Dr Joseph Henrich | WEIRD Minds-Why the West is psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous

foreign good evening everybody ladies and gentlemen distinguished guests I'm Simon Haynes welcome back to the Ramsey lecture Series in this beautiful space at the mint welcome from me and also on behalf of our chairman John Howard who sends his regrets that he was unable to join us this evening though I'm sure he would be as delighted as I am to welcome his opposite number the chairman of the Paul Ramsey Foundation Michael Trail welcome to you Michael and of course we are at the center are extremely grateful to the Paul Ramsey foundation for their support it's fantastic to see such a good turnout especially on a Friday night at this slightly later time can I just ask are there any Ramsay scholars in the room if so please great please raise your hands fantastic to see you um you are always the most important people in the room keep coming bring your colleagues and your friends because this Ramsay Center is an educational Enterprise above everything else we're nothing if we're not that and that means we're all about the Next Generation so as usual I'd just like to start briefly by acknowledging our extraordinary benefactor the late Paul Ramsey without whom nothing that we do the scholarships at undergraduate and postgraduate levels the University's support for the Humanities or any of these events would be possible Paul wished the Ramsey Center to be to have a starring role in his truly unique Legacy so we always do our best to honor and respect and enact that wish of Paul's so thank you Paul Ramsey before we start if I can just beg the Indulgence of our distinguished guest this evening and just give a short plug to some other forthcoming Ramsay events coming up don't miss them watch our website for when for the exact dates we will among others be hearing online from Professor Remy Bragg at the University of Paris later in the year one of today's most eminent historians of philosophy and thinkers about the nature of the West and he'll be talking about his famous best-selling book eccentric cultures a theory of Western civilization and I'd like to reassure audiences that this will be in English not in French but it will be it'll be online later on in this in this year in September we'll be hosting live probably either in this room or down the road at the um at the at the library Professor Robert Tunes from Cambridge will be talking about his history reclaimed project which to use his words in the in the in their um in their website is intended to push back against false readings of History which create or aggravate divisions resentments and even violence in society so that'll be good um and at a date we can't yet confirm because various Middle Eastern heads of state are involved in the permissions and the arrangements for her archaeological digs we are confident of finally welcoming live the distinguished historian and broadcaster Bethany Hughes from Cambridge to be in Sydney in in an unspecified but absolutely certain future time she's done a couple of wonderful talks already for Us online as you may know and many of you will have seen Bethany's SBS series on Sunday evenings so it will be a treat to see her here in person so don't miss that and watch our website for details more immediately however at a date at the very end of May or early June 30 31 1 in there we will be hosting a special panel on secondary education in Australia featuring among other luminaries our very own Elizabeth Stone a distinguished member of the Ramsey Center board also the departing principle of queenwood college in Sydney and as you may be aware Elizabeth was recently appointed the head of no less August an institution than Winchester College in England she is the first woman and the first Australian in 650 years to be appointed to that position she'll be joined by several others but including Elena Douglas the CEO of the social purpose business called the knowledge Society so do come along in a month or so please don't miss that very special event even though the Ramsey Center is obviously more preoccupied with the tertiary sector than the secondary one the secondary one is where it all begins very very important so that will be a very good a very good evening finally just on housekeeping please remember that after the event today you are most welcome to stay back and join us for snacks and drinks in the lobby and meet our guest outside so now it's a great honor and pleasure for the Ramsey Center to welcome tonight's speaker he has a very crowded schedule very rushed in the short time that he's here and we are especially grateful to him for making the time to come and speak to us he's just off the flight from the U.S so that's it's amazing that he's here um he's Professor Joseph Henrik and Joe is the Ruth Moore professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University previously he was a professor of both economics and psychology at the University of British Columbia where he held the Canada Research chair in culture cognition and co-evolution his research uses evolutionary approaches to psychology decision-making and culture he integrates ethnographic tools from anthropology with experimental techniques drawn from psychology and economics and he's explored in this way a variety of topics including economic decision making social norms fairness religion marriage Prestige cooperation and innovation he's done long-term field work in Peru in Chile and in the South Pacific and has spearheaded several large comparative projects he won in 2004 the presidential early career award for young scientists and in 2009 the early career award for distinguished contributions bestowed by the human behavior and evolution society and in 2018 he was awarded the Wagner prize for theoretical Innovation by the society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2016 Joe published The Secret of our success with Princeton and now in 2020 the best-selling book that he's going to tell us about now the weirdest people in the world who it turns out are basically us um so our fourth Ramsay lecture for 2023 is called weird Minds how religion marriage and the family made the West psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous ladies and Gentlemen please welcome Joe Henrik cool stuff it's great to be here I'm glad we're really glad we can make this work out so my thanks to the organizers so as Simon mentioned uh I want to tell you a little bit about my book um and one of the key things I'm going to be focusing on is the emerging picture of psychological diversity that we that's emerging from studies in lots of places and my efforts to try to explain a slice of that psychological variation all right so I thought to get us started I'd administer to you a psychological tool called the IM test or the who am I task so what I want you to do is try to finish this sentence in three ways and you're thinking about how you might describe yourself to someone else so I am and then whatever you want to say so normally psychologists would do this 20 times and they've had people all over the world finish this task in different places and then you can add up the way people respond to this and code it in different ways and you get interesting patterns so go ahead all right so I might answer this by saying I am Jessica's father I am a brother I am ARA's friend although that's probably not how I would actually answer it instead I might say something like I am curious I am a Scientist I am a sea kayaker right so in the first one I'm telling you about my relationships and my connections and the second one I'm telling you facts about myself that I might want you to know even the scientist one it's a group right but it's kind of a strange group and you know I don't pick up fellow scientists at the airport because we're both fellow scientists so it's more about me than it is about the group uh and so on one end we have attributes aspirations and accomplishments things about myself chosen by me uh versus roles and relationships and this varies quite dramatically around the world uh in terms of the degree to which people think of themselves as nodes in a social network versus uh unitary selves that are embodied by certain characteristics are described by certain characteristics so this has long been noticed by anthropologists it's part of the individualism complex so uh Clifford geerts an anthropologist at Princeton described it back in the early 70s writing the Western conception of the person as a bounded unique and more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe is however incorrigible it may seem to us a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures so that's so that's this notion of the self but that seems to go along with some other stuff so the focus on this self the atomic view of the self also a sense of guilt now guilt in this sense is contrasted with shame so anthropologists have long distinguished guilt and shame-based Societies in a shame-based society there's a large number of social norms and you're concerned about violating those social norms losing faith in the eyes of others shame is contagious or not contagious but it extends from people besides yourself so if your brother does something shameful then you feel shame as a consequence whereas guilt is about living up to your own personal standards so if you don't go to the gym on a particular day you might feel guilty but your brother is not going to be judged by your neighbors because you didn't go to the gym overconfidence so individuals tend to be overconfidence and we've done a lot of research on this ourselves and it's true overconfidence in the sense that people actually do overrate their own abilities and self-enhancement is just putting your best foot forward always emphasizing your best characteristics so those all kind of tend to Cluster together so that's a little global map of the world and you guys can see you're on the map here dark blue uh the most individualistic Societies in the world we beat you at 91 but the Australians come in at 90 close second not bad and then the British are at 89. so a lot of variation in there and you might think well that's interesting so people think about the self does this really matter for stuff that we care about so one of the hats I like to put on from time to time I was a