The WEIRDest People in the World summary

Now that we’ve learned how modern Westerners are WEIRD, it’s time to take a step back and focus on the way most people throughout human history have looked at the world. We’ll call this the non-WEIRD mentality.

Let’s face it: most people care more about their family members than anyone else. The technical term for this phenomenon is kin-altruism – the innate concern for close genetic relatives. In service of kin-altruism, early humans developed kin-based institutions. In other words, they built societies based around the family.

So, if people were non-WEIRD for so much of human history, what caused them to become WEIRD? What seismic shift led to the adoption of an entirely new way of thinking? 

Henrich argues that the answer lies in the Western Church – the term he uses to encompass the dominance of first the Roman Catholic Church from the fall of the Roman Empire, and then the Protestant Church following the Reformation.

One tenet of the Marriage and Family Plan has been especially influential: monogamous marriage. To understand why monogamy helped reshape Western civilization, we have to first consider a few realities of polygynous marriage – when a man has multiple wives. The first is a problem of simple arithmetic. For every man with two wives, some poor guy has to go without one. As it happens, in most polygynous societies, about 20 percent of men wind up like this because there simply aren’t enough single women to go around.

This type of marriage practice, common in non-WEIRD societies throughout human history, heavily favors high-status men at the expense of low-status ones. In premodern societies across the globe, the highest status men – kings, chiefs, and great warriors – routinely took on lots of wives. For example, the Ashante and Zulu kings in Africa had more than a thousand wives each! In Han China, emperors had harems of up to 6,000 women. Even in places where elite men took no more than a few wives, there was still a glut of low-status men desperate to climb the ranks to secure a partner.

So, in Henrich’s view, the Western Church’s Marriage and Family Plan made people WEIRD. But how did a set of rules about sex, marriage, and inheritance make Westerners educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic?

Henrich argues that the MFP had major ripple effects. For example, as incest – especially cousin marriage – became taboo, people’s behavior changed. Rather than marrying someone across the family dinner table, Europeans had to go out in search of potential mates – often to other villages and towns. This exposed them to new people, places, and ways of doing things.

In this Blink to Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World, you’ve learned about the strange ways many Westerners view and behave in the world. You’ve also seen how, thanks to the Marriage and Family Program of the Western Church more than a millennium ago, the nuclear family has replaced the kin-based institutions of old. This package of policies helped reshape European psychology and led to the voluntary associations that gave rise to charter towns, universities, and economic markets. In turn, these institutions helped establish the laws, norms, and culture that dominate the West today.

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