The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Religion [1 ed.] 0199397740, 9780199397747

Table of contents :
Short Contents
About the Editors
Contributors
Contents
1. An Introduction to Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion • James R. Liddle and Todd K. Shackelford
2. Mickey, Yahweh, and Zeus: Why Cultural Learning Is Essential for the Evolutionary Study of Religion • Will M. Gervais
3. The Diversity of Religious Systems Across History: An Evolutionary Cognitive Approach • Pascal Boyer and Nicolas Baumard
4. Religion as Anthropomorphism: A Cognitive Theory • Stewart Elliott Guthrie
5. Evolutionary Developmental Psychology of Children’s Religious Beliefs • Tyler S. Greenway and Justin L. Barrett
6. Belief, Ritual, and the Evolution of Religion • Matt J. Rossano and Benjamin Vandewalle
7. Adolescence and Religion: An Evolutionary Perspective • Candace S. Alcorta
8. Religion and Morality: The Evolution of the Cognitive Nexus • John Teehan
9. The Kin Selection of Religion • Bernard Crespi
10. The Coevolution of Religious Belief and Intuitive Cognitive Style via Individual-Level Selection • Michael N. Stagnaro and David G. Rand
11. The Early Origin of Religion: Its Role as a Survival Kit • Kenneth V. Kardong
12. The Elephant in the Pews: Reproductive Strategy and Religiosity • Jason Weeden, Robert Kurzban, and Douglas T. Kenrick
13. Religion: An Evolutionary Evoked Disease-Avoidance Strategy • John A. Terrizzi Jr. and Natalie J. Shook
14. Religion as a Means of Perceived Security: Testing the Secure Society Theory • James R. Liddle
15. Charismatic Signaling: How Religion Stabilizes Cooperation and Entrenches Inequality • John H. Shaver, Gloria Fraser, and Joseph Bulbulia
16. The Evolution of Religion and Morality • Azim F. Shariff and Brett Mercier
17. The Roots of Intergroup Conflict and the Co-optation of the Religious System: An Evolutionary Perspective on Religious Terrorism • Jordan Kiper and Richard Sosis
18. Selected to Kill in His Name: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religiously Motivated Violence • Yael Sela and Nicole Barbaro
19. Supernatural Beliefs and the Evolution of Cooperation • Pierrick Bourrat and Hugo Viciana
20. A Socioevolutionary Approach to Religious Change • Ryan T. Cragun and J. E. Sumerau
21. The Evolution and Exploitation of Transcendence • Gregory Gorelik
22. Challenges to an Evolutionary Perspective on Religion • Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
Index

Citation preview

The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Religion

Oxford Library Of Psychology Area Editors: Clinical Psychology David H. Barlow Cognitive Neuroscience Kevin N. Ochsner and Stephen M. Kosslyn Cognitive Psychology Daniel Reisberg Counseling Psychology Elizabeth M. Altmaier and Jo-Ida C. Hansen Developmental Psychology Philip David Zelazo Health Psychology Howard S. Friedman History of Psychology David B. Baker Methods and Measurement Todd D. Little Neuropsychology Kenneth M. Adams Organizational Psychology Steve W. J. Kozlowski Personality and Social Psychology Kay Deaux and Mark Snyder

OXFORD

L I B R A RY

OF

PSYCHOLOGY

The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Religion Edited by

James R. Liddle Todd K. Shackelford

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shackelford, Todd K. (Todd Kennedy), 1971– editor. | Liddle, James R, editor. Title: The Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology and religion / edited by Todd K Shackelford, James R Liddle. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : OUP, 2021. | Series: Oxford library of psychology Identifiers: LCCN 2020036963 (print) | LCCN 2020036964 (ebook) | ISBN 9780199397747 (hardback) | ISBN 9780199397754 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Evolutionary psychology. | Religion. | Psychology, Religious. Classification: LCC BF698.95 .O947 2021 (print) | LCC BF698.95 (ebook) | DDC 200.1/9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036963 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036964

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

S H O RT C O N T E N T S

About the Editors  vii Contributors ix Contents xi Chapters 1–373 Index 375

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A B O U T T H E E D I TO R S

James  R.  Liddle is a technical writer with 11 years of professional writing experience. He received a Master of Arts in experimental psychology, specializing in evolutionary psychology, from Florida Atlantic University in 2014. His primary areas of interest and expertise are the evolution of religious beliefs/behaviors and teaching evolutionary psychology. Todd K. Shackelford is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan., where he is codirector of the Evolutionary Psychology Lab. He received his PhD in evolutionary psychology in 1997 from the University of Texas at Austin. Much of Dr. Shackelford’s research addresses sexual conflict between men and women, with a special focus on men’s physical, emotional, and sexual violence against their intimate partners.

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C O N T R I B U TO R S

Candace S. Alcorta University of Connecticut Storrs, CT, USA Nicole Barbaro Oakland University Rochester, MI, USA Justin L. Barrett Graduate School of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary Pasadena, CA, USA Nicolas Baumard Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, France Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi University of Haifa Mount Carmel, Haifa Pierrick Bourrat Macquarie University Sydney, NSW, Australia Pascal Boyer Washington University—St. Louis St. Louis, MO, USA Joseph Bulbulia The University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand Ryan T. Cragun The University of Tampa Tampa, FL, USA Bernard Crespi Simon Fraser University Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada Gloria Fraser Victoria University of Wellington Wellington, New Zealand Will M. Gervais University of Kentucky Lexington, KY, USA Gregory Gorelik Vida Clinic, PLLC Austin, TX, USA

Tyler S. Greenway Graduate School of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary Pasadena, CA, USA Stewart Elliott Guthrie Fordham University New York, NY, USA Kenneth V. Kardong Washington State University Pullman, WA, USA Douglas T. Kenrick Arizona State University Tempe, AZ, USA Jordan Kiper University of California Los Angeles, USA Robert Kurzban RE: Writers Philadelphia, PA, USA James R. Liddle C&M Associates, Inc. Dallas, TX, USA Brett Mercier University of California, Irvine Irvine, USA David G. Rand Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, USA Matt J. Rossano Southeastern Louisiana University Hammond, LA, USA Yael Sela University of Michigan Flint, MI, USA Todd K. Shackelford Oakland University Rochester, MI, USA Azim F. Shariff University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada ix

John H. Shaver University of Otago Dunedin, New Zealand Natalie J. Shook University of Connecticut Storrs, CT, USA Richard Sosis University of Connecticut Storrs, CT, USA Michael N. Stagnaro Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, USA J. E. Sumerau University of Tampa Tampa, FL, USA

x Contri butors

John Teehan Hofstra University Hempstead, NY, USA John A. Terrizzi Jr. Texas Women’s University Denton, TX, USA Benjamin Vandewalle Southeastern Louisiana University Hammond, LA, USA Hugo Viciana Universidad de Málaga Malaga, Spain Jason Weeden OneOncology Nashville, TN, USA

CONTENTS

1. An Introduction to Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion  1 James R. Liddle and Todd K. Shackelford 2. Mickey, Yahweh, and Zeus: Why Cultural Learning Is Essential for the Evolutionary Study of Religion  18 Will M. Gervais 3. The Diversity of Religious Systems Across History: An Evolutionary Cognitive Approach  34 Pascal Boyer and Nicolas Baumard 4. Religion as Anthropomorphism: A Cognitive Theory  48 Stewart Elliott Guthrie 5. Evolutionary Developmental Psychology of Children’s Religious Beliefs 69 Tyler S. Greenway and Justin L. Barrett 6. Belief, Ritual, and the Evolution of Religion  83 Matt J. Rossano and Benjamin Vandewalle 7. Adolescence and Religion: An Evolutionary Perspective  99 Candace S. Alcorta 8. Religion and Morality: The Evolution of the Cognitive Nexus  117 John Teehan 9. The Kin Selection of Religion  135 Bernard Crespi 10. The Coevolution of Religious Belief and Intuitive Cognitive Style via Individual-Level Selection  153 Michael N. Stagnaro and David G. Rand 11. The Early Origin of Religion: Its Role as a Survival Kit  174 Kenneth V. Kardong 12. The Elephant in the Pews: Reproductive Strategy and Religiosity  182 Jason Weeden, Robert Kurzban, and Douglas T. Kenrick 13. Religion: An Evolutionary Evoked Disease-Avoidance Strategy  198 John A. Terrizzi Jr. and Natalie J. Shook 14. Religion as a Means of Perceived Security: Testing the Secure Society Theory  213 James R. Liddle 15. Charismatic Signaling: How Religion Stabilizes Cooperation and Entrenches Inequality  230 John H. Shaver, Gloria Fraser, and Joseph Bulbulia

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16. The Evolution of Religion and Morality  246 Azim F. Shariff and Brett Mercier 17. The Roots of Intergroup Conflict and the Co-optation of the Religious System: An Evolutionary Perspective on Religious Terrorism  265 Jordan Kiper and Richard Sosis 18. Selected to Kill in His Name: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religiously Motivated Violence  282 Yael Sela and Nicole Barbaro 19. Supernatural Beliefs and the Evolution of Cooperation  297 Pierrick Bourrat and Hugo Viciana 20. A Socioevolutionary Approach to Religious Change  315 Ryan T. Cragun and J. E. Sumerau 21. The Evolution and Exploitation of Transcendence  333 Gregory Gorelik 22. Challenges to an Evolutionary Perspective on Religion  356 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi Index 375

xii Contents

1

CH A PTE R

An Introduction to Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion

James R. Liddle and Todd K. Shackelford

Abstract Given that religious beliefs and behaviors are so pervasive and have such a powerful influence, it is vital to try to understand the psychological underpinnings of religiosity. This chapter introduces the topic of evolutionary perspectives on religion, beginning with an attempt to define “religion,” followed by a primer on evolutionary psychology and the concept of evolved psychological mechanisms. With this framework in place, the chapter then provides an overview of key adaptationist and byproduct hypotheses of various components of religion, highlighting the complementary nature of these hypotheses and their roles in forming a cohesive understanding of the evolution of religion. Concepts introduced in this chapter include hyperactive agency detection, minimally counterintuitive concepts, in-group cooperation, costly signaling theory, gods as moralizing agents, and cultural evolution. Key Words: evolutionary psychology, religion, religiosity, evolved psychological mechanism, ­adaptation, byproduct, cultural evolution

Religion has been and continues to be a powerful force throughout the world, having a substantive influence on individuals, communities, and even nations. Because religious beliefs and behaviors are so pervasive and have such a powerful influence, it is vital to try to understand the psychological underpinnings of religiosity. Psychologists have spent over a century examining religiosity (e.g., James, 2008/1902), but given the variety and complexity of religious beliefs and behaviors, there is still much that we do not understand. In recent years, an evolutionary psychological approach to religion has begun to add to our understanding, specifically by addressing the origins and functions of religion. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce much of the evolutionary psychological research on religion, setting the stage for the chapters that follow. By doing so, this chapter attempts to provide a coherent view of what we know about the origin and function of religious beliefs and behaviors, discuss what we do not know, and highlight directions for future research. However, before discussing these details, it is necessary to briefly discuss what is meant by “religion.”

What Is Religion?

Religion consists of a complex suite of beliefs and behaviors, with much variability within and between particular religious worldviews. Slone (2008) illustrates this concept well, while only scratching the surface of religious diversity: Nearly 2.5 billion of the world’s people belong to an institution that regularly serves its members a small meal of baked dough and fruit juice. The members are told that the meal is the flesh and blood of a dead-but-living fatherless god-man who has the superpowers to grant utopian immortality to those who eat him. Nearly 1.5 billion of the world’s people belong to a different institution that requires that five times a day members wash parts of their bodies with water, get down on their knees, bend over, and put their heads on the ground while repeating prescribed words. Members of this institution are also required to starve and parch themselves all day every day for a full lunar month. Some believe that taking even a sip of water during this time can result in eternal hellish punishment after death. (p. 181)

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This description, while informative of the variability between two of the world’s major organized religions, leaves out an even greater degree of variability that can be found when one includes tribal religions, in which adherents often believe in several gods, ghosts, and/or spirits with various abilities, personalities, and motivations, and have elaborate rituals and rules about how to interact with these agents (see Boyer,  2001, this volume; Moro & Myers, 2010). Given the complexity of religious behavior and the degree to which religions can vary, generating a single definition of “religion” is extremely difficult. Indeed, there is no general consensus among those researching religion on how it should be defined (see Gervais, this volume; Cragun & Sumerau, this volume). Nevertheless, Atran (2002, p. 13) has provided a definition of religion that serves as a useful starting point for the purposes of this chapter and is echoed throughout several chapters of this volume. Atran defines religion by providing a list of components that he argues converge in all societies to become what we refer to as religion. The four components are: 1.  widespread counterfactual belief in supernatural agents (gods, ghosts, goblins, etc.); 2.  hard-to-fake public expressions of costly material commitments to supernatural agents— that is, sacrifice (offerings of goods, time, other lives, one’s own life, etc.); 3.  a central focus of supernatural agents on dealing with people’s existential anxieties (death, disease, catastrophe, pain, loneliness, injustice, want, loss, etc.); and 4.  ritualized and often rhythmic coordination of 1, 2, and 3—that is, communion (congregation, intimate fellowship, etc.). This definition strikes a balance between specificity and generality, such that it likely captures almost all worldviews that we would intuitively consider to be “religions” while excluding phenomena that should not be considered religions (e.g., political ideologies, devotion to one’s favorite sports team, empiricism, etc.). Atran’s definition also above provides a useful roadmap for analyzing religion. Rather than attempting to analyze and explain religion as a whole, we can attempt to analyze and explain the individual components he identifies. The following sections of this chapter introduce how an evolutionary psychological perspective can aid in our under2

standing of these components of religion. But first it is worth clarifying what an evolutionary psychological perspective entails.

Applying an Evolutionary Psychological Perspective to Religion

Evolutionary psychology is not a subdiscipline of psychology, such as social psychology or personality psychology, but rather an approach to psychology that applies evolutionary theory (Buss, 2019). Evolutionary psychology is founded on the premise that the brain, like every other organ, has evolved and is therefore open to analysis from an evolutionary perspective, which means that the products of the brain (i.e., thoughts, feelings, behaviors, psychology) are open to evolutionary analysis as well. For example, an evolutionary psychological approach has proven useful in examining social behavior (Cosmides,  1989), learning (MacDonald,  2007; Weber & Depew,  2003), memory (McBurney, Gaulin, Devineni, & Adams, 1997), and perception (Rhodes, 2006), to name only a few topics. In short, all aspects of human cognition can be better understood by applying an evolutionary analysis, and religious beliefs and behaviors are no exception. More specifically, evolutionary psychologists posit that the mind is composed of domain-specific (and possibly a smaller number of domain-general) modules, or “evolved psychological mechanisms,” which evolved as solutions to specific and recurrent adaptive problems throughout our evolutionary history (Buss,  2019; see also Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992). This is a particularly useful concept when attempting to understand religion. Given the complexity of religion, it makes sense that rather than attempting to understand religion as the result of the mind in general, we should expect that religion results from the activity of several domainspecific psychological mechanisms that evolved as a consequence of specific adaptive problems. However, an important question to consider is whether religious beliefs and behaviors themselves are the adaptive solutions that these mechanisms evolved to produce, or if they are better understood as byproducts of these or other mechanisms. Despite what some critics of evolutionary psychology have suggested (e.g., Gould,  2000), evolutionary psychologists do not operate under the assumption that all behaviors are the product of specialized adaptations. In addition to adaptations, evolution by natural selection is capable of producing what are known as byproducts (Buss, Haselton,

James R. Liddle, Todd K. Shacke l f ord

Shackelford, Bleske, & Wakefield, 1998), and evolutionary psychologists acknowledge and apply this concept to the study of the mind. In terms of evolutionary biology, an often-cited example of a byproduct is the whiteness of bones (Buss et al., 1998). This trait has no impact on survival or reproduction, but it inevitably results from increased calcium concentrations in bones, which is an adaptation to increase bone strength. In terms of evolutionary psychology, examples of byproduct hypotheses include the possibility that music and art are byproducts of language acquisition and habitat preference, respectively (Pinker, 1997). This leads us to the question of whether religion is an adaptation or a byproduct. However, not only is this question difficult to answer, it may be unanswerable because it is overly simplistic. As Shariff (2008) notes: Religions are complex. More than that, they are complexes, stitched together from many elements that have evolved at different times for different reasons. Some aspects of religion may be, or may have been, individually or culturally adaptive, whereas others may be more analogous to viruses. Asking whether religion, as a whole, is adaptive is a misleading question. (p. 119)

Therefore, instead of asking whether religion in general is an adaptation or a byproduct, a better approach is to ask whether particular components of religion are adaptations or byproducts. As the next two sections will show, approaching the problem from this perspective results in byproduct and adaptation arguments that are not mutually exclusive (see, e.g., Stagnaro & Rand, this volume), despite the fact that these different accounts of religiosity are often discussed as if they are pitted against each other (Kirkpatrick, 2008; Schloss, 2008). But even if byproduct and adaptationist accounts are not in competition, it is still useful to examine the arguments and evidence for each separately, and then one can attempt to unify them into a coherent account of religion.

Byproduct Accounts of Religion

As Atran (2002) notes in his definition of religion, belief in supernatural agents is a universal component of religious worldviews. Therefore, a vital component of any thorough account of religion must explain why humans are predisposed to believing in supernatural agents. From an evolutionary perspective, the leading accounts of why people believe in supernatural agents suggest that these beliefs emerged as a byproduct of

evolved psychological mechanisms designed for other purposes. This section discusses what some of those mechanisms may be, what their evolved functions may be, and how they contribute to religious beliefs. Arguably the most important evolved psychological mechanism involved in the belief in supernatural agents is what Barrett (2000, 2004) has labeled the hyperactive agent-detection device, or HADD. Although not necessarily the first to recognize the human proclivity for detecting agency in the environment, this concept and the rationale behind it was developed by Guthrie (1980), who has since elaborated the idea (Guthrie, 1993, 2008, this volume). Guthrie’s argument rests on three assumptions: “perception is interpretation, interpretation aims at significance, and significance generally corresponds to the degree of organization perceived” (1993, p. 41). These assumptions are explained in detail in what follows. All stimuli that we perceive are necessarily ambiguous, in that they can be interpreted in an indefinite number of ways. This ambiguity is rarely noticed, though, because we have evolved predispositions to interpret stimuli in ways that were most beneficial to our ancestors. In other words, we have evolved mental heuristics that resulted, on average, in interpretations that were the least costly for our ancestors relative to other interpretations. One such heuristic is to assume that agency is involved whenever this is a possibility, because agents are often the most significant interpretations possible, generating the greatest amount of inferential potential (Barrett, 2004). Even if we are wrong, a false-positive identification of agency is less costly than a falsenegative. For our ancestors, assuming that a particular stimulus was not an agent (or the result of an agent) could have resulted in the loss of a meal (if the stimulus was prey) or even severe injury or death (if the stimulus was a predator). These possibilities, while rare, would have been far costlier than the potential waste of time resulting from a false-positive detection of agency. As explained by error management theory (Haselton & Buss, 2000), such asymmetrical costs should result in evolved psychological mechanisms biased toward the less costly output. Therefore, we have likely inherited from our ancestors a mechanism best described as the HADD, a perceptual system that is designed to assume the presence of agency when faced with ambiguous stimuli. There are many sources of evidence that support the existence of the HADD. For example, the logic behind the functionality of the HADD (i.e., that

An Introduction to Evo lutionary Perspectives on Religion

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false-positives are less costly than false-negatives) can be observed in species other than humans. Guthrie (1993) notes that frogs respond to small moving objects with flicks of the tongue and large moving objects with leaps into the water, interpreting the stimuli as prey or predator, respectively. These interpretations are the best bets a frog can make, resulting in the greatest potential payoff and the smallest potential cost. Other animals are also predisposed to detect agency even when it is not necessarily there, as Darwin (2006/1871) observed while watching his dog: [M]y dog . . . was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every time that parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent, and no stranger had a right to be on his territory. (p. 815)

Darwin’s account of the cognitive process resulting in the dog interpreting the stimuli as an indication of agency is impressively prescient with respect to Guthrie’s account of agency detection: The dog was presented with an ambiguous stimulus that could be interpreted as the result of agency or natural causes, but ultimately interpreted it as an agent because this represents the most significant, potentially useful, interpretation. While these examples provide support for hyperactive agency detection in other species, substantial evidence exists for humans as well. Not only are human infants capable of detecting agency but also this detection appears to be hypersensitive. A study by Gergely and Csibra (2003, as cited in Bering, 2011) indicates that stimuli as simple as dots on a computer screen can activate perceptions of agency in infants. When a dot is shown moving in a particular direction on a screen and continually appears to bump into a wall, infants appear to be surprised when the wall is removed and the dot continues to perform the same motion. As Bering (2011) describes it: It’s as if the baby is staring at the dot trying to figure out why the dot is acting as though it “thinks” the barrier is still there. By contrast, the infants are not especially interested . . . when the dot stops in front of the block, or when the dot continues along its path in the absence of the barrier. (p. 36)

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Several other studies have also shown that both children and adults tend to view the movement of simple dots and geometric shapes as interacting agents with their own goals and motivations (for a review, see Atran & Norenzayan,  2004; Barrett,  2000,  2004; Bering,  2011). Infants are even capable of inferring moral behavior in geometric shapes. When shown a vignette of one shape moving up a hill, another shape “blocking” the first shape from reaching the top, and a third shape “helping” the first shape by pushing it up the hill from behind, infants prefer to play with the “helper” shape rather than the “hinderer” shape, suggesting that they perceive these as good and bad agents, respectively (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). Importantly, when adults are shown the same vignette, they easily can describe the events as if these shapes are agents with individual goals and moral attitudes. In summary, the ability to detect agency and apply it to inanimate objects (given that these objects exhibit simple signs of agency, such as seemingly voluntary movement) emerges very early in life and persists into adulthood, supporting the idea that humans possess a HADD. However, there are still several questions that need to be addressed before the HADD can be invoked to help explain religious beliefs. Even if we have a predisposition for detecting agency, how would this lead to us believing in agents that are invisible or immaterial (i.e., supernatural)? For starters, it is important to note that not all gods throughout history have had the qualities of invisibility and/or immateriality (e.g., the Greek gods; Guthrie, 2008). Furthermore, Guthrie (2008) notes that invisibility and immateriality are not as unusual as one may initially think as characteristics of agents. For example, several animals have the ability to use camouflage that makes them, for all intents and purposes, invisible when in the proper environments or until they move. Intangibility can also be achieved, to a certain extent, in certain animals, such as those who travel in schools, flocks, and so forth, making it difficult to differentiate individual agents. It is also important to emphasize that detecting agency does not always involve detecting the agent directly; agency can often be inferred by detecting the effects of agents. The HADD not only predisposes us to view certain ambiguous stimuli as agents, but it also predisposes us to view certain ambiguous stimuli as the results of agents, because the same rules of false-positives and false-negatives apply: If it is possible that a certain event was caused by an agent, it is potentially more costly to assume it was not caused by an agent than to assume that it was.

James R. Liddle, Todd K. Shacke l f ord

Therefore, it is not necessary to actually perceive agents in order to infer their existence, leaving open the possibility that certain stimuli are the products of agents that cannot be seen, leading to belief in supernatural agents. Although the HADD provides a possible explanation for why humans are capable of believing in supernatural agents, the explanation provided so far offers little understanding of the particular characteristics of these agents. For example, why are supernatural agents almost always perceived as having human traits (e.g., human emotions, desires, motivations, etc.; see Boyer,  2001)? Guthrie (1993) notes that when interpreting ambiguous stimuli, “The most significant possibilities are usually organisms, especially humans. Practically, humans are most significant because their organization makes them most powerful and able to generate the widest range of effects” (p. 241, italics added). Furthermore, humans seem to be naturally inclined to believe in mind-body dualism, or the belief that the mind can exist independently of the body. Bering (2011) argues that this belief is “an inevitable by-product of our theory of mind” (p. 113). More specifically, we are unable to imagine what it is like to not have consciousness, such as after we die, and are thus unable to “turn off” our theory of mind when imagining our own death or the deaths of others. This results in the universal belief in an afterlife of some kind (with the specific characteristics of the afterlife varying across cultures), and therefore the belief that the mind can exist independently of the body. Studies by Bering and Bjorklund (2004) and Bering, Blasi, and Bjorklund (2005) indicate that the belief that certain mental states exist after death emerges in childhood and continues into adulthood. When asked questions following a puppet show of an anthropomorphized mouse being eaten by an alligator, most children 11–12 years old understand that biological, psychobiological, and perceptual abilities cease to function, but are less inclined to state that emotions, desires, and epistemic beliefs cease to function. This same trend is even stronger in adults, who are operating on the basis of afterlife beliefs that have been instilled in them for a greater length of time than for children. Even adults who explicitly deny believing in an afterlife demonstrate a tendency (albeit weaker than other adults) to believe that these mental functions survive death (Bering,  2002). In summary, because humans are predisposed to believing that the mind can persist without a body, they are capable of perceiving

human agents without bodies (i.e., supernatural agents). Finally, to further explain how belief in supernatural agents emerged in our ancestors, it is necessary to invoke another byproduct account advanced by Boyer (2001), who argues that our memory systems are susceptible to minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCIs), and that a byproduct of this susceptibility is belief in supernatural agents (see also Greenway & Barrett, this volume). This concept fits nicely with Guthrie’s (1993) account of agency detection, in that it builds on the premise that we are likely to detect supernatural agents that possess human minds. Boyer argues that when humans perceive a stimulus, the ontological category to which that stimulus belongs is automatically activated, and with it several assumptions are made about that stimulus. For example, when we detect human agents, that agent is automatically endowed with all the physical and mental capabilities that are typical to the category of “human” (e.g., our theory of mind is activated). Concepts of supernatural human agents are particularly memorable because they keep most of these characteristics intact, but violate a minimal number of our ontological expectations, making them MCIs. The idea that MCIs are more memorable than other concepts has been supported empirically. Boyer and Ramble (2001) performed a series of experiments to determine the recall rates of concepts that varied in terms of their counterintuitiveness. They found that MCIs elicited greater recall rates than both intuitive concepts that did not violate any ontological assumptions and concepts that violated several ontological assumptions. These findings were replicated by Barrett and Nyhof (2001), and they were also replicated cross-culturally (Boyer & Ramble, 2001; see Barrett, 2004, and Boyer, 2001, for a review). Also, it is important to note that not just any MCI will be easily remembered and transmitted; this is only likely to occur when the MCI has a high degree of inferential potential (Barrett, 2004). For example, a rock that turns invisible when you look at it is technically an MCI, but this concept is not useful at all for explaining or predicting events. Human MCIs, on the other hand, have the potential to be extremely useful, because humans are known to have beliefs, desires, motivations, and so forth, that can be used to predict their actions. With the byproduct accounts described so far in this section, we can begin to assemble a hypothetical

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account of how belief in supernatural agents may have arisen in humans. Our ancestors were almost certainly exposed to many types of ambiguous stimuli that could have activated their predisposition for detecting agency. As Rossano (2006) notes, “Natural processes with no obvious explanation—storms, illness, animal behavior, and so forth—were all prime candidates for the actions of a supernatural agent” (p. 347). The best bet for attempting to explain such phenomena would be human-like agents, as humans were (and continue to be) viewed as the most capable agents for affecting the world. Even if these human-like agents could not be perceived directly, it would not have been difficult for our ancestors to assume their existence, because they most likely held the implicit belief that the human mind can exist independently of the body. Furthermore, beliefs in human-like agents who violated a minimal number of ontological assumptions, such as being able to control processes that normal humans have no control over, would have had a selective advantage over other interpretations, because our ancestors’ memories were most susceptible to these kinds of beliefs. Therefore, beliefs in supernatural agents with human qualities who interact with the world were likely to be remembered and transmitted to others, laying a foundation for what would eventually become the supernatural agents found in tribal and organized religions today. An additional byproduct account that has received comparatively little attention from those researching the evolution of religion has the potential to explain the emergence of ritualized behaviors, which Atran (2002) considers to be an important component of religion. Once our ancestors held the belief that supernatural agents were responsible for certain events, it is likely that they would have attempted to interact with these agents to attempt to influence their actions. This possibility was noted by Darwin (1871/2006), who reasoned that “The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen ­spiritual agencies . . . would infallibly lead him . . .  to various strange superstitions and customs” (p. 816). However, if these supernatural agents did not actually exist, how could any behavior geared toward interacting with them persist? Would it not eventually be obvious that these attempts at interaction were futile? Not necessarily, due to the human predisposition to infer causation and the nature of reinforcement learning. Much like our hypersensitivity to cues of agency, it appears that we are hypersensitive to cues of 6

causation. It is reasonable to assume that this hypersensitivity exists for a similar reason that the HADD exists: Causal events provide a more significant, and therefore more useful, interpretation of events compared to randomness. Michotte (1963, as cited in Twardy & Bingham, 2002) was the first to demonstrate the ease with which individuals can be led to infer causation. For example, when shown a simple geometric shape on a screen moving toward another shape and touching it, followed by the touched shape moving, people assume that the first object caused the movement of the second. However, if there is a slight delay between the first shape touching the second and the second shape’s movement, causation is no longer inferred. Therefore, the human perception of causation alone seems insufficient to explain the origin of ritualized behavior directed toward supernatural agents. Although it is possible that the occasional pairing of behavior and desired outcomes (e.g., a rain dance paired with the ending of a drought) would elicit a causal interpretation, the many instances in which the two events are not paired would seemingly deter a causal interpretation. However, even rare pairings of behavior and reward can result in ritualized behavior because of the way our brains are designed to facilitate reinforcement learning. Given that any behaviors aimed at influencing supernatural agents would have fallen on deaf ears, our ancestors would have been exposed to a random schedule of reinforcement, in which their actions would occasionally, but only rarely, correspond to desired outcomes, suggesting that their attempt at “communication” had been successful. The possibility for random reinforcement to elicit ritualized behavior was initially illustrated by Skinner (1948, as cited in Dennett, 2006) and his “superstitious” pigeons. Dennett (2006) provides an informative and entertaining interpretation of the series of events: Every so often, no matter what the pigeon was doing at the moment, a click and a food-pellet reward were delivered. Soon the pigeons put on this random schedule were doing elaborate “dances,” bobbing and whirling and craning their necks. It’s hard to resist putting a soliloquy into these birds’ brains: “Now, let’s see: the last time I got the reward, I’d just spun around once and craned my neck. Let’s try it again. . . . Nope, no reward. Perhaps I didn’t spin enough. . . . Nope. Perhaps I should bob once before spinning and craning. . . . YESSS! OK, now what did I just do?”

Recent work in neuroscience provides an explanation for this phenomenon, which applies to

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humans as well as to pigeons and any organism capable of learning through conditioning. Studies by Niv and colleagues (Niv, Duff, & Dayan,  2005; Niv, Joel, Meilijson, & Ruppin,  2002; Niv & Schoenbaum,  2008) have documented that dopaminergic spikes are an important component for the establishment of classical and operant conditioning. Without reviewing the details, the key is that this release of dopamine plays an important role in synaptic plasticity and learning, namely by strengthening the neural connections associated with whatever neural activity preceded the reward, whether it was the perception of a stimulus (in classical conditioning) or the initiation of behavior (in operant conditioning). The latter effect is of particular importance in explaining the emergence of ritualized behaviors. When our ancestors engaged in behaviors designed to influence supernatural agents, they were occasionally “rewarded” with desirable outcomes. When this happened, the neural connections associated with whatever behaviors they were engaging in at the time were strengthened, thereby increasing the likelihood of performing those behaviors in the future. Any elaborations added to the initial behaviors would be subsequently strengthened as well if they were initiated at a time when the reward was obtained again. In short, it seems feasible that reinforcement learning predisposed humans to develop rituals associated with attempting to communicate or otherwise interact with supernatural agents.

Adaptationist Accounts of Religion

The psychological mechanisms described thus far—the HADD, susceptibility to MCIs, afterlife reasoning (i.e., belief in mind-body dualism), the perception of causality, and reinforcement learning—are the best candidates so far for explaining the origin of what would eventually become the complex religious beliefs and behaviors that exist today. More specifically, these mechanisms provide an explanation for how our ancestors originally developed a belief in supernatural agents and ritualized behaviors aimed at interacting with these agents. However, the complexity of supernatural agents and rituals as they exist in tribal and organized religions today cannot be adequately ­ explained by these mechanisms alone. The ­ ­adaptationist accounts that follow in this section complement—rather ­ than disprove—these ­byproduct accounts for explaining how religious beliefs and behaviors reached the level of complexity observed today.