professor of economics so uh it doesn't matter so this is a just a plot of individualism and patents per million people so rates of innovation I could put GDP I could put lots of different measures there now this actually comes from a paper published in the lead Economic Journal and those economists tried to make the case that this is a causal relationship the greater individualism is associated with this I think it probably is too although for this point it's it's enough to just say look there's an interesting correlation here and does that really matter so I'm going to come back to this but just suggesting that there's some economic importance going on here all right now the individualism complex is just the tip of an iceberg and that we really don't know how deep it goes this psychological iceberg so some other examples of psychological variation we find in the world is the use of intentions in moral judgment so this might seem very strange right so if somebody steals something if they do it on purpose or if they do it by accident should matter a lot and how much they punish people well we've done studies all around the world and there's quite a bit of variation Western societies the mental States the person had are crucially important in in making any sort of judgment which just to kind of if you just think about it for a second mental States we can never really know what was in someone else's mind so any punishment that's assigned based on mental States is an inference that we have to make about something that's fundamentally unknowable it might think of that might be something that you might not want to include in you know a Judicial proceeding but in Western Judicial seatings that's very important establishing these hidden unknowable mental States in other places it only only outcomes matter only what actually happened matters so if you burn someone's house down you're an arsonist whether you did it on purpose or you did it by accident analyst analytic versus holistic thinking that has to do with how we approach problems do we uh look for objects and assign properties to them and then try to explain the behavior of the system based on the properties we've assigned to those objects or do we look at the relations and interconnections between things just a simple example of analytic thinking would be a psychologists assign people personalities or other dispositional traits and then try to explain behavior based on that physicists assign properties to particles and then try to explain behavior based on that economists assign preferences to individuals same thing whereas holistic thinking it will be about the relationships so if one person is uh angrily yelling at another person you might say well that he's an angry person that's a dispositional attribution and a weird way of describing things a relational person would say there's a problem in their relationship or maybe the older person is trying to teach something to the younger person and really wanted to impress it upon them anyway uh so so different ways of approaching them a non-relational morality uh versus a universalistic morality just that the question of whether moral things apply to everybody or just small groups or there should be different rules for for different kinds of relationships I've said a lot about dispositional thinking when I was talking about analytic thinking but this comes out in two pieces of psychology you might be familiar with so the fundamental attribution error if you've taken a course in social psychology you might have heard of the fundamental attribution error it turns out not to be so fundamental and it's this tendency to ascribe internal or dispositional reasons for something so if someone doesn't show up at work maybe they're lazy that would be a dispositional attribution as opposed to a situational they got a flat tire something like that so that's the fundamental attribution error doesn't appear everywhere seems to be a phenomena of weird people and then cognitive dissonance so wanting to be consistent across contexts it bothers westerners individualists a lot it doesn't bother lots of other populations okay so this I can keep going down this thing trusting strangers Conformity and patience and one of the points I make is that there's been so little research across diverse populations that we're really not sure how deep the iceberg goes okay so I've been using this term weird it stands for Western educated industrialized rich and Democratic and two colleagues of mine Steve Heine and R nor in Zion we coined this term as a way of raising the consciousness of our fellow researchers to remind them that when they just study Americans or they just study Western subjects not only are they getting one slice amongst a spectrum of cultural diversity but they're getting an unusual slice it's not even like the median population it's some more outlier population so you want to be very careful about generalizing to the species as a whole at the time we raised these concerns back in 2010 the evidence suggested that 96 of all participants in Psychology studies came from weird societies seventy percent of those are Americans and then you go up from there to the 96. so it's it's heavily dominated by Americans and and weird people now there's a cluster of traits that all go together that turn out to be these kind of unusual traits that characterize weird people but I want to mention one of the one of the reactions that people have to often this psychological variation is there's a tendency to think well this is just the superficial psychological variation so I can when I give this talk to cognitive scientists I'd use a totally different language and I talk about things that are very cognitive sciencey so I can show you differences in memory people remember to differing degrees across societies uh in different aspects of memory are different attention varies visual perception varies spatial reasoning varies time psychology varies and more so you can carve this up in different ways and some of the basic aspects that a that a cognitive scientist would say you know that's good hard cognitive science would also vary okay and then the final is a kind of caution one of the things I found is that by by coining this term weird people have a tendency to build up a dichotomy in their mind between weird and non-weird societies and that kind of the language sort of naturally suggests it but just to give you a sense of of why that's uh of why that's a mistake if I was telling you about octopi and then you made up the category non-octopi that wouldn't tell you very much about the non-octopi right all the other animals are in that category so it doesn't it doesn't help you triangulate in you would just know they're not like the octopi so that's just meant to try to avoid making that dichotomy in your mind finally a cautionary note and this comes from my experience of having given this talk many times to many different groups is that I have to use these aspects of psychology to characterize people and I'm not trying to be critical of weird people or non-weird people making the thing I just said not to do um and one of the things that this comes off is we as when particular psychological traits are valued in your Society or are common in your Society you tend to Value it and the case is it good to be conformist but uh thinking that that's a bad thing is actually illustrating just how weird you are if you think being a conformist is a bad thing because in lots of places we could do research and and I can point to research showing this people think Conformity is a good thing and in fact if you ask people well should you teach your children to be conformist in the U.S they say you know that's not on the list of important things to teach your kid in lots of places it's one of the top things you want to do you teach your kid to be a conformist and in fact in experiments done by Christine legare who's a developmental psychologist at UT Austin she showed Parents videos of kids either behaving in a conforming way or a non-conforming way and she had Parents in Vanuatu and parents in in Austin Texas say how which kids they thought were the Smart Ones and the Vanuatu parents all thought the conformists were the smart kids and the Texas parents all thought that non-conformists were the smart kids so this just sort of very you know different cultural world so the people who I'm going to call a conformist think Conformity is good okay so here's the two questions uh how can we explain the psychological variation around the world so this is the variation here pictured in between out and in group Trust so we're going to try to do that and then does this psychological variation influence the kinds of things we care about outcome so democracy financial markets Innovation things like that this is a map of moral universalism versus relational moral universalism one thing I meant to point out in the individualism plot was that the gray area is Terra Incognito in terms of our knowledge so there's vast swaths of the globe where we don't have any data at all for at least some aspects of psychology so that's important scientific uh you know shortcoming okay so uh very briefly I want to lay out for you how I approach uh and think about cultural Evolution and psychological change and the kinds of processes I'm going to be talking about so here I'm drawing on my 2016 book The Secret of our success so I'm in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard I think if humans as animals that have undergone natural selection we have a common ancestor with chimpanzees about six thousand or six million years ago um six thousand is somebody else so I think of two important processes natural selection and phylogeny so we can understand a lot about humans just by knowing we're a kind of ape and then the question is what has natural selection done in the last six million years so for my purposes I like to partial out that we have evolved uh cultural capacities so more than any other species on Earth we are really good at observing other people and learning from them copying ideas beliefs values behaviors strategies heuristics all kinds of things from them but we also have other evolved aspects of our psychology which will become important when I talk about kinship and families which will play an important role in our story all right so we can say