The experience of war changes your internal preferences. For example, if you want to know how institutions might affect people's psychology, you can look at East and West Berlin. If you bring institutions of Ohio to Baghdad, they'll start behaving like people in Ohio. There's just this interface between people's acquired motivations and beliefs and values that fit with institutions. So you can't just transport institutions from one place to another.
Joe Henrich joins the podcast to tell us that we know nothing about his work and that how we got to teach a class in anything is absolutely amazing. We continue our discussion from Episode 17 about his critique of the social and behavioral sciences in "The Weirdest People in the World" and his work in small scale societies on fairness norms. We also talk about the weird American obsession with happiness, monkeys throwing cucumbers, and why some people reject "hyper-fair" offers of more than the half the pot in the ultimatum games.
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Special Guest: Joe Henrich.
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