Is it better to be WEIRD?

In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich never claims that WEIRD psychology (as in, the prevailing psychology in Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic societies) is in any way better than non-WEIRD psychology. It’s just “different”.

Yet it’s easy for a reader to infer that WEIRD psychology is overall better. After all, the subtitle of Henrich’s book is How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Most readers, including myself, reasonably see prosperity as a good thing. Prosperity can increase utility and improve outcomes in many areas we care about—child and infant mortality, life expectancy, access to clean water and sanitation, and so on.

But I think the assumption that more WEIRD = more prosperity = more utility is worth unpacking for two reasons:

• First, WEIRD psychology comprises a package of traits. Though the overall package may correlate with increased prosperity, not all of the traits will contribute equally to prosperity.
• Secondly, even if certain WEIRD traits increased prosperity and utility in the past, there’s no reason to assume a linear relationship. We can’t take for granted that increasing WEIRDness (or particular aspects of it) will keep increasing prosperity or utility.

WEIRD is a psychological package of traits

Both “WEIRD” and “non-WEIRD” are incredibly broad labels. Like Henrich, I’ve used these terms in my summary for convenience, but we should be mindful of their limits.

Henrich has pointed out that you could classify all of the world’s creatures as being either “penguins” or “non-penguins”. This classification is more helpful for understanding and working with penguins than it is for non-penguins. The “non-penguins” group is far too diverse for the label to be meaningful. Similarly, “WEIRD” may be a more useful label for understanding WEIRD populations than non-WEIRD ones.

But even “WEIRD” is a broad label. In his book, Henrich divides up WEIRD psychology up into three categories and suggests how each contributed to prosperity:

• Individualism gave people incentives to work hard and save. As individualism grew and kin-based institutions weakened, people increasingly began to choose their own careers and life paths. Intergroup competition between cities and voluntary associations ensued. Through this competitive process, the institutions and norms most conducive to prosperity thrived and spread.
• Impersonal prosociality facilitated cooperation and trade between much larger groups than was previously possible and reduced crime between strangers.
• Analytical thinking helped people discover new knowledge and make scientific advances.

This post focuses on the first two—individualism and impersonal prosociality.

Are there limits to individualism?

I can see how increasing individualism from a very low base would increase both prosperity and utility. Past some point, however, I doubt that further increases to individualism would have much effect. I’ve never heard a single person suggest that the key to increasing productivity in already developed countries is “more individualism”. And even if more individualism will keep increasing prosperity, the utility gains from this will decline as money has diminishing marginal utility.

At the same time, it seems likely that increasing individualism comes with real costs. Humans are social creatures and we get a lot of utility from community and belonging. Barry Schwartz and Oliver Burkeman have observed how social ties can make us happy despite limiting our individual freedoms. Marisa Franco similarly describes how individualistic boundaries can destroy relationships; strong relationships require communal boundaries that balance both parties’ needs. Some have also hypothesised a link between individualism and suicide rates—but the evidence for this is mixed.

I’m not saying for certain that continuing to increase individualism will cause more harm than good. I’m merely saying that, even if it’s true that individualism led to greater prosperity and utility in the past, there are good reasons to doubt this will continue forever in a linear trend.

Are there limits to impersonal prosociality?

I’m less convinced that the drawbacks to increasing individualism apply equally to impersonal prosociality. Impersonal prosociality consists of at least three different aspects:

• Impersonal trust (i.e. trust in strangers and institutions)
• Impartial, universal rules and punishments
• Emphasis on intention in moral judgments.

To work out whether there are downsides to increasing impersonal prosociality, we should consider each of these separately.

Impersonal trust

Frankly, I find it hard to see any downsides to increasing impersonal trust. High impersonal trust may not always be better on an individual level. For example, if I placed unfounded trust in a stranger or institution, I could easily get burned. But at a societal level, impersonal trust should be calibrated to the actual quality of institutions and cooperation in a society. In other words, high impersonal trust cannot persist in a society with poor institutions and rampant cheating.

High impersonal trust therefore seems to be both a cause and an indicator of a well-functioning society.

Impartial or universal rules and punishments

The picture becomes more mixed when we look at impartial or universal rules and punishments. Although Henrich deals with “impartial” and “universal” together in his book, they are different things. Impartiality, in the sense of treating people equally without regard to their particular connections or status in society, seems inarguably good. I’m not sure it’s possible for a society to be “too impartial”. What would that even mean?

Universality, on the other hand, is more debatable. Under some conceptions of justice and fairness, everyone should be held to the same standard. Universality also helps guard against inconsistency and motivated reasoning—there’s not much to like about a system where I can rob you but you can’t rob me.

But universality also has its detractors. Some argue that people are just different, whether due to their genetics or upbringing, so holding people to the same standards would be unjust. Others point out that universality can be taken too far. Even WEIRD societies don’t shoot for full universality, and most laws have exceptions. For instance, virtually all societies prohibit the intentional killing of other people, but virtually all of them have exceptions. You can usually kill someone in self-defence, and some societies also permit euthanasia. Similarly, in WEIRD countries, criminal sentencing laws often give judges considerable discretion to factor in aggravating or mitigating factors before deciding on the appropriate punishment.