a lot about how we learn who we learn from by using the logic of natural selection we think of culture as an adaptation our capacity to learn from others and then over Generations this gives rise to this process of cumulative cultural evolution so cultural cultural learning plus these other aspects of psychology affect these cultural products or create these cultural products complex tools practices and rituals social norms and institutions and languages and I mean I'm not going to be able to get into this but one of my interests is how just the ability to learn from each other gives rise to social norms so shared sets of Behavioral practices that have a standard in the sense that if anybody deviates them from them other people get upset and that leads to stableness in these social norms so what we've learned is that human brains are relatively plastic and I've made the case that that's actually by Design so our minds evolve to be plastic in order to adapt to the diversity of Worlds that's created by different languages different social norms the kind of cultural products and just an example of some things that we already know vary in response to these things are visual processing so all of us grew up in a world with 90 degree angle Corners that turns out to be rare across societies and it gives rise to this Mueller liar illusion you know the the line with the two arrows that go this way or the two hours that go this way in hunter-gatherer societies they don't see that illusion because they don't they haven't their eyes haven't calibrated to a world with lots of 90 degree angles uh something like uh so self-regulation we know is influenced by devotional and ritual practices so if you have to do the same thing every day repetitively you get a degree of self-regulation that you don't get if you don't engage in these things so that's a that's a that's a cultural practice that then affects a feature of psychology okay and one of the other main points I try to really push in both books in fact my opening vignette about the importance of reading which I'll get to at the end is meant to deliver home this point is that these are biological changes in our brains they're just not genetic changes so lots of things affect our biology that doesn't have to do with genes populations that grow up in different environments become biologically different because we've evolved to change our brains to respond to the social mildews we have to navigate so non-genetic biological differences now in the long run I've argued that this cultural process has affected this deeper evolutionary process over hundreds of thousands of years and altered our genetic Evolution although that's not important for today's lecture okay so we're going to be thinking about social norms and institutions and in particular I'm interested in the oldest and the most fundamental of human institutions and that's the one related to marriage in the family so humans have a bunch of innate features that affect our construction of families so we have a kinship psychology that we share with lots of other animals so we're preferentially inclined towards altruism and care towards close relatives so we know why parents love their children it falls right out of evolutionary theory it's really nice pair bonding like gorillas we form long-term relationships with members of the opposite sex for the purpose of rearing Offspring but cultural Evolution built marriage systems in many societies based on that there are a couple of exceptions of societies without marriage but if you look closely pair binding still pops up in those societies it's just not surrounded and sacralized and all the kinds of things that we do do to marriage in our society the same thing with kin psychology this basic aspect of psychology is then extended by culture in all kinds of interesting ways to other kinds of relatives and then finally like other animals we have to avoid inbreeding so we have incest aversion that's why you're disgusted at the idea of sex with your opposite sex sibling but lots of societies have incest taboos that say you can't have you can't marry or have sex with cousins of various kinds and in fact one of the most interesting things is that there are taboos on certain kinds of cousins but then other kinds of cousins who are equidistant are preferred Marriage Partners okay so this all shapes the fundamental social networks of human societies who grows up with who who's allied with who who has responsibilities to who so it's really kind of rewiring Society at a fundamental level now it's important to then realize that this is the families that many of us are familiar with are psycholog are unusual in a Global Perspective so here's a list of five kinship traits and if you go to the ethnographic atlas which is this database of information about over 1200 societies that anthropologists compiled in in the 1960s and you look at these different kinship traits you find that most of the ones that you know are Western families that would be necessary for Western families are rare So bilateral descent that's tracing descent through both Mom and Dad surprising to many it's only 28 percent of societies in the database have bilateral descent elsewhere it's patrilineal descent or matrilineal descent or sometimes more complicated things little or no cousin marriage so most societies have cousin marriage many societies encourage cousin there so 75 percent of societies do that monogamous marriage quite rare only 15 percent of societies prevent Elite and high status males from having additional wives uh meanwhile polyandry where a woman has multiple husbands is vanishingly rare in the ethnographic record so 0.1 percent of societies have that it does it also pops up sometimes but it's it's always rare and then nuclear family is quite rare 92 percent of societies don't have nuclear families as the basic structure and need a local residents 95 percent of societies require the bride in the groom to live either with the husband's family or the wife's family um but but not set up a new residence independent of everybody else so if we add all this up this is the so these are five practices if you have all five you're here and if you have none of them you're here so this is just over fifty percent of societies in This Global database have none of these practices and then this is the number here that have these five if you dig into this data these are either European descent Society so this is a global database it includes the Irish of County Cork Ireland for example uh and so they have they're in this bin the other interesting case are Cebu in the Philippines is in this category and when I dig into the history of the island of Cebu it turned out that that's where Magellan landed it's also where he died and his Antonio Pig feta writes about Magellan The Chronicles of Magellan and they clearly had a lot of these practices because he Magellan has the Padres on his voyage railing about the polygyny and other kinds of things which they're engaged in and then 60 years later Dominican missionaries arrive and so before the Anthropologist got there the Dominican missionary just got there same thing in North America okay so this is important because families it's an institution but it's the first institution humans encounter when they enter the world and it's also probably the oldest so and it's you know it's linked into our evolved psychology and important ways all right so that's an important background now what I'm going to be arguing so we want to explain weird psychology and towards the end I'm going to try to make some links here to suggest that this psychological variation affects these kinds of things now I'm going to make the argument that variation in family and kinship practices affect how people think about the world and that within Europe a transformation of these kinship and family practices led to a bunch of features of European history which distinguish it from other places so the spread of what historians call voluntary associations so guilds monasteries universities and even these Charter towns that popped up all over Europe were voluntary associations of a kind you don't are not common elsewhere there was competition amongst all these voluntary associations because they were voluntary so you could move and change and pick the ones you like for the sort of rules of organization and I'm going to argue that that had had an effect this led to Rising urbanization and occupational choice so in 800 CE Europe is behind many parts of the world an urbanization about one percent uh in about 1200 Europe passes China and sometime after 1500 it passes the Middle East and Mediterranean area so Rising urbanization over the entire period during the same period there's the proliferation of markets I think all of these green arrows affect aspects of psychology and then finally and this is what I'm going to move to now is I think this transformation in the mayor in the family was actually initiated by a set of policies that stem to the the late the church in late Antiquity and the medieval church so the church initiates a bunch of prohibitions on cousin marriage prohibits polygyny and certain kinds of uh inheritance practices I'll talk more about that in a second so this is the the key mover here which leads to this and today I'm just going to have time to focus on these three arrows so the red arrows are historical data the kind you need you have to make a historical case and the green arrows are psychological data so intellectually I'm doing something here sort of unusual is that I'm going to develop theories I'm going to show historical data to suggest that this has actually happened in the past and then I'm going to use contemporary data to test the psychological connections because at the time I didn't have data on dead people psychological data we're figuring out ways to get that so we're analyzing the Latin corpora I may yet have that data okay um so just to give you a sense of the kind of picture I have of why these kinship institutions matter let's just make a stark contrast so a world of weekendship so nuclear families you've got to make your way in the world and you have to find all of your own relationships you got to find your friends your business partners and your mates in this world most of your relationships are given at Birth your marriage is a range you work