Definition
Joseph Henrich is an American evolutionary social scientist whose work is primarily concerned with human psychology, decision-making, and culture. Originally hailing from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he obtained bachelor degrees in anthropology and aerospace engineering from the University of Notre Dame, followed by master’s and doctorate degrees in anthropology from the University of California in Los Angeles. Throughout his academic career, he has incorporated a diverse range of methodologies into his research, integrating ethnographic tools from anthropology with experimental techniques drawn from psychology and economics (Henrich et al. 2004). Using this multidisciplinary approach, he has spent a substantive amount of time studying indigenous peoples in Amazonia, Chile, and Fiji, as well as individuals living in modern industrialized societies across the globe. Henrich applies principles of evolutionary theory to the study of human culture and has investigated a variety...
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References
Atran, S., & Henrich, J. (2010). The evolution of religion: How cognitive by-products, adaptive learning heuristics, ritual displays, and group competition generate deep commitments to prosocial religions. Biological Theory, 5, 18–30.
Chudek, M., Muthukrishna, M., & Henrich, J. (2015). Cultural evolution. In D. Buss (Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology, integrations (Vol. 2). Hoboken: Wiley.
Henrich, J. (2001). Cultural transmission and the diffusion of innovations: Adoption dynamics indicate that biased cultural transmission is the predominate force in behavioral change. American Anthropologist, 103, 992–1013.
Henrich, J. (2004). Demography and cultural evolution: Why adaptive cultural processes produced maladaptive losses in Tasmania. American Antiquity, 69, 197–214.
Henrich, J. (2009). The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion: Credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution. Evolution and Human Behavior, 30, 244–260.
Henrich, J. (2016). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Henrich, J., & Boyd, R. (1998). The evolution of conformist transmission and the emergence of between-group differences. Evolution and Human Behavior, 19, 215–241.
Henrich, J., & Boyd, R. (2001). Why people punish defectors: Weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 208, 79–89.
Henrich, J., & Boyd, R. (2002). On modeling cognition and culture: Why cultural evolution does not require replication of representations. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2, 87–112.
Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, 165–196.
Henrich, J., & McElreath, R. (2007). Dual-inheritance theory: The evolution of human cultural capacities and cultural evolution. In R. I. M. Dunbar & L. Barrett (Eds.), Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., & Gintis, H. (2004). Foundations of human sociality: Economic experiments and ethnographic evidence from fifteen small-scale societies. New York: Oxford University Press.
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (2008). Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution. Human Nature, 19, 119–137.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61–83.
Shariff, A. F., Norenzayan, A., & Henrich, J. (2011). The birth of high Gods: How the cultural evolution of supernatural policing agents influenced the emergence of complex, cooperative human societies, paving the way for civilization. In M. Schaller, A. Norenzayan, S. Heine, T. Yamagishi, & T. Kameda (Eds.), Evolution, culture and the human mind. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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Tratner, A. (2017). Joseph Henrich. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_509-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_509-1
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