The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
Authors: Joseph Henrich Tags: psychology, history, anthropology, cultural evolution, economics Publication Year: 2020
Overview
In this book, I tackle a fundamental question that has long puzzled social scientists: why are people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic—or [[WEIRD]]—societies so psychologically peculiar? For centuries, we in the behavioral sciences have based our understanding of human nature almost exclusively on this thin, unusual slice of humanity, mistakenly assuming our findings were universal. My work demonstrates that WEIRD people are outliers on nearly every psychological dimension, from individualism and analytical thinking to moral reasoning and impersonal trust. This book traces the deep historical roots of this psychological divergence, arguing that it is not an innate feature of Western populations but the product of a long, contingent cultural evolutionary process. The story begins in Late Antiquity with a peculiar set of marriage and family policies promoted by one sect of Christianity—the one that would become the Roman Catholic Church. This [[Marriage and Family Program (MFP)]] systematically dismantled the intensive kinship institutions, like clans and cousin marriage, that had been the bedrock of societies for millennia. By breaking down these dense, kin-based networks into small, independent nuclear families, the Church inadvertently set in motion a cascade of social and psychological changes. This new social world fostered greater individualism, impersonal prosociality, and a more analytical cognitive style. These psychological shifts, in turn, laid the groundwork for the proliferation of voluntary associations, the rise of impersonal markets, the development of representative governments, and the emergence of Western science. This book is for anyone interested in the interplay of culture, psychology, and history. It challenges the foundations of the modern social sciences and offers a new framework for understanding global diversity, the rise of the modern world, and the challenges of globalization as different psychological worlds collide.
Book Distillation
1. WEIRD Psychology
People from WEIRD societies are psychological outliers. Compared to most of humanity, past and present, they are more individualistic, self-obsessed, nonconformist, and analytical. They tend to be guilt-ridden rather than shame-prone, more patient, and more trusting of strangers. In moral judgments, they focus heavily on intentions and mental states over outcomes and consequences. These psychological patterns are not human universals; they are a cultural inheritance.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[WEIRD Psychology]]: An acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It describes the psychologically peculiar populations that have been the primary, and often sole, subjects of study in the behavioral sciences, leading to a skewed understanding of human nature.
2. Making a Cultural Species
Humans are a cultural species, meaning our primary adaptation is the ability to learn from others. This capacity for cultural learning generates a process of [[cumulative cultural evolution]], where knowledge, tools, norms, and institutions become more complex over time. Our psychology has been shaped by our genes to learn effectively from our social world. This process assembles social norms into institutions, like those governing kinship and marriage, which are often anchored in our evolved psychology but can be culturally modified in profound ways.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[Cumulative Cultural Evolution]]: The process through which cultural traits (tools, practices, beliefs) are modified and improved over generations, allowing for the accumulation of complexity beyond what any single individual could invent alone. This is the secret to our species’ success.
3. Clans, States, and Why You Can’t Get Here from There
For most of history, as societies scaled up, they did so by intensifying [[kin-based institutions]]. People were organized into nested structures like clans, lineages, and tribes, which provided social security, identity, and governance. Premodern states were built atop this foundation of intensive kinship, not in place of it. This created a strong path dependency that made the emergence of impersonal, individual-based institutions nearly impossible. You can’t get to the modern world from there.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[Intensive Kinship]]: Dense, tightly-knit networks of relatives, often organized into corporate groups like clans or lineages, that govern most aspects of social life, including marriage, inheritance, residence, and legal responsibility. This was the standard social structure for most complex societies in history.
4. The Gods Are Watching. Behave!
Religions are products of cultural evolution. Through intergroup competition, belief systems with powerful, moralizing gods who punish violators of cooperative norms tended to spread. These religions expanded the sphere of trust and cooperation by creating imagined communities of co-religionists. Key innovations included [[contingent afterlives]] (heaven/hell), free will, and moral universalism, which provided powerful psychological incentives for impersonal prosociality.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[Moralizing Gods]]: Powerful, omniscient supernatural beings who are concerned with human morality, especially cooperation with strangers and co-religionists, and who punish norm violators. Their emergence was a key step in scaling up cooperation in large societies.
