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Joe Henrich Profile picture
Joe Henrich
@JoHenrich
Harvard Professor in The Dept. of Human Evolutionary Biology. Books: The Secret of Our Success & The WEIRDest People in World. Tweets r my own.
2 subscribers
Jun 27 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Peter misses the argument here, making the entire piece misleading. Once you understand the actual argument, the aDNA data is largely supportive. See below The argument is that ONE branch of Christianity (not "Christianity") diffused a set of prescriptions and prohibitions that dissolved the pre-Christian kinship structures into monogamous nuclear families. It's NOT about "cousin marriage" per se.
May 8 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Just finished "Abundance" by @ezraklein and Derek Thompson. Fantastic book! I found myself thinking, "I couldn't agree more." Well done! If I may offer one critique...however... The authors fall into a classic social science trap, writing and assuming, "What principally distinguishes the past from the present is not biology, nor psychology, but rather technology. If the world has changed, it’s because we have changed the world."
Mar 21 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
This paper misunderstands the goal of the WEIRD paper they cite so prominently. The point of the paper was to raise the consciousness of researchers to the presence of substantial variation in widely used psychological measures across societies. There is, in fact, substantial variation across populations in the susceptibility of various visual illusions. I don't think that's in dispute here. @DorsaAmir, correct me if I'm wrong ? Do you think we can just use undergrads to obtain human universal results for illusions?
Mar 21 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
Two scholars that I greatly respect published this perspective that I think is on the wrong track. We had the entire lab read the paper, so I'll reflect the concerns of multiple cultural evolutionary scholars. @mnvrsngh Image Answering evolutionary questions demands evolutionary theories captured by process descriptions, preferentially distilled in formal models. Surprisingly, M&F fall into the classic trap of trying to spot a key phenotype that distinguishes humans...that special something.
Mar 7 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
People's creativity hinges on the collective brain into which they are enmeshed. It's about the population size, interconnectedness and cognitive diversity. E.g., we've shown how the low innovation rates in the U.S. South arise (in part) from a lack of cultural diversity. Image Causal effect of cultural diversity on innovation @_MaxPosch_ @JF_Schulz static1.squarespace.com/static/6012d58…Image
Feb 15 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
Thanks again for your paper, @DorsaAmir & @chazfirestone. Disagreement is the lifeblood of science. I'm replying to this paper in 2 storm tweets. See below..@timothycbates First, in my lab, we've long worried about the data collection standards for the 1960s illusion. Led by @mmuthukrishna, 'we' (not including me :) ) collected new data and raised the bar: see
Feb 15 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
Let's review. Game on. The question: Is there evidence that population-level variation exists in susceptibility to visual illusions? @DorsaAmir & @chazfirestone wrote a fascinating paper to which I will reply in two storm tweets. I see major problems. Storm 1 coming... In my lab, we've long worried about the data collection standards used by researchers over a half-century ago. D&C rightly point this out. However, our approach is different: we go collect more data and set a new bar. Proud of my former students and post-docs. @mmuthukrishna
Feb 17, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Puzzling to see the @TheEconomist offering an analysis of the impact of cousin marriage without considering the recent work in Economics showing the powerful effects of the practice on economic and political outcomes. Let's review. First, the Economist's discussion: economist.com/united-states/…
Sep 23, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Is GPT psychologically WEIRD? Using the World Values Survey and other psych measures, we seat GPT within a global perspective. The culturally more distant a place is from the US, the lower the correlation with GPT @MohammadAtari90 @blasi_lang @DorsaAmir Image GPT falls between Germany and New Zealand...@mmuthukrishna Image
Aug 26, 2022 • 13 tweets • 7 min read
Anthropologists have long argued that kinship represents the oldest and most fundamental of human institutions. Does kinship--the organization of families--impact global economic outcomes in the modern world? An interdisciplinary and international team of anthropologists and economists take a look: @DumanBRad @JF_Schulz papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… @DrNathanNunn @GalorOded @DanielHruschka @mmuthukrishna @aiyanakoka @martinlangcz @CFCamerer @DrDaronAcemoglu @robert_t_boyd @tylercowen
Feb 5, 2022 • 6 tweets • 5 min read
New paper from the Laboratory for Culture, Cognition and Coevolutionary at Harvard @StevenHeine4 @slingerland20 @David_S_Wilson @gophilosophy_ @MicheleJGelfand trebuchet.public.springernature.app/get_content/2e… You can't understand "human" feet, bite, body temperature, hormones, vision, immune systems and much more without understanding the impact of culture. @MGurven @corenapicella
Jan 3, 2021 • 10 tweets • 8 min read
Jump starting a new field: Historical Psychology. Pop the clutch... @slingerland20 @mmuthukrishna @RachelASpicer annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.114… Image Psychology must take history seriously and team up with historians and other experts. Things that occurred centuries ago influence how we think, reason and perceive now. Image
Jul 6, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Is the free exchange of diverse views out in the academy? This open letter, from a supposedly learned society, calls for the silencing and demotion of @sapinker based largely on tweets going back a decade. The letter reads like a parody of academic discourse. They open with a dose of innuendo and guilt by association, but then publicly wash their hands. They dissect a scattering of Pinker’s statements, always confidently asserting the least charitable interpretation.
May 22, 2020 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
The WEIRD scale is out in Psychological Science. If you are a psychological scientist and want to generalize your findings beyond Americans, or whichever narrow sliver of humanity you started with, how can you make the best use of your resources? @mmuthukrishna @Adrian_V_Bell Cultural distance from the USA and China using a measure firmly grounded in cultural evolutionary theory. @wgervais
Jul 15, 2019 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Interesting findings on personality variation across 15 nations by Laajaj et al in @ScienceAdvances. Kudos to the authors. Imho, they show little evidence for the BIG 5 model of personality outside the WEIRD societies. advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/ea… However, analyzing a wide range of data with large-samples, they do find 1 dataset that does better in giving them data that matches the USA's BIG-5. It's an online website of mostly young, educated people that must respond in English, German, Dutch or Spanish.
Jun 25, 2019 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
When I discuss my concern that psychologists and behavioral economists rely on a thin and peculiar slice of humanity in order to understand HUMAN psychology, they often reply with the strong intuition that they (but perhaps not others) are studying “basic processes,” etc. To assess how difficult it is to identify these “basic process” without both evolutionary theory and serious cross-cultural research, let’s put aside psychology and focus on physiology and anatomy. Surely, those are “basic.” #WEIRDPeopleProblem
May 28, 2019 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
Many psychologists seem very concerned about diversity among their faculty and grad students. But, nearly a decade after the WEIRD People problem was identified as a scientific issue, there's been essentially no change in the diversity of psychology PARTICIPANTS. >90% WEIRD In Psychological Science in 2017, nearly 50% of all samples were American, but NO participants from Africa or Latin America. 6.6% from "Asia", which includes China, India and the entire Middle East. There was NO information on sources for nearly a quarter of the samples! Generic
May 2, 2019 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
Proper analyses of Whitehouse et. al.’s data reveals that moralizing god PRECEDE the rise of complex societies, but serious data concerns persist. psyarxiv.com/jwa2n @babeheim @DrQueue @martinlangcz @willismonroe @mmuthukrishna @slingerland20 @RachelASpicer @aiyanakoka To see the issue, first take a look at the data the authors’ analyzed. 1 = moralizing god present, 0 = evidence of no moralizing gods, and NA = Missing data. Data for Whitehouse et. al.’s 12 key location (green when writing appears)