The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous Hardcover – September 8, 2020

This is a groundbreaking book, predictably becoming the basis of much discussion. It is arguing that the West’s success stems from historically early moral decisions within society and their character building. Culture determines human life and ours would be coming from early Catholicism’s peculiarities of anti-nepotism and the forbidding of marriage within kin. This enhanced the church’s influence and supposedly loosened eventually a flood of innovation.Adopting such simple rules triggered a cascade of changes, creating states to replace tribes, science to replace lore and law to replace custom. This cascade produced what being weird means; that is by comparison with a bulk of the world that is utterly different (so far studies were centered too exclusively on societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, hence the acronym). The difference in tribal and non-tribal cultures is even evident in such examples as that blood donations are strikingly lower in southern Italy than in northern Italy today. We weird people of the West are individualistic, think analytically, take personal responsibility, and think nepotism is to be vigorously discouraged.Most people have tacitly adopted some dubious universal assumptions about human nature. This book asks of us to change our perspective in a way that is rather remarkable. It takes character building as a cultural and achievement separator. It is a wonderful discussion trigger. In this respect it reminds of Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”, Dennet with its emphasis on the evolution of minds, or Sean Carroll’s science based poetic naturalism with its many forms of understanding at different levels. But watch out. Is the route to science and riches really solidly tied to western morals? Oesterreicher’s “Beelines: from Chemicals to Chemists” sees Islamic golden age science based on tribalism as a counter argument. But interestingly he finds that many science accelerators were lucid Asperger-type and indeed somewhat off center. Henrich stimulates discussion.The title suggests some light reading. It is not. But the rewards are worth some input

During many years I had wondered why the Latin American countries and many others had not been able to develop as USA, Canada, Japan, Australia and the European countries and why they had always been plagued by historical corruption and many other problems. I finally found the answer in this book and it is so profound and thought-provoking, that I have incorporated it in the classes I teach when I try to make my students conscious about their context.However, this book is not an easy reading because of its length and because it is full with data, figures, graphs and tables that require careful analysis and comparisons. In addition, I recommend that you read each of the footnotes to delve deeper in the topics.Net, it is worth every minute of the reading and I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding how History explains our economic and political present at global level.

I'm glad I picked up the book and I'm glad I read it, but I didn't finish it. The topic is very interesting. The author gives many, many examples to back up his point, but it starts to read like a text book. Give it a try.

Rarely do I come across a popular science book that meets academic standards for research-oriented perspective on such interesting issues. The author cites from a bibliography spanning nearly 100 pages of research citations, explaining everything clearly in context, and giving clear indications of where he finds the data persuasive or otherwise.His thesis is that most academic studies of human psychology have used graduate students at Western Universities and assumed their findings could be generalized to all humans. He persuasively demonstrates that these subjects are very unrepresentative of humanity generally, being what he terms "WEIRD" -- Westernized, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (the polity, not the party).He persuasively demonstrates his thesis with page after page of fascinating vignettes drawn from his own research experience and that of numerous colleagues. By his account, the Catholic Church dramatically changed human folkways from their tribal baseline by outlawing plural marriages and kin marriages in favor of life-long monogamy with non-kin. He's able to trace, over more than a millennium, the progress in human communities as correlated with their adoption of the Church's marriage regime, and he persuasively explains why this happened.To say more about his thesis in this brief note would only trivialize what seems to me, as a psychiatrist with decades of professional experience in various contexts, an utterly non-trivial theory of our psychology as a species. Suffice it to say that I felt considerably enlightened by reading this, and have been quoting it and benefiting from its insights in my understanding of the world ever since. It certainly has important implications for our current resurgence of tribalism in the U.S., which is not a good omen. The most important question it raises is, if we have no unifying deity, how will we hang together as a people?