Unlike the majority of the world's population in the past and present, residents of Western countries are distinguished by high individualism, analytical thinking and trust in strangers. They focus on themselves - on their personal qualities, achievements and aspirations - rather than on relationships with other people and stable social roles. How did they become so strange in their psychology? What role did their psychological characteristics play in the emergence of Protestantism, the launch of the Industrial Revolution, and the worldwide expansion of Europe over the past few centuries? In the future, we will think, feel, perceive, and make moral judgments differently than we do now, and it will be very difficult for us to understand the mentality of those , who lived at the dawn of the third millennium. To answer these and other questions, Harvard professor Joseph Henrik draws on the latest evidence from the fields of anthropology, psychology, economics and biology in The World's Strangest. He traces the cultural evolution of kinship, marriage, religion and the state, demonstrating the profound mutual influence of these institutions and the human psyche. Focusing on the centuries immediately after the fall of Rome, Henrik shows that the fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage acquired a striking distinctiveness in the West as a result of the almost randomly formulated decisions of the early Churches. It was these changes that led to the emergence of a special psychology of Westerners, which subsequently began to evolve together with impersonal markets, professional specialization and free competition, thereby laying the foundations of the modern world. Adaptation to an individualistic social world means improving personal qualities that are equivalent in a wide range of contexts and relationships. On the contrary, thriving in a world of managed relationships means navigating a variety of different types of relationships that require very different approaches and behavioral strategies.