#422 - Dr Joe Henrich - Evolution, Psychology, Monogamy & Culture

that's what evolutionary biologists have argued that if you give females the choice and there's high inequality among men saying wealth it would be fitness maximizing for them to allocate according to the available resources but what it does do is that it'll inevitably create a pool of low status unmarried men because there's too much religion and those are the guys who cause problems because they're faced with possibly being zeros in the evolutionary race and so they are willing to take big risks in order to catapult themselves up the status hierarchy and have a chance to get into the marriage mating market i had a conversation with a friend daniel a couple months ago on the podcast and on it he explained to me that a lot of the traits that we associate with human behavior these sort of um unwritten rules that govern the way that we go about our lives he summarized it as cultural conditioning masquerading as human nature because the only time that we've been able to do uh psychological experiments which have been sufficiently robust and well practiced using the scientific method has only been during this time this time period what's your thoughts on that cultural conditioning masquerading as human nature yeah well i think there's a lot a lot of reasons to be concerned about that because uh so much research i mean if you look at the percentage of subjects in psychology experiments that come from modern western societies it's about 95 or 96 percent so my colleagues and i raised uh concerns about this in a paper we published in 2010 called the weirdest people in the world where weird is an acronym that stands for western educated industrialized rich and democratic and if you think about you know the origins of human nature humans evolve in relatively small scale primate societies uh hunting and gathering so that's very much the kind of environment that a lot of human nature has evolved for and then you put them in a society with hospitals lots of interactions with strangers police forces judicial stuff and i mean you can expect you're going to get a very different phenotype when you do that what is the boundary of western well so the important thing about the acronym weird is that it's really a consciousness raising device and so what i really do in the book is um is try to get rid of the need to define something like western and we try to explain the cultural evolutionary processes that lead down this particular path and cause people in this society to have uh unusual psychology but one of the exercises i do in the book is to explain variation among european regions so i can tell you why southern italy is different from northern italy and try to explain variation among different italian provinces you know i try to explain why eastern europe is different than western europe and tag that to events in european history that led to the diffusion of some institutions versus other kinds of institutions i'm going to guess that there's a particularly sharp difference between italy and china though yeah so i mean you get these global level differences but in one of my chapters i look at variation within china and try to show why more wheat or more rice growing parts of china are different from more wheat grown parts of china so again you can you can tap the variation within each of these countries you can show the same thing with india dig into wheat versus rice yeah so uh one of the key ideas that i develop is that our psychology the way we think about lots of things whether we're individualistic whether we think analytically versus holistically whether we trust strangers or are more nepotistic um depends on our kin-based institutions so our family structure and uh that can be affected by lots of things and i think one of the important things that mattered in europe was actually religion had a big impact on this but in china uh ecology and the kinds of things you can plant affect this so in places in china where you can grow patty rice you need fairly intensive large groups to engage in sustained cooperative labor and so this favors more intensive clans so in china you can show that certain ecological conditions led to stronger clans and that leads to more holistic thinking greater nepotism and some other downstream effects of that so human social psychology responds to its local ecology in a way yeah and one of the things i mean it can respond directly to environments but in this case it's responding through the institutions that are favored so you can imagine that there could be other institutions that aren't based on patrilennial clans which is what emerged in china that would lead to a different psychology even though the ecology was the same because there's more than one way to skin a cat what would be an example of that what would be an alternative well so for example um the kinds of societies that existed in california prior to the european expansion were you know hunter-gatherer societies that had you know fairly intense kinship but now los angeles doesn't have very intense kinship and that's exactly the same ecology just a different different approach to it there must be some fundamental features of human nature i'm guessing there must be some things that are like the building blocks upon which institutions and culture and rice and wheat can have their impact yeah so i wrote a lot about that in my book called the secret of our success which came out in 2016 and one of the key ideas i was just mentioning these kin-based institutions and family structure but there's a reason why i think that's the oldest and most fundamental of human institutions and it's because we do have instincts that we share with other primates and other animals so our tendency to be particularly altruistic uh and giving to members who individuals who are closely related to genetically uh we also have incest aversion towards you know brothers and sisters but that can be extended by incest taboos to shape our social structure and shape our families we have a pair bonding instinct which is the foundation of lots of marriage systems but of course there's lots of ways to use that pair bonding instinct some societies have polygynous marriage some societies add some polyandry and others have just normative marriage are you familiar with the westermark effect sure that's just that's just incest aversion essentially yeah would you be able to explain how that sort of comes about how that manifests usually yeah so the idea is that you know like other animals humans have to avoid inbreeding so breeding with close genetic relatives and the reason is is that in all of us we contain recessive allules that can cause disease and if you make with a close sibling they're likely to have the exact same recessive if you bring two recessives together then that leads to the disease phenotype so you have to avoid individuals who share this common descent because they're likely to have the same bad recessives and one of the things evolution has done to allow us to do that is when we're co-reared with members of the office of sex we develop a disgust reaction to the idea of having sex with uh with them and this is really interesting and it kind of shows the texture of evolution because at the same time we feel really close to those people and we want to help them and support them we're disgusted at the idea of having sex with them so you might be having a warm evening with your family playing monopoly or something but then that never breaks into having sex because that's