and human evolutionary biology. It's an absolute privilege to have you on the show, Joe, thank you so much for joining us. And I wonder if we could just start by you telling us a little bit about that unique career trajectory? Like what what got you interested in this? What motivated you and what was your kind of path a little bit?
Joe Henrich 01:01
Yeah, so first, it's good to be with you. So when I was an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, I went to study aerospace engineering. And in my first year, I took a course in anthropology. And I was interested in it, but I wasn't ready to give up the engineering. So I was fortunate that Notre Dame had a dual degree programme where you could get a degree in arts and sciences, or arts and letters, and then a degree in engineering. So I have a BA and a BS undergraduate degree, it took five years, but that allowed me to study both anthropology and engineering. I went and did engineering for a few years, working at an undisclosed location in Northern Virginia, and while I was doing that, I was thinking, well, do I want to continue on this path and maybe consider graduate school - I wanted to study space propulsion - or, you know, explore anthropology more and go into that. And so after two years of doing engineering, I quit and moved to California and enrolled in an anthropology programme at UCLA. And then, you know, I wanted to do a science of culture, a science of anthropology. And the professor that I started working with, he had done that too, although it wasn't very fashionable at the time. And as I was working there, I began reading more widely and bringing in tools from other disciplines and just kind of pursuing that. And then I found another professor at UCLA called Robert Boyd and Boyd had kind of been working, you know, he hadn't had students and he was working very much alone, building mathematical models of cultural evolution. So I got really interested in that, and really went from there trying to build an empirical programme around some of the mathematical models that Boyd and his collaborator Pete Richerson had built.
Rufus Pollock 02:49
We'll come to other things. So this is fascinating. I mean, just an aside for me. And I'm gonna interject like I, when I got in, I was an economist for a while, I was interested in the kind of evolution of knowledge and knowledge kind of production in a more formal economic sense. But then I had also come from a mathematical background, I'd studied math, originally. And I got into like branching processes and stuff like that. So I just kind of like, take me back to that part, which you said he kind of had no students, like, why was this? This was kind of rare in anthropology, right, at the time?
Joe Henrich 03:20
Yeah, it was. I mean, this is all public knowledge, I think. UCLA wanted to hire Rob's wife, whose name is Joan Silk, and she's now a renowned primatologist. So it was a very smart hire. But he was a spousal hire that was kind of trailing along. He doesn't have a degree in anthropology. He has a PhD in ecology and an undergraduate in physics. And so he gets hired as the spousal hire. And he's just building these mathematical models, which seems very odd and foreign to all anthropologists, including the people at UCLA. He did work with one guy named Bob Unger, but he wasn't technically his advisor. So I was really his first, you know, advisee-type student. But then, for whatever reason, two years after I kind of showed up on the scene, he brought in two other new students. And then we very quickly began working together. And Richard McElreath, who was my friend from graduate school, is now director of one of the Max Planck institutes.
Rufus Pollock 04:18
Yeah. I also guess what I'm asking is in anthropology, that wasn't common, that approach, which is, I guess, mathematical, and you said, building models of kind of cultural evolution and phylogeny ie what is the kind of tree of of culture. What I would also kind of lead into is, this trajectory that you've then gone on, there has been sort of an explosion in a way in this area. What's driving that and what's kind of cooking, what's evolving? Because, what I would say is very interesting, moments happen obviously, we could kind of almost be a bit meta here, like the evolution of disciplines, just as like cognitive science, which is now kind of a major discipline, which has all these connections, it's partly under psychology, but it brings in other stuff, there are these very fruitful moments when different disciplines come together and something kind of significant and new emerges. Do you feel that kind of thing has been happening over the space of your career in the area you're in?
Joe Henrich 05:22
Yeah, so certainly over the last two decades or a bit longer, there's been an explosion of the field that we now call 'Cultural Evolution', although it didn't have that name until about 2010. And that has brought together psychologists, linguists, economists, anthropologists, and others scattered from around the social sciences. And, you know, now there's a society and a lot of interest, I think, and a lot of publications in general science journals like Nature Human Behaviour. Now, this traces back to work that really began in the late 1970s, where first Cavalli-Sforza and Mark Feldman got together and they wrote a book called Cultural Transmission and Evolution published in 1981. And meanwhile, Boyd and Richerson also began working, they published their first paper on this in 1976, around the same time that Richard Dawkins begins to put the selfish meme idea out there. So there's some kind of interest going on, you know, culture wars are going on, because there are socio biologists who are trying to explain human behaviour with evolution. And then there's people going, Oh, but what about culture, you know, humans are cultural. And what these guys are doing is they're trying to think very systematically about culture and, you know, build models of it, but then also say, this has to flow within some kind of evolutionary model. So Boyd and Richerson really distil all this in their 1985 book, where they assume we're products of natural selection, we're animals, but we're animals who rely heavily on learning from other people and that we have specialised mechanisms in our heads that allow us to, from a young age, learn language and social norms, and how to use tools, and all those kinds of things that we think of as culture. So it seats culture within a broader evolutionary framework, and then allows us to think systematically about where do ethnic groups come from. Well, let's start with humans as learners, and why would you, why would ethnic groups ever pop up? And you can ask questions at the sociological level.
Rufus Pollock 07:23
I guess one question I'm asking there, just to go back, which is, you know, anthropology had, I mean, anthropology is a young discipline. And I don't know, I don't want to make myself foolish, but you know, we're talking 100 years, obviously, there's much stuff older than that, but we're talking 100, a bit over 100 years. But why, like, there's kind of this subdiscipline again, you know, I'm not an anthropologist, but there's culutural anthropology, but this was kind of like that, this hadn't been such, it would be much more qualitative, right? There's something kind of, there's mathematical models, there's then a tendency to want to go test this, you're describing certain things that have been coming up, part of that might be you're saying is just genetics had got more rigorous and got, and was kind of getting more, you know, The Selfish Gene, the very fact that we had a rich genetics was inspiring the idea of mimetics. But what was it, is it also there's been a revolution in data, because that's one if you were doing was then going out and starting to empirically, like, you know, for me, or you are trying to empirically look at things and for me, like one lease from reading your books was just this kind of idea of like, Oh, you were kind of going through economics to the ultimatum game, you know, are there replicable standardised kind of things would give me kind of cross cultural data that isn't just like, we've got a lot of data, I think it's in the Yale database, we've got a lot of data on like, marriage practices, but it's not kind of, it's not able to be kind of like standardised in a way that's going to allow us to make as good cross cultural analysis. So I guess I'm trying to ask also, what was it that led to the empirical revolution, or allowed these kind of folk ideas become more rigorous?
