Joseph Henrich | |
|---|---|
 Henrich in 2016 | |
| Born | 1968 (age 57–58) |
| Education | |
| Awards | Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2003) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Anthropology |
| Institutions | |
| Website | henrich |
Joseph Henrich (born 1968) is an Americananthropologist and professor ofhuman evolutionary biology atHarvard University.[1] Before arriving at Harvard, Henrich was a professor ofpsychology andeconomics at theUniversity of British Columbia. He is interested in the question of how humans evolved from "being a relatively unremarkable primate a few million years ago to the most successful species on the globe", and how culture shaped our species' genetic evolution.[2]
Henrich holds bachelor's degrees in anthropology andaerospace engineering from theUniversity of Notre Dame, earned in 1991. From 1991 to 1993, he worked as a Test and Evaluation Systems Engineer forGeneral Electric Aerospace (sold toMartin Marietta in 1993) in Springfield, Virginia. In 1995, he earned a master's degree and, four years later, a doctorate in anthropology from theUniversity of California at Los Angeles.
From 2002 to 2007, Henrich was on the faculty ofEmory University in the Department ofAnthropology.[3] He became then theCanada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution at theUniversity of British Columbia, where he was a professor in the departments ofpsychology andeconomics. In 2015, he was named Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
Henrich is a recipient of the 2003Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers[4] and the 2022 Hayek Prize.[5]
Henrich's research areas includecultural learning, theevolution ofcooperation,social stratification, prestige, technological change, economic decision-making, and the evolution ofmonogamous marriage and of religion. Early in his career, Henrich led teams of anthropologists and economists in conducting behavioral experiments to test the foundations ofgame theory in diverse societies around the world. This body of research demonstrated that not only did the predictions of standard game theory, rooted in canonical assumptions of self-interest, fail across a diverse range of human societies, but that they failed in different ways in different places.
Henrich's research on the origins and evolution of religions argues that the beliefs, rituals, and devotions that compose religious traditions have been shaped not only by reliably developing features ofhuman minds but also by competition among groups. Intergroup competition would have favored supernatural beliefs and ritual practices that increased within-group cooperation, harmony, or solidarity. Building on the observation that most human societies have permittedpolygamy, Henrich has argued that normative monogamy spread culturally because it reduces male-male competition and thereby promotes success in competition with other societies.[6]
Henrich's research has documented, and sought to explain, psychological differences across populations and around the world. This work argues that the most commonly used participants in psychological and behavioral research are not only a single type of population within a global spectrum, but that they are particularly psychologically peculiar. To raise the consciousness of researchers to this issue, Henrich and his collaborators dubbed the populations most commonly tapped for psychological and behavioral research as "WEIRD", a backronym that stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic", and which summarizes the background of most participants in psychological research.[7]
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