actually a way i get my students thinking about this in human nature when i teach that the interesting thing from that it was an example in i want to say steve stewart williams book where he says a lot of the time if you have a family that breaks up when the children are young and the children don't get to spend time together you get situations where brother and sister perhaps or daughter and father a lot of the time if the father hasn't been a part of their life come back together in later adulthood and you have quite awkward situations that can come out of that because you haven't had this whatever you want to call it western mark window of imprinting where the disgust mechanism has been activated and then you loop back around and some pretty yeah and that's one of the interesting ways that uh that scientists have been able to figure this out is because there's things like in taiwan and actually in china they have minor marriages so you'll get um babies essentially are betrothed and they'll bring the the future bride baby in and be co-reared with her future husband and that's a big mess in terms of marriage because it activates the western market even though they're not technically genetic relatives and so those minor marriages they end up having fewer children and more likely to divorce all the things you might expect yeah i wouldn't imagine that that would have stuck about given that it'll have pretty poor outcomes you're literally working against a pretty ingrained yeah and one reason why i might stick around in these particular situations is that you know china and india have a long history of having male bias and so they end up having a lot more boys than girls and so if you want your son to definitely have a wife in the future you can lock in that wife if you get a girl six months old yeah that's that's about as soon as you can so i want to talk about monogamy and male psychology you say that monogamous marriage norms constrained the darker aspects of male psychology talk me through that well do i say darker i hope i don't say darker that's my uh summary so uh yeah so the idea is is that um because of the differences in male and female biology human males can benefit from multiple matings and there's nothing about a pair bonding instinct so gorillas have a pair bonding instinct that prevents you from having multiple pair bonds and this is true of men and women except men can benefit uh because they can you can think of a serial versus parallel so men can have babies with multiple women at the same time whereas women can only have one baby at a time right and so there's few there's less benefit for a woman having multiple husbands than a man having multiple wives and polygyny turns out to be pretty common across human society so in the largest anthropological database that we have 85 percent of human societies allow elite and high status men to take additional wives what was how was that study conducted like who was the sample size well so back in the 1950s anthropologists began putting together a database called the ethnographic atlas um which contains over 1200 different societies so it's you know societies from all different continents basically all the places where anthropologists had collected data and that was elite and high status males were committed to take more than one partner yeah but even if you look at 100 gatherer societies so 90 percent of 100 gatherer societies allow uh prestigious men to take additional wives and they don't typically take many but they might have two or three you know very rarely you see more than four wives in 100 gatherer societies why do you think that is just difficult for the male to support more than four yeah yeah and so and the societies that do have noggamous marriage uh it's typically because the men are too similar right so there's no benefit to oh there's a hierarchy yeah so if the men are more or less the same because of the nature of the economy then then then polygyny doesn't appear is polygyny just uh more efficient resource allocation then well i mean that's what that's what evolutionary biologists have argued that if you give females the choice and there's high inequality among men staying wealth it would be fitness maximizing for them to allocate according to the available resources so if you have a choice between being the second wife of a guy who's three times richer then you're your number two choice then that's an easy choice um i mean there's things with paternal investment and stuff because you know there's only one male you can only do so much paternal investment but if resources are the critical thing having enough food say then then that logic makes sense but what it does do is that it'll inevitably create a pool of low status unmarried men if there's too much polygyny uh and those are the guys who cause problems because they're faced with possibly being zeros in the evolutionary race and so they are willing to take big risks in order to catapult themselves up the status hierarchy and have a chance to get into the marriage and mating market are there any examples from history of times where there's been large swaths of sexless men at the bottom of this underclass yeah it appears lots of times um i mean the places that we know best ethnographically are in these gerontocracies that appear in africa so gerontocracy is ruled by the old essentially and so and really it's old men so what what some societies have figured out is they put men through a series of initiation rites and in various initiatives you have to be you know you might have to be in your mid to late 30s to get through the final initiation rite which allows you to finally take a wife so that means you got this big pool of 20 30 something men who are basically the warrior caste the warrior class and eventually they're going to pass through the right assuming they survive and get to be old men and then get to be polygyny but the older men are basically taking the younger women so as soon as they're old enough um to have babies essentially they get married off as wives to these older men and then there's all these young guys roaming around and this this leads to a lot of conflict because you need to accumulate enough bride price um and you know and so there's a lot of reading and things like that but lots of societies had that so places where the elite you know in the inca empire aztec empire the elites all maintain large harems and so um if you look at the early descriptions from the friars for example that showed up in the aztec empire they talked about how your average indian uh your average aztec man had trouble finding a wife because the elites had basically taken all the available women yeah you talk about the the math problem right yeah yeah so this is this idea that when you know because males and you know humans tend to have one male and one female uh you can end up with this huge you know huge pool of males when the elite males take all the white holy all women's wives it's not a it's not too far from what we're seeing in the modern world though i'm aware that it's not because polygyny is happening all over the place in fact even though marriage as an institution and religious rates and stuff are declining and you can say that uh contraception and looser rules and norms around premarital sex and casual relationships and stuff like that um there is a currently an asymmetry i think the number of men reporting no sex between the age of 18 and 30 tripled since 2010 so in the last 10 years that number's tripled you also have women between the