Joe Henrich 08:57
So I mean, the one key thing, so I started to talk about what I began doing in the 90s. But that was, I was running directly upstream against what was going on in anthropology, because anthropology was becoming less rigorous and less quantitative, and less interested in that kind of stuff. The history is complex in anthropology, but, you know, beginning with Franz Boas who's considered the founder of American anthropology, there was a rich effort to go out into the world and just record, figure out what people are doing, do a lot of in depth ethnography, counting and quantifying was okay, but really you wanted to do a lot of ethnography. The group at Yale with the Human Relations Area Files, George Peter Murdock began, you know, at least quantifying things at the societal level so we could compare different societies and look at different patterns of kinship or language or all these kinds of cool things. So it was quantitative and it stays quantitative up until the 1970s. And then, you know, anthropology begins with a spread of postmodernism, french structuralism, it begins completely rejecting anything quantitative. And really, kind of unwittingly and stupidly, I show up and my advisors are older, right, they're of the pre generation, they're of the generation that was still quantitative. And so, you know, my advisor, my first advisor, not Rob Boyd, a guy named Allen Johnson, had written a book in the 70s called 'Quantification in Cultural Anthropology', which started to talk about how we could use computers and how we can do systematic data collection. But he was really an old dog, and he, you know, the trend in the field was going directly away from him. But, you know, I had an enterprise that I wanted to do and, you know, Boyd and Richerson had all this theory. So I just started picking out tools from other disciplines. So, in addition to harvesting things from behavioural economics, like the ultimatum game, I was also, you know, working with Richard Nisbett, for example, and taking tools from psychology, trying to measure psychological variation around the world. And I was, you know, I didn't know she was going to win a Nobel Prize, but I was reading Elinor Ostrom just because, you know, she was doing interesting work on cooperation and I was learning about public goods games.
Rufus Pollock 11:13
Yeah, okay. So one interesting thing is this, these kind of like, even a cultural tide within a discipline influence stuff, and there's kind of been a change, whether it's in anthropology, but this is kind of coming together. So maybe just kind of let's step that forward, is that there's this emerging, I guess in the background here, there's an emerging discipline, you're calling it 'cultural evolution'. I like to joke sometimes what happened to culturology, you know, in a way, what happened to the science and the study of culture? I mean, it's not in any discipline, but we want, that seems just to central to humanity, and what, what kind of, so if we kind of looked into that, in your, in your then evolution, you see that happening, the study of cultural evolution, what are some of the building blocks, and first of all maybe just for myself, and it's such an obvious thing, but what do we mean by culture here? I know, this is a kind of chestnut, but just roughly, what are we talking about when we say we're studying culture?
Joe Henrich 12:11
Yeah, so the core idea is that people learn stuff, right? So culture is information that got in our heads through some kind of learning process, usually a social learning process. And what we're doing when we're building a model of cultural evolution is we're tracking that information in individual minds through time. The evolution, this sort of natural selection, genetic side of it, comes into it, because once we say, well, okay, that's probably an important thing in humans, we can say, well, how might natural selection have shaped us to make us good cultural learners? What kinds of things should we pay attention to? How should we integrate information from different people in an effective adaptive way that allows an individual to better navigate the world? But then once you have a group of individuals, a population doing that, then you get these population-level phenomena. So one of the things you know, economics has got interested in institutions in the last 25 years, but that's really, they came kind of down to that, right? They were trying to solve higher level questions. Cltural evolution had to cobble up to figure out what an institution is; okay, people learn stuff, then we get social norms, and what's an institution, well an institution is a collection of social norms that regulate a certain area like marriage. And then when we put laws on top of that, that's typically what economists think of as institutions, when you have kind of legally regulated rules for interacting.
Rufus Pollock 13:32
Yes. Okay. What I also want to mark in there is therefore, what you're also mentioning, is that across different disciplines, this thing of the culture, we're kind of, there's a convergence from several directions, economists may be converging down towards that, because it's kind of the base layer, culture. I mean, even below it, and we're going to talk about that, is kind of, you might say, I would call it ontology, maybe we just call it psychology, to not have a fancy term, but what gives our views and values and way of being, who do we conceive ourselves to be, strictly that's psychology, but it's also a bit richer. There's these kind of layers down, there's kind of like, there's the formal institutions, there's kind of the informal, there's, there's then there's psychology, and culture's near the bottom of that. I think you've got quite a broad definition, which is strictly like, it's hard to determine where culture and formal institutions separate because some of the people debate about like, you know, is it culturre or is it institutions, or is it you know, genetic, genetic, you know, kind of inbuilt psychology. And the other direction is kind of building up in what you're saying is that we've been able to get better and better tools in kind of, I don't wanna call it scientific anthropology or science, you know, where we can go upwards of people's beliefs into aggregating that and how that forms institutions.
Joe Henrich 14:58
Yeah. So there's a few other trends going on at this time, which I think are interesting. So, within psychology, there's this older field of cross cultural psychology where they had been kind of using psychological tools in different societies. But for reasons I don't totally understand, it remained relegated to the peripheries of psychology through most of its history. Then, in 1991, Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama published a paper in a lead psychology journal, which really sparks up this field called 'cultural psychology'. And then Dick Nisbett gets in the act and studies the culture of honour. And then the field of cultural psychology really begins to take off. And they don't really know what they're doing with culture and they don't have a very good theory of culture, but they do know that they're finding psychological differences among populations, that previously the field would have said that these weren't expected. And then in economics, Rob Boyd, my advisor who I was telling you about, he's in this MacArthur group with Sam Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr and a lot of behavioural economists. And then we begin doing experiments across different societies, and that gets economics, at least a corner of economics, more interested in culture and stuff. And there seems to be a recognition that in order to address the, the rise of the West question, and why some countries are rich, and some countries are poor, maybe at least legal origins might matter? And once you have legal origins, then why did different countries have different legal origins? And then you begin to pull the thread, right?
