38 found
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  1. The weirdest people in the world?Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine & Ara Norenzayan - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3):61-83.
    Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...)
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  2.  12
    The Moral Machine experiment.Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, Jonathan Schulz, Joseph Henrich, Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon & Iyad Rahwan - 2018 - Nature 563 (7729):59-64.
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  3. The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.Ara Norenzayan, Azim F. Shariff, Will M. Gervais, Aiyana K. Willard, Rita A. McNamara, Edward Slingerland & Joseph Henrich - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39:e1.
    We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10–12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, (...)
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  4. A Cultural Species and its Cognitive Phenotypes: Implications for Philosophy.Joseph Henrich, Damián E. Blasi, Cameron M. Curtin, Helen Elizabeth Davis, Ze Hong, Daniel Kelly & Ivan Kroupin - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):349-386.
    After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of (...)
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  5.  26
    Foundations of Human Sociality - Economic Experiments and Ethnographic: Evidence From Fifteen Small-Scale Societies.Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr & Herbert Gintis (eds.) - 2004 - Oxford University Press UK.
    What motives underlie the ways humans interact socially? Are these the same for all societies? Are these part of our nature, or influenced by our environments?Over the last decade, research in experimental economics has emphatically falsified the textbook representation of Homo economicus. Literally hundreds of experiments suggest that people care not only about their own material payoffs, but also about such things as fairness, equity and reciprocity. However, this research left fundamental questions unanswered: Are such social preferences stable components of (...)
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  6. “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies.Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, Richard McElreath, Michael Alvard, Abigail Barr, Jean Ensminger, Natalie Smith Henrich, Kim Hill, Francisco Gil-White, Michael Gurven, Frank W. Marlowe & John Q. Patton - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (6):795-815.
    Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of (...)
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  7. Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment.H. Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Simon Fitzpatrick, Michael Gurven, Joseph Henrich, Martin Kanovsky, Geoff Kushnick, Anne Pisor, Brooke A. Scelza, Stephen Stich, Chris von Rueden, Wanying Zhao & Stephen Laurence - 2016 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (17):4688–4693.
    Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence (...)
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  8. The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions.Scott Atran & Joseph Henrich - 2010 - Biological Theory 5 (1):18-30.
    Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors—as an evolutionary by-product—the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in (...)
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  9.  46
    Weighing outcome vs. intent across societies: How cultural models of mind shape moral reasoning.Rita Anne McNamara, Aiyana K. Willard, Ara Norenzayan & Joseph Henrich - 2019 - Cognition 182 (C):95-108.
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  10. Susceptibility to the Muller-lyer illusion, theory-neutral observation, and the diachronic penetrability of the visual input system.Robert N. McCauley & Joseph Henrich - 2006 - Philosophical Psychology 19 (1):79-101.
    Jerry Fodor has consistently cited the persistence of illusions--especially the M.
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  11.  23
    The Cultural Evolution of Epistemic Practices.Ze Hong & Joseph Henrich - 2021 - Human Nature 32 (3):622-651.
    Although a substantial literature in anthropology and comparative religion explores divination across diverse societies and back into history, little research has integrated the older ethnographic and historical work with recent insights on human learning, cultural transmission, and cognitive science. Here we present evidence showing that divination practices are often best viewed as an epistemic technology, and we formally model the scenarios under which individuals may overestimate the efficacy of divination that contribute to its cultural omnipresence and historical persistence. We found (...)
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  12.  55
    Teaching and the Life History of Cultural Transmission in Fijian Villages.Michelle A. Kline, Robert Boyd & Joseph Henrich - 2013 - Human Nature 24 (4):351-374.
    Much existing literature in anthropology suggests that teaching is rare in non-Western societies, and that cultural transmission is mostly vertical (parent-to-offspring). However, applications of evolutionary theory to humans predict both teaching and non-vertical transmission of culturally learned skills, behaviors, and knowledge should be common cross-culturally. Here, we review this body of theory to derive predictions about when teaching and non-vertical transmission should be adaptive, and thus more likely to be observed empirically. Using three interviews conducted with rural Fijian populations, we (...)
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  13.  78
    Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies.Cameron M. Curtin, H. Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Daniel Fessler, Simon Fitzpatrick, Michael Gurven, Martin Kanovsky, Stephen Laurence, Anne Pisor, Brooke Scelza, Stephen Stich, Chris von Rueden & Joseph Henrich - 2020 - Evolution and Human Behavior 41 (5):415-429.
    Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just (...)
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  14.  38
    Early false-belief understanding in traditional non-Western societies.H. Clark Barrett, Tanya Broesch, Rose M. Scott, Zijing He, Renee Baillargeon, Di Wu, Matthias Bolz, Joseph Henrich, Peipei Setoh, Jianxin Wang & Stephen Laurence - 2013 - Proceedings of the Royal Society, B (Biological Sciences) 280 (1755).
  15.  85
    Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking.Tom Foulsham, Joey T. Cheng, Jessica L. Tracy, Joseph Henrich & Alan Kingstone - 2010 - Cognition 117 (3):319-331.
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  16.  37
    Parochial prosocial religions: Historical and contemporary evidence for a cultural evolutionary process.Ara Norenzayan, Azim F. Shariff, Will M. Gervais, Aiyana K. Willard, Rita A. McNamara, Edward Slingerland & Joseph Henrich - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39.
    In our response to the 27 commentaries, we refine the theoretical claims, clarify several misconceptions of our framework, and explore substantial disagreements. In doing so, we show that our framework accommodates multiple historical scenarios; debate the historical evidence, particularly about “pre-Axial” religions; offer important details about cultural evolutionary theory; clarify the termprosociality;and discuss proximal mechanisms. We review many interesting extensions, amplifications, and qualifications of our approach made by the commentators.
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  17.  23
    Memory and Belief in the Transmission of Counterintuitive Content.Aiyana K. Willard, Joseph Henrich & Ara Norenzayan - 2016 - Human Nature 27 (3):221-243.
    Cognitive scientists have increasingly turned to cultural transmission to explain the widespread nature of religion. One key hypothesis focuses on memory, proposing that that minimally counterintuitive (MCI) content facilitates the transmission of supernatural beliefs. We propose two caveats to this hypothesis. (1) Memory effects decrease as MCI concepts become commonly used, and (2) people do not believe counterintuitive content readily; therefore additional mechanisms are required to get from memory to belief. In experiments 1–3 (n = 283), we examined the relationship (...)
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  18.  44
    Impartial Institutions, Pathogen Stress and the Expanding Social Network.Daniel Hruschka, Charles Efferson, Ting Jiang, Ashlan Falletta-Cowden, Sveinn Sigurdsson, Rita McNamara, Madeline Sands, Shirajum Munira, Edward Slingerland & Joseph Henrich - 2014 - Human Nature 25 (4):567-579.
    Anthropologists have documented substantial cross-society variation in people’s willingness to treat strangers with impartial, universal norms versus favoring members of their local community. Researchers have proposed several adaptive accounts for these differences. One variant of the pathogen stress hypothesis predicts that people will be more likely to favor local in-group members when they are under greater infectious disease threat. The material security hypothesis instead proposes that institutions that permit people to meet their basic needs through impartial interactions with strangers reinforce (...)
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  19.  72
    Reasoning About Cultural and Genetic Transmission: Developmental and Cross‐Cultural Evidence From Peru, Fiji, and the United States on How People Make Inferences About Trait Transmission.Cristina Moya, Robert Boyd & Joseph Henrich - 2015 - Topics in Cognitive Science 7 (4):595-610.
    Using samples from three diverse populations, we test evolutionary hypotheses regarding how people reason about the inheritance of various traits. First, we provide a framework for differentiat-ing the outputs of mechanisms that evolved for reasoning about variation within and between biological taxa and culturally evolved ethnic categories from a broader set of beliefs and categories that are the outputs of structured learning mechanisms. Second, we describe the results of a modified “switched-at-birth” vignette study that we administered among children and adults (...)
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  20.  43
    How Culture Made Us Uniquely Human.Joseph Henrich - 2023 - Zygon 58 (2):405-424.
    This article argues that understanding human uniqueness requires recognizing that we are a cultural species whose evolution has been driven by the interaction among genes and culture for over a million years. Here, I review the basic argument, incorporate recent findings, and highlight ongoing efforts to apply this approach to more deeply understand both the universal aspects of our cognition as well as the variation across societies. This article will cover (1) the origins and evolution of our capacities for culture, (...)
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  21. Cross-cultural evidence that the nonverbal expression of pride is an automatic status signal.Jessica L. Tracy, Azim F. Shariff, Wanying Zhao & Joseph Henrich - 2013 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 142 (1):163.
