W.E.I.R.D. and the new kinship
Reflections on a book and the consequences of decreasing trust in society
I recently finished Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. This is a book from 2020 that I should have read sooner. It's quite fascinating and well supported by data. As I've been considering the book's thesis, I've been wondering if the characteristics that have made the West prosperous are heading in the wrong direction. I'll offer a quick summary of what the book says before explaining why society is heading in the wrong direction. To begin, WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.
Quick recap
From around 300 to 1300 C.E., Western Christianity supported its marriage and family program, which called for monogamous marriages and no kin marriages in particular. Over time, intensive kinships dissolved, attachments to extended kin weakened, relational and residential mobility rose, analytic thinking and individualism increased, and guilt increased while shame decreased. This boosted impersonal prosociality (trusting strangers), impartial rules and principles, patience, and time frugality, while diminishing interpersonal prosociality. All of this encouraged innovation and economic progress, as well as individual-centered legal systems and representative governments. To understand how this works, read the book, but here's an example:
In a world lacking intensive kin-based institutions, where people depend on well-functioning commercial markets for nearly everything, individuals succeed in part by cultivating a reputation for impartial fairness, honesty, and cooperation with acquaintances, strangers, and anonymous others, because it’s these qualities that will help them attract the most customers as well as the best business partners, employees, students, and clients. Such market norms specify how to behave when you don’t have a relationship with someone or know each other’s family, friends, social status, or caste. Such norms allow people to readily engage in a wide range of mutually beneficial transactions with just about anyone.
In summary, the shift away from kin-based organizations lessened nepotism, and people began hiring the best person they could find rather than the best family member. This has allowed us to build a society built on trust. For example, we would not hesitate to purchase anything on eBay from someone we do not know, trusting that they have accurately described what they are selling. My first point will be that we are returning to something akin to kin-based functioning.
My second point is about promoting monogamous unions. When the leader of a clan or kin group can take numerous wives, a lot of single males are left. It turns out that an overabundance of young single guys is detrimental to society, and my second point is that we have been headed in that direction.
The new kin-based society
Google the word tribalism, and what comes up are titles such as Is America Becoming More Tribal? Is That a Bad Thing?, Why Tribalism Took Over Our Politics, and The Political Divide in America Goes Beyond Polarization and Tribalism, where the last article says
“It’s not just that people only trust or associate with their own side,” says Wang, who directs the Center. “It’s that they’re contemptuous of the other side, whom they see as ‘other’ and less moral—an existential threat. This rise in out-group hate is what we find so alarming.”
Some may call this “tribalism.” But tribalism is based on the metaphor of kinship. In the authors’ view, a better metaphor may be the near-schismatic divides that have historically separated religious sects such as Sunni from Shia or Protestant from Catholic. Hence the term “sectarianism.”
Our society is built on trust, and the trust of people with opposing political views is decreasing. Figure 1 is from the Pew Research Center article As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System (8/9/2022). Figure 1 shows astounding increases in all categories during a six-year period. Democrats' dishonesty increased from 42 to 64, while Republicans' dishonesty increased from 45 to 72. Approximately two-thirds of the D or R teams believe the opposing side is dishonest.
How does this begin to unfold? YouGov polled about cross-party marriage in 2020. Despite the headline in Figure 2, I believe that cross-party marriage is frowned upon. Only 41% of Democrats would be unconcerned if their child married a Republican, while only 50% of Republicans would be unconcerned if their child married a Democrat.
According to the Pew data in Figure 1, I believe cross-party marriage is less acceptable today. Cross-party marriage is currently less acceptable than interracial marriage, which has 94% support. There are liberal and conservative dating apps, and the Guardian just reported on climate-change speed dating (10/20/2023).
It's not like we don't know how to distinguish other tribes or our "kin group." Pronouns in the bio: woke liberal. Wearing something with an American: right wing. Perhaps both groups are large enough to coexist, but considering the rancor in our politics, this is worrying. It's not only politics, but we can now vote with our dollars. The media is plainly biased to the left or right, but who would have imagined a "conservative Amazon" could be profitable? That is PublicSq's selling point, and it may be profitable shortly.
There are numerous examples, but our new tribes are acting very much like historical kin groups, which I don't think is a good thing. Now for my second point of view.
More single men = bad
I learned more about polygyny after reading the book. Being a cowife, one of many wives, to a clan chief or even someone higher up in the clan may appear to be a bad thing at first. In fact, that was often the better choice—more resources—than marrying someone at the bottom of the pack—fewer resources. What difference does it make if there are a lot of lower-status unmarried men, which was historical due to polygyny? More criminal activity. Marriage appears to suppress testosterone levels in men, and men in relationships are less likely to commit crimes.
First, testosterone. From Influence of marital status on testosterone levels-A ten year follow-up of 1113 men (3/10/2017)
Data on reproductive hormones, measured in serum, and lifestyle and marital status were obtained at both time points. As expected, an age-related decline in testosterone was observed. However, independent of age and lifestyle, we observed that men who went from unmarried to married (n=81) during the study period experienced an accelerated age-related decline in testosterone (-6.6nmol/L) whereas men who went from married to unmarried (n=67) experienced an attenuated age-related decline (-2.3nmol/L).
For the second point, Figure 3 is a summary from the article Associations Between Cohabitation, Marriage, and Suspected Crime: a Longitudinal Within-Individual Study (11/28/2022). Without going into the details of the study, what we do see are lower probabilities of crime if one is married or cohabiting, with the results being stronger for men.
According to Pew, the percentage of single men under thirty climbed from 51% to 63% between 2020 and 2023. The two graphs above indicate that this is not a positive trend for society (please note that I am not proposing that women marry these men for the sake of society). What is the reason behind the increase? First, women prefer to marry someone who is more educated and earns more money, while women outnumber males in higher education (see my three postings on this issue, start here). This results in a glaring mismatch. Second, women can now chase the highest-status guys more easily thanks to dating apps. Psychology Today (6/16/2023; nevertheless, the data cited here is from 2017).
He discovered that 50 percent of their attempts, or "likes," went to just 25 percent of women on the app at that time.
More surprising was that 50 percent of women’s likes went to just 15 percent of men.
It's unclear how realistic the current 6-6-6 rule (6 feet tall, 6 figures, 6 pack abs) is, but the fact that it's a "rule" is suggestive. Finally, 52% of single males voted for Biden in the 2020 election, while 63% of unmarried women did. Given what I wrote about dating across political lines above, we have a mismatch between unmarried male and female viewpoints. Whatever the cause, there are more younger unmarried guys, which is probably bad for society.
Conclusions
Predicting the future is a fool's game, but the patterns we're seeing point to increasing instability, owing to a decline in trust in the "other" group and an increase in single men. I'll conclude with a last graph from Our World in Data, Figure 4, that depicts the relationship between trust and GDP per capita to emphasize how we shouldn't just dismiss declining trust.
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