Foreign thinker
Joseph Henrich
Joseph HenrichEvolutionary anthropology and cultural psychologyAmericanb. 1968
Life and Thought
Joseph Henrich is an American evolutionary anthropologist and a leading figure in the theory of gene-culture coevolution, whose synthesis of evolutionary biology, behavioral economics, and field anthropology has transformed how scientists understand the role of cultural learning in human evolution. In his acclaimed book The WEIRDest People in the World, he has also offered a fundamental critique of the biases in Western psychology's understanding of the human mind.
Joseph Henrich was born in 1968. He began his studies in aerospace engineering at the University of Notre Dame before gradually turning to anthropology and evolutionary biology, earning his doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining Harvard University, where he chairs the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, he taught at Emory University and the University of British Columbia.
Henrich is one of the principal architects of the theory of gene-culture coevolution, which holds that cumulative cultural learning was not merely a byproduct of biological evolution but an independent and powerful force shaping human evolution, such that culture and genes have exerted reciprocal selective pressure on one another. He developed this idea in particular in his book The Secret of Our Success (2015), arguing that human cognitive superiority is less a product of individual intelligence and more the fruit of a collective capacity to accumulate and transmit cultural knowledge across generations.
In the 2000s, Henrich also led an international, cross-cultural project using behavioral-economics games such as the "Ultimatum Game" in small-scale societies around the world, showing that common assumptions about human selfishness and economic rationality — assumptions formed mainly through the study of Western industrialized societies — were heavily culture-dependent. This line of research eventually led to his widely discussed book The WEIRDest People in the World (2020), in which he argued that Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies (which he abbreviates as WEIRD) are psychologically highly unusual among humans, tracing the roots of this difference to the institutional transformations of the medieval Catholic Church and their effects on family structure.
Henrich's work has had a broad impact on anthropology, comparative psychology, and behavioral economics, making him one of the most influential contemporary voices in the scientific account of the origins of culture and human cognition.