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  22.  32
    Adaptive social learning strategies in temporally and spatially varying environments.Wataru Nakahashi, Joe Yuichiro Wakano & Joseph Henrich - 2012 - Human Nature 23 (4):386-418.
    Long before the origins of agriculture human ancestors had expanded across the globe into an immense variety of environments, from Australian deserts to Siberian tundra. Survival in these environments did not principally depend on genetic adaptations, but instead on evolved learning strategies that permitted the assembly of locally adaptive behavioral repertoires. To develop hypotheses about these learning strategies, we have modeled the evolution of learning strategies to assess what conditions and constraints favor which kinds of strategies. To build on prior (...)
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  23.  32
    Moral parochialism and contextual contingency across seven societies.Daniel M. T. Fessler, H. Clark Barrett, Martin Kanovsky, Stephen P. Stich, Colin Holbrook, Joseph Henrich, Alexander H. Bolyanatz, Matthew M. Gervais, Michael Gurven, Geoff Kushnick, Anne C. Pisor, Christopher von Rueden & Stephen Laurence - 2015 - Proceedings of the Royal Society; B (Biological Sciences) 282:20150907.
    Human moral judgement may have evolved to maximize the individual's welfare given parochial culturally constructed moral systems. If so, then moral condemnation should be more severe when transgressions are recent and local, and should be sensitive to the pronouncements of authority figures (who are often arbiters of moral norms), as the fitness pay-offs of moral disapproval will primarily derive from the ramifications of condemning actions that occur within the immediate social arena. Correspondingly, moral transgressions should be viewed as less objectionable (...)
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  24. Division of labor, economic specialization, and the evolution of social stratification.Joseph Henrich & Robert Boyd - 2008 - Current Anthropology 49 (4):715-724.
    This paper presents a simple mathematical model that shows how economic inequality between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning process driving cultural evolution increases individuals’ economic gains. The key assumptions are that human populations are structured into groups and that cultural learning is more likely to occur within than between groups. Then, if groups are sufficiently isolated and there are potential gains from specialization and exchange, stable stratification can sometimes result. This model predicts (...)
     
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  25.  21
    Adaptive Content Biases in Learning about Animals across the Life Course.James Broesch, H. Clark Barrett & Joseph Henrich - 2014 - Human Nature 25 (2):181-199.
    Prior work has demonstrated that young children in the US and the Ecuadorian Amazon preferentially remember information about the dangerousness of an animal over both its name and its diet. Here we explore if this bias is present among older children and adults in Fiji through the use of an experimental learning task. We find that a content bias favoring the preferential retention of danger and toxicity information continues to operate in older children, but that the magnitude of the bias (...)
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  26. Models of decision-making and the coevolution of social preferences.Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, Richard McElreath, Michael Alvard, Abigail Barr, Jean Ensminger, Natalie Smith Henrich, Kim Hill, Francisco Gil-White, Michael Gurven, Frank W. Marlowe, John Q. Patton & David Tracer - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (6):838-855.
    We would like to thank the commentators for their generous comments, valuable insights and helpful suggestions. We begin this response by discussing the selfishness axiom and the importance of the preferences, beliefs, and constraints framework as a way of modeling some of the proximate influences on human behavior. Next, we broaden the discussion to ultimate-level (that is evolutionary) explanations, where we review and clarify gene-culture coevolutionary theory, and then tackle the possibility that evolutionary approaches that exclude culture might be sufficient (...)
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  27.  29
    Ontogeny of prosocial behavior across diverse societies.Bailey R. House, Joan B. Silk, Joseph Henrich, H. Clark Barrett, Brooke A. Scelza, Adam H. Boyette, Barry S. Hewlett, Richard McElreath & Stephen Laurence - 2013 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110 (36):14586-14591.
    Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...)
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  28.  26
    Food Aversions and Cravings during Pregnancy on Yasawa Island, Fiji.Luseadra McKerracher, Mark Collard & Joseph Henrich - 2016 - Human Nature 27 (3):296-315.
    Women often experience novel food aversions and cravings during pregnancy. These appetite changes have been hypothesized to work alongside cultural strategies as adaptive responses to the challenges posed by pregnancy (e.g., maternal immune suppression). Here, we report a study that assessed whether data from an indigenous population in Fiji are consistent with the predictions of this hypothesis. We found that aversions focus predominantly on foods expected to exacerbate the challenges of pregnancy. Cravings focus on foods that provide calories and micronutrients (...)
