Joe Henrich @JoHenrich Twitter profile

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Joe Henrich

4 years

In the Sunday Times, London, Matthew Syed ( @matthewsyed ) interviewed me about my new book: @whitneypeeling

Joseph Henrich interview: the anthropologist who says it’s westerners who are the weirdos

I hate to break it to you, but you are (probably) weird. Different from most people on the planet and from most people who have lived throughout history. You se

www.thetimes.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

A great study of impersonal honesty using the lost wallet paradigm in 355 cities spanning 40 countries (17,000 lost wallets). Big variation across cities, but (almost) everywhere people were MORE likely to return the wallet when it had MORE money in it. @MichelAMarechal

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

10 months

Is GPT psychologically WEIRD? Using the World Values Survey and other psych measures, we seat GPT within a global perspective. The culturally more distant a place is from the US, the lower the correlation with GPT @MohammadAtari90 @blasi_lang @DorsaAmir

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

Anthropologists have long argued that kinship represents the oldest and most fundamental of human institutions. Does kinship--the organization of families--impact global economic outcomes in the modern world?

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Just arrived! 10 years of work, materialized in a compact form. @FSGtweets @whitneypeeling

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

Great piece @AndrewYang on boys. We are creating a pool of low-status unmarried men with little stake in future. 1/3 of US men are already out of the labor force and more men under 35 live with their parents than a romantic partner. @JonHaidt @hoovlet

Opinion | The data are clear: The boys are not all right

American men and boys are struggling. Why aren't the media and government paying attention?

www.washingtonpost.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 months

Jon is one of my favorite people to have discussions and debate with. I find his intellectual engagement to be thoughtful, serious and open minded. Until now I’ve never known anyone with this view.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 months

Humans are cultural learners, who automatically and unconsciously acquire ideas beliefs, motivations, and preferences from those around them. This is especially pronounced during the teenage years. It would be shocking if social contagion didn’t play some role in these patterns.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 months

Interesting plots from @TheEconomist Suicide and self-harm among teen girls

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

When I discuss my concern that psychologists and behavioral economists rely on a thin and peculiar slice of humanity in order to understand HUMAN psychology, they often reply with the strong intuition that they (but perhaps not others) are studying “basic processes,” etc.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 months

Puzzling to see the @TheEconomist offering an analysis of the impact of cousin marriage without considering the recent work in Economics showing the powerful effects of the practice on economic and political outcomes. Let's review. First, the Economist's discussion:

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Jump starting a new field: Historical Psychology. Pop the clutch... @slingerland20 @mmuthukrishna @RachelASpicer

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Is the free exchange of diverse views out in the academy? This open letter, from a supposedly learned society, calls for the silencing and demotion of @sapinker based largely on tweets going back a decade.

Jonathan Haidt

@JonHaidt

4 years

. @sapinker is an exemplary academic, bringing interesting ideas to the public, with nuance. An "open letter" against him in part for tweeting academic studies is unfair.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

The replication crisis in psychology (& elsewhere) is widely viewed as a methodological problem. @mmuthukrishna & I argue that at the root of the problem lies a lack of theory. Much of psychology lacks a cumulative theoretical framework. the rest follows.

A problem in theory

Nature Human Behaviour - Muthukrishna & Henrich argue that solving the replication crisis in psychology partly requires well-specified, overarching theoretical frameworks. They outline how...

www.nature.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation in the Annual Review of Psychology: @mmuthukrishna

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

6 years

Rates of monogamous marriage in Africa (vs. polygyny) are highly correlated with the proximity to historical locations of Christian Missions. Cannot explain monogamy globally without religion. From James Fenske

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

An observation: over the last 15 years, led by @DrNathanNunn , cultural economists have systematically harvested hypotheses from pre-post-modernist anthropology (so, back when cultural anthropologists had hypotheses) and subjected them to rigorous testing. Important insights...

