J Henrich
Biographic Data
| ID | 4130 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Henrich |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Henrich |
| SIGNATURE | HENRICH J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5012-0065 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 92 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 867 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 92 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Chance neglect in performance judgments
Instrumentality, empiricism, and rationality in Nuosu divination
Inconvenience and generalization in building a better psychology: Commentary on Sherman (2025)
In this commentary, we supplement Sherman's (2025) defense of convenience sampling, reviewing the complementary role of broad generalization and diverse samples. Specifically, Sherman's commentary could be misinterpreted as downplaying or disavowing the importance of broad generalization, despite the latter being necessary if we are to capture more than a narrow sliver of human cognitive variation. Moreover, we argue that stating the generalizabi…
How Cultural Diversity Drives Innovation: Surnames and Patents in U.S. History
The chronospatial revolution in psychology
Appealing to the minds of gods: Religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies
How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which religious beliefs and behaviors will be associated. To evaluate these criteria, we examine the conten…
Evolving payoff currencies through the construction of causal theories
Payoff-biased cultural learning has been extensively discussed in the literature on cultural evolution, but where do payoff currencies come from in the first place? Are they products of genetic or cultural evolution? Here we present a simulation model to explore the possibility of novel payoff currencies emerging through a process of theory construction, where agents come up with "channels" via which different cultural traits contribute to some u…
Magic and Empiricism in Early Chinese Rainmaking: A Cultural Evolutionary Analysis
Ritual protocols aimed at rainmaking have been a recurrent sociocultural phenomenon across societies and throughout history. Given the fact that such protocols were likely entirely ineffective, why did they repeatedly emerge and persist, sometimes over millennia, even in populations with writing and recordkeeping? To address this puzzle, many scholars have argued that these protocols were not instrumental at all and that their practitioners were …
A Cultural Species and its Cognitive Phenotypes: Implications for Philosophy
Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures
Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses t…
Machine culture
Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science
Material insecurity predicts greater commitment to moralistic and less commitment to local deities: A cross-cultural investigation
The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community sizes with diverse religious traditions including animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, we con…
The moralization bias of gods’ minds: A cross-cultural test
There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute…
Guiding the evolution of the evolutionary sciences of religion: A discussion
Cognitive bugs, alternative models, and new data
The Evolution of Religion and Morality project: Reflections and looking ahead
This special issue marks the formal end to the Evolution of Religion and Morality project and highlights the overall findings with particular attention to our second wave of data collection. In this concluding article, we first briefly detail how the project came about and how it developed. We then catalogue our contributions, summarizing the empirical results of key synthetic investigations that were part of the overall project. In an effort to …
Supplemental Material for The Causal Effect of Testosterone on Men’s Competitive Behavior Is Moderated by Basal Cortisol and Cues to an Opponent’s Status: Evidence for a Context-Dependent Dual-Hormone…
The religiosity gender gap in 14 diverse societies
Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this "gender gap" may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation into the prevalence of, and explanations for, the religiosity gender gap in 2,002 individuals from 14 d…
Psychology as a Historical Science
Psychology has traditionally seen itself as the science of universal human cognition, but it has only recently begun seriously grappling with cross-cultural variation. Here we argue that the roots of cross-cultural variation often lie in the past. Therefore, to understand not only how but also why psychology varies, we need to grapple with cross-temporal variation. The traces of past human cognition accessible through historical texts and artifac…
The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation
Humans are an ultrasocial species. This sociality, however, cannot be fully explained by the canonical approaches found in evolutionary biology, psychology, or economics. Understanding our unique social psychology requires accounting not only for the breadth and intensity of human cooperation but also for the variation found across societies, over history, and among behavioral domains. Here, we introduce an expanded evolutionary approach that con…
Small gods, rituals, and cooperation: The Mentawai water spirit Sikameinan
God's mind on morality
Machiavellian strategist or cultural learner? Mentalizing and learning over development in a resource-sharing game
The Cultural Evolution of Epistemic Practices: The Case of Divination
Can War Foster Cooperation
In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments from over 40 countries: individual exposure to war violence tends to increase social cooperation at the local level, including community participation and prosocial behavior. Thus while war has many negative legacies for individuals and societies, it appears to leave a positive legacy in terms of local cooperation and civic engageme…
Cultural Transmission and the Diffusion of Innovations: Adoption Dynamics Indicate That Biased Cultural Transmission Is the Predominate Force in Behavioral Change
In challenging the pervasive model of individual actors as cost-benefit analysts who adapt their behavior by learning from the environment, this article analyzes the temporal dynamics of both environmental (individual) learning and biased cultural transmission processes by comparing these dynamics with the robust "5-shaped" curves that emerge from the diffusion of innovations literature. The analysis shows three things: (1) that environmental lea…
Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes Can Produce Maladaptive Losses-The Tasmanian Case
A combination of archeological and ethnohistorical evidence indicates that, over an approximately 8,000-year period, from the beginning of the Holocene until European explorers began arriving in the eighteenth century, the societies of Tasmania lost a series of valuable skills and technologies. These likely included bone tools, cold-weather clothing, hafted tools, nets, fishing spears, barbed spears, spear-throwers, and boomerangs. To address thi…
Two ways to the top: Evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence
The pursuit of social rank is a recurrent and pervasive challenge faced by individuals in all human societies. Yet, the precise means through which individuals compete for social standing remains unclear. In 2 studies, we investigated the impact of 2 fundamental strategies-Dominance (the use of force and intimidation to induce fear) and Prestige (the sharing of expertise or know-how to gain respect)-on the attainment of social rank, which we conc…
A problem in theory
Are Peasants Risk-Averse Decision Makers
On Modeling Cognition and Culture: Why cultural evolution does not require replication of representations
Formal models of cultural evolution analyze how cognitive processes combine with social interaction to generate the distributions and dynamics of 'representations.' Recently, cognitive anthropologists have criticized such models. They make three points: mental representations are non-discrete, cultural transmission is highly inaccurate, and mental representations are not replicated, but rather are 'reconstructed' through an inferential process th…
Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution
Teaching and the Life History of Cultural Transmission in Fijian Villages
Market Incorporation, Agricultural Change, and Sustainability Among the Machiguenga Indians of the Peruvian Amazon
Division of Labor, Economic Specialization, and the Evolution of Social Stratification
This paper presents a simple mathematical model that shows how economic inequality between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning processes driving cultural evolution increases individual's economic gains. The key assumption is that human populations are structured into groups, and that cultural learning is more likely to occur within groups than between groups. Then, if groups are sufficiently isolated and…
War increases religiosity
Impartial Institutions, Pathogen Stress and the Expanding Social Network
Understanding Cultural Evolutionary Models: A Reply to Read's Critique
This reply to Read's (2006) critique of my paper (Henrich 2004) is divided into three parts. Part I clarifies misinterpretations and mischaracterizations of both Dual Inheritance Theory in general and my model specifically. Part II addresses several problems in Read's empirical analyses of forager toolkits, and presents an alternative analysis. Part III tackles some common misunderstandings about the relationship between cost-benefit models (such…
The Cultural Evolution of Epistemic Practices: The Case of Divination
The Cultural Transmission of Faith Why Innate Intuitions Are Necessary, but Insufficient, to Explain Religious Belief
The cognitive science of religion integrates insights from diverse scientific disciplines to explain how people acquire, represent and transmit religious concepts. This perspective has led to a fruitful research program on the naturalistic origins of religion. However, it has thus far not directly addressed a key component of religion: faith or committed belief. The present review proposes a framework that integrates standard approaches from the …
Strong Reciprocity and the Roots of Human Morality
Adaptive Social Learning Strategies in Temporally and Spatially Varying Environments: How Temporal vs. Spatial Variation, Number of Cultural Traits, and Costs of Learning Influence the Evolution of Co…
Why do religious leaders observe costly prohibitions? Examining taboos on Mentawai shamans
Magic and Empiricism in Early Chinese Rainmaking: A Cultural Evolutionary Analysis
Ritual protocols aimed at rainmaking have been a recurrent sociocultural phenomenon across societies and throughout history. Given the fact that such protocols were likely entirely ineffective, why did they repeatedly emerge and persist, sometimes over millennia, even in populations with writing and recordkeeping? To address this puzzle, many scholars have argued that these protocols were not instrumental at all and that their practitioners were …
The Zeus Problem: Why Representational Content Biases Cannot Explain Faith in Gods
In a recent article, Barrett (2008) argued that a collection of five representational content features can explain both why people believe in God and why people do not believe in Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse. In this model ‐ and within the cognitive science of religion as a whole ‐ it is argued that representational content biases are central to belief. In the present paper, we challenge the notion that representational content biases can explain …
Adaptive Content Biases in Learning about Animals across the Life Course
Machine culture
The religiosity gender gap in 14 diverse societies
Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this "gender gap" may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation into the prevalence of, and explanations for, the religiosity gender gap in 2,002 individuals from 14 d…
Corrupting cooperation and how anti-corruption strategies may backfire
The Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Vol. XXIV: November 1799-June 1800
Journal Article The Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Vol. XXIV: November 1799–June 1800. Ed. by Harold C. Syrett, Barbara A. Chernow, Joseph G. Henrich, and Patricia Syrett. New York: Columbia University Press and The Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Vol. XXV: July 1800–1802. Ed. by Harold C. Syrett, Barbara A. Chernow, Irene R. Diamant, and Patricia Syrett. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Get access E. James Ferguson E. James Ferguson Queen…
Market Incorporation, Agricultural Change, and Sustainability Among the Machiguenga Indians of the Peruvian Amazon
