This fits well with John Murray Cuddihy’s comment on a long line of Jewish intellectuals who viewed love as the product of an alien culture, as indeed it was.[233] For example, he quotes one of Freud’s disciples, Theodor Reik: “Love or romance had no place in the Judengasse [Jewish quarter].” Congruent with the above theoretical discussion, selection pressures in harsh environments combined with individual choice of marriage partner (i.e., personal characteristics being more important than kinship status) would also lead Europeans to value love as the basis of marriage—analyzed as a trait that makes close relationships between spouses mutually and intrinsically rewarding, leading to paternity confidence and the consequent willingness of fathers to provision the family, and to close relationships between parents and their children.
John Money has noted the relatively greater tendency of northern European groups toward romantic love as the basis of marriage.[234] At the psychological level, the evolutionary basis of individualism thus involves mechanisms such as romantic love and physical attractiveness in which mating behavior is intrinsically rewarding[235] rather than imposed by family strategizing or coercive practices such as purdah, as in collectivist cultures.
Wealth and social status have also been important marriage criteria in Western societies, particularly for the propertied classes, but even among the propertied classes there has been a trend toward the companionate marriage based on affection and consent between the partners. In the eighteenth century and thereafter, close relationships based on affection and love became universally seen as the appropriate basis for monogamous marriage in all social classes, even including landed aristocrats.[236]
Psychological Differences between WEIRD
People and the Rest
Cross-cultural research shows differences in a wide range of traits related ultimately to individualism. Joseph Henrich and colleagues reviewed research showing differences between subjects from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) nations and subjects in a wide range of other cultures on social traits (fairness, cooperation, moral reasoning, self-concept and related motivations), perception (visual perception and spatial reasoning) and cognition (categorization and inferential induction, reasoning styles).[237]
Social Exchange and Altruistic Punishment
Regarding social behavior, much research has centered around the ultimatum game where anonymous strangers have a one-shot interaction for a sum of real money. One of the pair—the proposer—offers a portion of this sum (from zero to the entire sum) to the second subject. The other subject must decide whether to accept or reject the offer. If he accepts, he gets the amount of the offer and the proposer takes the remainder; if he rejects, both players get zero. If subjects are motivated purely by self-interest, responders should always accept any positive offer; knowing this, a self-interested proposer should offer anything greater than zero.
Subjects from the U.S., which Henrich et al. found to be the most individualist society in their sample, generally offer between 40–50 percent, and offers of less than 30 percent are typically rejected even though doing so is irrational and a form of altruistic punishment—i.e., the person refusing the offer is punishing the proposer at cost to self. Evolutionists have argued that such tendencies could only have evolved among people who knew the reputation of those they were dealing with—humans who evolved in small groups where the vast majority of interactions was with familiar people. Whereas American subjects make high offers and reject low offers, people in small-scale societies tended to make small offers that were not rejected. This suggests that people in highly individualist societies are accustomed to interacting with strangers (or evolved in an environment where interactions with strangers was the norm). Hence, they make higher offers, knowing that the stranger will punish them if they make low offers.
This situation therefore models an individualistic culture because participants are strangers with no kinship ties. It implies that individualists are willing to punish people whom they see as unfair at a cost to self. For example, a study found that in games with multiple rounds (as opposed to the one-shot ultimatum game) subjects in Western countries who made high offers tended to punish people who did not, even though they incurred a cost in doing so, and that punished individuals subsequently made higher offers.66 The researchers suggest that people from individualistic cultures have an evolved negative emotional reaction to free riding that results in their punishing such people even at a cost to themselves—hence the term “altruistic punishment.” Importantly, the punished individuals changed their ways and donated more in future games even when they knew that the participants in later rounds were not the same as in previous rounds. The theme of altruistic punishment will re-emerge in Chapters 6–8 in discussions of punishment of individuals and groups that depart from a moral consensus.
Another study on a wider range of cultures replicated the finding on donation and the pro-cooperation effects of being punished. However, subjects from non-Western countries donated less (were less cooperative) to start with and were more likely to respond to punishment with revenge rather than increased cooperation. The authors suggest that “because in our experiment all participants were strangers to one another, people in collectivist societies might be more inclined than people in individualistic societies to perceive other participants as out-group members. Therefore, antisocial punishment [revenge] might be stronger in collectivist than in individualistic societies.”[238] Conversely, individualists are less likely to perceive others as members of an outgroup and hence are less likely to exact revenge.
Results from the dictator game are also revealing. Here one person can decide how much to give to the other person but the other person cannot reject the offer. Subjects in the U.S. tend to offer around 47 percent of the amount, substantially higher than people in small-scale non-Western societies. Again, the results are compatible with the proposal that Westerners evolved in an environment where interacting with strangers was the norm but in which people tend to be generous because they are concerned about their reputation in future interactions.
