By Joseph Henrich
In his summary, Dr. Henrich returned to three questions he posed in Chapter 1. These are the second and third questions, with his answers:
- Why are WEIRD societies particularly unusual, so often occupying the extreme ends of global distributions of psychology and behavior?
Answer: The sect of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church stumbled onto a collection of marriage and family policies that demolished Europe’s intensive kin-based institutions. This grassroots transformation of social life propelled these populations down a previously inaccessible pathway of societal evolution and opened the door to the rise of voluntary associations, impersonal markets, free cities, and so on.
- What role did these differences play in the Industrial Revolution and in the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries?
Answer: By the High Middle Ages, the social and psychological shifts induced by the Church had made some European communities susceptible to notions of individual rights, personal accountability, abstract principles, universal laws, and the centrality of mental states. This fertilized the psychological soil for the growth of representative governments, constitutional legitimacy, and individualistic religious faiths as well as the rise of Western law and science. These changes accelerated the ongoing social and psychological transformations that energized innovation and economic growth.
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 474