Cultural Evolution Explains Preferences and Beliefs

Cultural evolution has shaped human nature far more than we realize, and economist Robin Hanson and evolutionary biologist Joe Henrich reveal why ignoring this changes everything about policy, innovation, and our future. In this deep dive conversation, they explore how culture doesn't just influence behavior, it rewrites our preferences, beliefs, and even our cognitive machinery.

Joe Henrich, professor at Harvard and author of The WEIRDest People in the World, explains how humans evolved to be uniquely reliant on social learning, making us a cultural species first and foremost. Robin Hanson, economist at George Mason University and author of The Elephant in the Brain, challenges the implications: if cultural evolution can account for most of human nature, then far more has changed in the last hundred thousand years than conventional wisdom suggests—and far more could change in the near future.

Together, they tackle why economists bracket preferences instead of explaining them, how WEIRD psychology has dominated research while studying statistical outliers, why the collective brain hypothesis suggests innovation depends more on population size than individual genius, and why organizations systematically suppress innovation despite claiming to value it. They discuss marriage norms and kinship structures that literally reshape cognition across cultures, big gods and moral religions that enabled large-scale cooperation, and the uncomfortable selection pressures modern societies refuse to discuss openly.

This conversation bridges economics, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and policy—revealing why cultural evolution deserves far more attention than it receives in academia, government, and institutional design.⸻

TIMESTAMPS

00:00:04 – Introductions: Economics meets cultural evolution

00:01:26 – What is cultural evolution and why does it matter?

00:03:31 – The ambitious scope: explaining preferences, beliefs, and values

00:04:08 – Why economists bracket preferences—and why that's a problem

00:04:55 – Cultural evolution as a return to Darwinian thinking

00:06:26 – How genetic evolution shaped us to be cultural learners

00:07:45 – Why cultural evolution rarely enters policy discussions

00:12:00 – The WEIRD problem: most psychology research studies outliers

00:20:00 – Marriage norms, kinship, and cognitive differences across cultures

00:28:00 – The collective brain: why innovation depends on population size

00:38:00 – Can individuals or small groups out-innovate large populations?

00:48:00 – Religion, cooperation, and big gods that enforce moral norms

00:58:00 – Why societies struggle with explicit reasoning about cultural evolution

01:08:00 – Selection pressures we're not thinking about: fertility, values, migration

01:18:00 – The challenge of integrating cultural evolution into institutional design

01:24:30 – Cultural evolution's influence (or lack thereof) in economics

01:26:00 – Innovation: overwhelmingly important, surprisingly poorly understood

01:28:00 – Why organizations suppress innovation while claiming to promote it

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GUESTS

Robin Hanson – Economist, George Mason University

Author of The Elephant in the Brain and The Age of Em

https://overcomingbias.com/

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson

Joe Henrich – Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

Author of The WEIRDest People in the World and The Secret of Our Success

https://x.com/JoHenrich

https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu

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ABOUT CURIOSITY ENTANGLED

Curiosity Entangled pairs distinguished thinkers from different disciplines for unscripted conversations about consciousness, science, technology, and humanity's long-term future. Hosted by Accelerator Media, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to science storytelling and long-term thinking.