Joseph Henrich

Joseph Henrich
Harvard University | Harvard · Department of Human Evolutionary Biology

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344
Publications
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59,603
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Publications

Publications (344)
Article
Full-text available
The multi-site replication study, Many Labs 2, concluded that sample location and setting did not substantially affect the replicability of findings. Here, we examine theoretical and methodological considerations for a subset of the analyses, namely exploratory tests of heterogeneity in the replicability of studies between “WEIRD and less-WEIRD cul...
Preprint
Societies which bind the heads of their children to produce distinctive cone-shaped skulls are a poor source of participants for the study of typical human cranial development. Just the same, schooled worlds - societies in which individuals are raised from birth by schooled parents, emerge into a world where formal schooling is mandatory and in whi...
Preprint
In theory, the term "executive function" (EF) refers to universal features of the mind. Yet, almost all results described as measuring "EF" may actually reflect culturally-specific cognitive capacities. After all, typical EF measures require forms of abstract/arbitrary processing which decades of cross-cultural work indicate develop primarily in ‘s...
Preprint
Psychology is a young science. Its definition and scope have shifted over the discipline’s short history. Here, we call for psychology to become a historical and geographical science. We list four underlying reasons as to why such a transformation, a chronospatial revolution, has yet to take off: problems in data, scope, synergy, and theory. We dis...
Article
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Cognitive science is a study of human universals. This assumption, which we will refer to as the Newtonian principle (NP), explicitly or implicitly pervades the theory, methods, and prose of most cognitive research. This is despite at least half a century of sustained critique by cross-cultural and anthropologically oriented researchers and glaring...
Article
The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of 'machine culture', culture mediated or generated by machines. We argue that intelligent machines simultaneously transform the cultural evolutionary processes of vari...
Book
Cooperation among humans is one of the keys to our great evolutionary success. Natalie and Joseph Henrich examine this phenomena with a unique fusion of theoretical work on the evolution of cooperation, ethnographic descriptions of social behavior, and a range of other experimental results. Their experimental and ethnographic data come from a small...
Preprint
Large language models (LLMs) have recently made vast advances in both generating and analyzing textual data. Technical reports often compare LLMs’ outputs with “human” performance on various tests. Here, we ask, “Which humans?” Much of the existing literature largely ignores the fact that humans are a cultural species with substantial psychological...
Article
Payoff‐biased cultural learning has been extensively discussed in the literature on cultural evolution, but where do payoff currencies come from in the first place? Are they products of genetic or cultural evolution? Here we present a simulation model to explore the possibility of novel payoff currencies emerging through a process of theory constru...
Preprint
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We study whether interactions between individuals with different skills, expertise and perspectives influenced innovation in U.S. counties from 1850 to 1940. We introduce and validate a new measure of social interactional diversity based on the distribution of surnames: lower surname diversity indicates more concentrated social interactions among l...
Preprint
Full-text available
Payoff biased cultural learning has been extensively discussed in the literature on cultural evolution, but where do payoff currencies come from in the first place? Are they products of genetic or cultural evolution? Here we present a simulation model to explore the possibility of novel payoff currencies emerging through a process of theory constru...
Article
Full-text available
Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behavior, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulate...
Article
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How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which r...
Article
How did humans become clever enough to live in nearly every major ecosystem on earth, create vaccines against deadly plagues, explore the oceans depths, and routinely traverse the globe at 30,000 feet in aluminum tubes while nibbling on roasted almonds? Drawing on recent developments in our understanding of human evolution, we consider what makes u...
Preprint
Understanding how humans successfully stabilize public good contributions is a major ongoing question in the social and behavioral sciences. The use of targeted sanctions against defecting strategies is an important solution to this problem. However, ethnographic and behavioral evidence suggest that punishment is sometimes not used against defector...
Preprint
Fifty years of cross-cultural researchers critiquing classical cognitive science’s omission of cultural variation suggests an unresolved tension deeper than this surface conflict. We propose that the intransigence of classical cognitive science can be explained by the action of a tacit Newtonian principle (NP) that the proper subjects of cognitive...
Article
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English is the dominant language in the study of human cognition and behavior: the individuals studied by cognitive scientists, as well as most of the scientists themselves, are frequently English speakers. However, English differs from other languages in ways that have consequences for the whole of the cognitive sciences, reaching far beyond the s...
Article
Uchiyama et al. productively discuss how culture can influence genetic heritability and, by modifying environmental conditions, limit the generalizability of genome-wide association studies (GWASs). Here, we supplement their account by highlighting how recent changes in culture and institutions in industrialized, westernized societies – such as inc...
Preprint
Full-text available
A growing body of evidence suggests that many aspects of psychology have evolved culturally over historical time. A combination of approaches, including experimental data collected over the last 75 years, cross-cultural comparisons and studies of immigrants, points to systematic changes in psychological domains as diverse as conformity, attention,...
