The WEIRDest People In The World

Author: Joseph Henrich

A couple books ago I read “Empty Planet” and my first complaint was that the book was overly fluffy and read more like a news article than a well researched book. Well the WEIRDest People in The World is the exact opposite. With 500 pages of writing and an additional 200 pages of appendices, notes, and bibliographies, it was very apparent Henrich is an expert in his field and devoted years of study to write this very well informed book.

WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

The book kind of blew my mind in the way that the author showed how acutely time impacts our psychology and how entire civilizations can have their psychology changed over time by seemingly benign acts. The overarching example he uses in the book is Western society, which he argues has developed a unique psychology over time.

A good test to see if you fit the description of WEIRD that Henrich outlined is to ask yourself a simple question: “I am ______”. Fill in the blank. If you said “curious”, “intelligent”, “charming”, or other descriptive words about yourself, you are likely WEIRD. Isn’t it also true that you are the daughter/son of John? Or Jackson’s Father? Much of the world would have answered in a more relational/kin based manner.

I’ve procrastinated on this review for weeks because I’m finding it really difficult to summarize the book without getting into the deep detail and examples used in the book. I took a couple photo’s of pages that I thought stood out to me. I will add those to this post as a good summary. The first is a flow chart describing how western christianity shaped a lot of the social and psychological characteristics we find in the western world today. The author quotes this page as an outline of the main process described in the whole book, so it’s a good summary. He talks about every point on this page in great detail in the book, so if you are interested in anything you see on the page, it may be worth checking out the book.

Here is a few more pages that I found were good summaries of the overall theme of the book.