Arguably the most compelling adaptationist account of religiosity is that certain religious beliefs and behaviors (i.e., belief in omniscient and omnipresent supernatural agents that are concerned with human moral behavior, and hard-to-fake religious behaviors) are adaptive solutions to the problem of potential free-riding in large groups, facilitating in-group cooperation (Atran, 2002; Atran & Norenzayan,  2004; Boyer,  2001; Bulbulia,  2004; Shariff,  2008; see also Bourrat & Viciana, this volume; Shariff & Mercier, this volume; Shaver Fraser, & Bulbulia, this volume). For the majority of our evolutionary history, humans lived in small tribes of hunter-gatherers (Diamond,  1992). During this time, cooperation between humans within these small groups could be maintained via kin selection (Hamilton,  1964) and reciprocal altruism (Trivers,  1971). Because the members of these small tribes consisted mostly of genetically related individuals, cooperation could be maintained as a function of benefiting shared genes. In other words, although altruistic behavior toward another can be costly (i.e., resources that could have been invested in one’s own fitness are invested elsewhere), these costs can be canceled if applied to a genetic relative, because improving their fitness means benefiting their genes, and because you share a certain proportion of genes with this individual, your fitness is ultimately improved as well. Furthermore, with small groups, even if not all members are not genetically related, it is unlikely that any of the members are strangers to each other. Therefore, cooperation can be maintained based on the premise that if you help an individual at some point, you can count on them to help you later. Because nobody in the group is a stranger and repeated interactions are the norm, the ability to freeride (i.e., receive benefits from others in the group, or from group living in general, without paying the same costs as other members) is unlikely, because a free-rider will be discovered as such and will be punished (e.g., by being ostracized and no longer bestowed benefits by the other group members). With the advent of agriculture roughly 11,000 years ago, some groups of humans could afford to give up their nomadic lifestyles and settle in one area. More importantly, they could sustain larger and larger populations (Diamond, 2005). As group sizes increased, kin selection and reciprocal altruism became less sufficient for ensuring prosocial behavior within the group (but see Crespi, this volume, for further consideration of kin selection’s role in the evolution of religion). The chances of everyone

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in the group being related or knowing each other quickly decreased, and with anonymity came a greater potential for free-riding. This problem needed to be solved to prevent large groups from crumbling due to a lack of cooperation. In fact, Dunbar (2003) has estimated that if a group can not solve this problem, it will divide or collapse when the population exceeds 150 individuals. Whether this estimate is too conservative, several societal populations exceed this number by many magnitudes, and have done so for thousands of years. Humans have clearly managed to at least partially deal with the problem of free-riding, and religion may have been a key phenomenon in allowing this to happen (see Shaver et al., this volume). Given that the belief in supernatural agents and rituals designed to interact with these agents were almost certainly already in place as a result of the psychological mechanisms described earlier in this chapter (i.e., the psychological mechanisms involved will have evolved prior to human group sizes increasing), these beliefs and behaviors could have been gradually molded via cultural evolution in such a way as to make them more suitable for reducing the possibility of free-riding. As Bering, Mcleod, and Shackelford (2005) put it: The psychological foundations of some religious behaviors . . . may be co-opted spandrels (Andrews, Gangestad, & Matthews, 2002; Buss et al., 1998). They may be side effects of other design features that, quite by chance, had salutary effects of their own on the organism’s ability to pass on its genes and, over time, were independently subjected to natural selection. (p. 361, italics in original)

In other words, religious beliefs and behaviors that originally served no adaptive purpose were “exploited” to solve adaptive problems that did not exist when these beliefs and behaviors originally came into existence. Once this process began, cultural evolution molded these beliefs and behaviors into versions that were better suited to solve these new adaptive problems (see Shariff & Mercier, this volume). Adaptationist accounts of religiosity describe the end results of this process. In smaller groups, free-riding can be eliminated (or greatly reduced) because one’s reputation will determine whether others are willing to cooperate. If an individual has a reputation as a cheater or freerider, other members of the group will know this and be less likely to provide benefits to that individual. With increased group size and anonymity, an individual’s reputation is less likely to be tarnished 8

by acts of free-riding. Nevertheless, free-riders still need to be vigilant about avoiding a negative reputation and therefore should be sensitive to cues that their anonymity has been compromised. For example, the feeling of “being watched” should reduce one’s willingness to free-ride and increase their prosocial behavior. Indeed, a study by Haley and Fessler (2005) confirmed this prediction. When strictly anonymous participants participated in a dictator game, exposure to stylized eye-like shapes on a computer desktop resulted in participants allocating a significantly greater amount of money to the other (unseen) participant, compared to those who were not exposed to the eye drawings. The simple stimulus just described was apparently enough to invoke the feeling of being watched, but another stimulus that can be much stronger is the belief in a supernatural agent, because this belief will not be tied to any one location or time. However, it is first necessary to determine whether exposure to a supernatural agent concept, without any perceptual cues to that agent’s existence or presence, can reduce cheating or antisocial behavior just as perceptual cues can (e.g., “eyes” that are “watching you”). A study by Bering et al. (2005) confirms this possibility. Each participant was instructed to complete a difficult test of spatial intelligence on a computer while alone in the testing room, and they were told that the person with the highest score would receive $50. They were also told that this test was newly developed and occasionally might display the answer to a question by mistake, and that they should press the space bar when this occurs to clear the screen and solve the problem honestly. In reality, the test was designed to display this “opportunity for cheating” at five random and counterbalanced times, and cheating behavior was measured as the length of time taken to press the space bar. The key manipulation in this study was that some participants, before beginning the test, were asked to read a brief statement indicating that Paul J. Kellogg, a graduate student who had helped design this test, died recently and unexpectedly. Of those participants who were given this statement to read, some were also told by the experimenter, prior to beginning the test, that the ghost of this graduate student had recently been seen in the very room in which the test was occurring. A third group of participants was not given any such statements prior to testing. The results of this study indicated that participants primed with the ghost concept performed significantly worse than the control group and exhibited

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significantly shorter latencies for pressing the space bar during opportunities for cheating. According to Bering et al. (2005), “These findings appear to show, therefore, that supernatural primes dealing with dead agents genuinely reduce people’s willingness to intentionally cheat on a competitive task where the risk of social detection appears low” (p. 376, italics in original). In summary, it appears that the concept of a supernatural agency is enough to affect one’s behavior, even if there are no cues to suggest the agent’s presence. However, it is important to note that participants in the ghost condition were told that the supernatural agent had been previously detected in that testing room. In other words, it may not be enough to simply believe in a supernatural agent, but rather the agent must have the capability of watching you at the exact time you are tempted to behave antisocially. Therefore, for religious supernatural agents to be effective deterrents of cheating or free-riding, there are particular characteristics that they should possess, which are described in what follows. When groups are too large to ensure proper social monitoring by members to reduce feelings of anonymity, supernatural agents can act as a powerful substitute, provided that these supernatural agents have particular qualities (see Bourrat & Viciana, this volume). For instance, belief in an omniscient and omnipresent agent could lead individuals to believe that they are being watched at any time and that any instances of cheating or freeriding could be detected. Furthermore, this agent should not only be interested in the moral behavior of humans, but also be able and willing to punish humans for moral transgressions (Shariff,  2008). The God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam meets these criteria, and as Sanderson (2008) notes: in 2250 bce there were [estimated] only 8 cities in the world with a population of about 30,000, or a total urban population of about 240,000. By 650 bce, there may have been some 20 cities ranging in population from 30,000 to 120,000, with a total urban population of approximately 1 million. . . . And 62 percent of the population of these cities in 650 bce lived in or around the very small region that produced both Judaism and Christianity. (p. 71)

Further support for the notion that supernatural agents with particular qualities are selected for to combat free-riding is provided by Roes and Raymond (2003), who analyzed 167 societies from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCC) in terms of whether they adhered to a belief in “a spiritual being who is believed to have created all reality

and/or to be its ultimate governor,” and whether this being is “present, active, and specifically supportive of human morality” (p. 129). Roes and Raymond refer to a being with these qualities as a moralizing god, and they found a significant positive correlation between society size and belief in such a god. Given the logical relationship between society size and the potential for free-riding, these results are consistent with the idea that, ultimately, moralizing gods serve the adaptive purpose of minimizing the threat of free-riding. Snarey (1996, as cited in Norenzayan & Shariff,  2008) provides additional support for this conclusion by demonstrating that when controlling for society size, moralizing gods are more common in societies with high water scarcity, which is a factor that would increase the potential societal costs associated with free-riding. Norenzayan and Shariff (2008) summarize the results of this study and the study by Roes and Raymond (2003) by stating that “The cross-cultural evidence suggests that moralizing gods are culturally stabilized when freeloading is more prevalent or particularly detrimental to group stability” (p. 62). Finally, although the studies by Snarey (1996) and Roes and Raymond (2003) demonstrate the importance of belief in moralizing gods for deterring free-riding by relying on results obtained at the societal level, a recent study by Atkinson and Bourrat (2011) provides additional cross-cultural support for this hypothesis at the individual level. Using the World Values Survey—specifically, responses to questions about belief in God and the justifiability of 14 moral transgressions—they showed that belief in God uniquely and significantly predicts the unjustifiability of moral transgressions, with stronger belief in God associated with stronger belief in the unjustifiability of all 14 moral transgressions. Furthermore, they found that among those who believe in God, those who believe in a personal God (who is even more likely to be viewed as a moralizing agent) have an even stronger belief in the unjustifiability of all 14 moral transgressions. Finally, they found that belief in a personal God significantly predicted belief in the unjustifiability of 11 of the 14 moral transgressions when controlling for religious participation, religious denomination, country, and level of education. Taken together, the results of this and previous studies mentioned here suggest that the emergence of supernatural agents with particular qualities, especially an interest in the moral behavior of humans and the ability to keep a watchful eye over them, served

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the adaptive purpose of facilitating cooperation in groups that have the potential for free-riding, even if beliefs in supernatural agents in general did not originate to solve any adaptive problem (see Teehan, this volume, for further discussion of the evolution of religion and morality). However, it is not just religious beliefs that researchers argue have been under selective pressure, but religious behaviors as well. As described earlier, it seems plausible that at least some forms of religious ritualized behavior emerged as a byproduct of reinforcement learning. With some religious rituals likely already established before group sizes began to expand, another opportunity to reduce the possibility of free-riding and facilitate in-group prosocial behavior existed, as these rituals could be shaped into reliable signals of commitment to the group, thereby indicating that one is not likely to be a free-rider. In order for religious behaviors to be reliable signals of commitment, they must be hard to fake, and one way to achieve this is to make the behaviors costly. The idea of religious rituals as costly signals of commitment was originally proposed by Irons (2001) and expanded on by Sosis (2003). The logic behind this idea is that if someone is willing to perform costly behaviors (e.g., elaborate, timeconsuming, and energy-consuming religious rituals) to be part of a group, the other members of the group can safely assume this person is not a freerider, since they are already paying costs to be a member. A more specific proximate mechanism through which this process may work is cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1956, 1957). Religious rituals not only signal that one is willing to pay the costs necessary to be a part of the group, but also that they share the same beliefs and values of other group members. If one does not share these beliefs, but nevertheless engages in costly behaviors associated with the particular religion, they will likely experience cognitive dissonance because their ­ thoughts and actions are incongruent. One option would be to stop engaging in the behaviors, but this is not an option if one still wants to be part of the group. Therefore, cognitive dissonance will be reduced by changing one’s thoughts to be in line with one’s behaviors; in other words, costly religious rituals signal that one has the same religious beliefs as others, and as such should be trusted as a fellow member of the group (Sosis,  2003). Of course, group members need not be aware of any of the logic underlying costly signals but should simply be more likely to accept someone as a member of their group if they display such signals. 10

In recent years, empirical support for the idea of religious behaviors serving as a costly signal of commitment has begun to accumulate. For example, a study by Soler (2008) examined followers of Candomblé, a religion in Brazil that arose out of a mix of faiths introduced by African slaves in the 19th century. The participants in the study came from 13 different terreiros, or houses of worship. Most important for the purposes of this study is the fact that costly displays are an important component of Candomblé. As Soler (2008) describes: Communication with the supernatural occurs through various rituals, including elaborate feasts during which the orixás [deities that are directly involved in human affairs] possess the faithful in a music-induced trance. Feasts consume a large proportion of the terreiro’s income and require the coordination and cooperation of all members. . . . A devotee of Candomblé must also follow an exacting regime that includes proscriptions on food, dress, and codes of behavior related to terreiro hierarchy. (p. 168, italics in original)

Using a 14-item 7-point Likert scale survey of religious commitment and participation in a publicgoods economic game, Soler (2008) investigated how much of an initial $10 participants were willing to invest in the group. The more money that is donated, the more money everyone in the group receives, but individuals who do not donate can benefit the most by free-riding. The results of this experiment indicated that religious commitment was a significant predictor of donation amount, with those who scored higher on the commitment scale (e.g., those who participated the most often in terreiro feasts) donating significantly more money than those with lower commitment scores. Furthermore, when a factor analysis performed on the results of the commitment scale indicated a “group commitment subscale” (e.g., “I have never missed a feast in my terreiro”) and a “personal commitment subscale” (e.g., “There are certain foods I do not eat because of my orixá”), a regression analysis indicated that only group commitment predicted donation amounts. This is consistent with the costly signaling hypothesis, because group commitment behaviors are those that can be more easily monitored by others, thereby serving as more reliable signals than personal commitment behaviors. Additional support for the costly signaling hypothesis can be found in a study by Ruffle and Sosis (2007). This study examined religious rituals and in-group cooperative behavior in several Israeli

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kibbutzim, which are essentially modern communes that were originally conceived as “small collective farming settlement[s] in which members based their social and cultural lives on the collective ownership of property and wealth” (Ruffle & Sosis,  2007, p. 3). Although kibbutzim have changed from focusing on farming to being involved in a wide range of industries, religious kibbutzim have maintained an equal distribution of income among all members regardless of their profession, which generates a “tragedy of the commons” problem that must be avoided by a high degree of cooperation and self-restraint. Most secular kibbutzim, on the other hand, have abandoned the practice of equally distributing wealth among their members. By using a matched-pairs design, in which seven religious kibbutzim were each matched with one or more secular kibbutzim in terms of population size, year of establishment, degree of economic success, and degree of privatization, Ruffle and Sosis (2007) were able to compare cooperative behavior between religious and secular kibbutzim. They developed a two-player economic game in which anonymous participants are asked how much of a shared pot of 100 shekels they want to keep for themselves. They are told that if the amount chosen by both participants is greater than 100, they both will receive nothing, but whatever money, if any, is left over after they have made their choices will be multiplied by 1.5 and equally distributed to both of them. Therefore, greater cooperative behavior is demonstrated by taking fewer shekels initially. As predicted, members of religious kibbutzim demonstrated significantly greater cooperative behavior than members of secular kibbutzim, claiming on average 10 shekels fewer than secularists. In addition to comparing members of religious and secular kibbutzim, Ruffle and Sosis (2007) also compared the cooperative behavior of men and women within religious kibbutzim. In religious kibbutzim, even though both men and women engage in many costly religious behaviors, the costly behaviors required of men are generally more publicly oriented. For example, men must engage in public prayer three times daily, which requires roughly two hours every day (and up to 3.5 hours on the Sabbath). Women are not required to engage in this behavior, and even women who do wish to participate are separated from the men during the prayer and are not viewed as being a part of the ritual. Conversely, the rituals that women are exclusively required to engage in, namely the “laws of family

purity” (Ruffle & Sosis,  2007, p. 5), are not performed publicly. Ruffle and Sosis therefore predicted, and found, that religious men were significantly more cooperative in the economic game than religious women, claiming 29.9 shekels on average, while women claimed 33.7 shekels. Furthermore, among religious men, those who attend synagogue daily claimed an average of 27.2 shekels, while those who do not attend daily claimed 33.1 shekels, indicating that the more frequently men engage in public rituals, the more cooperative they are likely to behave. Finally, another study that supports the costly signaling hypothesis—but also suggests an important caveat—was conducted by Sosis and Bressler (2003). They analyzed the longevity of 83 (30 religious and 53 secular) 19th-century US communes and determined the degree of costly signaling in each by gathering data on the presence or absence of 22 costly requirements or constraints (e.g., constraints on certain foods and beverages, constraints on technology use or other material items, particular clothing or hairstyle requirements, fasting requirements, etc.). They found that secular communes were three times more likely to dissolve in a given year than religious communes, and that religious communes imposed twice as many constraints or requirements on their members compared to secular communes. In general, the number of costly requirements was found to be strongly positively correlated with commune longevity. However, this effect was found to be produced exclusively by religious communes. In other words, the number of costly requirements imposed on secular communes did not have any impact on their longevity. This is partially explained by the fact that secular communes had fewer costly requirements on average than religious communes, but even secular communes with a greater number of costly requirements than most reaped no benefit to their longevity as a result of this. This suggests, as Sosis and Bressler (2003) note, that “costliness is not the only feature of rituals that enable them to promote solidarity” (p. 227). They suggest that “the shortcoming of the costly signaling theory of religion . . . is [the] failure to capture some critical elements of religious belief that distinguish it from belief in a secular ideology” (p. 227). But what might this element—or elements—be? One possible answer to this question requires a revision to the costly signaling hypothesis by acknowledging that what matters most is not whether a signal of commitment is costly, but whether it is

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hard to fake. Costly behaviors are certainly an important category of hard-to-fake signals of commitment, but another reliable signal may be emotional displays. Emotions are processed outside of the neocortex and are, therefore, largely outside of conscious control (Ramachandran,  1997), making it difficult to generate false emotions or to hide genuine emotions (Pinker,  1997). Other important qualities of emotions are that they are easy to perceive in others and often provide accurate information about an individual’s motivational state (Bulbulia, 2004, 2008). Emotional signals may not be perfect and can be faked to some extent, but as Bulbulia (2008) reminds us, “we have seen that selection can work with imperfect materials, if their average benefits exceed their average costs” (p. 156). Even if emotions represent hard-to-fake signals, how does this help to explain the results of Sosis and Bressler (2003)? Shouldn’t members of secular communes have the same ability to express emotions as members of religious communes? Certainly, but the key difference, or “critical element” that Sosis and Bressler eluded to, may be that religions have the ability to elicit strong emotional states. According to Bulbulia (2004), some examples of emotions elicited by religious beliefs include, but are not limited to, “hard to fake expressions of gratitude, shrinking before great authority, maternal and filial piety, fear of reprisal, hopeful expectation, [and] sibling love for co-religionists” (p. 28). Furthermore, religious rituals in particular are often capable of eliciting high physiological arousal (Schloss,  2008; Xygalatas,  2008). Although this specific hypothesis has yet to be tested directly, it may be that religious societies are successful because both costly rituals and strongly elicited emotional displays interact synergistically to create even stronger signals of commitment than either type of signal in isolation, thereby explaining why the religious communes analyzed by Sosis and Bressler were more successful than secular communes. Another adaptationist account that some researchers have recently proffered is that certain religious beliefs serve an adaptive purpose as a result of being molded by sexual selection (Pyysiäinen, 2008; Slone, 2008; Sela & Barbaro, this volume; Weeden, Kurzban, & Kenrick, this volume). This idea is based primarily on the handicap principle (Zahavi & Zahavi,  1997), which can be viewed as a more specific version of costly-signaling theory. The handicap principle states that traits that are costly to develop and maintain can be used as signals of high mate quality, because one must be of high quality to 12

survive and thrive in spite of these “handicaps.” A common example is the peacock’s tail, which requires a large store of biological resources to develop and maintain while making it easier to be spotted by predators and more difficult to escape predators due to its burdensome size and extravagant color. In short, if a peacock can develop and maintain a large tail and still survive, this indicates the peacock has “good genes,” and as such peahens have evolved a preference for peacocks with the largest tails. Applying the handicap principle to religious beliefs, Pyysiäinen (2008) argues that ritual behaviors, which may have emerged for other reasons (as discussed earlier in this chapter), were “seized” by sexual selection as signals of mate quality. For example, “Men who could dance longer than others, who sacrificed more than their competitors, or who could memorize longer and more elaborate narratives, excited the interest of females, which meant a better reproductive success for these males” (Pyysiäinen, 2008, p. 177). Slone (2008) focuses less on religious beliefs and behaviors that may be “handicaps” and more on how they might signal qualities that are desired in potential mates. Based on research conducted by Buss and colleagues (see Buss, 2003, for a review), women tend to be particularly interested in longterm mates who can be relied on and display a willingness to provide for them and their offspring. Slone argues that: By being committed to a religious system (as evidenced by being willing to engage in its costly and apparently useless behaviors) and its ethical demands, which typically includes prohibitions against selfish, anti-social behavior, a man signals that he possesses the types of characteristics that a woman would find desirable. (p. 183)

In other words, in addition to costly religious displays signaling mate quality via the handicap principle (i.e., signaling good genes), the specific costly displays often expressed in a religion may offer additional information about whether one has desired mate qualities. These sexual selection hypotheses of religion (Pyysiäinen, 2008; Slone, 2008) represent another example of how specific religious beliefs and behaviors may have been shaped into their present forms because of selection pressures to solve particular adaptive problems. Finally, another component of religion—as defined by Atran (2002)—that has yet to be discussed but may be explained with an adaptationist account is “a central focus of supernatural agents on dealing

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with people’s existential anxieties (death, disease, catastrophe, pain, loneliness, injustice, want, loss, etc.)” (p. 13). In attempting to understand how and why this component of religion emerged, it is useful to begin by determining what most, if not all, of the phenomena labeled as “existential anxieties” have in common. One possibility is that they refer to events or states that can be characterized by a lack of personal control, and religious beliefs may serve the adaptive function of reducing the anxiety associated with lack of control (see Liddle, this volume). Several studies, using a variety of methodologies and addressing different levels of analysis, have provided empirical support for the compensatory effect religiosity has on an individual’s perceived lack of control. For example, a series of studies by Kay and colleagues (Kay, Gaucher, McGregor, & Nash,  2009; Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin,  2008; Kay, Moscovitch, & Laurin,  2010; Kay, Shepherd, Blatz, Chua, & Galinsky, 2010; Kay, Whitson, Gaucher, & Galinsky, 2009) indicate that when an individual’s feeling of personal control is decreased through experimental manipulations (e.g., asking participants to remember events from their life that they had no control over), the reported strength of belief in a personal God increases. Additionally, a study by Norenzayan and Atran (2004) demonstrated that inducing mortality salience—death being an inevitability that we have no control over—resulted in higher self-reported religiosity, particular belief in a personal God and supernatural intervention (i.e., external sources of control). Finally, societal level support for the idea that religiosity serves as compensation against the feeling of lack of control comes from a series of analyses by Norris and Inglehart (2004), as well as studies by Paul (2005,  2009) and Rees (2009), which have documented that as indicators of societal insecurity (e.g., economic inequality, lack of access to healthcare and education, crime, high infant mortality rates—all factors that could increase an individual’s feeling of lack of control) increase, religiosity increases (see Liddle, this volume). Importantly, these results also indicate that societies with the lowest levels of societal insecurity are also the most secular, a conclusion further supported by a series of informal interviews conducted by Zuckerman (2008), who found that many people in Denmark and Sweden (i.e., nations with very low levels of societal insecurity) apparently have little interest in or need for religion. This suggests that compensatory control is an adaptive function

of religious beliefs, because these beliefs seem to lose their appeal when this function is no longer required.

Religious Beliefs as Memes

The byproduct and adaptationist accounts discussed thus far provide a great deal of information for explaining some of the fundamental components of religion, but they do not explain why some religious worldviews are restricted to a small part of the world while others have spread to many societies. One controversial, but potentially useful, concept for explaining this is memetics. The term “meme” was coined by Dawkins (1976), who suggested that “units” of cultural transmission could be thought of as subject to the same rules of natural selection as genes. In other words, “Ideas can be thought of as competing with one another for residence in the minds of people, and those ideas that are most successful at being remembered will survive, get passed on and possibly change (i.e., evolve) over time” (Liddle, Bush, & Shackelford, 2011, p. 187). This concept has been expanded by several authors (Blackmore,  1999; Brodie,  2009, as cited in Liddle et al., 2011; see also Dennett, 2006, for a discussion of memetics in reference to religion) but remains controversial due to the speculative nature of memetics. Importantly, the theory of memetics moves the focus of fitness from the individuals holding the ideas to the ideas themselves. In terms of religion, this suggests that particular religious beliefs may survive and evolve independently of their effects on the fitness of humans, even if they are ultimately detrimental to human fitness. Memes are capable of being either symbiotic, parasitic, or neutral with respect to the fitness of their “hosts.” However, as with the byproduct and adaptationist arguments of religion discussed earlier, it is best not to apply this logic to religion as a whole. In other words, rather than saying, for example, that religion in general is a parasitic meme, flourishing at the expense of human fitness, it makes more sense to discuss whether particular religious beliefs and behaviors are parasitic (or symbiotic or neutral). For example, the adaptationist arguments discussed earlier suggest that belief in a moralizing god may be a symbiotic meme, because it benefits its hosts by facilitating in-group cooperative behavior, and one can look to Christianity and Islam to see how successful this meme has been at spreading around the world. However, this does not mean that all of the beliefs and behaviors associated with Christianity

An Introduction to Evo lutionary Perspectives on Religion

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and Islam are symbiotic memes. Therefore, applying memetics to religion would require an examination of specific beliefs and behaviors, rather than examining the transmission of an organized religion as a whole. Research by Fincher and Thornhill (2008) provides an interesting account of religious diversity that can be interpreted within a memetic perspective. Using data on the total number of religions in each of 219 countries/territories, and the pathogen prevalence of these regions, they predicted and found that religious diversity was strongly positively associated with pathogen prevalence. This is presumably because pathogen-rich environments increase the potential costs associated with interacting with neighboring societies (e.g., exposure to pathogens to which one has not evolved immunity), and so humans living in such environments have evolved predispositions that minimize intergroup contact (e.g., collectivist attitudes and xenophobia). Liddle et al. (2011) describe how these findings may be understood in terms of memetics: If high pathogen stress limits contact between groups, there is less direct competition between different religious beliefs, which means that these different beliefs will continue to survive. Conversely, low pathogen stress translates into greater cultural transmission, which leads to competition between beliefs, and only the “fittest” beliefs survive. (p. 187)

Despite its speculative nature, memetics provides a unique evolutionary perspective on religion that may be useful in explaining the spread of particular religious beliefs and behaviors around the world. More specifically, the “pathogen-stress” model mentioned earlier (see Terrizzi & Shook, this volume, for further discussion) provides a compelling account of differing levels of religiosity internationally and a key factor that may have influenced the spread of religious beliefs throughout history.

Conclusion

The usefulness of applying evolutionary theory to explaining religion was noted by Darwin (2006/1871) himself, who reasoned that: As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally have craved to understand what was passing around him, and have vaguely speculated on his own existence. (p. 815)

14

In recent years, evolutionary psychologists have begun to demonstrate how evolutionary theory can aid in our understanding of both the origin of religious beliefs and behaviors and the possible functions that they may have evolved to serve. A coherent picture of religion begins to emerge when several byproduct and adaptationist accounts are integrated together. Beginning with a reasonable definition of religion provided by Atran (2002), an evolutionary perspective can provide explanations for what are arguably important components of nearly all religions. Belief in supernatural agency may have emerged as a result of hyperactive agency detection, the belief in mind-body dualism, and susceptibility to MCIs. These supernatural agent concepts then evolved to include certain characteristics that made them suitable for partially solving the adaptive problem of free-riding in large groups. Religious rituals may have emerged as a result of human perceptions of causality and the neurological nature of reinforcement learning, as well as their impact on group cohesion via synchronized activities (see Rossano & Vandewalle, this volume). These rituals then evolved to become more elaborate, more difficult to fake, in some cases costly, and in some cases capable of eliciting strong emotional reactions. All of these qualities serve the adaptive purpose of signaling commitment to the group, thereby reducing the possibility that an individual who engages in these behaviors is a free-rider. Costly displays in particular may also have been sexually selected, in that they satisfy the handicap principle (see Weeden et al., this volume, for further consideration of sexual selection’s role in religiosity). Finally, religious beliefs may function to reduce existential anxiety by serving as a potent source of compensatory control, such that when an individual’s feeling of personal control is reduced, whether by events in life, insecurity in the environment, or mortality salience, the resulting anxiety is diminished by adhering to particular religious beliefs, such as belief in a personal god. The description and explanation of religion provided here is by no means complete. Such a complex topic needs to continue to be analyzed from a variety of perspectives. This chapter has hopefully provided a convincing argument that an evolutionary psychological perspective has much to offer to the study of religion and will likely continue to aid in our understanding of religion in the years to come—an argument further strengthened by the remainder of this handbook.

James R. Liddle, Todd K. Shacke l f ord

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2

CH A PTE R

Mickey, Yahweh, and Zeus Why Cultural Learning Is Essential for the Evolutionary Study of Religion

Will M. Gervais

Abstract Religions are complex and multifaceted. People engaged in the scientific study of religion may explore a diverse range of topics, ranging from supernatural agent beliefs to ritual practices to rites of passage to notions of eschatology and the afterlife. Recent decades have seen a flourishing of evolutionary theorizing on religion. This chapter poses six key questions for emerging theories, focusing on (1) the ubiquity of supernatural agent concepts across cultures, (2) the cross-cultural recurrence of common supernatural agent themes, (3) the fact that most people believe in only a select few mentally representable supernatural agents, (4) the fact that people tend to only believe in a subset of the gods currently worshiped worldwide, (5) the existence of atheists, and (6) the cultural success of some specific religions. I argue that modern approach es to cultural transmission and gene-culture coevolution are necessary components of any comprehensive evolutionary account of religion. Key Words: religion, atheism, cultural transmission, evolution, gene-culture coevolution, cognition

Of Mickey and Mithra: Why Cultural Learning Is Essential for the Evolutionary Study of Religion

Homo sapiens is a religious species. Around the globe and throughout history, most people have believed in supernatural agents of one sort or another. Some gods are powerful, others meek. Some gods punish wrongdoers and reward the good, others are fickle and morally unconcerned. Some gods are described as infinitely powerful, others have skillsets that are much more pedestrian. Some gods are glorious, others mundane. In the past several decades, researchers have begun to fruitfully explore the evolutionary and cognitive foundations of religious belief, including belief in supernatural agents. After all, many aspects of religion are initially puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. As far as we know, religion is both universally and uniquely human; religion presents a further puzzle because it often requires costly commitments from its adherents (Atran & 18

Henrich, 2010; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Boyer,  2001). Why would natural selection preserve costly behaviors that serve no apparent corporeal function? We know of no other animal species that organize their social lives out of a sense of commitment to supernatural agents. To illustrate these puzzles, imagine a pride of lions or a charm of hummingbirds engaged in communal ritual prayer, or willingly puncturing their own flesh (à la Thaipusam) to signal their commitment to their maned or winged gods. This chapter poses a series of questions central to any evolutionary study of religion. I argue that modern approaches to cultural transmission and gene-culture coevolution are necessary components of any comprehensive evolutionary account of religion. Along the way, I also highlight the utility of some previous approaches to the evolution of religion and discuss ways in which the present model may complement existing scholarship in the field. The past few decades have brought parallel advances

in evolutionary psychology, gene-culture coevolution, and the cognitive science of religion. By drawing heavily on all three perspectives, I hope to present a relatively unified framework for understanding how religion works. To begin, however, it is worth considering the types of questions that a proper evolutionary accounting of religion must answer.

Six Questions

Religions are complex and multifaceted. People engaged in the scientific study of religion may explore a diverse range of topics, ranging from supernatural agent beliefs to ritual practices to rites of passage to notions of eschatology and the afterlife. In the present chapter, I focus primarily on people’s beliefs about supernatural agents and consider why people believe (or not) in gods, from an evolutionary perspective. Specifically, I propose that any comprehensive evolutionary model of religious belief needs to answer (at least) the following six questions: 1.  What explains the cross-cultural ubiquity of supernatural agent concepts? 2.  Why do the gods of different religions seem to have so much in common? 3.  Why do people believe in only a small subset of the supernatural agents they can imagine? 4.  Why do individual believers believe in only a small subset of the gods that are worshiped worldwide? 5.  Why do some people not believe in any gods? 6.  Why are some types of gods more popular than others today? I. Ubiquity. All known cultures have endorsed the existence of supernatural agents to at least some degree. This implies that, on some level, belief in gods and other supernatural agents is a core feature of human nature. Which cultural and evolutionary forces might have shaped human cognition such that supernatural agent concepts are easy to entertain? II. Commonality. At a superficial level, gods worldwide appear a heterogeneous bunch. Ganesh has the head of an elephant. Papa Gede enjoys cigars, apples, and escorting souls to the afterlife. Loki is a trickster. Yahweh is a universal presence. Many ancestor gods rarely travel outside of a given village. Despite this apparent variety, gods worldwide tend to have a lot in common. Specifically, they all tend to be moreor-less anthropomorphic intentional agents, with goals and attitudes that are largely similar to those of

humans. Why should seemingly diverse gods nonetheless be represented similarly at a deeper cognitive level? III. Gods versus fairy tales. People are able to entertain countless representations of supernatural agents. For example, at my desk right now, I can easily call to mind agents such as Mickey Mouse, Count Chocula, Gandalf the Grey, and Santa Claus. Yet, despite all of these agents sharing similar cognitive representations as widely worshiped gods, no adults (presumably) believe that they actually exist. Why is it that only a vast minority of all the supernatural agents that people can mentally represent actually invite belief in their existence? IV. My gods versus your gods. Not all mentally represented supernatural agents come to recruit belief. At the same time, most people tend to believe in only one or a handful of the “successful” gods that have ever been, or currently are, believed in. For example, believers in Yahweh tend not to also believe in Zeus, even if they come to learn that others believe in Zeus. Why do people only come to believe in a tiny subset of the gods with content that is appropriate for belief? V. Atheists. While most people believe in god(s), there might be nearly a billion people on earth who claim to not believe in any gods (Zuckerman, 2007). Thus, there are myriad gods with the requisite content to inspire belief, and many of them still inspire widespread belief today. Yet, many people believe in none of them. If religious belief is a recurrent part of human nature, why are there atheists? VI. Currently successful gods. People around the world have believed in the existence of a vast number of gods. However, not all gods are equally successful. Currently, the most successful gods— success being gauged in terms of the numbers of people who believe in them—tend to share a number of common features. Why do some gods win and others lose? A comprehensive account of human nature needs to also explain religious belief. At the same time, any comprehensive account of religious belief needs to explain not only the universal aspects of belief, but also patterns of variability in belief. Although these six questions are by no means exhaustive, they provide a good starting point for exploring the evolution of religious belief. Any evolutionary account of religion that cannot answer these questions is necessarily incomplete. At the same time, I will argue that— given existing evidence—the most successful evolutionary accounts of religious belief draw heavily upon Mickey, Yahweh, and Zeus

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insights from cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolutionary theory. The chapter begins with a brief overview of a few different and prominent evolutionary models of evolution, including their respective strengths and weaknesses. Second, I provide a brief overview of contemporary scholarship on how cultures evolve, based on evolved cognitive adaptations for acquiring and transmitting cultural information. Third, I outline an approach to the evolution of religion that acknowledges insights from byproduct and adaptationist perspectives while also enthusiastically incorporating cultural evolution. Fourth, I explore the degree to which this integrated account can successfully answer these six fundamental questions. Finally, I close with some speculation about the future of religious belief.

Byproducts and Adaptations: Early Evolutionary Approaches to Religion

Psychological and other social scientific interest in religion has waxed and waned repeatedly over the past century or so. Yet, beginning in the latter decades of the 20th century, steady research programs emerged, attempting to explain the evolutionary origins of religious belief. In particular, approaches viewing religion as either an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations (Atran & Norenzayan,  2004; Barrett,  2000,  2004; Boyer, 2001, 2003) or as an evolved adaptation in its own right (Bering & Bjorklund, 2004; Bering, McLeod, & Shackelford,  2005; Johnson & Krüger, 2004) began to tackle the universality of religion. Both approaches have yielded impressive insights and have helped transform religion from a scientific mystery to a tractable scientific problem (Atran & Norenzayan,  2004). Further, both approaches continue to inspire new empirical explorations of religion. Both byproduct and adaptationist approaches to religion have proven scientifically successful, continuing to permeate scholarship in the area (as evident in, for example, this volume!). Both approaches are heterogeneous, and the brief overviews of both that follow are not intended to gloss over important and subtle differences existing within each approach.

Religion-as-Byproduct

Across religions, supernatural agent beliefs share a number of recurrent features. One possible cause for this convergence is that successful religions stem from, and are good at interfacing with, ordinary social cognition (Barrett, 2000; Boyer, 2003, 2008; Gervais, 2013b). For example, humans have a number 20

Will M. Gervais

of reliably developing intuitions about agency and purpose (Kelemen, 2004; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009). Given our evolved minds, some concepts will be more emotionally evocative, memorable, and transmittable, aiding in their persistence across generations. One vivid illustration of this in a nonreligious domain concerns etiquette norms: Over centuries, etiquette norms evoking core disgust tend to remain, while others pass as fickle fads (Nichols, 2002). The supernatural agents common across religious traditions tend to be largely anthropomorphic, yet also distinctly nonhuman in other ways (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Gervais, 2013b). That is, they only mildly violate our ontological assumptions derived from folk physics, folk biology, and folk psychology (Boyer, 2001, 2003). Critically, this minimal counterintuitiveness reliably yields more memorable concepts (Boyer & Ramble,  2001; Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, & Schaller, 2006). In other words, minimal counterintuitiveness is one content-based learning bias that may help explain the cultural persistence of many supernatural concepts (Boyer & Ramble, 2001). Successful supernatural agents also tend to have largely anthropomorphic psychologies. They are represented as having various beliefs and desires, and people can interact with them to assuage existential concerns (Atran & Norenzayan,  2004; Purzycki,  2013). They are inferentially potent, actionable agents (Boyer, 2001; Purzycki et al., 2012). Similarly, this anthropomorphic psychology may both derive from and trigger ordinary human mind perception (Waytz, Gray, Epley, & Wegner,  2010) and mentalizing faculties (Gervais, 2013b). Walking rocks might interest people, but talking rocks enable relationships. One of the key insights derived from byproduct accounts is that religions may not persist because supernatural concepts are a “special” cognitive category. Rather, they may persist because they are good fits for evolved human cognition. Thus, byproduct accounts have a great deal to say about why (1) some supernatural concepts are more successful than others, and (2) why supernatural concepts from otherwise diverse religious traditions are nonetheless so similar at a deeper cognitive level. In terms of the Key Questions, byproduct accounts most successfully tackle those of Ubiquity (I), Commonality (II), and Success (VI). Yet, byproduct accounts have a tougher time with some of the other questions. The well-known Mickey Mouse problem addresses one challenge for byproduct accounts. Many fictional characters such

as Mickey Mouse are minimally counterintuitive agents with humanlike psychology. Yet nobody believes in them (Question III). Perhaps—although their content is superficially similar to successful gods—some special content ingredients are missing (Barrett, 2008). However, of all the gods with the requisite content to inspire belief, most people only believe in a handful and do not come to believe in any successful god they learn about—the so-called Zeus Problem (Gervais & Henrich, 2010). If content is the answer, why does any individual only believe in so few of the successful gods she learns of (Question IV)? And why do some people believe in none of the successful god concepts they encounter (Question V) (Gervais & Henrich,  2010; Gervais, Willard, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2011a)? Byproduct approaches have been tremendously successful and have inspired a great deal of excellent scholarship. And they provide excellent candidate answers to many of the Key Questions posed in this chapter. At the same time, they leave other Key Questions unaddressed, or only partially addressed.

Religion-as-Adaptation

While byproduct accounts largely arose to answer the questions of ubiquity and commonality of supernatural agents across societies, many adaptationist approaches instead ask why religion persists in the face of its apparently costliness. Adherents to various religions willingly impose harsh and costly restrictions on themselves. Dietary, sexual, and other restrictions are in many ways puzzling: Why forego perfectly nutritious calories or perfectly available reproductive opportunities to appease invisible agents? Perhaps costly elements permeate religions because they actually confer hidden evolutionary benefits. Dominant adaptationist approaches to religion tend to focus on potential cooperative benefits. Group living confers many advantages, but it also quickly breaks down in the face of free-riders (Henrich & Henrich, 2007). Well-functioning cooperative groups quickly erode when parasitic noncooperators infiltrate and reap the rewards of others’ efforts. Many evolutionary mechanisms such as kin selection (Hamilton,  1964) or reciprocal altruism (Trivers,  1971) can explain cooperation in circumscribed situations—among families and repeatedly interacting dyads, respectively—but they all face challenges when explaining cooperation as it scales from small groups to large-scale anonymous societies (Chudek & Henrich,  2011; Henrich,  2004; Henrich & Henrich, 2007).

