10 things I learned from The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
1. This is a complex premise, bordering on eugenics
2. Hundreds of years of cultural evolution led to dramatically different results in northern Europe, compared to the rest of the world
3. There was a transition away from kinship based relationships
4. Most published psychological studies only studied people from a western background. There are not very many studies that cross-reference people from the Amazon rainforest, for example, against college students in New England.
5. Kinship based cultures that rely on inheritance to pass wealth can frequently trap generations as they wait for the older generation to pass on
6. European churches specifically, Protestant churches through a number of mechanisms, caused people to become more independent from their families.
7. This independence combined with what is termed the protestant work ethic starting in the middle ages caused European people to behave more ambitiously and find satisfaction out of their family group
8. The book compares a kinship based culture to be more loyal to Family where a culture that is less based on kinship is loyal to laws and processes and contracts
9. When people became unattached from their family units, there were more able to meet other people and congregate and cities so that ideas could cross pollinate faster
10. The WEIRD people are a minority percentage of the people of the world, even though for those of us that live in these countries it seems like our way is the way that the world is, most cultures are kinship based
This probably leads to a lot of misunderstandings and political problems
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