Joseph Henrich

You find that most, 85% of societies, allow elite and high-status men to marry additional wives.

You find cousin marriage in most societies is permitted.

Neolocal residence is very rare, although common in the West, as we discussed.

And just many other kinship practices like levered marriage, which you don't find in the West, are common around the world.

So it's as if these norms evolved to build these dense networks of kin to organize production and consumption and distribution.

And by preventing this from happening in parts of Western Europe, the Church actually opened the door to new kinds of institutions and new ways of thinking about the world.

Yeah, so this began in about 2005 when I arrived at the University of British Columbia.

And there I was moving out of anthropology into psychology, and I encountered two colleagues, Steve Heine and R. Noren Zion.

And we would go to lunch together, and we were each talking about our research, and we were all studying cultural differences.

And what we had each independently found is that not only was there interesting cultural variation around the world, but that the populations most studied by psychologists and economists were psychologically peculiar when placed in a global and historical perspective.

So, we began to think about and try to put together a case trying to convince psychologists and economists that they needed to think more broadly about psychological variation and just not generalize to all of humans based on one common culture that they most commonly studied.

So, we coined this acronym, or I guess it's a backronym, WEIRD.

It stands for Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

Yeah.

So this was my very first anthropological field work.

And I went to the Peruvian Amazon.

I flew in on missionary planes and landed on the river and went into the village.

And then I traveled around in a dugout canoe around to the different villages.

And at this point in my career, this is kind of the mid-1990s now, I'm studying cooperation.

And one of the ideas that we were thinking about was the possibility that the willingness of other people to punish poor behavior, non-cooperative behavior, unfair behavior