with your cousins you're a production unit you don't have another production you know production unit separate from your family uh here you have to cultivate those dispositional attributes so you want to be smart honest clever you anything that you think is going to help you distinguish yourself from others and find those relationships in this world your your goal is to conform to those expectations of the relationships you don't need new relationships because you have this can Network you've received at Birth so here you're going to you've got to use these personal attributes so you're judging others on their dispositional attributes and you're trying to cultivate your own here you you trust someone for example you seek a new business partner based on your connections to them because it's those social connections that are going to make them trustworthy not some dispositional trait uh so trust based on disposition based on embeddedness this is a shame world where you're trying to live up to all these standards and there's a lot of rules for you to follow this is a world of guilt where you have to cultivate those traits so whatever those are which could vary across individuals um you're trying to live up to those traits and then here you identify your identity is to touch to your this cultivate itself this set of attributes you're trying to cultivate whereas in this world it's about your relationship so you're you think of yourself as a member of your clan or extended family okay now most people think that the the small monogamous nuclear families that characterize uh Western societies for example emerge after the Industrial Revolution so people start getting wealthy and then they do the sensible thing and make small families that's of course not what rich people do in Saudi Arabia and other people and they don't suddenly start making small families so we have the test of what happens when people get rich but in any case that's what people think but I don't think the data supports that we know that the uh the data is clear that the the nuclear family goes back to at least 1400 1500 in Europe so that's before the Industrial Revolution and here I'm drawing on this book by Jack goody but a number of other historians have or he's an anthropologist but historians have made the same point that in fact it was the church's efforts which began in late Antiquity which gradually broke Europeans down into these monogamous nuclear families so you might be familiar with the incest taboos and just to give you a sense of how embedded this is in uh it's embedded in English of course so when when you when you refer to your in-laws um you say sister-in-law brother-in-law father-in-law most people don't realize the in-law part is in canon law so she's your sister in canon law which means no sex or marriage with her male um and that was a reminder because affines meaning uh In-laws in many societies are possible Marriage Partners so in a poligenous society after you marry one sister you might marry the next sister or even if that's not allowed if your wife dies naturally you want to maintain the relationship with the same family it's about relationships so you would get one of the younger sisters and is to replace the older system but the church put an end to that in fact that was one of the very first things they did then they banned first cousin marriage and then they they expanded the circle sometime around a thousand CE it goes out to six cousins then in the fourth ladder in Council it's brought down to just include third cousins but it does expand quite widely and it includes spiritual relatives and uh these affinial relatives uh so that's that of course polygeny is banned had been common in Europe uh second there were sort of primary and secondary wives and the church also banned sex slaves no arranged marriages uh so the in the Christian ceremony the bride has to say I do that's actually quite rare cross-cultural usually nobody asked the bride what her view is but here this is the priest being like let's do one last check are you okay with this all right and um and the church also discourages uh corporate ownership of land now goodie makes the point the church has got self-interest here because the Archbishop of Milan Ambrose figured out that uh he could get people to donate to the church if he convinced them that you donate to the church we give it to the poor and then there's a passage in Mark which says that the you know the sorry long story but in any case the church figured out a way that they convinced people that if they gave to the church they'd have a better chance of getting to heaven now of course the idea was to give during your life most people didn't want to do that so they would give on their deathbed and then they would get the ideas they could get to heaven so that led the church to become one of the richest or the richest institution in Europe and gradually accumulate quite a bit of land okay but that affected the inheritance system okay so finally I want to mention this this is a part of the many modern weddings today but it actually traces back to the carolingian period so many of you are probably familiar with it so if anyone here can show Just Cause while this couple cannot be lawfully joined in holy matrimony let them speak now or forever hold their peace and then there's like a pregnant pause and everybody looks around um this is this is an incest inquiry this is again the priest saying let's make sure these two aren't relatives we've got everyone together here who could possibly know if they're relatives and do let's do one final check and then if we make sure they're not cousins then we can we can finally join them so this is part of this effort that the carolingian Empire went to teaming up with the priests and you know the pope and stuff to try to end this incest problem okay so this is all suggests and then by 800 to begin to see actual statistical evidence and then the amount of evidence we have that this is operating seems to grow over time after that okay now to make this into a scientific program now I got to move into the modern world and use data to see if we can find evidence for the kinds of effects that I'm suggesting occur so my task this is published in the journal science is two if this is true I should be able to link the church's uh the spread of the church the marriage and family program to differences in kin based institutions so I need data on something like rates of cousin marriage rates of polygyny things like that I should be able to link those to psychological data and then I should be able to go this way all right so just to give you the highest level data I can possibly show you where this is global data so these are different countries around the world this is centuries under the medieval Church of these populations and I just picked the easy thing to understand I have more complicated measures I could show you but an easy thing to understand would be the rate of cousin marriage so more centuries under the medieval Church less cousin marriage around the world if we take the rate of cousin marriage so that's a log scale and then we found data on 17 different psychological variables at the country level and just for Simplicity we add them all up and create a single index and we called it the individualistic impersonal psychology index and greater cousin marriage means less individualism less impersonal trust the things that are in this scale a fairly strong relationship now I could show you the data for every single one of the 17 and you'd see the same pattern so there's you know there's no hidden stuff behind the curtain so it's all in the paper okay and then finally I can go this way so more centuries under the church more individualistic impersonal psychology now in many of these measures we have data on the western church and the Eastern Church and historically the evidence seems to suggest that the Eastern church had a kind of weak version of this marriage and family program that dissolved the Western families into small monogamous nuclear families they were kind of late they didn't the bands didn't go out as far and they were less enthusiastic about it but it did occur and we frequently see this pattern where we get a weak effect for the Eastern church and then a strong effect for the western church so more individualism and impersonal psychology there so this at least globally it fits with the basic pattern now we can add all kinds of fancy controls to this but it's still cross-national data and whenever you see cross-national data you should be suspicious because everything correlates cross-nationally there's lots of correlations so what we did to kind of dig into this more deeply is we created a database of uh bishoprics around Europe and so we have a GPS location for each bishopric and we have a date so we can track the spread of the church you'll see sometimes the red dots will turn gray and that means that that part of Europe is under a political power that's unfriendly to the bishop in Rome to the pope so we don't count the period when you know it's under Islamic power say and you'll see that you know Spain gets conquered in various parts of Italy get conquered it's also sometimes they're under the Orthodox church or under the the bishop and Constantinople so not under the Roman side uh so this goes from 500 to 1500 and so we get this dosage measure you'll see Ireland is interesting right people tend to think Ireland got Christianity early right St Patrick and whatnot um but that brand of Christianity did not have the marriage and family program as part of it Ireland doesn't get the marriage and family program until the Normans arrive there much later 12th century 13 . okay so this gives your dosages around Europe in this map we include the carolingian borders in uh blue because the carolingians played an important role they're also an important political Border in 800 and then the Iron Curtain also is there okay so what we do is we have four psychological Dimensions that we get from the European Social Survey so a measure of individualism a measure of conforming obedience measure of impersonal fairness and impersonal Trust happy to talk more about those if people want to hear more but so we these psychological measures and what we do is we use the exposure of each region to predict the individual psychology so in the