289 - Joe Henrich: How Culture Made Humans Weird

28:01Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. That makes total sense. sense. It's super fascinating. Something else I'd like to ask about weird psychology, but before we even get to weird psychology, it would probably make more sense to talk about how this changed over millions of years.

28:46But when I spoke with Richard, we talked a bit about chimpanzee violence and alphas and how, if I recall correctly, I mean, an alpha among chimpanzees is the strongest chimpanzee that can kind of eat everybody up. But that's not the way with humans at all anymore. The alpha is now, it looks like Donald Trump, who wouldn't win a fight against a lot of people. We form coalitions. And I'm wondering how it is that this happened in human evolution that our dominance hierarchy has changed so much. Right, right. Well, the case that I've made, and I might want to muddy Richard's picture there a little bit.

29:44Assuming I got it right. Right. Well, one of the things that I know basically through my partner, who is a primatologist who studies the chimpanzee group next to Richard's, is that there's a lot of variation between chimpanzee groups. So the group she studies is called N 'Gogo, and they were a group of 200 chimpanzees, a much larger group, whereas Richard's group, Kaniwara, is a much smaller group of chimpanzees. And the picture I get from those primatologists is that chimps build coalitions in order to climb to the alpha role and that a lot of it's about coalition building. And I think in the smaller chimpanzee groups, you don't see that as much.

30:27So there could be interesting variation there. I think the key thing for thinking about humans is the fact that we actually have two clear avenues to status. So there are these avenues to status based on whether it's individuals or coalitions using force and aggression in order to consolidate power and using force and force threat, or individuals who are esteemed for what they know, for having knowledge and competence and skill. And then other individuals are naturally attracted to them, want to pay them deference, hang around them, learn from them, tend to be influenced by them, want to imitate them.

31:08Sort of naturally natural persuasion comes from that. And so you want to think about two different avenues to status in humans. Prestige, which is this new one I'm describing, and then dominance, which we still have and our closest living relatives surely have it. And so I think that helps us understand. And so societies like some societies have been described by anthropologists as big man societies. And these have no formal political hierarchy, but they do seem for at least periods of time to be nominated by leaders who were able to generate a lot of prestige and influence by virtue of one having this coterie of people who attach themselves to the prestigious guy.

31:46And then also by using gifts, they give away a lot of stuff, they create debt, and they can also use some force and force threat by using this big coalition they've assembled. How do you see prestige and dominance roles being filled and playing out in the smaller cultures, more isolated cultures that you've studied versus those in weird societies?

32:18Well, I think the biggest difference there is that what has been remarkable to me, first I should say, and remarkable to me in trying to review the literature and reading the research done by others that's been done in small-scale societies now in prestige and dominance, is how similar prestige and dominance is across human societies, including in weird societies. I would think one of the big differences is in weird societies, we've built some prestige into our institutions. So things like meritocratic hierarchies. But one of the things about how we built our institutions is that we often create positions that merge prestige and dominance, sometimes in uncomfortable ways.

33:00So somebody who gets up to be a boss, an executive, a manager, somebody like that, has a position that they presumably got to because of skill, competence, and these maybe positive traits. But then they control force and force threat, and they could potentially manipulate and push others because they control salaries or vacation time or things like that. So we merge those. One of the tricks you see CEOs doing, for example, is they take the prestige role and they force one of their subordinates to be the dirty work who do the hiring and firing and the reprimanding and all that kind of stuff. So it separates them from the dominance part of the job to keep that more pure.

33:40And then we can see they can be particularly influential. So there's this great work looking at how the trust of CEOs can then affect the trust of people in the company experience.

33:54And democracy, you can think of as when you have a vote and someone wins a vote, their prestige actually goes up because it's as if there's a signal that everybody else thinks this president is worthy. So maybe I should up my feelings of their worthiness. So you see that bump in popularity. So in some sense, this prestige competition that I talked about in the big man society is formalized in democracies. Do you also study social networks in weird societies? Because what you're talking about now reminds me of just like influencers and follower accounts. Yeah. Yeah. So you can really see the prestige psychology coming through in social media.

34:39So, I mean, it should strike people as odd that we would spend so much time keeping track of followers and likes and all this kind of stuff. But it's because we're that's that's our prestige cue. Right. We somehow take it as worthy if someone has a lot of followers like, you know, it makes us more likely to follow than if they have lots of other followers. And the prestige logic is very much like that in the sense that when deciding who to learn from, if you're using a prestige queue, you're asking yourself, well, who else are other people paying attention to for the purposes of learning? With the idea that lots of people are partially informed.