Before considering whether religions may provide a partial explanation for large-scale human cooperation, it is worth first considering a prevalent alternative evolutionary account. Perhaps it is unnecessary to postulate that religion serves an adapt­ ive cooperative function because accepted evolutionary hypotheses already account for the puzzle of human cooperation. Specifically, it may be that a mismatch between current environments and ancestral environments can explain why humans are often so cooperative, even in anonymous one-off encounters. Current human environments differ markedly from our ancestral environment. In many cases, behavior that would have been adaptive in ancestral environments (e.g., relentlessly pursuing fats, sweets, and salty foods) are problematic in current environments. Thus, mismatches between current and ancestral environments can explain some seemingly puzzling human behavior. Might environmental mismatches help explain large- scale human cooperation? This possibility is superficially plausible. If Homo sapiens’ social and cooperative instincts evolved in an environment in which people pri­ma­ rily lived in small groups of close kin and known allies, perhaps natural selection would have furnished us with social psychologies biased toward relatively indiscriminate altruism. In this environment, boons bestowed on others would be boons bestowed on kith and kin. Thus we may have evolved to treat everyone as we would treat known kin or allies; in a current environment full of anonymous one-shot interactions, our social psychologies may “misfire” and lead us to maladaptively—though fortuitously!—cooperate with strangers, paving the way for large-scale cooperation (Burnham & Johnson, 2005). The superficial plausibility of this “mismatch hypothesis” of large-scale human cooperation, unfortunately, faces a number of conceptual and empirical challenges. These challenges are outlined in detail in other sources (see, e.g., Chudek & Henrich,  2011; Chudek, Zhao, & Henrich,  2013; Henrich, 2004), but a brief description of a few of the key challenges is in order. First, the mismatch hypothesis does not clearly predict actual patterns in human cooperative behavior. A hard interpretation of the mismatch hypothesis would imply that cooperation rates would be highest in conditions that most closely resemble the ancestral environment. Yet, actual cooperation rates among hunter gatherers is itself highly variable from cultural group to cultural group, and is certainly not uniformly Mickey, Yahweh, and Zeus

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higher than rates observed across industrialized societies (Chudek et al.,  2013; Henrich,  2006; ­ Henrich et al., 2005; Henrich et al., 2006). Second, the mismatch hypothesis is not supported by rigorous modeling work. Mathematical models of cooperation (resting on kin selection or reciprocal altruism) do not predict that promiscuous altruism would result in groups consisting largely of kin and allies. Instead, these circumstances would select for more restrictive altruism (Chudek et al., 2013; Henrich & Henrich, 2007). In a large-scale society, a free-rider is someone who can convince strangers to treat her like a cousin or an acquaintance. In the ancestral environment described by the mismatch hypothesis, a free-rider would be someone who can convince acquaintances to treat her like a friend, or a cousin to treat her like a sister. In homogeneous groups of allies and kin, rigorous modeling reveals that selection favors narrowing, rather than broadening, the cooperative circle (Henrich & Henrich,  2007; McElreath & Boyd, 2007). Perhaps most damning, the mismatch hypothesis describes a human social psychology that we know, largely through the work of pioneering evolutionary psychologists, to be false. The mismatch hypothesis absolutely requires a psychology in which, in the domain of cooperation, humans do not differentiate between kin and nonkin, or between allies and outsiders. Yet, human social psychology is keenly attuned to kinship cues in other domains (Daly & Wilson,  1988; Lieberman, Tooby, & Cosmides,  2003), and an evolved coalitional psychology tracking group membership (Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001) emerges early in development (Hamlin, Mahajan, Liberman, & Wynn,  2013; Mahajan & Wynn,  2012) and is a potent driver of social life. Indeed, the human compunction to differentiate in-group from out-group is arguably the most robust finding in the history of social psychology (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Yet, the mismatch hypothesis predicts that in the domain of cooperation, humans are blind to kinship and group membership; in fact, humans keenly track both. Patterns of cooperation worldwide show clear patterns of cultural inheritance (Henrich et al., 2005; Henrich et al., 2006), and religion may have been a key driver of the rapid upscaling of human cooperation over the last 12,000 years (Henrich et al., 2010; Norenzayan et al., 2014). On its own, the mismatch hypothesis appears insufficient to explain large-scale cooperation. However, religious beliefs and behaviors might 22

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serve valuable adaptive functions in cementing large-scale cooperation. Punishment of free-riders can stabilize cooperation (Henrich et al.,  2006), but punishment itself imposes costs on would-be punishers (Henrich, 2004). However, if individuals restrain their selfish impulses for fear of divine retribution (or with expectation of divine rewards), cooperation may stabilize without the need for people to engage in their own costly punishments. Thus, many have proposed that belief in powerful, knowledgeable, and morally concerned gods might have aided in the stabilization of human ­cooperation (Bering & Bjorklund,  2004; Bering et al., 2005; Johnson & Krüger, 2004; Norenzayan et al., 2014). Like belief, religious behavior may serve a cooperative benefit. Willingness to endure religious costs may both signal and promote cooperation. Consistent with this, for example, costly taboos predict the success of religious communes (Sosis & Alcorta,  2003), and both participation in and attendance at costly religious rituals leads to increased prosociality to religious groups (Xygalatas et  al., 2013). Thus, the costliness of religious practices may be a “feature” rather than a “bug,” guaranteeing within-group cooperation among those willing to endure them. Like byproduct accounts, various adaptationist accounts (and they are a heterogeneous lot) have fruitfully explored many previously mysterious features of many religions. Regarding the Key Questions of this chapter, they most directly approach the question of Success (VI). Many gods and practices experience success because they also confer success. Many other Key Questions, however, are left largely unaddressed. Plausibly, the adaptive advantages of morally concerned gods might help answer questions of Ubiquity (I) and Commonality (II). However, questions of belief acquisition (III) or nonbelief (IV) are largely beyond the purview of adaptationist approaches.

Summary

Both byproduct and adaptationist accounts have enjoyed a great deal of success, and helped illuminate previously obscured phenomena. As both approaches arose in response to different aspects of religion, it should come as little surprise that they each enjoy different success at answering each of the six Key Questions. In addition, there is plenty of room for viewing some aspects of religion (such as the mental representation of supernatural agents) as byproducts and others (cooperative benefits) as

adaptations. This suggests that an integrated approach may be fruitful. May I suggest that a third ingredient would further enrich the recipe?

Cultural Evolution

Over the past 30 years (Boyd & Richerson, 1985), researchers have successfully adapted rigorous evolutionary modeling techniques to the study of cultural change. Although the precise details of transmission differ markedly between genetic and cultural evolutionary processes, modeling techniques developed primarily for studying genes can nonetheless still be productively applied to nongenetic transmission and inheritance (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Boyd, Richerson, & Henrich, 2011; Henrich & Boyd,  2002; Henrich, Boyd, & Richerson,  2008). After all, evolution and natural selection fundamentally result from just three key ingredients: (1) variation, (2) inheritance of variation, and (3) differential success among variants. Cultural transmission easily provides all three, and detailed theoretical and empirical work continues to productively explore how learning mechanisms can produce variation, inheritance, and differential success (Boyd & Richerson,  1982,  1985; Henrich & Boyd, 1998, 2002; Henrich et al., 2008; Henrich & McElreath,  2003; McElreath & Boyd,  2007; Richerson & Boyd, 2006). While genetic evolution relies on high-fidelity, particulate inheritance, this does not imply that all forms of evolution have the same requirement (Astuti,  2001; Henrich & Boyd, 2002; Henrich et al., 2008). Much of what people know is learned from others and passed on to others, introducing both variation and a mech­an­ ism of inheritance. And some learned traits (behaviors, beliefs, practices, norms, etc.) are clearly more successful than others. Cultures evolve, and the toolkit of genetic evolution can be adapted to the study of cultural evolution. Decades of work reveal several different learning strategies that can be applied by naïve learners in a given environment (Rendell et al.,  2011). Naïve learners could eschew social learning entirely, and rely solely on trial-and-error and hope to stumble across useful innovations. Alternatively, learners could differentially attend to and adopt cultural practices that are socially transmitted. Within social learning, there are also both content- and contextbased learning biases (Boyd & Richerson,  1985; Rendell et al., 2011) that provide grist for the mill of cumulative cultural evolution. Content-based learning biases produce differential transmission of concepts because of differences

in the concepts themselves and their interaction with human psychology. Emotional evocativeness and minimal counterintuitiveness, as already discussed, represent examples of content-biased transmission. Some concepts are more memorable or more easily transmittable; these concepts are privileged in subsequent transmission. Much early work in the cognitive science of religion focused on these content biases. However, it is possible that the early fascination with content biases may have led some research programs to overlook the perhaps more important role of context (Gervais, Willard, et al., 2011a). People are not passive cultural sponges that simply absorb the “stickiest” concepts they encounter. Rather, learners actively filter information and seek to learn from the best sources of information. From a young age, children display relatively sophisticated critical thinking and pay differential attention to some sources rather than others (Heyman, 2008; Heyman & Legare, 2005). Thus, context-based social learning is central to cultural evolution, and people display a number of highly specific—possibly genetically adapted—learning strategies. While a full accounting of these strategies is beyond the scope of this chapter, many other sources give them a more comprehensive treatment (Chudek, Heller, Birch, & Henrich,  2012; Heyman, 2008; Heyman & Legare, 2005; Jaswal & Neely, 2006). To illustrate the general principles of context-biased learning, consider four independent strategies: kin-biased transmission, conformist transmission, prestige- or success-biased transmission, and credibility enhancing displays. Kin-biased transmission is straightforward: In many (though not all) cases, it may behoove learners to attend to their parents and close relatives. Much important social learning is passed on from parent to offspring, and among family lines more generally. In many cases, we learn from our families. Yet, clearly not all social learning happens within the boundary of the family. We learn from peers, friends, nonrelative leaders, and many others. But who to imitate? Classic research in social psychology (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004) underscores the role of conformity. And conformist learning plays an important role in many formal treatments of cultural evolution (Henrich & Boyd,  1998; Kendal, Giraldeau, & Laland, 2009). When in doubt about who to learn from, it often makes sense to cast a wide net and learn from everyone! If most models are relatively successful, then a naïve cultural learner can gather a lot of information by just observing Mickey, Yahweh, and Zeus

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what lots of others do. Learners may simply copy the majority or may instead take a blending approach, yielding an averaging conformist learning strategy (Rendell et al., 2011). As we shall soon see, conformist transmission can also help stabilize many cultural traits at the group level (Henrich,  2004; Henrich & Boyd,  1998), with important implications for patterns of cultural variation and subsequent selection. Rather than simply learning from everyone, savvy cultural learners may seek to selectively imitate (or emulate) the most successful models in a given context. Thus, success-biased learning can help learners pick up the best information from the best sources (Chudek et al., 2012; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). Oftentimes, it is difficult to directly infer which traits lend success to the successful, so a related strategy—prestige-biased transmission (Henrich & Gil-White,  2001)—can also be important. When in doubt about who is the most successful, it may be useful to figure out who ­everyone else is learning from (Henrich & GilWhite, 2001). Crucially, prestige-biased learning is evident among children, who readily attend to cues of who others attend to (Chudek et al., 2012). Finally, learners must guard against exploitation. Oftentimes, learning is not free, and learners may have to pay a cost for access to (“suck up to”) pres­ tig­ ious models (Henrich & Gil-White,  2001). Furthermore, some models may intentionally deceive others in order to advance their own interests. Imagine a model giving a learner a mushroom and telling her “eat this mushroom, it is delicious and nutritious.” On the one hand, the model may actually hold the belief that the mushroom is worth eating. On the other hand, the model may be trying to poison the learner. Leaners must decipher whether models’ stated beliefs accurately reflect underlying mental states. In this case, it makes sense to let the model’s actions speak for themselves. If the model engages in behaviors that would be costly if he did not actually believe what he claims to, learners can infer that the model is not engaging in deceptive sabotage. On the other hand, if a model refuses to act on proclaimed beliefs, learners should be suspicious. These potentially costly behaviors (costly, that is, if stated beliefs are insincere) are termed credibility enhancing displays (Henrich, 2009) of underlying mental states. In sum, modern approaches to cultural evolution stem from a synthesis of social psychology, developmental psychology, and—most importantly—the adaptation and application of formal models of 24

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social evolution. The rigorous toolkit of cultural evolution has seen continued success for more than 30 years (Boyd & Richerson, 1985) and continues to advance (Boyd et al., 2011). Humans use a toolkit of specific mental adaptations for cultural learning (Rendell et al., 2011), and cultural learning, in turn, plays a central role in human evolution (Boyd et al., 2011). Although both genetic and cultural evolution stem from the same three common ingredients (variation, inheritance, consequences), the transmission details lead to some striking and important differences between genetic and cultural evolution. These differences may be most apparent in the levels of selection at which they are likely to act.

Multilevel Selection and Cultural Group Selection

In principle, selection can act at many levels in the biological hierarchy simultaneously (Dawkins, 2006b; Price, 1970, 1972). Though group selection has been observed in practice (Muir, 1996), and in principle is relatively uncontroversial among theoretical biologists (Queller,  1992), the plausibility of selection actually being an important force at different levels has been a matter of ongoing debate for decades. Prior to the advent of modern evolutionary biology in the 1960s and 1970s, naïve approaches to the evolution of altruism argued for a form of group selection: Individuals sacrificed themselves “for the good of the species.” In the 1970s, insights on a number of fronts (Dawkins,  2006b; Smith,  1964) cast doubt on this possibility, as selfish individuals could easily invade cooperative groups and outcompete their members. Thus, with the rise of sociobiology (Wilson,  2000) and the gene’s-eye view of evolution (Dawkins, 2006b), many viewed group selection as effectively banished to the wastebin of history and scientific folly (Pinker, 2015). The speed with which mainstream evolutionary biology abandoned any notion of group selectionist thinking may have overshadowed pioneering theoretical work by Price, Wilson, and others (Price, 1970, 1972; Wilson, 1975; Wilson, Van Vugt, & O’Gorman, 2008) showing that group selection was possible under certain constraints—indeed, Price’s work was championed by none other than William Hamilton (Harman, 2010). Perhaps it was his unusual modeling formulation or personality that led to Price’s work being overlooked (Harman,  2010), perhaps not. But nonetheless, group selection remained exiled by “right-minded” evolutionists for decades, even though the fundamentals of Price’s mathematical formulation remain

largely uncontested among theoretical biologists (Queller,  1992; see also D.  S.  Wilson,  2015, Queller, 2015, and Henrich, 2015 for commentaries on Pinker’s [2015] argument.). Price partitioned evolution into different components acting at different levels. Whether or not a trait spread depended on selection among variation operating across levels. Traits such as selfishness would be advantageous at the individual level, but detrimental to group functioning. But for selection to operate at any given level, variation must also be present. This, crucially, may limit the applicability to genetic group selection, as even tiny amounts of migration between groups quickly drive betweengroup genetic variability to zero. Thus, while group selection is in principle possible (groups of only cooperators would outcompete groups of Machiavellian manipulators), it is unlikely in practice (groups of only cooperators cannot repel or expel invading manipulators). The primary obstacle to group selection is not theoretical intractability; it is the practical issue of maintaining stable between-group variability (Henrich, 2004). This problem is more easily overcome in the case of cultural evolution. Learned traits will vary at the level of the individual, and different traits can be differentially successful. But, crucially, cultural learning mechanisms like conformist transmission and punishment of nonconformists can help stabilize between-group variability, providing fodder for between-group cultural selection (Henrich & Boyd,  1998; Henrich & Henrich,  2007). Migrants can change their beliefs and adopt new norms, assimilating into their host groups. As a result, cultural group selection may have played an important role in human evolution (Boyd et al., 2011; Diamond, 1999; Norenzayan et al.,  2014; Wilson,  2010). To foreshadow, religion provides many examples of largely stable between-group variability with differential success for different cultural groups (Norenzayan, 2013).

Learning to Believe: Religious Belief and Cultural Evolution

Cumulative cultural evolution may be one of the central tricks that helped Homo sapiens become this planet’s dominant species. Without culture, human evolution makes little sense (Chudek & Henrich, 2011; Henrich & Henrich, 2007; Henrich & McElreath,  2003; Richerson & Boyd,  2006). How, then, might evolved capacities for cultural learning help explain religion? It is possible to sketch an integrated model of religion that draws on insights from evolutionary

biology, psychology, and cultural evolution. This model incorporates insights derived from both existing byproduct and adaptationist approaches to religious belief, and uses the logic of cumulative cultural evolution to build on them. Like extant byproduct approaches, I recognize that memory and transmission-based content biases can help some concepts spread and gain popularity; unlike these approaches, however, I posit that contextbiased learning is necessary to move from mental representation to belief (Geertz & Markússon, 2010; Gervais & Henrich, 2010; Gervais, Willard, et al., 2011a). Further, like many adaptationist approaches, I recognize that many religious beliefs and practices promote cooperation and other group-beneficial outcomes; yet, I posit that these beliefs and practices are themselves transmitted and highly variable across groups, as are their consequences (Astuti,  2001; Henrich et al.,  2005; Henrich & Henrich, 2007; Henrich et al., 2006). Thus, an integrated cultural evolutionary model can both explain and offer hypotheses at all stages of the evolution of religion, from basic questions of representation and belief to more complicated questions of which religions flourish.

Mental Representation and Content Biases

Byproduct accounts provide a number of ­intriguing insights about why the supernatural agents endemic to world religions tend to share so many features: In a nutshell, these features make such supernatural concepts more memorable and interesting (Boyer & Ramble, 2001; Norenzayan et al., 2006). All the posited gods who lacked such enticing content were likely forgotten long ago, without ever recruiting successful transmission (Barrett,  2008). In other words, any posited god may enjoy a small amount of success. But any that are not sufficiently evocative, memorable, or actionable will—by virtue of insufficient content—fail to be transmitted across individuals and generations. These boring, mundane gods are long (and easily!) forgotten. Content-biased learning helps to explain why some supernatural agents are more successful than others: requisite content will favor the transmission of certain concepts, including supernatural concepts (Barrett,  2008). At the same time, content-biased learning has more to say about mental representation than about belief (Gervais & Henrich, 2010). Mickey Mouse, Yahweh, and Harry Potter are all minimally counterintuitive agents, and minimal counterintuitiveness may explain their popularity; indeed, minimal counterintuition can help explain Mickey, Yahweh, and Zeus

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the popularity of some fairy tales over others (Norenzayan et al., 2006), even though nobody believes them to be true. However, to their adherents, religions are about more than just fairy tales. People believe in their supernatural agents, and are willing to engage in costly behaviors to prove their faith. Content alone seems insufficient to explain patterns of belief.

Belief in Context

Over the past several years, many have suggested that the evolutionary study of religious belief would gain much by incorporating context-based learning strategies (Atran & Henrich,  2010; Geertz & Markússon,  2010; Gervais, Willard, et al.,  2011a; Henrich, 2009; Norenzayan et al., 2014). Most societies on earth consist mostly of religious believers (Inglehart & Norris, 2004), so conformist learning strategies would bolster belief in locally favored deities. Further, kin-biased transmission and prestigebiased learning would also favor the development of religious beliefs. Finally, successful religions often include a variety of costly religious practices, prohibitions, and rituals that give adherents ample opportunity to prove their faith by actions (Henrich, 2009; Xygalatas et al., 2013). Thus, credibility enhancing displays may play a key role in ratcheting up belief. A key testing ground for different approaches to religious cognition focuses on religious disbelief. Byproduct theorists have offered a few speculative accounts of religious disbelief (Barrett,  2000, ­ 2004, 2008; Boyer, 2008). But the present integrative account makes very clear predictions on this front. Learners will come to believe in gods supported by local context-based learning. Thus, ancient Greeks come to believe in Zeus, and rural Kentuckians likely come to believe in Jesus instead. But in the absence of clear contextual cues that others believe in a given god, atheism may be the natural result. Lanman (2012) provided one of the first systematic tests of the role of context-based learning (specifically credibility enhancing displays) in the development of religious disbelief. He found that people who grew up without witnessing clear displays of faith in their surrounding contexts were likely to become atheists. Crucially, even children of believing parents were likely to become atheists if the parents did not sufficiently engage in credibility enhancing displays. Lanman offered a tantalizing two-stage account of the sudden rise of secularism and nonreligion in Western Europe. As secular institutions stabilized and took over many 26

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of the roles often held by religion in society, people maintained their faith, but gradually stopped engaging in more public displays (church attendance, tithing, etc.). To the next generation, there were few contextual cues—backed by credibility enhancing displays of faith—and few people came to hold the supernatural beliefs that their parent generation held but did not act on. Recent archival investigation also lends support to the potent and perhaps necessary role of contextbiased learning in the development of belief and disbelief worldwide. Using World Values Survey data, Gervais and Najle (2015) distilled proxy measures for kin-biased transmission, conformist learning, and credibility enhancing displays and used them to predict both international and individual variability in belief in gods. Using both signal detection theory analyses and multilevel modeling, they found consistent evidence that (1) parental and familial cues represent a potent cue that a learner should (or should not) believe in locally favored gods, and that (2) additional bias to believe comes largely from other community cues (conformist learning and credibility enhancing displays). Children who were raised to be religious and who grew up in countries with churchgoing elders almost universally come to believe in God (or gods); learners growing up without these cues believe at barely-higher-than-chance rates. Even crude proxy measures of context-biased learning exert powerful predictive power in understanding global patterns of belief and disbelief. Finally, cultural evolutionary processes can be powerful tools for understanding why some ­religions thrive and others fail. Recent—and much more thorough—treatments of this question are  available (Norenzayan,  2013; Norenzayan et al., 2014), but a brief sketch is in order. In short, cultural evolutionary forces such as conformist learning help stabilize suites of norms and beliefs in different religious groups. Those who deviate from these norms are often punished or excluded, and migrants can come to adopt a group’s beliefs (typically, this is called “conversion”). Thus, religions can produce stable between-group cultural variation, opening the door for cultural group selection. Those groups with beliefs (Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008; Roes & Raymond, 2003; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2011; Watts et al., 2015) and practices (Sosis & Alcorta, 2003; Xygalatas et al., 2013) that are better able to promote in-group cooperation thrive at the expense of rival groups. Norms regarding reproduction also have clear fitness ­

c­onsequences for cultural groups (Norenzayan et al., 2014). Those beliefs and practices thus spread along with the successful groups that adopt them. As a result, most religious adherents today belong to only a small set of religions (religions that tend not at all to be characteristic of most religions that have ever existed) because these religions include beliefs, norms, and practices that proved successful in between-group cultural competition (Norenzayan et al., 2014).

Can This Integrated Framework Answer the Six Questions? Yes. Here is how.

What Explains the Cross-Cultural Ubiquity of Supernatural Agent Concepts?

The model articulated in this chapter recognizes the centrality of both content- and context-biased learning in cumulative cultural evolution. Byproduct accounts have produced a largely coherent framework for understanding the cognitive mechanisms that make supernatural agent concepts so easy to acquire. The interaction of cultural learning with ordinary mind perception abilities certainly goes a long way in explaining why supernatural agent concepts are so reliably present across cultures. Although neither the present model nor existing byproduct models can do more than speculate about how the first supernatural agent concepts arose, they both can explain why they persist: Simply put, supernatural agent concepts are good fits for evolved human cognition. We did not evolve to entertain supernatural agent concepts, but supernatural agents have the requisite content to recruit attention and processing, making them incredibly successful in cultural evolution.

Why Do the Gods of Different Religions Seem to Have So Much in Common?

Evolved social cognitive processes do not merely provide a substrate for the acquisition of supernatural concepts; they also explain why supernatural agents from diverse cultures have so much in common at a basic cognitive level. Some concepts are better fits for human psychology than others. Those with appropriate content—memorable, emotionally evocative, and so forth—are privileged in cultural learning and transmission. Both religious supernatural concepts and popular folk tales with the right kinds of content will be more successful (Boyer & Ramble,  2001; Norenzayan et al., 2006). Thus, a survey of successful cultural

products (whether religious or not) will yield predictable patterns (Nichols,  2002). The constant winnowing of supernatural concepts through cumulative cultural evolution will guarantee some common themes across successful religions— themes such as anthropomorphism and minimal counterintuitiveness (Atran & Henrich,  2010; Atran & Norenzayan,  2004). In this way, the ­content-biased learning common to both byproduct accounts and the present model converge on the notion that those supernatural concepts with the right content will be more likely to be successful in cultural evolution. In other words, evolved human cognition both facilitates and constrains the contents of successful supernatural agent concepts.

Why Do People Believe in Only a Small Subset of the Supernatural Agents They Can Imagine?

Byproduct accounts are quite successful at predicting which types of supernatural concepts will be popular, well remembered, and transmitted. However, they face a tougher challenge in explaining or predicting patterns of belief (Atran & Henrich, 2010; Gervais & Henrich, 2010; Gervais, Willard, et al., 2011a). Given the numerous successful and popular supernatural agent concepts one could possible mentally represent, what explains why people only believe in a small minority of them? This is the so-called Mickey Mouse problem: There are vastly more supernatural agent concepts with the requisite content for cultural success than there are successful supernatural agent concepts that actually recruit belief. After all, cultural learners (even children!) can mentally represent and reason about supernatural agents without coming to believe in them (Golomb & Galasso, 1995). Here is the point at which the present model diverges from traditional byproduct accounts: It seeks to explicitly include mechanisms for belief acquisition. The combined actions of various context-biased learning strategies (such as kin-biased transmission, conformist learning, and credibility enhancing displays) explain why people come to believe in some agents rather than others (Gervais & Henrich, 2010). People only come to believe in the existence of supernatural agents whose existence is supported by credible testimony (Bergstrom, Moehlmann, & Boyer,  2006; Harris & Koenig,  2006; Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004) and credibility enhancing displays (Gervais & Najle,  2015; Henrich,  2009; Lanman,  2012) in the environment, regardless of Mickey, Yahweh, and Zeus

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content. For example, belief in Santa Claus does not wane through childhood because Santa’s content changes; instead, children cease believing in Santa Claus as soon as context-biased learning no longer supports his existence (Gervais & Henrich,  2010). Many eminently mentally representable and cognitively attractive supernatural agents (e.g., Mickey Mouse, Count Chocula) never garnered visible fealty. As a result, cultural learners never received cues that one ought to believe in them. Content can give many supernatural concepts a leg up in cultural transmission, by being memorable, for example. But this does not fully explain why so many popular supernatural agents, folk tales, and works of fiction do not inspire belief.

Why Do Individual Believers Believe in Only a Small Subset of the Gods That Are Worshiped Worldwide?

If belief in supernatural agents is solely driven by representational content biases, a peculiar prediction seems reasonable: People should come to believe in the existence of any supernatural agents with the right content. However, this is not the case. Clearly the gods of largely extinct religions (gods like Zeus, Thor, etc.) had content capable of inspiring belief, as they all had their adherents. Yet, when a Christian child today learns about the Norse pantheon, she probably does not—by virtue of the content of these supernatural agents—come to believe in them. Likewise for many currently successful gods. If a Jewish man travels to Haiti, will he come to believe in Papa Gede as soon as he encounters the inspiring content of Papa Gede’s description? Perhaps, but probably not. This conundrum is known as the Zeus problem (Gervais & Henrich, 2010), which can be simply stated: Why do believers in one god tend to believe only in their god (or gods), and not come to believe in any popularly worshiped god they hear about? As with the Mickey Mouse problem, the answer to the Zeus problem lies in context-biased learning. The aforementioned Christian child has likely witnessed many other Christians engaging in credibility enhancing displays of their belief in the Christian deity, but no credibility enhancing displays supporting belief in the Norse pantheon. People come to believe in the supernatural agents and concepts supported by local context-biased learning, and to disbelieve in those agents that are not similarly supported (Gervais & Najle,  2015; Lanman, 2012). 28

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Why Do Some People Not Believe in Any Gods?

A comprehensive account of religion needs to explain both the presence and the absence of belief in gods. The most comprehensive available estimate is that there are perhaps 700 million atheists worldwide (Zuckerman, 2007). Given the intense stigma faced by nonbelievers in religious societies (Edgell, Gerteis, & Hartmann, 2006; Gervais, 2013a, 2014; Gervais, Shariff, & Norenzayan, 2011), this number may very well be an underestimate. Consistent with this, indirectly measured atheism rates—using techniques that mitigate social desirability concerns—in the United States, for example, are nearly twice as high as direct self-reports suggest (Gervais & Najle, 2017). This is plausibly also the case in many other religious majority societies, where people may be reluctant to disclose disbelief in gods, even in anonymous polls. Why do so many people not believe in any gods? Arguably, this question is among the most important testing grounds for various models of religion. Some frameworks would predict that atheism might be cognitively unnatural (Barrett, 2010; Boyer, 2008), exceedingly rare and perhaps psychologically superficial (Barrett, 2004; Bering, 2010), or only possible in aberrant environments (Barrett,  2004). On the other hand, frameworks that lean heavily on contextbased learning as a key feature of the acquisition of religious beliefs would be able to accommodate a much wider range of atheist prevalence values. That is, context-biased learning can make detailed predictions about both which gods people believe in, but also the circumstances in which people might believe in no gods (Geertz & Markússon,  2010; Gervais & Henrich,  2010; Gervais & Najle,  2015; Gervais, Willard, Norenzayan, & Henrich,  2011b; Lanman, 2012). Religious disbelief (like religious belief) likely arises from the complex interaction of several factors. For example, individual differences in the basic cognitive capacities enabling the mental representation of gods (e.g., theory of mind) predict individual differences in religious belief (Norenzayan, Gervais, & Trzesniewski, 2012). In addition, people with an analytic cognitive style are less likely to endorse supernatural beliefs (Gervais & Norenzayan,  2012; Pennycook, Cheyne, Seli, Koehler, & Fugelsang, 2012; Shenhav, Rand, & Greene,  2012). Furthermore, a suite of motivational components bolster belief (Inzlicht, Tullett, & Good, 2011), and disbelief flourishes when a variety of motivational needs are met (Inglehart & Norris, 2004). But—taking these factors

into account—cultural learning appears to be a primary factor explaining religious disbelief. Existing empirical evidence suggests that a variety of context-biased learning mechanisms (kin-biased transmission, conformist transmission, prestigebiased learning, and credibility enhancing displays) interact to powerfully influence whether or not people come to believe in any gods. Where credibility enhancing displays support gods, belief flourishes. In the absence of credibility enhancing displays favoring any god, disbelief in gods appears to be the natural result.

Why Are Some Types of Gods More Popular Than Others Today?

Religions are born every day. Most of them do not survive for long, while a few have come to dominate the globe. Can a cultural-evolution-informed approach help explain why only a few gods have come to dominate? Recently, exactly such an approach has  been attempted (Atran & Henrich,  2010; Norenzayan, 2013; Norenzayan et al., 2014), building on byproduct accounts, adaptationist accounts, and gene-culture coevolution. This approach focuses on religions as culturally evolved suites of beliefs, norms, and practices. These features have differential consequences on the societies that adopt them. Some religions—typically associated with belief in powerful, morally concerned gods (though not always—see Atkinson et al., 2015; Watts et al.,  2015)—appear to enhance large-scale cooperation, leading to differential success in cultural group selection. Religions with beliefs and norms conducive to outcomes such as cooperation, reproduction, or the mitigation of within-group strife will succeed at the expense of other religions. Thus, the major world faiths today have gods that— though rare in the ethnographic literature—prescribe and proscribe group-beneficial actions on the part of their adherents. Thus, some types of gods are more common, in large part due to their ability to create more competitive cultural groups.

The Future of Faith

Cultural learning and cultural evolutionary processes are central to the evolutionary study of religious belief. Armed with an integrated model of the cultural, evolutionary, and cognitive forces that underlie religious belief, it is possible to provide some speculation about the future of religion. Existing scholarship points to two potential opposing forces on religion, and their interaction will powerfully ­influence the future of faith.

On the one hand, many parts of the world have undergone rapid secularization, bolstered by successful secular institutions that galvanize cooperation and guarantee day-to-day existential security in large parts of the world (Inglehart & Norris, 2004). The rise of secular institutions operates in concert with cultural learning to drive down religiosity (Lanman,  2012). As a result, many people in the world simply do not receive inferentially potent cues (Henrich, 2009) that one ought to believe in gods. Without these cues, and supporting testimony in the existence of gods (Harris & Koenig, 2006), disbelief is the natural result (Gervais & Najle, 2015). On the other hand, religions have historically— and currently in many places contemporarily still do—cemented cooperation and built moral communities (Graham & Haidt, 2010; Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008). Given this, it is unlikely that religion will simply fade away. However, secular institutions can climb the cooperative ladder of religion and then kick the ladder away (Norenzayan,  2013; Norenzayan et al., 2014), leaving stable secular societies (Zuckerman, 2008). Yet, existing demographic patterns suggest that religion will continue to thrive: Among other things, religions provide and enforce reproductive norms that can help drive the success or failure of societies and ideologies (Norenzayan et al.,  2014). Currently, religious believers outreproduce nonbelievers by a wide margin (Blume, 2009; Inglehart & Norris, 2004), and in many places secular individuals do not currently breed to replacement levels. Thus, while more and more countries begin to enjoy strong secular institutions, within these countries, religion enjoys a considerable dem­o­graphic advantage. Beyond reproductive advantages, religions also have a considerable conversion advantage worldwide. Some prominent critics of religion (Dawkins,  2006a) envision a future in which ra­ tion­al­ity vanquishes religious superstition. A nuanced appreciation of the evolutionary and cognitive forces supporting religion makes this vision appear perhaps naïve (Boyer, 2008). There is some evidence that analytic thinking predicts lower levels of religious belief (Gervais & Norenzayan,  2012; Pennycook et al., 2012; Shenhav et al., 2012), but often lost in discussion of this work is the fact that these effects are typically miniscule in magnitude, and their cross-cultural generalizability is unknown. Cognitive style is but one factor among many—and a relatively weak one at that—influencing levels of religious belief and disbelief (Norenzayan & Gervais,  2013). Furthermore, rapid secularization Mickey, Yahweh, and Zeus

29

would require religious deconversion on a massive scale; however, this sort of deconversion is highly unlikely, given the functions that religions serve for many. Compounding this, many people find some pro-atheist rhetoric literally distasteful (Ritter & Preston,  2011). Some approaches to modern atheism seek to appropriate those aspects of religions that make stable communities (De Botton,  2012). Speculatively, these approaches will prove more successful in the long run than approaches that sacralize rationality and dismiss religion out of hand (Dawkins, 2006a). As atheism continues to inspire social movements, only time will tell if atheist movements have considerable staying power in the realm of cultural evolution. But, for now, it seems clear that religion is here to stay. Regardless of what one wishes for the future of religion, a nuanced ­appreciation of the role of cultural learning and cultural evolution in religion is likely to prove ­ ­beneficial.

Coda

Religion is a cross-cultural human universal. Yet its expression is highly variable, both across and within societies. Many theoretical models have emerged, largely aimed at understanding the apparent ubiquity of religious belief worldwide. Byproduct accounts speak to the cognitive capacities that facilitate, constrain, and canalize the mental representation of supernatural agents. Adaptationist accounts look to explain why religion persists, in spite of its apparent costliness. In a large part, it looks like both religious beliefs and practices can promote within-group cooperation, leading to their success. This chapter posed six key questions for any comprehensive evolutionary account of religion. Any such account must grapple with (1) the ubiquity of religion across cultures, (2) the commonalities of different cultures’ gods, (3) the fact that people disbelieve in most supernatural agents they can mentally represent, (4) the fact that people disbelieve in most supernatural agents that have inspired belief, (5) the fact that a large number of people—in the face of potent stigma—disbelieve in all gods, and (6) the differential success of some gods over others across time and space. An integrated account that draws heavily from byproduct and adaptationist accounts, and especially from the rigorously developed tools of cultural evolution, can provide at least tentative answers to all of these questions. 30

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Little about religion makes sense without considering human evolution. And much in the evolution of religion only makes sense in light of cultural learning.