ages of 40 and 45 white women are the highest users of antidepressants at the moment and that is sometimes pointed toward women who may have hit the wall and are looking at a future that is potentially childless without a family because they haven't been able to find a partner that they feel attracted to so you have kind of two big swaths of uh both genders that aren't neither of them particularly happy with the situation both are single but you end up even though those women haven't been tied up by high status man at the top of the tree you still get the sexless underclass of men and presumably whether it's because women have been captured by another man or women haven't hypergonously found somebody that they're fundamentally attracted to um the sexless underclass of men are probably not fantastic no matter why the women aren't interested in them yeah no it's the exact same logic except here what's happened over the last half century is that uh increasing female choice and female labor participation female labor market participation means that it's now an option for women to not get married and there's strong evidence that women prefer males that are high status higher status than they are and so that means that women were increasingly willing to just opt out of the marriage market entirely um if they can't get a higher status man which means you got this pool of men who are who can't get a date basically and apparently you can see this uh in data from dating apps like there's a relatively small group of men who get all the interest from the women and there's a whole bunch of men who never get a single message you said that getting married reduces a man's odds of committing a crime then when the man got divorced or their wife passed away the likelihood of committing a crime increase again after that yeah so what the data looks like it looks like monogamous marriage now religion is a separate thing monogamous marriage domesticates males and probably even has a hormonal effect of reducing testosterone when you get into get married and then again when you have children and when you have children and that's in this happens in lots of animals where you basically if the male's going to death in the offspring you have to lower his testosterone probably make a few other adjustments so he's willing to protect the nest oh he's disagreeable he's less likely to get into risky behavior and get into a fight with someone and then be dead and then the child doesn't have a father anymore right right so he's not doing things to kind of show off and impress the girls he's doing things like a father would do where and so what happens when they get divorced is they have to go back on the marriage and mating market so t levels go up and that means the risks of things like crime things would raise your status you know you want to get some more money so you can buy a fancy car or whatever irrelevant uh currency is whatever your status display is and uh and yeah so that's that's the consequence rolling the clock forward seeing this imbalance that we have in the sexual marketplace at the moment and it doesn't really feel like either gender is fantastically happy with it um i'm not asking you to come up with like an applied solution but what's your prediction if you were to roll the clock forward from here with regards to this imbalance this sort of gender imbalance that we have in the sexual marketplace yeah i mean that's a good question there could be um a variety of technological solutions so it could be the way for example a lot of people find their mates now on these dating apps it could be the dating apps could be adjusted so there would be more chance for diverse matches um and you know maybe that's gonna happen through competition amongst different apps uh another thing is we don't know what's gonna happen with sex robots and other kinds of fantasy play based on technology so that seems i mean one place to look is japan where there seems to be a lot of views of that kind of thing there's a whole there's a whole class of males that have opted out of kind of dating what's the name for those guys that live in apartments together yeah well there's herbivores i don't know if that's the one you're thinking of no it's a japanese word for it i can't remember oh okay yeah i don't know it's like this it's not ikigai but it's something like that um but yeah they call them don't the chinese call them like herbivore men or plant men or something like that because the chinese are going through this we need to make chinese men manly thing right now right uh they don't want anybody to look like k-pop stars so they've restricted the amount of time that kids can play video games do you see this yeah so oh yeah they're only allowed to play video games between 8 and 9 p.m friday saturday sunday uh they're trying to sort of re-masculinize chinese men and they look at the k-pop stars and i'm sure it's called like plant men or vegetable men or something herbivore men might be it and um yeah they don't want that yeah it's um i don't know what it is i would like to hope that we could reinvigorate marriage as an institution um i don't know what you got in trouble while the pope trended on twitter for saying that people who get pets instead of having children building a family are basically not doing their uh civic duty as a human uh a human being which was a i know i guess a pretty outlandish thing for the pope to say right enforced child rearing coming from the pope someone did make a joke around the fact that if there's anybody that shouldn't be encouraging more children to be around it's the roman catholic church they haven't got a fantastic record yeah i don't know man the sex robots thing is an interesting one um it's got no easy i mean there are some potential solutions but it doesn't have an obvious one i mean you know clearly gender equality is not something we want to relinquish so whatever the solution has got to be involved gender equality and but that's going to lead to this problem yeah it's it's so strange to think back at the fact that there is absolutely no reason that women shouldn't have equal access to employment to education to the ability to gain status and prestige and all those sorts of things but bizarrely the fact that women were held back over the last you know post-industrial revolution but pre what the last 40 years let's say something like that 30 years and that made it easier for women to find a relationship with a man that they were fundamentally attracted to because they weren't competing themselves out of the overall dominance hierarchy by rising up it it's it's so weird that dynamic so fascinating and sort of stark and brutal as well right right and then the tricky part is if you're a woman the higher you go up the status hierarchy the less attractive most men get right because you only like men that are you know at least you're equal right really like higher but but equals probably okay lower that just seems lame well dude think about how brutal it is that you can spend a decade building up your career or getting a phd or doing a startup or whatever some super high performing woman and then you think right i would also like to have a family let's look at the potential dating pool that i have there's like three guys there's three guys out of seven billion people that are above and across from where you are yeah that's tough it's not so let's go back to the weird characteristics and stuff the so you have something about conformity was one of those yeah so one of the package of weird traits