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now on bbc news, it's hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. the debate between nature and nurture is as old as the hills. is genetics or cultural conditioning the key to understanding human evolution? well, my guest today, joseph henrich, is a harvard professor whose fascination with human evolution and anthropology has brought him to a radical conclusion — western societies preoccupied with the individual, not the collective, are weird, and the cultural power of the west has skewed our view of what is normal. so how much do we humans really have in common?

joseph henrich at harvard university, welcome to hardtalk. it's good to be with you. you are now in the middle of a heated debate about human evolution. now i'm used to thinking about evolution in terms of genetics, darwin's survival of the fittest. you seem to put your focus not so much on biology, much more on cultural conditioning, nurture. am i right? yeah. i mean, one of the unique things about our species is that more than any other species, we're dependent on acquiring large bodies

of information from those around us, from the societies we grow up in. and in fact, our brains have evolved to be able to take in and learn how to process information. so our motivations, preferences, emotions, heuristics, all of these things we can acquire in order to adapt to the cultural technologies and languages and institutions that we have to confront in the world, so we're very much a cultural species. right. and you have written a book which has caused many waves. now there's an acronym at the centre of it — weird — which stands for western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic societies. and you seem to be saying that — let's say we, because you're at harvard. i'm here in london — we in the west have evolved in ways which are very different from human beings in pretty much all other places around the world. can you explain? well, i mean, the coining of the acronym weird is meant as a consciousness—raising device for people who study human psychology, for behavioural economists,

cos when some colleagues and i began to put all the data together that was available from the experimental behavioural social sciences, we found that over 90% of it, and often as much as 96% of it, came from americans and people from the uk, french, australians, canadians, and that this actually gave us a very biased picture. when we looked at other data from other societies, we found out that not only were westerners one slice, or these populations most commonly studied, one slice of humanity, but they were a particularly unusual slice. along a number of important psychological dimensions, they ended up at the end of the distribution, so what i've spent the last ten years doing is trying to figure out why, both how we can explain the global variation we find in psychology and how it is that westerners, where the disciplines of psychology and economics developed, ended up to be so psychologically unusual. yeah. so let's start talking about it in very blunt terms. why are westerners weird in your view? well, i think first it might

be helpful if we think a little bit about the kinds of psychological dimensions that are weird. so one that a lot of people are familiar with is individualism. so this means that individualists tend to focus on themselves. they tend to emphasise their own attributes and accomplishments. they're looking to distinguish themselves as unique. and this differs from people in other societies, which tend to focus on their relationships and they define themselves by their families and their clans and their tribes and this kind of network of relationships that they're born into. this leads more individualistic societies to have greater overconfidence, to be more self—enhancing and, actually, to think about themselves differently. rather than an interconnected or interdependent self, they think of it as atoms. it also leads people to be more...to be less conformist. so westerners tend to be low on conformity relative to other societies. we tend to focus on people's intentions and dispositions in explaining their behaviour instead of contexts and other situational factors. right. we tend to be analytic thinkers, so when we see a problem, we assign properties

to individuals or atoms and try to use that to explain things, rather than looking at the background or context. so... you're getting through... yeah. professor henrich, you're getting through an awful lot of really interesting and complicated stuff and i want to try to break it down a little bit. it seems to me that what you are pointing to in your narrative, the way in which western societies became abnormal, you're pointing to a crucial role played by christianity and the christian church, particularly in medieval times in europe. and a lot of your story seems to hinge on the way in which the church and the regulations it imposed, social regulations it imposed on the people of europe, fundamentally changed the way in which european people thought and behaved. are you putting that much weight on christianity in the medieval period?

yeah, i think that does play an important role. that doesn't mean it's the only role. but when you look at the kinds of families we see across societies, the monogamist nuclear families that were widespread across at least some parts of europe by 1500 are fairly unique in a global and historical pattern, if you look globally and historically, so historians call this the european marriage pattern. so then the question becomes how did europe get so weird long before the economic growth of the industrial revolution or globalisation or periods like that, and a number of historians, as well as a famous anthropologist named jack goody, had traced this to the church, specifically to the church that evolved into the roman catholic church. so this isn't a story about christianity in general. it's a story about a set of taboos and proscriptions about marriage and the family. so, for example, the church outlaws polygamy, it outlaws marriage to in—laws and increasingly outlaws marriages to cousins of increasing distances.