This research provides a model for the evolution of cooperation among individualistic peoples. The results are most applicable to individualistic groups because such groups are not based on extended kinship relationships; individuals interact with non-kin, and are therefore much more prone to defection (i.e., non-cooperation). As a result, cooperation can only occur if people are willing to punish non-cooperators and provide attractive offers in games like the ultimatum game. In general, high levels of altruistic punishment are most likely to be found in individualistic societies.
These results are least applicable to highly collectivist groups which in traditional societies were based on extended kinship relationships, known kinship linkages, and repeated interactions among members. In such situations, actors know the people with whom they are cooperating and anticipate future cooperation because they are enmeshed in extended kinship networks. They would make fair offers only to people that they know and would not reject offers from known others.
Europeans are thus exactly the sort of groups modeled by this research: They exhibit high levels of cooperation with strangers rather than with extended family members, and they are prone to market relations and individualism.
This suggests the fascinating possibility that a key strategy for any group intending to turn Europeans against themselves would be to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the moral blameworthiness of their own people. Altruistic punishment is essentially a moral condemnation of the other person as unfair. Because Europeans are individualists at heart, they readily exhibit moral anger against their own people once they are seen as defectors from a moral consensus and therefore blameworthy—a manifestation of Europeans’ stronger tendency toward altruistic punishment deriving from their evolutionary past as hunter-gatherers. In altruistic punishment, relative genetic distance is irrelevant. Free-riders are seen as strangers in a
market situation; i.e., they have no familial or tribal connection with the altruistic punisher. This scenario is discussed further in Chapter 6 which focuses on the Puritans as exemplars of this tendency toward altruistic punishment.
Other Psychological Tendencies of WEIRD
People
WEIRD people tend to view themselves as independent and self-contained rather than enmeshed in social relationships and with a strong sense of social roles. They see themselves as having various personality traits (e.g., introversion/extraversion) that explain their behavior rather than having various socially prescribed roles (e.g., behavior appropriate for males but not females). They also tend to have higher self-image and are more likely to engage in self-serving biases, whereas in many non-Western societies, especially East Asian, people are more self-effacing. WEIRD people value a sense of freedom and are more likely to believe that their actions are freely chosen. On the other hand, people in non-Western societies have less of a sense that their actions are freely chosen and are more willing to rely on trusted others to make decisions for them. Moreover, in studies where subjects are paired with several other people who claim something that is obviously incorrect, Westerners are more likely to dissent from the consensus (although even most Westerners go along with the consensus).
Moral Reasoning. An illustrative contrast between Western and non-Western societies can be found in the area of moral reasoning. In non-Western societies based on extended kinship, morality is defined in terms of whether an action satisfies obligations within the family or kinship group, whereas in individualist societies, morality is thought of as satisfying abstract notions of justice such as Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative: Act according to the maxim that you could wish all other rational people to follow, as if it were a universal law.
The moral implications of the individualism/collectivism distinction can be seen by a study contrasting India (a collectivist culture) and the United States (an individualist culture). Young adults and children are asked what they would do in the following situation:
Ben was in Los Angeles on business. When his meetings were over, he went to the train station. Ben planned to travel to San Francisco in order to attend the wedding of his best friend. He needed to catch the very next train if he was to be in time for the ceremony, as he had to deliver the wedding rings. However, Ben’s wallet was stolen in the train station. He lost all of his money as well as his ticket to San Francisco. Ben approached several officials as well as passengers at the train station and asked them to loan him money to buy a new ticket. But, because he was a stranger, no one was willing to lend him the money he needed. While Ben was sitting on a bench trying to decide what to do next, a well-dressed man sitting next to him walked away for a minute. Looking over at where the man had been sitting, Ben noticed that the man had left his coat unattended. Sticking out of the man’s coat pocket was a train ticket to San Francisco. Ben knew that he could take the ticket and use it to travel to San Francisco on the next train. He also saw that the man had more than enough money in his coat pocket to buy another train ticket.
Indian subjects were more than twice as likely to decide to take the ticket in order to fulfill their social obligations (around 80 percent to 40 percent)—i.e., social obligations that in collectivist cultures are embedded in kinship relations.[239] Children in the United States, on the other hand, tended to say that the man should not steal the train ticket because stealing violates principles of justice that apply to everyone. Thus, for children from India, morality is defined by social obligations (prototypically obligations toward family members), while for children in the United States, morality is defined more by abstract principles of justice. Henrich et al. note that even highly educated people in collectivist cultures fail to demonstrate principled moral reasoning.