Rufus Pollock 16:39
Yeah, you pull the thread. I mean, listen, I mean, this is for me, going back, I mentioned I'm a Zen Buddhist and, you know, so I got intersted because I was interested in happiness research, but also I was a Buddhist, and, you know, you open any econ textbook, and like, the beginning is, you know, economics is about the allocation of scarce resources you know, with unlimited want, this, you know, I literally open a textbook of my 15 year old nephew the other day, and this is it. And I was seeing this as a Buddhist saying, okay, but at least with happiness, crude Buddhism, I'm going to simplify it, but you know, is like, preferences are changeable, you know, your suffering arises because you've got, not because you just got preferences, but you've got cravings. You can transform craving, and that's the path to true liberation. You know, can you imagine, it's kind of like the inverse, that you should spend all your attention as a human being on like, basically, transforming your inner self, rather than trying to acquire things, which is kind of economics, externally to satisfy them. And what's funny is you go into economic literature at this point in the mid 2000s, when I was doing this, and you're like, there are these models called endogenous preferences, which in economics, you'll know, is fancy terminology for like your preferences can change within the system. And they kind of die out in the 70s, traditionally, because they're too complicated, basically, which is unfortunate, like in macro stuff, they lead to like weird equilibria, and so on. And they only get resurrected, actually, by rational addiction, like the Chicago school use a bunch of them in like the 90s and 2000s for rational addiction models of smoking, you know? But it's like, it's in a weird way, this is one of these things which should have been almost existential to the core economics, because once you think culture is significant, you're like, well, what creates culture, what creates being? And you have some of this in [unintelligible - 00:18:30], who's your colleague, but you know, there is this stuff on like, bounded rationality and self control, you know, like, I only have so much - this is big in psychology, like ego mode management - self control, what do I spend it on? But that goes deep, like, should I spend my limited self control, or like working hard to acquire stuff, or work hard meditating, for example, right? If you really ran this, you'd be in a very interesting place of like, what shakes being and how should we we, you know, do that? Yeah.
Joe Henrich 19:01
Yeah, so I've had this discussion frequently with economists over the years, and the answers have changed, which is, I think, a good thing from my point of view. So, I mean, a good example is Sam Bowles wrote a paper around 1997, which is, it's got endogenous preferences in the title. And it's basically making the case, using lots of different evidence from before that, that humans have endogenous preferences. It's a great paper, but it doesn't go anywhere, right? Or at least, I mean, eventually it turns out to have a big impact but it wasn't like it was on everybody's lips or anything. It didn't have a big immediate impact. I think for the reasons you're suggesting it was a very slow takeoff. People like Nathan Nunn had to get into the development people in there and the economic history people. But whenever I've brought this up and I would start saying things obnoxious to economist like, we know people acquire preferences via cultural learning, I can give you a big pile of evidence to show, so we know preferences are endogenous, why are you assuming they're exogenous? And it was basically the kind of mathematical argument, you said if, if preferences can move around, there's too many parts moving. And we can't, so we're just going to assume this is fixed. And that can't be the right answer.
Rufus Pollock 20:14
That can't be the right answer. And it's sort of kind of profound here. And I mean, I'll give you other practical examples that really touched me. So let's say, you know, let's say you're interested in education policy, and this is one of my favourite examples. Generally, people talk about Finland, as one example, we won't get to debate right now about how well Finland, but certainly, for example, when the first set of cross country assessment came out, which was the OECD PISA stuff, and it came out also, when people didn't know it was a test, which was really important, because once you have a test for a reasonable period of time, it becomes rubbish, unfortunately, because people teach to it. Finland like ace this, you know, it came top or close to the top. And you ask them a question about, well, how can you reproduce the Finnish education system? A lot of our world today will go like, Oh, they have their schools laid out like this, or they have a curriculum like that. But then you say, well, it's actually the culture. For example, if you go and read books, you interview people, they're like, well, you know, we have really high trust of our teachers, also, pupils tend to respect them, or we have a society where being a primary school teacher is the number one desired profession as a woman. And yet, then huge amounts of ink will get, which is kind of, I would say, is a cultural-type explanation. Now, of course, you can influence that by structuring, you know, paying teachers more, but again, they're not actually paying teachers that much more. But it's higher status, it's high prestige, yes. And that's another point, I've actually got a quote, I got it an excerpt from your book. And we should come to that. I think at one point where you say, prestige is a universal amongst cultures. But what is kind of given prestige, what gives you to acquire prestige, whether it's growing big yams - I'm paraphrasing your quote - whether it's growing big yams, or being great, is incredibly variable. And given the centrality of that to what we do in the world, is it high prestige to like consume lots of stuff and be really famous? Or is it high prestige to be a really brilliant scientist? Or is it high prestige to look after the environment? You know, we can kind of just see obviously in front of our eyes, the profound impacts, those things are going to have on our society and very major challenges we face from the climate crisis, to education to inequality to you name it. So just kind of going back on that endogenous preferences, the point for listeners is, there's a revolution happening, in a positive way. I would say economics is the dominant discipline of our age, for good or ill. You know, what I mean, is it reflects the kind of, at least for policymakers or the elite, often a way of thinking about the world and a dominant kind of social policy tool, whether it's abused, I, you know, having been an economist who's given advice to government, you know, I'm not, I'm not blaming, you know, economists for all that happens. But there's a really big revolution that you're describing is happening, potentially, and even is bubbling up in things like economics, where this primacy of culture and the primacy of being, the amount of evidence that's there is really becoming massive, and that can have some profound impacts, is what you're saying.
Joe Henrich 23:33
And I mean, I think we should, I mean, economics deserves a hat tip in the sense that I really think in the last 15 years, the field's been very responsive. And there's, you know, I see lots of young economists taking these questions on and, you know, thinking thoughts they wouldn't have done so in the 90s.
Rufus Pollock 23:49
I really want to acknoledge that, I think one of the great strengths is quite empirically, the heavy empirical orientation is fantastic. I think the point I would just flag to you, is that going to this point about endogenous preferences, while it is described as a technical barrier, just to go back to like, what would a Buddhist economics look like? There's something kind of baked in, you know, if you go back to Pareto, you know, who weirdly I read about in a sociological survey by Raymond Aron of sociologists like Durkheim and [unintelligible - 00:24:19], there's something quite deep in the economic way of seeing the world that goes back even to kind of early modernity that's under threat if you take this model seriously. If you take culture and ontology and psychology really seriously. I'll just take one other example here that comes from Buddhism: my preference is not fixed, but also knowing what I really want is hard. And therefore, we live in a society today, I'll just point out, where basically the two things that underpin our most good, summum bonum, which is consumption in the free market and voting and democracy, are both based on the assumption that people know what they want. Now, of course, economists are kind of knocking at the door, you know, Fishing for Fools is written by two Nobel Prize winners, they were economists, but the challenge has always been that really calls into question some profound things about Western society if you keep running with it, just as, I would in analogy with your book, Protestantism called into question profound norms about the nature of the pre modern world, i.e. where did authority come from, how did you decide about things, you know solo scripture or individualism, which, as you point out, had come from a long history of context. But I just point out that, yeah, I think as a scientific discipline, but that's kind of a seismic shift in society as we start to take your and other work seriously.
