Person: Henrich, Joseph
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Henrich
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Joseph
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Henrich, Joseph
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Publication Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2021-07-07) Beheim, Bret; Atkinson, Quentin D.; Bulbulia, Joseph; Gervais, Will; Gray, Russell D.; Henrich, Joseph; Lang, Martin; Monroe, M. Willis; Muthukrishna, Michael; Norenzayan, Ara; Purzycki, Benjamin Grant; Shariff, Azim; Slingerland, Edward; Spicer, Rachel; Willard, Aiyana K.Whitehouse, et al.1 have recently used the Seshat archaeo-historical databank2 to argue that beliefs in moralizing gods appear in world history only after the formation of complex “megasocieties” of 30 around one million people. Inspection of the authors’ data, however, shows that 61% of Seshat data points on moralizing gods are missing values, mostly from smaller populations below one million people, and during the analysis the authors re-coded these data points to signify the absence of moralizing gods beliefs. When we confine the analysis only to the extant data or use various standard imputation methods, the reported finding is reversed: moralizing gods precede increases in social complexity. We suggest that the reported “megasociety threshold” for the emergence of moralizing gods is thus solely a consequence of the decision to re-code nearly two-thirds of Seshat data from unknown values to known absences of moralizing goPublication The Big Man Mechanism: how prestige fosters cooperation and creates prosocial leaders(The Royal Society, 2015) Henrich, Joseph; Chudek, Maciej; Boyd, RobertAnthropological evidence from diverse societies suggests that prestige-based leadership may provide a foundation for cooperation in many contexts. Here, inspired by such ethnographic observations and building on a foundation of existing research on the evolution of prestige, we develop a set of formal models to explore when an evolved prestige psychology might drive the cultural evolution of n-person cooperation, and how such a cultural evolutionary process might create novel selection pressures for genes that make prestigious individuals more prosocial. Our results reveal (i) how prestige can foster the cultural emergence of cooperation by generating correlated behavioural phenotypes, both between leaders and followers, and among followers; (ii) why, in the wake of cultural evolution, natural selection favours genes that make prestigious leaders more prosocial, but only when groups are relatively small; and (iii), why the effectiveness of status differences in generating cooperation in large groups depends on cultural transmission (and not primarily on deference or coercion). Our theoretical framework, and the specific predictions made by these models, sketch out an interdisciplinary research programme that cross-cuts anthropology, biology, psychology and economics. Some of our predictions find support from laboratory work in behavioural economics and are consistent with several real-world patterns.Publication Cross-cultural dataset for the evolution of religion and morality project(Nature Publishing Group, 2016) Purzycki, Benjamin Grant; Apicella, Coren; Atkinson, Quentin D.; Cohen, Emma; McNamara, Rita Anne; Willard, Aiyana K.; Xygalatas, Dimitris; Norenzayan, Ara; Henrich, JosephA considerable body of research cross-culturally examines the evolution of religious traditions, beliefs and behaviors. The bulk of this research, however, draws from coded qualitative ethnographies rather than from standardized methods specifically designed to measure religious beliefs and behaviors. Psychological data sets that examine religious thought and behavior in controlled conditions tend to be disproportionately sampled from student populations. Some cross-national databases employ standardized methods at the individual level, but are primarily focused on fully market integrated, state-level societies. The Evolution of Religion and Morality Project sought to generate a data set that systematically probed individual level measures sampling across a wider range of human populations. The set includes data from behavioral economic experiments and detailed surveys of demographics, religious beliefs and practices, material security, and intergroup perceptions. This paper describes the methods and variables, briefly introduces the sites and sampling techniques, notes inconsistencies across sites, and provides some basic reporting for the data set.Publication A problem in theory(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2019-02-11) Muthukrishna, Michael; Henrich, JosephA growing body of evidence suggests that humans are a new kind of animal—a product of genetic information from our parents and cultural information from our societies. This “Dual Inheritance Theory”, grounded in the biological sciences, offers a deeper understanding of human origins and a formal theoretical framework for unifying the social sciences. Such a theory has remained elusive with attempts dismissed as “physics envy”. We argue that if social scientists are to envy or emulate another science, that science ought to be biology, whose staggering success is in large part due to its synthesis under a formal evolutionary theoretical framework. Dual Inheritance Theory makes several predictions for the psychological foundations of cultural evolution, with implications for our psychology and behaviour more broadly. These foundations give us the mechanisms of cultural evolutionary theory, which offers a formal framework for understanding the evolution of institutions and the co-evolving cultural norms. These often-invisible cultural pillars on which institutions rest are the key to understanding why institutions, such as democracy, often succeed in one cultural context, but fail in another, with implications for economics, politics, and law. An understanding of how cultural traits interact with other cultural traits combined with large databases of historical knowledge may offer new approaches to the study of history. The general approach of deriving and testing these predictions with tools from the biological and social sciences is a crucial, but ignored aspect of the replication crisis and a model for how to move toward a more general theory of human behaviour.Publication War increases religiosity(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2019-01-28) Henrich, Joseph; Bauer, Michal; Cassar, Alessandra; Chytilová, Julie; Purzycki, Benjamin GrantDoes the experience of war increase people’s religiosity? Much evidence supports the idea that particular religious beliefs and ritual forms can galvanize social solidarity and motivate in-group cooperation, thus facilitating a wide range of collective behaviors including—but not limited to— peaceful collective resistance to aggression and/or further violent conflicts. However, little work has focused on whether violent conflict, in turn, might fuel greater religious participation. Here, we analyze survey data from 1,709 individuals in three post-conflict societies—Uganda, Sierra Leone and Tajikistan. The nature of these conflicts allows us to infer, and statistically verify, that individuals were quasi-randomly afflicted with different intensities of war experience—thus potentially providing a natural experiment. We then show that those with greater exposure to these wars were more likely to participate in Christian or Muslim religious groups and rituals, even several years after the conflict. The results are robust to a wide range of control variables and statistical checks, and hold even when we compare only individuals from the same communities, ethnic groups and religions.