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Price, G. R. (1970). Selection and covariance. Nature, 227(5257), 520–521. Retrieved from http://www.hubmed.org/display. cgi?uids=5428476 Price, G.  R. (1972). Extension of covariance selection mathematics. Ann Hum Genet, 35(4), 485–490. Retrieved from http://www.hubmed.org/display.cgi?uids=5073694 Purzycki, B. G. (2013). The minds of gods: A comparative study of supernatural agency. Cognition, 129(1), 163–179. Retrieved from http://www.hubmed.org/display.cgi?uids=23891826; http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S0010027713001224 Purzycki, B.  G., Finkel, D.  N., Shaver, J., Wales, N., Cohen, A. B., & Sosis, R. (2012). What does God know? Supernatural agents’ access to socially strategic and non-strategic information. Cognitive Science, 36(5), 846–869. Queller, D. C. (1992). Quantitative genetics, inclusive fitness, and group selection. The American Naturalist, 139(3), 540–558. Queller, D.C. (2015). Two languages, one reality. Edge.org. Retrieved from http://edge.org/conversation/the-false-allureof-group-selection#dq Rendell, L., Fogarty, L., Hoppitt, W. J., Morgan, T. J., Webster, M. M., & Laland, K. N. (2011). Cognitive culture: Theoretical and empirical insights into social learning strategies. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(2), 68–76. Retrieved from http://www. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661310002548 Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2006). Not by genes alone. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ritter, R. S., & Preston, J. L. (2011). Gross gods and icky atheism: Disgust responses to rejected religious beliefs. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(6), 1225–1230. doi:10.1016/ j.jesp.2011.05.006 Roes, F. L., & Raymond, M. (2003). Belief in moralizing gods. Evolution and Human Behavior, 24(2), 126–135. doi:10.1016/ s1090-5138(02)00134-4 Shariff, A. F., & Norenzayan, A. (2011). Mean gods make good people: Different views of God predict cheating behavior. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 21(2), 85–96. doi:10.1080/10508619.2011.556990 Shenhav, A., Rand, D. G., & Greene, J. D. (2012). Divine intuition: Cognitive style influences belief in God. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 423. Retrieved from http://graphics. tx.ovid.com/ovftpdfs/FPDDNCOBAHHNLK00/fs047/ovft/ live/gv024/00004785/00004785-201208000-00005.pdf Smith, J. M. (1964). Group selection and kin selection. Nature, 201, 1145–1147.

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3

CH A PTE R

The Diversity of Religious Systems Across History An Evolutionary Cognitive Approach

Pascal Boyer and Nicolas Baumard

Abstract The mental representations and behaviors we commonly call “religious”—everyday supernatural imagination, tribal cults, archaic religions, modern world religions—are amenable to explanation both in terms of computational, information-processing systems and in terms of adaptations that emerged during human evolution. These two research programs, focused on proximate and ultimate aspects of cultural representations respectively, have been particularly fruitful in the last 30 years. Early developments in cognitive approaches ushered in a whole new field in the study of religion. More recently, evolutionary psychology has provided new tools for explaining the emergence and transmission of religious ideas. This chapter aims to show how this cognitive and evolutionary approach can provide a better understanding of the historical diversity of religious systems. Key Words: religion, evolution, cooperation, morality, Axial Age

Avoiding Anachronism: Religious Beliefs in Human History

Most scholars of religion grew up in cultural environments influenced by so-called world religions (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism), a specific kind of religion that appeared only recently in human history and only in the most developed antique societies (e.g., China, India, Mediterranean) (Baumard & Boyer, 2013; Bellah, 2012). In such cultural environments, it seems obvious that there is a religious domain, quite distinct from other domains of human thought and behavior. Also, it seems obvious that religious behavior always comes with a doctrine and that religious representations are intimately connected to the justification of moral behavior. It also seems obvious that costly behaviors, like pilgrimage, charity, and abstinence, must have been around for as long as humans had religious notions, as they constitute credible demonstrations of belief. Finally, it seems obvious that the actual beliefs of, say, Christians are on the whole described by the Christian doctrine, and that 34

adherence to this doctrine is the reason why people join that particular community. But all these assumptions are clearly false, as most anthropologists and historians of religion have pointed out (Bellah, 2011; Bloch, 2008; Boyer, 1994b, 2001; Lawson & McCauley, 1990; Pyysiainen, 2001). As most of the features we spontaneously associate with “religion” are not actually present in human cultures, except for a few recent but familiar exceptions, it is not clear that the term “religion” is of much use to cognitive or social scientists. The term may be similar to “tree,” a category that is of pragmatic value for some purposes, like finding shade or designing landscapes, but of no use to biologists. That is, there is nothing much to find out—for example, concerning growth, reproduction, evolution—that would apply to all and only those things we think of as “trees.” In the same way, there is very little in terms of evolutionary dispositions, cultural transmission, or social dynamics that would apply to all and only those phenomena commonly called religious (Dubuisson, 2003; Saler, 1993).

In this chapter, we place religious representations and behaviors in the context of the archaeological, anthropological, and historical record. We briefly examine four major phenomena relevant to the field: (1) all human beings have a disposition for entertaining representations of supernatural beings, which feed daydreaming, fantasy, and fiction; (2) in most human groups, people engage in cults focused on some products of that imagination, such as ancestors, ghosts, gods, and spirits; (3) in large-scale archaic societies, corporations of priests turned some of these cults into “religions,” that is, organizations with unique doctrines, standardized ceremonies, and ritual specialists; (4) in some large-scale societies during the Axial Age, there appeared a subset of religions that included morality and individual disciplines in the doctrines. (See Figure  3.1 for an illustration of these processes in the creation of diverse varieties of religious representations.) Seeing religious phenomena in this historical perspective should allow us to dispense with some misleading assumptions that unfortunately crop up in many discussions of religion in terms of cognition and evolution. As mentioned already, our common views about religion stem from the fact that all scholars in this field are familiar with one type of religious system—usually Christianity— that was rather exceptional in human prehistory and history but is common in our modern societies. To get beyond that misleading familiarity, it is important to keep in mind the following points: 1.  There is no need to stipulate that humans have a specific capacity for religious representations, since all the cognitive capacities engaged in that domain are also present in some nonreligious domains. 2.  For most of human prehistory, there were no religious doctrines, no corporations of specialized priests, no way in which one set of ideas was a “religion” distinct from another one, no interest in cosmogony, little interest in the afterlife, and no religious sanction for morality. 3.  For most of human history, in archaic societies, religious doctrines described superhuman agents as interested in people’s obedience, not belief, and in the provision of sacrifices and other ceremonies, not adherence to moral norms. In fact, the gods themselves were usually amoral. 4.  Religious doctrines do not describe people’s religious representations—the doctrines are an

attempt, by literate specialists, to specify what people ought to think. In fact, all the evidence suggests that people’s representations are usually very different from religious doctrines. In what follows, we outline the main results of studies of religious thought and behavior that avoid anachronistic and ethnocentric fallacies, by paying close attention to human evolution, cognitive processes, and the historical record.

The Supernatural Repertoire

The concepts that we usually identify as religious (ancestors, gods, spirits, etc.) all belong to a domain of human imagination that we may call the supernatural repertoire. As such, they activate cognitive processes typical of human imagination (Byrne & Girotto, 2009; Harris, 1991; Roth, 2007), as well as more specific processes to do with superhuman agency (Atran, 2002; Barrett, 1996,  2000; Boyer, 1994a, 2001; Guthrie, 1993; Pyysiainen, 2001; Saler, 1993). Specifically, many supernatural concepts can be described as activating two kinds of information: (1) some highly specific information that violates intuitive expectations about a domain of reality (e.g., trees that are plants yet understand speech), and (2) some intuitive, generally tacit expectations about that domain of reality (the listening tree is still solid, in one place, etc.) (Barrett, 1996; Boyer, 1994a). In this description, a “domain of reality” should be understood as a cognitive domain; that is, a large ­category of objects for which we have systematic expectations, like person, living thing, artificial object, animal. The domain-wide expectations associated with these domains are, for example, ­intentional behavior for animals and persons, physiological processes for all living things, physical ­properties for all solid objects, and so on (Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994). As there are only a limited number of fundamental, domain-wide expectations to violate, this suggests that despite the apparent open-endedness of human imagination, there is a limited catalog of such supernatural constructions, at least in terms of their underlying assumptions (Boyer, 2000). Empirical studies show that some types of supernatural construction are (1) vastly more common than others in human cultures, and (2) more easily acquired and communicated by individuals. In ­particular, there is a clear advantage, both cultural and cognitive, for concepts of persons with nonintuitive physical properties (e.g., going through solid

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Fantasy, daydreaming Evolved susceptibility to supernatural imagination

Myths, legends etc…

in all human beings

‘Shamanism’, healing Ancestor cults

Cultural selection in most human cultures

Local deities

Codified rituals

Codification by monopolistic guilds of specialists

Doctrines Scriptures

in large-scale societies

Notion of “religion”

Non-local gods

Moral gods Transformation by Axial Age moral movements in some prosperous ancient societies

Moral cosmos Soteriology Personal disciplines

Figure 3.1  A sketch of the processes whereby evolved human capacities combine with different historical circumstances to create different varieties of religious representations.

objects) or cognitive capacities (e.g., knowing people’s thoughts) and, to a lesser degree, for notions of artificial objects with mental capacities (e.g., statues that listen to prayers) (Barrett, 2000, 2002; Barrett & Nyhof, 2001; Boyer & Ramble, 2001). Such supernatural concepts are found in individual dreams or fantasies, as well as in socially transmitted 36

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myths, folk-tales, and other forms of fiction and many forms of magic and religion. The cognitive and cultural advantage for representations of intentional agents (either objects that become agentive or, more frequently, imagined agents with counterintuitive physical properties) over nonagent concepts is related to the central

place of social interaction, especially communication, in human survival. Humans live in a “cognitive niche” (Tooby & DeVore, 1987), in that they depend more than any other species on information provided by others and information about others. That is the evolutionary background for the emergence of an intuitive psychology or “mind-reading” (Frith & Frith, 2007; Leslie, Friedman, & German, 2004). As a consequence of capacities for intuitive psychology, a significant part of human social interaction takes place with non–physically present agents—for example, people who are away, deceased individuals, or of course imagined supernatural agents. Memories of what people did or said, as well as expectations, fears, and hopes of what they may do, are a constant theme of trains of thought and ruminations (and also the quintessential subject matter of social gossip). From an evolutionary standpoint, thoughts about absent agents may be necessary and useful, given the computational constraints of social interaction. Given the potential costs of mistakes in the social domain, a capacity for simulated interaction would provide the mind with a tool for representing and choosing between possible courses of action. There is evidence for the preparation and use of such scenarios in actual social behavior (Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001; Saarni, 2001). In childhood, simulated interaction with imaginary friends also results in enhanced competence (Taylor, 1999; Taylor & Carlson, 1997).

Small-Scale Societies: Interaction with Superhuman Agents

In small-scale societies (bands of foragers, tribes, chiefdoms), a range of cultural representations center on concepts of imagined superhuman agents, a subset of the supernatural repertoire described above. Classical anthropology has provided an extensive description of the behaviors centered on such agent concepts, under the labels “primitive religion” or “tribal religion,” so that there is no need to go into much detail here (see, e.g., Child & Child, 1993; Lehmann & Myers, 1993; Spiro & D’Andrade, 1958). It should suffice to mention a few general and roughly defined types that can be found in many different small-scale societies. A first type is the variety of healing practices thought to involve some communication with souls or spirits. The term “shamanism” may be used here, as a vague but convenient label. The rationale for engaging in these practices is always to address a specific issue, like a case of illness or misfortune. As many people interpret unfortunate events as caused

by spirits or ancestors, they call on a specialist, who is supposed to have special skills in communicating with these agents. Such specialists are hired on the basis of a reputation for successful cures. They trained with other such specialists, from whom they received special recipes, ritual songs, and so forth. In some cases, these shamans or mediums lose their reputation for efficacy, or lose out to more attractive competitors. By contrast, “ancestor-cults” are carried out by specific individuals by virtue of their genealogical position (e.g., being the eldest male in a lineage). These ceremonies are directed at dead individuals whose protection is deemed necessary (e.g., to ward off misfortune or ensure that crops grow as planned). These cults are more typical of agrarian, sedentary tribal groups than of bands of foragers. There is a great variation in the extent to which ancestors are identified individuals or generic elders. In many cases, the living owe the ancestors sacrifices as a quid pro quo for protection. Sacrificed animals (and more rarely plants) are actually consumed by the participants, although there is generally some local theory about the way some part of the offering is consumed by the unseen ancestors. Rules for the distribution of parts of the sacrificed animals often underscore the genealogical status of different individuals and groups. Finally, in such societies there is often a host of other superhuman agents, such as spirits of particular places or elements. A mountain or a river may have their particular spirits, who must be pacified to ensure a safe trek or passage. In horticultural and agrarian societies, offerings to these local deities may be necessary before cultivating each garden or field. It may be of help to summarize the features of such “religious” practices, if only to emphasize how the latter epithet can be misleading when we turn to very different practices and representations: 1.  There is no doctrine. As most anthropologists found out when studying such “religious” practices, there is simply no agreed description of the superhuman agents, beyond some very rough features. For instance, spirits are described as invisible, but there is often no specific, agreed on understanding of what that implies. Shamans can contact spirits, but most people are content with the vaguest description of how that is done, what language spirits speak, or other details of that kind. When one presses people for more specific information, as anthropologists are wont to do, the

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response is embarrassed silence or idiosyncratic speculation. Most people find these questions of no interest whatever. 2.  Practitioners are individuals. People attribute the practitioner’s skill at interacting with superhuman agents to individual qualities, especially in the case of shaman-like healers and other individuals with special access to spirits or gods. These specialists may place some emphasis on their training or initiation, as a guarantee of quality, but the ineffable internal qualities are always required. Obviously, this personal attribution may be quite different in the case of ancestor cults, where genealogical position is the only qualification for office. Note, however, that in many places people in that genealogical position are also said to have inherited a special essence or are initiated in a particular cult before reaching their position. 3.  The goal is to address specific problems. People sacrifice to local gods because these have the power to dry wells or damage crops. They “offer” pigs to the ancestors because the latter may get angry and make people sick. The point of a shamanistic ritual is to cure some specific person of some specific ailment. People are not motivated to develop a relationship or become intimate with superhuman agents—indeed the point of many rituals is to keep them at bay. Transactions with the agents are most often described in cool bargaining terms, as when illness is thought to occur because the ancestors found the last sacrificed animal insultingly small. 4.  There are no unified services. Different shamans may provide connection with spirits in completely different ways. They may also provide substantially different services to different people or at different times. This is of course connected to the above feature. As the point of the ceremonies is to address particular cases, the specialists provide equally particular services. 5.  Superhuman agents are local. That is obviously the case for place-spirits like the god of a river or mountain. Ancestors too are local in the sense that they are bound to a particular group, so that no one would assume that their power extends beyond the boundaries of the lineage. Although myths often mention cosmic gods or mythical heroes that created human culture, these agents are generally not relevant to people’s existence and circumstances. 6.  Loose connections to political authority. In lineage societies, elders are both political leaders 38

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and ex officio responsible for organizing the ancestor cult, mobilizing people and resources for sacrifices, and so forth. Besides this, most activity concerned with superhuman agents is provided by informal specialists, who generally yield little political influence and in many cases are not even of high social status. 7.  There is generally no question of membership, adherence, or commitment. In many of the situations described here, it would make no sense to ask participants whether they are members of a cult. People who consult a shaman or healer do not generally join a community, no more than would the patients of a particular physician in a modern context. In the case of ancestor cults, the question is irrelevant, as only people of a particular lineage participate in the ceremonies. The main exceptions to this pattern are secret societies, usually marginal in the “religious” activities of such groups. 8.  No specific moral doctrine. This deserves some emphasis, as it seems clear, indeed self-evident, to most modern people that notions of gods, spirits, and ancestors are connected to specific moral imperatives in the form of moral codes given by the gods or exemplary behaviors demonstrated by these superhuman agents, or because the gods will reward or punish ordinary people as a function of their behavior. This kind of connection, however, is a recent cultural innovation, as we explain later. Spirits will capture your soul simply because they can, whether you were good or not. The ancestors or local deities are frequently said to monitor people’s behavior, but that generally implies adherence to specific norms supposedly laid out by these agents, such as wearing particular colors or marrying outside one’s lineage. In general, nobody expects the spirits to be aggravated because someone lied or otherwise failed to uphold moral norms. Obviously, this does not entail that people in such groups have no moral feelings or principles. On the contrary, the ethnographic record and experimental studies so far suggest that there are no substantial differences between different cultural environments in terms of intuitive moral understandings. In such groups, as elsewhere, moral understandings emerge inevitably in normal brains socialized in a normal environment. The contrast is that, in most human societies, people can entertain these moral intuitions without making an explicit connection between their content and the existence of particular superhuman agents.

Kingdoms and City-States: The Creation of “Religion”

Complex polities originated in a few regions of the world, a few millennia ago, and became city-states, kingdoms, or empires. Their complex economies and embryonic markets meant that many activities, craftsmanship in particular, became the province of specialized groups. These guilds or corporations worked as cartels for the provision of particular goods or services. They organized training, often arranged uniform prices, and generally guaranteed a standard of service. The provision of religious services is no exception to this trend. Together with guilds of merchants, blacksmiths, or butchers, there appeared groups of ritual officers and other specialists of the supernatural. They generally operated a monopoly, with an exclusive right to perform particular rites. They formed centralized organizations that maintained a strict control over new candidates. They tried to bind as closely as possible with political power. They, naturally, promoted the view that their services could not be obtained elsewhere. The innovations introduced by these organizations are best understood in contrast to the cults and practices described above: 1.  There is a doctrine. That is, the religious corporation provides a set of propositions that define superhuman agents, describe their characteristic powers, link these powers to various features of the cosmos, specify what ceremonies must be performed and why, and so forth. These propositions are explanatory and generally coherent. Practitioners or the common populace may be required to learn and recite them, thereby reinforcing this internal coherence (Whitehouse, 2000). In most cases, religious corporations make extensive use of literacy—indeed, religious corporations are among the first users of scripts, together with accountants and lawmakers (Goody, 1977, 1986). Writing facilitates the uniformity of service and practice that is characteristic of such professional groups. 2.  Practitioners are licensed by the organization. Religious corporations describe their members as specially trained, in a uniform manner, so that all members of the corporation provide equally effective services. Individuals who join the organization are generally not deemed to possess specific essential qualities—but in most cases they must demonstrate an ability to acquire the doctrine and perform standardized services as required. Any

appeal to personal charismatic features or personal revelation is strongly discouraged. 3.  Ceremonies focus on general issues. Ritual services are typically not just about particular issues, such as individual cases of illness and misfortune, but rather focus on cosmic or political themes, as prescribed by the doctrines. One recurrent theme is the protection of the polity and its rulers by the gods. 4.  The services are standardized. It is quite natural for a shaman to use flexible, highly variable ritual recipes. A religious organization, by contrast, is bound to insist on highly codified, inflexible ritual recipes. Members of religious organizations often use written texts to maintain a uniform provision of religious services. A religious organization promises to deliver a stable, uniform kind of service that only it can provide, but also a service that any member of the guild will provide in the same way. Proper service depends not on the personal qualities of the specialists but on their training and membership in the organization. 5.  Religious organizations promote concepts of powerful, nonlocal gods. Religious specialists who strive to reach a large market naturally describe their activity as concerned with highly abstract, delocalized, cosmic gods, in contrast to shamans who deal with local superhuman agents. Religious organizations address not local groups, but the polity as a whole or a global community beyond political boundaries. The religious corporations typically claim connection not to local spirits and ancestors, but to larger-scale supernatural agents with whom the guild proposes to interact with in the same way, regardless of the particular place and customers. 6.  Close connection to political power. Castes or corporations of priests are directly sponsored by kings, provide special services to the political officials, and often put forth theological arguments to legitimize the existing political order. In many cases the religious corporation is part and parcel of the state institutions. The connection to coercive institutions is essential, as the religious organizations generally try to enforce a monopoly of religious provision. The specific “religion” that becomes widespread in the polity usually is the one whose corporation managed to garner the most political influence. 7.  Coercive enforcement of participation. In most historical large-scale societies until the Enlightenment, people were coerced into participating in collective ceremonies, as well as

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transferring resources to the religious organizations through tithes, donations, or taxes. In many places, forced labor was mobilized to build temples, statues, and other monuments. The state and its religious corporations do not tolerate any contestation or modification of the established religious doctrines and rituals. In other words, the populace cannot be said to adhere to the local official religion or its doctrine, as they generally have no say in the matter. 8.  No specific moral doctrine. We must mention this feature, though it does not stand in contrast to informal religious practices described above, because it is often misconstrued in evolutionary models of “religion.” People in archaic societies imagined gods with extensive powers over them but little moral concern. These gods were said to monitor what people do, but mostly to check that they provided the prescribed ceremonies or sacrifices, and conformed to established political and social norms. Also, in many cases the gods themselves were described as unencumbered with moral conscience and uninterested in human morality. One particular development needs emphasis: the emergence of an explicit notion of “religion.” In tribal or foraging societies, there are rituals directed at spirits, other rituals for ancestors, and traditions of magic and various superstitions and mythical lore—but there is no assumption that all these different kinds of practices belong to a single conceptual domain. This was noticed by anthropologists from an early stage; people in “traditional” societies seemed to have no clear notion of “religion.” Missionaries had to create special terms for this domain of ideas and activities. In large-scale societies, by contrast, there is an explicit conception of “religion” as what is provided by the religious organization—ritual services but also doctrines, ­ ­eschatology, the training of specialists, and so forth. This must be emphasized as the origin of a misunderstanding about “religion” in small-scale societies. Cultural anthropology and other social sciences, as well as history or philology, emerged as systematic disciplines in societies with organized doctrinal religions. They naturally assumed that other types of societies, including small-scale tribes or bands, must also have some form of “religion,” some organized domain of representations and practices centered on a doctrine of supernatural agency (Saler, 1993; Smith, 1982). More recent cultural anthropology has largely abandoned this assumption. It does not 40

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generally treat “religion” as a useful analytical concept (Bloch, 2008).

The Axial Age Movements

Religions are special institutions that only appear in large-scale, mostly state societies with an extensive division of labor. But not all religions are the same, and one development in particular is worthy of attention because of its importance for the world we now live in—the appearance and great cultural success of what are called “Axial Age” religions (Arnason, Eisenstadt, & Wittrock, 2005; Bellah, 2011). The term was coined by Karl Jaspers, who noted that most so-called world religions had appeared at a specific time, roughly between 600 bce and 100 ce; were very similar in their prescriptions; and could be traced to a small set of original doctrines (Jaspers, 1953). In three distinct places—northern China, the Ganges valley, and the eastern Mediterranean—at the time mentioned by Jaspers, there appeared doctrines that emphasized cosmic justice (i.e., the notion that the world overall is fair), that described the gods themselves as interested in human morality, and that promoted all sorts of personal or “spiritual” techniques to do with moderation, self-discipline, and withdrawal from excessive greed and ambition. That is the case, despite many obvious differences, for Buddhism, Jainism, and various forms of reformed Hinduism (Bronkhorst, 2007; Gombrich, 2009; Obeyesekere, 2002; Olivelle, 1993); for Taoism and Confucianism (Katz, 2009; Slingerland, 2007); and for Orphism, Second-Temple Judaism, Stoicism, and Christianity (Bremmer, 1983, 2002). The similarities in doctrine are dramatic, including, for instance, quasi-identical formulations of the Golden Rule (Baumard & Boyer, 2013). These doctrines described a just world in which bad deeds are punished, but also a world in which transgressions can be redeemed by penance and self-sacrifice. Finally, the new doctrines described a variety of moral paragons, saints, or sages, whose behavior should be emulated to the best of one’s capacities (Baumard & Boyer, 2013). These moralizing religious doctrines projected onto the gods, in an explicit form, principles of moral reasoning that are actually present, albeit in an intuitive form, in everyday moral reasoning. From an evolutionary standpoint, many moral intuitions and feelings can be explained as the outcome of principles that guide cooperation, by motivating people to seek mutually beneficial arrangements, for example, a repartition of the

fruits of labor that matches different people’s contributions, an equitable distribution of available resources, and so forth (Baumard, André, & Sperber, 2013). These intuitive assumptions are made explicit, for instance, in the Golden Rule, following which an interaction is just if positions are interchangeable—if I would not lose out by being you, nor you by being me. In the same way, one of our implicit moral principles is that transgressions should be punished by a decrease in welfare that is proportional to the undue benefit (Baumard, 2010). Once translated in explicit religious terms, this motivates the notion that sinners should give alms and extend charity as reparation, for example. So, in various domains, the religious doctrines that originated in the Axial Age seem intuitive, and compelling, because they explicate and extend our preexisting moral intuitions (Baumard & Boyer, 2013). Axial Age movements fostered personal discipline and moderation, and provided various techniques aimed at controlling the self, taming desire, limiting appetites, and so on. This was consistent with a notion of the “soul” as a personal, highly individual entity that could be made better or purer, and crucially could be “saved” through moral behavior (Bremmer, 1983). The various techniques were supposed to curb essential evolved motivations in human beings—the desire to have food, shelter, and resources, to gain social status, and of course to maximize reproductive potential. Ascetic doctrines described all these motivations as negative, inferior to the cultivation of a pure soul, and generally counterproductive. The prescribed way was to constrain oneself and lead a decent life (Confucianism), to demote pain and suffering as transient (Stoicism), or to renounce the material world altogether (Buddhism). This raises the question: Why should the notion of a moral cosmos, the conception of gods as moral, a preoccupation with the soul, and the cultivation of self-discipline all occur together, in similar ways, in these specific places? Quantitative history studies may provide the answer by evaluating levels of economic development and material affluence at different times and in different places in history (Morris, 2013). A variety of proxies (e.g., size of houses, number of hearths per house, extent of craftsmanship, traces of pollution, and many more) provide a convenient index of prosperity and show a remarkable pattern of development. There was a steady increase in energy extraction from foragers to horticultural and agricul-

tural societies, and then a sharp amplification with large-scale societies, like Egypt, the Inca and Mayan empires, early Chinese kingdoms, and the Sumerian city-states. But that progress is dwarfed by the remarkable uptake that occurred around 1000 bce in three specific regions: the Ganges valley in India, the Yellow and Yangtze valleys in China, and the eastern Mediterranean (Baumard, Hyafil, Morris, & Boyer, 2015). Note that the Axial Age movements all developed first among the upper classes. Gautama, founder of Buddhism, was a prince. Indian and then Chinese Buddhism spread first among the aristocracy. Greek Stoicism too was an aristocratic fashion. Obviously, the movements then spread and were appropriated by other social groups, and sometimes turned into protest movements by the dispossessed. But the appearance of moral-spiritual concerns, as connected to gods and religious activities, was clearly characteristic of the affluent upper classes. This in turn raises the question: What is the mechanism? Why should extreme prosperity lead to these specific concerns for morality and selfdiscipline? A possible explanation is in terms of life-history strategies (Figueredo et al., 2006; Nettle, 2010). There is a wide variety of such strategies in humans, triggered by such external information as birth weight, nutrition during childhood, the state of the reproductive market at puberty, and the risk of early death in adulthood (Ellis, Figueredo, Brumbach, & Schlomer, 2009). As a result, people intuitively prefer to behave at different points on the spectrum between moderate conduct and wise investment in long-term prospects at one end, and the furious satisfaction of urgent needs on the other. As extreme affluence may predispose people toward patience and long-term perspectives, they would find ideologies of moderation and preservation of the soul intuitively appropriate and therefore compelling (Baumard et al., 2015). This life-history approach also explains other features of Axial Age doctrines. First, the doctrines generally promoted a restricted sociosexuality and a heavy investment in the family. This specific value distinguished, for example, early Christians from Pagans (Brown, 1988; Harper, 2013). Second, the movements emphasized hard work, self-discipline, and frugality. Long before the Protestant Revolution, acedia or sloth was one of the seven deadly sins. This nonmaterialistic orientation fits naturally with a slow strategy in life-history terms. A high i­ nvestment

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in work and one’s children’s upbringing only makes sense if it is likely to pay off in the future—that is, if the environment is stable enough to make such bets sensible. By contrast, in a harsh and unpredictable environment, it is more profitable to consume than to invest. Although a future-oriented strategy is beneficial in an affluent and stable environment, it is vulnerable to exploitation. Moralists, philosophers, and religious thinkers, from Plato to Dostoevsky, have long considered this vulnerability as a central problem for cooperative strategies. To solve this solution, many of them have resorted to the idea that the universe is somehow in favor of those people who cooperate. A belief in supernatural punishment can then be used strategically by future-oriented people to legitimize their way of life and their moral condemnation of sexual promiscuity, limited cooperation, and present-oriented behaviors (Kurzban, Dukes, & Weeden, 2010; Trivers, 2011). To sum up, moralizing religions could be used to legitimize a new, future-oriented way of life characteristic of the most affluent members of antique societies.

The religious systems and organizations we are most familiar with, especially in modern Western environments, are the cultural descendants of these Axial Age movements—of a highly specific perspective on supernatural agency and its connection to morality, which was imposed on very large populations through conquest, invasion, and colonization yet remains fairly special among the varieties of supernatural representations entertained by human minds. Figure  3.2 illustrates this specificity of the Axial Age doctrines and their descendants.

Why Religions Never Completely Eliminate Local Cults

Our succinct account of various processes relevant to what one usually calls “religious” representations starts from universal human capacities, notably the capacity to imagine counterintuitive entities and to entertain social interaction with physically nonpresent agents. Part of the products of individual imagination may spread in the minds of different members of a group, thereby becoming “cultural.” Some of these cultural representations are the object of

Figure 3.2  An illustration of the ways in which cults emerged from the supernatural imagination, religions (with doctrines and organized personnel) emerged from informal cults, and Axial Age doctrines emerged from archaic religions.

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collective projects such as cults or rituals. Some of the latter are codified into doctrines by religious organizations in large-scale polities. And some of the doctrines were transformed into moralistic, soteriological movements in the Axial Age. It would be a grave mistake to take these different processes as different, consecutive stages in the development of religious representations. First, obviously, the capacity for supernatural imagination is present in all humans and all cultures. Most important, psychological and anthropological evidence shows that, appearances notwithstanding, most organized religions (1) do not succeed in implanting their doctrines in their followers’ minds, and (2) generally fail to reach the monopolistic position to which they naturally aspire.

Theological Correctness

Consider first the question of doctrines. It may seem that religious doctrines, as exposed by the specialists of different traditions, provide a good guide to what is believed, or at least represented, by members or followers of these different traditions. This is very much the accepted view in most public discussions of religion, debates on the conflict between religion and science, and in debates between religious specialists. However, that assumption is extremely misleading (McCauley, 2011). Indeed, demonstrations of the noncongruence of doctrines and actual representations were among the first developments of the cognitive approach to the field (Barrett, 1996, 1998). In particular, we should not assume (1) that people’s statements (e.g., that spirits live in the forest or that Buddha is infinite compassion) are the straightforward expression of beliefs, (2) that people indeed entertain a set of stable beliefs about superhuman agents, (3) that they have conscious access to all these beliefs, and finally (4) that they strive to be consistent in their beliefs. Unfortunately, a lot of history and sociology of religions is written on the basis of these simplifying assumptions, which turn out to be very misleading in this domain. Point (3) is particularly important. We can assume that people have a “concept” of Buddha, for example, by which we mean that stored semantic memory information allows them to think about Buddha, have conversations about it/him, and behave in particular ways in certain situations, and so forth. But is that information accessible? After all, the reason for having cognitive psychology and neuroscience is that we do not have access to the

information underpinning our ordinary concepts. Why should that not apply to the domain of superhuman agents? Indeed, experimental evidence shows that religious concepts are informed by a set of tacit assumptions and information structures that are not accessible to conscious inspection. For instance, concepts of superhuman agency “piggyback” on a number of tacit assumptions and principles of intuitive psychology that people need not—and often could not—represent explicitly. The fact that tacit assumptions are added to explicit information is most visible in the experimental studies of discrepancies between these two kinds of information. Justin Barrett coined the term “theological correctness” to describe situations in which people express a commitment to a specific, explicit statement p, while their inferences are driven by tacit assumptions that sometimes amount to non-p. For instance, Barrett elicited descriptions of “god” from Protestant believers, who seem to place superhuman mental powers (prescience, omniscience) at the center of that concept. However, implicit tasks like story recall or the choice of themes for prayers reveal that the same people tacitly assume ordinary limits to god’s mental powers, such as serial attention (Barrett, 1996; Slone, 2004). Generally, there is a discrepancy between professed doctrine and actual inferences, as the latter are based on nonreligious, indeed non–culturally specific intuitive principles. The same phenomenon has been observed in Hinduism, Japanese Buddhism, and various Protestant denominations (Barrett, 1998; Malley, 2004; Slone, 2004).

The Failure of Monopolization

Doctrinal religion does not displace other kinds of religious thought and behavior, but it adds to it an extra layer of official concepts and norms. This new layer is characterized by explicit and coherent links between the various concepts; a definition of a domain of “religion” as specific, sui generis; and the presence of an organized group of religious scholars or specialists. In most complex polities, there is an organized guild of religious practitioners, as described here, but also a variety of informal providers, local shamans, wizards, healers, inspired idiots, and ominous dreamers. Their claim to efficacy is based on local reputation, on apprenticeship with a famed specialist, on supposed connections to local supernatural agents, in general on their individual characteristics.

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In most cases, the dominant religious organization uses whatever political clout it can garner to dissolve this competition, demote it, relegate it to u ­ nimportant or local rituals, and hinder its operation and the transmission of its recipes. That is the origin, in many traditions, of explicit conceptions of “magic” or “superstition” as supposedly distinct from the domain of “religion” (Tambiah, 1990). However, as religious specialists know all too well, the war against what they call superstition is never-ending. For instance, consider the fact that in most Muslim societies, there are informal cults of saints and marabouts—that is, supposedly holy individuals—whose intention is required in case of personal misfortune or social conflict. In many cases, these activities are frowned upon or outlawed by the official establishment—that is, the ulema, the legal scholars with strong political clout—in charge of the doctrine (Gellner, 1981; Lambek, 1993). The same conflict has been pervasive in Christian societies, ever since the Christian churches became politically influential and could use that influence to exclude magicians, healers, and other informal competitors (Brown, 1981). Such examples illustrate the more general point that established institutional religious groups in many different places simply fail to enforce their monopoly of ritual provision. The competition from informal, smaller-scale providers seems impossible to eradicate, even though the official religious groups frequently resort to oppressive tactics against them. Why is the resurgence of competition seemingly inevitable? One possible explanation may lie in the fact that literate specialists are bound to create theories that move further and further away from intuitive expectations, because the tools of literacy and of systematic argument allow the emergence of such theories. Starting with concepts that include an optimal balance of counterintuitive statements and intuitive assumptions (e.g., a god that watches you), theologians are wont to create much more abstruse concepts (e.g., three persons that are one person). By contrast, shamans, mediums, diviners, and the like, generally utter statements that are much closer to the most easily acquired and transmitted religious representations—that is, closer to the spontaneous supernatural repertoire described at the beginning of this chapter. Another factor may be the special qualities of the official services. As mentioned above, religious institutions must provide unified, identical services for a whole polity, or even beyond political boundaries. 44

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Obviously, such standardized services do not vary with the specifics of particular cases. So two people afflicted with misfortune may be required to pray to the same god in the same way and perform the same rituals. By contrast, informal specialists provide services focused on the specifics of the cases at hand. For instance, a shaman’s patient is provided with a ritual aimed at recapturing his or her particular soul from specific spirits, who stole the soul for specific reasons to do with that person’s circumstances. We do not know enough about the cognitive processes whereby people represent misfortune, which is why it is difficult to explain this urge to provide particularistic explanation and remedies. However, the urge is certainly there, and may pose a fundamental challenge to the ambitions of religious corporations.

