The WEIRDest People in the World

The WEIRDest People in the World has been described as a work of Big History and compared with works such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011).

The first part, "The Evolution of Societies and Psychologies", describes WEIRD people "in broad strokes", according to reviewer Pauline Grosjean.[2] Henrich discusses the research of Richard Nisbett suggesting that people in WEIRD cultures think reductively with a focus on personal attributes and intentions, while Asians think holistically with a focus on relationships and situations. Non-Westerners will emphasize family connections and allegiances. Henrich also states that WEIRD people are more trusting of strangers and more likely to give blood than most humans. Westerners, according to reviewer Judith Shulevitz, "identify more as members of voluntary social groups—dentists, artists, Republicans, Democrats, supporters of a Green Party—than of extended clans.”[3]

The second part of the book, "The Origins of WEIRD People", provides a comparative political account of how societies have used religion to scale up from families to states.

The third section, "New Institutions, New Psychologies", is about how the Catholic Church and its offshoot, Protestantism, shaped early institutions and psychology, paving the way (in the view of the author) for modernity. While accounts of modern history frequently argue that the Protestant Reformation created individualism and a belief in rule of law, Henrich claims that edicts by the Church that he calls the "Marriage and Family Program" (MFP) put an end to clannishness, making Western Europeans more analytic and individualistic, and paved the way for various intermediating institutions and trust in abstract rules; thus, as Henrich argues in the fourth section, "Birthing the Modern World", the Marriage and Family Program opened the doors for the Reformation,[4] with Protestantism being a "booster shot" (in the author's words) for a process the Catholic Church set in motion.[3]

Henrich has been described as espousing "macro-cultural relativism" and "cultural evolutionary determinism" with the book.[3]

The WEIRDest People in the World received a number of positive reviews. In The Week it was billed as "a work of dazzling ambition [...] Henrich goes to great pains to back [his arguments] up with a huge variety of 'data points' and statistics."[5] Andrew Wilson of The Gospel Coalition dubbed the book "sweeping, polymathic, counterintuitive, and provocative. In a number of places it looks like Henrich is shoehorning facts into his theory [...] but he hits far more than he misses [...] the splutters of incredulity you experience are more than made up for by the breadth and chutzpah of the narrative."[6] Wilson compared it with the work of N. T. Wright. In Kirkus Reviews it was praised as a "fascinating, vigorously argued work that probes deeply into the way “WEIRD people” think."[7]

Hilton Root, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, argued, "Henrich’s genius and the source of his methodological originality reside in his application of contemporary social science to uncover universal laws, and to classify and categorize social reality in a context-free approach. [...] The evidence strongly supports the importance of repressing 'kinship intensity' in trajectories toward modernity." However, the reviewer also argued that readers will not learn the larger-system context that also defined Europe, saying, "Only in passing does Henrich note that the Church did not apply the marriage rules on elite lineages with the same rigor as it did on peasant communities". Root also noted, "Tracing an outcome, e.g., the distinctive psychology of Western society, to an original cause, the Church ban on cousins wedding, is in itself WEIRD." The reviewer said that despite "jumping from the fifth century to the High Middle Ages [...] the book makes a significant contribution to the study of what makes the West unique and will be a landmark of early twenty-first-century social science."[4]

Judith Shulevitz of The Atlantic was skeptical of the claim that WEIRD and non-WEIRD people possess opposing cognitive styles, saying differences in subjects’ personal experience may be the reason for differences in Triad Task responses. She also said the author's "indifference to individual and institutional intentions is guaranteed to drive historians nuts." However, Shulevitz argued, "The big-picture approach soars above the reigning paradigms in the study of European history [...] Henrich offers a capacious new perspective that could facilitate the necessary work of sorting out what’s irredeemable and what’s invaluable in the singular, impressive, and wildly problematic legacy of Western domination."[8]

Not all reviews were positive. Wilson had also discussed the Philip Jenkins book Fertility and Faith (which makes a different argument), and described it as "more focused" than The WEIRDest People in the World.[6] A reviewer in The Economist claimed not to be fully convinced of Henrich's thesis that the Roman church ushered in a more fluid society, saying that more likely "the medieval church was negotiating with, rather than moulding, a social reality which was evolving fast as cities emerged." The reviewer also criticized the Western-style/kinship-intensive divide by noting that one family can contain a range of roles and attitudes.[9]

Pauline Grosjean, Professor in the School of Economics at University of New South Wales, noted in Science that marriage age has varied over time and that the colonies of the U.S. and Australia (places with abundant land) saw a sharp drop in marriage age among migrating 19th century Europeans; she described this as evidence against Henrich's suggestion that the Church's marriage prohibitions explain the Europeans’ propensity for late marriage.[2] Additionally, she said Henrich fails to address "the role that states may have played as competitors and regulators of the Church". Philosopher Daniel Dennett praised The WEIRDest People in the World as an "engagingly written, excellently organized and meticulously argued book [...] One of the first lessons that must be learned from this important book is that the WEIRD mind is real; [...] we must stop assuming that our ways are 'universal.'" However, Dennett claimed that on "why the church fathers enforced these prohibitions so tenaciously against resistance over the centuries, this is still a bit of a mystery. [...] This book calls out for respectful but ruthless vetting".[10]

The controversial evolutionary psychologist Bo Winegard, in a conversation with his brother Ben, mildly criticized Henrich as "leaving the 'gene' part out of the gene-culture coevolution theory (just to note how powerful the taboo against talking about these differences is)." Winegard claimed different natural environments, and (after the Agricultural Revolution) very different cultural trajectories, would have exerted selective pressures on not only physical traits but the psychological traits on which the book centers.[11]

Nicholas Guyatt of The Guardian anticipated that scholars would point out the uneven effects of the church's "marriage and family programme" across time and space; the low hostility of the Protestant church to cousin marriage compared to that of its Catholic rival; and the increase in cousin marriage across many European societies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Guyatt also said the book insufficiently discusses the wrongs of the west, overly stereotypes non-“weird” societies, lacks insight into the phenomenon of non-Europeans carrying ideas and practices; and that "in its emphasis on the supposedly discrete nature of culture and on the virtues of “weird” thinking and progress it comes uncomfortably close to" endorsing social Darwinism.[12]

Razib Khan wrote that "Henrich’s engrossing narrative is filled with neat facts and insightful theories. The sequence of coincidences and correlations across history, psychology, and anthropology make for compelling reading." Khan said the author "makes a strong case that the Christian Church’s MFP was the cause for the transformation of Western European society during the medieval period. [...] But the second half of the book is arguably much more tendentious, as the author attempts to answer the great riddle of economic historians, the 'great divergence' between the West and the rest."[13]