Joseph Henrich & The Culture of Democracy

As part of our ongoing series of interviews, this time we are exploring how our cultures can shape how we practice politics and what type of culture democracy requires to thrive.

For this, we interviewed Prof. Dr. Joseph Henrich, Professor of Biological Anthropology & Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and author of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.

Prof. Dr. Joseph Henrich is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology & Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

While Prof. Henrich’s areas of research are extensive (including evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making and culture, leadership, religion and the emergence of complex human institutions, to name just a few), he is perhaps best known for his analysis of what he calls WEIRD societies, or societies which are “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”.

Below is the transcript of the interview between Dr. Fuller and Prof. Henrich:

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RF: Prof. Henrich, I recently read your book The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, which I found incredibly thought-provoking. I don't think I've thought about a book this much in 20 years.

Henrich: Thank you. That is great to hear.

RF: Your essential thesis in this book, is that what we think of as modern Western civilization is, as the title says, weird. So, historically and geographically, most people have not lived like us. And according to you, these differences are actually quite profound. Could you elaborate on that central idea for people who may not be familiar with your work?

Henrich: There are a few different ways to get into that, but one place to start is that if you do psychological measures along many dimensions that we know are important for innovation and the functioning of institutions – so, for example, trust or cooperation with strangers; analytic thinking; whether we use intentionality in moral judgments; individualism – we find that not only do these vary around the world, across different societies, but that the populations most studied by psychologists and economists are often on the end of global distributions. So, they are not just one variant among many, but particularly unusual in a global and psychological perspective.

As part of that, it's worth keeping in mind that in the world that most humans have lived in over most of our evolutionary history you couldn't call 911, there were no police, there weren't foods available in supermarkets, it was just a very different kind of world. And so, part of the argument is that our minds and ways of thinking have adapted to these institutions as they've emerged over, say, the last thousand years or so.

RF: One of the reasons this feels so relevant for democracy, is that many people who have become very committed to spreading democracy around the world tend to make two basic assumptions: the first is an assumption of universalism – the idea that our way of life is applicable to everyone, and thus we just need to explain it to people, and then they will adopt the institutions of our society like democracy; and the second is an assumption that we ourselves have no culture –  in other words, that Western society is a culture-free zone, and therefore there would be nothing you'd have to explain to other peoples about that, no adaptations they would have to make to adopt our institutions and lifestyle. Your work definitely seems to tell a different story than those premises.

Henrich: What you're describing about a culture-free zone is really funny in the field of psychology. There's social psychology and cognitive psychology, and then there's a field called cultural psychology. And cultural psychology is where you study the psychology of everybody else, all the non-Americans or non-Westerners. So, if you take that starting point, it obscures the fact that Western subjects, the typical subjects, even have a culture. But of course, Western or American culture is just one of many cultures. English is a very unusual language. We have a very unusual set of institutions. Considering that, it's not surprising that we have an unusual set psychology, if our minds respond to the world in which we grow up in, to the affordances of the environments, and that sort of thing.

RF: So, if you were to imagine advising someone who has already made up their mind to bring democracy to a country like Afghanistan – this is a decision they have made, and you can’t change their mind on that goal – what would you say are the obstacles they would likely run into in attempting to do that within a short space of time?

Henrich: Well, assuming you want to do this, and that’s a given, what I argue in the book and what I still think is true, is that people take a top-down approach. They think that people are just going to like democracy from the beginning, because it's the most sensible institution. But in fact, if your world has been adapted to a place with weak states, where you have to rely on your clan, where you've built relationships with other clans through cousin marriage, where some of your men are polygynous – all of which is the case in Afghanistan – then you're going to be mostly interested in building the solidarity, strength, and cooperativeness of your local group, whether that is a tribal unit or a cultural unit. And so, in terms of political power, you would want members of your group to get political power.

That means that how this democracy works will come down to the size of the tribal population. Everybody votes for their own tribe, and the tribe with the highest number of voters wins. You see this in lots of places with tribal communities, where democracy is just a sort of tribal-size event. So, if you were to say, we want well-functioning democracies where people carefully compare the candidates and choose the one that they think is best for themselves or for the country, then you would need to break down those complex kinship units into monogamous nuclear families, or smaller units, because you need people to think as individuals and not in terms of clans and these interconnected social networks that they live in.