35:14So by attending to that, we can aggregate information in an otherwise tricky and ambiguous information or situation. The problem with social media and the way modern technology has harnessed that and it's really exploited that prestige psychology is that this was built for the real world where that person, in order to generate that prestige, competence and success, had to actually be good at something. They had to be good at hunting or medicinal plant use or midwifery or something like that. Whereas what you have to be good at in the social media game is getting more followers. And so the skill is getting followers instead of it being some third thing that we value that then gets this as a side effect.

36:00Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense. I don't know if I encountered this in your work or Richard's or both, but it's so surprising to me to think that something like quantum physics is inherently, I think, very fascinating, very peculiar. Yet nothing is more interesting to us than what's going on in People magazine or on Keeping Up with the Kardashians when it seems like just to me that should be so much less interesting. But I'm endlessly fascinated by the interpersonal drama among my friends. Yeah. I mean, that fits with our general sociality, our concern with reputation and gossip. Because, you know, and one of the things that is sometimes it's hard to convey the degree to which we are an interdependent species.

37:00So we're interdependent at multiple levels. So hunter gatherers long ago became dependent on food sharing and individual hunting strategies alone only makes sense. And the fact that others are pursuing these probabilistic strategies and we can share the food. But we're also interdependent because we take care of each other's children and we learn from each other. The next generation is socialized by the group as a whole, not by just the genetic parents of the kid. So the kid learns from lots of other knowledgeable members of the group. So we're really an interdependent species. And so we're keeping track of all this information.

37:34But this obsession with kind of media prestige, you could just think of it as a kind of malfunctioning piece of evolved psychology, where we have this prestige psychology geared for these ancestral environments. And then you give it an environment where someone gets all this attention and we can see that this person is getting attention from other people and that cues up us to want to pay more attention to them and it creates this exaggerated effect. I mean, I've used this to explain why Beyonce can sell Pepsi and Tiger Woods can sell Buicks. And, you know, there seems to be, Beyonce is not particularly knowledgeable about soft drinks.

38:10And there's no reason to think Tiger has studied the various car designs from the manufacturers. But yet, we seem to see that as a signal that we should want to drive Buicks also.

38:24this dovetails with with what i was going to ask next is i'm particularly curious about how attraction plays a role in prestige and why it is that i mean somebody like beyonce is obviously very attractive or taylor swift um or clavicular i don't know if you have heard that name never no that's very funny he's a he's a very popular male social media influencer right now who is popular in large part because he is very attractive and openly trying to make himself more attractive via surgery, et cetera. But why is it that humans are, we attribute prestige to very attractive people. And I can understand why we would want to date an attractive person, but why do we want to buy Pepsi because the attractive person drinks Pepsi?

39:31Right. So there's actually two separate things in there that I want to separate. So let me answer the Pepsi question first, which is that, so the first thing you want to do is think about this as a problem of information. So you're a young hunter in a community, and obviously hunting is highly valued. You internalize the notion that I want to become a good hunter too. So you begin watching. You want to hang around the really good hunters in the community. Now, when you're hanging around them, you're looking and you're seeing what they're doing. But, you know, someone might be a good hunter because of how they make their arrows, because of how they walk in the forest, because they get up early.

40:10Maybe they eat a lot of carrots, which might improve their eyesight. There are a whole bunch of things that one can do for which the causal relationship from the action to the outcome is unclear. So we've acquired the inclination to copy in bundles. So there's probably a bunch of things like Beyonce has a certain voice coach. Maybe, you know, it makes sense to go to that voice coach. But she probably does a whole bunch of other things that help make her such a great performer that are less obvious. And so people are going to copy those. And just that little bit of extra boost of, oh, gosh, maybe it's the fact that, I mean, nobody thinks that, obviously, that she drinks Pepsi.

40:47But there's just this inclination to do what dress like her. She has a lot of tattoos. I talk about one of my favorite examples is Angelina Jolie. So, Angelina Jolie, well, so six months before she wrote her op-ed in the New York Times about her decision to get a double mastectomy, the government of Great Britain had initiated a program in which they wanted to, its public health campaign, encourage women to get tested for a particular gene that dramatically increases your chances of getting breast cancer. And their public health campaign was full of informational messages and trying to teach women about the need for this.

41:25And doctors are recommending this. And the campaign is having very little effect. And then Angelina Jolie writes an op-ed in May, or I forget whether it was May or June. And the op-ed goes all over the Anglosphere. And it causes the phone lines in lots of clinics that do this kind of testing to light up. Everybody wants to get tested for the BRCA gene. And that's a case where just her sheer prestige, She wasn't particularly knowledgeable. She's not a medical doctor. She doesn't have trained. She hasn't been researching cancer genes or anything like that. But just the fact that she's interested in doing it caused all these other women to do this decision.

