YOU'RE LIKELY WEIRD … AND YOU DON'T KNOW IT
If you're reading this there is a good chance you think you're normal, but it's likely you are actually quite WEIRD.
And, for the most part, that's just the way it is — if you live in North America. Your WEIRDNESS could, according to evolutionary psychologist Joseph Henrich, even help explain your relative prosperity.
WEIRD is a brilliantly far-reaching acronym invented more than a decade ago by some creative social psychology professors at the University of B.C. It refers to people who are “Western,” “Educated,” “Industrialized,” “Rich” and “Democratic.”
UBC'S Ara Norenzayan, Steve Heine and Henrich, who has since moved to Harvard University, whipped up their WEIRD formula over a Chinese takeout lunch at a basement food court on the Vancouver campus.
Everybody talks about diversity now. But when these profs examined contemporary social-science research they uncovered a huge blind spot to cultural differences, which has led to misleading conclusions about human psychology and, for that matter, human nature.
The colleagues published a groundbreaking paper in 2010 that showed more than 96 per cent of experiments in social psychology were based on subjects who are WEIRD. Compared to the vast majority of people on the planet, WEIRD people tend to be highly individualistic, control-oriented, nonconformist, analytical and trusting of strangers.
We are not the global norm. As Henrich says, “Textbooks that purport to be about `Psychology' or “Social Psychology' need to be retitled something like `The Cultural Psychology of Late 20th-century Americans.' ”
Such American-centric textbooks might not even fully describe what Canadians are like, although there's little doubt we lean toward the WEIRD.
Henrich explains all this and much more in his new magnum opus, titled The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Despite its 680 pages, it's quite readable.
Henrich's book takes the UBC crew's understanding of WEIRD traits to new levels of significance. Gleaning from history, philosophy, religion and anthropology, it attempts to explain why there are differences between cultures, including why some are more prosperous. It's reminiscent of the transdisciplinary project Jared Diamond took on with Guns, Germs and Steel, which maintained geography shaped Eurasian power.
To oversimplify Henrich's sweeping theory, he thinks the medieval Christian church's assault on incestuous relations and polygamy led to the Western model of two-person marriage and the “dissolution of kinship intensity,” or extreme clannishness.
That created the groundwork for individualistic and mobile WEIRD societies in which “impersonal social norms about fairness, honesty and co-operation provide a framework for interactions … between strangers.”
Here are two of the many revealing ways Henrich et al have shown people are different because of their ethnoreligious background.
“WEIRD people are bad friends,” Henrich writes in one catchy subtitle.
WEIRD people aren't really willing to lie for a friend, he explains. In a cross-cultural experiment in disparate nations, participants were asked to imagine what they would do if they were a passenger in a car with a close friend who, while driving above the speed limit, hit a pedestrian.
More than 90 per cent of people in WEIRD countries such as Canada, Switzerland the U.S. would not testify their friend was driving slower than he was. “By contrast, in Nepal, Venezuela, and South Korea most people said they'd willingly lie under oath to help a close friend.” Communal bonds matter more in places that are not WEIRD.
People from China also trust in different ways from people in more strongly WEIRD cultures. Cross-cultural surveys show people from China, because of dense social networks, often have high levels of trust in family kin and people who are around them.
But they don't have what he calls “impersonal trust.”
“The signature for this pattern emerges when people are specifically asked about how much they trust strangers, foreigners and people they've met for the first time.” In China, compared to more WEIRD countries, people “explicitly distrust strangers, foreigners and new acquaintances.”
While Europeans and North Americans were developing bills of rights based on autonomy and rationality, however, Confucianism in Asia was teaching respect for parents.
“Elders could commit crimes against junior kin with lesser penalties than vice versa. Even into the 20th century Chinese fathers could murder their sons and receive only a warning.”
Things have evolved, though. Henrich maintains China, South Korea and Japan have economically prospered in the past century because during this brief time they banned clans, marriage between cousins, polygamy and patriarchal inheritance rules. The impersonal rules that go along with WEIRDNESS helped turn them into Asian tigers.
In this era in the West, some academics and activists will likely protest that Henrich ignores their argument that European imperialism is the reason Westernized countries have prospered and colonized regions have struggled.
Acknowledging his book does not “highlight the very real and pervasive horrors of slavery, racism, plunder and genocide,” Henrich emphasizes “human psychology adapts culturally over generations” and globalization, distinct from colonialism, has created “mismatches” that can weaken a society's institutions.
Henrich is valiantly trying to paint a very big picture in The WEIRDEST People in the World.
While clearly disposed to “celebrate diversity,” he avoids the cliché that, because of our common humanity, “deep down everyone's the same.” It's only true to a small extent: If we're cut with a sharp object, for instance, we all bleed.
But because of our collective histories and cultures, humans can turn out starkly different. So much so that Henrich makes it clear that ethnic and religious conventions can rewire the structure of our brains, even our genes.
It's a real-world position: Humans become the peculiar and often amazingly different people they are due to myriad unrecognized cultural forces.
Elders could commit crimes against junior kin with lesser penalties than vice versa.