5. WEIRD Families
The Western Church, beginning in Late Antiquity, progressively rolled out a unique set of prohibitions and prescriptions regarding marriage and family. This program banned cousin marriage, levirate/sororate marriage, polygyny, and adoption, while promoting individual consent, neolocal residence, and individual testaments. This effectively dismantled the intensive kinship structures that were common across Europe and the rest of the world.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[Marriage and Family Program (MFP)]]: The Western Church’s unique and extensive set of doctrines that began to dissolve intensive kinship in Europe by the early Middle Ages. It is the historical prime mover that initiated the WEIRD psychological trajectory.
6. Psychological Differences, Families, and the Church
The intensity of a society’s traditional kin-based institutions strongly predicts its psychological profile today. Lower kinship intensity is associated with greater individualism, impersonal trust, and analytical thinking. The historical duration of a population’s exposure to the Western Church’s MFP is a powerful predictor of both its kinship intensity and its psychological patterns today. The longer the exposure, the weaker the kinship and the WEIRDer the psychology.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[Kinship Intensity Index (KII)]]: A composite measure of the strength of traditional kin-based institutions, combining factors like cousin marriage rates, polygyny, and the presence of clans. The KII is negatively correlated with most dimensions of WEIRD psychology.
7. Europe and Asia
The causal relationship between the Church, kinship, and psychology holds even within Europe. Regions with longer historical exposure to the MFP (e.g., northern Italy) have weaker kinship and WEIRDer psychology than regions with shorter exposure (e.g., southern Italy). In places like China, ecological factors, specifically the cooperative demands of [[paddy rice cultivation]], drove the intensification of kinship and produced similar, though less extreme, psychological patterns in the absence of the Church.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[Rice vs. Wheat Theory]]: A theory explaining psychological variation within China. The intensive cooperation required for paddy rice farming fostered tighter, more interdependent kinship networks and a more holistic-thinking, collectivist psychology in southern China, compared to the individual-based farming of wheat in northern China.
8. WEIRD Monogamy
The Church’s imposition of monogamous marriage was a peculiar institution that had profound psychological and social effects. Polygynous societies create a pool of low-status, unmarried men, which increases competition, risk-taking, violence, and crime. By enforcing monogamy, the Church suppressed male-male competition, reduced the pool of unmarried men, and lowered average testosterone levels, making men more patient, less risk-prone, and more focused on paternal investment.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[Polygyny’s Math Problem]]: In a society with a balanced sex ratio, if high-status men take multiple wives, it mathematically guarantees that many low-status men will have no marriage prospects. This creates a pool of unattached young men with little stake in the future, leading to higher rates of crime and social instability.
9. Of Commerce and Cooperation
The breakdown of kin-based institutions created a social vacuum that was filled by the growth of impersonal markets and urbanization. Living and transacting in these environments fostered a new psychology of [[impersonal prosociality]]: a willingness to be fair, trusting, and cooperative with strangers. This is the essence of the Doux Commerce thesis—commerce softens manners and makes people more gentile and trustworthy in their dealings with anonymous others.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[Impersonal Prosociality]]: A suite of psychological traits, motivations, and norms that support fair, honest, and cooperative behavior toward strangers or anonymous others. It is a hallmark of WEIRD psychology and is fostered by engagement in impersonal markets.
10. Domesticating the Competition
In a world of voluntary associations rather than kin-groups, intergroup competition had different effects. Both violent conflict (war) and benign competition (e.g., between cities or guilds) strengthened in-group solidarity and reinforced impersonal, universalistic norms rather than kin-based loyalties. Over time, this led to the rise of [[domesticated competition]] between firms, political parties, and universities, which harnesses our tribal psychology for productive, positive-sum outcomes.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[Domesticated Competition]]: Non-violent, rule-governed forms of intergroup competition (e.g., economic, political, sporting) that have become embedded in modern institutions. This form of competition can increase impersonal trust and cooperation within a society.