42:00But it also turns out they copy Angelina on lots of other things. So there are plastic surgeons who report women wanting their lips a certain way, or apparently she has a lot of tattoos. So people try to copy their tattoos, probably mostly women. Yeah, so you get these bleed over effects in lots of different domains. So my theory about that is that it's this copying in bundles. We don't know what leads to the person's success. It certainly can't hurt to have the tattoo. So, well, I guess it could hurt, but costs have to be paid. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I don't know if you said that you were going to disentangle my question.

42:41Yes, I was disentangling the attraction one. So, I mean, there's obviously sexual attraction. Let's put that one aside. That's not what we're talking about. The way you want to think about attraction is one of the things that a person can be good at is attracting other people. That is a skill. So you might copy a person who is particularly attractive, what makeup they use, how they do their hair, how they dress, the way they talk. All of these things could be incremental improvements to their attractiveness. So you're attending them because they're good at the attraction thing. And then you're trying to figure out all the different elements that lead to the attraction thing.

43:17So the value domain is attraction. And then it's just more of the more of the copy type stuff. That's why, you know, the Kardashians can advertise makeup, for example. And going back to the hunter who our hunter gatherer correlate would want to emulate. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense?

43:55There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. does he want to emulate the hunter because the hunter is good at hunting or because the hunter is popular because he's good at hunting and i guess this goes to the social media question of today where today people want to emulate the influencer because the influencer is getting is good at getting people to follow them um i don't i i don't know i'm trying to think of research that might disentangle that because one picture of this is that the learner gets the goal.

45:07People around here value what hunting generates. And so I'm going to attend to people who seem to be particularly good at hunting. Now, it's probably the case that that hunter also really values hunting. So that's going to tie those things together. So in order to pull that apart, you have to have something who was really good at something, but then didn't really like it or something or didn't want to do it or maybe was forced to do it or something. I guess the question that I find interesting here is, let's say we have our young person in the tribe who wants to be a great hunter and they want to emulate this great hunter.

45:45Is it because they think hunting itself is such a cool skill that they want to be great at it? or is it because they just have a desire to be popular and hunting is the way to achieve that? I guess what I'm asking is, it's just a question about human motivation. The easiest way to get at that, I think, is from these ethnographic descriptions, when a group of hunters often brings back a prey, it just showers those bringing back the goods. with kind of a pride, a kind of glow, right? So the young people seeing this are like, wow, people really value meat. And I also, you know, they get to participate in the meat as well.

46:35It's presumably they like it. And they get to see all the sort of good thoughts and warm feelings that people have towards the people bringing back the food. And so this seems to be as a young person something, well, I want to be the person bringing back the meat that everybody thinks is awesome. And so I think those two things are tied together in that way. But the best way to get at this would be think about the experience the learner has, which is going to be actually bringing back the prey. In the case of the social media, that's sort of disconnected because the thing they seem to bring is this group of followers.

47:07Although I guess you could say you could look at the postings or whatever. And one last question about imitation. Some characters, like in today's world, like Conor McGregor 15 years ago, somebody who's both physically dominant and just an icon for other reasons, prestige-wise. I'm wondering if we tend to imitate people only if they're popular for prestige reasons or also if they're popular for physical dominance reasons. it would make more sense to me i guess if we if we wanted to emulate prestige people because prestige people are the ones who have let's say the knowledge and the abilities that give them this so the plates were uh you know you just requires a little bit of untangling would be like if you're in a comp say you're

48:10looking at a competition where it's lifting the most weight or beating up the most people, then the person at the top of the prestige hierarchy is going to be the one who can, you know, inflict the most violence on others. So that's really the valued skill. So it's a prestigious person whose skill is inflicting violence upon others, which is different than someone who you're deferring to because you're afraid of them because you think they're going to beat you up. and you mentioned that today's influencers their their skill is really just acquiring followers are there other ways in today's world of social media and ai tv that our prestige focus and our imitation instincts are hijacked by technology?

49:07Well, the main ones I thought about are kind of the Instagram X kind of story. And there are cases on the social media platforms where individuals have had psychiatric conditions that involve certain tics and stuff, and those tics end up spreading. And so there's a surge of people going into medical clinics because they've acquired some tic, and it turns out they acquired it from an influencer. So it just gives you the sense of how powerful these forces can be. something that i don't think we even used the word yet is morality have you done much work on how morality itself has evolved well yeah so i mean that relates to my evolution of human society stuff so uh i mean i think of morality as the as a collection of social norms about how people are supposed to behave i don't think there's an independent category morality and you know philosophers debate this.

