I spent a lot of time this past summer reading Joe Henrich’s work and I was really taken by it. Henrich is professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard and also has a background in aerospace engineering and anthropology among other fields. His research, which includes fieldwork among indigenous people in South America and large-scale survey analysis, seems to me to be reshaping the social sciences and pushing them together into a kind of grand unified theory.
Maybe more importantly, he’s one of those thinkers that you just want to talk about with friends.1 I love telling people his story about what happens to humans when they find themselves in a new environment (hint: they usually die unless they meet natives who show them how to survive) or how certain superstitions can be viewed as randomization techniques (for example, hunting in the direction that a thrown stick points).
Because he got me so excited, I thought that I would try to summarize some of what I’ve learned and then see if his work had any lessons for political science, my own field.
The three big ideas that I take away from him are the following:
The importance of culture. Human beings couldn’t survive without culture and hence our brains are programmed to learn from others. Accumulation of knowledge through cultural transmission is arguably more important for human flourishing than our capacity for abstract reasoning, a fact that he illustrates with the fate of humans who found themselves isolated in a new territory noted above or the way that otherwise poisonous foods like cassava can be rendered edible through complicated preparations that are far from obvious.
The distinctive nature of modern psychology. Human psychology is not a universal. In fact, members of WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) societies think very differently than most of our ancestors. He distinguishes a kin-based psychology (and social order) that has dominated almost all of human history from our current individualistic, analytic psychology. These differences show up in both attitudes and behavior, for example, in the way individuals play the ultimatum or public goods games. And most psychological research ignores these other ways of thinking.
A historical account of the emergence of this psychology and its links to the industrial revolution and democracy. The main thread in this story is the way that the Catholic Church broke up clans and tribes in Europe by prohibiting cousin marriage and changing inheritance rules. This in turn incentivized people to develop individual skills and reputations and to trust and cooperate with strangers, all prerequisites for scientific innovation, sustained growth, and representative government.
I am leaving out many of the details and auxiliary work here and “Henrich” is a shorthand for a number of collaborators and fellow-travelers, but these ideas seem to me as big and important as anything I’ve read since I started to study social science thirty-some years ago.
In this post, I wanted to think through some of the implications of Henrich’s for political science. Henrich is an anthropologist and though he demonstrates implications of his theory for democracy and governance, it behooves us as political scientists to think more about the implications of his work for our own theories. In my view, his work forces us to rethink at least three areas: how we produce normative theory, how we think about rational behavior, and how we study culture.
Normative Theory
I think that most political scientists (myself included) would count themselves as liberals - believers in the primacy of human rights. While we might not all be Rawlsians, most of us would probably feel sympathy for the idea that individuals have plans for their lives and should be free to carry out those plans as long as they do not hurt others.
Henrich, however, makes clear the extent to which liberalism is historically contingent. Our default psychology and the social orders that governed most of human history instead were based on kinship - elders and kin had a say in all of our actions and choices. The idea that we are independent agents carrying out our own life plans came relatively late and required massive psychological and social changes.
This criticism of liberalism is not new. Plenty of theorists have criticized Rawls for his failure to realize how people are embedded in social relations. Indeed, this was the big debate when I was in grad school: communitarians versus liberals. It has mostly disappeared because liberalism seemed to have won and I think relatively few thinkers today identify as communitarian.
Yet, Henrich suggests that the communitarians have been right for most of history and that their basic idea better corresponds with our inherited psychology. The communities that shaped most of our history, however, are not the nice democratic ones that communitarians emphasized. Instead, they are more authoritarian kinship groups who carefully monitor the behavior of their members and punish deviations. This was not just a power play, but an adaptive response to the environment that they faced and was in some ways baked into our brains, as I’ll discuss below.
The question that arises is what sort of political theory or political ethics would fit the sort of societies that dominated history. Given Henrich’s evidence, can we really just say that these societies are atavisms that had to be overcome and consigned to the dustbin? If not, would an ethics for kin-based societies simply reiterate the internal norms of those societies including practices like arranged marriages? Could we imagine some sort of reflective equilibrium that changes these practices on the margin to something slightly more palatable?
I don’t think these debates are purely theoretical. In reviving the doctrine of integralism, Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule make the case for a return to the old morality based on community. Somewhat ironically, their proposals rest on Catholicism, whose marriage and family program, according to Henrich, was responsible for the breakdown of traditional communities. But the psychological foundations for their view are pre or non-WEIRD in Henrich’s terms.
The earlier revival of Carl Schmitt and his distinction between friends and enemies seems to point in the same direction. Together these theorists appeal to a kind of kin-based psychology which Henrich refers to as the human default. More palatable thoughts along these lines can be found in Raymond Geuss who, in his recent autobiography, “Not Thinking Like a Liberal”, describes what it was like to grow up in non-liberal milieu and his efforts to bring anthropological research into political theory.
Liberals have of course considered how to include non-liberals in a liberal society. But the question becomes acute when non-liberal practices include arranged and cousin marriage or confining women to the home among others. There are some like Geuss who search for a middle ground that is not simply a reintroduction of pre-modern society, but is also not based on autonomous individuals like liberalism. He calls this political realism (a term that we will see again below).