RF: It's a really interesting point you make, because – and you may know of this example – in early democracy in ancient Greece, they actually had a moment where they did something similar. They did have tribal affiliations and they decided to mix these tribes up, in other words, to re-arrange people into different tribes in order to dilute those pre-existing loyalties. It’s regarded as a very significant reform in the early development of democracy.

Henrich: Yes, and they did other things as well. For example, just before the classical period, they began to institute monogamous marriage which limits a male's ability to create these broad, extended kin networks. If you can marry a number of different wives, you can have lots of sons, they're all half-brothers, and then you can have also relations to these other families.

RF: That’s actually a major theme of your book: the contrast between family and kinship bonds on one side, and what you call ‘impersonal pro-sociality’ on the other. Why is that differentiation relevant to the societies we live in?

Henrich: I like to differentiate between impersonal pro-sociality and interpersonal pro-sociality. The latter, the interpersonal pro-sociality, refers to pro-sociality with people you know. That could include family members, friends, or even friends of friends – people who maybe you haven't personally met, but you have a cousin and a friend in common. These are people that are part of your network, as opposed to the Uber driver, or the random person – the guy running the fruit stand at the corner, or something like that. Just a stranger. You don't know the names of their children, you have no social connections. So, the relevance is the difference in how you treat these two different groups of people. Because in order to make impersonal institutions work, to make modern legal systems work, for example, you need as much impersonal pro-sociality as you can get. So, fairness and cooperation towards strangers, or at least tolerance of strangers.

RF: So, I have to be able to say to myself when I go out into the world, that I can rely on the fact that if I find myself in front of a court, my case will be fairly heard.

Henrich: One of the pieces of data that I use is precisely that. It's a vignette study in which you're asked to imagine that you’re a passenger in a car, and your friend is driving recklessly. They hit someone, and their lawyer tells you, ‘no one else saw this, so if you go to court and say he was driving under the speed limit, we're good.’

Do you tell the truth in court, or do you lie?

That is the question we ask people. And the variation in responses spans almost the entire range, with people in some countries saying, ‘I would tell the truth in court’, and people in other countries saying ‘Are you crazy? That would be totally immoral. You've got to help your friend.’ And both groups see them as virtues. It's not like one group is just more dastardly. They just have a different value system.

RF: I found that study absolutely fascinating when I read it. In our culture, it feels to me like the idea that you should be prepared to personally sacrifice in the interests of the absolute truth or the impersonal institutions, as you call them, seems to have weakened over the past decade. It feels like today people feel more strongly about passing on their possessions to their children, for example. Is that because we're under economic pressure? Is it just because these tendencies reassert themselves?

Henrich: The way I think about this is that interpersonal psychology, being concerned with kin members, is a more natural state for humans to be in. We even share our kinship psychology with our close relatives among the apes: chimpanzees and bonobos. Primates are heavily kin-based groups. So, it's easy for us to go back to the tribal and kin-based ways of organizing. What's difficult is to keep us behaving in fair-minded, honest, and cooperative ways with strangers. At least on the trust measures, it is the case that the United States, for example, has been declining in trust in strangers, trust in institutions, and whatnot, basically reverting to the old-fashioned way.

RF: That doesn’t sound like a good development.

Henrich: If you like our well-functioning impersonal institutions, it isn’t. There's an economist, a colleague at Harvard named Ben Enke and what Ben has done is he's measured this size of the moral circle, using data from some psychologists, Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham, and colleagues. He's looked at how that moral circle has changed over time in the United States, and what it looks like in rural areas especially, so outside of major cities. And moral universalism has been on the decline, at least since 2008, which is where the data starts.

RF: So, people are more open about the fact that they would not apply rules evenly or treat people according to a certain basic standard regardless of their personal relationship?

Henrich: One way to get at this is to ask people, ‘who do you want to engage in charitable giving towards? Do you want to give to the firefighters in your town or poor kids in Africa?’ Moral universalists tend to say, ‘well, gosh, the poor kids in Africa need it more than the firefighters in my town, so give to them.’ Whereas people who are more parochial tend to say, ‘well, I care about my town much more than some distant people, so I'm giving to the firefighters.’

RF: I suppose that could be because people feel their communities have to be more self-sufficient, or because there is more economic pressure on those services than there was in the past.