Joe Henrich 25:54
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, just as a practical level, as someone who sometimes finds himself advising young PhD students in economics, is it's still the case that everybody wants a utility function, and that they really want to, you know, they might have an interesting empirical result, but they've got to figure out how to get that result from, you know, a utility function that they have to use to get the result. So and in the sense that individuals as optimizers, you gotta be optimising something and, you know, sometimes in our models of cultural evolution, we think people are very much choosing unconsciously, and they're not weighing costs and benefits in the way suggested by the Standard Model.
Rufus Pollock 26:35
Yes. So I wanted to build on that this kind of primacy of being thesis, like kind of coming from this emergence of a new discipline of cultural evolution. Anthropology as we put it, in my sense, when I went to university was, it wasn't like economics is prestigious, there's massively endowed business schools and so on. We can see a future where maybe, whatever the department you're in, this new science of culture is going to be pretty major and central to our kind of intellectual field. That's kind of a thesis that I think we're exploring here. Could you say what you think the directions that would go in like over the next 10 or 20 years? Or that you might like to see it go in? What do you think are the trends here? And what are the gaps?
Joe Henrich 27:28
So I would like to see what you're saying be correct, but I'm not sure it's going to be correct, because, I mean, universities are still so ossified. So it's hard to imagine a university ever saying, um, we're creating a Department of Cultural Evolution. I mean, just to give you a sense, so at Harvard, like many places, the quote "sciences" are under one dean and one administrative unit, and then other things are in other administrative units. But the field of cultural evolution takes seriously genetic evolution, thinks of humans as a kind of animal studies, epigenetics and how that might affect cultural preferences. And at the same time, is interested in you know, where do ethnic groups come from, how does social stratification emerge, what leads to innovation, all things that you would find in economics and sociology and other kinds of fields like that, also religion. So I'm interested in the origins and evolution of religion or religions, none of which would normally be on with the biologists and physicists, right? So the organisation of the university makes it hard to have a Department of Cultural Evolution. Now you can always have centres and stuff and there are centres. At the Arizona State University, they have the Department of Human Evolution and Social Change, which is actually kind of an experiment, I guess, where they have the anthropologists together with lots of other disciplines. So that's a case. My department, human evolutionary biology, we sit with the physicists and the biologists, but we do have people who stretch across into these other disciplines like economics. Now, so I'm actually going to a meeting of leading scholars from different disciplines in November, and basically our charge is, that we've given ourselves, is to design a proper and interdisciplinary social science. So for example, a simple question to ask yourself is how would you train a graduate student? You know, and so I, you know, I want them to know how to do ethnography, like I think one of the problems of development economics is that you gotta go there and live among the population to really understand what's going on, but, you know, it's also good to have an instrumental variable or to conduct randomised field trials or all the kinds of things we see in modern economics. So I want all those tools to be available and at the ready for a young student
Rufus Pollock 30:09
One thing you've just mentioned about the future and what gets in the way, particularly, maybe of this term 'culture' is that it's interdisciplinarity, and particularly, it's not interdisciplinarity in the sciences. It's not like biologists and physicists need to hang out, which is already a challenge, it's that biologists need to hang out with anthropologists. And so there's this kind of structural, a general ossification problem. You know, and I am no longer in academia, but I still collaborate and so on, so I know that. So that's one kind of institutional, cultural thing. Let's say things went well, what are kind of the topics you'd like to see studied or like, what are the kind of gaps that are really interesting? To give a concrete example, it seems that you have examples in your book and maybe you can now give some, where we can study a particular feature, you know, you know it might be the way people are going to prepare manioc for eating. Or they're gonna, you know, avoid pellagra by preparing cornmeal in a certain way, you can mention these from your book. Those are very specific, but then what we could call like, memeplexes in another area, like, maybe marriage and family, the marriage and family programme for your Weirdest People example, or even, like, puritanism or sometimes you say the Western world. So they're these much bigger levels, kind of like whole constellations of values, views, beliefs, practices. And you know, from another area that I come from, people have these kind of grand unified theories, which are in fashion in physics, but not in social sciences, you know, there are like major waves of human cultural development. I don't know if you've heard of teal organisations, have you heard of this term teal organisation? No? So there's a guy called Ken Wilber and spiral dynamics, I don't know, this is a whole different topic, which was kind of interested in human development in a broad sense. And this is like people in Harvard and other places, you also got interested in like lifespan development, you know, how do humans evolve over the lifespan, not just developmental psychology. There's a small population of people who kind of did some quite radical stuff, you know, this, Robert Keegan, who you might have heard of, right, which is people can kind of become self transcending, or Maslow, you know, self transcendence, not just self actualizing, we do have data on this stuff. Then what came up was that there was this argument that people's kind of values could evolve in substantive ways, like, you know, we start out focused on me, that's both as a tiny child, but there's an analogy with cultures, cultures are focused on, you know, the big man or something like that. This is very crude simplification now of anthropological evolutionary history. But there's points, like we, for example, we expand our domain of concern from me, to my tribe, to larger groups, and ultimately to the world and then to all beings, for example. And this kind of background have these grand theories of these kind of cultural stages of humanity. And why this has then showed up and been very influential is - maybe more in the management consulting and this discussion of teal organisations - these people who came up with this grand unified theory, ended up using colours. So there's like red societies, red is like the mafia and like, it's all about the strong man or woman. And there's this kind of spectrum. So modernity in this spectrum is orange. It's all about rationality, it's all about reason, it's all about meritocracy, it's about bureaucracy. And then the next age has been kind of more like egalitarian, post modernism, it's, you know, they have this grand unified theory that these standard kind of things that highly correlate, you know in a principal components analysis, it'd be like these different dimensions of values of use that highly correlate to reduce to a smaller dimensional draft. And the teal phase is the next one. And so there is a highly influential book called Reinventing Organisations, influential in Silicon Valley and other places about, we need organisations that are much flatter, but where people have a lot more autonomy, but they also are responsible, where they can kind of coordinate in different ways. And for me, by the way, reading your work, one of the connections was what was this revolution of puritanism, of the reformation. This did, maybe in this case through a religion or some set of views and values, shape how people could coordinate and organise in a radically different way and much more maybe egalitarian way, much more effective way, because people could self police in their heads a bit, you know, God's watching them and so on all these classic stories about it. So, to kind of come back to the question I was asking you, where are we in the science of this? We have now examples, and maybe you could describe, where we can trace a given practice, and it's maybe phylogeny, or its development, or at least demonstrate, you know, certain practices are culturally transmitted. And then you have an example in your book of the marriage of family programmes and quite big one, and how that influenced. But where are we in, like, you know, one day, are we going to be able to say, wow, you know, we can explain how this, you know, this new whole culture evolved, you know, or there's a new pocket of something really new emerging over here in, you know, in the southwestern United States, where, you know, it's got these different features that have never been seen before, together, of a cultural behaviour.