50:12I hadn't seen a good argument to separate off any particular category, but certain social norms, people believe that supernatural agents care about those norms. So if God cares about the norm, then we might want to call it moral. Another thing why people might want to call a norm moral is if they think everybody should follow the norm. So that's universal. So it can be universal, divinely inspired, those kinds of things. So one thing is like, you know, nepotism. So nepotism is a case where we think that that's when you're biasing too much towards your family. But of course, in lots of places over human history, nepotism has been the right thing to do.

50:52You know, you should help your family. You should put your family first in lots of places. So that's a case where there's been a change in what people think the ethical or moral thing to do. I find the case studies particularly intriguing. Have you studied any groups of people that have radically different moral norms than we do?

51:17Well, I mean, it depends how radical you think it is, but like lots of people, for example, in the world today, think not only is it good to have multiple, not only is it okay to have multiple wives, but it's good to have multiple wives. A male who has accumulated multiple wives is more worthy of emulation. They're more prestigious. Some people think that it's actually not only can you marry your cousins, but it's quite nice if you marry your cousins and you build stronger bonds within your family. and sure yeah what are the circumstances that a group of people could be in where having multiple wives or marrying your cousins would be beneficial for the group and do those same factors not apply to us in a weird society well i've made the case that um we as a species tend to be more inclined if, you know, assuming there's enough resources and then males can generate differences in wealth, that humans are going to be inclined towards polygynous systems, which doesn't mean that everybody's polygynous, but it means that high status and elite males tend to accumulate additional wives, which creates a pool of men that don't have any wives, assuming a roughly 50-50 ratio.

52:42Now, if there's some reason why male mortality is super high, then that's not out of equilibrium. And I've made the case that the spread of the normative monogamy, the requirement that men have additional wives actually has benefits at the societal level, because at least historically, it prevented elite and high status men from essentially courting all the wives. And then it allowed lower status males to marry and have a chance in the marriage and mating market, have children. So it essentially increases the number of fathers in the society. It lists more men in the army of fathers. And it may affect testosterone too.

53:23So when men marry and when they have a child, their testosterone drops. So all of these things, we don't know exactly the causal pathways, but there's reason to believe that this would lower crime rates, increase internal harmony, and increase economic production. And I'm guessing that when you research and theorize about morality, is the working assumption usually going to be that a practice has evolved because it was helpful for the group of people in question? And if it weren't, it would have been cut out? No, no. Well, I mean, something like we talked about incest diversion, it's easy for us to evolve incest taboos, which would normally have a kind of moral feel to them.

54:18And in some societies, those incest taboos are applied to certain kinds of cousins, but not other kinds of cousins, which are equidistant apart. We have incest taboos also. So, yeah. I mean, so it's a mixture, right? So the arguments are usually, you know, there's a group benefit, there's evolved psychology operating, there's individual incentives. So you're trying to sort through all those. And so you used the phrase evolved psychology multiple times, and I probably should have asked exactly what it meant earlier. Is that when you would actually see something in the genome that pertains to our psychology?

55:01So the idea there is that genetic evolution has built an adaptation into our psychology that reliably develops in the species. So, I mean, a classic example would be the love people experience for family members and why mothers love their children. We're pretty sure that one's an innate evolved psychology. Are there other very obvious or easy to explain ways in which our moral psychology is evolved and you can point to features of the genome that show this? Well, I mean, the case I was making before and the case I've made in lots of places is that moral psychology is a lot about social norms. Now, that doesn't mean that pieces of evolved psychology don't play a role.

55:55so you and i have been talking about prestige and dominance and so those are pieces of evolved psychology that can affect which norms get picked up and you know why people are okay with democratic elections things like that uh yeah so um i mean yeah and as we spend a lot of time I'm talking about social norms, moral norms, but these norms don't have any force if there is no enforcement mechanism. And I'm wondering how enforcement mechanisms have changed over time and how they vary today among different peoples. Yeah. So, I mean, when I say norm, I actually, the enforcement mechanisms are built into norms.

56:48So in the world I live in, what we do is we build mathematical models that ask the question under what conditions will some costly behavior, like being cooperative, will that be held stable? And things like reputation and punishment, various other sanctioning systems, signaling opportunities can help sustain a norm so that you know, everyone's going to do it. And if anybody deviates, then there's some kind of penalty for deviating, or there maybe there's some kind of incentive for doing it. So this all assumes that these things are locally stable. Uh, I mean, the big change that I've worked on over time is that seems like small scale societies don't tend to have a lot of costly punishment where third parties will get pissed off at you and then do something that'll cost you.