Henrich: Different things affect those outcomes. What we know affects it is a reduction in intergroup competition. So, when firms are competing less, moral universalism goes down. Economic shocks will drive it down, and also weather shocks will drive it down. So it's probably the case that certain parts of the U.S. are getting more hammered by climate change, and that's probably driving down moral universalism.

RF: Returning directly to your book, you sometimes use the term ‘dark matter’ in it, and I think you mean by that ‘things we fail to see.’ But another way to look at it is that some of the material you present is actually pretty dark. For example, you talk about how people who believe in hell are less likely to commit crime; you talk about how in societies that practice polygyny, a large number of men end up unmarried, and are often more aggressive in their behavior than in societies that practice monogamy; you talk about kinship bonds, and you say that in cultures where kinship bonds are very strong, people participate less politically, they're more inclined to favor, to quote the book, ‘peer conformity, deference to elders, shame avoidance, respect for traditional authorities.’

I do feel that a conservative commentator might look at these findings and feel some validation of their worldview. They might say ‘I told you so: this is why people should believe in hell and practice monogamy. We need to return to these traditional values to keep society shipshape.’ What is your take on that? Because that conservative approach is an increasingly strong voice in our society right now.

Henrich: If our goal is to maintain moral universalism, the one thing I discuss in the book that seems to work in favor of moral universalism is to have benign intergroup competition. So, intergroup competition amongst firms or sports teams or other kinds of institutions. This leads strangers to cooperate in these institutions, and that kind of builds up some general cooperation with strangers. In the US, the economy is increasingly dominated by a small number of large companies, and so that's going in the opposite direction. Laying a social safety net for weathering shocks is another way that would reduce the effects of shocks on universal morality.

RF: In your book, you also describe a number of what you call ‘games’, but are actually a kind of psychological experiment that you've played all around the world with a wide variety of people. Could you describe some of those that you think are the most relevant, or that show the sort of different psychological aspects that you're talking about?

Henrich: Yes. In the book, I try to use lots of different kinds of data sources, and one of the data sources that economists really like are called games, but they're social interactions, usually among anonymous individuals who don't know each other. And in these interactions, people are given real money. So, the economists like it, because there's real skin in the game.

One typical game is called the public goods game.

Individuals are each given, say, $20, and they can allocate between $0 and $20 to a common project. Whatever goes into the common project is increased by 50% and distributed equally amongst the group. Now, what's individually beneficial is for you to keep all $20 for yourself and get your share of whatever anybody else contributes. But of course, if everybody does that, if we all keep our $20, and nothing goes into the common project, nothing gets increased. Now, the best thing for the group is if we all put in our $20, it all grows, and then we all get an equal distribution of that.

So, economists have done this experiment around the world, and you get quite different results. In lots of places, people will give very little, and in other places, they give a fair amount.

One of the interesting variants of this experiment is economists found in the late ‘90s that if you allow people to punish freeriders – those people who don't contribute – in Western societies, that'll drive you up to full cooperation, where everybody's giving. However, elsewhere, people were disinclined to punish freeriders. And if anybody punishes them, they'll punish the other person back. The games are anonymous, so the freeriders can’t always tell who punished them, but they can guess, for example, that one of the high contributors punished them. When that happens, it creates a big decline in the overall payoffs.

But in any case, this is one measure. And I like it, because you can do it anywhere, and you can control for things like education and income. You have real incentives on the line, but it tells the same story as if you used something like anonymous blood donations. There's data on people's willingness to go through the time and effort to give blood. You don't get anything for it, and you're just helping some person who gets in a car accident or something and needs blood, so blood donation is very much an anonymous form of cooperation. And those two things tell the same story. So that's just the sense that we're getting at something real here.

RF: I know I’m extrapolating a little bit from my own field, from what you're saying, but you've kind of basically described a tax system where we all contribute some money, and we build a subway system or a hospital or something that we derive considerable value from. And you’ve described this in reverse: where we get rid of the mechanism we use to enforce tax collection, where people are able to punish those trying to enforce that collection on them. Or perhaps, in real life, people lose faith in the returns that will accrue from that system and feel like putting money into it is pointless.

It feels that as a society we’ve been taking what is a largely voluntary system of raising funds for public goods for granted when maybe we shouldn't have been doing so. How can we incentivize people to act in this cooperative way that has brought us so many good things in the past, and I think that most people would probably like to keep going in some fashion?