Conflicting Goals Within Official, Post-Axial Religions

Many of the religions we are familiar with were created, transformed, or influenced by Axial Age movements. As a result, their doctrines to this day give pride of place to moral transformation, self-discipline, and cosmic justice. This emphasis may seem quite natural to more affluent believers, especially to a cultural and political elite, whose chosen behaviors (e.g., in terms of moderation) are given cosmic legitimacy by the doctrines. By the same token, however, Axial Age doctrines of moderation may seem irrelevant to the populace, buffeted by disease, hunger, and violence. These people generally favor religious activities that will address their immediate and critical problems, for instance through the supposed efficacy of prayers, sacrifices, or other rituals. In the post-Axial civilizations, this has resulted in the familiar tension between a relatively austere, nonpragmatic version of the doctrine and a limited accommodation, on the part of religious authorities, of people’s demand for efficacious rituals. In effect, the dominant religious organizations may to some degree avoid the direct competition with informal providers described above by offering some elements of ritual efficacy as well as doctrine and values. For instance, Tibetan lamas do not just transmit abstruse doctrine and personal discipline; they also provide farmers with ritual protection against caterpillars (Ramble, 2008). Muslim clerics occasionally sanction the cult of saints and relics (Bowen, 1993), in between periodic returns to doctrinal orthodoxy (Gellner, 1969, 1981). The history of Christianity provides many illustrations of this tension (Brown, 1988, 2013; Harper, 2013; Stowers, 2001; Veyne, 2010). It started as a

typical Axial Age movement, focused on salvation and antimaterialism. It garnered considerable popular support by accommodating the cults of saints and relics, as well as the cult of the Virgin. This in turn gave rise to periodic outbursts of dissent, from groups trying to return to voluntary poverty, moderation, or even chastity (Cathars, Waldensians, Franciscans, etc.) (Little, 1983; Vauchez, 1993). Both sides in these disputes used the same scriptures in contrasted ways, the ritualists seeing Jesus as a great magician and a powerful warrior against Satan, while the spiritualists described him as a paragon, a moral exemplar of poverty and chastity. In the end, the Christian churches did manage to acquire an official religious monopole in the West, but at the price of diversifying its “offer” so much that the official doctrine diverged from the actual practices and beliefs of many participants. More generally, this conflict is inevitable in religious institutions influenced by Axial Age doctrines. On the one hand, if official religions align with the need of the affluent elite, they fail to get the adhesion of the population, who may turn to old gods and folk rituals. On the other hand, when official religions make room for the needs of sacrifice and prayer, they appear to degenerate into ritualistic cults, a change that drives away people motivated by the prospect of spiritual transformation. This conflict explains why official religious organizations constantly struggle to impose an official doctrine that accommodates both ritualistic needs and spiritual needs, and why they are constantly contested on both sides.

Religious Representations and Human Evolution

From an evolutionary perspective, the dispositions and processes involved in what people commonly call “religion” result from a number of distinct adaptations, all of which underpin some “religious” phenomena as well as many “nonreligious” ones, if one really wants to use these labels (Boyer & Bergstrom, 2008). For instance, supernatural imagination is an evolved characteristic of human minds, with consequences in the construction of fiction, superstitions, and daydreams as well as “religious” and magical concepts (Harris, 2000; Roth, 2007). Humans readily conceive of superhuman agents, found in stories and myths, as well as in “religious” accounts of gods and spirits (Barrett, 2000). Evolved mechanisms of threat-detection account for many fears, obsessions, and phobias, and explain some common themes of “religious” and “nonreligious” rituals

(Lienard & Boyer, 2006). Dispositions for mutualistic cooperation explain universal moral intuitions that occur mostly in “nonreligious” situations, even though they were in some places reformulated and codified by Axial Age “religious” doctrines (Baumard & Boyer, 2013). The human skill at building and maintaining complex coalitions makes it possible to set up all sorts of productive organizations, in most cases of a “nonreligious” kind but occasionally, in large-scale societies, as “religious” organizations (Boyer, 2001; Ekelund, Hébert, & Tollison, 2006). Each of these domains can be illuminated by taking into account cognitive adaptations and historical conditions. None of them is explained any better by separating the “religious” from the “nonreligious” parts of their effects. In the modern, generally Western places where scholarly studies of religion take place, it is quite clear that there is such a thing as “religion,” with specific cultural, social, and political consequences (Dubuisson, 2003). This explains, as noted above, the anachronistic and ethnocentric temptation to project features of such systems onto human prehistory. It also explains why there is a strong social demand for “explaining religion” or replacing “religion in the context of evolution,” as well as investigating how “the brain creates religion” or “how science conflicts with religion” (Smith, 1982). For all these reasons, one may predict that “theories of religion” will continue to flourish, even though they do not focus on a coherent domain of cognitive or cultural phenomena. Despite this confusion, there is ample scope for the evolutionary study of things usually identified as religious, because they provide salient cases in which we can investigate evolved human cognition and its cultural effects. For instance, the study of religious thought and behavior in various cultures may lead to a better understanding of the human capacities for imagination, of our understanding and enjoyment of fiction, of moral intuitions, and of the construction of stable institutions, as diverse consequences of human evolution by natural selection.

References

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4

CH A PTE R

Religion as Anthropomorphism A Cognitive Theory

Stewart Elliott Guthrie

Abstract This chapter reviews and advances a theory the author has long advocated, namely that religion may best be understood as anthropomorphism and that the latter is largely the byproduct of an evolved cognitive strategy. The strategy is to resolve uncertainty, which pervades cognition, with the logic of Pascal’s Wager: When in doubt about the nature of a phenomenon, bet on the most relevant possibility. For humans, that possibility usually is that the phenomenon is personal or has personal features or traces. From earliest infancy, we are preoccupied with persons, and our prototype of intentional agency evidently is our concept of the human mind. We interpret phenomena as personal involuntarily, automatically, and mostly unconsciously. Key Words: religion, cognition, evolution, anthropomorphism, theory

In order to explain a fact as general as [religion] by an illusion, it would be necessary that the illusion invoked . . . have causes of an equal generality. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

I notice something and seek . . . an intention in it, and above all someone who has intentions, a subject, a doer; every event a deed. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Introduction

Work in several disciplines on cognition, religion, and related topics in human thought and action supports a particular cognitive theory of religion, namely that religion can best be understood as anthropomorphism and that the latter is largely a product of a cognitive strategy.1 The strategy has an evolutionary context, shared with nonhuman animals, that comprises our need to resolve cognitive uncertainty and our interest in intentional agents. 1  In summarizing earlier work, this paper recapitulates certain views and arguments, and occasional phrases, in papers including Guthrie 1980,  1993,  2000,  2002,  2007a,  2007b,  2013,  2014,  2015b.

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For us, the most acute uncertainty usually is whether or not a person or persons, or signs or qualities of them, are present. Events crucial to us, as Hume (1957/1757) noted, are difficult to understand and predict, forcing us continually to seek interpretations. Among these, Hume continued, we prefer personal ones. Who brought plague or earthquake? Was an event a message and, if so, what? Religion resembles science (Horton, 1993) and common sense in attempting to resolve uncertainty. It diverges from science, however, in (among other ways, cf. McCauley, 2011) its strategy—like that of Pascal’s Wager—of guessing first at what matters most. For humans, that almost always is persons,

and guessing that they are present is a good bet. Sometimes we are right: a person or a personal characteristic is present, and we profit from realizing it. Sometimes we are wrong, but the mistake usually costs us little (Guthrie, 1980, 1993). I have argued that our interpretations of the world are highly personified (a condition long reported by philosophers but incompletely explained) and that this condition is a byproduct of the above strategy, undergirded by human ontogeny and neurology. The strategy’s effects—though less often the strategy itself—in thought and action have been noticed in disciplines including anthropology (Gell, 1998; Horton, 1993), art history (Van Eck, 2010, 2012), ethology (Foster & Kokko, 2008), linguistics (Cherry, 1992), neuroscience (Farah & Heberlein, 2007; Heberlein, 2008), philosophy (Hume, 1957/1757; Nietzsche, 1966), and psychology (Barrett, 2000; Wegner, 2005). My claim that religion not only necessarily displays (as most theologians admit; Guthrie, 1993) but also is anthropomorphism rests on other claims that now are generally uncontroversial, assembled in an argument that is not difficult. The claim also has considerable precedent. Forbears include perhaps Xenophanes (c. 500 bce) and certainly Spinoza (1670/1951), Hume (1757/1957), Feuerbach (1873/1957), Tylor (1873), Nietzsche (1966), Freud (1927/1975), Horton (1960,  1993), Spiro (1966), and Lévi-Strauss (1966). All these describe religion as consisting in imagining and treating the world as humanlike. Religion is, for example, an “extension of the field of people’s social relationships beyond . . . purely human society” (Horton, 1960, p. 211) or an “institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman [but humanlike and natural] beings” (Spiro, 1966, p. 96). It “consists in a humanization of natural laws” and in “anthropomorphism of nature” (Levi-Strauss, 1966, p. 221; italics in original). These predecessors, however, disagree about the causes of anthropomorphism itself. These causes are central here. Because anthropomorphism entails seeing nonhuman phenomena as humanlike, it is worth specifying that “humanlike” may describe physical features, but most importantly describes a mind, capable for example of desire, belief, and most specifically language and symbolism (Guthrie, 1980). Hume (1757/1957, p. 32) similarly defines religion as the attribution of humanlike “invisible, intelligent power,” or mind, to the world; and manifestations of humanlike mind are

the possibilities for which we most assiduously watch. Bodies, in contrast, whether human or nonhuman, are of interest primarily because they may embody minds; but minds, in intuitive or folk theory, need not even be embodied. We may thus describe religion substantively as a relatively systematized and shared attribution of personhood to nonhuman things and events, together with corresponding postulated social interaction with them. In this view, concepts of gods are continuous with concepts of other persons such as ancestors, demons, and yetis. All have a human prototype2 and consist (as Feuerbach, 1957/1873, wrote of God) in attributing personal features to the impersonal world. My theory satisfies Durkheim’s requirement in the epigram that any explanation of religion as an illusion must invoke an illusion with equally general causes. Indeed, the causes invoked here are not only equally general, but more so. They are the evolutionary conditions of our knowledge—our evolutionary epistemology. This epistemology suggests why we are and must be broadly susceptible to the illusion. With regard both to the relation of anthropomorphism to religion and to the nature and causes of anthropomorphism, my argument has long remained much the same, except for two points. First, “animism” now seems to me not parallel to anthropomorphism but an aspect of it, because our prototype of agency appears to be the human person. Second, my original explanation of the invisibility of gods (that it is modeled on invisibility by camouflage and other deception) has been superseded by a more convincing one, namely that—as scholars of mind-body dualism now generally agree—humans intuitively conceive the mind as independent of the body and as more or less disembodied. Thus, our concepts of disembodiment in such persons as gods and ghosts are not sui generis, but prefigured in our concepts of ourselves. Although anthropomorphism appears in religion in relatively concentrated and systematized form, it pervades art and daily life as well. As scholars have noted (Bernstein, 2012; Frye, 1957; Gell, 1998; Guthrie, 1993, pp. 122–151; Osborne & Tanner, 2007; Van Eck, 2010, 2012), art similarly represents the world as strongly humanlike, with correspondingly humanlike artifacts and preoccupations. Yet although art and literary critics often lament anthro2  “Prototype,” (as Saler, 2015, has pointed out) has several senses, most commonly “the first or original model or representation of something” and the “best or clearest exemplar of a category.” Here I use “prototype” in the first, generative sense.

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pomorphism, most have found it inexplicable. The art historian Van Eck (2010, p. 645), for example, says the anthropomorphic “living presence response” to art resists “any form of scientific explanation.” The critic W. J. T. Mitchell (2005, pp. 71–82) calls anthropomorphism “uncanny,” the writer Barthelme (1978, p. 27) calls it a “mystery,” and the scholar of literature Bloomfield (1963, p. 161) finds it universal but “obscured by conflicting theories.” A viable theory of anthropomorphism, then, would be of service to more than one field of study. Of most relevance here, it would clarify religion by explicating a phenomenon central to it. At the very least, it would help explain why beliefs and practices concerning gods, demons, and other nonhuman persons arise and persist. Views of religion as anthropomorphism have, as previously remarked, been advanced by scholars including philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, and others, most of whom have written since the 17th century.3 Spinoza (1670/1951) appears as the earliest writer to have developed a full account. For him, religion mirrored our conceptions of ourselves and our relation to the world. We imagine this world as comprehensively resembling us, with goals and purposes like our own. We grasp it solely in terms of its usefulness and dangers to us, and evaluate every aspect only as it affects us. We judge objects that we find unpleasant to look at “ugly” and weather that is comfortable for us “good.” Because we do not know the source of the amenities with which the world presents us, we suppose they were provided for us. We are concerned to show that nature does nothing in vain, which is to say, nothing useless for us. In short, we conceive the world both anthropomorphically and anthropocentrically. A century after Spinoza, Hume (1757/1957) offered a similar picture, in which humans find themselves in a mysterious world that they suppose operates on the same principles as they. Hume’s image of people is as spectators in a theater, in which events are produced by offstage causes to which we have no access, and in which we therefore are threatened by dangers we can neither understand nor predict. Desperately seeking understanding and a measure of control, we fall back on our knowledge of the most familiar model: ourselves. This model induces us to imagine the world as animated and populated, 3  Xenophanes (6th century bce), with his ironically artistic lions and horses, often is cited as noting that religion anthropomorphizes, but his surviving text is too fragmentary to disclose his theory.

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so that “trees, mountains and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion” (1957/1757, p. 29). Thus the source of religion is cognitive error, under pressure of ignorance and fear. About a century after Hume, Feuerbach (1854/ 1957) again described religion as anthropomorphism, but a more subjective one. Rather than an interpretation of the world, this anthropomorphism is, unbeknownst to us, a product of our self-scrutiny and aspirations to improve ourselves. God is a conception of realized human desires for self-perfection, externalized or “projected” on the world (Harvey, 1995). For Feuerbach, in contrast to the relative rationalism of Spinoza and Hume, not only is the resolution that anthropomorphism and religion achieve out of our awareness, but so also is the problem they solve. E. B. Tylor (1873), the first systematic anthropological theorist of religion, judged Hume as the founder of the modern view of religion and was, like him, a cognitivist. Religion was a belief in humanlike “spiritual beings,” conceptions of which arose as an interpretation of certain salient phenomena, namely dreams and death. People worldwide suppose, Tylor wrote, that dreams about other people are visits by their spirits and that death is the permanent departure of such a spirit. Thus spirits originated in these human experiences, and later were extended to account for natural phenomena as well. Religion, then, is a view of the world as populated by persons, either disembodied or embodied in natural phenomena. Freud (1927/1975) again described religion as anthropomorphism—as our “humanization of nature”—but he famously saw it not as an attempt to understand the world but as self-delusion. Freud’s work on religion was inconsistent, but largely described it as wishful thinking, an attempt to preserve our equanimity against the prospects of danger and of inevitable death. Probably drawing on Feuerbach and perhaps on optical projection in film (Guthrie 2000), he described anthropomorphism as a “projection” of ourselves on the world. Horton (1960, 1993) is a cognitivist, a self-described neo-Tylorean, and a long-term ethnographer among the Kalabari of the Niger Delta. Drawing on his fieldwork and on philosophy of science, Horton too described anthropomorphism as important to religion, although only as a reasonable “idiom” with which to order, explain, and influence the world. In their explanatory quest, Horton held, religion and science are similar enterprises, distinguished primarily by science’s well-developed awareness of alternative theory and by

religion’s lack of such awareness and its resulting conservatism. As a practice, however, religion for Horton, as for Tylor, consists of social relationships with persons, either disembodied or embodied in natural phenomena. Theories of religion as anthropomorphism thus are both venerable and varied. Nonetheless, no unified account of anthropomorphism has emerged, and in consequence these theories, though influential in studies of religion, still are insufficient. I build on these predecessors with a particular account of situated cognition—an evolutionary epistemology—and describe something of the pervasiveness of anthropomorphism in thought and action. That pervasiveness, a recurrent theme in Nietzsche’s work, characterized for him the human worldview. “Truth” for him was “a moveable army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a collection of human relations that have been poetically and rhetorically elevated, transformed and decorated” (Nietzsche, 1966, p. 314). Nietzsche’s treatment of anthropomorphism began with attempts to avoid or mitigate it (Stack, 1980) but ended by conceding that it is comprehensive and irremediable. It can only be acknowledged and accepted. This human condition includes our continuous imagination of possible persons and qualities of persons—hypotheses, few of which we can rule out and to many of which we commit, often without knowing it. These persons constitute an indefinite spectrum: embodied and disembodied, omniscient and ignorant, malevolent and benevolent, weak and powerful, stranger and kinsperson. Concepts and stories of some of them, more compelling than others, coalesce in religions. My argument is consistent both with those of most of the predecessors cited, beginning with Spinoza, and with natural selection at the individual level.4 It relies on a small number of unsurprising and falsifiable assumptions to account for a range of phenomena broader even than those of religion.5 These phenomena include conceptions of, and supposed interactions with, such persons as elves, Martians, ancestors, yetis, Santa Claus, cars, computers, and gods. The phenomena also include more 4  Because it is consistent with natural selection at the individual level, this account of religion seems preferable to accounts such as that of the biologist David Sloan Wilson (2002) and others that depend on “group selection,” a notion that remains controversial. 5  In contrast to religion, anthropomorphism is, as noted above, universal in neurologically normal humans and probably in all humans. Nonetheless, its scope is not generally appreciated.

general and abstract ones, such as our proclivity for finding design in nature and purpose in events— that is, for teleology—and for finding moral causality (formalized in the doctrine of karma) in the impersonal world. Thus we ask the meaning of accidents, blame victims, and admire the fortunate. The argument has seven parts: reviews of several theories of religion; an overview of anthropomorphism in everyday life; accounts of anthropomorphism as a byproduct of an evolved strategy, of animism as anthropomorphism, of animism among animals, and of a cognitive neuroscience of anthropomorphism; and responses to critics.

Some Contemporary Theories of Religion

No general theory or other unifying account of religion prevails in religious studies, and indeed none comes close. Some scholars of religion (e.g., Asad, 1993; Bloch, 2008; Fitzgerald, 1997; McCutcheon, 1997; J. Z. Smith, 1982, 1993) have written that the concept “religion” is arbitrary and unstable, and that therefore the very quest for a theory is quixotic. Others (e.g., Saler, 2000/1993,  2008,  n.d.; Schilbrack, 2010) have worked to stabilize the concept, for example with the notions of prototype and family resemblance. Saler (2000/1993) wrote, in a view now representative in religious studies, that religion is an abstraction and that its prototype is Western and culture-bound. That prototype is, in a standard view, the Abrahamic religions, conceived as having a particular collection of features: ethics, symbolism, ritual, doctrine, a priesthood, an afterlife, and a god. However, according to the “family” model of religion, advanced by Saler (2000) and to a large degree adopted here, none of these features is necessary or sufficient for membership. Instead, all serve as criteria for some degree of membership, which is not either-or but more-or-less. Saler’s treatment arguably achieves some stability, yet no particular theory of religion necessary follows from it. In a continuing effort to distinguish religion from secular life, many scholars (e.g., Atran, 2002; Boyer, 2001; Bulbulia, 2004, 2013; Mithen, 1999; Norenzayan, 2013; Pyysiänen, 2013; M.  Wilson, Bulbulia, & Sibley, 2014) invoke a second problematic term: “supernatural.” Few of these writers, however, provide a definition of this term. Yet “supernatural” as a category is as indefinite and as culture-bound as “religion,” as critics including Durkheim (1965/1915), Hallowell (1960), Lienhardt (1961), Horton (1967,  1993), Luckmann (1976), Saler (1977,  n.d.), and Klass Religion as Anthropomorphism

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(1995) have urged. Luckmann (1976, p. 678) called the concept a “vestige of 19th-century scientism [that has] misled much . . . theorizing about religion.” Hallowell (1960, p. 28) called its use “unfortunate,” and Evans-Pritchard (1937, p. 80, in Saler, n.d.) wrote that it means “very much the same as abnormal or extraordinary.” “Supernatural” thus may mean many things, but often seems to mean only “strange,” “false,” or “inconsistent with current science.” Hence the confidence many writers have in this term as a means for defining religion appears misplaced. Fortunately, major theories of religion exist that do not depend on it, though even these are colored by it. A brief review provides context for the present theory. Among ways of classifying them, three categories (often intermingled) are useful: wishful thinking, functionalism or adaptationism, and cognitivism or intellectualism. Of these three, religion as wishful thinking now has the fewest scholarly proponents and appears least compatible with evolutionary thought. Nonetheless, theories invoking it seem plausible at first blush, contain some truth, and have had proponents from Euripides to Hume, Feuerbach, Freud, Malinowski, Spiro, Stark and Bainbridge, and Norenzayan. All these writers claim that people hold religious beliefs because they are comforting, with such postulates as immortality, protective deities, and communion with spiritual others. Gods, for example, “exist as hopes” (Stark & Bainbridge, 1996, p. 23) in human minds. Wishful-thinking theory may well tap some individual benefits of religious thought, as Norenzayan, Hansen, and Cady (2008) argue. However, as a general explanation, this theory is contradicted by fearsome features in religion, including hells, demons, and wrathful gods, for example in the Calvinism that Hume described as frightening him as a child. It also is hard to understand religion as wishful-thinking evolutionarily, because it provides no clear selective advantage. Rather, its undermining of realistic thought and action would seem disadvantageous. The second category of theories, variously called symbolist, adaptationist, or functionalist, has been important and even dominant in social science for over a century, and has existed far longer. Its advocates range from Polybius in the first century bce to Comte, Freud, Marx, and Durkheim in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 20th and early 21st centuries, its proponents in anthropology alone have included Radcliffe-Brown (1979/1939), Malinowski 52

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(1948), Turner (1969), Rappaport (1999), Sosis (2000), Whitehouse (2000), Atran (2002), Lanman (in Barrett & Lanman, 2008), and Purzycki6 (2015). Other disciplines with advocates of this kind of theory include biology (most notably Wilson 2002), psychology, and religious studies. Theorists of this persuasion hold that religion concerns neither individual hopes and fears nor the world in general, but human societies, in which it fulfills various functions. In particular, it is said to increase cohesion and order, for example by positing moralistic gods that encourage ethical behavior. Societies that encourage religion may endure longer than those that do not, and their persistence accounts for the persistence of their religions. Although religion clearly can produce cohesion, this seems an insufficient explanation of its existence. One objection to such an explanation is factual. If the claim that religion strengthens groups is more than the circular assertion that it unites its own members, it must include groups (e.g., families, clans, villages, and states) that have some basis (e.g., kinship, ethnicity, or polity) in addition to ­religion. Rather than reliably strengthening such groups, however, religions may instead undermine them with sectarian conflict. Some have led to near or total destruction of their member communities, for example in mid-16th-century central Europe, mid-19th-century China, the American West in the 1890s, and at Jonestown in 1978. In addition to such factual problems, functionalist and adaptationist explanations face a theoretical problem as well: that of explaining the genesis and adoption of a feature said to accomplish a function. In the case of social and cultural arrangements, functionalists must say why they arise, and how and why members of society identify, establish, and maintain them. Because most “functions” can be accomplished by more than one means (Douglas & Perry, 1985) and because means are chosen by persons, theorists must say why people adhere to particular ones such as religion. Functionalists and adaptationists often have imagined religion as arising by chance or have argued that the benefits it confers encourage mental traits that enable it. Chance cannot well explain its worldwide distribution, however, and explaining religion by its benefits is teleological. For example, “Why do religious persons believe in Gods and not 6  Purzycki (2015) distances himself from pure functionalism, endorsing (as “adaptationists” such as Norenzayan, 2013, often do) a byproduct account of the origins of religion.

merely distal persons? Answer: If prosocial conduct is to be motivated, the Gods must be believed to be real.  .  .  .  Why is religious belief recalcitran[t]? Answer: Effective cooperation demands social prediction” (Bulbulia, 2013, p. 234). Thus a need that a function be accomplished explains the existence of the condition that accomplishes it. That this cause-and-effect relation seems plausible, however, may reflect our readiness to find purpose more than it reflects our science. Despite these reservations, adaptationist research helps make clear that religions are created by members of society, not by lone individuals, and that the world appears social to us because human society is the framework in which we exist. In addition, such work often incorporates accounts of religion as a byproduct or “spandrel” of other human cognitive tendencies, helping explain how religious thought and action begin. The third category of theories, the cognitivist category, characteristically asserts that religion is in the first instance a cognitive endeavor, an attempt to produce information about—and understandings of—the world and to act accordingly. This category again has a considerable history, dating at least to Spinoza and arguably to Lucretius. At present, cognitive theories, together with adaptationist theories that incorporate them, are in the ascendant in studies of religion. These have joined in a new and growing discipline, the cognitive science of religion (CSR), with an international organization and publication, the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion. The new discipline is currently the most rapidly growing area in religious studies, with many scholars, directions, and even overviews.7 The CSR is marked methodologically by more experimentation than elsewhere in religious studies, and marked theoretically by naturalism, comparison, evolutionism, and a view of religion as characterized in large part by its conceptions of humanlike but other-thanhuman agents, especially gods (e.g., Barrett, 2000; Barrett & Keil, 1996; Boyer, 1994,  2001; Burkert, 1996; Franek, 2014; Guthrie, 1980, 1993; Lawson & McCauley, 1990, McCauley & Lawson 2002). Despite this much agreement, cognitive theory in CSR is of two sorts. The first, to which the theory 7  Some representative edited volumes are Pyysiäinen and Anttonen (2002), Whitehouse and Laidlaw (2007), Xygalatas and McCorkle (2013), Geertz (2013), Geertz and Jensen (2014), and Martin and Sorensen (2014). Other representative journals are Culture and Cognition and Religion, Brain & Behavior.

advocated here belongs, tries primarily to explain the genesis of religious thought and action, not their transmission. It maintains that they are intuitive, in the sense of Sperber (1996, p. 89)—that is, generated by “spontaneous and unconscious perceptual and inferential processes.” In this view, our response to the ambiguity of the world and to our need to distinguish persons from nonpersons is to constantly imagine a range of possible persons, variants of our concepts of humans. Only a small fraction of the concepts we generate are consciously accessible and, of those, few are widely shared or preserved. Ideas about persons not only arise readily but also transmit well, because their fundamental features are both familiar and relevant. We have them without even knowing it. The other kind of cognitive theory of religion, often deemed central to the “standard model” in CSR (e.g., Murray, 2009, p. 460), is based on an account of cultural transmission called cultural epidemiology (Sperber, 1985,  1996). This account compares the genesis and transmission of culture to those of disease. Like new strains of germs, religious ideas and practices arise randomly. They are retained and spread, however, because they are memorable, and memorable because they combine an intuitive element that makes them easy to understand with a counterintuitive one that makes them salient (Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2000; Boyer, 1994,  2001; Pyysiäinen, 2002). A leading proponent of this theory, Pascal Boyer, writes that its key term, “counterintuitive,” is “technical” and does not mean “strange . . . exceptional or extraordinary” (2001, p. 65). Rather, it describes certain concepts said to violate innate ontological categories or “templates” that stipulate features necessary for membership. The templates “person,” “plant,” and “animal,” for example, stipulate that members have life, alimentation, growth, aging, and death. Counterintuitive concepts are of two kinds: those that belong to a given category but lack one or more of its features (e.g., a concept of an animal that lacks mortality), and those that do not belong to a category (e.g., person) but nonetheless have one or more of its features (e.g., speech). The most memorable concepts have only one or two features that violate their category, because a greater number is harder to remember. Hence the theory is “minimal counterintuitiveness,” or MCI, theory. Although MCI theory presently is widely endorsed in CSR and has generated considerable research, several problems accompany it. First, the Religion as Anthropomorphism

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meaning of the key term, “counterintuitive,” is unclear (Guthrie, 2007a, pp. 53–55,  2015a; Näreaho, 2008; Russell & Gobet, 2013; Purzycki & Willard, 2015), and researchers use it in different ways. Some researchers find counterintuitive what others find intuitive, such as “swimming cow” or “omniscient person” (Purzycki & Willard, 2015). In Hume’s opinion, for example, immortals are not implausible; and young children apparently believe that humans are immortal (Slaughter, Jaakkola, & Carey, 1999, in Emmons, 2015). Minimal counterintuitiveness theory nevertheless affirms that immortality is counterintuitive. In light of such contradictions, Russell and Gobet (2013, p. 741) believe that most researchers on counterintuitivity use “their own personal concepts to design stimuli that they claim . . . are universal.” A second, related problem is showing that the ontological categories postulated are in fact innate. Minimal counterintuitiveness theory asserts, for example, that “person” and “animal” are innately distinct; yet young children appear to understand animals as persons (Carey, 1985,  1995; Carey & Spelke, 1996; Hatano & Inagaki, 2002). If, as it seems, persons and animals are not innately distinct, then such supposedly counterintuitive concepts as “talking dog” are instead merely strange or bizarre, which does not count (Boyer, 2001, p. 65). A third problem is that key claims of the theory have received uneven attention. Most studies of the theory investigate its claim that inference-violation aids memory (Purzycki & Willard, 2015). In contrast, few have tested whether religious thought actually is counterintuitive, or whether the reason that religion is widespread is that it is memorable. Moreover, researchers observe only unreliably the MCI stipulation that ontological categories and the expectations they generate must be innate. Many instead have studied expectations that clearly are learned, such as the (mistaken) idea that cows do not swim. A fourth problem for MCI theory is that a central claim—that attributing mind to inanimate objects is counterintuitive—is contradicted by scholars in several fields. Anthropologists (Gell, 1998), linguists (Cherry, 1992), neuroscientists (Cullen, Kanai, Bahrami, & Rees, 2014; Farah & Heberlein, 2007; Heberlein, 2008; Schilbach, Eickhoff, Rotarska-Jagiela, Fink, & Vogeley, 2008), philosophers (Hume 1957/1757; Nietzsche, 1966; Spinoza, 1670/1951), and psychologists 54

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(Beit-Hallahmi, 2009; Heider & Simmel, 1944; Norenzayan et al., 2008; Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000; Wegner, 2005) have reported instead that attribution of mind to objects is ubiquitous, intuitive, and indeed automatic. Another important MCI claim, so closely related to the last that it may be considered a corollary, is that “an agent without a physical body [is a] violation of intuitive expectations” (Pyysiänen, 2013, p. 7). This claim is crucial because gods and other spirits frequently are invisible or disembodied and thus purportedly are counterintuitive, which in MCI theory explains their persistence. Multidisciplinary research on mind-body dualism, however (Bering, 2002, 2006; Bloom, 2004; Cohen, Burdett, Knight, & Barrett, 2011; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Leder, 1990; Lohmann, 2003; Roazzi et al., 2013; Wellman & Johnson, 2008), again has concluded the opposite: that mind-body dualism is intuitive and even innate, and that in it, mind (or soul, spirit, etc.) is invisible and separable from body. Thus the disembodiment of gods, far from counterintuitive, is simply the same priority and independence of mind that we automatically posit for humans. A fifth problem concerns the theory’s relation to a central tenet of evolutionary theory, namely that the features selected are those that contribute to an organism’s fitness. Minimal counterintuitiveness theory asserts that human cognition favors counterintuitive concepts, which violate innate ontologies. That this predilection should have been selected implies some advantage; yet, to my knowledge, none has been posited. Because the ontological categories themselves supposedly are innate and hence presumably evolved, moreover, a tendency to violate them should be counterproductive. Meanwhile, a simpler principle to explain memorability, long available from information theory, appears more parsimonious and consistent with natural selection: that unusual things and events are more informative than usual ones, and therefore more memorable. It is not clear (partly because the meaning of “counterintuitive” is obscure) that MCI theory captures anything that information theory does not. A sixth problem, or at least weakness, is that this theory sheds little or no light on the genesis of religious concepts. Instead, it pictures them as generated randomly, on the model of genetic mutations. Yet despite great variation among religions, all standard exemplars have concepts of other-thanhuman persons. These persons share a limited range

of nominally counterintuitive properties, principally invisibility and disembodiment, and often qualities and powers that (in MCI theory) are other than human, such as immortality, unusual knowledge, or creative ability. Explaining why we imagine and find such persons plausible needs not chance but specific conditions. As Anttonen (2002, p. 27) writes, for scholars “there is hardly a more serious task [than] identifying the mechanisms that generate religion” (emphasis added). Last, a curiosity about MCI theory is that leading advocates (e.g., Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2004; Boyer, 2001) also embrace hyperactive agent detection device (HADD, Barrett, 2000) theory. Yet this theory holds that humans find unseen agents intuitive (Barrett, 2007, p. 6, calls this “reflexive”), while MCI theory holds that we find them counterintuitive. These two theories thus are an odd couple, sharing an explanandum but characterizing it in opposite ways. Until the several apparent contradictions described above are resolved, the cognitive science of religion might be judged theoretically inchoate. We return, then, to the cognitive theory advanced here, which (though both more general and more specific) resembles HADD.8 I begin with the suggestion (Franek, 2014; Guthrie, 1980,  1993) that there is, after all, one major strand of agreement among most students of religion. This is that religions include (in Hallowell’s 1960 phrase) “other-than-human persons,” often with powers that are superhuman (but not necessarily supernatural; Spiro, 1966, in Saler, n.d.). Lawson and McCauley (1990, p. 5, in Saler, 2008) write, for instance, “What is unique to religious ritual [is] superhuman agents.” As an exception to this association of religion with other-than-human persons, Buddhism often is cited because it supposedly has no gods. But “Buddhism,” like “Hinduism” or “Christianity,” names not an entity but a historical aggregate. The variants of Buddhism we call “religious” have not only gods but also far more adherents than those without gods, which are better called philosophies. Thus the supposed exception is instead a conflation, and scholarly agreement on the ubiquity of humanlike persons in religion still is possible despite Buddhism. 8  This likeness is not surprising because Barrett (2000 and elsewhere) kindly credits Guthrie (1980,  1993) as the basis of HADD.

The family-resemblance approach to conceptualizing religion stipulates that no single feature is necessary or sufficient for inclusion in that category. Nevertheless, the feature of postulating, and nominally interacting socially with, other-than-human persons seems at least first among equals. As a hypothesis, this feature is inferentially rich and hence parsimonious, in that any postulation of, and interaction with, persons (human or not) generates four additional features: ritual, symbolism, doctrine, and ethics. Including the postulated god or gods, then, we get five of the seven features cited above for the Western prototype of religion. The remaining two features are a priesthood, which is not universal in religion, and an afterlife, which appears implicit in mind-body dualism and thus (like most of the individual features) exists in secular thought and action as well. The identification of religion as anthropomorphism advocated here gives religion a broad foundation, in that (unlike religion itself ) anthropomorphism is universal in neurologically normal humans (Cullen et al., 2014; Farah & Heberlein, 2007; Heberlein, 2008; Heberlein & Adolphs, 2004; Schilbach et al., 2008). Moreover, this foundation points to a rudimentary analog to religion in other animals (Burkert, 1996; Darwin 1871; Guthrie, 1980, 2002; Harrod, 2011, 2014; Wallace, 1966), many of which appear to attribute life to inanimate phenomena. The identification of religion as anthropomorphism, nonetheless, has failed to gain general ­acceptance in religious studies, probably in part ­because the pervasiveness of anthropomorphism is not recognized and in part because no explanation of it is generally accepted. Within the cognitive ­science of religion, the basis (Guthrie, 1980, 1993) of this chapter’s account of religion and anthropomorphism has been promulgated, though frequently simplified as “agent detection.” Nonetheless, writers still disagree on why anthropomorphism occurs. My theory, meant to help explain why anthropomorphism and hence concepts of gods arise and persist, is cognitive in several ways. Most importantly, it addresses religion as cognition—that is, as an attempt to make sense of the world (in Horton’s [1993] terms, to reduce apparent complexity to simplicity and apparent chaos to order), both in the service of action and through action. A second cognitive feature is that the theory maintains that religion attributes cognition to the world, prototypically in the form of humanlike mind. Third, such attribution of Religion as Anthropomorphism

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mind by religion is itself cognitively parsimonious in that, on the basis of a single familiar model, it seems to explain much. Human minds, as the most highly organized phenomena we know, produce the most diverse behavior and artifacts, from boot prints in snow to vehicle tracks on Mars to mushroom clouds. As a model of the world, then, the human mind’s organization, together with its intimate familiarity, makes it uniquely productive (Guthrie, 1993). Last, the theory identifies a corresponding pragmatics: that we are concerned to identify humanlike minds not only because they provide the most inclusive account but also because, by the same token, they are the most powerful actual agents. As do other theories, this one builds on antecedents. These antecedents, dating to the 1600s and described above, similarly have claimed that religion is anthropomorphism and that anthropomorphism is built into the conditions of human cognition. They diverged, however, in describing these conditions. Current writers diverge as well, appealing to projection, wishful thinking, or counterintuitiveness, which share the claim that we use ourselves as models of the world but not the reason why we do so. Even Hume, the theory’s leading exponent, said we do so simply because we are “intimately familiar” with ourselves (1757/1957, pp. 29–30). This explanation, however, appears to invoke only egocentrism as the reason for choosing ourselves as model, and is to some degree pre-Darwinian. As evolutionists, we might ask, what adaptive value has this choice? Hume (1932: I, 157) himself says of one aspect of anthropomorphism, namely teleology, “A Theory to solve this would be very acceptable.” My aim is to suggest a theory of anthropomorphism that solves the problem of teleology and more. The context of the theory is set by four general propositions (Guthrie, 1980, 1993) that now are relatively familiar.9 First, there is neither a clear line nor a fundamental difference between religious and secular thought and action, which are continuous in form and greatly overlapping in content. As B. H. Smith (2009, p. 9) writes, “the cognitive tendencies that give rise to [religion] are indistinguishable from the capacities and dispositions that give rise to . . . culture more generally.”