11. Market Mentalities
Life in a world of impersonal markets, urban occupations, and voluntary associations fostered new mentalities. These include [[time thrift]] (punctuality, viewing time as a scarce resource), a greater emphasis on industriousness and hard work, and a more patient, future-oriented disposition. The proliferation of social niches also led to the development of the WEIRD-5 personality structure, as individuals specialized psychologically to fit into diverse roles.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[The Industrious Revolution]]: A historical shift, preceding the Industrial Revolution, in which people began to work longer and harder. This was driven by a new psychology that valued hard work and self-discipline, and a growing desire for consumer goods available in expanding markets.
12. Law, Science, and Religion
The emerging WEIRD psychology—analytic, individualistic, and focused on internal states—made new kinds of institutions seem more intuitive. Concepts like [[individual rights]], universal laws, and scientific principles became easier to think. Protestantism emerged as a ‘WEIRDest religion’ that sacralized this new psychology, emphasizing a direct personal relationship with God, individual faith, and self-discipline, which in turn gave a ‘booster shot’ to these psychological trends.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[Psychological Dark Matter]]: The invisible, underlying psychological shifts (in individualism, analytic thinking, etc.) that shaped the evolution of Western institutions like law, science, and democracy. These institutions didn’t arise from pure reason but from a coevolutionary process with a peculiar psychology.
13. Escape Velocity
Sustained, innovation-driven economic growth became possible because of the expansion of Europe’s [[collective brain]]. The social and psychological shifts—weaker kinship, greater mobility, impersonal trust, individualism—increased the size, diversity, and interconnectedness of the network of minds. This accelerated the rate of cumulative cultural evolution, allowing new ideas to be generated, recombined, and spread more rapidly, ultimately sparking the Industrial Revolution.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[The Collective Brain]]: The idea that a society’s capacity for innovation depends on the size of its population of interacting minds and the degree of interconnectedness among them. More and better-connected minds lead to a faster rate of cumulative cultural evolution.
14. The Dark Matter of History
The cultural evolution of psychology is the historical dark matter that explains why societies have followed such different trajectories. The peculiar path of Western Europe began with the Church’s MFP dismantling kinship, which created a WEIRDer psychology. This new psychology fostered impersonal markets and voluntary associations, which in turn expanded the collective brain and sparked the innovations of the modern world. Understanding this process is crucial for navigating the challenges of globalization, as WEIRD institutions are exported to societies with different psychological foundations.
Key Quote/Concept:
[[Culture-Gene Coevolution]]: The process by which cultural evolution (e.g., the development of tools, norms, and institutions) drives genetic evolution, and vice-versa. This book argues for a primarily cultural evolutionary process, where culture shapes psychology and brains without necessarily changing gene frequencies over recent millennia.
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Essential Questions
1. What does it mean for a population to be psychologically ‘WEIRD,’ and why is this concept a fundamental challenge to the behavioral sciences?
For centuries, my colleagues and I in the behavioral sciences have operated under the assumption that our findings, largely derived from studying university students in Western nations, were revealing universal truths about human nature. The concept of [[WEIRD]]—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic—shatters this assumption. My work demonstrates that people from these societies are psychological outliers. On nearly every dimension we can measure, from individualism, analytical thinking, and moral reasoning to fairness and trust, WEIRD people anchor the extreme end of the human distribution. They are more individualistic, guilt-ridden (rather than shame-prone), nonconformist, and patient. This isn’t a denigration but a crucial scientific observation. It means that our textbooks are not about human psychology, but about the psychology of a small, peculiar slice of humanity. This realization forces a fundamental re-evaluation of our field. It demands that we recognize the profound role of [[cumulative cultural evolution]] in shaping our minds and begin the difficult work of understanding the vast psychological diversity that truly characterizes our species, a diversity that is not noise but a core feature of our adaptation.
2. What is the central historical process that I argue set the West on its peculiar psychological trajectory, and how did it operate?
The prime mover in my account is a unique and historically contingent set of religious doctrines I call the [[Marriage and Family Program (MFP)]]. Beginning in Late Antiquity, one particular sect of Christianity—the one that became the Roman Catholic Church—began to systematically promote a peculiar package of prohibitions and prescriptions regarding marriage and family. This program banned cousin marriage (eventually out to sixth cousins), polygyny, adoption, and remarriage after divorce, while promoting individual consent and the establishment of independent, nuclear family households. These policies were a direct assault on the [[kin-based institutions]]—the clans, lineages, and extended family networks—that formed the bedrock of virtually all complex societies. By systematically dismantling these dense, interdependent webs of kinship over centuries, the Church inadvertently broke down the fundamental social and psychological structures of European populations. This process atomized society, dissolving large, corporate kin-groups into small, independent nuclear families. This new social reality created a vacuum, forcing people to cultivate new ways of relating to each other and fostering a new psychology based on individualism, impersonal trust, and analytical thought.
