The WEIRDest People in the World
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
The WEIRDest People in the World
| Full title | The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous |
|---|---|
| Author | Joseph Henrich |
| Published | 2020 |
| Pages | 704 |
| Recommended | 2 times |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Henrich’s argument that Western psychology is a historical artifact — that a medieval change in marriage and kinship rules produced individualistic, analytically-minded people, and that literacy physically rewired them. |
Where I heard about it
- Jim O’Shaughnessy (@jposhaughnessy) — opened a thread on the book on X, March 2025 (“Becoming highly literate changes the physical shape of our brains”), quoting it: “Learning to read forms specialized brain networks that influence our psychology across several different domains, including memory, visual processing, and facial recognition.”
- Replies to @SpencrGreenberg — named again in the thread answering “What non-fiction book taught you the most about how the world really works?”, June 2025. Full list: A question for you — What non-fiction… (tweet).
Connections
- Ideological Family Tree — where Western assumptions came from.
- Education — literacy as the mechanism Henrich credits.
- Religion — the medieval church’s marriage rules as the causal lever.
- Jim O’Shaughnessy — the recommender.
- A question for you — What non-fiction… (tweet) — recommendation #2: named in this crowd-sourced thread.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.