so by about 500, 600, the church is banning first—cousin marriage, but by the 10th century, 11th century, the church is banning marriage all the way out to sixth cousins. right. itjust seems to me you're asking that idea of the change in familial relationships that was imposed by the catholic church in sort of medieval europe, you're asking us to believe that that did an awful lot of heavy lifting in terms of the transformation of europe, notjust, in the end, spiritual, but in every way — economic, social, in every aspect of life. you are suggesting that that change brought about by the catholic church transformed europe in a way that made europe fundamentally different from everywhere else in the world. well, what i'm... so the first thing is that it's a hypothesis, right? so we went out and put together quite a bit of evidence and we looked at diverse family structures and we put them

together with the available psychological evidence based on the work that psychologists have done and global surveys, and we can show strong relationships between the structure of families, the amount of cousin marriage, the presence of clans, whether your society has polygyny and this whole range of psychological outcomes, so we have evidence. this is not just a european story. so if we take europe out of our data, we can see the same patterns in the rest of the world. the question is why is europe so extreme on these family questions? so then the case the book lays out is that the church did this. we can see the changes in european languages. european languages begin dropping their complex kinship terminologies and they're developing, by 1200 in most cases, the simple kinship terminologies that we currently use in english and spanish and these other kinds of things, which is similar only to hunter—gatherers in a cross—cultural perspective. the other important element here is that there's both psychological and social changes which lead to all kinds of new institutions.

so the transformation of the family shunts europe on a different cultural evolutionary trajectory, which leads to the kinds of things like representative democracy, competitive economic institutions. all the things that we subsequently see begin to emerge in the high middle ages. exactly. that's why i'm saying your theory is... it's one of these grand theories that starts with something quite simple and straightforward and specific and then tries to show that it had so many ramifications, that it touched every aspect of society, and it intrigues me, but you seem to be saying that such profound things as the development of impersonal trust relationships, which were hugely important to the development of capitalism, of the economic breakthroughs that we saw in europe after the middle ages, you're saying that that can be traced back to this change from a kinship society to a much more individualistic society. you're also suggesting that rational thought and analysis is also deeply tied to the change from relying

on tribe and kin to a much more individualistic way of placing yourself in the world. i find it all fascinating. i just wonder whether there is enough real evidence to make it more than a fascinating intellectual exercise. yeah. so first, the big picture here is that institutions shape how we think. so throughout the book i start with the kin—based institutions and look at how being broken down into individuals and nuclear families forces individuals to go out and make new relationships, which is advantaged by trust in strangers and particular ways of thinking in the world, of focus on dispositions and intentions, for example. and then i also look at how the creation of voluntary institutions, whether these are monasteries oi’ universities, allow people to flow between institutions and then those institutions compete for membership, and that leads to the evolution of particular norms and ways of doing things where you trust strangers and you're willing to build cooperative relationships with people you're not tied into

a cultural network. so the first people you go to aren't necessarily those you're linked to because you might not be linked to many people. and so unlike a lot of these kind of big history books, there's tons of psychological evidence and psychological data where i do statistical analysis and i review evidence that connects things like the presence of impersonal markets to how people perform in simple bargaining experiments where they have to allocate money between themselves and a stranger, as well as lots of other kinds of psychological... yes, you're weaving together... so the book is different than a lot of these accounts. yes, sorry. you're weaving together your academic background in anthropology and you're using sociology and you're using history and you're using some sort of biology and genetics as well to bring this picture together of why the west and, in particular, europe became so weird. with all big theories, though, you know, there comes a point where you have to start picking holes in the grand ambition. one thing it seems to me you've got a problem with is that,

you know, even within the west, there are massive differences between different societies. you couldn't compare, for example, the united states and scandinavian societies and say that they're just the same and you still, less, could say even within one country, italy, you couldn't say that the anthropological and sociological background of the north of italy is the same as the south of italy. so does your generalisation begin to fall down? yeah, i think those are great examples because that's where some of our best evidence comes from. so in pursuing this question, what we did is we mapped the diffusion of the catholic church across europe by documenting the location and the founding year of bishoprics as they moved across europe. and then for 440 different regions in europe, we can tack that region to how long the populations that live there have been under the western church. and then we use the number of centuries under the western church to predict kinship structures like how much cousin marriage they had in the 20th

century and then to predict features of psychology. so from various european surveys, we can get measures of individualism, conformity, trust in strangers, fairness toward strangers, and we can show that within the same country, having more years under the church leads to greater trust in strangers, higher levels of individualism and less conformity. and we can analyse italy in detail by looking at italy's 93 provinces, getting data on the cousin marriage, and predict the variation in things like voluntary blood donations and measures of impersonal trust, like whether you're willing to use cheques or how much of your wealth you keep under the mattress or in banks or financial instruments. these are measures of impersonal trust. 0k. so, yeah, it's perfect for explaining the variation among european countries. 0k. so you say it can take account of variation within the weird category, but let's now think of the non—weird rest of the world. i mean, i'm thinking of countries like japan and south korea, which, you know, for a very long time now have been successful

