About

Dr. Joseph Henrich is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology. His research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making, and culture. He investigates topics related to cultural learning, cultural evolution, culture-gene coevolution, human sociality, prestige, leadership, large-scale cooperation, religion, and the emergence of complex human institutions. Methodologically, he integrates ethnographic tools from anthropology with experimental techniques drawn from psychology and economics. His area interests include Amazonia, Chile, and Fiji. Dr. Henrich's work addresses fundamental questions about human evolution, such as what drove the evolutionary success of our species and how culture has shaped our genetic evolution, including physiology, anatomy, and psychology. He explores how evolutionary theory can be used to understand cultural transmission and learning, laying a foundation for a theory of cultural evolution. His research also examines human social status, the nature of prestige, and the unique characteristics of human sociality and cooperation. Additionally, he studies the role of war and intergroup conflict in human evolution, particularly regarding cooperation and sociality. He investigates how human societies expanded from small-scale hunter-gatherer bands to complex nation states within about 12,000 years, the drivers of innovation and cumulative cultural evolution, and how cultural evolution shapes psychology, brains, motivations, hormonal responses, beliefs, worldviews, and preferences. Dr. Henrich also seeks to explain the immense psychological variation observed globally and the peculiar psychological and behavioral patterns found in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Political Science
• Anthropology
• Cognitive psychology
• Cognitive science
• Epistemology
• Demography
• Law
• Social Science
• Neuroscience
• Linguistics
• Ecology
• Geography
• Criminology
• Economic geography
• Evolutionary biology
• Philosophy
• Mathematics education
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Reply to Mazzaferro et al. and Niebaum: The limits of alignment: Grounding executive functions without assuming special contexts

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2026-04-06

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We thank the commentary authors for pointing out how our original dichotomy—between “executive functions” as universal and culturally specific—can be overcome, albeit by qualitatively expanding the scope of “executive function” as it is traditionally defined (e.g., refs. 1 and 2). In fact, this universal-and-culturally specific notion (“inclusive EFs”) stands to integrate our data with the crucial work of commentary authors in studying local patterns of EF engagement (3–5) and supporting development in a diverse array of contexts (6, 7). Such an inclusive approach, however, depends upon moving beyond the notion that tasks must be “aligned” with populations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The chronospatial revolution in psychology

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2025-06-02 · 10 citations

  review
  PublisherDOI

• How Cultural Diversity Drives Innovation: Surnames and Patents in US History

  Journal of Political Economy · 2025-10-28 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  <p dir="ltr">This paper examines the impact of cultural diversity on innovation. Focusing on the United States from 1850 to 1940, we develop a novel surname-based measure of cultural diversity and combine this with patent data. Leveraging quasi-random variation in counties' surname compositions driven by historical immigration, we find that rising diversity increased both the quantity and quality of innovation within counties and for individual inventors. Examining mechanisms, we provide evidence suggesting that greater surname diversity accelerated innovation both by expanding the range of ideas, skills and perspectives available for recombination and by fostering the diverse social interactions that facilitate idea sharing.

  PublisherDOI

• The cultural construction of “executive function”

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-06-30 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In cognitive science, the term “executive function” (EF) refers to universal features of the mind. Yet, almost all results described as measuring EF may actually reflect culturally specific cognitive capacities. After all, typical EF measures require forms of decontextualized/arbitrary processing which decades of cross-cultural work indicate develop primarily in “schooled worlds”–industrialized societies with universal schooling. Here, we report comparisons of performance on typical EF tasks by children inside, and wholly outside schooled worlds. Namely, children ages 5 to 18 from a postindustrial context with universal schooling (UK) and their peers in a rural, nonindustrialized context with no exposure to schooling (Kunene region, Namibia/Angola), as well as two samples with intermediate exposure to schooled worlds. In line with extensive previous work on decontextualized/arbitrary processing across such groups, we find skills measured by typical EF tasks do not develop universally: Children from rural groups with limited or no formal schooling show profound, sometimes qualitative, differences in performance compared to their schooled peers and, especially, compared to a “typical” schooled-world sample. In sum, some form of latent cognitive control capacities are obviously crucial in all cultural contexts. However, typical EF tasks almost certainly reflect culturally specific forms of cognitive development. This suggests we must decide between using the term EF to describe 1) universal capacities or 2) the culturally specific skill set reflected in performance on typical tasks. Either option warrants revisiting how we understand what has been measured as EF to date, and what we wish to measure going forward.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Chance neglect in performance judgments