Joe Henrich 36:03
So, the field, because it focuses on individual learners, at least at the core, an approach like that would be say you're broadly interested in democracy, and you would look at what kinds of cultural beliefs in a population tend to foster the spread of democratic norms, democratic practices, and you could study things like the school committee's vote or how do families operate, do kids have a vote at the dinner table or where they're going to go the next day or something like that. But then, once you begin to get practices like that, the question will be how did those beliefs and practices and institutions, what kinds of things do they attract? Do they make certain other ideas more likely? So for example, one idea that I've toyed with, and it's hard to get good data on it, but the idea that the spread of monogamous marriage may have actually created a milieu that made democracy more likely to spread. And historians have suggested this as well. So that's two unrelated things that you might not normally put together, but because of the way that enforced monogamy alters the marriage pattern for elite men, that might create more equity within families and give women more bargaining power in the household and that may encourage more democracy, right? That's just one kind of hypothesis. But in any case, so we'll be able to say, well, the hope is that we'll be able to say how different practices and beliefs affect each other, thinking about a population and either acquiring or not acquiring these kinds of beliefs. Some ideas, we're going to learn, fit better with aspects of human nature, so they're more readily to get picked up. Maybe there are ideas and practices that don't fit as well with human nature, but are really good for getting people to cooperate, and you need to have a lot of socialisation practices, rituals, other kinds of institutions that help get these hard-to-think practices and ideas into people's heads. So it'll be a kind of complex articulation of psychology, cultural and sort of innate psychology, with all the bits and pieces that form a society, and then thinking about how those bits and pieces fit together. This stuff you were describing with the stages makes me really nervous, because that's not the picture that's emerging; those are made up.
Rufus Pollock 38:27
Right, exactly. It's much richer than that, I think. What I guess I would want to ask, which kind of came out of that though, for myself, was when I was asking about the future of the field, one question I guess I would have, is there are things like the World Values Survey, or the European Values Survey. If we had better data, you know I sat there more informally and was like, okay, if one had quite detailed stuff, and you might get it now out of Facebook or things, can you see new norms almost emerging in real time? Just like in genetics, we might say, okay, we haven't seen this gene, this is a new mutation, this is a new thing and we're going to see how it interacts. If one was interested in like, there might be easier things to track, but this spread of sustainability attitudes or the spread of concern for nature, in the next 20 years on the field, might we be able to have more granular cross cultural data?
Joe Henrich 39:39
Yeah, that's definitely the way things are going. There's a proliferation of data sets like the World Values Survey, but the real frontier is, well I think, getting data from social media and online sources, and then figuring out how to analyse it using natural language processing. What my lab's working on is trying to measure aspects of psychology, so things like analytic thinking, or tightness and looseness, inclinations towards individualism, impersonal cooperation, and trying to pry that out of text. So, for example, we have the corpus of US newspapers going back to at least 1840 and we're analysing that to study psychological variation across space and time. And we can also do that in the modern world. So, for example, I'm interested in witchcraft and there's a symbol that appears on Twitter which is an evil eye protection symbol, the nazar, and so we're analysing the appearance and diffusion and increasing frequency of the use of that symbol.
Rufus Pollock 40:46
And there's two parts here, because for me, forgetting even the stages question, the question would be, these kind of memeplexes that there are which comes up, let's say, in more classic stuff, Inglehart and the World Values Survey, we're going to have this crude, good but useful, two dimension, or there's more autonomy or self expression, or the Shalom Schwartz and, you know, these seven factors. But could we get a lot more granular and see that sort of principal components analysis out of like a 50 questionnaire survey? Could we start to see that and see particularly interesting pockets of innovation happening? And then the second point, you're saying, is what's causing that or how they function. What's the causal factors and what causes something to cede or spread? I think that's going back to your first point. There's also these interesting connections between some, maybe, cultural features, it wasn't the intention of it, but the accidental benefit in some other way, like monogamy practices leading to actually growing equality and therefore maybe leading to actually more democracy, which leads to more economic effectiveness or something like that. To take another example from a book I read recently, people are like Burning Man is a nascent micro culture, there are values and norms which are evolving there, which are kind of the frontier of something, you know, it's highly creative. I'm not saying I subscribe to that but it's an example, you might say, how could I work out whether it's really the case that Burning Man has a distinct set of values from the rest of the population, and how is that spreading? How, how do those people when they go there and then they go back to their work, does that transmit? How does it transmit?
Joe Henrich 42:42
Yeah, I mean, it would be interesting to think about how you could do that with Burning Man, we're getting an increasing ability to do that. A simple example that that reminds me of is there's this paper in economics, I forget the authors, where there ends up being a situation where people get randomly picked to go to the Hajj, and they go to the Hajj and they experienced that and they actually become more cosmopolitan, and more tuned into the global values as a consequence of that experience. And it's a random assignment situation so you can infer causality. So that's a case where we know there's a ritual that has a certain psychological effect, you can imagine something similar with Burning Man, and then people go back to somewhere and then do those ideas spread? Do they have legs in these different kinds of communities? And then you could try to explain why they might have legs in some communities but not others.