analysis we're explaining the psychological traits of individuals and we're using where they live and how long that region has been under the church's influence so our findings are that individuals from regions with longer Church exposure have greater impersonal trust greater and personal fairness less Conformity and obedience and greater individualism Independence in this analysis what we can do is we only compare regions within the same country so there's nothing about National Health Care Systems or GDP or anything in this because we're only comparing within countries we have individual demographics income and education as well as age so it's not an income effect it's not an education effect we're only comparing college degree people with other college degree people we have lots of uh Geographic variables we have climatic variables and one might worry that it's it's somehow the church is associated with Roman influence so we have historical maps of the Roman roads that interconnected the Roman Empire and we can use proximity to Roman roads uh as a measure and uh so so that's it's not part of that we use initial prox prosperity in 500 the presence of medieval universities monasteries the carolingian Empire all as controls in this analysis and the result holds one of the most persuasive analysis is for me is if you say let's forget Western Europe and just focus on everything on the other side of the Iron Curtain we get the same results over there so if we just look at what the former Soviet Bloc right what's the other side of the of the curtain all right so this is this is one set of analyzes now um I also in that in that this sort of job I gave the team the job I gave myself to to figure out was that I should be able to show that um more exposure to the western church predicts things about kinship so I could show you analyzes showing that longer and more time under the church leads to less cousin marriage across Europe but I thought I'd show you these plots instead which are saying the amount of cousin marriage and this is based on a 20th century measure and the amount of individualism independence based on the same measure I just showed you so from the European Social Survey so places with more cousin marriage are less individualistic and independent just looking within Europe you can see we got data from Italy Spain France and turkey we don't have data from everywhere so this is just the particular regions of those countries where we could find data and we put turkey on there now the everything holds if we remove turkey but I think it's worth noting that turkey Falls exactly where you'd expect it if you know its cousin marriage rate so this is a place with a very different history but yet once you know it's because in marriage rate you can say something about its psychology okay same thing with impersonal fairness so greater more cousin marriage less impersonal fairness and again there's turkey where it should be and then everything else Falls in there um conforming obedience so more cousin marriage greater Conformity and obedience and uh more cousin marriage less impersonal Trust and again turkey's down there we can add a number of different bells and whistles to this and try to control for various things in general the result holds it's not a huge data set like the previous one because we only have these 68 regions of Europe but that's what we got now this analysis solves a number of problems so we use the European Social Survey and we only look at second generation immigrants so these are people who move to Europe from other places and they had kids this and then the kids take the European Social Survey so we only compare second generation immigrants with second generation immigrants they grew up in Europe they speak the language fluently they went to the European schools all that kind of stuff but yet they had families and possibly social networks that were from other places and so what we do is we attach to that person the the measure of the kinship intensity this thing that we're we think is the key thing going on how sort of interconnected families are and what not the structure of the social network or cousin marriage or church duration to this individual and then we try to explain their psychology based on where their parents came from essentially and what we find is that individuals who have whose parents come from places with less kinship intensity or less cousin marriage have greater impersonal trust greater and personal fairness less Conformity and obedience and greater individualism Independence so the same patterns that we would expect where there's some cultural transmission coming from the parents or the social networks the parents create to the kid that cashes out now when I present this people are there's always you know people who are thinking about immigration debates usually ask questions so I'll just address that now this data allows us to look at the strength of these factors and what we find is that going from first generation to Second Generation to third generation the effect declines by an order of magnitude each generation so we can detect it because we got a really big sample but it's much smaller than first generation and then third generation it's even smaller we can often still detect it and then very hard to detect in fourth generation okay and then in this case we can have our usual hold constant all of the same stuff we add feelings of being discriminated against in case people from different places get discriminated against different amounts uh and we can do another we can do other fancy stuff so one of the fancy things we do is we if you have mothers from the same country but different ethno-linguistic groups then we can hold constant the country where the person came from and just compare people with moms that were from different ethnic groups in the same country it's just another way of kind of removing other sources of variation okay so uh that was kind of um that's the European analysis there's also evidence which is not in the book because it came later from Africa so this is Augustine Bergeron's work he's an economist and what he did is uh we have a map of historical Christian missions all over Africa so places where missionaries went and um and then he's studying people in the in the city of kananga which is a large city in the Democratic Republic of Congo and he looks at where people are from what their home Villages are which are often pretty far away and scattered all over the DRC and then he sees if he can use the proximity of the home Village to these Christian missions to predict whether they have these more intense kinship networks and then whether they're morally universalistic and in-group loyalty and the patterns he finds is that when you're closer to the Christian Mission you have these smaller more nuclear families and you have a more morally universalistic psychology less concerns about in-group loyalty so the same pattern we would expect except now we we replicate it in the DRC I often get in debates about with the European historians who will come up with some story about how the European Elites having some complicated thing going on and I'm like well how does that explain the Democratic Republic of Congo finding so you got to test these ideas in different places so uh then looking at China and India this in this case we have variation in kinship intensity measured by Clans except now rather than the church being the thing that affects kinship there's a large literature suggesting that Patty rice agriculture intensifies Clans and so using this we can explain the variation around Han Chinese only so throughout all other groups just focus on Han Chinese Han Chinese from places with more Clans Where It's associated with more Patty rice agriculture approach the world with less analytic thinking and a more interdependent self-concept and more concerns about in-group loyalty so the same pattern basically and this is from the U.S so uh as the U.S is expanding uh cousin marriage is popping up in various places and getting to some non-trivial thresholds so various states start enacting cousin marriage laws and so Goshen colleagues who's an economist at the University of British Columbia shows that when States enact their laws against cousin marriage you have a decline in cousin marriage and this leads to Greater income at urbanization later so there I don't have the psychological data but I can show the expected economic effects all right so finally I want to say a few things about Innovation and this is kind of the latest stuff on the agenda so um in my prior work I developed this idea that uh a lot of human Innovation knowledge comes from the interaction among diverse Minds so most novel ideas are actually recombinations of existing ideas so if you get people with a lot of different ideas together and let them interact you know they can make baby ideas and so so if this is true then we should expect the size of a population and the amount of cognitive diversity in the interconnectedness to interact to create faster innovation okay now in the weirdest people in the world I apply this saying that the social factors that I talk about which I ultimately anchor in the church and these psychological changes uh so greater urbanization that's always going to create more Innovation my immigration is going to create more because immigrants bring diverse ideas these institutions are different so the the apprenticeship and and journeyman institutions are uh different in Europe than other places and I'll just give you one key element so the journeyman phase after you've been trained by one master to be a Craftsman of some sort say you then have to go do what I think of as a postdoc in another Master's shop and it has to be far away like there's a rule that it can't be nearby that means you're remixing with a bunch of other guys coming from other places who worked under other Masters it's an environment that's really ripe for new recombinations because you're bringing together ideas that would normally never see each other if everybody keeps their ideas combined and of course universities are spreading knowledge societies are spreading coffee houses and in the book I show how knowledge societies have an impact on British innovation and uh this this one is actually relevant for urbanization because this is uh so from 1100 to 