capitalist democracies. according to your distinction between the weird world and the non—weird world, they shouldn't really be in the state they're in, should they? so there's two different elements to that. the first thing i do is in the book i take a look at different provinces in china and i show that you can explain psychological variation among chinese provinces, all han chinese, you know, don't look at any other ethnic groups, and you can relate things like, instead of getting the variation from the church, things like the suitability for rice agriculture leads to differences in the nature of the kinship structures across provinces in china. and then you can link that to psychology. so in that case, we're getting the variation in family structure from an ecological source instead of the church source, but it still allows this theory to be tested. we do the same thing just in india and look at variation amongst regions in india. and then to get to your question, why are places like south korea and japan doing it? one thing i don't think people realise is that

beginning in the 1880s, so the first country in asia to do this, japan began importing western civil codes, so it outlaws polygyny, cousin marriage and institutes a bunch of sort of things that restructure families. and then, you know, of course, there was existing local psychological instruments, but it does begin to break down and take advantage of these smaller family structures. the same thing happens in korea and china began importing western—style family models in the 1950s in the communist revolution. right. from the very beginning of this interview, you've suggested to me that the way, collectively, the academic world and the intellectual world regards what is normal in terms of human societies has been skewed because the people defining what's normal tend to be western and they see themselves as part of normal societies, when your work says, actually, the west is highly abnormal, it's much more of an outlier. does that mean if we're to take you seriously, that you don't believe in, for example, the concept

of universal values, things like the un's declaration of universal values? i think 19118 the un defined what it regarded as universal values that applied to human societies all around the world. in your view, is that kind of talk nothing more than sort of western cultural imperialism? well, i think it's both possible to believe and hold those values deeply, which i certainly do, but also to recognise that they're the product of a particular cultural trajectory. they're not the products of reason in a bucket. they come from a way of thinking about the world that endows individuals with certain properties and ignores their relationships. so when you say people have certain fundamental human rights, you're imagining internal properties inside of people, which, at least based on our knowledge of physiology, don't exist, so they are things we imagine and place into people. now, i think it happens to be a particularly good way of thinking and i hold those dear, but it wasn't something

thatjust comes from reasoning. it comes from a kind of cultural psychology. and this helps us understand why the acceptance of those values is variable across societies. so if we bring this debate up—to—date and we try to think of your complex academic ideas in terms of the way the world has worked in the recent past, are you saying that when, for example, us governments, both in afghanistan and iraq, talked about, you know, using military strength to then deliver freedom and democracy to countries which had previously been sunk into authoritarianism and tyranny, are you saying that those notions that were developed in the united states were absolutely bound to fail because they fundamentally misunderstand the way that the societies work that they're projecting upon? yeah. and i think that's one of the potentially practical insights of the book,

is that there is a co—evolution between the formal institutions, so something like the us constitution or british common law that can be picked up and moved just by moving law books the way you might move the us traffic code from maryland to baghdad, which is what the us military did, and the psychology of the people in the place. and there has to be a fit between those two. so often these attempts to transplant formal institutions that operate well in ohio or in london to other places fail because of this misfit between the psychology of the populace and the formal institutions which evolve somewhere else and are just being transplanted. isn't there a danger of an extraordinary arrogance in your portrait of the way the world works today? because you're kind of implying that those parts of the world which are very definitely not weird, to use the acronym again, are in a sense sort of sunk in a very traditional kinship—based way of living in which, you know, polygamy

and other social norms which we reject are still very prevalent. it's a very unflattering way of looking, isn't it, at the non—western world? well, not at all. i mean, i'm a cultural anthropologist, so i kind of revel in this kind of interesting variation. and one of the things i emphasise in my chapter on innovation is that what really has driven innovation during the industrial revolution, and subsequently in the us, is the embracing of cognitive and cultural diversity. so if you look at immigration into the us, it spurred innovation in every case. and so, when the united states has reacted against innovation, there's now very good studies in economics showing that it's stifled the new patents and new innovations. immigrants not only bring in fresh ways of thinking, but this recombines with the native—born americans and allows them both to be more productive and more innovative. so i think... i mean, as a practical matter,

you want to harness this kind of cognitive variation that comes from all these different systems. the other thing is that there's, you know, when you have the long view of history, there's no sense in which we're at the end of history. and we talked about how these western institutions have diffused to other places like china and korea and japan, and they've produced new recombinations of institutions which take their existing institutions and meld it with some ideas from these other societies, and there'll be new forms and new competition, and, you know, all civilisations fall. and do you think it's time that the weird societies, that is the western societies, started perhaps doing less sort of preaching and assuming about the supremacy of their ways of doing things and started to look and listen a little more to what happens in the rest of the world and bring some values and ways of behaving back home from elsewhere? yeah. and that's one of the things the penultimate chapter shows, is that the bringing of ideas from diverse societies back home has actually fuelled a lot

