The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation

Abstract

Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of many Western populations. We propose that part of this variation can be traced back to the action and diffusion of the Western Church, the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church. Specifically, we propose that the Western Church’s transformation of European kinship, by promoting small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility, fostered greater individualism, less conformity, and more impersonal prosociality. By combining data on 24 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both Church exposure and kinship, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions, and among individuals from different cultural backgrounds.

The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure

“…expectations shared across many people). For example, it has been hypothesized that elements of western individualism (Henrich et al, 2010) trace their origins to the Marriage and Family Program of the Catholic Church (Schulz et al, 2019). This program promoted 'by choice' marriages, required couples to set up independent households, and forbid marriage between immediate cousins (later extending the prohibition to distant cousins, step-siblings, and in-laws).…”

Cultural prerequisites of socioeconomic development

“…If, along with the demographic transition, secular-rational and cosmopolitan culture were the drivers of prosperity, how did these values spread? Precisely why secular-rationality and cosmopolitanism arose in Western Europe is not known; it could be due to historic institutional innovations [65,66] or possibly just an accident of history. Nonetheless, once established these values appear to have diffused through geographic proximity-the Uralic speaking nations of Europe have high secular-rationality and cosmopolitanism-and diffused even more readily into nations with similar cultures and languages [41,42,46], giving rise to the current observed pattern of national differences in cultural values ( figure 3).…”

Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability

“…This would distort our understanding of the generalizability of our finding to samples that have undergone different educational curricula, and even more so to those with different levels of educational attainment. Note that even the literacy instruction provided in the home environment is already shaped by cultural evolution, both in terms of the content being transmitted (reading and spelling), and the structures that are transmitting (family organization in Western countries; Schulz et al 2019;Henrich 2020). In societies that produce literate children, culture impacts the heritability of literacy from the moment that variation in this trait emerges in development, virtually sealing off the possibility of assessing 'baseline' heritability even at the very start of life.…”

“…Genetic samples largely come from WEIRD countries that are clustered together along multiple cultural dimensions (Hofstede 2001;Inglehart and Welzel 2005;, and that are perhaps an extreme unrepresentative outlier on many psychological and behavioral measures, with these countries registering the highest scores for traits like individualism, analytical thinking, and prosociality toward strangers, and the lowest scores on opposite constructs such as collectivism, holistic thinking, and prosociality toward relatives but not strangers (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010;Schulz et al 2019;Henrich 2020). When we restrict the scope of genetic samples, the cultural environment against which genetic effects are evaluated also become skewed.…”