9  These propositions have in the interim been somewhat widely adopted—and adapted—especially in the cognitive science of religion, for example as Justin Barrett’s (2000) wellknown “hyperactive agent detection device” or “HADD.”

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Second, we (like most sentient beings) need to know whether others are present, and we judge readily that they are. We see ambiguous things and events—motions, shadows, sounds—disproportionately as persons, though sometimes in nonhuman form. Thus we typically discover more persons than really exist. Third, our prototype and default conception of animal, or intentional agent, is the human person and centrally the human mind. Cognitive scientists and others (e.g., Carey & Spelke, 1996; Chartrand et al., 2008; Cullen et al., 2014; Farah & Heberlein, 2007; Hatano & Inagaki, 2002; Heider & Simmel, 1944; Mars et al., 2012; Schilbach et al., 2008; Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000) indicate that this default is involuntary, automatic, and mostly unconscious. Fourth, our readiness to suppose that persons are present constitutes a cognitive strategy, evolved for good reason. If we are right, and someone is there, we gain much by knowing it, and if we are wrong, we lose little (Guthrie, 1980). Some have misread my argument as a claim that anthropomorphism (or a “hyperactive agent detection device”) is itself a strategy. It therefore bears repeating that anthropomorphism is not a strategy but a byproduct of one. The strategy is, to repeat, when confronting uncertain phenomena, to bet first on what matters most. What matters most varies, but usually is a human or a human artifact. Our tolerant standards for judging that a human is present constitute an evolved version of the adage “better safe than sorry” (Guthrie, 1980). The categorical term “anthropomorphism,” then, names a residue of judgments that a human, or a trace or characteristic of one, is present after a later judgment has been made that it is not. Anthropomorphizing is ancient and has causes we share with other species. Indeed, the Makapansgat pebble (together with animal behavior reviewed below) suggests that the tendency long predates humanity. This pebble, which resembles the face of a hominin, was carried into a South African cave some 2.5 to 3 million years ago, apparently because of this likeness and apparently by an Australopithecine. It resembles a human or human ancestor so much that it seems an artifact; yet archaeologists say it is a natural object. Our reluctance to believe this reflects our bent to experience things and events as persons or human artifacts. This bent has a particular ethology, epistemology,

and neurobiology that correspond to our biological interests.

Anthropomorphism in Everyday Life

We conceive persons in endless variety. Their embodiments may be fully humanlike, as in the God of Genesis and of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Bodies may also be animal-like, as in Coyote and other tricksters; object-like, as in computers and cars; wraith-like, as in Tylor’s spirit beings and ghosts; or nonexistent, as in the gods of theologians. Their minds, in contrast, are less diverse. They may again be fully human, with the same range of sensations, beliefs, desires, emotions, opinions, and knowledge that we know in ourselves. Minds may also be conceived as deficient, however, as when we dehumanize or “infrahumanize” (Demoulin et al., 2008; Kwan & Fiske, 2008) groups other than our own and conceive them as lacking secondary emotions such as pride, shame, and guilt. Such impaired persons may be conceived either as human or as other-than-human, as in Satan (Demoulin et al., 2008). Conversely, we may suprahumanize such persons as gods, for example with greater knowledge or wisdom. That ancestors too may be gods reminds us that the spectrum of persons is a continuum. Ancestors are especially prominent in “house” societies (in which residence is an aspect of kinship) and in clans and lineages. They originate as human persons and, after death, are other-than-human primarily by virtue of permanent disembodiment. Ancestors may become other than human also by losing individual characteristics, such as desires for tobacco or alcohol, yet retain personhood. Often they are conceived as remaining so closely tied to their kin groups that they are continuous with living elders (Kopytoff, 1971). A similar continuity of gods and humans is suggested by Euhemerus’s proposal that concepts of gods originated in stories of exceptional humans, and by the divinity or near-divinity sometimes postulated for kings and emperors. Thus the otherness asserted for gods in some traditions such as the Abrahamic religions (cf. Saler, 1980, 2009) is not a cultural universal and need not command special effort in our elucidation of concepts of them. Personal spirits may be conceived as embodied not only in biologically living things such as animals and plants but also in inanimate ones. These commonly include mountains, streams, other landscape features, and even artifacts. We may

treat stuck drawers and resistant bottle tops as though they were willfully recalcitrant, kiss or speak to sculpture and paintings, and conceive these as weeping, bleeding, or sweating (Van Eck, 2012).10 Industrial products not considered “art,” such as bottles and glasses, also are represented explicitly or implicitly as personal. Television advertisements animate containers with speech and movement, and print advertisements often give containers faces. Notably, bottles and glasses in print advertisements widely—though often covertly—enact stereotypic gender roles, in which bottles are men and glasses are women (Guthrie, 2007b). Bottles typically orient themselves to the viewer and are dominant and disproportionately large, while glasses orient themselves to, or lean on, the bottles.11 In another widespread trope, a Kool-Aid advertisement depicts a pitcher with condensate in which a finger has traced two eyes and a smile. Over the image, the caption asks, “Why is this pitcher smiling?” This may be a good question, but more relevant here is the question, why do we so easily see a pitcher as a person? Current explanations of anthropomorphism ­include ones we have met earlier as accounts of religion: wishful thinking, projection, and counterintuitiveness. These three explanations, however, are inconsistent with each other and also with evolutionary principles, in that they lack apparent selective advantages. They would seem, in fact, maladaptive, because their interpretations not only are mistaken but also are in principle undirected either to accuracy or to usefulness. Regarding “projection,” moreover, Harvey (1995) rightly notes that this concept is a metaphor without a theory. The metaphor problematically assumes (Guthrie, 2000) two kinds of perception: biased or “projective” perception and unbiased or “normal” perception. Contrary to the assumption that normal perception is unbiased, however, all perception (Nietzsche, 1966) is biased, because all perceivers have interests. Thus, if any perception is “projective,” all must be, and the nominal distinction is without basis. As mentioned above, other interested scholars include Gell (1998), Mitchell (2005), Osborne and Tanner (2007), Guthrie (2007b), Van Eck (2010, 2012), and Bernstein (2012). 11  While representations of bottles and glasses cannot be called religious, moreover, they nevertheless are similar to Feuerbach’s God in that they are unconsciously externalized and idealized versions of ourselves. 10 

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Wishful thinking theory (Freud, 1975/1927, pp. 22–23, 47), though not without merit, is subverted both by the absence of apparent selective advantage and by the fact that anthropomorphism often is not reassuring but frightening. Home alone at night, we may hear a door closed by wind as someone in the house and be alarmed, not comforted. We see not (as a popular saying has it) “what we want to see,” but what is important to see (Gombrich, as cited in Arnheim, 1974, pp. 50–51; Guthrie, 1980). According to the counterintuitiveness theory, anthropomorphism (like religion) transmits well because its violations make it memorable (Boyer, 1996; Mithen, 1998). As noted, however, what actually is counterintuitive is contested. Researchers in varied disciplines—anthropology (Gell, 1998), archaeology (Hodder, 2006,  2009), architecture (Drake, 2008), art history (Van Eck, 2010,  2012), cognitive neuroscience (Cullen et al., 2014; Farah & Heberlein 2007; Schilbach et al., 2008), cognitive psychology (Mar & MacRae, 2006; Norenzayan et  al., 2008; Wegner, 2005), and developmental psychology (Kelemen, 1999, 2004)—write instead that anthropomorphism is intuitive and even mandatory. Current theories of anthropomorphism, then, reach no more consensus than did earlier ones. Attributing human qualities to objects and events would, in “dual-process” cognition (e.g., Kahneman, 2011) be “fast” or “system one.” We immediately see, for example, even schematic facelike stimuli as faces, in what appears a modular process (Nakayama, 2001). Similarly, infants at birth (Goren, Sarty, & Wu, 1975) prefer schematic images of faces with “eyes” and “mouth” correctly positioned to images that have them in the wrong place. Although monistic materialism is now intellectually dominant in the industrial world and, among adults, overwrites anthropomorphism, the latter remains beneath the surface. It is “ubiquitous . . . in young children’s understanding of the world” (Hatano & Inagaki, 2002, p. 45) and even in science, although, warned by Bacon (1620/1960), most researchers try to avoid it. The scientist, Nietzsche (1966, p. 316) wrote, looks: at bottom only for metamorphoses of the world in man; he wrestles for an understanding of the world as a human-like thing and wins at best a feeling of assimilation . . . [He] regards the whole world as connected to man, as an infinitely broken echo of an original sound that of man; as the manifold copy of an original picture, that of man.

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This condition is omnipresent and multifaceted. Scientists base even the physically irreducible concept of “force,” Nietzsche wrote, on feeling their own bodies pushing. Darwin anthropomorphized natural selection as a “powerful agent always ready to act and select” with “unerring skill” (Guthrie, 1993, p. 173); and Kelemen, Rottman, and Seston (2013) find that physical scientists under pressure of time are, like the rest of us, teleologists.

Anthropomorphism as Evolutionary Byproduct

My account of anthropomorphism begins with that of Hume, called by some (Morris, 2013) the leading philosopher of religion and a precursor of cognitive science. Hume held, we recall, that our world is inscrutable and alarming and that, lacking a better model by which to explain, predict and control it, we fall back on ourselves. Hume (1957, pp. 29–30) wrote—anticipating Meltzoff and Moore (1977) and Meltzoff’s (2007) “like me” description of how we conceive intentional agents—“There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.” This is such a natural mistake, Hume wrote, that even “philosophers” (including scientists) cannot avoid it. Hume seems, despite his explanation by familiarity, to have been puzzled by the mistake and perhaps to have thought it egocentric and ­arbitrary. With the advantage of Darwin, Nietzsche, cognitive science, and Pascal’s Wager (the last is error-management theory: Guthrie, 1980,  1993; ­ Nesse, 2005; Pascal & Levi, 2008), we now can place this mistake in an evolutionary context that is remarkably simple. We can account for it with an evolutionary epistemology of theories (Bradie & Harms, 2012), a  description of the context of the acquisition of knowledge. My version of this epistemology ­emphasizes our biological need to detect agents, ­especially humans; our epistemic uncertainty; and an evolved strategy, in six short and largely uncontroversial propositions. First, contrary to common sense but in agreement with many philosophers and others (Arnheim, 1969,  1974; Gombrich, 1969,  1973; Greco, 1998; Gregory, 1997; Wittgenstein, 1953/2001; pace Gibson, 1986), perception is interpretation. The raw material of perception is sensation—for example, light and dark, color, sound, smell, and touch—and

every sensation has several possible causes. A tickle (to use two favorite examples) on our ankle may be a loose thread or a spider, and taps on our window may mean a visitor or a branch in the wind. Second, we interpret sensations with models (or templates, patterns, search images, or schemata, with somewhat varying meanings). Perceiving, then, amounts to choosing a model. As Wittgenstein put it, we don’t “just see” but “see as” (1953/2001, Pt. II, p. xi), and in Gombrich’s terms (1969, following Adelbert Ames and emphasizing uncertainty), perceiving is betting. Third, our bets are motivated by our interests, of which our central ones are persons. Thus we look first, mostly unconsciously, for persons and appear to find them everywhere (Farah & Heberlein 2007; Hume 1957/1757; Schilbach et al. 2008; Stack, 1980). Scanning for evidence of our fellows is ancient, as the pebble carried into the South African cave attests. Some three million years later, we still scan involuntarily for faces everywhere and find them in rock formations, clouds, orchids, and artifacts.12 Fourth, ambiguity and uncertainty in cognition are pervasive and ongoing (Arnheim, 1969,  1974; Gregory, 1997; Gombrich, 1969,  1973; Methys et al., 2014; Yang, Wu, & Li, 2014). Perception is “inferential” and “necessarily uncertain” (Methys et al., 2014, p. 1) and, in the perceptual process, “uncertainty pervades every aspect” (Yang et al., 2014, p. 1). This intrinsic uncertainty is heightened when we look for animals in nature, where stillness and camouflage often make them invisible. Such invisibility, available to humans as well (and at present, just as in the Pleistocene) has selected for our hairtrigger perceptual sensitivity to people and other animals (Guthrie, 1993, Ch. 2). Because human behavior is endlessly diverse, we must see possible human presence behind endless events. Fifth, our sense of agency may be triggered by a few features of anatomy and, more importantly, of behavior, to which we are especially sensitive. In anatomy, eyes, faces, and bilateral symmetry, and to a degree whole bodies (especially upright ones) 12  Apparent “faces” in artifacts are a perennially popular topic of photographs, often in collections. They often appear under the heading of “pareidolia,” or the imagined perception of pattern in random stimuli. In artifacts, pareidolia invoking faces doubtless is heightened by bilateral symmetry. The reason that artifacts are so often bilaterally symmetrical, in turn, even when this carries no apparent practical benefit, apparently is aesthetic and stems from our evolved interest in complex animals, which are bilaterally symmetrical.

stand out. Eyes are the most powerful formal features (Watson, 2011), in part because their paired black pupils are distinctive (Arnheim, 1974, p. 73) and relatively invariant; and most vertebrates, from fishes on, use them as search images for animals. In human perception eyes also appear, like faces (to which they are central), as stimuli to which our sensitivity is innate and modular (Nakayama, 2001; Watson, 2011). Their salience for us appears, for ­example, in the representations of eyes that crossculturally deter misbehavior (Bateson, Callow, Holmes, Redmond Roche, & Nettle, 2013). Stimulating our sense of agency, however, requires no anatomy at all. Behavior by itself—even the mere collective movement of dots—suffices if it is consistent with goal orientation or interaction (Heider & Simmel, 1944; Johnson, 2003; Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000). Infants, for example, try to interact with a mobile because they see its response to kicking as social (Carey, 1995, p. 279) and attribute goal orientation even to a featureless box if it varies its approach to a destination (Csibra 2008). They also can see “crawling” and “walking” in moving collections of light points. The importance of detecting goal-orientation to detecting intentional agents suggests why teleology is universal in humans. Teleology (a misapprehension that phenomena show purpose or design) is, I speculate, a byproduct of our search for agents. Scanning the world for goals and purposes discovers agents relatively efficiently because, although the appearances of agents are indefinitely diverse and often camouflaged, their goals are relatively few and easy to detect (Guthrie, 2013). Teleology then is, like anthropomorphism generally, an inexpensive byproduct of a necessary search. A sixth proposition, now widely accepted (Bloom, 2004; Cohen et al., 2011; Koch, 2009; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Leder, 1990; Roazzi et al., 2013; Tylor, 1873; Wellman & Johnson, 2008), is that humans are mind-body dualists (or soul- or spirit-body dualists, with varying but overlapping referents). In this dualism, mind has priority over, and independence of, body and is more or less immaterial and invisible. This intuitive or folk dualism, unlike that of Descartes, appears not absolute but continuous (Cohen et al., 2011), and the dividing line between mind and body is indistinct. The mind’s independence, however, means that it survives the body and, during life, temporarily may leave it. Such disembodiment, like that of Tylor’s spiritual beings, means that the frequent invisibility Religion as Anthropomorphism

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and immateriality of gods mirror those we attribute to the human mind. As Turchin (1998, p. 1) writes, agency is a representation of action, and “we do not see agents, we see only what they are doing.” The epistemology proposed has described our perceptual gambles as situated in uncertainty and as betting on the most important possibility. These gambles thus are, like those of other animals, predictable outcomes of natural selection. Largely in consequence of that selection, we scan the world first and foremost with models of persons. This epistemology constitutes an apparent explanation both of teleology and of anthropomorphism at large.

Animism as Anthropomorphism

“Animism” (Latin anima, “soul,” “spirit,” “life force,” or “breath”—concepts that are associated in a number of unrelated languages) is used, as are “supernatural” and “religion,” in varied ways. Three overlapping meanings are common. One is the attribution of impersonal “life” to aspects of the world that science labels inanimate. A second meaning is a belief in “spiritual beings” (Tylor, 1873), immaterial and usually invisible humanlike beings that animate and direct bodies. For Tylor, belief in spirit beings is both the origin and the definition of religion. A third and most common meaning, though derived from Tylor, diverges from him by singling out only one kind of religion: any (typically in a small-scale society) that endorses both a general animacy and a belief in spirits as its cause. As the foregoing indicates, the three most common meanings of animism all begin as concepts of human persons and subsequently are applied to nonhuman things and events. Thus animism is anthropomorphism, as many scholars have assumed, by definition. Nonetheless, others including this writer (e.g., Guthrie, 1993,  2002; McDonald & Stuart-Hamilton, 2000) have employed “animism” in the sense of conceptions and actions imputing mere impersonal animacy, “life,” to the world. I now believe that this usage is misleading, because we see whatever we suppose is animate initially in terms of human features. In a phrase whose abstraction resembles that of impersonal animacy, however, many writers (e.g., Barrett, 2000,  2004; Barrett & Lanman, 2008; Boyer, 2003; Schjoedt, Stodkkilde-Jorgensen, Geertz, & Roepstorff, 2009) in the cognitive science of religion use “intentional agent” to describe concepts of gods. This phrase could mean any agent with goals, including simple animals and even 60

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robots (Kiesler, Powers, Fussell, & Torrey, 2008). As a characterization of persons, whether humans or gods, it therefore is insufficiently specific. Indeed, it is impoverished. We pray, for example, not to generic intentional agents but to persons, who possess histories, responsibilities, and symbolic communications.13 When we confirm that an agent is a person, human mental and behavioral attributes are implicit, most distinctively language and symbolism (Guthrie, 1980, 1993). Even the least-personal animism, which seems to attribute only “life” to things and events, can, according to writers from Aristotle to Piaget, Cherry, and Carey and Spelke, “be regarded as personification” (Inagaki & Hatano, 1987, p. 1013). Personalism, moreover, begins early (Frith & Frith, 2010; Johnson, 2003; Meltzoff, 2007; Meltzoff & Moore, 1977). Most importantly, Meltzoff’s widely cited work (e.g., 2007) finds that the concept of intentional agency is built up from birth, through imitative interactions between the infant and other humans. If so, then agency intrinsically is personal and is something with which, as Hume (1757/1957, pp. 29–30) put it, we “are familiarly acquainted and of which [we] are intimately conscious.” Animism is never dispelled (McDonald & Stuart-Hamilton, 2000), and the human person remains our default concept of agency throughout life.

Animism Among Animals

Most scholars of religion see religion as clearly setting humans off from other animals. A few, however, find religion-like features among animals, either in behavior, such as ritual (Harrod, 2011, 2014; Wallace, 1966), or in cognition, such as social and communicative dispositions toward the world in general (Burkert, 1996). Darwin (1871, p. 64), emphasizing cognition, wrote that higher mammals share our uncertainty and our interest in agency, and may think that objects “are animated by spiritual or living essences.” His dog for example, though “sensible,” seemed to have mistaken an umbrella, jostled by wind, for an agent, and barked and growled fiercely. That many animals appear to overestimate agency in the world is unsurprising because, as noted, the possibility of illusion is built into the conditions of 13  See Rottman and Livingston (in press) for a contrary position, in which our underlying conception of intentional agency is not personal but more general and abstract.

perception. Pelicans dive on fishing lures, young coyotes stalk blowing sage-brushes (Bekoff, 1990), and animals worldwide avoid even the sketchiest scarecrows, such as Inuit rock piles. Chimpanzees, however, are most relevant here. Communities in the wild (Goodall, 1975, 1992, 2001, 2005; Harrod, 2011, 2014; Pruetz & LaDuke, 2010; Whiten et al., 1999) sometimes confront rapid streams, storms, and fires with the same show of vigor they use against rival chimpanzees and predators, including shaking, breaking, and dragging tree branches. Goodall (2001, as cited in Harrod, 2014, p. 29) suggested, in parallel with Darwin, that chimpanzees might wonder whether a waterfall is alive, and biologists Foster and Kokko (2008) replicated Guthrie’s (2002) animal-animism argument that animals often see inanimate things and events as alive. (Foster and Kokko [2008] even cite, like Guthrie [1980, 1993, 2002], the logic of Pascal’s Wager as the reason for such perception.) Burkert (1996) similarly asserted that animals treat the world as socially disposed and as sending signals, a claim supported by evidence that many animals understand the warning calls of other species (Snowden, 2009). Storms, waterfalls, and fire often are seen as alive by humans too, doubtless because such features of life as motion, growth, and unpredictability exist also in them, and because distinguishing between living and nonliving things is perpetually difficult (Aristotle called the distinction intrinsically unclear). The problem of detecting agents is universal, and humans and nonhuman animals alike respond with tolerant standards. Varied religions, from Christianity to Shinto, may interpret storms, waterfalls, and wildfires as gods or their artifacts. Nonetheless, animal animism does not, in a deservedly standard view, amount to religion. Rather, religions are as much cultural and symbolic (Geertz, 2013) as they are intuitive. Yet nonhuman animals do share our epistemological situation and our intentional stance, and respond in seemingly analogous ways.

Cognitive Neuroscience and Anthropomorphism

Humans treat the world as humanlike by default. According to a number of cognitive neuroscientists, the neural correlate of this default is the set of areas constituting the “social brain” (Brothers, 1990; Cullen et al., 2014; Dunbar, 1998; Farah & Heberlein, 2007; Frith & Frith, 2010; Heberlein, 2008; B.  Wilson, 2011) and especially its overlap with the cognitive intrinsic or default system

(Mars et al., 2012; Schilbach et al., 2008). This system comprises the areas active when we are at leisure, as in daydreaming. Anthropomorphic ideation, according to Schilbach et al. (2008), ­ Heberlein (2008), Cullen et al. (2014), and others, is represented in this spatial overlap of social ­cognition and intrinsic activity. Thus, when we are unengaged and unaware of any particular train of thought, we are unconsciously thinking about social relationships. During such times, we “approach the world as though it were full of ­ mental agents” (Schilbach et al., 2008, p. 464), and ­ humanlike models “are routinely extended into the nonhuman world” (Farmer, 2009, p. 23). Partial exceptions to such ideation are people with autism and those with damage to the amygdala (Heberlein & Adolphs, 2004), who anthropomorphize less—and are less religious—than neurologically normal people. Cullen et al. (2014, p. 1276) noted that anthropomorphism is “pervasive among humans” but is individually variable and correlated with the volume of gray matter in the left temporoparietal junction, an area involved in attributing mental states. Their finding further indicates that both anthropomorphism and personhood primarily concern mind rather than body (Guthrie, 1980, 1993, 2013). The concept of personhood, which though difficult to define is foundational to social relations, probably is represented in the same brain areas. Farah and Heberlein (2007), generally supported by Phelps (2007), have maintained that personhood is represented as a network in the temporoparietal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and fusiform gyri. Stimulating any part of the person system, Farah and Heberlein (2007) report, activates the system as a whole. The system is independent of conscious thought, including beliefs about stimuli. It is stimulated even by schematic and fragmentary representations (such as stick figures and smiley faces) as well as by real persons, even when the observer is aware that these representations are not of a human person. The same social areas again are active during a typically religious behavior, prayer, especially if it is spontaneous rather than rote. The areas active in such prayer are the same as those in social conversation (Neubauer, 2014; Schjoedt et al., 2009, p. 199), so prayer appears neurologically indistinguishable from conversation. This reinforces the view of scholars in several disciplines (e.g., Burkert, 1996; Guthrie, 1980; Horton, 1960; Koch, 2009; B.  H.  Smith, 2009) that there is no general and Religion as Anthropomorphism

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principled distinction between religious and secular ideation. The person network also includes mirror neurons that, when a subject views even static artifacts of human action, fire in representation of the action that caused them. Freedberg and Gallese (2007) report that mirror neurons fire in view of an action painting, in a pattern that reflects the motions of throwing paint on a canvas. The breadth and depth of anthropomorphic perception may also be seen in the fact that mirror neurons that fire when one person touches another also fire when an observer sees two inanimate objects in contact (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007). Similarly, the same neurons fire for a given action whether the observer sees it performed by a person or by a robot (Gazzola, Rizzolatti, Wicker, & Keysers, 2007). The neurology of person perception thus suggests that no clear perceptual criteria distinguish phenomena that are personal and impersonal, or even personal and inanimate. This casts further doubt on the notion that an innate ontology distinguishes among persons, animals, and objects.

Critical Objections

Since the theory was first presented, friendly critics have questioned several aspects. They ask, for example, how “anthropomorphic” gods can be invisible and intangible when people are not. Earlier (1980, 1993), I tried to forestall this question with two observations that reduce the difference between gods and humans. First, many real agents, too, are invisible or intangible, by virtue of concealment, camouflage, or small size (as in viruses, whose effects once were seen as those of intentional agents). Second, invisibility is not intrinsic in all gods, some of whom are conceived (as by some early Christians and among the Crow; Lowie, 1924/1970) as both tangible and visible, and some of whom (like Homer’s gods) must use cloud or smoke to conceal themselves. Those claims understandably did not satisfy all critics. Pyysiänen (2002, p. 122), for example, countered that “Gods are not invisible in the same sense as camouflaged animals” but rather in principle. Their invisibility is counterintuitive, unlike that of animals, because they combine “belief-and-desire psychology and lack of a physical body. It runs counter to human [intuition] for a person not to have a body.” Pyysiänen’s assertion that invisibility in animals and gods is different may be sound, although subjectively the difference is small, because camouflaged animals can seem miraculously to shift 62

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from visibility to invisibility. However, his claim that a person without a body is counterintuitive, pivotal for MCI theory, now confronts the considerable consensus that we conceive persons primarily as mind and conceive mind as different from and independent of body. The simplest explanation of why we conceive other-than-human persons as disembodied, or as potentially disembodied, is precisely that their prototype is the human person. A similar doubt about invisibility, as well as about immortality and “remarkable powers,” was raised by Saler (1980, 2009, p. 50)14 in the context of the specifically unanthropomorphic “otherness” that theologians postulate of gods. For Saler (following Ehnmark, 1935, p. 1) this otherness is necessary to evoke worship. Does it not, he asked, partly negate anthropomorphism? Two answers, very like the answer to Pyysiänen, are possible. First, the line between gods and humans is indistinct intrinsically. If gods are “other” by their invisibility and immateriality, for example, human persons also must be “other” because they are commonly conceived as essentially mind, which makes them similarly invisible and immaterial (Bering, 2006; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Leder, 1990; Turchin, 1998). If their remarkable powers are said to distinguish them, we must note that similar powers may be accorded—and worship may even be directed—not only to gods but also to human persons such as heads of state, corporate magnates, and movie stars. Second, the alterity of gods is more theological than popular, in that people typically envision gods as rather like themselves (Barrett & Keil, 1996; Demoulin et al., 2008; Epley, Waytz, Akalis, & Cacioppo, 2008, p. 146; Feuerbach 1854/1957; Haslam et al., 2008). Just as no line (I have held) separates either the form or the content of religious belief and behavior from those that are secular, no line separates persons as conceived in religious and in secular ideation. Instead, gods are on a continuum with other persons: rulers, ancestors, ghosts, and goblins. Crucially, gods are, like people, able to understand and produce language and other symbolic communication (Guthrie 1980,  1993). If so, then explaining beliefs in gods resembles explaining beliefs in any humanlike being, including humans themselves. Burkert (1996) observed that transactions with gods may not differ greatly from those with distant merchants; and Saler (n.d.) himself noted that the ancient Greeks called exceptional 14 

These publications are reviews of Guthrie (1980, 1993).

humans “godlike” and reserved little more to the gods proper than immortality, and in any case did not consider gods supernatural. While “gods” generally are in some way superior to humans (e.g., Demoulin et al., 2008; Haslam et al., 2008), this is so simply by definition. Demons, ghosts, and goblins, for instance, similar to gods in respect of invisibility and unusual powers, may on balance be inferior to humans. Japanese kami-sama (“gods” or “demons”), for example, vary in their power. Anyone encountering the minor though dangerous kappa-sama, a water god, out of water can defeat it simply by bowing to it. (When it reflexively returns the bow, water in a reservoir atop its head spills, sapping its strength.) Thus a god out of its element may be less powerful than a human and even slightly buffoonish. A last critical question is why, if anthropomorphism—and hence religion—are mistakes, so many people fail to acknowledge and correct them. For example, “Guthrie’s model requires an explanation for the recalcitrance of religious beliefs” (Bulbulia, 2013, p. 233) and “Guthrie . . . cannot explain why such everyday animism [as that toward a car] not only survives, but even flourishes within our own scientifically enlightened civilization” (Willerslev, 2013, p. 45). Several answers bear on this question. First, conceptualization is conservative generally, and its resistance to change may be useful. B.  H.  Smith (2009, pp. 7–8) argues that while confirmation bias narrows our attention and slows our correction of mistakes, it also makes us confident, energetic, and optimistic. By enabling us to continue generally successful courses of thought and action despite setbacks, they allow these courses to survive vagaries. Such prejudices are limited neither to any particular kind of conviction, such as anthropomorphic or religious ones (although they are strong there), nor to any particular population. Rather, Smith writes, they are general and as widespread among scientists as among laypersons, and appropriately so. “Dissonance,” B. H. Smith (2009, p. 22) remarks, “gives rise to hermeneutic,” and this is not pathological. Rather, gaps between expectation and experience always are explained by further accounts, of which (I have held) humanlike models generate a unique range. Last, the most tenacious conceptions and practices are those that are formed earliest and are most central to our interests. As Meltzoff and Moore (1977), Meltzoff (2007), and others have shown for infants, these are conceptions of—and patterned interactions with—ourselves and other humans.

Some of these concepts (e.g., of eyes and faces; Slater et al., 2010) and interactions (e.g., imitation; Meltzoff, 2007) are innate or developmentally regular, begin developing at birth, and remain central to development. Aspects of them in social or person networks (Brothers, 1990; Farah & Heberlein, 2007) appear intrinsic to our neurology and constitute fundamental templates for recognizing and understanding agents and potential agents. They are differentially accessible but mostly unconscious and hence difficult to correct. Concepts of persons therefore appear, as Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche held, inalienable from our general concepts of the world. Norenzayan et al. (2008, p. 191) wrote that it seems “nearly impossible to make sense of the world without . . . an anthropomorphic framework,” but Nietzsche wrote simply that it is impossible. Anthropomorphism is, moreover, not alone in being both illusory and ineradicable. Centuries after humans came to understand that the earth spins on its axis, for example, the sun still appears to us to “rise” in the east, “move” across the sky, and “set” in the west. Similarly, the two equal lines of the Müller-Lyer illusion stubbornly appear unequal, and people and things at a distance continue to look small. The question here has been, why should we form and find plausible conceptions of other-than-human persons, from gods to goblins, at all? The answer, I have argued, may be found in the logic of Pascal’s wager (an instance, as noted earlier, of errormanagement theory) with its recommendation that, faced with inscrutable phenomena, we bet high, on the most important possibility. That possibility varies with the situation, but most often is personal. Possible persons, in turn, vary in their characteristics and their relevance to our concerns. The most relevant are the most powerful and best equipped to help or hinder us. People in small-scale societies typically envision gods who offer technical help, while those in large-scale societies envision gods who offer communion (Horton, 1960)15

Summary

Anthropomorphism pervades cognition, as evidence from anthropology, art history, ethology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology indicates. It evidently is a byproduct of an evolved strategy, one that has both precedent in 15  Epley et al. (2008) find the same two motivations—to obtain control and to obtain companionship—underlying all anthropomorphism, including religion.

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other animals and a basis in neurology and ontogeny. The strategy takes the form of a high sensitivity to persons and features of persons, and a low threshold for judging them present. It is advantageous because cognition is uncertain and because, among phenomena, we need most to discern agents, especially persons. In the animate world, we often encounter concealment and deception, so we must envision possible agents everywhere. The prototypical and most important agents are persons, and we bet on them first. In doing so, we sometimes find real persons and benefit significantly. Often we imagine persons where they do not exist, but we lose little by it. Following the principle, better safe than sorry, we assume that persons, or personal qualities such as purpose, are present until shown otherwise. Drawing on our capacities to imagine, find, and establish relationships with human persons, we conceive of and try to establish relationships with possible others. Not all are human, and some are central to the varying forms of thought and action termed religion.

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5

CH A PTE R

Evolutionary Developmental Psychology of Children’s Religious Beliefs

Tyler S. Greenway and Justin L. Barrett

Abstract The pancultural presence of religious beliefs suggests that children’s ordinary development may incline them toward such beliefs. Various cognitive processes that mature during this time period may enable and encourage religion. Such processes include the ability to distinguish agents from objects, think about the mental states of other agents, see purpose in the world, and view agents dualistically. The generation and persistence of religious beliefs may also be a product of their violation of certain intuitive ontologies, as such violations are more memorable for younger individuals. The naturalness of religion is discussed, and evolutionary accounts of religion as an adaptation and byproduct are presented. Key Words: belief, naturalness, religion, developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology

Religious beliefs exist across the globe in some form or another. Some cultures may encourage belief in the Hindu brahman, others may espouse beliefs in ancestor spirits, and still others may emphasize belief in Allah. The supernatural beings that these traditions embrace may be all-powerful and allknowing or they may only be endowed with a few supernatural qualities that barely separate them from humans. Given the widespread presence of these and other similar beliefs, some may wonder why religious beliefs are so common and why they continue to exist. Researchers in the cognitive science of religion have argued that religious beliefs and practices are common and persistent because they are largely natural. Naturalness in this sense refers to ways of thinking or abilities that are a normal part of development. Specifically, this type of naturalness is termed maturational naturalness (McCauley, 2011), as these cognitive and behavioral capacities are a natural aspect of human maturation. The mental structures that develop recurrently in most humans (because of an interaction between common biology and environmental regularities) shape how humans perceive, consider, remember, and recall

information. In shaping the way humans think, it seems that these natural cognitive structures facilitate pancultural beliefs in superhuman beings, some kind of afterlife, and other religious ideas. Though these cognitive structures do not guarantee religious belief or commitment for any individual, they may account for the persistence of these beliefs by generally inclining the human mind to notice particular stimuli, think about minds in certain ways, and retain certain memories over others. In short, the structure of the human mind is such that many religious beliefs may be readily generated, accepted, and remembered by most humans across the globe. In this way, evolved cognitive systems undergird cultural evolution. Spoken language is analogous to religion, as language is also maturationally natural. No one is surprised when a child begins to learn a language; children seem to do this quite naturally without classrooms or language instruction. The language may be Spanish, Chinese, Russian, or Dutch, but children will predictably acquire some language at roughly the same age and in the same ways. Why is it that humans readily learn spoken languages? Maturationally natural learning biases encourage 69

humans to attend to and parse the language of their home. Humans differentiate and attend to spoken words over other noises in their environment, and the early years of childhood are critical for learning to make these distinctions. These cognitive mechanisms seem to incline the human mind toward language by focusing the mind on some aspects of sounds rather than others and handling this input in characteristic ways (Pinker, 2007). Should it be surprising to find certain thought processes inclining the mind to language development? Not at all. For something to exist within all cultures and to be acquired by nearly every human on the planet along comparable developmental timetables, it would be surprising if the opposite were true: that no such thought processes encouraged language development. Religion may be considered similarly. For religious thought to exist across the globe and within nearly every culture, it should not be surprising that certain thought processes incline the mind toward religion; rather, it would be surprising if no such thought processes existed. This chapter focuses on the evolutionary developmental psychology of children’s religious beliefs. In short, this chapter argues that children are naturally inclined toward religion because of how human minds ordinarily develop during childhood. The first section of the chapter describes the development of distinguishing agents from objects. The second section then addresses how children tend to think of the minds of these agents they have identified. The third section describes children’s propensity to see purpose in the world—sometimes despite explicit teaching otherwise. The fourth section addresses children’s tendency to view intentional agents dualistically, as composed of both a body and a soul or mind. The fifth section considers how seemingly counterintuitive ideas about supernatural beings are generated and remembered. The sixth section summarizes what these different processes seem to point to: natural religion. This section also considers why atheism might then be considered unnatural. Finally, the seventh section considers whether religion is best understood as an evolutionary adaptation or a byproduct.

Detecting Agents

Many religious beliefs concern superhuman or supernatural agents. Agents, or beings that act according to their own will, include animals, other humans, and supernatural beings that are thought to exist. Furthermore, these supernatural agents 70

might themselves come in a variety of forms, ranging from various spirits or ghosts to angelic figures to the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God of the Abrahamic faiths. All agents, however, share in common the ability to act and not merely respond mechanistically to environmental contingencies. This ability distinguishes them from ordinary objects, which require an agent or other outside force in order for them to move or change. The family cat is an agent because it can choose to scratch or not scratch the back of a chair with its claws. The chair is not an agent because it has no willful mind by which it can move itself and is subject to the will of these agents (were it an agent, it likely would not put up with such abuse). Thus, the chair is only an object.

