Reading Joseph Henrich TWO : Social institution of the individual
Preamble
In ONE I discussed some of my reading of Joseph Henrich’s books, and this morning I am riffing within the same books on the idea of the individual as a social institution. Or at least the interplay between the acknowledgment and the possibility of the individual as social institution.
This is some more exploratory & metaphoric work on the implication of WEIRD societies. In short this acronym refers to the assumptions made in various socio-psycho studies which were primarily done with data collected from members in western societies, in particular college students in North America as they were the humans they had at hand at institution of higher learning who also do research. I.E. they did not control for environmental factors enough, especially socially constructed environmental factors, like social institutions.
Why the acronym WEIRD? The acronym WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic—aims to raise people’s consciousness about psychological differences and to emphasize that WEIRD people are but one unusual slice of humanity’s cultural diversity. WEIRD highlights the sampling bias present in studies conducted in cognitive science, behavioral economics, and psychology. When my colleagues and I coined the term a decade ago, our goal was to encourage experimental behavioral scientists to diversify their sampling and avoid generalizing from a peculiar subgroup to the entire species. Only by recognizing this diversity can we begin to rewrite the textbooks in ways that provide a more inclusive picture of the psychology and behavior of Homo sapiens. from weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu
Social institutions exist in a blur of habit and expectation, routine and ritual comfort. At one extreme they are codified in laws. At the other they are just how it is always been, imbibed with your mother’s milk. Some are foundational (marriage) others are more peripheral (colour coding) but both give a culture its aesthetic and excuse for identity politics or internal policing (of individuals which gives institutions a bad name if you come from a society where individuals are a social institution).
Social institutions differ across the planet and in the same locations through time. Henrich’s book spends some time explaining the data (yes data) that anthropology has collected over the years on the variety and mix of institutions and how they then affect the context we each think in, including the context of the individual each ‘culture’ provides.
There is more to be done.
I wish there was even more on this in The WEIRDest People in the World than on the history of Catholicism, but then Henrich has spent his life with this data and it is not news to him, he sort of has to get it out of the way as the background, as he and his co-workers get on with developing a correlation between being WEIRD and restrictions on cousin marriage, into argument that this distinction between West European societies and all the others is due to the power of the Catholic Church (which I grew up in and heavily criticise see To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church).
This idea takes over the book, for a take-down of the correlation as more than a correlation, i.e. causal, see David Roman’s piece Quick Take: The Christian Church Didn't Save the West from Cousin Marriage, but I have some problems with that account too, and not just because the writer natively has a strongly polemical style. Even if we are all agreed that cousin marriage is not a very good idea for societies and their individuals which need to innovate and respond to changing conditions at any and all levels of survival.
To be fair Henrich is aware of this correlation/cause issue which is why so much text is spent on the issue, but this perhaps, in the end, just maps the correlation extremely well.
More important for me, and it is a similar correlation/cause issue, was learning about how the basics of psychology as currently used to get some measure of our psychology, i.e. the five-factor model of personality may well be limited to WEIRD societies. What has been taken as a human species-wide baseline may well just map diversity within the sub-group of WEIRD peeps. Because institutions.
I’ll have to read more on that.
Data does not always get you out of being potholed in a framework.
But now the main bits of the discussion
① If psychological baselines can be so influenced by a group’s rituals of interaction, their habits of expectation, and the hope in routines, as well as their negotiations or interplay or trade-offs in which we each and all end up as the remains of the day, then what can act as a baseline for measurement, and thus data, information and wisdom?
As a meta-anarchist, we can see variety itself is a data-point, even if we cannot yet map all the variation. How do a variety of frameworks then become a data-point when one cannot see one’s own framework, even as one sees the world through that framework, thus creating it.
The individual is a social institution. Discuss. (Especially in reference to how recent it is).
② Henrich points out strongly in The WEIRDest People in the World with reference to the variety of human group organisations and individual-ness, that WEIRD societies share very few aspects with other groups-life styles, not that they are all similar, merely that they are more likely to share versions of this or that with the other variations than they are with WEIRD. WEIRD societies are the outliers (and then he gets distracted by how did this come to be? But its a good hook for a publisher i guess).
Then there is a passing remark (Chapter 5?) that there is an exception to this; many hunter-gather groups members are quite individualistic.
So I would add, even if they lack the social institution of individualism, their behaviour is more like individuals in WEIRD societies.
But they do not have the institution of the individual to give that perspective a place in the social arena, where it slugs it out with other social institutional interplays. (Analytic versus relationship thinking, or outsider-trust etc are another matter). Moreover, individualistic selfing can just be lived without the social institution
Here we can see westerner's foundational myth of the social institution of the individual in discovering/creating the nobel savage arise out of the mists of time.
③So perhaps the effort in Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World on the Catholic Church is not wasted, and is useful in mapping how that social institution of the individual arose in that noyau of Western Europe within the broader innovation-space of the Euro-Afri-Asia continental interplay.