1900 and this is I call this the size of the collective brain but it's just a number of other people that one person might have access to and what I did is I said well let's assume you can access everybody in your city and then your ability to access people in other cities depends on the cost for getting to that City and so then if you then sort of add up how many people can I access you know discounting people in other cities by the cost of travel there then you get you get this kind of thing where the size of the collective brain the number of people that any one person can access is is getting big rapidly right around the time the Industrial Revolution occurs okay psychological factors are important too because if you co if you trust and cooperate with strangers then you're more likely to share ideas interact collaborate with people you don't know are members of your family those kinds of things individualism if you want to be the smartest guy in the room or impress everybody then uh that's an incentive as opposed to being conformist keep your ideas to yourself stay in line that kind of thing also obviously a novelty preference breaking with tradition is going to help here and tolerance of religious differences because then you can access more of those ideas that are in different Minds all right so what we did is we took the database of patents between 1980 and 2014 and my colleagues did most of the hard lifting here and we tried to explain variation just within Europe so I've already shown you this link going from the church to uh aspects of weird psychology and that's a map of weird psychology just combining all four of the traits that I talked about it's also you can take Modern Family so this is a percentage of nuclear families or Facebook friends greater than a hundred kilometers so that's we also have Facebook data so we can we can make this connection and then we can show these two links so we can make these connections and explain patterns using aspects of psychology and families and then we can do this one so that's this one so more exposure to the medieval church more patents per capita just comparing Europeans with Europeans only analyzing within the same country and using these very small regions to compare okay now uh we can do other analyzes to improve this um I can talk about that at the end okay I'll just mention this I'm I've run a little bit over time here so I just want to I'll say this very briefly one of the things I was trying to explain is um you know Weber asked this question uh while he even asked this question he made the proposal that protestantism played a big role in the rise of capitalism and markets and things like that but I think uh the question one of the questions I wanted to address is how do you get to Protestant in the first place so it's a highly individualistic religion I talked a lot about mental States early on and you know whether you're meant to steal it or you stole it by accident in Protestant is if you can get to heaven just based on mental States so faith alone gets you to heaven as opposed to Faith and good works it's a very strange idea in the context of world religions and the idea that individuals should read the Bible for themselves is really peculiar why should we give every schmuck a chance to read the Bible for themselves and have an opinion uh but this led to the widespread literacy because people had to learn to read the Bible than for themselves it was thought that everybody should do this boys and girls so Protestant populations figured out ways to educate boys and girls so they were literate and what the fun part most people don't realize is that when you learn to read it changes your brain so it thickens your corpus callosum it gives you specialized region in your left ventral occipital temporal region it Alters part of your Superior temporal sulcus and left inferior prefrontal cortex and it improves your verbal memory because you can make a picture of the word and it creates larger patterns of brain activation even when you hear speech so you hear speech and part of your brain is actually turning it into words right to written to written stuff now uh it also shifted facial recognition um to the right hemisphere so the current thinking is that in we needed some neurogeography and so when we learned to read we drive out some of the facial recognition and that means we be literate people become right hemisphere bias for facial recognition so for a long time uh neuroscientists were telling us humans humans are naturally right hemisphere bias for facial recognition turns out that's mostly about literate people or right hemisphere bias because we've used some neurogeography for something else so anyway uh key closing point is you have to think about psychology as co-evolving with institutions and other aspects of culture and this affects how those institutions operate so plucking an institution that evolved in one society and dropping it on another society which was a favorite activity of Europeans for a long time it doesn't work because it doesn't fit with the psychology that exists there right there are different expectations and the whole whole set of Dynamics deep history matters for economic outcomes so if we want to understand the Contemporary world we have to understand history so plug for the historians um important to note here you know I'm talking a lot about culture and cultural groups this is a story of not essentializing cultural groups but of dynamic change over time so you know if you look at Europe in a thousand CE there were Islamic scholars who would talk about the northern barbarians and by that they meant like you know the English and the Dutch and stuff who they thought were unsophisticated uncouth and stupid um and there was a big change in in Europe over that over that Thousand-Year period and then I made this point previously about cultural Evolution being a type of biological evolution but not genetic evolution all right that's it [Applause] so that was um that was just fabulous there's so much there one hardly knows where to start I'm going to take advantage of my my the fact that I've got the mic at the moment just to ask you a question first um and just picking up on what you were saying right at the end about Weber um and I'm I'm thinking about this from from a Ramsay Center perspective because our University programs as you all know focus on the great books of the past so we always like to put the things that we hear from the speakers in the context of kind of long tradition of thinking about whatever it is and so thinking about um what you just said about Weber who talks about ascetic protestantism and he says of course the protestantism leads to the rise of capitalism so he traces this back to Luther like like you did but I'm thinking even more about Alexis to talkfil in um in Democracy in America her and you quote a a sentence from detoxing at the beginning of one of your your chapters I think I can see the whole Destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on these Shores um and the top Bill also says as each person concentrates on himself men become more equal and more detached from their fellows and the idea of Devotion to one's kin in your in your model becomes more foreign democracy destroys the Instinct for devotion this is this is the talk so I'm just I'm thinking there's strong parallels between what you're saying and what people like Weber and detox saying but the difference is that they're talking about not the west but modernity so this is a conversation that's been going on for a long time 200 years in the West about what it is to be modern and you segued that into a conversation in the west about what it is to be Western so can you can you just talk about that in in a sense I see what you've done as a as a wonderful kind of uh late addition to a tradition of conversation in the west about modernity but now it's become something about westerners can you can you can you yeah I mean it's one thing it's interesting because I the I the idea of characterizing something as modernity doesn't appeal to me I want something much more specific that I can get my hands on than ex and explain so if you want to just discuss something like the breaking down of family ties or the relative not lack of importance of the family or moral universalism I would break it down into a series of elements and just talk about how those elements change over time I wouldn't want to put a label on it because that makes it difficult and unwieldy and the other thing is eventually modernity will be the past and so if you want to think long term you don't use terms like that because then you've got to have Neo and then um yeah so uh I'd better to get back to your question I do think that I I think it's worth seeing my Enterprise as related to Weber and de tocqueville and I think they made many of the same observations as I mentioned I was trying to really get to Weber and then one of the things I do in the book is I look at some of the modern evidence that actually supports some of the things that favor said so if you compare Protestant and Catholic Germans based on whether they happen to live in a place that when Catholic or Protestant due to the decisions of some Prince or Duke you know in the 16th century you can see differences in how many hours they spend at work so you can see evidence of the Protestant work ethic and whatnot the same is true in the use of mental States so so Jimmy Carter president former president of the U.S you know famously talked about how guilty he felt when he had impure thoughts about women but other religious Traditions like Jews for example and this is research by Paul Rosen don't feel such such guilt about that is it's about actions it's not about thoughts so just to give you an example um and I think one of the things that fits with the de tocqueville thought is that you know the migrants to the U.S had an advantage because they didn't have these structures that that existed that had to be torn down in places like France um if you look back into European history there was democracy or at least representative governments at the local level beginning in the high Middle Ages it just took a long time for like how are we going to govern our town where he had a Town Council and the town would make group decisions and the representatives from the different guilds to