The question for political theory is how we might incorporate this alternative psychology and social ordering into our normative thinking. I think some of this has been done by Jacob Levy and Will Kymlicka among others, but the challenge might be much larger. Interestingly, Henrich takes something of a relativistic view towards non-WEIRD psychologies and acknowledges that WEIRD psychology may not be entirely satisfying. This is an area where I will have to read more.
Rational Behavior
Henrich’s arguments are a challenge for empiricists as well. The big question in democratic theory today seems to be whether human beings are mostly groupy creatures or whether they act in individually rational ways. Achen and Bartels’s Democracy for Realists makes the case that classic views of democracy where voters either punish incumbents for bad performance or choose among a variety of platforms are poor explanations for actual voter behavior.
Instead, they argue that a group-based theory of democracy works better. Group attachments - whether to ethnic or identity groups or political parties - ultimately shape how individuals see the social and political world. To give a simple example, the exact same economic situation will be perceived very differently by a Democrat and a Republican. The key psychological concepts employed here are motivated reasoning and social identity theory, but the links to Henrich’s kinship psychology are clear. Achen and Bartels’s “realist” view (note the coincidence with Geuss’s “realism”) builds on some of the same inherited psychological features as Henrich’s.
This is putting things too bluntly. Henrich himself notes how the Church’s marriage and family program and later the Protestant Reformation created a new psychology and indeed rewired the brain to push people in a more individualist direction. This in turn spurred the urban, scientific, and industrial revolutions along with more democratic forms of government, which accelerated these psychological changes and spread them around the world.
The empirical question is then how much of the old kinship or groupy psychology is simply an atavism that is being overcome or how much is a constant that will always hold a place in our thinking. Maybe a better alternative is to think in terms of variation or continuums. More individualistic or groupy thinking may come to the fore in certain places and times. Indeed, Henrich finds wide variation across the globe in the survival of kinship institutions and psychology. This variation was precisely one of my criticisms of Achen and Bartels.
Again, this is not a hypothetical question. The recent rise in populism and nationalist movements (and perhaps even wokeism on the other side) suggests that the old kinship appeal is alive and well, at least under certain conditions. These movements raise up the pure members of the nation, typically the dominant ethnicity or race or religion, against others, whether minorities or foreigners or so-called globalists. But are these movements inevitable because we are still a species where the kinship impulse is strong? Or are they a thermostatic response to a liberalism that pushed too far? Or were there other factors - economic difficulties, elite overproduction - that made them more attractive? These seem to be the central questions in social theory right now and ones that Henrich helps to illuminate.
Political Culture
Henrich’s emphasis on culture is a final challenge to political science (though in some ways it is just the inverse of my previous point). Our discipline once took political culture fairly seriously. The key works came out of the modernization school and distinguished premodern and modern cultures. The one that is most remembered today is Edward Banfield and his concept of amoral familism.2 These works were ultimately dismissed as essentializing and patronizing, which they often were. Critics argued that cultures were instead dynamic and diverse. Moreover, early works tended to be based on less replicable methods and data than became the norm.
I understand the reasons that political science (and even more so economics) has mostly ignored culture. It is usually better to first consider structures and incentives in explaining behavior. Simply positing different preferences is just too easy as Brian Albrecht humorously points out:
Henrich’s work, and here I am thinking of his book The Secret of Our Success, suggests that we should take culture more seriously. Human brains are engineered to learn from others who are similar to them and who are successful in their environment. And this suggests that culture will matter. Moreover, cross-national and cross-regional research has found wide variations in cultural beliefs across the world, which often correlate with important political outcomes. Henrich has contributed here as well. His team’s analysis of the World Values Survey produced cultural distances from the US and China to other countries (the US is closer to more countries than China).
The question is what to do with culture? Probably the best known cultural theory in political science is Inglehart’s work on postmaterialist values. Interestingly, his conclusions are somewhat reversed from Henrich’s. Inglehart argues that as long as societies are poor, values tend to be materialist. But when societies become richer, members find that their material needs are fulfilled and they turn to other needs, those higher on Maslow’s hierarchy. These often turn out to be related to identities (gender and sexual or cultural). This I think contrasts with Henrich who puts identity politics first, though I could imagine ways to reconcile the two perspectives.
Our increasing ability to measure these cultural differences means that they can play a larger role in models of politics. A good number of works from historical political economy (many cited by Henrich) use the spread of religion, due to bishoprics or missions, as a key causal variable. Henrich’s theories about cultural learning may be particularly useful today in thinking about misinformation. If our brains are designed to learn from social and successful models, then what happens when we are linked up through social media. Again, I don’t know this literature well, so this connection may already be well-known.
Summary
For me, reading Henrich tied together a lot of fascinating trends in social science and made me think about them in new ways. Even though I tend to be skeptical of grand theories, I have a bit of nostalgia for the old days when grand theories were at the center of intellectual debates. I think Henrich returns us to those days with its mash-up of culture, economics, history, politics, and psychology, but with much more evidence and rigor.
Henrich’s work in many respects recapitulates some of the distinctions drawn by Banfield in his description of southern Italy.