is relatively low conformity so conformity varies a lot around the world and you can predict it with this kinship data so when you have small monogamous nuclear families you tend to have low conformity now of course there's probably lots of other things that affect this but that's one of them and then you can imagine that's going to affect things like uh innovation so in order to have you know robust innovation creativity people have to be allowed to go outside the rules and think it's okay to go outside the rules um individualism is associated with greater innovation at least based on patenting things like that what is it so there's a homogeneity right around this particular group of people but within this we have different subcultures you know silicon valley as an example like that's this hotbed of innovation and stuff like that how do you see it do you see it as um a predisposition for people that within this weird group the western group uh or is there a glass ceiling how do you see it well no i mean it's at least so we've studied the u.s patent data from uh basically 1800 until about 1940 and we can predict the amount of patenting in the county by knowing the distribution of last names we can use the distribution of last names to tell us how clumpy people are in terms of kinship so no way yeah yeah and we can actually trace we're using newspapers to actually trace it to um features of psychology so there's this uh the psychologist michelle gelfin is talking about norm tightness versus norm looseness and if you're too tight with the norms that's kind of like conformity and so people aren't good innovators in tight societies what do you mean by tight norms uh tight norms so people who are from societies with tight norms will report yes people are watching my behavior i don't feel like i can you know take my own actions i worry a lot about how people judging me things like that i mean of course that's a feature of being human but it does vary across societies and communities so places that are relatively looser tend to produce more patents you know cities of course tend to be looser because you're not growing you're still not living with basically the kids you went to high school with which if you're in a small town you know there's kind of this permanent community right in any case we're getting to the point where we can connect the dots between the you know the number of immigrants let into a place it gets looser more innovation is generated uh and you can see the psychological shift that goes along with it at least based on the newspaper data that's wild what does the newspaper actually have to do with it so what we can do is so there are new techniques to develop you know basically in the field of cultural evolution where we can try to measure psychology by looking at the text and so in the simplest versions of this you just look at like collections of words so people in tight societies tend to use certain kinds of words um or you can look at individualism so when you describe individuals you tend to describe them according to traits and characteristics and attributes or do you tell me who someone's father is and what their social group is and things like that uh so one's more individualistic and one's more collectivist so you can use these to get psychological measures from text and then you can apply those to newspapers and books and you know fictional corpora and things like that so this is allowing us to look at change in psychology through time and across space what is the least conforming society that you found well uh cross-nationally it's definitely you know places like australia the us places like that i mean places you'd expect australia being non-conforming does not surprise me all i've seen some videos coming out there recently and they they have scraps with each other they don't need to go against the police they they have a problem with each other well i mean there is some data on cross-national loss aversion although i don't think we put that to the test yet to try to see if we can explain the variation but in the u.s you know generally somewhere like california is more individualistic and non-conforming a lot of trends in the u.s starting california and then spread east so something like silicon valley tends to be more non-conformist and more individualistic as well as like new york city you know urbanization is correlates with this i would guess that loss aversion having high loss aversion would correlate with lower creativity also because people are prepared to take fewer risks right right interesting yeah and something like overconfidence you know also tends to generate innovation because really most innovations you're probably going to fail for a variety of reasons so being overconfident if a population is more overconfident it tends to produce more innovation because someone gets lucky right so if everyone thinks they can do it they all try and one of them succeeds and then the society gets an innovation that's cool where are the most overconfident people well americans are very overconfident that's surprising and so we're still mapping the variation kind of within the u.s yeah i've noticed this i went to austin i spent five weeks in texas just for christmas and it really is a stark difference between i would say confidence and sort of blue sky vision to a degree as well and the way interpersonally that people deal with the potential of success even for their friends so as an example i got invited on a really big show and i had an hour and a half before i was going to leave to get picked up i went on a little walk and during the time i did this walk three of my friends from america that i met within the last i don't think that two weeks three of my buddies i texted me or rang me like hey man just want to let you know i know you're gonna be nervous tonight i'm gonna be watching you're gonna crush it uh really really rooting for you i'm thinking are these are they coordinated because they don't know each other but it's just so alien to me as a stuffy tall poppy syndrome stiff-up lit brit okay um that was very that was very it was lovely um but really stood out to me yeah well i don't know if it's related to this but there is a um another factor that i talk about the weirdest people in the world is non-zero-sum thinking so if you the world is zero-sum if you get more famous and more successful that means there's less success for me you're crowding me out but if it's a non-zero-sum world you can be super successful and i can be super successful because we're not we're not in competition so the more you think of the world as non-zero-sum the less you're bothered by the success of others in worlds that are really um zero-sum thinkers you get things like witchcraft accusations jealousy people sabotaging each other undercutting each other all that kind of thing do you get is is zero-sumness associated with population density well i mean urban areas for example tend to have uh larger division of labor uh more innovation going on more economic dynamism so they actually are less zero-sum whereas if you're you know if you're in a small town with a finite or shrinking population you know how many dentists can you have so if someone sets up a second dentist shop you might actually lose customers right but in a big city you know do you think that islands have any role to play here is there something psychologically about being waterlocked that impacts the way that people and cultures grow yeah i mean potentially but i haven't really thought about that so i don't know