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It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Harvard’s Joseph Henrich uses it in the title of his 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Klein’s piece prompted me to order Henrich’s 2020 book.
Sep 6, 2020 · Big History asks Big Questions and offers quasi-monocausal answers. Why and how did humans conquer the world? Harari asks. Cooperation. What explains differences and inequalities among...
Joseph Henrich’s book, “The WEIRDest People in the World,” is a groundbreaking work that explores the origins and evolution of human culture. The book delves into the history of the Western world and how it has shaped the way we live today.
Its basic message is that people should be helped and not blamed for their own misfortune. Diamond is the Sigmund Freud of Big History; the first bumbling and incompetent attempt to understand why some humans do better than others, without pre-conceived notions of inherent superiority or inferiority.
- Why the acronym WEIRD? The acronym WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic—aims to raise people’s consciousness about psychological differences and to emphasize that WEIRD people are but one unusual slice of humanity’s cultural diversity.
- And yet you caution readers not to set up a WEIRD vs. non-WEIRD dichotomy as they read your book. Can you expand on that? That’s right. While WEIRD should raise people’s consciousness about psychological differences, it’s not meant to suggest a simplistic dichotomy or binary worldview.
- What are the big questions this book aims to answer? I’d say there are three, and they are interrelated. First, how can we explain the psychological diversity that has now been documented around the world?
- What’s the connection between culture and psychology? Our minds are frequently understood using a misleading digital computer metaphor, with our brains and psychological processes as the hardware and our cultures—our values, customs and know-how—as the software.
The WEIRDest People in the World has been described as a work of Big History and compared with works such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016).
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Clan society in the West in turn succumbed after the fall of the Roman Empire to an assault, led by the Roman Catholic Church, on marriage to relatives. After centuries of struggle, the modern world with its vast, impersonal markets arose and triumphed over the rest of the world.