Rufus Pollock 43:38
Exactly. Why do they take off? And also there's both the context but also, what's the practice? Another example, for me, would always be like you go to a meditation retreat, it'd be an amazing experience, like, this is really important, but what's the half life? You know, you go back to London or Boston and you're back in your normal life, you're like, oh, it was so important to practice every day, and then you don't, and obviously the huge impact of what's called Sangha or community, are there other people practising with you and how? And particularly for pro social practices, that could be a very important question. So both what's the context, but what other things like if people stay in touch, how does that affect that? What things have we already found, maybe if you summarise a bit for us, you give some examples, where we have been looking at this both development and evolution, there are some examples in your book, The Weirdest People in the World, and where the frontier of that is concrete, things that you would want to look at, maybe start with examples of what you have found?
Joe Henrich 44:53
Yeah, so my obsession lately has been trying to understand innovation. So, for example, we're working on stuff now, we have a global patent database, which gives us a measure of innovation, at least as captured by patents. So we focus narrowly on Europe and then we say why do some regions of countries have more patents than other parts of countries? And I want to test the ideas developed in the Weirdest People in the World. So what we look at is different parts of, say, Germany spent more centuries under the mediaeval church. And so we're able to connect that to differences in the social structure in terms of the families, and we get that from a different survey. And then we can look at how far people's friendships are based on Facebook data, so that gives us another social measure. And then we can look at aspects of psychology from the European Social Survey, which asked people about trust and fairness and conformity and these kinds of questions. And what we find is that the church affects that, and then those things seem to cash out on more patents. So in places where the church was longer, people are more individualistic, less conformity, more trusting, they have friends that are further away, and they have smaller families, and they produce more patents. And you know, we can compare regions within the same country and hold lots of stuff constant.
Rufus Pollock 46:18
So for listeners, let's just walk this through, going back, maybe to start with, the mediaeval church. It's obviously central to your book, the Weirdst People in the World, which I just cannot recommend to listeners enough, really fascinating, of the rise of the West in a way, like a really interesting answer. But to start with, why is the mediaeval church important here? What's the impact of that, you said, on individualism and family structure? Just walk that through briefly and I get that that's going turn out into psychology and then into patenting. But let's start with that.
Joe Henrich 46:49
Yeah, so the branch of Christianity that eventually leads to the Roman Catholic Church began to adopt a set of unusual practices in the global historical perspective. So they, for example, banned cousin marriage, first to first cousins, but then it eventually goes out to sixth cousins around 1000 CE and contracts back just down to third cousins in 1215. They end polygyny, so the Franks and the Celts and stuff were all polygynous, so they end that. They end concubinage. New inheritance practices; rather than patrilineal inheritance, which was common throughout Europe, they have bilateral inheritance, so you inherit your identity through mom and dad. And so that began spreading throughout Europe and what that effectively does is it begins to dismantle the clans of Europe and breaks them down into monogamous nucular families. And of course, the church spreads kind of semi randomly out from Rome and it goes to England early, but then very late to Scotland and Wales and places like that, so there's these interesting patterns of variation. And so I think that had a big effect on how cultural evolution went in those places, and the development of other kinds of institutions. So when you break the family down, the complex kinship structures of lots of societies, they're not only your personal identity, they're the groups that do production and distribution. They're also the groups that are your legal identity in dealing with laws. And when you break people down to nucular families, you get rid of all that and also a lot of the security that goes along with that; who takes care of you if you're injured or old, that used to be your kin network, and now it's got to be done by something else. So these new institutions around 1000 CE begin emerging in Europe. So think about guilds, which eventually become occupational guilds, monasteries begin proliferating, universities pop up, and charterred towns. So these people would join the towns as citizens, participate in the defence and whatnot, they'd often get some privileges and whatnot, and so these charter towns with certain rights to the individual began diffusing through Europe. So new kinds of institutions you wouldn't have seen otherwise. So like when I was talking about democracy before, this is a case where the church did a bunch of things because they thought that God wanted them to do that, just like in Islam, you can only have four wives and in Zoroastrianism, you should marry relatives, right? So religions have different family policies. But that had these downstream implications for the kinds of other institutions that were likely to emerge. And that then affects people's psychology and, downstream, economic productivity, success and competition against other groups.
Rufus Pollock 49:30
So, to summarise, the church had these unusual policies about marriage and family that break down traditional kinship networks and clans. That leads to kind of more individualism, but the consequence is - humans don't function well alone, we need to collaborate with others - instead of the family relationships, we start building more ties outwards. And that leads to more egalitarianism and individualism to these charter towns and so on and so forth. And to finish with the example then is that you have this variable of how long different places in Europe were exposed to the Catholic Church's policies. That cashes out in family structure which cashes out in psychology and behaviours and friendship networks. And that then shows up in, for example, innovation levels. Now, one thing that's kind of negative and positive about this story, I just want to flag again to our policy implication story is, the hard thing about hard things like, this took hundreds or thousands of years, and then has payoffs for hundreds or thousands of years. Often, you know, I was in policy and innovation and so talked to government, they're always like, you know, can't we have a startup fund or something and what we're kind of saying with this is actually, some of the really big things go really deep, and you can't just say we're going to set up a new innovation office, and that's going to lead to more innovation, really, that's one big actual implication of some of this work. But the other way about it, what I hear is, that a long term attitude that supports cultural change can have really, really, really big impacts for a really long time.
Joe Henrich 51:34
Yeah, so one way of looking at that story is 'well, it doesn't give us much to do in terms of policy, because we can't affect how long the Catholic Church has been around'. But it does tell you, well, what do I need to get innovation? Well, I need free, trusting and cooperative interactions among cognitively diverse minds. How do I get that? Well, it so happens the US bumbled on to that, by having lots of immigration during the 19th century, and one of the other projects is is we look at what leads to innovation in different US counties. And we find counties that have more diverse last names, meaning people from more different kinds of backgrounds, more different families, leads to more innovation coming in the coming decade. So you can think about this as a kind of measure of cultural diversity measured at the family level, and then we're predicting into the future, how many patents you're going to get. And then you know, so the economists will worry, well, we're not sure that's causal, so what we use are these immigration shocks. So there are these tools from economics that allow you to predict whether a county is going to get an immigration shock and that gives us an infusion of last names leading to more cognitive diversity and more innovation. And so anyway, there's this cool relationship between more immigration and more innovation. And something like, you know, Petra Moser's work where she looks at the immigration quotas that were imposed in the US in 1924; that caused immigration to plummet. Prohibition causes immigration to plummet. Now, prohibition is a great case, because you might think, well, alcohol, people are not drinking, maybe they should have better cognitive processes, but turns out ideas meet in saloons and they make baby ideas there. So anyway, so it gives you a bunch of tools, what are we going to do to create the trusting interaction among diverse minds?