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

11 months

New manuscript showing that greater social interactional diversity has propelled American Innovation for much of our history (1850-1940). @_MaxPosch_ @JF_Schulz

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

When I was doing a PhD in cultural anthropology, I was told that the Ethnographic Atlas was non-sense. True? We correlated traits from EA, observed circa 1900, with the same (or similar) traits from 21st-century global surveys. We find robust relationships @AnkeBecker_ @DumanBRad

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Many psychologists seem very concerned about diversity among their faculty and grad students. But, nearly a decade after the WEIRD People problem was identified as a scientific issue, there's been essentially no change in the diversity of psychology PARTICIPANTS. >90% WEIRD

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

Teaching people about how evolutionary processes created human nature and our shared humanity likely reduces prejudice, ethnocentricism and racism. Darwin knew this. We are one species. We need more education on human nature & evolution not less. @NAChristakis @StevenHeine4

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Here's the syllabus that Richard Wrangham and I used to teach "Human Nature" at Harvard. We cover incest, cooperation, social status, violence, war, religion, mating prefs, sex differences, technology, language, sexual prefs & monogamy.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 months

Whatever your theory of human behavior (economists?), it should be able to account for the widespread practices of divination, witchcraft and rain-making rituals. For over 2000 years, philosophically sophisticated elites employed experts to conduct rain-making.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

Cognitive Science is a branch of Cultural Psychology and should be renamed "The Cognitive Science of English Speakers". Unfortunately, English is a peculiar language. Let's place English in a global perspective. @blasi_lang @leraboroditsky @MohammadAtari90 @StevenHeine4

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

Yeah, as predicted. It's worth noting that polygamy (which is mostly polygyny) is the ultimate form of (male) inequality and is not conducive to gender equality. Progressive support reflects what happens when you lack an empirically-grounded theory of human nature.

Brad Wilcox

@BradWilcoxIFS

2 years

Acceptance of polygamy is on the rise, esp. among progressives. Harvard’s @JoHenrich on monogamy, democracy & the West:

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 months

What drives innovation? The Collective Brain Hypothesis ( @mmuthukrishna , @MaximeDerex ) argues that innovation arises from the recombination of ideas that occurs when diverse minds interact and share ideas... @mattwridley @tylercowen

Innovation in the collective brain | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological...

Innovation is often assumed to be the work of a talented few, whose products are passed on to the masses. Here, we argue that innovations are instead an emergent property of our species' cultural...

royalsocietypublishing.org

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

The WEIRD scale is out in Psychological Science. If you are a psychological scientist and want to generalize your findings beyond Americans, or whichever narrow sliver of humanity you started with, how can you make the best use of your resources? @mmuthukrishna @Adrian_V_Bell

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Excellent paper by Gerd Gigerenzer on the replication crisis and the unfortunate statistical rituals used by psychologists and medical researchers:

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

Led by @DumanBRad , our lab has created a webtool that links data in the Ethnographic Atlas data via linguistic relatedness to ethnolinguistic groups around the globe: @AnkeBecker_ @JF_Schulz @DrQueue @amesoudi @David_S_Wilson

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

Some authors have argued that humans do NOT have status based on dominance, as seen in other animals. Here, we review the evidence and consider the challenges to studying dominance in humans. Great work @Joey_Cheng_ and TC! @ProfDavidBuss @SpeciesTypical @durkeepk @markvanvugt1

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

It's as if people care about anonymous strangers, or have principles (or something). But, this varies dramatically across societies.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Forthcoming Book Website:

THE WEIRDEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD

How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

10 months

Computer scientists seem unaware of global psychological variation. WEIRD in WEIRD out. Check out our draft here @asifa_majid

Which Humans?

Large language models (LLMs) have recently made vast advances in both generating and analyzing textual data. Technical reports often compare LLMs’ outputs with “human” performance on various tests....

osf.io

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

Great paper by @DumanBRad , showing what happened when India made a law in 2005 requiring equal female inheritance: more parallel cousin marriage and less labor force participation (fig below). @DrNathanNunn @JF_Schulz . Fascinating implications for Islam&Christianity. @HarvardHEB

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

New paper from the Laboratory for Culture, Cognition and Coevolutionary at Harvard @StevenHeine4 @slingerland20 @David_S_Wilson @gophilosophy_ @MicheleJGelfand

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

@robertwrighter 's distinction between 'explanation' and 'justification' is CRUCIAL. The tendency to attack researchers who try to explain morally repugnant things on scientific groups as 'justifiers' undermines our ability to understand and thus remedy social ills.