Finally, it’s worth pausing to consider where universal rules come from. According to Henrich, medieval lawyers believed that there were divine or natural laws laid down by God, and the job of a legal scholar was to figure out what they were. If natural laws exist, it makes sense that they might apply universally. But if you don’t believe in natural laws or you disagree on who has access to those laws, it becomes much harder to justify universal rules.

It’s relatively easy to justify applying a law like “don’t kill people without good reason” universally, because it has near-universal buy-in. However, most laws don’t meet such a high bar. Should a rule supported by only 60% of the population apply universally? Is the idea of democracy or “majority rules” a natural law? What about the processes by which we aggregate people’s preferences or determine who has a vote? What if the minority 40% disagree with the law-making process itself and want to set their own laws?

Intention in moral judgments

Whether focusing on intention in moral judgments is good or not depends heavily on how you view other moral questions. Do you believe free will exists? Are you more of a consequentialist (i.e. you think actions should be judged on their consequences), deontologist (i.e. you think actions are good or bad according to certain fixed rules) or virtue ethicist (i.e. you focus less on actions themselves and on whether the person is of good character)?

If you don’t believe in free will, intention hardly seems relevant. If you’re a consequentialist, intention is only relevant to the extent it affects deterrence. Punishing unintentional acts is unlikely to deter future behaviour. For a deontologist, intention may be relevant or not depending on what the rule in question says—e.g. if a rule prohibits lying, intention is highly relevant because it distinguishes lies from mere falsehoods. For a virtue ethicist, intention is crucial because it reflects the character and moral disposition of the individual. Good intentions indicate virtuous character.

Personally, I’m more of a consequentialist and don’t believe in free will, so I believe that focusing on intention in moral judgments is largely misguided. However, this is a complex issue, and people can reasonably hold different views.

Are individualism and impersonal prosociality necessarily linked?

While I can see downsides to excessive individualism, I’m not sure the same is true—at least not to the same extent—for impersonal prosociality. So what I’d like to know is the extent to which individualism and impersonal prosociality necessarily go hand-in-hand.

The trends Henrich describes seemed to have occurred in broad strokes. The Western Church promulgated a “package” of marriage and family policies, which weakened intensive kin-based institutions, and this led to a “package” of WEIRD psychology traits. This makes it hard to disentangle individualism from impersonal prosociality.

Henrich gives a few examples of societies with high individualism and low impersonal prosociality (the Matsigenka people and early hunter-gatherers). However, he didn’t note any societies with the opposite profile (high impersonal prosociality and low individualism).

In one way, this makes intuitive sense. I can see how an intensive kin-based society would stifle the development of impersonal prosociality. When social norms dictate that you favour your kin, it’s hard to be impartial.

However, once impersonal prosociality has developed and individuals stop favouring their kin, it may begin to conflict with individualism. Since impartial and universal rules apply to everyone equally, there is no reason to favour one person’s wellbeing over any other person’s—or over multiple people’s wellbeing. In that sense, high impersonal prosociality seems more compatible with utilitarianism than with a more individual, rights-based moral framework.

To summarise

This has been a pretty speculative post. To summarise my thoughts on the question of whether it’s better to be WEIRD:

• We need to unpack further what we mean by “WEIRD” and “better”.
• To the extent that WEIRD psychology increases cooperation and prosperity, I would say that WEIRD psychology is broadly “better” than non-WEIRD psychology.
• However, WEIRDness consists of at least three different psychological traits (individualism, impersonal prosociality and analytical thinking), each of which contribute in different degrees to increased cooperation and prosperity.
• Even if increasing individualism caused greater prosperity and utility in the past, I don’t think we can expect that trend to continue forever. At some point, it seems likely that the costs of further increasing individualism will outweigh its benefits.
• But this caveat may not apply to increasing impersonal trust or impartiality. I find it hard to see any downsides to increasing these aspects of impersonal prosociality.
• I don’t think that individualism and impersonal prosociality are necessarily linked. Once impersonal prosociality has developed, it seems to conflict with individualism. So it’s plausible that impersonal prosociality could continue to increase even if individualism does not.

What do you think about the benefits or drawbacks of WEIRD psychology?

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If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also like:

• Criticisms of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
• Sapiens vs Guns, Germs and Steel
• Causality is so much harder than we normally think

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  In Chinese societies, interpersonal trust tends to be very high—see the importance of guanxi—while trust in strangers tends to be low. This would tend to suggest Chinese are low on “impersonal trust”.
  
  Yet, interestingly, the longest-running independent survey of Chinese satisfaction with government shows rather high levels of trust in government institutions, particularly central government. By contrast, Americans and many other democracies show higher levels of trust in their local governments than in their state or federal government. There are many possible explanations for these differences, which I won’t get into here. My point is simply that even “impersonal trust”—already a subset of “impersonal prosociality”—is a broad label that can be further broken down into different elements.