Cognitive Differences. WEIRD people also tend to have important cognitive differences from non-Westerners. We tend more toward analytical reasoning (detaching objects from context, attending to the intrinsic characteristics of objects, and developing rules for explaining and predicting phenomena) as opposed to holistic reasoning (attending to relationships between objects and their surrounding field). Analytic thinking is associated with thinking of oneself as independent, whereas holistic thinking is linked to thinking of oneself as interdependent with other people. For example, memory for objects is worse among East Asians if the background is removed compared to Westerners, implying that Westerners pay less attention to the background and relationships between background and objects in it. Moreover, Westerners tend to categorize objects on the basis of rules that are independent of function and hence more abstract whereas non-Westerners are more likely to categorize on the basis of function and contextual relationship.
These differences in a wide range of areas strongly suggest a biological basis for Western individualism. The differences between individualist and collectivist cultures—whether in fairness and altruistic punishment, moral reasoning, cognition, or perception—are all “of a piece;” they all fit into a consistent pattern in which Westerners detach themselves from social, cognitive, and perceptual contexts, whereas non-Westerners see the world in a deeply embedded manner. This pattern is highly consistent with Western peoples being more prone to scientific reasoning—a phenomenon discussed in Chapter 9.
Conclusion
The egalitarian-individualist strand of Western culture is an important component of the current cultural climate of the West. The thesis here is that egalitarian individualism, along with aristocratic individualism, are critical for understanding the dynamism of the West, particularly in the post-medieval world. The conflicts between these strands will be the subject of later chapters. However, the following chapter focuses on the unique family patterns of Western Europe as a necessary prelude to that discussion.
4
The Familial Basis of
European Individualism[240]
_______________________________________________
There is a consensus among historians of the family that the family structure of northwest Europe is unique: Mary S. Hartman has labeled it a “strange” and “aberrant” pattern.[241] However, there is dispute about exactly how early this family pattern can be discerned and about its causes. One view common among historians had been that European uniqueness derived from the creation of capitalism and a system of national states[242]—a blank slate, top-down perspective that posits a central role for elites. But family historians have produced evidence that the unique family structure long predated these features of Western modernization and, in fact, had a central causal role in creating the modern world.[243] This latter perspective fits well with the biological view developed here because it isolates family structure as a central variable amenable to evolutionary/biological analysis.
Marriage in Western Europe: Some Basic
Differences
The standard marriage model in non-Western societies with intensive agriculture, including even southern and eastern Europe, was for parental control of marriage, with the woman considerably younger than the man (7–10 years on average). The couple would move into the same residence as the parents of the groom, resulting in multi-family households (often labeled joint families) in which individuals were enmeshed in patrilineal extended kinship networks. It was unusual for people not to marry. In southern and eastern Europe such families were monogamous, but this was often not the case in other areas, such as the Middle East.
There were major differences between areas with joint families and the family pattern in England, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, northern France, German-speaking areas and northern Italy (settled by the Germanic Lombards). These differences date at least from the Middle Ages and I will argue that they go back to prehistory and likely have an evolutionary origin.
In northwest Europe, (1) marriage was monogamous; as noted in Chapters 2 and 3, monogamy is a primeval feature of Indo-European-derived (e.g., Corded Ware culture) and hunter-gatherer-derived Europeans; (2) late ma
rriage was common (except for the aristocracy); (3) the partners were similar in age; 4) unmarried individuals, especially women, were relatively common; (5) critically, the married couple set up their household independently of their parents and their extended families; and (6) except for elites (which only conformed to the pattern much later), marriage was not arranged by parents but was entered into by individual choice of partners.[244] Because aristocratic families deviated from this pattern in important ways, this marriage regime cannot be seen as a top-down cultural shift.
Both household types tended to have similar numbers of members, but the difference was that in northwest Europe, the additional people beyond the immediate family were servants, not relatives.[245] Thus the northwest European pattern was a family that was cut off from extended kinship networks, quite unlike the pattern in the rest of the world’s cultures based on intensive agriculture. Further, since individuals set up their own economically independent households, the northwest European family pattern encouraged saving during the pre-marriage years and planning for the future when marriage would be possible.[246]
Because of the importance of property and rank, marriages among the aristocracy were less often based on personal characteristics, and it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that it was assumed even among the high aristocracy that marriage ought to involve affection and companionship.[247] This reflected the Church’s policy on marriage which included a strong emphasis on consent and affection between the partners. By the eighteenth century, close relationships based on affection and love became universally seen as the appropriate basis for monogamous marriage in all social classes, including landed aristocrats.[248] As in Jane Austen novels, among the propertied classes the ideal was a marriage that combined property with the bonds of personal attraction, including romantic love first and foremost.
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