  Cognition · 2025-11-20

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Chance Neglect in Performance Judgements

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Chronospatial Revolution in Psychology

  2025-04-29 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Psychology’s definition and scope have shifted over the discipline’s short history, yet it has largely remained ahistorical and geographically narrow. Here, we call for psychology to become a historical and geographical science, a transformation we term the chronospatial revolution. We list four barriers to this shift in psychology: problems in scope, data, synergy, and theory. We discuss the need for psychology to adopt a more holistic lens and propose a research agenda that integrates historical processes, cultural dynamics, and ecological variations into psychological inquiry. Such an integrated approach not only enriches our microscopic understanding of Homo sapiens but also draws a more telescopic map of human psychology that encapsulates the human journey. By embedding psychology within time and space, we can better account for cross-cultural psychological diversity, historical change, and evolved psychological mechanisms, ultimately fostering a more globally representative, historically enriched, and theoretically robust discipline.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Inconvenience and generalization in building a better psychology: Commentary on Sherman (2025).

  American Psychologist · 2025-10-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  In this commentary, we supplement Sherman's (2025) defense of convenience sampling, reviewing the complementary role of broad generalization and diverse samples. Specifically, Sherman's commentary could be misinterpreted as downplaying or disavowing the importance of broad generalization, despite the latter being necessary if we are to capture more than a narrow sliver of human cognitive variation. Moreover, we argue that stating the generalizability of our findings explicitly is key to both accurate interpretation and effective translation into applied work-a principle which holds even when our studies are not aiming to produce generalizable conclusions. We close with a review of practical ways in which broad generalization may be achieved. These include developmental, comparative, or computational approaches, as well as theoretical frameworks and "inconvenient" samples that capture cross-cultural variation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• WEIRD Questions: Diversifying Conceptual Sampling

  2025-02-15 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Psychological science is defined in terms of the study of the human mind. Psychological research, however, has fallen short of examining diverse human populations, with most existing research focused on a small slice of human diversity around the globe, typically people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) populations. On top of the WEIRD-participants problem, there is also a bias in the researchers themselves, most of whom come from WEIRD backgrounds. Here, we make the case for a new and distinct source of bias: WEIRD questions. Our species offers a substantially varied distribution of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral repertoires, but researchers have sampled topics and questions from a small part of this distribution, leaving out a variety of cognitive processes, emotions, and behaviors that remain understudied. We review sources of bias in asking questions about the human mind, discuss examples, and call for diversifying conceptual sampling in psychological science. We close by discussing some remedies to counter the WEIRD-questions problem: taking theory seriously, valuing descriptive research, rethinking team science, and aligning structural disciplinary incentives.

  PublisherDOI

• Psychological Change and Kinship Intensity in China over Two Millennia

  2025-06-09 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  A growing body of evidence suggests that important aspects of psychology culturally co-evolve with different institutions and social norms over historical time. Here, using two classical Chinese corpora, we apply a new computational text-analysis pipeline to capture psychological characteristics across time (770 BCE to 1911 CE) and space (270 prefectures). Our results offer two key insights. First, our psychological measures demonstrate both substantial regional variation and non-linear temporal dynamics, bringing into question any monolithic, static, linear, or essentialized views of Chinese psychology. Second, to explain historical and regional diversity in psychological traits, we test and find support for the hypothesis that family organizations—captured by kinship intensity—predictably co-evolve with particular socio-cooperative aspects of psychology. Our contribution extends efforts to measure psychological attributes from textual sources beyond Western societies (and predominantly English-language data) and highlights the importance of kinship in shaping psychological outcomes in Chinese history.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michal Bauer

  1164 shared

• Julie Chytilová

  1159 shared

• Edward Miguel

  1157 shared

• Tamar Mitts

  Columbia University

  1154 shared

• Christopher Blattman

  University of Chicago

  843 shared

• Christopher Blattman

  University of Chicago

  312 shared

• Ara Norenzayan

  University of British Columbia

  94 shared

• Aiyana K. Willard

  Brunel University of London

  73 shared

Labs

• Culture, Cognition, Coevolution LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  University of British Columbia

  1991

• B.A., Economics

  University of Alberta

  1986