Varieties of Experience

THE WEIRDEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

BY JOSEPH HENRICH

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 704 pp., $35

THERE IS A PUZZLE at the heart of my academic work. I am an anthropologist, and among other things, I study the voices (or auditory hallucinations) of people in different countries who have schizophrenia. Their voices are clearly shaped by local culture. In Shanghai, the hospital patients hear politicians, and in Chennai, they hear their kin. But the voices reported in the United States stand out from the rest—more violent, more alien, more mean. It’s weird.

The puzzle of that weirdness is the point of this big book. Joseph Henrich, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, that demonstrated that people who were Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—or WEIRD—were often outliers on all kinds of basic psychological measures, compared with other people across the globe.