The WEIRDest People in the World

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 saw it: Recommended by @jposhaughnessy on X (March 23, 2025), quoting the book: “Learning to read forms specialized brain networks that influence our psychology across several different domains, including memory, visual processing, and facial recognition.”

Re-surfaced (recommendation #2) in the reply thread to @SpencrGreenberg asking “What non-fiction book taught you the most about how the world really works?” (June 5, 2025) — a crowd-sourced list Kyle recovered by hand; the full list lives on 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.