The WEIRDest people in the world: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous

Shame is rooted in a genetically evolved psychological package that is associated with social devaluation in the eyes of others. Individuals experience shame when they violate social norms (e.g., committing psychology course), or when they find themselves at the low end of the dominance hierarchy. Shame has a distinct universal display that involves downcast gaze, slumped shoulders, and a general inclination to “look small” (crouching).

Guilt is different; it’s an internal guidance system and at least partially a product of culture, though it probably integrates some innate psychological components like regret. The feeling of guilt emerges when one measures their own actions and feelings against a purely personal standard. I can feel guilty for eating a giant pizza alone in my house or for not having given my change to the homeless guy that I encountered early Sunday morning on an empty Manhattan street. Unlike shame, guilt has no universal displays, can last weeks or even years, and seems to require self-reflection. In contrast to the spontaneous social “withdrawal” and “avoidance” of shame, guilt often motivates “approach” and a desire to mitigate whatever is causing the guilt.

• Individualism and Personal Motivation
• Self-focus, self-esteem, and self-enhancement
• Guilt over shame
• Dispositional thinking (personality): Attribution Errors and Cognitive Dissonance
• Low conformity and deference to tradition/elders
• Patience, self-regulation, and self-control
• Time thrift and hard work (value of labor)
• Desire for control and love of choice
• Impersonal Prosociality (and Related Worldviews)
• Impartial principles over contextual particularism
• Trust, fairness, honesty, and cooperation with anonymous others, strangers, and impersonal
• stitutions (e.g., government)
• An emphasis on mental states, especially in moral judgment
• Muted concerns for revenge but willingness to punish third parties
• Reduced in-group favoritism
• Free will: notion that individuals make their own choices and those choices matter
• Moral universalism: thinking that moral truths exist in the way mathematical laws exist
• Linear time and notions of progress
• Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities and Biases
• Analytical over holistic thinking
• Attention to foreground and central actors
• Endowment effect—overvaluing our own stuff
• Field independence: isolating objects from background
• Overconfidence (of our own valued abilities)

1. Humans are a cultural species. Our brains and psychology are specialized for acquiring, storing, and organizing information gleaned from the minds and behaviors of others. Our cultural learning abilities directly reprogram our minds, recalibrate our preferences, and adapt our perceptions. As we’ll see, culture has devised many tricks for burrowing into our biology to alter our brains, hormones, and behavior.
2. Social norms are assembled into institutions by cultural evolution. As powerful norm-learners, we can acquire a wide range of arbitrary social norms; however, the easiest norms to acquire and internalize tap deeply into aspects of our evolved psychology. I’ve highlighted a few aspects of our evolved psychology, including those related to kin-based altruism, incest aversion, pair-bonding, interdependence, and tribal affiliation.
3. Institutions usually remain inscrutable to those operating within them—like water to fish. Because cultural evolution generally operates slowly, subtly, and outside conscious awareness, people rarely understand how or why their institutions work or even that they “do” anything. People’s explicit theories about their own institutions are generally post hoc and often wrong.

Thus, early farming spread not because rational individuals prefer to farm, but because farming communities with particular institutions beat mobile hunter-gatherer populations in intergroup competition.

The idea here is that cultural evolution, driven by intergroup competition, favored the emergence and spread of supernatural beliefs that increasingly endowed gods with concerns about human action and the power to punish and reward. These beliefs evolved not because they are accurate representations of reality but because they help communities, organizations, and societies beat their competitors.

sometimes evolving to foster more smoothly flowing trade between occupational castes or ethno-religious groups. In South Asia, for example, some medieval ports established enduring exchange relationships between local Hindus and Muslim traders on the Indian Ocean. Centuries later, long after the disruption of Islamic trade routes by European powers, trading ports experience less interethnic violence between Hindus and Muslims than nontrading cities. It seems that trade between these groups forged enduring informal institutions, the psychological effects of which persisted long after trade ceased. These kinds of prosocial effects can be observed today all over the world by examining the relationship between a community’s proximity to large rivers or oceans and the attitudes of its inhabitants toward foreigners and immigrants. Large rivers and oceans have long been, and remain, the arteries for much of the world’s trade. Living near a port usually means living in an urban center where norms, practices, and beliefs have been shaped by trade and commerce more intensely than elsewhere. This fact suggests that western Europe had a geographic edge over many parts of the world in developing trade and commerce: this region possesses an unusually large number of natural ports and navigable waterways as well as inland seas in both the north (Baltic) and the south (Mediterranean).64 Once market norms developed, they could rapidly disseminate along the waterways into the fertile grounds of ports. This geographic preparedness would have catalyzed the process of market integration that I’ve been describing. Summarizing our progress: the breakdown of intensive kin-based institutions opened the door to urbanization and the formation of free cities integration and—we can infer—higher levels of impersonal trust, fairness, and cooperation. While these psychological and social changes were occurring, people began to ponder notions of individual rights, personal freedoms, the rule of law, and the protection of private property. These new ideas just fit people’s emerging cultural psychology better than many alternatives. Urbanizing premodern Europe was being transformed from the middle outward, up and down the social strata. The last groups to feel these enduring psychological and social shifts were (1) the most remote subsistence farmers and (2) the highest levels of the aristocracy, who continued to consolidate power for centuries through intensive forms of kinship, long after it had been extirpated from the urban middle classes. Of course, this wasn’t a smooth and continuous transition, even in rapidly growing urban centers. One of the greatest threats to the functioning of voluntary associations was, and remains, intensive kinship. It wasn’t uncommon for new organizations, including banks and governments, to be usurped for a time by large, powerful families consolidated by arranged marriages.65 However, as noted, this is a tough road in the long run because the Church suppressed nearly all the basic tools of intensive kinship. Under these constraints, family businesses struggled to outcompete other organizational forms. At the same time, politically or economically powerful family lineages were simply more likely to die out without polygyny, customary inheritance, remarriage, and adoption. When dominant royal families did die out, urban communities were often able to re-forge their formal institutions in ways more appealing to people with a protoWEIRD psychology.