3. How did the psychological shifts toward ‘WEIRDness’ pave the way for modern institutions like impersonal markets, science, and representative governments?
The psychological changes I trace are the invisible ‘dark matter’ that made the emergence of modern institutions possible. The breakdown of kinship created a world of socially untethered individuals who needed new ways to organize and secure themselves. This fostered the growth of voluntary associations—from guilds and charter towns to universities and monasteries—where membership was based on shared interests, not blood. This new social world required and cultivated [[impersonal prosociality]], a willingness to trust and cooperate with strangers based on abstract rules and shared identities. This psychology made large-scale, impersonal markets seem intuitive and viable. Furthermore, the shift toward an analytical, non-relational cognitive style, combined with a focus on individual intentions and dispositions, made concepts like universal laws and [[individual rights]] seem self-evident. People began to see themselves and others as independent agents with inherent attributes, rather than as nodes in a relational web. This psychological substrate was the fertile ground from which modern science, with its search for universal principles, and representative governments, built on the rights of individual citizens, could grow. These institutions did not spring from pure reason but coevolved with our peculiar psychology.
Key Takeaways
1. Psychology is not universal; it is profoundly shaped by cultural institutions, and WEIRD people are global outliers.
My central argument is a direct challenge to the ‘psychic unity of humankind.’ For too long, the social sciences have treated the human mind as a universal processor, assuming that findings from one population—typically American undergraduates—apply to everyone. My research, and that of many others, shows this to be demonstrably false. People from [[WEIRD]] societies are more individualistic, analytical, and trusting of strangers, and they rely more on guilt than shame for moral regulation. These are not innate biological traits but the downstream consequences of living in particular kinds of social worlds. For most of human history, people have been enmeshed in dense [[kin-based institutions]] that cultivate a more holistic, collectivist, and shame-based psychology. Recognizing this diversity is the first step toward building a true science of human nature, one that takes the powerful role of culture in shaping our minds seriously.
Practical Application: An AI product engineer must recognize that models trained predominantly on data from WEIRD populations will inherit their psychological biases. For example, a content moderation AI trained on WEIRD norms of direct, low-context communication might misinterpret indirect, high-context speech common in many other cultures as evasive or malicious. Similarly, a recommendation engine might assume individualistic preferences, failing to account for family- or group-oriented decision-making in other contexts. To build globally successful and equitable AI products, engineers must actively seek out and incorporate psychologically diverse datasets and be wary of assuming that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ [[product design]] will work universally.
2. The Western Church’s Marriage and Family Program (MFP) was the historical prime mover that dismantled intensive kinship, creating the social conditions for WEIRD psychology.
The divergence of the West is not rooted in geography, genes, or ancient philosophy, but in a peculiar set of religious prohibitions that began to spread in the Middle Ages. The Western Church’s [[Marriage and Family Program (MFP)]] systematically banned cousin marriage, polygyny, arranged marriages, and adoption. This package of policies, enforced over centuries, was unique among world religions and effectively shattered the intensive kinship networks that were the default social structure for complex societies globally. By breaking down clans and lineages into small, monogamous nuclear families, the Church created a new social environment. This environment, in turn, selected for a different psychology—one that was more individualistic, mobile, and reliant on impersonal rules and trust to navigate a world of relative strangers. This historical process was not intentional; it was an accidental byproduct of one religion’s peculiar obsessions, but it had world-changing consequences.
Practical Application: Understanding deep historical path dependencies can inform long-term strategy. An AI product engineer might analyze how foundational ‘technical decisions’ in a platform’s architecture, like the initial choice of a data model or API structure, can have long-term, cascading effects on user behavior and the types of products that can be built, much like the MFP shaped European society. When designing a new platform, consider how initial rules and constraints (e.g., on identity, social connections, or data sharing) might unintentionally shape the ‘psychology’ of the user base and the ecosystem that evolves around it over many years.