Perhaps it was bound to occur somewhere in that vast expanse of continental possibility. And pointing out any civilisation’s features as hindrances to its potential ignores this greater/meta factoid. Importantly just because it is bound to occur does not imply destiny. Merely that the solution space in this innovation spaces is big enough to allow it to occur. In time we should be able to point parameters on this space. Where, when, who are mere accidents if it is part of a process which is two steps forward, eight sidewise, and three back with an occasional skip.
Such that now one can think of oneself as an individual, or not. Whereas before one just behaves as an individual self without the social institution framing that movement.
And this thus provides the psycho-socio-pathologies of an identitarian moment, like the sovereign citizen movement or propertarian libertarians, who double-down on this social institution of the individual and turn it into dogma by declaring society does not exist (I think they mean the social institution of society does not exist) (saying a social institution does not exists is meaningfully meaningless and vice-versa) but all the while using social institutions like ‘the constitution’ or ‘property’ to corral their ‘individualness’ into the world.
The world can also be a social institution, or not.
In any case, the meta-anarchist will still see the world as a child.
How does this link to evolution?
Selection works on the individual, so their choices are important, and thus the population of the species that moves through the timeframes of generations, does not care about the groups of individuals and their petty identities and boundaries issues even as individuals must pick and choose their way among them, whether or not they have a sense of the individual as an institution or not.
Its about making mistakes, having the space to make mistakes and the social insurance to cover those mistakes, and most importantly, learn and maintain that knowledge including how to transfer it down the generations (with a side benefit which allows it to colonise all continents). Social institutions are one of those methods.
Evolution does not care about morality, yet individuals may care. Indeed the more individuals care the more unlikely evolution will hardwire any morality/polity/culture/ or other social institution we come up with into our genes.
This is probable why death cults exist, a type of immuniological cell-death activity. Maybe that’s why we haven’t yet irradicated the parasites of narcissm and psychopathy out yet. Where and when they lead death cults they protect the ongoing survival of the species where individuals get to choose which groups they live with. The way cell death protects the body from some incursions or mis-growths.
To repeat: genetic selection works at the individual level, an outcome is the species/population, and because inter-group selection is (partly) about competition for individuals, this is then the motor of Homo sp. evolution.
Actual inter-group rivalry, shall we say, is of no notice to this motor. This is why group-selection theories (race) while possibly possible, is not as likely. It is less parsimonious in explaingin our variation, and the maintainence of that variation across all human populations around the planet, even as that planet turns into a common world.
And if Garvey is right about rollback, where morality cannot be hardwired (because we outsource problem-solving to social learning processes outside the individual's brain and experience) then it is just as likely to affect other outcomes of the worlding urge besides morality: as well as stuff like group/race selection. Garvey's rollback could even undo or counter Baldwin effect processes.
In regard to group selection I suspect speciation would follow very quickly, and I suspect the species/population with group-selection would be outcompeted by various expressions of inter-group selection. (Race is a dead end.) Something then like 'cultural evolution' is within a solution space in which innovation is more important than progress (which like logic is a more a hindsight than a motor) (cultural evolution is just fashion history).
Indeed i would argue the social institution of slavery is evidence that species with inter-group competition outcompetes population with group-selection. While the categories of race were developed in the Atlantic markets for humans by slavers, slavery itself is evidence of the power of inter-group competition over group-selection. As is adoption and the avoidance of cousin marriage (hunter-gatherers have complicated systems to keep it at bay, and while this is also an identity, it can also incorporate blow-ins like the transported convict Wiliam Buckley.)
Inter-group competition is in part a competition for individuals, the motor of evolution. Focussing on the rivalry between groups gives us history and stupidity of mistakes we can learn from, but in terms of evolution not so much.
References:
Joseph Patrick Henrich:
- The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. 2016. Princeton: Princeton university press.
- ‘Chapter 7 The Evolution of Innovation-Enhancing Institutions’, Innovation in Cultural Systems: Contributions from Evolutionary Anthropology, Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology. 2009. Cambridge (Ma.): MIT Press.
- The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. 2020. London: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books.
Michael Price. 2019, November 7. ‘How the Early Christian Church Gave Birth to Today’s WEIRD Europeans’, Science | AAAS. Retrieved 9 November 2019 from https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/how-early-christian-church-gave-birth-today-s-weird-europeans.
David Roman. 2024, June 29. ‘Quick Take: The Christian Church Didn’t Save the West from Cousin Marriage’, A History of Mankind. Retrieved 7 March 2025 from https://mankind.substack.com/p/quick-take-the-christian-church-didnt.
meika loofs samorzewski and Ben Loomis. 2025, April 4. ‘The Individual Is a Social Institution Discuss’, Substack. Retrieved 5 April 2025 from https://substack.com/@meika/note/c-105892158 [Substack notes so may be behind a patlform login wall]
Thanks Ben for the social learning opportunity, I recommend his blog both/and.
Crossposted at substack.com