Preprint
Full-text available
How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which r...
Article
Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this “gender gap” may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation int...
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The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community size...
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This special issue marks the formal end to the Evolution of Religion and Morality project and highlights the overall findings with particular attention to our second wave of data collection. In this concluding article, we first briefly detail how the project came about and how it developed. We then catalogue our contributions, summarizing the empir...
Article
There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and...
Article
Less intuitive, hard-to-learn cognitive heuristics can thrive.
Article
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After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss n...
Article
Background Human enterovirus 68 (EV68) is a primary etiological agent for respiratory illnesses, while no effective drug has yet used in clinics largely because the pathogenesis of EV68 is not clear. DNA damage response (DDR) responds to cellular DNA breaks and is also involved in viral replication. Three DDR pathways includes ataxia telangiectasia...
Article
Full-text available
Dominance captures behavioural patterns found in social hierarchies that arise from agonistic interactions in which some individuals coercively exploit their control over costs and benefits to extract deference from others, often through aggression, threats and/or intimidation. Accumulating evidence points to its importance in humans and its separa...
Article
Full-text available
After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss n...
Article
Full-text available
Although a substantial literature in anthropology and comparative religion explores divination across diverse societies and back into history, little research has integrated the older ethnographic and historical work with recent insights on human learning, cultural transmission, and cognitive science. Here we present evidence showing that divinatio...
Preprint
Full-text available
Ritual protocols aimed at rainmaking have been a recurrent sociocultural phenomenon across societies and throughout history. Given the fact that such protocols were likely entirely ineffective, why did they repeatedly emerge and persist, sometimes over millennia even in populations with writing and record keeping? To address this puzzle, many schol...
Article
The Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock, 1967), an anthropological database, is widely used across the social sciences. The Atlas is a quantified and discretely categorized collection of information gleaned from ethnographies covering more than 1200 pre-industrial societies. While being popular in many fields, it has been subject to skepticism within cultu...
Preprint
Durkee et al. (2020) conducted a cross-cultural investigation of people’s beliefs about how traits, behaviors, and practices that enhance an individual’s perceived ability to generate benefits (prestige) or inflict costs (dominance) promote perceived social status in humans. In this document, we (a) identify multicollinearity in the authors’ statis...
Article
A new study investigates hunters' causal understandings of bow design and mechanics among the Hadza, one of the last remaining foraging populations. The results suggest that sophisticated technology can evolve without complete causal understanding.
Preprint
Durkee et al. (2020) conducted a cross-cultural investigation of people’s beliefs about how traits, behaviors, and practices that enhance an individual’s perceived ability to generate benefits (prestige) or inflict costs (dominance) promote perceived social status in humans. In this online extended version of our letter, we identify multicollineari...
Article
Full-text available
Theorists have sought to identify the key selection pressures that drove the evolution of our species’ cognitive abilities, life histories and cooperative inclinations. Focusing on two leading theories, each capable of accounting for many of the rapid changes in our lineage, we present a simple experiment designed to assess the explanatory power of...
Article
Full-text available
Most research on cognition behind religious belief assumes that understanding of other minds is culturally uniform and follows the Western model of mind, which posits that (a) others’ thoughts can be known and (b) action is best explained by mental state inference. This is potentially problematic if, as a growing body of evidence suggests, other po...
Article
Cognitive and evolutionary research has overwhelmingly focused on the powerful deities of large-scale societies, yet little work has examined the smaller gods of animist traditions. Here, in a study of the Mentawai water spirit Sikameinan (Siberut Island, Indonesia), we address three questions: (1) Are smaller gods believed to enforce cooperation,...
Preprint
Durkee et al. (2020) conducted a cross-cultural investigation of people’s beliefs about how traits, behaviors, and practices that enhance an individual’s perceived ability to generate benefits (prestige) or inflict costs (dominance) promote perceived social status in humans. In this online extended version of our letter, we (a) identify multicollin...
Preprint
Durkee et al. (2020) conducted a cross-cultural investigation of people’s beliefs about how traits, behaviors, and practices that enhance an individual’s perceived ability to generate benefits (prestige) or inflict costs (dominance) promote perceived social status in humans. In this letter (also see online extended version), we (a) identify multico...
Preprint
Most existing research on beliefs about supernatural agents assumes a Western model of mind that posits a) one can infer others’ thoughts, and b) mental state inference is the best explanation for actions. Other cultures view minds differently. We recruit Indigenous iTaukei Fijian communities who hold 1) a local model of mind that discourages menta...
Article
Humans are an ultrasocial species. This sociality, however, cannot be fully explained by the canonical approaches found in evolutionary biology, psychology, or economics. Understanding our unique social psychology requires accounting not only for the breadth and intensity of human cooperation but also for the variation found across societies, over...