get that up to the National level where there was Elites and Royal Blood and all that kind of stuff so you can think of it as an up trickling from the kind of a Grassroots thing go to the U.S there's no there's no Elites to fight with I mean some came over of course but okay so that's great thank you I'm hoping we'll get back to reading at the end this question I want to ask but I there are a lot of hands so can we start right right at the end of that can I ask um people to just identify themselves and if possible keep the questions reasonably short unlike me yeah this will be short um Luther um probably was somewhat similar to Emmanuel Kant in his cultural construction I.E Northern Germany that German kind of deontological morality as it never ever tell a lie even if the Nazis turn up at Anne Frank's house and says where's Anne Frank versus maybe a socialistic type of uh morality Allah Jeremy Bentham and um consequentialism and utilitarianism so maybe the bifurcation is not um Europe versus the Orient it may not be temporal maybe it's a bentamite consequentialism versus deontological ethics which obviously has a temporal and civilizational facitude as well that could be another interpretation of the data um so but okay um but then why would why would that why would I be able to use the medieval Church diffusion I've worked in a medieval Church institution and I can give you an example out because I have seen it I have looked after mentally handicapped people in uh Catholic Church institution in France and I have noticed there that uh French aristocrats do send their inbred mentally damaged children into church organizations where they can be cared for blah blah blah blah presumably they never told me it was above my pay grade the idea is we'll look after your kids from Cradle to grave they won't breed and then you'll give us some money into the church and this will make the western church powerful you know since the carolingian I don't know when I don't know Charlemagne crowned himself in the year 800 or whenever it was so anyway the church has done those sorts of things throughout time I'm sure that's quite correct that is there's nothing wrong with that data it's just that possibly as well as that factor I'm not saying that's falsified there are other explanations such as philosophical developments a la con versus Bentham Allah socialism versus capitalism a la past you know ancient times Roman Greco Roman stuff versus Barbarian stuff but yeah the church thing works well it's a nice it's a very nice anthropology it's plausible yeah I mean uh one of the things that has been our approach is that you know if someone if when you know if there's another hypothesis out there or you know these don't have to be mutually exclusive is that we try to you know try to find some data so the question would be is there something that we could measure that could capture the dimension you had in mind so you saw all the kinds of controls we put in there one thing I didn't mention in some of those analysis is that there is an independent effect of whether someone's Protestant on on those outcomes I was focusing on the duration of the church but there is that Protestant bump um on a bunch of those so so then so there could be other factors that playing a role just my job to figure out how to measure it I I I'm I'm so impressed that you've just come off a transatlantic flight and thank you so much it was fascinating um I have two very well I'm Lucy um I have two questions both of them potentially odd or curveball-ish um the first is how would you place Judaism in what you've been describing and I asked that as uh someone who is very interested in Judaism my ex-husband is Jewish I was always I am still interested in converting you don't have to answer that if you don't want to the other question is um I don't know if you or anyone else in the room read the um ft's piece that's going to appear in this weekend's paper on Godlike AI and as an anthropologist how you feel about the Advent of Godlike AI completely unrelated and yet relevant I would think as a journalist who was at the economist for a very long time okay great question either off okay um yeah so uh well so well the the initial Prelude chapter on reading used to be longer because one of the things I wanted to dig into was um I would I make the case there that this which is the case I made just a few minutes ago is that the spread of literacy was driven by protestantism and one of the things economists do is they use the distance from Wittenberg and they look at literacy in the 19th century in the closer yard of Wittenberg the more literate and you know Luther has these these great quotes where you know protestantism will spread from Wittenberg like Stone on a pond you know the waves and that that actually looks like part of what happened um but one could say the printing press so not too long before that the printing press appears in a different part of Germany in mines and you know you can put the distance from mines in and it looks pretty good but anyway it's a common alternative hypothesis but there is another group that was highly literate before long before any Europeans were and that that's Jews so after the destruction of the second temple it became a norm for Jewish men to have to learn to read the Torah for themselves it was you know part of being a Jewish man was being literate being able to read you would you would learn to read Aramaic script but the the Torah and so this meant that Jews at least men were highly literate relatively early on So You Know thousand years before or what is it well a thousand years I mean it took a while for this to spread so let's say a thousand years for fun before uh Luther you had Jews were completely literate they were entering urban populations they were doing all the things that go along with literacy so that's part of the story there but then they created these large long trade networks so then they communicated through letters and they were very Market integrated so they had a bunch of the elements that you would think would lead to a weirder psychology except they also maintained strong family ties so there's some interesting third story to be told there that's neither you know analytic thinkers tend to think along lines but this is more like a branching puzzle type deal um another fun fact though is that if you look at one of the pieces of evidence I use in the book is the change in kinship terminology in different European languages and you see them go from the kinds of complex kinship terminology that typical agriculturalist societies have where you have different words from mother-in-law and different kinds of cousins and stuff to the simple terminology that is common in English and other Western languages and when that occurs so it seems to occur right when you expect it occurs first in the Latin languages so Spanish Italian French and then later in the germanics and it occurs all throughout all the Germanic dialects except one and that's Yiddish and so Yiddish never gets the new terminology it still uses the old terminology from the complex days so anyway it's a fun piece of evidence uh and I think I'm going to pass on the AI one but we might come back to reading in a minute yes the gentleman just here hang away for the wait for the mic how do you reconcile the Nations which value non-conformity uh with the fact that those same Nations seem to be the very most conformist at the moment they bow down to work culture and cancel culture they seem to accept facts and uh what are basically forced vaccinations it seems to be a paradox well I guess I like to think that there's a lot of uh debate about those things so there aren't there a lot of anti-wokers out there yeah what's that oh okay I don't know I I still I think there's Lively debate about all those topics which is why we're having that debate right now or that discussion right now okay but I should say let me just so all humans are conformists right so it's a matter of degree right everybody wants to go along with their peers and stuff like that so you know psychologists do this thing called The Ash Conformity test where they have you know a few people ahead of you who are actually Confederate to the experimenter give the same obviously wrong answer and then the question is how long is the subject say what the other people said versus say what they would perceive to be the correct answer and everybody conforms to some degree in all populations it's just a matter of the degree of conformity okay uh my name's Chris I do research in neuroscience and genetics and I found your presentation very interesting I had a question about if there was any Divergence in your data between looking at for example the church and the Protestant church and places where there was more or less cousin marriage in general because if not how do we not know if some of these effects or if not all the effect is this coming from going up an apologetic Society in a like so apologetic or a society of higher genetic diversity could that just be what's driving this change rather than the church right so let's see um the first thing we do so you know I I was showing cousin marriage in this talk because it's easy to understand but really the main uh measure we use was you saw it pop up there the kinship intensity index and we created that from that ethnographic Atlas with I mentioned that has all those different kinship for different societies and so we took whether you have Clans polygyny uh and things about your inheritance system whether you have nuclear families and we rolled that together into an index now that includes cousin marriage but that's our main predictor so cousin marriage isn't isn't playing a big role there um now so so that's one piece and if I wanted to test your idea I could drop cousin marriage out and I think I would still capture it uh there's an economist named Ben Anki who you know he's kind of working in parallel we're both at Harvard and we're having beers together sometimes so uh and he developed a version of this his kinship intensity index doesn't have cousin marriage and he has a paper published in economics which does similar kinds of things so I feel confident that it's not the cousin marriage thing having said that we have a paper that's in manuscript form and what we did is we took satellite imagery of the entire world at