any any interesting relationship yeah i'm just thinking about the uk um there is there is definitely a i can't define them perfectly but there's a zero-sumness to parts of uk culture um and i was wondering whether that is because we have such high population density you know you have relative we have a lot of people on quite a small bit of land compared to america that has tons of people on a ridiculously huge amount of land and i wonder as well whether there's an insulated mentality perhaps that comes from being surrounded by water right well one place you can get a zero-sum mentality cropping up is when you're in say a city that is declining say it was an industrial city and the industrial age has passed so the population is moving out there are no new jobs then it actually is a zero-sum world there's not a growing pie there's a shrinking pie uh so that's why you get a proliferation of people helping people in cities that are on the up and it's much more post-apocalyptic mad max wasteland when a city is on all the gasoline right precisely uh confirmation bias what about that um let's see i don't think there's good data well i mean there's some cultural variation confirmation bias but i don't know if anybody's trying to tackle it to see if they can explain the variation in it all right it was delayed gratification one of them as well yeah yeah so there's good data on that uh and that clearly varies across societies and is associated like so individuals who have are more willing to defer gratification are healthier they save more money they get more education um we know this can be culturally transmitted being transmitted in the laboratory um varies across societies by a lot one of the arguments i make is that um protestanism seems to be associated with greater deferral gratification so if you compare europeans catholics and protestans you can show that they tend to work harder and uh are more willing to defer gratification so the protestant work ethic is a genuine cultural phenomenon there's a growing body of evidence to say there's something to that now it gets complex because a lot of people who claim to be protestants are kind of borderline atheists so you know we look for it more as a kind of historical legacy so you look at the protestant parts of germany say compared to the catholic parts of germany so it's where does the protestant work ethic finish and where does uh gary v hustle culture get the grind at 4 a.m begin that's the difference that's the tricky part okay um what was that story about parking tickets yeah so one of the uh kinds of data so we were trying to compare psychological differences among countries to see if we could explain them with some of this kinship structure and other stuff and so there's lots of interesting psychological data but we found this data set uh from ted mcgill and ray fishman two economists and what they did is they got data on parking tickets received by diplomats who come to the united nations in new york city from around the world and what we were able to do so then each diplomat or each diplomatic delegation will accumulate some number of parking tickets and they have diplomatic immunity so this is a case where they can park um and not have to pay or receive any penalty the nypd still issues the ticket so this creates a database of people willing to you know park in front of fire hydrants or block driveways or double park all those kinds of things and so um if you tag the kinship intensity the kind of how complex and intertwined families are of the diplomats home country to the diplomats you can explain a lot of the variation in the willingness to get parking tickets so the canadian diplomat got zero parking tickets no way diplomat from sweden got zero who got the most um good question i don't remember exactly um i'm not sure why the fact that it's the canadians that didn't get any is kind of fits pretty funny um what about these passengers can we do this as an experiment sure so uh it's just a question so you're riding a car with your friend and your friend is driving recklessly and they hit a pedestrian who's crossing the street and kill him and uh so then you know there's a legal case and you're asked to testify to lying court essentially that your friend was driving under the speed limit uh and not recklessly and so the question is do you want to support your friend friend loyalty is a good thing uh or um or tell the truth in court and then you're told by your lawyer that your friend will get convicted then and probably do jail time it's one of those weird questions because both of the outcomes are things that are supposed to be valued right you're supposed to everybody likes loyalty to friends tell the truth in court sounds like you should do that uh but then the question is which one do you pick right what did you tease out to do that well there's quite a bit of variability so um this will vary across populations and you know this was all part of an effort to see what we could explain using these measures of family structure so we find that you know the places with small monogamous nuclear families people are much more likely to say uh i would tell the truth in court whereas places with big families where people depend on relationships and you get jobs through relationships and you'll keep the same friends for your whole life people say of course i'd be loyal to my friend it's not even a question i mean i remember i asked this question in a seminar once and i there was a it was mostly for undergraduates but there was a postdoc there who was working with me from columbia and he was just stunned that so many of the harvard students would said they would tell the truth in court because he was like in columbia we would go with a friend no way yeah what what what was the group of people that was the most ruthless that you found from the one that was just prepared to throw their friend under the bus uh well i mean canadians were up there uh i think australians and americans were up there brits too probably good good keep it safe in court what about shame and guilt what's the difference between those two yeah so anthropologists have long noticed that there are shame-based societies where shame is really the governing emotion and that's the emotion you feel when you violate a social custom or a rule or do something gets you a bad reputation and you're worried about how other people perceive you so in humans there seems to be a stylized display so people feel like they want to be small they want to disappear from view and not be seen and this contrasts with more guilt-based societies where there's lots of different uh rules around and you might do something like for example you might plan to go to the gym and take a day and instead you eat a big pizza and take a nap so you might feel guilt for that but really your neighbor's not judging you it's just you have set some standards for yourself for which you're not achieving this self-imposed standard so you feel guilt and so a couple different ways to measure this but it seems like there's a lot of variability in degrees which society is guilt oriented so the dutch are very high on guilt and there's hardly any shame uh whereas in lots of societies in africa and pacifican stuff really shame is the main thing and it's hard to find guilt you have to search around to find evidence of guilt the same action cause either guilt or shame yeah so i mean you can these two things can come together but like in experiments you can pull them apart by saying you know either people do something no one