Robert Wright

@robertwrighter

3 years

Is Darwin guilty of “offering justification of empire and colonialism and genocide,” as an essay in the journal Science alleged last week? No, I argue in this issue of my Nonzero Newsletter. I also argue that the allegation rests on a dangerous fallacy.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 months

Second, in the Economic Journal, @JF_Schulz links cousin marriage to the strength of democratic institutions, voting, civic engagement, etc. More cousin marriage, less democracy. An unintended consequence of the Church's incest taboo on cousin marriage.

Kin Networks and Institutional Development

Abstract. This study provides evidence that strong kin networks are detrimental for democratic participatory institutions and that the medieval Catholic Ch

academic.oup.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Researchers who do work outside the WEIRD world are challenged by reviewers/editors to justify their samples from places like India, China, Poland, Sierra Leone or Amazonia. Such samples can lead to rejection because they're "not of general interest".

Hammad Sheikh, PhD 🔍

@HammadSheikh

5 years

@JoHenrich I was told at a recent job interview that I should not highlight that I work with non-Weird populations b/c “we psychologists care more about universality; fieldwork is for ethnographers.”

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Is much of contemporary psychology merely the cultural psychology of societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Demographic (WEIRD)? Should textbooks be re-labeled to reflect the fact that over 90% of all participants in psychological studies are WEIRD?

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 months

Our new piece in Psychological Review is out: A collaboration with my former post-docs, Ivan Groupin (LSE, dev psych) and @Helen_E_Davis (ASU, anthro) @StevenHeine4 @ThomasTalhelm @slingerland20

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

8 months

Looks like the standard result to me. The horizontal axis is a log scale. Less bang for the buck for each dollar.

Timothy Bates

@timothycbates

8 months

Money increases happiness, but Nobelists argued this stopped at $80k. A new paper shows that for the vast majority, the effect of higher income works all the way up with no limit in sight barring scales not going high enough to capture the joy.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Interesting findings on personality variation across 15 nations by Laajaj et al in @ScienceAdvances . Kudos to the authors. Imho, they show little evidence for the BIG 5 model of personality outside the WEIRD societies.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

9 months

Our workshop on the new field of historical psychology. Fantastic group of historians, classicists, economists, psychologists, data scientists and one wayward cultural anthropologist. Held in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. @WalterScheidel @JF_Schulz

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

1 year

ManyLabs2 is often taken to provide evidence against cross-cultural psychological differences. We had a close look and offer a different perspective. Thanks to the authors for sharing their data! @BrianNosek

Many Labs 2: Investigating Variation in Replicability Across Samples and Settings - Richard A....

We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variati...

journals.sagepub.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 months

It’s important to keep our scientific understandings of these phenomenon, separate from any moral judgments. Social contagion could play a role without saying whether that ‘fact’ is good, bad or neutral.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

The new editor at Psychological Science, Patricia Bauer, appears to be taking the WEIRD People Problem quite seriously. Great news. @JeremyGinges @mmuthukrishna @slingerland20 @David_S_Wilson @corenapicella @aiyanakoka @leraboroditsky

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

The experience of war seems to induce an enduring increase in ritual attendance and the importance of religion in people's lives. Evidence from 3 post-conflict societies. @BGPurzycki @Peter_Turchin @NatureHumBehav

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Evidence from child development for (1) the centrality of social norms for cooperation and (2) the university of norm psychology across diverse societies! @baileyrhouse @jbsilk1 @an_crittenden @TBroesch

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

Great paper; the scale of hunter-gatherer cooperation far exceeds that which can be explained by the canonical models of the evolution of cooperation.