night and that gives us measures in lumens and we use it as a proxy for economic productivity so basically parts of the earth that are more lit up are more economically productive and you know we can we can hold constant population density so we're actually interested in extra Luminosity above and beyond your your what Your population density would predict and we show that the the having a low kii is not very much kinship intensity having small nuclear families is associated with lots of Luminosity right so we we link it to economic growth uh and then we do an analysis where we get data from genetic data and we want to generate another proxy measure for this kinship intensity so we look at the runs of homozygosity so this is you're going to create runs of homozygosity when your people are marrying close relatives and places with more homozygosity have less less light intensity which then comes back to your question is maybe maybe it has to do with this kind of genetic diversity that's where you're going right and but so then we have to then this question comes up directly for us in the paper and we look at the available data on the relationship between the amount of this homozygosity and IQ measures and education measures and we find that that effect is teeny compared to the large effect we see in our study so the contribution it can't be the main factor it could be a small factor hey I'm Winnie my question is a bit broad I think it generally is around what do you think will happen in the future given the rates of globalization we have so many more people migrating to different countries and such as sharing and influx of different ideas and particularly between kingship intensive I guess societies and non-kingship in terms of societies do you think that there will be a I guess a unification of traits particularly psychologically across the world in the future or do you actually think that it will be more competitive and potentially more of like a doministic kind of well certain traits will be selected and they will probably be one or the other or some like new type yeah yeah great question so uh and this this gets to this uh I guess this is I'm going to pitch the don't think along a linear line so I think there is a loss of a lot of the diversity we had seen but I think we're seeing the creation of new social forms new institutional forms so if you think about just Japan and China for example in 1880 you know the the Japanese take in a lot of Western institutions they actually copy law codes from places like Switzerland you know verbatim and China the same thing happens in the in 1950 or so they adopt Western marriage a number of other things but then of course these societies have their own indigenous institutions which then get remolded and so the you know they're on new trajectories which haven't been seen before in West in history because they have some Western institutions in there but then they have lots of the local institutions and they've created this hybrid which is like nothing that existed before so it's going to be a new kind of psychology that doesn't that hadn't been seen in the world in the past it's not going to be Western but it's not going to be like traditional Chinese or Japanese psychology so so an old variation being destroyed New variation being created time for a couple more was that okay um we've got a question um I'm Karen Kerman I very much enjoyed your presentation I have two questions um one question is uh do you think at a very general level people are becoming smarter or more intelligent from the biological processes that are taking place and the second question relates to a theory I had when I was a Jane Austen fan in you know sort of early teens and that was I used to ponder on the idea of whether people were becoming smarter and we're getting all this Innovation at the time I was growing up in the you know 70s and 80s because of the decline of arranged marriages in the west and my thinking was that you didn't have to marry someone you know that your parents knew you could marry someone that you wanted and therefore if you're a smart person you could marry another smart person then you'd have smarter children so that was a very dodgy Theory from you know me at 12 or 13. but I just wonder what your thoughts were on it yeah um uh fun question so so I tend so I have some work on IQ uh which I I think the way to think about IQ and I don't think we think about it correctly because we think about it as this General raw intelligence I think we should think about it as a specialized set of cognitive abilities for navigating the world we've created so IQ has risen dramatically in the last century um so much so that someone from 1900 the average IQ would be 70 if scaled by moderate standards so in that sense IQs are higher so what people are good at as as navigating the world we live in now you might say well doesn't that mean they're smarter well it means they're better adapted to this environment but we have this project which I'm going to next month in Namibia and we're studying the effects of schools on children we have the same ethnic group one is in Angola where there's no schools and one is uh has one is in Namibia where there are some schools so we get to track child's cognitive development in a whole bunch of domains with and without education and the the kids with no schools are better at spatial tracking so if I say you know where's broom you can be like you know they know immediately they can they're geo-locating all the time and they're also better at Raw pattern recognition so they're not bringing a bunch of expectations that come from school and stuff so there's lots of other cognitive domains too which I think we lose when we educate people so if those could be smart in a context of being a hunter-gatherer or are trying to survive I mean being able to get home is pretty important right so and I actually think having GPS is making our spatial navigation abilities even worse right used to kind of at least look at the map and figure out which way it was North now he was like oh so anyway so I think that's a big thing and what was the second part of your question oh yeah no I actually we think we have real data on this which is that what's happening since women entered the labor market so say in the U.S that's the early 1970s and now with these dating apps is you're getting a lot more people who are mating with people who are similar to themselves so the economists are marrying other economists and making baby economists and and what that does is uh is it it pushes out the ends of the genetic distributions right so it doesn't change the mean but it means you're getting people with more extreme traits right if if autistic people marry other autistic people then you know so that's the idea so that is it is affecting the genetic pool in an interesting way we've got time for maybe one more was it was was there a hand somewhere there Tom Tom just given all of the changes that are happening in society now the significant changes with marriage with all those things what would be the one or two uh things that you would say in terms of policy advice that you would say to you know senior senior policy advisors give policy advice right okay very wise well so I'm I'm working we won't hold you to it whatever you say I uh well so I'm interested in um the collective brain and the idea that Innovation is driven by cognitive diversity and urbanization so things that bring people together with diverse ideas any policy that encourages that so and I've been trying to study the immigration policy in the U.S and it looks like immigration has been a powerful driver of U.S Innovation over most of the histories although the H-1B visa is a failure because it ties immigrants too tightly to the company and they're not able to go out and interact and start new businesses with other locals but if you look at something like so in 1924 the U.S banned immigration from a whole bunch of places and this drove down productivity in a number of areas and actually made native born Americans less creative less patenty because they don't get the ideas coming in and then make new ideas with that so that sounded kind of policy related fair enough I think we do have to stop very quickly though on reading okay if I may um and I'm asking this because increasingly I'm I'm feeling that the that the Ramsey centers project more than anything else is reading encouraging young people to read and and one say says this to undergraduate audiences with a greater and greater sense of urgency because reading is harder and harder for young people to do because because they're doing this all the time right so so what I I guess what I'm wondering is do you think that the the very uh technique and skill of reading which sparked off the modernization that you've been talking about is is receding and young people are becoming less literate at the same time as they're becoming more atomized because they're buried in the screen all the time so those two effects are quite worrying don't you think yeah and so I mean I haven't looked at research on this but given what we know about how people are affected by Technologies and other factors it would seem that people are getting shorter attention spans and the sort of deep reading I'm going to sit down and read this book for three hours and I'm going to focus I'm going to be in the in the zone you know uh you know because if reading and if reading has those even like like I think even uh people who were less affected by the technology just the email and the websites and stuff like that you really want to close all that off and just yeah you and the text yeah I mean if reading has the good effects that you're talking about and then we read less then that's a bad thing right right anyway fellow weirdos I think we should we should say a very big thank you to somebody who's just got off a very long flight to deliver this wonderful talk very grateful to Joe Henry thank you Joe [Music]

Channel: The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation

Views: 5,562

Keywords: harvarduniversity, WEIRD, josephhenrich, evolutionarybiology, anthropology, catholicchurch, psychology, ramsaylecture, westerncivilisation, thewest, WEIRDpsychology, joehenrich, harvar

Id: xk_2PUUGHeE

Length: 84min 10sec (5050 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023