Many believe that these grand institutions, the bequests of Western civilization, represent the products of reason and the rise of rationality. These institutions—the rationalists argue—are what you get once you strip away Church dogma and apply “reason.” This is true even of Protestantism: many believed, and some continue to hold, that (some version of) Protestantism is what you get if you apply reason to the truths expressed in by cultural evolution during the Middle Ages—by the demolition of Europe’s kin-based institutions (Chapters 5–8), the expansion of impersonal markets (Chapter 9), the rise of domesticated forms of intergroup competition (Chapter 10), and the growth of a broad, mobile division of labor in urban centers (Chapter 11). The WEIRDer psychology that was emerging in fragmented communities across Europe, along with the accompanying changes in social norms, made people in these populations more likely to devise, endorse, and adopt particular kinds of ideas, laws, rules, policies, beliefs, practices, and arguments. Many modern ideas about law, government, science, philosophy, art, and religion that would have been “unthinkable,” aversive, or nonintuitive to people in most complex societies over most of human history began to “fit” the emerging proto- WEIRD psychology in medieval and Early Modern Europe. In many cases, these new ideas, laws, and policies were filtered and selected by relentless intergroup competition between voluntary associations, including among cities, guilds, universities, monasteries, scientific associations, and eventually territorial states.

At the broadest level, cultural evolutionary processes are fast and powerful relative to natural selection acting on genes. This means that over periods of centuries (as is the case here), cultural adaptation will tend to dominate genetic adaptation, though in the longer run—over many millennia—genetic evolution can have larger effects and, in many cases, push things further than culture alone could.

To warm up, let’s consider four aspects of WEIRD psychology that likely had broad influences on the formal institutions built in Europe during the second millennium of the Common Era.

1. Analytic thinking: To better navigate a world of individuals without dense social interconnections, people increasingly thought about the world more analytically and less holistically/relationally. More analytically oriented thinkers prefer to explain things by assigning individuals, cases, situations, or objects to discrete categories, often associated with specific properties, rather than by focusing on the relationships between individuals, cases, etc. The behavior of individuals or objects can then be analytically explained by their properties or category memberships (e.g., “it’s an electron”; “he’s an extrovert”). Troubled by contradictions, the more analytically minded seek out higher- or lower-level categories or distinctions to “resolve” them. By contrast, holistically oriented thinkers either don’t see contradictions or embrace them. In Europe, analytical approaches gradually came to be thought of as superior to more holistic approaches. That is, they became normatively correct and highly valued.
2. Internal attributions: As the key substrates of social life shifted from relationships to individuals, thinkers increasingly highlighted the relevance of individuals’ internal attributes. This included stable traits like dispositions, preferences, and personalities as well as mental states like beliefs and intentions. Soon lawyers and theologians even began to imagine that individuals had “rights.”
3. Independence and nonconformity: Spurred by incentives to cultivate their own uniqueness, people’s reverence for venerable traditions, ancient wisdom, and wise elders ebbed away. For good evolutionary reasons, humans everywhere tend to conform to peers, defer to their seniors, and follow enduring traditions; but, the incentives of a society with weak kin ties and impersonal markets pushed hard against this, favoring individualism, independence, and nonconformity, not to mention overconfidence and self- promotion.
4. Impersonal prosociality: As life was increasingly governed by impersonal norms for dealing with nonrelations or strangers, people came to prefer impartial rules and impersonal laws that applied to those in their groups or communities (their cities, guilds, monasteries, etc.) independent of social relationships, tribal identity, or social class. Of course, we shouldn’t confuse these inchoate inklings with the full-blown liberal principles of rights, equality, or impartiality in the modern world.