Joan Silk

@jbsilk1

3 years

Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson have posted a preprint of a new paper documenting large scale cooperation in small scale societies.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Do the gods of small-scale societies shape cooperation, and if so, how are they different from the gods of world religions? How are these beliefs transmitted? (rituals) @mnvrsngh et. al. gives us the Mentawai view (Indonesia). @azimshariff @aiyanakoka @wgervais @David_S_Wilson

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

I'd reverse this list. 1. Theory 2. Measurement and ecological validity 3. Preregistration 4. Power 5. Replication Without explicit theory, you can't properly do #2 , 3 or 5. Pre-registering and replicating the personal hunches, folk ideas or vague descriptions isn't science

Brian Nosek (@[email protected])

@BrianNosek

5 years

My priority order is: 1. replication 2. power 3. preregistration 4. measurement 5. theory Progress can be made on all simultaneously, but the order is my weighting for achieving a robust, efficient science as quickly as possible-bc later ones depend some on earlier ones.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

Harvard-GMU postdoc integrating cultural evolution, anthropology, economics and psychology to understand global variation in how people think, feeling and reason as well as the kinds of formal institutions they construct. @JF_Schulz @mmuthukrishna @PsychoSchmitt @NAChristakis

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

I really enjoyed @kph3k 's book. A better understanding of genetics and behavior can inform policy in important ways. I recommend @StevenHeine4 's book alongside.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Right on, but many of those cognitive biases are WEIRD, and likely to be products of cultural evolution, not genetic evolution. So, you need a version of evolutionary psychology that explicitly theorizes cultural evolution and considers how it shapes psychology.

David Sloan Wilson

@David_S_Wilson

5 years

That's right. The entire concept of cognitive biases and heuristics developed in the context of the rational actor model and needs to be rethought from an evolutionary perspective. A few people have called for this from the beginning but it is still a work in progress.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

Globally, religions create the conditions for cultural group selection. @mmuthukrishna Cool new paper in pnas. @David_S_Wilson @slingerland20 @PascalBoyerUSA @robert_t_boyd The numbers of Cultural Fst values. They are plenty big.

Cultural evolutionary theories suggest that world religions have consolidated beliefs, values, and practices within a superethnic cultural identity...

www.pnas.org

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 months

The evidence: in the QJE, Gosh, Squires and their colleagues at UBC: . State legal bans on cousin increased longer-term income. So, such evidence should give @TheEconomist or politicians pause. @DrNathanNunn

Economic Consequences of Kinship: Evidence From U.S. Bans on Cousin Marriage*

Abstract. Close-kin marriage, by sustaining tightly knit family structures, may impede development. We find support for this hypothesis using U.S. state ba

academic.oup.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

1 year

I was humbled last week to receive an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven in Belgium. Thanks to KU, the Rector and my amazing nominators, who came from Philosophy and Historical Linguistics. @DeblockBlock @HarvardHEB Humbling nomination video

Joseph Henrich | KU Leuven eredoctores 2023

🎓 Op 3 februari 2022 reikt KU Leuve🎓 Op 3 februari 2022 reikt KU Leuven een eredoctoraat uit aan de Amerikaanse antropoloog Joseph Henrich. Hij doceert men...

www.youtube.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

In 2019, a group of excellent scholars for whom I have the highest respect published a paper in @nature on moralizing gods. I was part of a team that raised some questions. Our concerns were just published in Nature:

Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods

Nature - Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods

www.nature.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

6 years

Gender differences in social preferences (aspects of psychology) expand with rising wealth and greater gender equality. Data from 80,000 people in 76 countries...

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Inspired by ethnographic observations of how cooperation really works in small villages, this evolutionary model shows how greed and jealousy can evolve to stabilize larger-scale cooperation, creating favorable condition for cultural group selection.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

WEIRD exps show that individuals tend to judge bad side effects as more intentional than good side effects (Knobe effect). When tested in Oceania, the opposite effect arises: good side effects were judged as intentional. #WeirdPeopleProblem @eerobbi

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

9 months

On the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith's birth, I'm honoured to receive the Panmure House Prize. @HarvardHEB @Harvard @HKS_Research @HarvardPsy @AdamSmithHouse

Honouring Intellectual Achievement: Panmure House Prize 2023 Winner Announcement | Panmure House

Discover the brilliance of the Panmure House Prize 2023 winner as we celebrate outstanding intellectual contributions. Join us in recognising excellence and innovation in this prestigious event held...

panmurehouse.org

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 months

Third, Duman Bahrami-Rad, in the Journal of Dev. Economics shows how a change in inheritance laws aimed at decreasing gender inequality instead increased cousin marriage and unintentionally increased gender inequality. Unintended consequences when policy-makers don't get kinship.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