Rufus Pollock 53:29
Right, and the other aspect that we're having here is also some insight that allows us to create conditions for this. I think one of the learnings from this cultural thing is that individually we're actually quite dumb, what we have is the benefit of this huge cumulative learning that is our culture.
Joe Henrich 53:58
Yeah, and that's a theme that runs through both The Secret of our Success and The Weirdest People in the World, and it's really the core of the new book I'm working on; individuals, especially if you strip us of all our cultural knowledge, we're really not good at solving problems. When we depend on this big download of tools for thinking and problem solving and framing things and you had mentioned ontology, or like what even exists in the world? Do germs exist, does witchcraft exist? What am I working with here? And then of course, our ability to generate new ideas is mostly the recombination of existing ideas that are all circulating in the cultural milieu. And it's the bringing together of those different ideas that really drive a lot. So you've got to nurture the collective brain. Geniuses and whatnot are much less important than in the popular myth, the myth of the heroic adventure, for example.
Rufus Pollock 54:53
Right. So basically now we have more knowledge about culture and cultural evolution. While it might take a long time, we can now benefit from that learning and transport stuff. I mean, one example in your book, in The Weirdest People in the World is that this, this might seem negative, but this kind of destruction of traditional kinship networks, which in the long run has its benefits, which China starts doing in 1950s, it's 1950 that I think they ban concubinage, which is polygamy, they start banning, partly in imitation of the West, but the Communist Party did a load of stuff. And the other example, which I'm very close to, because my partner is Taiwanese, you could say the basic Confucian cultural download is quite hierarchical. Classically, if you look at Shalom Schwartz, China would show up as quite hierarchical in the model. But yeah, Taiwan, within a period of 50 years, has become a quite well functioning democracy. This is the point, culture is sticky normally for reasons just because they create institutions, which are equilibriua point, and there's a whole bunch of reasons you can go into as to why it's often hard to change culture. But when it does, because of the way imitation works, it can happen very quickly. So I think the other point is that if we realise that it's culture that we need to shift sometimes, rather than like, we're not going to build a fancy new technology office, it might be like, we need to enable more people to meet in the cafeteria, or we need to have a new attitude to risk taking or something like that; those things can actually move quite quickly, but it's that we do need to be conscious that it's that. If we go and just imitate the layout of Finnish schools, nothing much will happen. But if we imitated the attitude of Finnish teachers or something like that, then we might have a lot of impact.
Joe Henrich 56:49
Yeah, I think that's a great point; culture is often sticky and inertial, because you have different institutions that sort of interlock. Even if you have the new Burning Man idea about egalitarianism or something that doesn't fit with all the other practices and stuff in the society so it's hard for it to get moving, but if you reorganise things, so that there's not disincentives to adopting or spreading that idea, then things can change quickly, like the Taiwan case; there's lots of cases like that.
Rufus Pollock 57:19
Yes. You've mentioned, while obviously built on the marriage and family programme, the spread of literacy with Protestantism was a very rapid change in the level of reading. So, just to go back, are there other examples? So the marriage and family programme, knowing research stuff, that probably took a lot of thought. And there are other examples that are fascinating in your book, like, the Ilahita tribe. Why I want to mention these is in our day and age today, the challenges that we face, most dramatically the ecological crisis we face, are collective action problems. And you could see one massive aspect of what you call social institutions, but also culture, as having been ways, often because of intergroup competition, to scale cooperation in some way. Could you talk a little bit about maybe the example there, or other examples you've come across, where groups have scaled. And because I mentioned the [unintelligable 00:58:31], we kind of somehow need to scale a bit globally; we somehow need to have enough identification or connection that we can act on these wicked problems that we face. And obviously societies have done that, you know, and the Ilahita had a wicked problem with a neighbour that was going take them over. Maybe with that example or others, can you talk that through a bit for the audience?
Joe Henrich 58:54
Yeah, the Ilahita case is interesting, because it's a small scale society of the Arapesh in New Guinea. And anthropologists who had been studying this region thought there was a kind of ecological threshold, ecology was forcing people not to have communities more than about 300 people, or 70 men. So they thought that groups were bumping up against this, but then they found this exceptional village of, depending on how you count, 1500 or 2500, people were living in Iligita and it was the most powerful community in the area, it was very safe from its neighbours, because they had such a large fighting force compared to the other groups. And what had happened there was they had the same system as everybody else, but there was this aggressively expanding group nearby that seemed to have a ritual cult of some kind. And when they copied the cult, they made certain mistakes in which they ended up with communal-wide gods and a communal-wide set of rituals that kind of build bridges between the different clans. And it turns out when these communities split, they split along clan lines. So this structure builds connections between the clans, and helps keep everybody working more harmoniously. And if things start to go bad in the village, people thought that the gods were not happy with them. So they would begin doing the rituals and the rituals are a kind of social technology, which bonds people together and that would re-nurture the bridges between clans and between individuals, and help keep the group together. I use it as a case of institutional evolution, because so much of our institutional evolution is not conscious design. Just to give you one example, people point gto the founding fathers of the US and, of course, a lot of thought went into the Constitution, but they never imagined political parties, or they were against political parties, I should say, they didn't want them to be part of the system. But of course, political parties immediately invaded and have been central to the system. So the system was never designed to have political parties. I mean, that's just an example of an unforeseen consequence. So that's the main point, a lot of my interest has been in how religious ideas foster cooperation and gets spread by this intergroup competition process.
Rufus Pollock 1:01:13
Well, of course, just to be clear on religion, again, an area which is often taboo, like, we'll come to the potential dead ends of modernity. If I'm an economist, a lot of stuff is collective action problems, let's call it the most generic version, or private information, like if you really got economic technical about it, like, you're going to do something and I don't know whether you've done it or not. You're going to do my gardening, I don't know how hard you're going to work, or we're going to go fight against the enemy and I don't know if you're going to shirk or not, or all kinds of stuff like that. And, basically, we need some methods of binding cohesion, but also creating internal monitoring; basically ways that you weren't shirk in some way. I'm kind of doing this in nutshell, I'm probably doing violence for readers who are technical to some of it. And religion obviously plays this central role in doing a whole bunch of things, but obviously, in creating cohesion, but also dealing with with shirking and other types of stuff; you're gonna get punished by the gods, you have examples of taboos in your book, there's many examples. And again, in the Ilahita case, just to flag it, this tribe that grew, let's put it this way, they grew to three or four times the scale that was thought feasible for a group in that area. Can you talk a bit to that? Religion was central there, in what kind of ways, just in that one example?