will never know or you make something public um you make something someone do something that's a personal standard versus a communal standard so in shame societies there tend to be lots of norms and so you have to spend a lot of time and cognitive effort making sure you do the right greeting and that you know you're behaving just the right way so there tend to be more rules in guilt societies there's fewer rules but people have more of this self-aspirational goals and stuff so they spend more time thinking about what makes me special rather than uh trying to you know see if that should be imposed upon everybody else i imagine that you must have big clumps of traits that just bundle together like this that most of these are going to be correlated with each other yeah so a lot of the stuff i'm talking about um at the cross national level so across countries this is dominated this is really a lot of these things we've been discussing are kind of one dimension now i don't think they have to be one dimension i think there's a particular set of institutions and historical processes which have brought all these together because every now and then we find some outlier society which is high on these dimensions but not high on this one or something like that so it's not that there's some underlying dimension sometimes when psychologists study this they see this psychological measures correlate and they declare that this is because it represents some underlying thing in the brain that could be true but it doesn't have to be true so everyone on the planet has the same biology pretty much right the i have to object to that we don't have the same biology so here's the here's the thing about biology so a lot of people say biology they they mean genetics that's one so one of the one of the big points that i make is that culture changes our biology so we just talked about how marriage systems affect our testosterone testosterone is our biology so if you move from a monogamous to a polygynous society it changes your biology the exact same genetic program you know in a polygynous society when men get married their testosterone doesn't go down because they're still in the marriage and mating market no way so so the marriage system affects the technology when you learn to read which is a relatively recent skill it thickens the corpus callosa in your brain and gets you to do specialized circuitry for recognizing letters in your brain so it changes your brain biologically just not genetically wow so not only is our psychology responding to our local ecology and the society and the culture and stuff like that but it's a two-way street between what we're around how that impacts our own biology our physiology and then that subsequently predisposes us to more types of actions which then bleed back into culture and society and this feedback loop continues right that's interesting so i mean so cultural institutions these kinds of things across societies technologies something like just having a phone in your pocket maybe actually hurting our memories so uh all of these things affect our biology it's just that they don't affect our genetics what were the biggest um impositions but the biggest impacts on um the people's personality was it the race of religiosity was it the family structure was it kinship was it did you find out what the main um impacts were well it's hard to figure out what the relative weight of these things is so in the case of religion i have a whole body of research showing that when people believe believe in powerful moralizing gods they're more likely to uh you know be pro-social or cooperate with strangers even when nobody's watching them by themselves so you know because the god is omniscient that seems to have some effect on people's pro-sociality but some religions say you know you can't marry polygynously and you can't marry your cousins and so those are changing the family structure so the religion is having an indirect effect on people's psychology through that and then the weirdest people in the world make the case that these two factors lead to rising urbanization in europe beginning in about the 10th century and you know in the 12th century europe passes china in terms of urbanization and having cities with a complex division of labor with lots of different jobs that people can do seems to actually change the structure of personalities so you know psychologists have long told us that there's a five factors in personality so things like neuroticism and conscientiousness uh extroversion and um but it turns out when you go to small scale societies like amazonian populations in bolivia uh you just find two factors so there's a good case to be made actually uh well none of the two in the original five there's like industriousness and pro-sociality seem to be the two important dimensions wow so that's something which you've seen by a lot of psychologists as the fundamental um parameters that you're playing with for someone's personality and you can go to a place where not only do you not have any of them but you also have two more you have two different ones so and that's a case where psychologists did a completely inductive thing right they just started giving people questionnaires and uh and then they got this result and they could do it amongst lots of different undergraduates so it seemed like it was pretty robust but as soon as you take it to a society very different from a weird society just like this is a conversation we started off with uh you get a completely different answer which means the nature of personality i think is an adaptation to all the different socio-ecology and occupation so you can imagine if you have some genetic proclivity to want to be by yourself um if you live in a society where you don't have a choice to become a librarian or a computer programmer then you're sort of forced to cultivate some degree of public speaking or some degree of social interaction because you need to get engaged in trade or you need to get a cooperative work group for your farm or something like that but you can get a job as a librarian and just sit and shuffle books around um then you can just you become even more introverted and you go down a particular trail presumably as well that will have a selection effect for the people that are likely to be successful in that society so the ones that are high status that have more resources that have a stronger group around them if you're the super introvert in the society that requires you to be extroverted and you are um your predisposition is so so tight that you're not able to step into that um you're gonna be competing out of the gene pool so you end up presumably with societies which over time what do they begin to look more like themselves how does that work yeah i mean i haven't seen any research at the genetic level but i do have a graduate student who's working on this idea that one of the things that modern societies where you have lots of labor market choice and mobility is it better harnesses the available genetic resources so imagine people varying like how good how suited they are for computer programming or how suited they are for being a physician or for being an economist or whatever the various things are and what you want to do is effectively shuffle the genes that are best for those different things into the right categories as opposed to a cast approach where you know you're born into the sandal maker cast and you're gonna make sandals like it doesn't matter what you like right yeah um you said that an alien visiting