Review: The WEIRDest People in the World
Review: The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich This is a huge book, both in ambition and scope. It took me a months to read and and digest as it presents a number of far-reaching concepts such as cross-cultural psychological variation, cultural evolution and a history of European psychology and social institutions. Each of these could encompass a life's work much less a few chapters, and yet we have another topic and another. A veritable banquet. Heinrich's main thesis is that a number of Catholic church policies enacted from 500 to 1000 AD related to marriage and family changed European psychology and institutions in ways that eventually culminated in the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West. Rather than simply walk us through his thesis, Heinrich first explains what legs and feet are and then painstakingly explains the mechanisms of biomechanics so we might put the pieces together and walk through ourselves. Part 1 explains to us first that cross-cult