Joseph Henrich

Well, so my story is that the rise of the Industrial Revolution in Europe has to do with the consolidation of Europe's collective brain.

And one of the things that requires is trust in strangers and at least the beginnings of moral universalism.

And it's that moral universalism that eventually causes the British to say –

we've got to stop with the slave trade thing.

And, you know, it's a moral decision that they make because it's no longer consistent with the changing moral values over time.

Right.

Yeah.

So the first observation is that there's a great deal of global psychological variation around the world.

So European, American, Australian populations tend to be highly individualistic.

They're inclined towards analytic thinking over holistic thinking.

They have a lot of impersonal prosociality, so trust in strangers.

They're against conformity, willingness to cooperate with strangers.

So the question is how can we explain the global variation in these features of psychology?

Towards the end of the book, I actually connect these features of the psychology to economic differences, including the industrial revolution that happened in Europe, which reshapes the world.

The story is that the key event is the spread of a particular form of Christianity into Europe, where the Catholic Church, what becomes the Catholic Church, systematically dismantles the intensive kinship systems in Europe, leading to small monogamous nuclear families.

And this transformation leads to the creation of new institutions.

So by the high Middle Ages, you get the rise of guilds, which are voluntary groups of craftsmen and self-help societies because people don't have their families to rely on.

People begin moving around.

There's occupational sorting into different occupations.

You get urbanization is rising.