earth in around about 1000 ad would struggle to predict that the west would end up being so dominant why do you think that is well because if you look at the world around 1000 ce you know the most sophisticated urbanized societies are in china and the middle east um you know it's kind of the islamic world with a real center in persia in central asia um is producing science and experimental method is developed and what becomes algebra is developed and all these things eventually the numbers is a symbol for zero all these eventually move into europe but at that point you know europe looks like a backwater and so i have a quotation from a scholar in toledo an islamic scholar who talks about the black barbarians to the south and the white barbarians to the north and then he goes through and he lists all the contributors to civilization the persians and the egyptians and um the folks in the fertile crescent uh and and you know the europeans the french and the danish they don't they're the white barbarians in the north wow so what happens what how is it that europe ends up being so dominant if we were these backwards hairy barbarian people only a thousand years ago what is it that we do that makes it so special well the case that i make for why you know from 1500 to the current times uh european institutions and european population spread around the world i lay out a narrative that takes about a thousand years to unfold but it begins with a particular brand of christianity that brand of western christianity that eventually evolves into the roman catholic church and one of the unique things that that church did was it adopted this peculiar set of taboos and prohibitions around marriage and family and i make the case that this transformed european families from the kind of kindreds and polygynous clans and stuff that we find anthropologists have documented around the world including in places like china and in the islamic world into small monogamous nuclear families and this was you know the church didn't intend to do this but this opened the door for things like charter towns which had constitutions where you had voluntary groups of strangers getting together out of mutual need because all they had these little monogamous nuclear families so if you need a production group or you need a group for security or social insurance you had to form these groups and sometimes they were monasteries sometimes they were charter towns universities actually started as labor unions either for students or for professors and so universities began spreading all these different voluntary institutions and that eventually over centuries gives rise to our notions of individual rights and democratic government and stuff which formed the institutions which have now spread all over the world so does a more atomized monogamous society is that better for specialization within the workforce well it allows you to move so typically clans would specialize and clans often will maintain whatever knowledge they've had and only pass it on to other clan members but if you have the occupational system that developed in europe you could as a stranger just sign on to be an apprentice of a master blacksmith and you would learn his things and learn from him and then you have to be a journeyman so now you're an official blacksmith but you have to go do essentially with a postdoc so you go to find another blacksmith in another town you got to do some years with him and you know then you're learning from all the other journeymen who show up there plus you're saying well how does what you do compared to my previous master and you're recombining different ideas where if you pass things down in family lineages the only recombining is that basically you know families are trying to sneak and you know peek and see what others are doing i also guess that if you have a big group and you decide that you want to go off and live your life as a superstar blacksmith the ability to pick up your family and move them with you when the family isn't four people it's 20 people right so multi-pan generational commune somewhere that's basically grandma's not coming with you so you can fulfill your blacksmith dreams and the problems are really not intuitive for uh for someone from a society with monocamous nuclear family because these societies with intensive kinship you have lots of really important responsibilities to all kinds of relatives so you know you're responsible for burying your uncle you have to do rituals to the ancestors to make sure that the land they'll keep the land continuing to be fertile you know if one of your cousins gets injured you may have to avenge their their deaths or their injuries or something to make sure blood money is paid or things like that so when you leave you're in a cog in a wheel and you're kind of leaving everybody in the lurch without all these important jobs you have so you're giving up on lots of obligations but you're also leaving your social safety net so as long as you hang around these people if you get injured they'll take care of you get old they'll take care of you um but you know to go to a town and not have any of that is a tough choice did you ever look at jews or ashkenazi jews and stuff i know they've got some gene pool uh odysseys in there well they're a fun case because jews in general are a fun case because you know i open the weirdest people in the world with looking at literacy and i make the case that what we think of now is that the standards that everybody becomes literate and the fact that literacy is you know schooling to make sure everyone's literate really begins to spread with protestantism and it's because protestants believe that everyone should learn to read the bible for themselves girls and boys so that's why there's lots of literacy in girls because they had to read the bible and uh but the exception to that is is actually i only mentioned in a footnote in the book but um after the destruction of the second temple in the first century a.d. c.e. um jews decided all jewish boys should learn to read the torah in hebrew and so so jews become the earliest society with widespread literacy so almost 100% of jewish males could read the torah and then this opens the door for jews to spread into urban occupations all over the islamic world um and that's how the jews end up as not as a bunch of farmers which they were in jesus's time but as these urban populations become accountants and all these other kinds of things you roll the clock forward a couple of thousand years and you have the highest number of nobel prize winners per member of the population by some ridiculous factor right yeah yeah and so i mean the song drawing on this book called the chosen few but the argument there is that once you have a culture of literacy you get a culture of debate about what the torah says and a culture of commentary on that and that just cultivates a way of thinking that you get just from sitting at the dinner table as well as you know other kinds of training that you know if you're from the kind of irish catholic background that i'm from you know we don't argue about religion or politics or debate uh scripture or anything like that looking at the um previous setups for family with regard to this more commune pan-generational uh living on site with the rest of your family and also what we spoke about earlier on which is this difficulty we have this atomization this individualization of society i don't think that many people are superbly happy with that at least essentially or psychology in terms