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  29.  22
    Beyond Newton: Why assumptions of universality are critical to cognitive science, and how to finally move past them.Ivan Kroupin, Helen E. Davis & Joseph Henrich - forthcoming - Psychological Review.
  30.  35
    Tackling group-level traits by starting at the start.Maciej Chudek & Joseph Henrich - 2014 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (3):256-257.
  31.  30
    Moral parochialism misunderstood: a reply to Piazza and Sousa.Daniel M. T. Fessler, Colin Holbrook, Martin Kanovsky, H. Clark Barrett, Alexander H. Bolyanatz, Matthew M. Gervais, Michael Gurven, Joseph Henrich, Geoff Kushnick, Anne C. Pisor, Stephen P. Stich, Christopher von Rueden & Stephen Laurence - 2016 - Proceedings of the Royal Society; B (Biological Sciences) 283.
  32.  20
    Introduction to Symposium on “Just How Special Are Humans?”.Eric Priest, Joseph Henrich, Celia Deane-Drummond & Mary Ann Meyers - 2023 - Zygon 58 (2):378-383.
    We here introduce the Zygon Symposium on “Just How Special Are Humans?” This collection is based on a symposium at Harvard University in 2020 that brought together world leaders on the study of human nature from science, theology, and philosophy. They shared their research and perceptive insights on this key topic of great contemporary interest from quite different disciplines and viewpoints. The present Symposium contains articles further developed from the presentations, as well as two additional contributions from experts specializing in (...)
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  33. Further Thoughts on the Evolution of Pride’s Two Facets: A Response to Clark.Azim F. Shariff, Jessica L. Tracy, Joey T. Cheng & Joseph Henrich - 2010 - Emotion Review 2 (4):399-400.
    In Clark’s thoughtful analysis of the evolution of the two facets of pride, he suggests that the concurrent existence of hubristic and authentic pride in humans represents a “persistence problem,” wherein the vestigial trait (hubristic pride) continues to exist alongside the derived trait (authentic pride). In our view, evidence for the two facets does not pose a persistence problem; rather, hubristic and authentic pride both likely evolved as higher-order cognitive emotions that solve uniquely human—but distinct— evolutionary problems. Instead of being (...)
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  34.  32
    Cultural evolution may influence heritability by shaping assortative mating.Tian Chen Zeng & Joseph Henrich - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e181.
    Uchiyama et al. productively discuss how culture can influence genetic heritability and, by modifying environmental conditions, limit the generalizability of genome-wide association studies (GWASs). Here, we supplement their account by highlighting how recent changes in culture and institutions in industrialized, westernized societies – such as increased female workforce participation – may have increased assortative mating. This alters the distribution of genotypes themselves, increasing heritability and phenotypic variance, and may be detectable using the latest methods.
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  35.  47
    Economic and evolutionary hypotheses for cross-population variation in parochialism.Daniel J. Hruschka & Joseph Henrich - 2013 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7.
  36.  32
    Challenges for everyone: Real people, deception, one-shot games, social learning, and computers.Joseph Henrich - 2001 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (3):414-415.
    This commentary suggests: (1) experimentalists must expand their subject pools beyond university students; (2) the pollution created by deception would not be a problem if experimentalists fully used non-student subjects; (3) one-shot games remain important and repeated games should not ignore social learning; (4) economists need to take better control of context; and (5) using computers in experiments creates potential problems.
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  37.  21
    How evolved psychological mechanisms empower cultural group selection.Joseph Henrich & Robert Boyd - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39.
    Driven by intergroup competition, social norms, beliefs, and practices can evolve in ways that more effectively tap into a wide variety of evolved psychological mechanisms to foster group-beneficial behavior. The more powerful such evolved mechanisms are, the more effectively culture can potentially harness and manipulate them to generate greater phenotypic variation across groups, thereby fueling cultural group selection.
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  38.  33
    Understanding the research program.Joseph Henrich & Maciej Chudek - 2012 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (1):29-30.
    The target article misunderstands the research program it criticizes. The work of Boyd, Richerson, Fehr, Gintis, Bowles and their collaborators has long included the theoretical and empirical study of models both with andwithoutdiffuse costly punishment. In triaging the situation, we aim to (1) clarify the theoretical landscape, (2) highlight key points of agreement, and (3) suggest a more productive line of debate.
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