Henrich: One is the intergroup competition I mentioned. The other is just to have more mutually beneficial transactions among strangers. One of the things that I talk about in the book is the effects of market integration on all these things. I worry that in our modern society with touchless transactions that might be ebbing away. A simple example would be the differences in how we use taxis and Ubers. It used to be that you didn't give any money to the taxi driver when you got in the car. You would pay them when you arrived. You had to trust a taxi driver to take you to the right place, and they had the trust that you would pay them and not just leap out of the car and run away. But now, they get your credit card before you go anywhere, and they're all in the system, so you – the passenger – know who they are. So there's just a lot less trust involved in some of these kinds of transactions now. And you might think, well, that's good, right? That makes it better. But it could make it worse, because it could affect our psychology in ways that corrode our general trust in humanity when these things aren't there. And there's always going to be times when these things aren't there.

RF: I actually have a similar gripe about hotels. Years ago, you used to go into a hotel as a complete stranger, stay there overnight, sometimes for many days, and then pay them on your way out the door in the end. They just trusted that you would do that instead of disappearing. Whereas today, you give the hotel your credit details up front and they even take a deposit in case you break anything while you're there. So, it's quite the change. Maybe by not giving that trust we’re reinforcing to ourselves that everyone is potentially the enemy, anyone might double-cross us and we have to look after ourselves first.

Henrich: That's right. So, the more you have to put safeguards on to deal with trust, and the less things are governed by norms and mutual goodwill and things like that, I worry that that is taking away some of the signals that, ‘yeah, people around here are generally trustworthy’.

RF: Something else I want to ask you also about is religion. You said in the book that you yourself are not religious, but you spend a lot of time in your book talking about religion, and how it's affected our society. It starts somewhere around the early Middle Ages, and it just keeps going from there. How do you feel that religion has affected our society, maybe without us realizing it?

Henrich: This is kind of a long answer, because part of one of my research programs has been to understand the role of religion, and if it has any role in the scaling up of human societies. So myself, Ara Norenzayan, and several other collaborators have been making the case that religion, so belief in gods with certain kinds of powers, helped human groups to get bigger, to cooperate at larger scales. And this may have been brought about by some competition among groups, so the more your god is able to galvanize things like bravery in the battlefield, and cooperation, mutually beneficial transactions among strangers, internal harmony – so not killing other members of your group and working together with them – then those religious beliefs are going to spread. So this can help us understand how ethical beliefs got all tied up with supernatural beliefs, why there's heaven and hell and things like that. And this has affected lots of societies – this isn't just a Western story.

But when you get into Europe, religion took on a new aspect where it started regulating family structures in particular ways that dissolved intensive kinship groups. People often get confused. This is not about Christianity, it's about one branch of Christianity. The fact that Christianity split into many different branches with your Orthodox branch and your Coptic Christians and your Syrian Christians allows us to compare them. And it's really the Western Church, the one that eventually leads to the Roman Catholic Church that got really excited about these taboos and reorganization of the family. And I think that leads to this other feature of psychology.

Now, more towards the end of the story, we get to Protestantism. As you know, Max Weber famously talks about the effects of Protestantism as increasing thrift, increasing people's inclinations to work hard, and about this all possibly contributing to capitalism. I provide evidence for that to be the case, but then I also make another link, which is to say: ‘How did you ever get Protestantism in the first place?’

It’s a kind of an absurd religion in a global and historical perspective, because each individual seems to have the responsibility and the obligation to read the sacred religious texts themselves, and so everybody has to become literate. Before this there was a dependence on the ancient sages, or on the few elders who had specialized in this kind of thing. The average person wouldn't be deemed worthy to have an opinion about what sacred scriptures say. But Protestants got super-individualistic and super-focused on mental states. Western law reflects this as well in that there's a lot of details about what people were thinking when they're doing whatever it is they're doing.

RF: Yes, I even remember some of the examples you cite in your book from in law school. Of course, what a person believed to be true and what they intended to happen are quite relevant to our system of law.

Henrich: Which is funny, because it's the one thing you can't be sure of.