57:34Instead, it seems to more work through reputation, people withdrawing help. One of the mechanisms I've documented ethnographically is that if someone violates a norm in some of the communities I've worked in, then that essentially lowers their shield. So the members of the community stop protecting them. And then other people who have grudges against them will do things like, you know, break all their stuff or burn their crops at night. and that exacts the punishment. And then the person comes back into compliance with the norm so that the community then begins protecting them. Interesting. So in this case, let's say somebody burns somebody's crops that they have a grudge against and where the shield has been sort of lowered against that for that person.

58:21The rest of the community doesn't then enforce a different norm against the crop burner because surely there's just like a general norm, like don't take people's stuff. So that gets to this question about the nature of morality. So the morality there is you cannot do bad things to good people. But if someone falls into bad standing and they're not in the good person standing anymore, then it's open season. That's very fascinating. And that's why you can get conflict. So for example, suppose the police barracks set up next to the village and decided to start enforcing these crop earnings. Well, that would completely undercut the punish the system, right?

59:01Because now the crop burners couldn't do their thing anymore. And now people would stop complying with the cooperative norms and they'd stop, you know, cleaning the village and, you know, fixing the pipe and things like that. this is a bit of a different question from the sorts i've been asking you but normatively speaking do you have any feelings informed by your research about what punishment ought to be like uh you mean like criminal punishment or Sure, criminal punishment or whether the sort of morality that you were just describing is a better morality where justice is kind of carried out by individuals who are affected rather than third parties, or are you just kind of isolationist in this regard?

1:00:00Yeah, I mean, I don't have any strong applied proposals for how to improve the system, if that's your question. I don't think I think that system I described could work really well in small village type environments. It's probably a recipe for disaster in a large scale society if people just started punishing their neighbors when their neighbors went into bad standing. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think, you know, a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

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1:01:24and do you notice any trends in the severity of punishment over time or yeah i mean there's like clearly at the level at at some level i mean you know executions used to be quite regular uh and even in hunter-gatherer societies there are executions so i mean the mere fact that some people are completely opposed to capital punishment and in some places you can't do it, just suggest the general decline in that sort of thing. So in the groups of hunter-gatherers that you have studied today, for instance, they still carry out execution. Yeah. Well, and here I'm pinching off of my colleague who you interviewed, Richard Wrangham.

1:02:08So Wrangham has gone through and tried to document all these cases of execution. And he argues that their execution hunter-gatherers were fairly common. And what sorts of crimes would provoke execution? I just, I recall when I was a, this was like very traumatic for me when I was, I don't know, just getting on the internet, seeing a video of some people, I think it was in Africa and it wasn't a hunter-gatherer society. It was a normal, I mean, I don't know, a village of thousands of people and somebody had just stolen a chicken, I think. And the whole village just got around and beat him to death.

1:02:54And I found that really astonishing. So I'm wondering if different today we wouldn't, or in the United States, we wouldn't use capital punishment on somebody who stole a chicken, but maybe in hunter gatherer societies, that's different. Well, so the kinds of things you're talking about does happen, although a lot of times there's more to the story, because one of the things about these cases is it's always embedded in some kind of larger, long-term set of relationships, or at least often. But there's certainly things that are very salient to folks in our society, like the witch burnings that still happen and witch beatings and things like that, where people are thought to have engaged in supernatural harm of others.

1:03:41And they're severely punished for that, sometimes murdered. But the hunter-gatherers, my take on the ethnography, and I'm pretty sure Richard would agree with this, is that these are cases of someone who is really repalcitrant and has, you know, stolen food and refused to help and, you know, had inappropriate relationships and all kinds. Someone who just is, you know, the people are starting to get afraid from maybe, maybe they's engaged in violence against members of the group, stuff like that. and repeatedly repeatedly so it's not like one chicken and you're going to get your throat cut at night are there other sorts of crimes that we wouldn't condone capital punishment for in the united states say that you would find it in some hunter-gatherer groups uh well the hunter-gatherer groups aren't the one that jumps to mind uh nothing leaps off the page to me, but just to go back to the example I gave previously, I mean, there's so many anthropologically documented cases of executions of witches.

1:04:55And yeah, and that goes into your, you know, that's of course happens a lot in European history, US history as well. Just curious, do virtually all hunter-gatherer societies have what we would consider supernatural beliefs of some sort or other yeah for sure interesting so there are there are there aren't any who are just good naturalists very interesting okay well joe this has been really fun we covered a lot of ground thank you so much for joining me and let me pepper you with all these questions nice chatting with you Thank you.