Joe Henrich 1:02:49
Yeah. So the big thing they had there was they had these rituals that would allow men to pass through these age sets and the way that was organised was such that it would create interdependence among men from different clans. So it kind of pulled them together and gave them a sense of psychology of interdependence. We know from work in psychology and related fields, that actually performing a ritual together can increase the amount of binding between you. They also began to believe that these gods that were over the entire community, rather than just the usual clan gods, would punish people and they could use that as an explanation for what would otherwise be witchcraft accusations. And oftentimes, clans would split apart and get angry with each other because if someone died, they would think someone from another clan bewitched him. But now an explanation could be given that it was the action of the village gods, this cult that they had. And anyway, so there's a bunch of little factors that work together there to bind people together. One of the other things about religion besides having punishing gods and shared notions of reality and shared aspects of morality, it also has these rituals, which either bind individuals together, or they bind people to their beliefs, they make people believe more strongly in commitments.
Rufus Pollock 1:04:17
Now for today we're coming near the end, we've only just really started this discussion. You talk about it in your book, we could think of an evolutionary tree of culture and practices that, in one sense, could allow for scaling. There's competition between groups, and we could think of this in analogy with genetics in a moment, but there's competition between groups and that's going to pressure development along of like, can you get bigger as a society to some extent, because that's a crude way of defending yourself, at least at the beginning, untill you have nuclear weapons or something. So, one of the points I think you make in The Weirdest People is that what was very unusual about what happened in the West was most other societies have kind of gone a kinship route. And then scaling has happened basically via empire, some kinship-knit elite ends up basically controlling a large number of people, because they have exploitive technologies, or slavery or whatever. But what was really unusual about the West in the long run was that we didn't go that route, yet managed to scale. The point was, if I put it this way, just as there are certain evolutionary dead ends in genetics, we can think of things which are highly adapted, but at some point, the problem about them is they're sort of a dead end. There's no way to go forward from there, you know, they are local maxima, if you like, or whatever. Similarly, kinship, like really developing your kinship structure, can be highly effective. But to go back to our point about institutional equilibria, if you're really, really locked into that, it's very hard to change. Right. Why it comes back to this, we can imagine it if we did do another episode, is where are we going today. So let me take a concrete example, which is, to go back to religion - I'm just gonna be provocative here - the West went down a route which, famously in Weber's phrase, once we let the genie out of the bottle with Protestantism, they didn't realise it, but once you have enough free thinking, you're going to come to science, then you come to materialist reductionism and then, in Weber's phrase, the magic has gone out of the world. Everyone predicted in the late 19th century, well the intellectuals, there's going to be a problem coming, because ultimately it's going to destroy religion. And religion is, what you've described, a major thing that binds us. Now, maybe you could say that science in a certain way is a religion, or there are certain other faiths, but they're very thin faiths, in a way, compared to the other faiths. So one example, I'm just being provocative is, are we in something of a dead end, at the moment, where individualism, which has been fantastic and hugely valuable in lots of ways, I'm at least gonna say, but there are limits like, you know, when they have lots of externalities, there are problems in individualism. And similarly, scientific materialism, which has been hugely productive in many ways, taken to where it is, paints us in to a dead end, and it takes us away from the magic of the world. So I'm just asking this question, maybe we could talk to that particular point, but in a more general question that if we were to have a follow up, if we were starting to paint this, like evolutionary tree, for example, of organisational structures that allow us to scale and solve collective action problems, and we have bad need of that today, where are we? To go back to my question, even of studying little groups with Facebook data of where new stuff is popping up, where is the equivalent of like, you know, Martin Luther, or even the Catholic Church in 50 AD? Where are these? What are our dead ends we feel today? And sometimes our dead ends are actually the most evolved thing because they've exhausted themselves. Where are the other places on our cultural evolutionary tree that are most exciting? Maybe we can't even predict, we don't have that capacity yet. But we at least have the ability to notice when they are happening. Yeah, any comments on that? And I said, maybe at this point, we're at the end of the episode. This is something we might come to you if we had a follow up. But any just immediate thoughts on that?
Joe Henrich 1:08:16
Yeah. Well, I just wanted to re describe what you were saying because I think it's a really important point, which is that, in The Weirdest People in the World, I make the case that most societies got complex and larger by building on the notion of kinship intensity, or these complex kinship units, where eventually you have an elite, which is, you know, emperors and lineage, and they're stratified so there's all these other farmers and whatnot, that formed the lower half. And what happened, not intentionally but unintentionally, due to the church's marriage and family programme, Europe gets knocked down and you know, dark ages or whatever, and then it wouldn't rebuild itself, it's going up a different peak that can go higher, at least in terms of economic production. The first one is, in some sense, easier to access, because we are primates, and we have a kin psychology, and we have a bunch of elements of human nature, which makes that one easy to hit. The church puts those away by making taboos against them and that forces it up this other peak. The chances that that's the best of all possible peaks is quite low, right, just as a statistical matter, the second peak we found. So just in kinds of thinking about a broad cultural evolutionary canvas, there must be other recombinations of cultural institutions and ways of thinking that can lead to even greater prosperity or greater happiness, or all the kinds of good things, greater human flourishing. Now, where and what that's going to look like is harder to imagine because I always say that cultural evolution is smarter than we are. But the place to look would be novel recombinations. Right. So we can see some of these around; what's going on in China, it's a recombination of Western capitalism and some other Western institutions, universities, plus a lot of older Chinese statecraft and Chinese institutions. So that's a new recombination. Japan has a new recombination and we're gonna see new recombinations appear in Africa and the Middle East and so we don't know whether those are going to be great pathways or whether they're going to lead to more human flourishing, but they're experiments that are in process all around the globe.
Rufus Pollock 1:10:27
Wow. I think that's a great point to end on. So thank you very, very much and, listeners, I hope you will tune in if we have a follow up. Thank you so much, Professor Henrich.
Joe Henrich 1:10:38
Okay, great to be with you. Thanks.
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