Article
Psychology has traditionally seen itself as the science of universal human cognition, but it has only recently begun seriously grappling with cross-cultural variation. Here we argue that the roots of cross-cultural variation often lie in the past. Therefore, to understand not only how but also why psychology varies, we need to grapple with cross-te...
Preprint
Full-text available
There are compelling reasons to expect that representing any active, powerful god or spirit may contribute to cooperation. One possible mechanism underlying this effect is a system that infers that spiritual agents are morally concerned. If individuals cognitive represent deities as agents, and if agents are generally conceptualized as having moral...
Article
Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a mo...
Article
Full-text available
Religious leaders refrain from sex and food across human societies. Researchers argue that this avoidance influences people's perceptions of leaders’ underlying traits, but few, if any, quantitative data exist testing these claims. Here we show that shamans in a small-scale society observe costly prohibitions and that observers infer cooperativenes...
Article
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In this article, we present a tool and a method for measuring the psychological and cultural distance between societies and creating a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Because psychological data are dominated by samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations, and overwhelming...
Article
Cultural evolution There is substantial variation in psychological attributes across cultures. Schulz et al. examined whether the spread of Catholicism in Europe generated much of this variation (see the Perspective by Gelfand). In particular, they focus on how the Church broke down extended kin-based institutions and encouraged a nuclear family st...
Article
Does integration into commercial markets lead people to work longer hours? Does this mean that people in more subsistence-oriented societies work less compared to those in more market-integrated societies? Despite their venerable status in both anthropology and economic history, these questions have been difficult to address due to a dearth of appr...
Preprint
Full-text available
Cognitive and evolutionary research has overwhelmingly focused on the powerful deities of large-scale societies, yet little work has examined the smaller gods of animist traditions. Here, in a study of the Mentawai water spirit Sikameinan (Siberut Island, Indonesia), we address three questions: (1) Are smaller gods believed to enforce cooperation,...
Preprint
Full-text available
Religious leaders refrain from sex and food across human societies. Researchers argue that this self-denial promotes perceptions of credibility, invoking such associations in explanations of shamanism and prosocial religion, but few, if any, quantitative data exist testing these claims. Here we show that shamans in a small-scale society observe cos...
Article
Full-text available
Cooperation plays a crucial role in primate social life. However, the evolution of large-scale human cooperation from the cognitive fundamentals found in other primates remains an evolutionary puzzle. Most theoretical work focuses on positive reciprocity (helping) or coordinated punishment by assuming well-defined social roles or institutions (e.g....
Preprint
Full-text available
Whitehouse, et al.’s creation of the Seshat open archaeo-historical databank is laudable. However, the authors’ analysis methods, treatment of missing data, and source quality undermine the paper’s key conclusion that moralizing deities appear only after rapid increases in social complexity. First, their report fails to address the inherent ‘forwar...
Preprint
Full-text available
Whitehouse, et al.’s creation of the Seshat open archaeo-historical databank is laudable. However, the authors’ analysis methods, treatment of missing data, and source quality undermine the paper’s key conclusion that moralizing deities appear only after rapid increases in social complexity. First, their report fails to address the inherent ‘forwar...
Article
Full-text available
Converging evidence suggests that high rank is communicated through various nonverbal behaviors (e.g., expansiveness), but prior studies have not examined whether 2 distinct forms of high rank-known as prestige and dominance-are communicated through distinct nonverbal displays. Given the divergent messages that prestigious and dominant leaders need...
Article
Full-text available
The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to...
Article
Full-text available
The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to...
Article
The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to...
Article
Full-text available
Does the experience of war increase people’s religiosity? Much evidence supports the idea that particular religious beliefs and ritual forms can galvanize social solidarity and motivate in-group cooperation, thus facilitating a wide range of cooperative behaviours including—but not limited to—peaceful resistance and collective aggression. However,...
Article
The replication crisis facing the psychological sciences is widely regarded as rooted in methodological or statistical shortcomings. We argue that a large part of the problem is the lack of a cumulative theoretical framework or frameworks. Without an overarching theoretical framework that generates hypotheses across diverse domains, empirical progr...
Article
Full-text available
Significance State centralization occurs when previously separate communities are united, forming a single political system often associated with economy, trade, warfare, and culture. One example is the precolonial Kuba Kingdom of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Using genetic data from over 690 individuals from the DRC, we compared indi...
Article
Full-text available
In the last few million years, the hominin brain more than tripled in size. Comparisons across evolutionary lineages suggest that this expansion may be part of a broader trend toward larger, more complex brains in many taxa. Efforts to understand the evolutionary forces driving brain expansion have focused on climatic, ecological, and social factor...