3. The expansion of impersonal markets and voluntary associations coevolved with, and reinforced, a psychology of impersonal prosociality.
Once the MFP dissolved the old kin-based safety nets, people needed new ways to cooperate and manage risk. This led to a proliferation of voluntary associations, from guilds and monasteries to charter towns. Simultaneously, people began to interact more with strangers in burgeoning markets. These new institutional environments created a powerful demand for [[impersonal prosociality]]—a willingness to be fair, honest, and trusting with anonymous others governed by impartial rules. My cross-cultural experiments show a strong correlation between a society’s market integration and its degree of impersonal fairness. This isn’t because markets make people ‘good’ in some abstract sense; rather, in a world of mobile individuals and commercial transactions, a reputation for impartial fairness becomes a valuable asset. This psychology then makes more complex impersonal institutions, like formal legal systems and large-scale trade networks, viable, creating a coevolutionary feedback loop.
Practical Application: For an AI product engineer building online marketplaces or social platforms, fostering [[impersonal prosociality]] is critical for scale. The book’s findings suggest that simply creating a space for transactions is not enough. The platform must also evolve institutions that build trust and fairness. This could include robust reputation systems, transparent rules, impartial moderation, and mechanisms for third-party punishment of norm violators. The success of platforms like eBay or Airbnb depends not just on technology but on the cultural evolution of norms that allow millions of strangers to trust each other enough to transact.
Suggested Deep Dive
Chapter: Part II: The Origins of WEIRD People (Chapters 5-8)
Reason: This section contains the core of my historical argument. It details precisely what the Church’s [[Marriage and Family Program (MFP)]] entailed, how it differed from practices elsewhere, and how it systematically dismantled the [[kin-based institutions]] of Europe. For anyone wanting to grasp the central causal mechanism of the book, this is the place to focus. It provides the historical evidence and anthropological context necessary to understand why the peculiar institution of [[WEIRD Monogamy]] became the norm and how that laid the foundation for everything that followed.
Key Vignette
The Protestant Reformation and the Rewiring of the Brain
In the 16th century, a religious belief promoted by figures like Martin Luther—that every individual should read the Bible for themselves (sola scriptura)—led to an explosion of literacy across parts of Europe. This was not driven by economic incentives but by a desire for personal salvation. This cultural shift had profound, and entirely unintended, psychological and neurological consequences. As literacy spread, populations neurologically rewired themselves, thickening their corpus callosa, improving verbal memory, but diminishing their facial recognition abilities. This vignette, detailed in the Prelude, is a microcosm of my book’s central theme: how a non-rational cultural belief can set in motion a cascade of psychological changes that ultimately reshape societies and their economic fortunes.
Memorable Quotes
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe…is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.
— Page 33, Chapter 1: WEIRD Psychology
Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code. A society in which 95 percent of adults are highly literate would have, on average, thicker corpus callosa and worse facial recognition than a society in which only 5 percent of people are highly literate.
— Page 18, Prelude: Your Brain Has Been Modified
In a world without at least some semblance of these modern secular institutions, people would have been crazy to abandon their kin-based organizations. If people won’t or can’t extricate themselves from their kin-based institutions, how could cultural evolution ever build modern states and related formal institutions in the first place? How do you get here from there?
— Page 129, Chapter 3: Clans, States, and Why You Can’t Get Here from There
The cultural evolution of psychology is the dark matter that flows behind the scenes throughout history.
— Page 460, Chapter 14: The Dark Matter of History
The upshot is that cumulative cultural evolution—including innovation—is fundamentally a social and cultural process that turns societies into collective brains.