of the psychological health we have rising rates of suicides amongst men and people report loneliness etc etc do you ever see a time where we could return back to kinship or pan-generational commune houses where you and auntie and grandma and daughters and cousins all live together yeah i mean uh this is definitely a problem right because the trajectory of society is increasingly bringing us down not only to monogamous nuclear families but now with things like social safety nets uh and unemployment insurance really we can operate as individuals right we don't even get married anymore and uh so and that leads to loneliness this location people live near their families as they pursue careers and these kinds of things um and that leads to lots of mental health problems and whatnot not everyone's well suited in that so i mean you might think that the trajectory of society has got to figure out a way for people to live in community again now it might not be by building patrilineal clans uh but there might be lots of ways in which humans can live in enduring communities and get the kind of warmth of having this group that you know is there to take care of you and being surrounded by um the kind of fellowship uh that's why i do feel work in the south pacific and you know one of the ways i describe the feeling of being in that village where you're related to everybody is you know just being wrapped in a warm hug i think that's what a lot of people crave um the tricky part is to continue to energize economic growth while still getting the warm hug yeah it's strange right because the uh existential void is filled by achievement and accolade and status and prestige and the byproduct of that is you're probably a pretty good commercial engine pretty good economic individual um whereas if all you need is a bottle of beer on the the porch with your grandmother sat next to you and your daughter sat on your knee you're no longer driving as hard yeah that's the tricky part i don't know i'd be very very interested to see what happens with that commune style multi-generational living i don't know i think it'd be pretty cool but i don't know whether it would just get i don't know you can go back to that i just thought as well is this a potential malignant side effect of ubi that no one's really talking about if you increase that social safety net for people at the bottom you encourage individualization and atomization of people in society is that is that a side effect of it yeah so uh things like those kind of social safety nets at the individual level is not going to help this problem um because at least now lots of people do rely on kin and that does forge kin links they form long-term enduring friendships where people help others out but if the government's always going to step in and lay a floor down for everybody then you're not going to have to build those enduring human relationships it's actually also a worry with um technology this is a related worry so it used to be that as a kind of merchant or something you would have to cultivate a reputation for honesty and one the best way to cultivate a reputation for honesty is to be honest right actually be honest and be trustworthy and you know when you sign a contractor when you make a handshake agreement that you're as good as your word uh but now everything is secured by these electronic transactions like you know uber's got my credit card number so it doesn't really matter if i'm trusting you know they already got me so it means that i don't necessarily i'm not cultivating this sense that i'm a trustworthy guy because everything's fixed by technology oh it's less trustworthy yeah so the trustworthiness has been externalized it's been outsourced and buttressed by technology i think i read about how um um there is a concern among linguists and child developmental psychologists that the use of smart speakers is going to cause um reduced uh speech skills among young children because they won't you don't ever say um hey siri please turn on the bedroom light you don't say please there's never a thank you there's never a please a lot of the normal social graces that you go through they're just not there did i just set your phone off when i hated you get in i did say please um yeah i mean that's another thing right you you associate you use technology to encourage you it's so funny thinking about the fact that you said because there is a safety net but it's not so high you could live without the assistance of your family uh people are almost forced together by necessity um and i i don't know there's something about this desire for sovereignty that we have at the moment right in the modern world to be a sovereign individual as agency and control over their directory and so on it kind of works against it you want to say well no i want to choose to be with my family i don't want to have to be with my family you go well you say that but you don't know what's best for you a lot of the time it may be that having to have your family is actually better for you than choosing to not have them and then the existential loneliness that you don't know how to fix it was fixed it was fixed when you needed them right exactly and i think there's a so one of the things we study in my lab is the idea that our minds are cued to the group for which we're socially and economically interdependent with and that we have special bonds with people that we're economically interdependent with and the more you have these programs it just reduces any economic interdependence at all and you end up as an island right but you know at least nuclear family there used to be one job for for the female and one job for the male and they were dependent on each other my dad can't make toast right um so he's dependent on somebody to make his toast for him is kind of the idea but now you know you said that belief in an afterlife that depends on one's behavior in life is associated with greater economic productivity and less crime for every 20 percent increase in those who believe in hell and heaven a country's economy will grow an extra 10 percent yeah that's wild that's research from one of my colleagues in the harvard economics department i'm just analyzing data that's through time on gross domestic products and uh data on religious belief and how that changes and you know interestingly it's not heaven it's the hell it's the kind of bad side and the more people believe that there's a hell out there they behave a bit better and that leads to some economic prosperity hell is what every manager of a sales team needs to be threatening their staff with that's the right don't get so many robins in don't do your linguistic programming just bring some theology back in and you're laughing uh joe we made it thank you very much for today what are you working on next what have you got any other cool stuff in your lab the big stuff we're doing is the stuff i alluded to with the textual data so trying to extract psychology from texts and the kind of big game in the lab right now is the latin corpora so if we can extract this stuff from latin then we can go back a thousand years and we can track it this is like being a linguistic lexical archaeologists yeah so i got a team of like you know digital humanities guys latin scholars historians economists that's pretty cool where should people go they want to keep up to date with the work that you do well i have a pretty good website for both myself and my lab and if you just google my name it should come up thanks joe okay see you thanks joe okay see you next time