Joseph Henrich
Anthropologist and Harvard professor of human evolutionary biology; author of The Secret of Our Success (2015) and The WEIRDest People in the World (2020), on how culture shaped human evolution and Western psychology.
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 6 things — each backed by an exact quote.
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Recommends The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
It's been hugely influential. It's created whole research programmes and driven lots of research.
fivebooks.com 13 Oct 2016
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Recommends The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire
But Flannery and Marcus show, in my view persuasively, that you can use ethnographic cases to enrich your understanding of the archaeological record, and then look at how things like religion, the organisation of clans, and a bunch of different social factors allow some societies to scale up and get stratification, whereas other societies seem impeded by their social structure from scaling up. They don't end up being larger and more integrated, but they also don't end up with high degrees of social inequality.
fivebooks.com 13 Oct 2016
Loved Guns, Germs, and Steel
The book is a masterpiece in terms of integrating a vast range of material from different disciplines, material on language, archaeology, comparative bio-geography, with also lots of his own ethnographic field studies peppered in there.
fivebooks.com 13 Oct 2016
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Recommends Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
Finally, Not by Genes Alone puts together 30 years of research in one place. It makes the case that culture is really important, that it is evolving, and that we can solve lots of problems—like explaining 'the demographic transition'—by thinking about cultural evolution.
fivebooks.com 13 Oct 2016
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Recommends Culture and the Evolutionary Process
But it is Boyd and Richerson who ended up writing a book, in 1985, called Culture and the Evolutionary Process, which is a highly technical book, but really lays out a framework for thinking about the interaction between genes and culture — how culture can give rise to different kinds of social phenomena, how it can explain human cooperation.
fivebooks.com 13 Oct 2016
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Recommends The Selfish Gene
I really picked this book because for me, and I think for lots of people, it was an entry point into thinking about applying evolutionary principles to human behaviour. In a very user-friendly way, it gives you some of the basic tools you can use to start thinking about it.
fivebooks.com 13 Oct 2016
Where they publish
Site henrich.fas.harvard.edu Personal site on Harvard's faculty host
x.com @JoHenrich Posts on cultural evolution and his research
Link verified 31 Oct 2026.
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