The Development of Agency Detection

At a young age, children process the world they live in by making important distinctions among the stimuli with which they are presented. One of those distinctions is the differentiation between objects and agents. This distinction likely seems facile to adults, as it is readily made without conscious thought; but in the first year of life, children evince this ability and begin to put it into action. Testing young children’s ability to differentiate between objects and agents is somewhat complicated by their inability to speak at a young age. Looking-time methods have been developed to overcome this challenge. Typically, longer looking times demonstrate interest; shorter looking times demonstrate boredom or disinterest. At the very least, when two displays are placed side-by-side and one is looked at more than the other (i.e., preferential looking), an experimenter may infer that the infants detect a difference between the two displays. A related method developed for testing infants is habituation-dishabituation. Habituation involves familiarizing children with a certain visual display until they grow bored, indicated by refusal to continue looking. Dishabituation occurs when their attention has been recaptured because something new has been introduced. Using such methods, researchers have presented children with scenarios in which objects move as they should (e.g., moving at the initiative of an agent) and scenarios in which objects act as though they are agents (e.g., seemingly moving according to their own will). Children’s looking time is measured to assess which scenarios they find interesting or surprising. Several studies find that children look longer at scenarios in which objects seem to violate

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principles of agency, but not when agents act in the same way (Spelke, Phillips, & Woodward, 1995). An example of such a surprising event would be that of a toy beginning to move on its own after several examples of its needing to be moved by an agent. Children are thought to look longer at such a scenario because they find it surprising that an object would begin to act like an agent. These studies suggest that children, even under a year of age, possess knowledge concerning the distinction between agents that can move on their own and objects that must be moved by agents. Once children are able to distinguish between agents and objects, they can begin to interact with agents and objects differently. Agents will respond to cries and screams; objects will not, and so they require an agent for them to be moved. Thus, a child may understand that a bottle of milk placed out of reach on the kitchen counter will not jump down or move toward the child regardless of how long the child attempts to coax it down. Instead, the child may direct her cries to the adult in the room— an agent capable of moving this object—until the bottle is moved. Pleading with an object may produce no action, but directing these pleas to an agent will likely result in action of some sort. Accordingly, infants differentially use pointing and verbalizing around agents (such as other people) versus nonagents (Legerstee, 1994). Agents are thus marked by a particular characteristic—the ability to move or act according to their own will—whereas objects are marked by the lack of this characteristic. The human mind learns to make this foundational distinction during the first year of life, but even in adulthood this distinction may at times be muddled. Sometimes objects are treated as agents and vice versa. Computers, though objects, often seem to have a mind of their own. When programs close, saved documents disappear, and software fails, the appropriate reaction may seem to be the same screams that might ordinarily change the actions of an agent, though the computer instead responds as any object would. On the other hand, agents may also be treated as objects. When in a hurry and moving quickly through a crowd, the agency of various people may be forgotten and they may instead be nudged and shoved as though they were objects. Though this ability is developed at young age, mistakes are sometimes made—a point that is addressed later. The distinction between objects and agents may be applied to supernatural agents as well. Children may develop beliefs in unseen agents

who are capable of interacting with the natural world and even responding to requests. Children, like adults, may call on these agents with pleas for action much like their pleas to other agents.

Agency Detection and Belief in the Supernatural

The ability to distinguish between agents and objects may certainly enable children to understand that supernatural agents are different from objects, but the ability to make this distinction alone does not readily lead to the detection of supernatural agents or the production of belief in the supernatural. If this ability had evolved only for detecting visible, present agents, then perhaps belief in invisible superhuman agents would be much rarer. Instead, the cognitive mechanism used for detecting agency registers the activity of even unseen agents and may detect agency given only ambiguous or incomplete information (Barrett, 2011). As natural selection works on cognitive systems to minimize both the frequency of fitness-reducing outputs and the severity of the fitness reduction, the agency detection system may be tuned in the direction of false positives, an example of error management (McKay & Dennett, 2009). That is, to avoid costly failures to detect agents (e.g., stealthy enemies or predators), the agency detection system may sometimes detect agents when none are present. It has been theorized, but not yet empirically established, that such a sensitive agency detection system may generate or encourage the continuation of beliefs in ghosts, spirits, and other superhuman agents (Barrett, 2011; Guthrie, 1993). This type of agency detection is believed to be one means by which belief in supernatural agents is produced. A lightning strike or a falling rock, seemingly coming from nowhere, may cause an individual to consider whether an agent was the cause of this event. Since no human or animals seems to be capable of such action or near enough to produce it, the individual might begin to consider whether some unseen agent, perhaps with powers beyond those of humans, initiated this attack. Over time, other actions might be attributed to this perceived agent as well, and beliefs might be further developed and solidified. Even if agency detection might be capable of initiating belief in some supernatural agents, it may fail to produce or encourage belief in all types. Agency detection may lead an individual to believe that a spirit, ghost, angel, or some lesser god is nearby, but agency detection may not be capable of

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easily producing a robust belief in larger, more powerful gods. These are open empirical questions. Nevertheless, beliefs in these Big Gods may rely on other cognition, which is discussed in detail in subsequent sections of this chapter. Once agents have been distinguished from objects, the motivation for various willful actions might be considered. Why is it that an agent chooses to act one way but not another? This reasoning about the mental states of agents is typically termed theory of mind. Theory of mind is an important ability that develops during the early years of life and, like agency detection, may be applied to both supernatural agents and natural agents. This section discusses how theory of mind develops in children as well as how it is applied to supernatural agents during childhood.

moves the toy somewhere else, perhaps into a drawer. Anne then also leaves. Sally returns and children are asked to indicate where Sally will look for the toy. If children believe Sally will look for the toy where Anne left it (e.g., a drawer), they fail the task because they do not distinguish between reality (e.g., the toy is in the drawer) and Sally’s belief about reality (e.g., the toy is in the toy chest). If, however, children indicate that Sally will look for the toy where she last left it (e.g., the toy chest), they pass the task because they demonstrate that they are capable of distinguishing between reality and Sally’s belief about reality. These children are able to understand that beliefs may be false. At this point, theory of mind approximating the mature form is thought to be in place. The age at which children are able to pass these tasks is debated, but most research has found that children generally begin to pass at the age of 4 (Wellman et al., 2001).

Theory of Mind Development

Theory of Mind and Nonhuman Agents

Engaging Minds

Theory of mind development necessarily begins with the detection of agency. Once agency has been detected, children may then consider the minds of the agents. Fully developed theory of mind enables individuals to consider the goals, preferences, desires, emotions, visual perspectives, and beliefs of others, but evidence demonstrating that children possess the ability to attribute all of these mental states in infancy is quite limited (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Theory of mind is believed to approach a mature form once a child is able to understand that beliefs do not necessarily correspond to reality and are instead representations of reality and may be false. A 2- or 3-year-old child might be confused if his mother goes to the refrigerator to find the orange juice when his father recently moved the orange juice to the dining room table. The child may fail to understand that his mother’s belief that the juice is in the refrigerator is false and does not correspond with reality (that the juice is on the table). Most 5-year-old children, however, are capable of identifying false beliefs and will find their mother’s search for the orange juice in the refrigerator reasonable, given their mother’s incorrect belief about the location of the juice. The means by which this representational theory of mind has often been tested is the false belief task, of which the Sally-Anne task is perhaps the most popular variant. In this task, a child observes Sally leaving a toy somewhere in a room, perhaps in a toy chest. Sally then leaves the room. Anne enters and 72

When adults think about the minds of other individuals, they understand that often the mental capabilities of each individual are different and thus their perceptions or beliefs may differ. A grandmother might not be able to hear as well as her granddaughter, and in speaking to the grandmother, the granddaughter may know that raising the volume of her voice is helpful because her grandmother may not be able to hear as others can. Theory of mind enables the granddaughter to think differently about different minds and the different capacities of these minds. Theory of mind may also be similarly applied to nonhuman agents. In considering the mental states of different types of beings, understanding the different abilities of these agents may become increasingly important. If a child is interested in understanding whether or not her pet cat can see something, knowledge about the cat’s better night vision might influence her belief about the cat’s perception. Thus, the child may believe that the cat can see some things the child cannot. Furthermore, theory of mind may also be applied to superhuman agents. A child might consider what knowledge Santa Claus has. Santa Claus is said to know about the misdeeds of children, and conscientious children know that they ought to act accordingly if they wish to receive presents for Christmas. Interestingly, Santa Claus’s knowledge of and distaste for immoral behavior may have a greater effect than a child’s father’s distaste for the same deeds, because Santa Claus is

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understood to have greater knowledge (and perhaps the consequences of Santa Claus learning of poor behavior are greater than the consequences of father learning). These examples illustrate how theory of mind must be applied differently to different agents. The capacities of all minds are not the same, and if these minds are to be understood correctly, these differences must be attended to. Building on research investigating children’s ability to think about human minds, children’s ability to think about differently able agents has also been studied. One task used to assess how children think about these agents is a surprising contents task. Children are shown a familiar box, often a cracker box, and asked what they believe is inside. Generally, children indicate that they believe crackers are inside, but then the researcher shows the child what is actually in the box. Contrary to expectations, researchers have placed some other object in the box instead of crackers, often rocks. Children are then asked what various other agents believe is inside the box. What would mother think is inside the box? What would a cat think is inside the box? What would God think is inside the box? Younger children (3- and 4-yearolds) often respond similarly for all agents by indicating that they too know that rocks are inside the box. Older children (5- and 6-year-olds), however, differentiate between different agents, noting that some will have knowledge of the true contents of the box, but others will think that the box contains crackers as the child previously thought and as the box indicates. A similar task uses a darkened box within which some object has been placed. Without a flashlight the child cannot tell what is inside the box. After the contents of the box have been revealed with a flashlight, children are asked what they think other agents will believe is inside the box. Similar to the surprising contents task, 3- and 4-year-olds indicate that all agents will know what is inside the box, whereas 5- and 6-year-olds again begin to differentiate between agents. Older children note that some of these agents, such as a cat that is able to see well in dark places, will be able to see what is inside the box, whereas one of the child’s friends with similar visual ability will not (Barrett, Richert, & Driesenga, 2001).

Cross-Cultural Evidence

Variants of these tasks have been conducted among different cultures with similar findings. A version of the surprising contents task was conducted in

Mexico using a ho’ma (Knight, 2008; Knight, Sousa, Barrett, & Atran, 2004). A ho’ma is a dried squash generally used for holding tortillas and was familiar to the Maya children in the study. Instead of tortillas, researchers placed a pair of shorts inside. After revealing these surprising contents, the researchers asked children what they believed God, another human, any number of animals, or other gods and spirits would believe was inside. Similar to previous studies, 4-year-olds thought that all agents would believe shorts were inside—even gods and spirits that Maya adults would not regard as all-knowing. Older children (6- and 7-year-olds) differentiated among different agents, believing God would know the true contents of the ho’ma, but another human or animals would think tortillas were inside. Recent evidence from China and Ecuador further confirms the cross-cultural presence of this developmental pattern. Researchers asked Chinese and Ecuadorian children about the perception and knowledge of various supernatural, cultural agents using three tasks with a similar logic. Children were asked if these agents could hear music from a radio (when in reality no sound was audible), see a picture drawn on a piece of paper from a distance (when in reality the picture was not visible from that distance), and know the contents of a closed box. Dissimilar to many previous studies, children did not themselves have knowledge about the music, picture, or contents of the box. Yet findings from these studies were similar to previous research. Though ignorant themselves, 3- and 4-year-old children attributed more knowledge and perception to other agents than they themselves had. By ages 5 and 6, children differentiated between agents, attributing knowledge and perception to those they believed were able, and attributing less knowledge and perception to those they believed were not able (Foley, Greenway, & Barrett, 2017). Similar results from nearly identical tasks have been reported with Israeli children (Burdett, 2013). Similar tasks have extended these findings to supernatural agents that may be more personal to children: their invisible, imaginary friends. When asked about the abilities of their invisible friends, younger children attributed knowledge and perception to these imaginary friends that was similar to their own. Older children also attributed this knowledge and perception to these agents (but not other agents, such as their visible friends), indicating that these invisible friends have abilities that are greater than their visible friends (Wigger, Paxson, & Ryan, 2013).

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Together these studies demonstrate that preschoolers tend to err in the direction of attributing super perception or knowledge to agents, whereas older children are more selective about the agents they believe will have these superabilities. Whether in a state of knowledge or ignorance, 3-year-old children tend to assume others may know about the object in question; and when these young children themselves know something, they attribute nearly infallible beliefs to others. Such findings indicate that the superhuman properties of ghosts, gods, or God are readily accepted by younger children and may even approach default assumptions about others’ knowledge and perception. Belief in these superagents may be corrected (if they are limited in their knowledge and perception) or encouraged (if they are infallible) as children grow older. The reason for such a developmental trajectory is unclear, but one might speculate that it is more adaptive to assume that agents are powerful and knowledgeable rather than weak and ignorant. Similar to the human inclination to overdetect agency (see Guthrie, this volume), overattributing knowledge and perception in others may bear fewer fitness costs than underattributing knowledge. In this way, children may be prepared to accept notions of supernatural beings.

Teleological Reasoning

Further influencing children’s religious beliefs is their propensity to see design and purpose in the natural world. Children’s questions about design and purpose are likely familiar for parents and caretakers. Children are often curious about the reason for things being the way they are and as a result often ask the question, “Why?” Why do cars have windows? Why do giraffes have long necks? Why do oceans exist? These questions are perfectly natural and justified, particularly for human-made objects. Why does a house have a roof? The builders of the house put a roof on the house to keep out rain and sun. Without the roof, the people inside the house might get drenched by the rain or burned by the sun, and people generally prefer to be dry and not burned. The design and purpose of these objects is easily explained because the designers and the source of the object’s purpose are humans themselves. Children’s “Why?” questions may thus be easily answered. Similarly, children might ask why plants and animals have the features they do. Why do trees have leaves? The leaves are on the tree because the tree uses its leaves to gather much-needed sunlight. 74

Without these leaves the tree would wither and die. Here too purpose can be readily explained and children’s “Why?” questions may be responded to satisfactorily. Responding to children’s questions about design and purpose may be more difficult when they ask about whole species or other natural nonliving things. Why do trees exist? Why do mountains exist? Adults may struggle to respond to questions about geological formations or the purpose of an entire species. From a scientific standpoint these questions may seem unanswerable. Adults may point to the natural processes of evolution in order to explain how trees came to exist, but these responses fail to address a purpose for the existence of trees. Children’s curiosities about the design and purpose of such things have prompted the developmental psychologist Deborah Kelemen to investigate this apparent attraction to purpose-based explanations. Various studies have found that when asked questions about natural objects and animals, children prefer purpose-based explanations to other more mechanistic explanations. One study conducted by Kelemen and DiYanni (2005) asked children why various natural and nonnatural things exist. Interestingly, children preferred purposebased explanations not only for human-made artifacts (e.g., a hat, a boat), but also for natural objects (e.g., a mountain, a river) and animals (e.g., a bird, a monkey). This finding was replicated for natural objects and animals when children were asked to choose between physical-reductionist explanations (e.g., “The first ever thunderstorm occurred because some cold and warm air all rubbed together in the clouds”) and teleofunctional explanations (e.g., “The first ever thunderstorm occurred to give the earth water so everything would grow”; Kelemen & DiYanni, 2005). These results may be surprising, given the emphasis science generally receives in children’s education and the emphasis this education places on the evolution of animals or the natural development of natural objects. Despite such education, it seems that children continue to prefer purpose-based explanations, further suggesting the presence of a natural attraction to such explanations. Children seem to naturally look for purpose in the world. Interestingly, this propensity to prefer purposebased explanations seems to continue into adulthood. Kelemen and Rosset (2009) administered a study in which adults responded to several statements concerning the reason for various phenomena. In this

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study, some participants were required to respond quickly, giving them little time to think about how to respond. This speeded condition was used to reveal participants’ “gut” reactions to these statements. Those individuals who had to make their decisions quickly were more likely to prefer purpose-based explanations (e.g., “the sun radiates heat because warmth nurtures life”) even though they were not more likely to prefer incorrect control statements. Though adults may override a preference for purposebased explanations when they are unwarranted, Kelemen and Rosset’s study suggests that the inclination to prefer such explanations remains even in adulthood and is used when rapid decisions are required. That is, the early-developing preference for teleological explanations is not simply outgrown but only tamped down, and only in some cultural conditions (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009). This preference for teleological explanations may have evolved in part because of the advantages it can provide for humans. One of the abilities that separates humans from other species is advanced tool use. Certain species use some tools (e.g., chimpanzees, crows), but human proficiency with tools is unmatched. In particular, the human ability to design and improve tools is unique. Chimpanzees, for example, may use sticks to dig termites out of their hills, even breaking branches off of these sticks to make them better for this task; but they have yet to improve on this tool beyond its current use. Humans, however, possess the ability to consider the purpose of a tool and use this understood purpose to improve on the tool or to use the tool for a novel purpose. This ability is one of the defining features of modern humans and, at times, is used to distinguish modern humans from human ancestors. For instance, human ancestors used hand axes (sharpened stones) for many thousands of years. In fact, these hand axes can be found among many generations of human ancestors with relatively few changes in their design. But at a certain point in human evolution, technological development advanced rapidly and these tools began to change and improve (Somel, Liu, & Khaitovich, 2013). These improvements in tools are sometimes thought to be the result of an adaptation that enabled humans to think differently about the tools they were using. It may be that a preference for purpose-based explanations inclines humans to both attribute purpose when they encounter various phenomena and speculate concerning the goals and desires of the agent who caused the phenomena. An ancient human might have examined a stone hand axe and

determined that its maker designed and used it for cutting meat. That human might then have considered this purpose and attempted to improve on this tool, perhaps by adding a wooden handle. A tendency to discern purpose may have been and may still be particularly advantageous for the human species in a similar way. Modern humans may examine various pieces of technology, consider their purpose, and improve on this technology for the sake of similar purposes. The tendency to look for purpose is immediately useful when developing tools, but it seems that humans extend their questions of purpose to the natural world. Such an extension may support the development of religious beliefs. In considering why trees exist, people may discern their design and determine that someone placed trees on the earth for the purposes of shade, shelter for animals, or the production of tasty fruit. Using these discerned purposes, these early humans may have wondered what type of beings could have made trees. Such wonderings may have lead ancient peoples to think that a powerful forest spirit or creator-being existed. Further beliefs may have developed, potentially in combination with those beliefs that were produced by agency detection and theory of mind, resulting in developed religious beliefs.

Intuitive Dualism

Beliefs about an immortal soul or the afterlife are also common across cultures and thought to be the result of naturally developing cognition. Such ideas generally require a belief that humans and other agents are composed of at least two distinct parts, often a body and a soul or mind. Belief in this distinction is termed dualism, and is in contrast to the belief that agents are composed of a single substance, otherwise termed monism. Paul Bloom (2005) argues that children are intuitive dualists. That is, children naturally develop the belief that agents are composed of two different, separable substances. The reason for this intuitive belief in dualism, Bloom argues, is that from childhood humans have two different cognitive systems: one for thinking about physical objects and another for thinking about the minds or souls of psychological agents (i.e., theory of mind; Bloom, 2007). Because these two separate systems have different input conditions, characteristic outputs, developmental trajectories, and evolutionary histories, they result in dualistic thinking that inclines children to think of minds as distinct from bodies and find the cultural idea of souls very intuitive.

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Humans and many other natural agents, having both physical and psychological properties, engage both systems. A human or other agent may, however, be considered by only a single system at any particular time. The corpse of a human, for instance might only be attributed with physical properties. The system that addresses psychological or social stimuli, however, might also operate independently, enabling children to consider beings without bodies. Such beings may include any sort of god, ghost, or spirit that has a mind but lacks a body. Imaginary friends also fall into this category and provide strong reason to suspect that children’s ­receptivity to belief in disembodied or invisible agents is not merely the result of indoctrination or gullibility; a large proportion of children carry on relationships with imaginary friends, apparently spontaneously (Taylor, 1999). The ability of the theory of mind system to consider such agents ­appears to be integral for religion. Evidence for intuitive dualism can be found in studies investigating children’s beliefs about identity and its relationship to the brain. Johnson (1990) asked children about the thoughts and actions of beings after a hypothetical brain transplant. Younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) in particular tended to distinguish between one’s identity and the brain, suggesting that an understanding of the brain as the home of one’s identity is not yet developed at this age. Another study conducted by Gottfried, Gelman, and Schultz (1999) also employed stories about hypothetical brain or “insides” transplants with similar findings. Younger children did not always believe that a brain or “insides” transplant would result in changes of the mental properties of the transplant recipient. Together these studies suggest that younger children have not yet come to believe that the brain or another part of the body is responsible for all mental activity, and that some other distinct aspect of a being drives at least some of its psychological properties. Said differently, younger children seem to believe that some psychological characteristics of humans are distinct from their biological characteristics, and a transfer of biology from one being to another is not sufficient for a transfer of these psychological characteristics.

Evidence of Afterlife and Immortality Beliefs

The argument for children’s intuitive dualism is further supported by their belief in the afterlife—a feature of religion present in most cultures. Jesse Bering (2002, p. 269) links afterlife beliefs to theory of 76

mind or “second-order representation,” arguing that “without second-order representation to give a ghost its thoughts, a corpse is but a corpse” and “spirits and ghosts (and gods, for that matter) are essentially disembodied minds.” Bering points out the evolutionary advantages of this type of thinking (enabling humans to “ ‘read into behavior’ in a way that organisms unaware of other minds . . . simply could not”) and notes that belief in the continuation of mental states after death may be a byproduct of this skill. Whereas other primate species might “respond in relatively unusual manners to the sight of dead conspecifics,” sometimes even exhibiting behaviors akin to grief, only humans “conventionally practice such things as ritualistic disposal of the body and ancestral obeisance” (Bering, 2002, p. 271). Such behavior marks a distinction between other primates and humans, the latter of which seem “compulsively reserved to assuaging what are perceived to be the decedents’ ongoing emotive states” (p. 271). Using participants from the United States, Bering and Bjorklund (2004) tested children’s understanding of the afterlife by enacting a scene with puppets in which a mouse was eaten by an alligator. Children were then asked questions about various possible states of the mouse after its death: psychobiological (e.g., Is he still hungry? Does he still feel sick?) and cognitive (e.g., Is he still thinking about the alligator? Does he know where he is now?). A majority of kindergarteners thought that these states would continue after death. However, 6- to 8-year-olds were slightly disinclined to think the psychobiological states would continue after death but still just as likely to think the cognitive states would continue as not. In a further experiment, Bering and Bjorklund (2004) included adults in addition to children and considered a wider range of states. They found that both adults and older children (but not kindergarteners) tended to believe biological and psychological states discontinued after death, but even adults regarded some psychological states as just as likely as not to continue after death. A majority of adults thought the deceased mouse would still think he was smarter than his brother and that he would love his mother. These initial studies make two interesting suggestions. First, children have to learn that biological states end at death. The developmental default appears to be continuation of life-related states. Second, psychological death does not parallel biological death. Children quickly learn that biology

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ceases at death, but they continue to entertain psychological states—such as knowing where one is or loving one’s mother—as continuing after death, even into adulthood. If understanding death were merely due to social learning or enculturation, these patterns of results would be surprising.

Cross-Cultural Evidence

Evidence for natural intuitive foundations for belief in the afterlife has also been found in samples taken from outside the United States. Bering, Hernández Blasi, and Bjorklund (2005) replicated these experiments among both the religiously and secularly schooled children of Spain. Their findings were similar to those found by Bering and Bjorklund (2004). Additionally, Bering et al. (2005) found that secularly schooled children were more likely to consistently believe that states ended with death than religiously schooled children. These findings suggest that belief in the continuation of various states after death is grounded in natural cognition, but that instruction and environment can shape these beliefs, particularly as children age. Harris and Giménez (2005) conducted a similar study by asking Spanish children about whether various functions of the body or mind would work after death. Importantly, Harris and Giménez asked children these questions using both a religious narrative (i.e., including religious cues such as “Your grandmother is with God now”) and a secular narrative (without these cues). Again, they found that older children (11-year-olds) were more likely than younger children (7-year-olds) to believe that functions of the body and mind ceased after death, and that children were more likely to think that functions of the body ceased than functions of the mind. The framing of the narrative also influenced these findings. Within the context of the religious narrative, children were more likely to believe that functioning of the body and mind continued. Similar studies were replicated once again by Astuti and Harris (2008) among the Vezo people of Madagascar. Astuti and Harris used two narratives similar to Harris and Giménez (2005) in that one drew attention to an individual’s continued ex­ist­ ence after death (as an ancestor) and the other drew attention to the biology of death. Similar to Harris and Giménez (2005), Astuti and Harris found that participants were more likely to believe functioning ceases when presented with the narrative that drew attention to the biology of death than the narrative that drew attention to continued existence after

death, and were more likely to believe functioning of the body ceases than functioning of the mind. Together, these numerous experiments suggest that younger children are more likely to believe that functioning continues after death than older children—the opposite pattern of what we would expect if children were only socialized into such beliefs. As children age, it seems that they tend to believe more states are discontinued and tend to be more selective in the states they believe will continue functioning. Such findings are suggestive of a dualistic tendency that is most prominent among younger children, in turn supporting Bloom’s (2005) conception of intuitive dualism. Such naturally developing cognition likely encourages children to believe in the continued existence of some features after death. Even children in war-torn Israel have been found to attribute forever-continuing life to God at a younger age than recognizing human eventual death (Burdett, 2013). Furthermore, several studies also suggest that religious framing of the afterlife can influence beliefs about the afterlife. Though beliefs about continued psychological functioning may decrease with age, religious teachings may encourage prolonged belief in a dualistic perspective concerning agents. Alternatively, it may be that counterreligious narratives may discourage the natural propensities toward afterlife beliefs. Bek and Lock (2011) found that, among adult English participants, a biological framing of a story about a deceased person, similar to Astuti and Harris’s (2008), reduced how often thoughts and feelings were regarded as continuing after death compared to a neutral or an emotional framing. Likewise, Chinese adults claimed to have far fewer explicit beliefs about minds continuing to operate after death than the American adults in Bering and Bjorklund’s (2004) study and, yet, performed similarly when asked more precise questions about mental and emotional states, such as whether a recently deceased character in a story was still angry at his wife (Huang, Cheng, & Zhu, 2013). These results suggest the possibility that, as with tel­ e­o­log­i­cal reasoning, the early-developing tendencies to see mental activities as extending beyond death may have to be culturally overridden to avoid afterlife beliefs in adults more than culturally encouraged to sustain them.

Minimally Counterintuitive Ideas

The previously discussed cognitive dynamics may make belief in supernatural agents, a divine creator, and the afterlife largely intuitive, but many other

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facets of religious thought and behavior surely stretch beyond these natural foundations. Certain beings within the stories of various religious traditions may seem bizarre or absurd (e.g., talking serpents and donkeys), yet they too continue to persist and are easily remembered by children. Why is it that such beings are so readily recalled and passed on to others? One suggestion for why even somewhat unnatural concepts manage to become widespread enough to be recognized as cultural—including religious— concepts is that being minimally, but not mostly, counterintuitive makes concepts more memorable and likely to be successfully transmitted (Boyer, 2001). This idea of a conceptual optimum having a particular impact on cultural transmission and evolution is sometimes called minimal counterintuitiveness theory, or MCI theory (Barrett, 2004). The term “counterintuitive” is used here to describe ideas that violate various naturally developing conceptual assumptions that arise as a normal part of human development in the first several years of life. Such counterintuitive ideas are in contrast with intuitive ideas, which do not violate these conceptual assumptions or intuitions. The key conceptual assumptions concern how different classes of things in the world work, an example being the impermeability of solid objects. It seems children quite naturally develop the belief that solid objects will stop when they meet other solid objects. A violation of such a conception might then be an object that can pass through walls, as this violates this intuitive notion of permeability (Spelke & Kinzler, 2007). Minimal counterintuitiveness refers to the violation of one or few intuitive beliefs. A dog that cannot walk through walls would be, not surprisingly, quite intuitive. Such a dog would not be all that interesting or attention grabbing, and would likely not be distinctively remembered or brought up in conversation. A dog that is a dog in every way but can walk through walls would, however, be minimally counterintuitive. Such a dog violates a single intuitive belief (i.e., solid objects are impermeable) and would therefore be interesting, attention grabbing, easy to remember, and easy to talk about with others. As a result, detailed belief about this dog would likely persist. However, a dog that can walk through walls, defy gravity, talk, and be in more than one place at once would be more drastically counterintuitive as it violates several intuitive beliefs. This dog, while certainly attention grabbing, would be harder to remember and talk about with 78

others because of the number of intuitive beliefs it violates, resulting in it being a poor candidate to become a widely shared cultural idea. These MCI concepts are theorized to be more memorable than intuitive ideas and drastically counterintuitive ideas (i.e., those ideas that violate more than a few cognitive principles), and are also theorized to account for some of the memorability of religious beliefs. For instance, a being with a mind but without a physical body violates few intuitive beliefs and is likely easy to remember and discuss with others. Such an agent may be given the term “ghost.” Likewise, a being without a mind but with a physical body also violates few intuitive beliefs and is likely easy to remember and talk about with others. Such an agent may be given the term “zombie.” Both of these beliefs are likely to be remembered because they are both interesting and not overly complicated. A being that has no body and a mind that works backward, however, is much more difficult to think about and is therefore much less likely to be remembered or discussed with others. The theorized ease of remembering and transmitting such MCI is thought to contribute to the persistence of religious beliefs that fall on this cognitive optimum (Barrett, 2008). Recent evidence from China and the United Kingdom has found that young people are particularly prone to generate and remember these types of ideas (Gregory, 2014a, 2014b). When asked to form statements using a list of adjectives and nouns, 8- to 20-year-olds more readily created counterintuitive statements (e.g., a laughing banana, a shrinking chair). Adults older than 28 years, on the other hand, less readily formed such statements. Similarly, when asked to remember a list of both counterintuitive ideas and intuitive ideas, participants 8 to 20 years old remembered the counterintuitive ideas (e.g., a snowflake that is hungry, a cucumber that is listening) better than intuitive ideas, but adults older than 28 years remembered the intuitive ideas (e.g., a stone that is smooth, a cabbage that is rotting) better than the MCI ideas. A similar age-related memory pattern was found across Chinese- and English-speaking populations using counterintuitive versus intuitive displays in a virtual laboratory environment (Hornbeck & Barrett, 2013). Many religious beliefs about supernatural agents involve MCI concepts, and thus young people may, in part, be responsible for the generation and per­ sist­ence of some of these ideas. Furthermore, as these studies were conducted with participants

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from both the United Kingdom and China, these findings suggest that the cognition involved in the generation and memory of MCI is present across cultures. Why a propensity for generating and remembering MCI evolved among the human species is still unclear, but their potential contribution to the generation and transmission of religious ideas is substantial. Perhaps young people’s developing minds are more curious about potential deviations from the cognitive principles they are developing, and attending to such deviations becomes less important with age, as important exceptions to the rules will have already been encountered. Regardless, were it not for the cognition that seems to support MCI, these ideas might not have the advantage they do among the other stimuli that are presented to the human mind.

The Naturalness of Religion

Cumulatively, these ordinary conceptual systems collaborate to make religious thought attractive to human minds. Agency detection, coupled with theory of mind, teleological reasoning, intuitive dualism, and MCI dynamics seem to lead in the direction of religious expression. In this sense, it can be argued that children are “born believers” (Barrett, 2012) or that “religion is natural” (McCauley, 2011). Normal development by no means guarantees religious expression, but it does seem to incline humans toward it. Such development may account for the pancultural presence of belief in the supernatural. This natural religion may take different forms among different cultures, just as language naturally takes different forms in different cultures. Mormonism, Judaism, or Buddhism may all be the result of natural cognition leading to religious expression, just as Spanish, German, and Hindi may all be the result of natural cognition leading to linguistic expression. Natural religion seems to support some general religious beliefs, but not the specific religious beliefs of a particular religious tradition. Some of these more general beliefs seem to be (1) that supernatural beings exist, (2) these supernatural beings have abilities that are greater than those of humans, (3) certain natural objects and animals are made with purpose by some supernatural being or beings, (4) and some features of agents, generally psychological characteristics, persist beyond death into some sort of afterlife. Note that, by this analysis, some aspects of different religious traditions can be thought of as cognitively unnatural. Although much of what has been

discussed thus far addresses the natural aspects of religion, there are certainly teachings within many traditions that are not easy for children to believe. For instance, belief that a god exists outside of time is one religious belief that seems particularly unnatural. This teaching may appear in several religious traditions, yet it is difficult even for most adults to comprehend. Similarly, the belief that a god is nonspatial (i.e., does not exist in any one location) is also difficult to understand and unlikely for children to naturally adopt without much formal teaching. In order to promote and emphasize these cognitively unnatural beliefs, many religious traditions have adopted theologies. Theology must be distinguished from natural religion. Whereas natural religion may arise as part of the normal course of development, theology requires training. Certain beliefs, such as the nonspatiality or nontemporality of supernatural beings, require formal teaching in order for them to be adopted. Although belief in a supernatural being might require very little teaching, belief in various unnatural teachings might take some time to adopt and correctly articulate. Depending on the tradition and the teachings, separate schools may be required for the purpose of teaching more unnatural doctrines and ensuring their proper understanding. As McCauley (2011) has argued, much of theology is as comparably unnatural from a cognitive developmental standpoint as is much of science, and it requires institutions and experts to safeguard its successful communication. If religion is natural in the sense that much early developing cognition encourages and enables religious thoughts and behaviors, then atheism may seem cognitively unnatural. If development naturally leads to religious expression, more teaching or effort seems to be necessary to alter this trajectory and thereby produce atheistic beliefs rather than theistic beliefs. Nonreligious parents may be surprised at how easily their children adopt some of these religious beliefs despite their lack of religious teaching or even despite teachings contrary to religious beliefs. Though parents may never expose their children to teachings on life after death, children may require minimal exposure to such ideas from their peers to remember and adopt them. Parents may instruct their children that there is no afterlife, but given the evidence for some sort of intuitive dualism, particularly among younger children, these children may find notions of the afterlife more favorable than parents’ teaching otherwise (Barrett, 2012).

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The relative naturalness of religion does not necessarily bear on the truth of any religious claims. Though it may be that religious beliefs are natural and certain theological or atheistic claims are not, their truth cannot be determined simply by the study of this development (Barrett & Trigg, 2014).

Religion as Evolutionary Adaptation or Byproduct?

Returning to the comparison between language and religion, language seems to have evolved as an adaptation. Increased communicative abilities were hugely advantageous for the human species, and over time those individuals with better communicative skills, culminating in language, were more likely to pass on their genes than those with poor communicative skills. The evolution of religion is less clear. Perhaps religion evolved in a similar fashion; those individuals who were more religious were more likely to pass on their genes than those who were less religious. Or, it might be that religion was pieced together using a variety of other mechanisms that evolved for other purposes. Religion, then, did not initially evolve because of any fitness advantages it provided, but rather was enabled by other evolved mechanisms. A debate exists among researchers investigating the evolution of religion. Many researchers argue that religion is an adaptation that has persisted because of the fitness advantages it provides. Others argue that religion is a byproduct that has “piggybacked” on cognitive mechanisms that evolved for other reasons. Though this chapter will not be able to resolve this debate (because more work is needed to fully understand how religion evolved), the following section will briefly sketch the two sides of the argument: religion as an adaptation and religion as a byproduct.

