From Peter Frost's Newsletter:
When did northwest Europeans become WEIRD? Not when they became Christian - Peter Frost
Joseph Heinrich has argued that northwest Europeans are less clannish and more individualistic because Western Christianity banned cousin marriage—to a limited degree in the 7th century and then much more in the 9th. Evidence from aDNA, however, suggests they were already avoiding cousin marriage before the ban.
WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It refers to people of northwest European descent and was coined to warn against using them in studies to understand human nature in general. They are not necessarily the same as people elsewhere.
Two decades ago, Joseph Heinrich and other social scientists concluded that WEIRD people are outliers in many aspects of mind and behavior, including sensory ability, economic preferences, personality structure, morality, and cognition. They are divergent because they have adapted to an atypical environment of weak kinship, strong individualism, and “impersonal pro-sociality”—in other words, social interactions that are less personal, less emotionally intense, and extending much further than friends and family.
For at least a thousand years, this behavioral environment has prevailed north and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg (known as the Hajnal Line). It is characterized by certain longstanding patterns of behavior:
- Solitary living for at least part of adulthood, with many individuals remaining single their entire lives.
- Departure from the home upon reaching adulthood, either to form a new household or to circulate among unrelated households, typically as servants.
- Less loyalty to kin and greater willingness to trust strangers
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| Hajnal Line |
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