RF: To bring those two things together, I actually recall a biblical story of a man who kills somebody by accident, and then he seeks sanctuary in a particular city, because the dead man’s relatives want to kill him. I remember some vague sermons on this from my childhood where clearly some importance was being attributed to this point although exactly what the point was was a bit fuzzy. So, probably that was it: emphasizing the importance of this internal belief structure as contrasted to a previous method of attributing blame regardless of intent. I mention this because it was one of those stories that didn’t seem entirely straightforward to me as a kid, and I’m guessing that is because by that time, we’d internalized that belief so thoroughly, we didn’t fully understand the story anymore.  

Henrich: Right, and the reaction there is classic. If you're an anthropologist you know that of course there are many societies where it doesn't matter whether you meant to kill someone else, you killed them, so you're responsible. And not only could the other group who has to take vengeance seek out you and kill you, they could kill your family. Or they could hold your family hostage until they get you.

RF: So a kind of group punishment.

Henrich: Right. Collective guilt.

RF: Interesting question: Can you have a society with no religion? I don’t mean by that that people have to earnestly believe in it or even that it has to be a religion per se. It could be something like Confucianism. But generally speaking, it seems that pretty much every culture throughout history has one or more belief systems, whereas today a large number of people don’t even pretend to ascribe to that kind of overarching ideology. Can you run a society that has no religion? I mean, you've been to many different places around the world. Is there such a thing?

Henrich: Well, that is a great question, and I don't have a clear answer to that, but we have running experiments now. So, we have places like the Netherlands and Scandinavia, which seem to be at least on the far end of people in terms of not admitting the existence of supernatural agents or attending traditional religious societies. And so, the question is, what's the durability of societies that are increasingly secularist?

Now, of course, some are saying that people aren't really becoming true atheists. They're becoming vaguely spiritual. But it's not clear that vague spirituality does the work that heaven and hell did. So, it may not matter that they're vaguely spiritual as opposed to full-blown atheists.

RF: I think I’ve become interested in it, because if you want to make somebody else behave in society, you typically call on your common moral values. For example, if someone lied to me, I could call them out on it, or I could tell other people they lied, and this would cause them some reputational damages, because of this pre-existing belief in our society that lying is wrong.

Henrich: And God doesn't like lying.

RF: Yes, you can call on them to observe their own belief system. Because law only does so much in terms of norm enforcement. Most of the heavy-lifting is self-policing or people calling each other out on things before they get out of hand. Lying isn’t illegal, for example, but intolerance of lying probably cuts down on a lot of other problems.

Henrich: I think you have to have some baseline set of shared commitments. I lived in Canada for nine years, and Canada is big on saying we're pluralistic, but there is a sort of baseline set of commitments. One way to crystallize that is the Declaration of Human Rights or something, and then once you have that, that gets you a long way. The problem is that that’s a Western product. It's not clear that everybody believes in that, or that they will continue to believe in that.

RF: What lessons do you think we should draw from your work for democracy? There are many people who are a bit over-zealous, I think, in bringing democracy to the rest of the world. There are some people who believe there should be a global democracy where every person in the world is involved in one polity. What's your opinion on that? Should we have such a missionizing zeal about bringing these things to other people, or should we have a more live and let live attitude?

Henrich: Well, ultimately, you want to encourage human flourishing, and I think it's worth putting together the case and trying to figure out whether societies that adopt democracy end up to be more flourishing than other societies and whether at least post hoc people will agree with that even if they don't agree right away. You might think about ways that democracy could vary across society. Is there a one-size-fits-all democracy, or do you need a kind of stepwise process? Maybe you don't start with maximum democracy, you start with some intermediate step, or some partial democracy. Lots of places can do democracy better at the local level. Where it gets hairier is at the national level. So maybe you start at the local level, that sort of thing.

RF: Is there anything else you’d like to bring up? Something you feel like you’d like to say in interviews, but no one ever asks?

Henrich: I think that I've already said the main thing, which is it's really about a grassroots story, because if you have a society that has intensive kinship, has clans, then the democracy is never really going to work well.

Another factor that is relevant for the moral universalism question is residential and relational mobility. So, in the book, I review some research that shows that if people move away from their families and hometowns, they get more egalitarian-minded, more morally universalistic, and in the US, residential mobility has been declining for at least 20 years.

RF: So people move less than they did 20 years ago?

Henrich: That's right.

RF: Well, definitely something I loved about this book was how dense the information you packed into it was and the extent to which the facts just keep coming.

Henrich: I'm glad you noticed that. I try not to repeat myself.

Roslyn: It was excellent, and thanks very much once again for taking the time to do the interview today.