Most of the world thinks differently to us

Let’s say your close friend Geoff ran over an innocent pedestrian with a car, causing a serious injury. You were in the passenger seat and clearly saw Geoff far exceed the 20 miles per hour speed limit. Geoff’s lawyer says that if you lied in court and claimed Geoff was only driving at 20, it would prevent serious legal consequences. What would you do?

If you’re a Westerner, you probably think your friend Geoff has no right for you to give false evidence in court. 90 per cent of people from places like Canada, Switzerland and America agree that Geoff deserves no such testimony, despite your close friendship. Outside the West, however, that feeling declines. The majority of people in Nepal, Venezuela and even South Korea said they would willingly lie under oath to help a close friend in such an ethical dilemma. They would see it, rather than lying, as rightly prioritising friends and family over impartial principles.

This, Joseph Henrich says in his landmark book The Weirdest People in the World, underscores what makes Westerners different — we put strangers above friends, are far more likely to tell the truth, and look down on ideas like nepotism. These views are, from a global perspective, “weird” — most people do not think like us.

Take, for example, having a sense of guilt. Most Westerners feel a sense of guilt if they fail to live up to a personal moral standard. This ranges from eating a doughnut whilst on a diet, to failing an exam you didn’t revise for, to stealing an item of food from the shop. It is precisely this feeling of guilt that prevents the “weird” Westerner lying in court for the reckless Geoff — you would feel a sense of guilt for failing to live up to your own personal standard as an honest person.

Shame, by contrast, is defined as “the social devaluation in the eyes of others”. Rather than arising from the breaking of personal moral law, shame emerges when you, or your friends and relatives, fail to live up to a moral standard set by a community. Stealing jewellery, therefore, would not elicit a sense of shame. Being caught in the act of doing so, however, would.

Most people put these differing moral responses down to different levels of prosperity, but the evidence fails to bear this out. This was most conclusively shown when New York City gave immunity to all United Nations diplomats from paying parking tickets until 2002. Fascinatingly, in the five years before 2002, “weird” Western diplomats, like the British, Dutch, Swedish, Canadian, Australian and Japanese (among others) received precisely zero parking tickets. In contrast, diplomats from Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria and Mozambique received over 100 tickets per diplomat. Kuwait, the very worst offender, recorded an astonishing four tickets per month per diplomat.

UN diplomats, as Henrich points out, are all materially comfortable corporate managers with limited financial incentive to break New York City law. What could possibly explain such a weird finding?

Henrich singles out Western marriage patterns originally enforced by the Roman Catholic Church as the greatest cause for “weird” thinking. As he explains, the banning of cousin marriage, the enforcement of monogamy, and the creation of neolocal residence (newlyweds leaving their family home) are all extremely unusual — just 0.7 per cent of societies in the Ethnographic Atlas (of 1,200 societies throughout history) possess these Western family traits.

 These unusual marriage patterns have, in turn, shaped our psychology and altered our moral compass. By banning cousin marriage, Westerners were forced to focus more on others outside their own family or clan. Higher rates of cousin marriage correlate with less trust of strangers, lower rates of blood donations, and a greater likelihood of lying in court for your close friend. Kinship networks, as studies have shown, undermine “participatory institutions” that help our democratic way of life flourish. Cousin marriage, by the way, remains prevalent; in 2010, it was estimated that slightly over one in ten marriages worldwide are to second cousins or closer.

The enforcement of monogamy, too, made a huge impact. Roughly 40 per cent of “low status” men don’t get married in even mildly polygamous societies. What is so powerful about marriage is that it gives participants status, capital, and incentives to create something for the next generation. This, in turn, prompts more people to view society as a contract between those “who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”, as Edmund Burke once put it, and promote the institutions that allow a democratic society to flourish.

 But as Sebastian Milbank mused elsewhere, Henrich fails to get to the philosophical nub of the matter, partly, of course, because he is a psychologist and anthropologist by trade. The reality is that we can trace the philosophical cause of our weird Western thinking to Christianity. The fundamental equality of all human beings stems from the belief that all are “made in the image of God”. Welcoming the stranger is encapsulated in The Parable of the Good Samaritan. Our intrinsic sense of guilt is a word-for-word reading of the fall and the Christian doctrine of original sin from Genesis 3. As the historian Tom Holland concluded in Dominion:The Making of the Western Mind, we “are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”

We have shown too little scepticism towards the hostile stranger

 The mistake Westerners make is to think most people share their Christian-enthused morality and psychology. In the last 15 years, that myth has been shattered. In 2005, 57 per cent of Americans optimistically thought democracy would “probably” be created in Iraq, and vainly spent over $2 trillion failing to create it. According to the most recent Democracy Index, Iraq ranks 126th out of 166 countries for democracy, while Afghanistan is dead last.

 Closer to home, political elites hold international law as sacrosanct and thought opening the borders to unfettered immigration would prove a positive boon for Western countries. The overwhelming reply, with the rise of the populist right across the West, has been the opposite opinion. Large-scale immigration has fostered severely unbalanced economies, newer forms of political corruption, and the practice of Sharia law in Britain. In other words, while most of the world doesn’t regard the stranger highly enough, we have shown too little scepticism towards the hostile stranger. Yes, often immigrants have integrated, and integrated successfully. But elsewhere, it’s time we acknowledged this truth: most of the world thinks differently to us.