Speaker

Joseph Henrich

Joseph Henrich

Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and one of the most influential theorists of how cultural and biological evolution interact. His best-known books are The Secret of Our Success (2015), which argues that human intelligence is primarily a collective rather than individual achievement, and The WEIRDest People in the World (2020), which traces how the Catholic Church’s medieval marriage programme produced the psychologically unusual populations that built modern capitalism.

Henrich trained first as an aerospace engineer before turning to anthropology at UCLA. He has conducted fieldwork in Fiji, Chile (with the Mapuche), the Peruvian Amazon (with the Machiguenga), and with Iraqi Chaldean Christian communities in Michigan. He has held joint appointments in economics and psychology — an unusual vantage point that he credits with shaping his cross-disciplinary method and his ability to observe each tribe from outside.

Core positions

Human cognition is culturally constituted. Henrich’s central claim is that the cognitive abilities we take as distinctively human — counting without bound, analytical reasoning, spatial reference frames — are tools downloaded from prior generations, not capacities computed afresh by individual brains. The collective brain (the pool of know-how distributed across a connected population) is the real unit of human intelligence; its size and interconnectedness determine what a society can build and maintain.

WEIRD psychology is an outlier. Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic populations — the subjects of most psychology research — sit at the statistical extreme on a wide range of behavioural and perceptual measures. The general-purpose norms for dealing with strangers that underpin market cooperation are cultural achievements, not human universals.

Religion scaled cooperation. Big gods — morally demanding, monitoring, punishment-capable — solved the problem of reliable cooperation among strangers in a way that locally embedded ancestor gods could not. Henrich holds this to be the functional story behind religion’s spread, while remaining agnostic about its metaphysics.

The Church made the West individualist. The Catholic Church’s sustained campaign against cousin marriage, polygyny, and complex kinship networks, beginning around 600 AD in Anglo-Saxon Kent, restructured European social life over centuries. The eventual product was a population oriented around individuals rather than clans, capable of impersonal trust — which Henrich sees as the proximate psychological cause of Western economic distinctiveness.

In the wiki