World-renowned biological anthropologist and best-selling author Dr Joseph Henrich presents a Ramsay Lecture titled ‘WEIRD Minds: How religion, marriage and the family made the West psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous’.

According to Dr Henrich, an accumulating body of evidence reveals not only substantial global variation along several important psychological dimensions, including conformity, individualism, moral judgment, guilt, patience, trust, and analytic thinking, but also that people from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) are particularly unusual, often anchoring the ends of global psychological distributions.

Drawing on the principal thesis of his 2020 best-seller, The WEIRDest People in the World, he shows how the most fundamental of human institutions—those governing marriage and family—influence motivations, perceptions, intuitions and emotions.

He also explores how the Western Catholic Church systematically dismantled the intensive kin-based institutions in much of Latin Christendom, effectively altering people’s psychology and opening the door to new forms of voluntary organizations (charter towns, universities, guilds, monasteries), impersonal markets and eventually modern organizational competition.

Dr Henrich is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. In 2004 he won the Presidential Early Career Award for young scientists, and in 2009 the Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions bestowed by the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. In 2016 he published The Secret of Our Success (Princeton), and in 2020 The WEIRDest People in the World.