1 year

Check out our new piece on Historical Psychology; we explain why and how... @MohammadAtari90 @StevenHeine4 @slingerland20 @JonHaidt @David_S_Wilson @leraboroditsky @PsychoSchmitt

Historical Psychology - Mohammad Atari, Joseph Henrich, 2023

A growing body of evidence suggests that many aspects of psychology have evolved culturally over historical time. A combination of approaches, including experim...

journals.sagepub.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 months

Also, of potential of interest on this front, my colleagues and I show that kinship intensity, which in increased by more cousin marriage, reduces economic prosperity around the globe.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

Interesting piece in Perspectives on Psychological Science on Cognitive Neuroscience. Who are the participants? Mostly, we don't know. 80% non-reporting. Generic humans? How is it that we are still here? @StevenHeine4 @slingerland20 @CristineLegare

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Great self-reflection on Economics by George Akerlof. As someone who came into economics (Prof for 9 years) from outside, these "sins" are all obvious and right on target.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Really enjoying @JonHaidt 's and Greg Lukianoff's new book. It's a must-read for anyone concerned about university culture, intellectual freedom, trigger warnings and the mental health of teens and young adults. Engaging and beautifully written.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

“I couldn’t agree more.” This was my reaction to, "This View of Life". David provides a magisterial vision for how a broad evolutionary approach can not only integrate the social and natural sciences, but also why this effort is crucial for getting policy right. @David_S_Wilson

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Proper analyses of Whitehouse et. al.’s data reveals that moralizing god PRECEDE the rise of complex societies, but serious data concerns persist. @babeheim @DrQueue @martinlangcz @willismonroe @mmuthukrishna @slingerland20 @RachelASpicer @aiyanakoka

Treatment of missing data determines conclusions regarding moralizing gods

Whitehouse, et al. have recently used the Seshat archaeo-historical databank to argue that beliefs in moralizing gods appear in world history only after the formation of complex “megasocieties” of...

osf.io

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

Super important BBS paper: cultural evolution can drive up the genetic heritability of valued phenotypic traits. Behavioral genetics needs cultural evolution. Well done! @rlmcelreath @David_S_Wilson @JonHaidt @SarahMathew1 @CeliaHeyes @ProfJessTracy @StevenHeine4 @slingerland20

Michael Muthukrishna

@mmuthukrishna

3 years

🚨New target article in @BBSJournal : "Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability" w/ @RyutaroUchiyama & @RachelASpicer Preprint: BBS: Long thread, but important topic. Helps to resolve controversies such as IQ differences 1/

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

6 years

Fantastic paper showing cultural group selection in action, sustaining impersonal trust in the modern world. Francois and collaborators

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

The Journal Religion, Brain and Behavior did a special issue on my book, The WEIRDest People in the World. Great commentaries from leading scholars in religious studies, philosophy and anthropology. @mmuthukrishna @slingerland20 @ed_hagen @adlightner

Latest articles from Religion, Brain & Behavior

Browse the latest articles and research from Religion, Brain & Behavior

www.tandfonline.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

6 years

Half of Americans believe in ghosts...(from @TheEconomist )

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

10 months

On Analytic thinking, GPT is Scandinavian @ThomasTalhelm

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

What kinds of things, aside from linguistic cognition, do you get wrong if you rely on English. Some examples:

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

The Origins of WEIRD People (a talk on my forthcoming book) at the Sage Center, UCSB:

Joseph Henrich--"W.E.I.R.D. Minds"

Recorded on December 5, 2019 at the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara

www.youtube.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Such virtue-signalling stunts provide the bandwagon-hoppers with the illusion that they are doing something while they actually undermine efforts to fight injustice. They destroy our unity in misguided efforts to achieve ideological purity.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Cultural evolution shapes genetic heritability, often driving it up for locally valued traits. @mmuthukrishna

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

Such a great paper by @JF_Schulz , showing the impact of the Church and cousin marriage on the emergence of democratic institutions ( @DumanBRad ):

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Here's the background reading: The Origins of WEIRD Psychology

The Origins of WEIRD Psychology

Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized,...

osf.io

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Biologists studying non-humans have to deal with their own version of the WEIRD problem: great piece in Nature by Webster and Rutz highlighting selection biases:

How STRANGE are your study animals?