Does Culture Matter in Economic Behavior? Ultimatum Game Bargaining Among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon
Does Culture Matter in Economic Behavior? Ultimatum Game Bargaining among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon by Joseph Henrich. Published in volume 90, issue 4, pages 973-979 of American Economic Review, September 2000
In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies
In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies by Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis and Richard McElreath. Published in volume 91, issue 2, pages 73-78 of American Economic Review, May 2001
The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission
Cultural Transmission and the Diffusion of Innovations: Adoption Dynamics Indicate That Biased Cultural Transmission Is the Predominate Force in Behavioral Change
In challenging the pervasive model of individual actors as cost-benefit analysts who adapt their behavior by learning from the environment, this article analyzes the temporal dynamics of both environmental (individual) learning and biased cultural transmission processes by comparing these dynamics with the robust "5-shaped" curves that emerge from the diffusion of innovations literature. The analysis shows three things: (1) that environmental lea…
On Risk Preferences and Curvilinear Utility Curves
On Modeling Cognition and Culture: Why cultural evolution does not require replication of representations
Formal models of cultural evolution analyze how cognitive processes combine with social interaction to generate the distributions and dynamics of 'representations.' Recently, cognitive anthropologists have criticized such models. They make three points: mental representations are non-discrete, cultural transmission is highly inaccurate, and mental representations are not replicated, but rather are 'reconstructed' through an inferential process th…
On Risk-Prone Peasants: Cultural Transmission or Sigmoid Utility Maximization
Are Peasants Risk-Averse Decision Makers
Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation
The evolution of cultural evolution
Humans are unique in their range of environments and in the nature and diversity of their behavioral adaptations. While a variety of local genetic adaptations exist within our species, it seems certain that the same basic genetic endowment produces arctic foraging, tropical horticulture, and desert pastoralism, a constellation that represents a greater range of subsistence behavior than the rest of the Primate Order combined. The behavioral adapt…
Foundations of Human Sociality
This book is the result of a collaborative effort by eleven anthropologists and six economists, and questions the motives that underlie the ways that humans interact socially, and whether these are the same for all societies, and are part of our nature, or are influenced by our environments. Over the past decade, research in experimental economics has emphatically falsified the textbook representation of Homo economicus, with hundreds of experime…
Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes Can Produce Maladaptive Losses-The Tasmanian Case
A combination of archeological and ethnohistorical evidence indicates that, over an approximately 8,000-year period, from the beginning of the Holocene until European explorers began arriving in the eighteenth century, the societies of Tasmania lost a series of valuable skills and technologies. These likely included bone tools, cold-weather clothing, hafted tools, nets, fishing spears, barbed spears, spear-throwers, and boomerangs. To address thi…
“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies
Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we un…
Understanding Cultural Evolutionary Models: A Reply to Read's Critique
This reply to Read's (2006) critique of my paper (Henrich 2004) is divided into three parts. Part I clarifies misinterpretations and mischaracterizations of both Dual Inheritance Theory in general and my model specifically. Part II addresses several problems in Read's empirical analyses of forager toolkits, and presents an alternative analysis. Part III tackles some common misunderstandings about the relationship between cost-benefit models (such…
Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation
Cooperation among humans is one of the keys to our great evolutionary success. Natalie and Joseph Henrich examine this phenomena with a unique fusion of theoretical work on the evolution of cooperation, ethnographic descriptions of social behavior, and a range of other experimental results. Their experimental and ethnographic data come from a small, insular group of middle-class Iraqi Christians called Chaldeans, living in metro Detroit, whom the…
Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution
Division of Labor, Economic Specialization, and the Evolution of Social Stratification
This paper presents a simple mathematical model that shows how economic inequality between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning processes driving cultural evolution increases individual's economic gains. The key assumption is that human populations are structured into groups, and that cultural learning is more likely to occur within groups than between groups. Then, if groups are sufficiently isolated and…
Strong Reciprocity and the Roots of Human Morality
The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion
Pride, personality, and the evolutionary foundations of human social status
Most people are not Weird
The weirdest people in the world?
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions…
The Zeus Problem: Why Representational Content Biases Cannot Explain Faith in Gods
In a recent article, Barrett (2008) argued that a collection of five representational content features can explain both why people believe in God and why people do not believe in Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse. In this model ‐ and within the cognitive science of religion as a whole ‐ it is argued that representational content biases are central to belief. In the present paper, we challenge the notion that representational content biases can explain …
Psychology (65 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (56 works) · Sociology (49 works) · Social Psychology (46 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (43 works) · Epistemology (30 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Cognition (21 works) · Language and cultural evolution (21 works) · Philosophy (20 works)