— Page 433, Chapter 13: Escape Velocity
Comparative Analysis
My work builds upon and challenges several grand theories of historical development. It shares a deep historical perspective with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, agreeing that biogeographic factors gave Eurasian societies an early advantage. However, where Diamond’s story largely ends with the establishment of these early advantages, mine begins, seeking to explain the ‘Great Divergence’ within Eurasia. I argue that Diamond’s framework cannot explain why Western Europe, a relative latecomer to agriculture and statehood, ultimately outpaced early leaders like China and the Islamic world. My explanation—the cultural evolution of psychology—is the missing link. Similarly, I engage with the institutional focus of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail. While I agree on the importance of institutions, I argue they overlook the crucial role of psychology. They don’t adequately explain why inclusive institutions first arose in Europe. My thesis provides a prequel: the dissolution of [[kin-based institutions]] by the Church created a peculiar psychology ([[impersonal prosociality]], individualism) that made these new, inclusive institutions both thinkable and sustainable. Without this psychological shift, attempts to transplant such institutions often fail, as they clash with the deeply ingrained psychology of intensive kinship. My unique contribution is to posit psychology not as a constant, but as a key variable that coevolves with institutions, acting as the ‘dark matter’ that explains different historical trajectories.
Reflection
In writing this book, my goal was to synthesize vast amounts of evidence from across the sciences to tell a new story about the rise of the modern world. Its greatest strength, I believe, is this synthesis—connecting the dots from medieval Church marriage policies to contemporary psychological patterns and from there to the emergence of global, impersonal institutions. I’ve grounded this grand narrative in specific, testable evidence, from laboratory experiments and global surveys to detailed historical and ethnographic data. However, the very scope of the argument is also its primary weakness. A causal chain stretching over 1,500 years is inherently difficult to prove definitively. While I’ve presented many lines of converging evidence, it’s possible that other factors, which I’ve tried to account for, played a more significant role than I’ve credited. A skeptical reader might argue that the [[Marriage and Family Program (MFP)]] was more a symptom of changing social structures than a cause, or that the psychological effects are a recent product of industrialization, not a precondition for it. I believe the evidence, particularly the data showing the Church’s impact predating industrialization and the persistent psychology of immigrants, weighs against these critiques. Ultimately, my argument is not that I have provided the final word, but that we can no longer ignore the cultural evolution of psychology. It is the crucial, missing ingredient in our understanding of global history and diversity.
Flashcards
Card 1
Front: What does the acronym WEIRD stand for?
Back: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It describes the psychologically peculiar populations that have been the primary subjects of study in behavioral sciences, leading to a skewed understanding of human nature.
Card 2
Front: What was the Western Church’s Marriage and Family Program (MFP)?
Back: A unique set of doctrines promoted from Late Antiquity onward that systematically dismantled intensive kinship by banning cousin marriage, polygyny, adoption, and levirate/sororate marriage, while promoting nuclear families.
Card 3
Front: What is the core difference between shame-based and guilt-based moral psychologies?
Back: Shame is rooted in social devaluation and depends on public judgment of norm violations (common in kin-based societies). Guilt is rooted in violating one’s own internalized, personal standards, regardless of public knowledge (more prominent in WEIRD societies).
Card 4
Front: Define ‘impersonal prosociality.’
Back: A suite of psychological traits, motivations, and norms that support fair, honest, and cooperative behavior toward strangers or anonymous others. It is a hallmark of WEIRD psychology, fostered by engagement in impersonal markets.
Card 5
Front: What is the ‘collective brain’ theory of innovation?
Back: The idea that a society’s capacity for innovation depends on the size, diversity, and interconnectedness of its network of minds. The breakdown of kinship and rise of urbanization expanded Europe’s collective brain, accelerating cumulative cultural evolution.
Card 6
Front: What is the primary psychological difference between analytical and holistic thinking?
Back: Analytical thinkers (more WEIRD) break phenomena down into constituent parts and assign properties to them, seeking universal rules. Holistic thinkers focus on relationships, context, and the similarities between phenomena.
Card 7
Front: How did the imposition of monogamous marriage affect male psychology and society?
Back: It reduced the pool of unmarried, low-status men, thereby suppressing intense male-male competition, violence, and crime. It also lowered average testosterone levels, making men more patient, less risk-prone, and more focused on paternal investment.
Card 8
Front: What is the ‘psychological dark matter’ of history?
Back: The invisible, underlying psychological shifts (in individualism, analytic thinking, impersonal trust, etc.) that shaped the evolution of Western institutions like law, science, and democracy, making them seem more intuitive and ‘fittable’ to the population.
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