of economic growth in western countries as it, you know, as well as in other places. are we at a watershed moment where much of your discussion of how human societies have evolved over many hundreds of years — and as we've discussed, for you, it goes back to religion and the catholic church and all sorts of other things — are we at a watershed moment where none of that will matter for much longer because technology, globalised digital technology is changing the ways in which societies work and people access information and carry out their lives in a way that will sweep away so much that is more localised, so much that is more personal or kin—based? all of us, whether we live in the west or not in the west, are going to see our lives revolutionised, aren't we? yeah. i mean, it's certainly the case that technological changes are going to revolutionise the nature of organisations, but i don't think we can see well the direction that may go. religion has a way of reasserting itself. families always

reassert themselves. nepotism is an ever—present power in our psychology. so the one thing we can guarantee is that the future won't be like the past. and does that fill you with hope or with dread? i'm kind of neutral on that. i could see it going either way. and particularly, i'mjust thinking, a final thought about the united states. you point out that in some ways donald trump is a very non—weird leader in that he appeals to people not based on rationality, but much more based on, for example, a resentment of the elites and of experts and of people who tell them what to think. do you think the united states is, in a way, moving away from this, as you've called it, weird tradition? yeah, and it's a good question as to why, but there's a new paper by my colleague in economics, benjamin enke, and enke shows that he gets data on the moral psychology of counties all across the united states and he links this. and, you know, you can

categorise people along a dimension for more universalistic thinking, where they care about harm and fairness, to another end of the spectrum, where they care about loyalty and divinity and a kind of broader moral foundation, and he finds that voting for donald trump in 2016 is strongly predicted by being at the kind of loyalty, the kind of parochial end of the scale instead of the universalism scale, and that's even true if you remove people who are... ..if you take away the effects of voting for romney or mccain or other republicans, so you're only looking at that extra bit of trump voting and that's heavily predicted by people's moral differences. so then the question is, why are different parts of the united states evolving to have different moral characters? and there's a bunch of ideas on the table. i don't think there's any leaders now, but economic shocks probably play a role, weather shocks probably play a role. so i show in the book how weather shocks like hurricanes and things like that, when they're more intense and more frequent, it does

affect people's psychology. so there could be a whole series of factors that are pushing these things apart. yeah. once you start digging into this, there's an awful lot of work to do and i'm sure you're going to continue to do it. joseph henrich, it's been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you very much indeed. good to be with you. thanks. hello there. many of us saw some rain at some point during the day on tuesday. there was some big puddles out and about on the roads.

for example, in the highlands of scotland with the wet weather here, and it wasn't just in scotland, the rain was pretty extensive and at its heaviest across northwest england, where in rochdale, in the greater manchester area, we picked up 42 mm of rain. that was the wettest place in the country. it did bring one or two localised issues. still a few showers at the moment, then a clearer slice of weather, but further out in the atlantic, the next lump of cloud is developing, and this will bring rain late in the day on wednesday across many areas. right now, we've got some rain across the northwest of scotland. that rain will be with us well until wednesday to be honest. southwards, a few showers coming down through the irish sea, one or two of those might be picked up in northwest england, particularly around cumbria and north lancashire for a time. otherwise, a slice of sunny weather for northern ireland, wales, and western england. those sunny skies pushing eastwards as we go through the day. some reasonable weather and much more in the way of sunshine compared with tuesday. later in the day, we will see rain returning to northern ireland, wales and south west england, and along with the rain, it will turn increasingly windy from the southwest late

in the day, gusts of about 40, 45 miles an hour or so around the coast and hills. that rain extends northwards, probably reaching southernmost areas of scotland for a time. certainly we're looking at a wet night wednesday night, and then the rain slowly clears away from eastern areas of england. a mixture of sunshine and showers follow from the north and west. it will begin to turn cooler across northwestern areas. temperature about 9 degrees in stornoway, 11 in glasgow. but perhaps around 17 degrees or so for a time in london. that rain band should clear well to the south, but there is a small chance it could ripple its way back. either way, on friday, it looks like we will see a mixture of showers or some lengthier outbreaks of rain, so it is staying on the unsettled side, the air getting cooler for most of us, with temperatures dropping. highs 10 to 15 celsius. into the weekend, we will be greeted with a northerly blast coming down, and that will make you feel quite chilly if you're out and about. it will also bring showers down to some of our eastern

coasts and into the north of scotland as well. not entirely dry. it will feel quite cool in those strong winds in the east.

a very warm welcome to bbc news. my name's mike embley. our top stories: president trump walks away from negotiations over a multi—trillion dollar covid relief deal to support the us economy. white house adviser stephen miller becomes the latest of over a dozen members of donald trump's inner circle to test positive for coronvirus. with coronavirus keeping trump off the campaign trail, his rivalfor the presidency, joe biden, tells voters that the country is in a dangerous place. police in bangladesh arrest four men accused of sexually assaulting a young woman, a month after footage of the attack was posted on social media.

and eddie van halen,