Nature - A new framework for animal-behaviour research will help to avoid sampling bias — ten years on from the call to widen the pool of human participants in psychology studies beyond the WEIRD.

www.nature.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

6 years

Audio version of The Secret of Our Success:

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

Historical Psychology Post-doc at Harvard: Open to folks from any field with the right tools and interests in cultural evolution @diyclassics @JF_Schulz @WalterScheidel @slingerland20 @_MaxPosch_ @StevenHeine4 @leraboroditsky @Peter_Turchin @David_S_Wilson @corenapicella

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

Given that that's hard to physiology and anatomy right by studying WEIRD people, in our exotic environments, we should not be surprised that so much psychological variation is now being documented around the world.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

The letter reads like a parody of academic discourse. They open with a dose of innuendo and guilt by association, but then publicly wash their hands. They dissect a scattering of Pinker’s statements, always confidently asserting the least charitable interpretation.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 months

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

6 years

Hey @aiyanakoka , I'm an ethnographer. When among Swiss bankers and economists, one adopts the local customs. Some communities require their adult males to tie strips of colorful cloth around their throats and cinch them tight using a special knot, some don't.

Aiyana Koka Willard

@aiyanakoka

6 years

Omg @JoHenrich is wearing a tie.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

Rituals aimed at bringing rain have been common across societies. Even in societies with writing and sophisticated philosophical traditions, such rituals have persisted for millennia. Given the evidence that people perceived these protocols as technologies, why did they persist?

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Here's the trailer for The WEIRDest People in the World (arriving Sept 8):

The WEIRDest People in the World (Book Trailer)

Get a taste of Joe Henrich's new book.

www.youtube.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

9 months

The Lab for Culture, Cognition and Coevolution in HEB at Harvard is accepting applications from potential graduate students for next year. @mmuthukrishna @Helen_E_Davis @fierycushman @David_S_Wilson @jbsilk1 @JonHaidt @StevenHeine4 @rlmcelreath

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

5 years

To what degree is the structure of personality a cultural evolutionary adaptation to the diversity of social and occupational niches? As urbanization decreases, the correlation among personality dimensions increases:

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Fighting racism and other injustices is hindered by silencing those who offer alternative views or policy approaches that diverge from the local orthodoxy. Instead of calling for a silencing, the signees should dispute @sapinker , explain their views, and have the debate.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

Interested in pursuing a PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology: Come to our Open House on Thursday @HarvardHEB

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

10 months

GPT falls between Germany and New Zealand... @mmuthukrishna

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

4 years

Great preview of my colleague Dan Lieberman's book "Exercised" in Harvard Mag. If you are interested in living longer and exercising, take an evolutionary approach that cuts through the BS ( @HarvardHEB @hoovlet @NicoleBarbaro ; @TDCapellini ):

Excerpt from “Exercised,” by Daniel E. Lieberman | Harvard Magazine

A biological anthropologist explains why and how exercise works to combat senescence.

www.harvardmagazine.com

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

2 years

Do market integration and impersonal prosociality coevolve culturally as cultural evolutionists have argued? Using folklore and a brilliant collection of market measures (including exogenous variation), my colleague @BenjaminEnke nails it. @mmuthukrishna @robert_t_boyd @JonHaidt

Nature Human Behaviour

@NatureHumBehav

2 years

How do markets relate to morality? @BenjaminEnke analyses historical folklore to find that a society's degree of market interactions is associated with the cultural salience of prosocial behaviour, interpersonal trust, and universalist moral values.

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

3 years

Here's my take on the new Hadza study by Harris and colleagues exploring the role of casual inference in technological evolution ( @corenapicella , @SarahMathew1 , @mmuthukrishna @MaximeDerex @_MaxWinkler_ @JF_Schulz ):

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Joe Henrich

@JoHenrich

9 months

That’s a common misconception. Culture can evolve and adapt to an unconscious process of errors, variation,retention and recombination. The secret of our success is full of examples, and this can be shown in the laboratory.