Adaptationist Accounts of Religion

Adaptationist accounts of religion argue “that religion has propagated due to its history of fitnessenhancing effects” (Powell & Clarke, 2012). According to this account, religion directly produces advantages that benefit the individual. These advantages are then selected over time. For example, if a particular individual believes a god exists and this belief causes the individual to act more prosocially, then this effect will likely lead to increased cooperation and increased ­fitness for the individual. If a neighboring individual does not believe that a god exists and exhibits less ­prosociality as a result, then this neighbor may not cooperate as often and may thus receive comparatively fewer fitness advantages. Religion, then, may 80

be an adaptation that has evolved to solve the evolutionary problem of ensuring cooperation among individuals and therefore provided fitness advantages to the religious. Similarly, some adaptationist accounts argue that religion produces beneficial effects through signaling. Religious individuals who exhibit seemingly “wasteful and occasionally dangerous” behaviors may signal that they are reliable cooperators using these behaviors (Bulbulia & Sosis, 2011). Again, the result may be more frequent cooperation and increased fitness. Along this line, Periss, Blasi, and Bjorklund (2012) argue that children’s beliefs about the supernatural may signal their level of maturity and lead to greater care from adults. Just as certain infantile facial features are generally perceived as cute and endearing among children, in turn leading to caretaking behaviors, certain beliefs and explanations may elicit similar reactions. Periss et al. (2012, p. 1206) found that adults and older adolescents from the United States and Spain rated children communicating certain thoughts about the supernatural (e.g., “Mommy, today at recess, a big cold wind came! I think it knew that I was hot and it came to cool me down!”) with more positive affect than those children that expressed mature cognition in similar domains (e.g., “Mommy, today at recess, a big cold wind came. Jordan (a classmate) said the wind came because he was hot. I told him, ‘the wind doesn’t know you’re hot.’ ”), though other types of immature thinking did not generate similar ratings. Supernatural thinking may thus be adaptive because children exhibiting these thoughts may be perceived more positively and receive more care from adults as a result. The main thrust of the adaptationist account is that religion came into existence because of the ­fitness advantages it bears. Were it not for these ­fitness-enhancing effects, religion would not exist in the form that it does.

Byproduct Accounts of Religion

Byproduct accounts of religion argue that religion “is not an adaptive mechanism ‘designed’ for generating religious representations and their associated behaviours, but rather an evolutionary side effect of various cognitive adaptations” (Powell & Clarke, 2012). Further, religion has arguably not “contributed in any significant way to the survival and reproduction” of the individual. Byproduct accounts point to various cognitive mechanisms, such as agency detection and theory of mind, to explain how

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different aspects of religion are influenced and produced by cognitive mechanisms that presumably evolved for reasons unrelated to the religious beliefs they now encourage. For instance, agency detection may have evolved to help detect predators or camouflaged enemies but, as a byproduct, led an individual to believe that an agent is present even if an agent is not visible. This belief may have led to a more developed belief in ghosts or spirits of some sort. One analogy for understanding the byproduct account of religion is a Rube Goldberg device (McCauley, 2011). Rube Goldberg devices use a variety of objects that serve other purposes to produce some action that falls outside the original functions of these objects. Similarly, religion relies on cognitive mechanisms that evolved for different reasons but are then used to produce different aspects of religion. While theory of mind and a preference for purpose-based explanations may not have evolved for the purposes of believing in God or gods, they may contribute to this belief together. In contrast to adaptationist accounts, byproduct accounts of religion argue that religion did not come into existence because of any fitness-enhancing effects that religion produces. Rather, individual cognitive mechanisms bear with them fitnessenhancing effects and enable (and sometimes ­encourage) religious beliefs. This is not to say that religion does not benefit individuals, as there are many research studies that suggest religion is beneficial for the individual (e.g., see Koenig, 2008). Rather, byproduct accounts emphasize that these benefits of religion did not lead to the initial emergence of the evolution of religious thought and action.

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that children are naturally inclined toward religion because of the conceptual systems that developed during childhood. Agency detection, theory of mind, teleological reasoning, and the mnemonic impact of minimally counterintuitive ideas all seem to contribute and point to natural religious expression that begins in childhood. This natural religion is similar to language in the sense that language, though natural, is expressed in different ways depending on the culture in which one is raised. Similarly, religion, while a natural part of development and common around the world, is expressed in different ways depending on the culture in which one is raised. Religion must also be distinguished from theology. While religion comes naturally and requires little formal training, theology is used to teach more unnatural religious beliefs

and requires much more formal training. Similarly, atheism may be thought of as an unnatural religious expression as it works against much of the natural development that results in natural religion, and more teaching is often required to produce atheism. The evolution of religion is also a source of debate. Some argue that religion evolved as an adaptation, but others argue that religion is a byproduct that stems from multiple sources that, when pieced together, form natural religion. Regardless, children’s developmental psychology seems to point toward the naturalness of religious beliefs, which may, in turn, account for the commonness and persistence of these beliefs.

References

Astuti, R., & Harris, P. L. (2008). Understanding mortality and the life of the ancestors in rural Madagascar. Cognitive Science, 32, 713–740. doi:10.1080/03640210802066907 Barrett, J. L. (2004). Why would anyone believe in God? Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Barrett, J. L. (2008). Coding and quantifying counterintuitiveness in religious concepts: Theoretical and methodological reflections. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 20, 308–338. Barrett, J. L. (2011). Cognitive science, religion, and theology: From human minds to divine minds. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press. Barrett, J.  L. (2012). Born believers: The science of children’s religious belief. New York, NY: Free Press. Barrett, J.  L., Richert, R.  A., & Driesenga, A. (2001). God’s beliefs versus mother’s: The development of nonhuman agent concepts. Child Development, 72, 50–65. doi:10.1111/14678624.00265 Barrett, J.  L., & Trigg, R. (2014). Cognitive and evolutionary studies of religion. In R. Trigg & J. Barrett (Eds.), The roots of religion: Exploring the cognitive science of religion (pp. 1–15). Farnham, Surry, UK: Ashgate. Bek, J., & Lock, S. (2011). Afterlife beliefs: Category specificity and sensitivity to biological priming. Religion, Brain and Behavior, 1(1), 5–17. Bering, J.  M. (2002). Intuitive conceptions of dead agents’ minds: The natural foundations of afterlife beliefs as phenomenological boundary. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2, 263–308. doi:10.1163/15685370260441008 Bering, J. M., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2004). The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity. Developmental Psychology, 40, 217–233. doi:10.1037/00121649.40.2.217 Bering, J. M., Hernández Blasi, C., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2005). The development of “afterlife” beliefs in religiously and secularly schooled children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23, 587–607. Bloom, P. (2005). Descartes’ baby: How the science of child development explains what makes us human. New York, NY: Basic Books. Bloom, P. (2007). Religion is natural. Developmental Science, 10, 147–151. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00577.x Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York, NY: Basic Books.

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Bulbulia, J., & Sosis, R. (2011). Signalling theory and the evolution of religious cooperation. Religion, 41, 363–388. do i:10.1080/0048721X.2011.604508 Burdett, E.  R. (2013). Cognitive developmental foundations of cultural acquisition: Children’s understanding of other minds. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Oxford. Foley, G. S., Greenway, T. S., & Barrett, J. L. (2017). Children’s understanding of intentional agents: Revisiting the preparedness hypothesis. Manuscript submitted for publication. Gottfried, G. M., Gelman, S. A., & Schultz, J. (1999). Children’s understanding of the brain: From early essentialism to biological theory. Cognitive Development, 14, 147–174. doi:10.1016/S0885-2014(99)80022-7 Gregory, J.  P. (2014a). Exploring counterintuitiveness: Templateand schema-level effects. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. University of Oxford, March 2014. Gregory, J.  P. (2014b). Is there a window of opportunity for religiosity in childhood and adolescence? Presentation at the “Is Religion Natural: The Chinese Challenge” conference, Hong Kong, April 2014. Guthrie, S. E. (1993). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Harris, P. L., & Giménez, M. (2005). Children’s acceptance of conflicting testimony: The case of death. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5, 143–164. doi:10.1163/1568537054068606 Hornbeck, R., & Barrett, J.  L. (2013). Refining and testing “counterintuitiveness” in virtual reality: Cross-cultural evidence for recall of counterintuitive representations. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 23(1), 15–28. Huang, J., Cheng, L., & Zhu, J. (2013). Intuitive conceptions of dead persons’ mentality: A cross-cultural replication and more. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 23(1), 29–41. doi:10.1080/10508619.2013.735493 Johnson, C. N. (1990). If you had my brain, where would I be? Children’s understanding of the brain and identity. Child Development, 61, 962–972. Kelemen, D., & DiYanni, C. (2005). Intuitions about origins: Purpose and intelligent design in children’s reasoning about nature. Journal of Cognition and Development, 6, 3–31. doi:10.1207/s15327647jcd0601_2 Kelemen, D., & Rosset, E. (2009). The human function compunction: Teleological explanation in adults. Cognition, 111, 138–143. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.01.001 Knight, N. (2008). Yukatek Maya children’s attributions of beliefs to natural and non-natural entities. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8, 235–243.

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Knight, N., Sousa, P., Barrett, J. L., & Atran, S. (2004). Children’s attributions of beliefs to humans and God: Cross-cultural evidence. Cognitive Science, 28, 117–126. doi:10.1016/j. cogsci.2003.09.002 Koenig, H.  G. (2008). Medicine, health, and religion: Where science and spirituality meet. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press. Legerstee, M. (1994). Patterns of 4-month-old infant responses to hidden, silent, and sounding people and objects. Early Development and Parenting, 3, 71–80. McCauley, R. N. (2011). Why religion is natural and science is not. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. McKay, R.  T., & Dennett, D.  C. (2009). The evolution of misbelief. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 493–510. doi:10.1017/S0140525X09990975 Periss, V., Blasi, C.  H., & Bjorklund, D.  F. (2012). Cognitive “babyness”: Developmental differences in the power of young children’s supernatural thinking to influence positive and negative affect. Developmental Psychology, 48, 1203–1214. doi:10.1037/a0026979 Pinker, S. (2007). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Powell, R., & Clarke, S. (2012). Religion as an evolutionary byproduct: A critique of the standard model. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 63, 457–486. Somel, M., Liu, X., & Khaitovich, P. (2013). Human brain evolution: Transcripts, metabolites and their regulators. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14, 112–127. doi:10.1038/ nrn3372 Spelke, E.  S., & Kinzler, K.  D. (2007). Core knowledge. Developmental Science, 11, 89–96. Spelke, E. S., Phillips, A., & Woodward, A. L. (1995). Infants’ knowledge of object motion and human action. In D.  Sperber, D.  Premack, & A.  J.  Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (pp. 44–78). New York, NY: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press. Taylor, M. (1999). Imaginary companions and the children who create them. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development, 72, 655–684. doi:10.1111/14678624.00304 Wigger, J. B., Paxson, K., & Ryan, L. (2013). What do invisible friends know? Imaginary companions, God, and theory of mind. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 23(1), 2–14. doi:10.1080/10508619.2013.739059

Tyler S . Greenway, Justin L. Ba rre t t

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CH A PTE R

Belief, Ritual, and the Evolution of Religion

Matt J. Rossano and Benjamin Vandewalle

Abstract This chapter outlines an evolutionary scenario for the emergence of religion. From cognitive science, four mental prerequisites of religious cognition are discussed: (1) hyperactive agency detection, (2) theory of mind, (3) imagination, and (4) altered states of consciousness. Evidence for these prerequisites in nonhuman primates suggests their presence in our early hominin ancestors. From comparative psychology, evidence of ritual behavior in nonhuman primates and other species is reviewed. Archeological evidence of ritual behavior is also discussed. Collectively, these data indicate that the first step toward religion was an elaboration of primate social rituals to include group synchronized activities such as dancing, chanting, and singing. Control of fire, pigment use, and increasing brain size would have intensified group synchronized rituals over time, which, in the context of increased intergroup interactions, eventually led to the first evidence of supernatural ritual at about 70,000 years before present. Key Words: agency detection, burial, cave art, costly signals, evolution, religion, ritual, synchronized movement, theory of mind

Anyone interested in probing the evolutionary origins of religion faces a formidable challenge: Belief is central to religion, and belief does not fossilize in the archeological record. Looking at a half-million-yearold Acheulean hand axe may tell us something about the maker’s technical skills, diet, hunting practices, and lifestyle, but very little about his or her beliefs— let alone the supernatural beliefs inherent to most religions. But there are guiding parameters that the investigator can use to make reasonable inferences about when, where, and why religious beliefs likely arose during hominin evolutionary history. First, the very fact that religion is rooted in supernatural belief means that certain requisite mental abilities must be present for one to even entertain such beliefs. You cannot believe that which you cannot think. Dogs do not sweat over differential equations or theodicy because they literally cannot conceive of either. ­ Second, religion does not just involve belief, it also involves behavior—specifically ritual behavior—and

ritual can leave archeological traces. It is along these theoretical lines that a tentative, and hopefully testable, evolutionary history of religion can be written. As far as we can tell, no other animal on earth has religion. Thus mentally, religion’s beginnings reside somewhere along the 7-million-year journey from the mind of the common ancestor to that of modern humans—with the chimpanzee mind serving as the common ancestor’s best proxy. Behaviorally, religion resides somewhere between the vast repertoire of nonhuman primate social rituals and human religious rituals, with the rituals of traditional societies serving as our hominin ancestors’ best proxy.

The Religious Mind

Religious cognition appears to be built on at least four mental attributes: (1) a hyperactive agency detection device, or HADD; (2) theory of mind, or TOM; (3) altered or ecstatic states of consciousness; and (4) general imaginative ability (imagination). 83

All four of these attributes are present to some degree in our primate relatives, suggesting that their elaboration into forms capable of supporting fullblown religious cognition was not necessarily improbable or extra-ordinary.

Hyperactive Agency Detection Device

First among the mental building blocks of religion is something called HADD: the hyperactive agency detection device (Barrett, 2011; S.  Guthrie, 1993). Agency detection is (as the name implies) the ability to recognize or infer the presence of an agent, that is, another goal-directed organism. For social species especially, agents are highly fitness relevant as protectors (e.g., parents, other group members), prey, or predators. It is unsurprising, then, that many species have highly sensitive agency-detection mechanisms, including humans. We are quick to attribute the slightest creak of a floorboard or crunch of a leaf to the approach of a malevolent stranger. Seeing faces in the clouds, silhouettes in the shadows, or hearing voices in the wind are, to one degree or another, manifestations of HADD. While HADD may make us more vigilant and paranoid than necessary, it is probably better to be safe than sorry given that just one failure to detect a truly dangerous agent could be fatal. It has been argued that our religious tendencies stem in part from HADD (Barrett, 2011; S. Guthrie, 1993; Tremlin, 2006, pp. 75–80). Our natural tendency to overextend HADD could easily have led our ancestors to attribute seemingly mysterious natural events (storms, illness, droughts, rainbows, etc.) to the actions of superagents. Obviously, there is much about religion that HADD leaves unexplained; but it does provide a conceptual building block—a potentially necessary but insufficient precondition for religious cognition. HADD does not appear to be unique to humans. An analogous form of HADD seems widespread in the animal kingdom. Cats interpret nearly any moving object (smaller than themselves) as prey. Rhesus monkeys will form strong emotional bonds with cloth-covered, but quite inanimate, “mother” monkeys; and male chimpanzees produce dominance displays to roaring waterfalls, thunderclaps, or loud motor cars (Whiten et al., 2001). In each case, the animal appears to be doing something quite similar to humans—that is, responding as if they are in the presence of another agent (prey, protector, or rival) on the basis of minimal cues. This suggests that HADD is a relatively simple cognitive 84

mechanism, and possessing a HADD capable of supporting religious cognition probably arose fairly early in hominin evolution.

Theory of Mind

One reason why HADD alone is incapable of explaining religious cognition is that humans do far more than merely assume that a natural event is agent-caused. We further assume that the agent behind the event had knowledge, emotions, and goals motivating its action. The ancestors are not just responsible for the drought; they are angry that taboos have been violated and require certain rituals and sacrifices be performed as restitution. Moving from agency attribution to agent motivation requires a second, related mental ability: theory of mind (TOM). Theory of mind refers to the ability to infer mental states in others and to assign them as causal, motivational forces driving action. Theory of mind does not appear in human children until about 3 or 4 years of age (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). The extent to which it is present in our closest primate relatives has been a source of debate. Some studies indicate that chimpanzees do not understand what others may or may not know (Povinelli & Eddy, 1996). Other studies using more naturalistic testing procedures, however, suggest otherwise (Hare, Call, Agnetta, & Tomasello, 2000). In their review, Tomasello, Call, and Hare (2003) conclude that chimpanzees understand some mental states, such as goals and desires, but not more sophisticated ones such as beliefs and inferences. The important point—one which echoes that found earlier with HADD—is that TOM’s presence (albeit in limited form) in our primate relatives suggests that it was also present in early hominins as well.

Altered or Ecstatic States of Consciousness

William James (1961/1902) argued that the mystical experience was foundational to religion. Indeed, nearly all religious traditions cultivate forms of contemplative or meditative practices in order to better relate to the supernatural. Moreover, ritually induced trance is central to shamanism, thought by many to  be humanity’s oldest form of religious ­practice (Lewis-Williams, 2002; Rossano, 2007; Whitley, 2006). The altered state of consciousness associated with shamanism may also have contributed important fitness-enhancing health and healing effects, providing a selective advantage to those hominins with a greater capacity for altered states (McClenon,

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2002). However, as with HADD and TOM, altered states are not absent from our primate relatives. For example, a relaxed, pacific mental state conducive to social bonding accompanies grooming in nonhuman primates, resulting from the release of endogenous opiates (Keverne, Martinez, & Tuite, 1989). Altered states have also been associated with social conflict. Jane Goodall described how a young male chimpanzee, challenging for ascendancy in the social hierarchy, ritualistically “rocked” himself into an agitated state (the human equivalent of a pregame “psych-up”) prior to a raucous aggressive display (Goodall, 1971, pp. 112–114). Similarly, male mandrills will sometimes consume the iboga root, which appears to have a powerful excitatory effect on them, in preparation for conflicts with other males (Samorini, 2002, p. 58). Evidence of altered states of consciousness has also been found in nonprimate species such as rats and rabbits (see Rossano, 2010, p. 136). It is therefore likely that early hominins also had some capacity for altered states.

Imagination

That imagination is central to religion seems indisputable. Gods, spirits, souls, heaven, hell, and the myriad other supernatural concepts integral to religious belief are not things that (most) people directly encounter. Instead, we envision them. But what exactly is imagination? In this context, imagination is defined as the ability to create situational models unconstrained by the realities of the immediate present (Harris, 2000, p. 192; Hauser, 2006, p. 203). A situational model is a mental representation of how an object or system operates, or how an event is organized. If this model is unconstrained by the immediate present, then it is free to vary beyond the limits of concrete reality. For example, consider what goes on in the mind of someone reading a story. The immediate reality of reading is momentarily set aside as the person envisions the story’s events based on the author’s description (e.g., “it was a dark and stormy night”). Having developed this capacity, humans are able to mentally represent not just immediate sensory inputs (what is happening), but models based on interpretations of those inputs (what could have happened, or what might happen in the future). Imaginative capacity emerges early in human development. By age 2 or 3, most children are able to engage in pretend play, where they understand how objects are redefined to fit with imagined events and

scenarios (Harris, 2000, pp. 11–13). By age 3 or 4, most children can engage in counterfactual thinking (Harris, German, & Mills, 1996). There is only scant evidence that nonhuman primates might have a similar, but more limited, capacity. Two studies have shown that great apes will select tools in anticipation of using them hours later in order to obtain food, suggesting that they can plan for (and possibly envision) the future (Mulcahy & Call, 2006; Osvath & Osvath, 2008, but see also Osvath & Persson, 2013). Primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth propose that because chimpanzees and bonobos live in fissionfusion communities, where group members are often separated from each other for hours or days, they may have evolved a (limited) capacity to envision future encounters with other group members (Cheney & Seyfarth, 2007, p. 279). Since most other primates, including nearly all monkeys, live in more static communities, it is not surprising that evidence of future-planning in them is largely lacking. All of this suggests that our early hominin ancestors very likely possessed a primitive imaginative capacity. However, it seems that this capacity was well short of religious imagination. It was probably not until the ecological stresses of the late Pleistocene that this primitive imaginative capacity flowered into something more akin to religious imagination.

Evolving the Religious Mind

Many important mental building blocks for religious cognition were likely present at the outset of hominin evolution. An important question is why these building blocks eventually coalesced into full-blown religion in our ancestors and not in other primates. Undoubtedly, brain size played some role. Hominin brain evolution is punctuated by two periods of particularly large gains in size: one at around 2.5 million years before present (mybp) with the emergence of the genus Homo, and a second at  around .5 mybp with the emergence of Homo ­heidelbergensis (McHenry, 1994;  Ruff,  Trinkhaus, & Holliday, 1997). A combination of climatic, ecological, and social factors conspired in creating the conditions for these size increases (see Geary, 2005, pp. 54–61, for discussion). A bigger brain could support more sophisticated cognition, including (potentially) religious cognition. However, as is ­ ­discussed shortly, there is no ­convincing evidence of   supernatural belief until around 70,000 ybp,

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and this was probably catalyzed primarily by social ­factors.

Ritual and Emergence of Religious Cognition

Having a brain capable of religious cognition does not necessarily ensure the emergence of religion. Actualizing this potential might require certain social conditions: specifically, a threshold level of social complexity. Essential to achieving the requisite level of social complexity is ritual. Ritualized behaviors have deep evolutionary roots as a means of regulating social life. Throughout the animal kingdom, ritualized acts are used for sending clear, unambiguous social signals when cautious, precise communication is required. For example, among elk and other large ungulates, females generally avoid mature males. For mating purposes, however, males must (obviously) find a way to get in close proximity to a female without frightening her. This is accomplished using the “low stretch ritual,” which serves to signal nonaggressive intentions (R. Guthrie, 2005, p. 68). The stretch position emulates that of a calf wanting to nurse and puts the female at ease while allowing the male to better detect estrus odors. Similarly, among many waterfowl, ritualized mating dances are used both for selecting mates and building social bonds between them (Kraaijeveld & Mulder, 2002). Finally, many dog owners are familiar with the “play bow ritual” often seen at the opening of a roughhouse play session. The dog lowers its head to the ground between its front paws with its hind end raised and tail wagging. The bow conveys the important message that seemingly aggressive acts (growling, chasing, biting, etc.) are not to be misconstrued as real aggression—they are for play. As highly social creatures, our primate cousins have an array of ritualized behaviors for regulating their social lives. For example, when chimpanzee, bonobo, and spider monkey foraging parties reunite, they engage in ritualized acts of welcoming and social reaffirmation including mutual embracing, kissing, group pant-hooting, and grooming (Goodall, 1986). Gelada baboons use rhythmic back-and-forth approach vocalizations to signal benign intent during close-quarter feeding sessions. These vocalizations allow two baboons to peacefully feed near one another without threat (Richman, 1987). Finally among chimpanzees, reconciliation between combatants is signaled by submissive bows, plaintiff vocalizations, and the hand-out begging 86

gesture (on the part of the loser) followed by embraces and kisses (from the winner; de Waal, 1990). These examples highlight the important features that characterize ritualized behaviors. They are typically repetitious, exaggerated, attention-getting gestures designed to send important social signals (for more in-depth discussion, see Rossano, 2012). Ritualized behaviors are not the same as rituals. In rituals, ritualized behaviors are embedded within symbolic, ceremonial, and traditional cultural elements in order to heighten their emotional impact and memorability. Whereas many species have ritualized behaviors, only humans have true rituals. Given their primate heritage, our ancestors were preadapted with a rich repertoire of ritualized behaviors for regulating social life. However, when we compare human ritualized behaviors with those of other primates, an important religiously relevant difference stands out: Humans are able to move together as a group in coordinated and synchronized ways. Put more simply, humans dance, sway, march, and chant together; other primates do not. This ability to synchronize on a groupwide scale may have been the first step toward creating the social context from which religion could arise.

Learning to Move Together

Religious rituals frequently involve group synchronized actions. In mosque worship, people bow, kneel, and fall prostrate together. In churches across the globe, people sing hymns, kneel, and pray in unison. Indeed, there are reasons to suspect that humanity’s earliest religious rituals involved energetic group singing, dancing, and chanting around roaring fires. Genetic analyses indicate that three traditional societies—the !Kung San of Southern Africa, the Andaman Islanders of Southeast Asia, and the Australian Aborigines—very likely represent humanity’s most ancient populations, with the latter two possibly tracing back to the earliest “out of Africa” migration of Homo sapiens (Endicott et al., 2003; Hudjashov et al., 2007; Kumarasamy et al., 2003; Wade, 2009, pp. 99–102). Common to all three are religious rituals involving highly emotive night-long sessions of vigorous singing and dancing (Wade, 2009, p. 118). This may be significant in that it suggests that our ancestors’ earliest religious rituals may have been similar. Moving in synchrony has powerful social/emotional effects on participants. A number of studies have shown that people who move together emotionally bond together. For example, Wiltermuth

Mat t J. R ossano, Benjamin Van d ewalle

and Heath (2009) had subjects engage in either synchronized motor movements (walking in step, singing in synchrony, singing and moving in synchrony), nonsynchronized movements (walking at individual paces, singing and moving individually), or no movements at all. Later, all subjects played an economic game where they could extend varying levels of trust and cooperation to other players. Subjects who engaged in synchronized movements were found to be more trusting and cooperative compared with others. Later studies have found that moving together enhances perceived similarity, likability, and the sharing of sacred values, all of which can motivate within-group altruism (Fischer, Callander, Reddish, & Bulbulia, 2013; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2011). Finally, synchronized movement has been found to increase pain tolerance, potentially allowing group members to achieve difficult, collective goals (Cohen, Ejsmond-Frey, Knight, & Dunbar, 2010). Moving in synchrony is not uncommon across the animal world. Fiddler crabs, frogs, fireflies, and dolphins all appear capable of synchronous movement (see Rossano, 2013, pp. 116–119 for discussion). Among our primate relatives, however, collective synchrony is almost never observed in the wild. More controlled settings, however, reveal some capacity for synchrony. Japanese macaques trained individually on a button-pressing task, spontaneously synchronized their button-pressing when paired later with another (Nagasaka, Chao, Hasegawa, Notoya, & Fujii, 2013). Furthermore, Hattori, Tomonaga, and Matsuzawa (2013) found that one of three chimpanzees was able to synchronize her motor movements to an external beat, ­although somewhat less flexibly than humans. These findings are consistent with the observation of Wolfgang Kohler (1927, pp. 314–316), who reported that while playing, a group of chimpanzees began to “march in an orderly fashion in a single file around and around the post . . . a rough approximate rhythm develop[ed] and they tend[ed] to keep time with one another.” Kohler remarked that nothing he had seen before from the chimps so strongly reminded him of the dancing of some primitive tribes. However, Kohler also noted how he usually needed to supply the rhythmic driver for the chimpanzee movement by stamping his foot. When he ceased, the chimps usually halted their dance (with great disappointment). The nonhuman primate brain may place some limits on their ability to synchronize with one

a­nother. An imaging study found evidence that rhesus macaques are sensitive to surface-level rhythmic grouping, but (unlike humans) are not responsive to induced beat, thus limiting their ability to coordinate to a common external rhythm (Honing, Merchant, Haden, Prado, & Bartolo, 2012). Larsson (2012, 2014) has provided theoretical arguments for the facilitative effect of committed bipedalism on the evolution of synchronous movement. Thus, rhythmically coordinating group-level movements appears to be something just beyond the ability of our closest primate relatives. Given that chimpanzees can almost move in synchrony, and given how easily synchrony appears to arise in nature, it seems that moving together in dance and song was probably not terribly difficult for our hominin ancestors to achieve. However, identifying when our ancestors began to sing and dance together is problematic given these behaviors do not fossilize. What does fossilize is the potential venue for such activities: the campfire.

Controlling Fire

The communal religious rituals of traditional societies frequently occur around fires. Thus, where we see evidence of the controlled use of fire—especially what appear to be large, communal fires—we have the possibility of religious ritual similar to those found today among traditional people. The first possible evidence of the use of fire is dated to around 1.2 mybp from Swartkrans Cave in South Africa (Brain & Sillent, 1988). Evidence of fire dating between 1 and 0.8 mybp has also been reported at Wonderwerk Cave in Southern Africa (Berna et al., 2012) and Gesher Benot Ya’aqov Cave in Israel (Alperson-Afil, Richter, & Goren-Inbar, 2007). However, even if these very early instances of fire use are genuine, they are sporadic. Habitual fire use would be necessary if it were to have important, lasting effects on human evolution. Both a review of the European record and a recent longitudinal analysis of Tabun Cave in Israel have found evidence for habitual fire use beginning sometime between 300,000 and 400,000 ybp (Roebroeks & Villa, 2011; Shimelmitz, et al., 2014). Moreover, the occurrence of stone-lined hearths is not widespread until about 250,000 ybp, where they are found in both Africa and Eurasia (Klein & Edgar, 2002, pp. 156–157). Clearly then, by the time of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals (roughly 200,000 ybp), fire was not only under control but also available as a venue for regular collective ritual

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activity. Despite this, there is evidence that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals did not always use fire similarly. For example, a comparison of the Mousterian (Neanderthal) and Aurignacian (Homo sapiens) layers at Klisoura Cave in Southern Greece (Karkanas et al., 2004) found that Mousterian hearths were relatively unstructured and composed of discrete fire episodes. By contrast, the Aurignacian hearths were composed of much thicker ash accumulations, indicative of more intense occupation and continuous fire use. Additionally, Sandgathe et al. (2011) have argued that the intermittent lack of evidence of fire at the Mousterian sites of Pech de l’Aze’ IV and Roc de Marsal in southwestern France is hard to attribute to natural processes, changes in site use, or overlooked evidence. Instead, they contend it is more likely due to the local Neanderthals’ reliance on naturally occurring combustive events, rather than their own fire-creation. This would explain why evidence for fire is not present during the coldest periods, when conditions for naturally occurring fires would have been poor. Similar evidence has been documented at other Neanderthal sites such as Combe-Capelle Bas and possibly Jonzac and La Quina. These data stand in contrast to evidence from later Homo sapiens sites where fire use intensified during harsher conditions (Thery-Parisot, 2002). Along with more consistent fire use, there is also evidence that Homo sapiens occasionally built larger fires than Neanderthals. Some of the best-studied Neanderthal hearths are located at Abric Romani, a rock shelter near Barcelona, Spain, dated to between 70,000 and 40,000 ybp (Vallverdu, et al., 2010). Here, numerous hearths were discovered, all of which were small (less than 0.3 meters) and shallow, indicating the presence of short-duration, lowtemperature fires. Most are associated with domestic activity such as knapping, butchering, or sleeping. The largest Neanderthal fires, measuring about 1 meter in diameter, have been found at Kebara Cave (dated to 60,000–44,000 ybp) in modernday Israel (Meignen, Goldberg, & Bar-Yosef, 2007). The Kebara hearths are about half the size of those attributed to Homo sapiens at Sibudu Cave (65,000–58,000 ybp) in South Africa (Wadley, 2012). Here, a number of hearths measuring over 2 meters in diameter have been found. Large, presumably communal fires, similar to those of Sibudu, have been found at other Homo 88

sapiens sites. For example, at the Abri Pataud rock shelter site in southwestern France (about 23,000 ybp), Cro-Magnons built large hearths over a meter in diameter and lined them with cobbles gathered from a nearby river. Hearths of nearly 2 meters in diameter have also been reported from Chauvet Cave, presumed to be around 30,000 years old (Whitley, 2006, p. 66). Even more impressive are the hearths found at the Dolni Vestonice (23,000 ybp) site in the Czech Republic (Vandiver, Soffer, Klima, & Svoboda, 1989). Hearths over 2 meters in size with deposits over 40 cm thick have been found there. Furthermore, some of the hearths are associated with the shattered remains of carved clay figurines and pellets, apparently made to explode when heated. Two stone-age “kilns”—clay structures used for firing clay—have also been found capable of generating very hot fires. It is clear from Dolni Vestonice that fire had taken on more than just practical significance for the Homo sapiens living there. The clay pellets and shattered figurines were likely used in some ceremony involving fire; possibly—as archeologist Bryan Hayden contends—in religious rituals invoking animal spirits (Hayden, 2003, pp. 134–135). Thus, Dolni Vestonice provides us with some of the earliest compelling evidence for the social use of fire: as a venue for communal rituals. It is certainly possible that hominins were dancing around fires prior to Dolni Vestonice. However, based on hearth presence and size, the strongest cases for communal ritual activity prior to Dolni Vestonice are restricted to particular Homo sapiens sites beginning about 65 thousand years ago (kya).

Religious Ritual as Costly Behavior

A feature of religious ritual that often distinguishes it from non-religious ritual and can leave archeological traces is cost (Sosis, 2004). Religious ritual is often costly, requiring considerable time, energy, risk, or resources for little—if any—utilitarian payback. This costliness, however, serves an important community- and trust-building function (Xygalatas, Mitkidis, Fischer, Reddish, Skewes, Geertz, Roepstorff, & Bulbulia, 2013). Using costly ritualized acts for social bonding purposes has deep evolutionary roots. For example, male baboons use a “scrotum-grasp ritual” as a means of cementing friendships. It is effective for this purpose precisely because it entails an obvious cost—participants literally place their reproductive success in another’s hands (Whitham & Maestripieri, 2003).

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Costly ritualized displays are present among a wide range of species. Examples include peacock’s tails, frog’s croaks, and the energetic stotting of Thompson’s gazelles (Welch, Semlitsch & Gerhardt, 1998; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997). Costly rituals are also common among traditional societies, where rites of passage, peacemaking, and dispute settling can often be physically and psychologically taxing ordeals (see Rossano, 2009 for summary). Importantly, the rituals of traditional societies nearly always have some spiritual dimension. Thus, evidence of costly ritual behavior in the hominin archeological record may also serve as an indicator of supernatural belief. This evidence often takes the form of ritually-relevant remains requiring considerable time, energy, or effort in their procurement or creation.

Red Ochre

Ochre is a general term for a pigmented iron oxide mineral that can be ground into powder and mixed with various liquids to produce a paint-like substance. Red ochre is used extensively in traditional societies for ritual purposes to color the body, weapons, tools, and other artifacts (Power, 1999; Power & Aiello, 1997; Watts, 2002). Some have argued that red’s symbolic importance rises to the level of a universal human archetype for such things as blood, sex, life, and death (James, 1957; Marshack, 1981; Wreschner, 1980). However, ochre can also have practical applications in tool making and hide tanning, and as medicine (Velo, 1984; Wadley, Hodgskiss, & Grant, 2009). Thus, the mere presence of ochre, even red ochre, in the archeological record does not immediately imply ritual use. The oldest sites bearing red ochre date to about 300,000 years ago (Barham, 2002). From the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in Africa (roughly 280,000–25,000 ybp), at least 74 sites have been found bearing substantial amounts of ochre (Watts, 1999). Indeed, the amounts found at some sites such as Twin Rivers (estimated over 30,000 pieces, nearly 70 kg), Sibudu (5,000 pieces, over 15 kg), Blombos Cave (8,000 pieces, 5.8 kg), and the European site of Grotte du Renne (1,500 pieces, 18 kg) are striking. Some archeologists (Barham, 2002; Watts, 2009,  2010) have argued that such vast quantities of specifically red ochre (when other colors were equally or more easily available) clearly indicate ritual use. However, not everyone is convinced of this. In her studies at Sibudu, Lyn Wadley (Wadley et al., 2009) has shown that red ochre is useful in producing the adhesives necessary for

­ afting. Thus, large amounts of red ochre could be h explained in a purely utilitarian manner. There is, however, a potential weakness to this argument. Wadley’s own studies show that coarsegrained ochre is not merely useful, but essential to successful hafting. Nevertheless, at Sibudu, coarse-grained ochre is the least common type throughout the entire period of occupation at the site (Hodgskiss, 2012, p. 107). Thus, at no time were the residents of Sibudu preferentially selecting the coarsest grain ochre (sandy ochres) over others, as might be expected if hafting were its main use (Hodgskiss, 2012, pp. 112–113). Similar preferences for fine-grained ochre are also documented at Blombos, Pinnacle Point, Diepkloof, Qafzeh, and Skhul (Dayet, Texier, Daniel, & Porraz, 2013; d’Errico, Salomon, Vignaud, & Stringer, 2010; Henshilwood, et al., 2001, p. 431; Hovers, Ilani, Bar-Yosef, & Vandermeersch, 2003, p. 502; Marean et al., 2007, p. 906; Watts, 2010, p. 409). Thus, at numerous sites, hominins were intentionally procuring a form of ochre that was not well suited for practical ends. Furthermore, procuring the desired form of ochre also required considerable travel. At Twin Rivers, hominins traveled 20 km or more to find their ochre. At Blomobs it was 30–40 km; at Pinnacle Point it was 60 km, and at Qafzeh it was 80 km. Once brought back to the site, the ochre had to be worked—ground into a power, heated, and mixed with various liquids to form paint. The most favored ochres (specularite and hematite) are quite hard, and studies show that grinding them into power is effortful and time-consuming (Wadley, 2005). Thus, on a range of dimensions—amount, time, distance, and effort—the presence of ochre represents a highly costly behavior whose practical value is, at best, suspect.

Beads

Beads are perforated shells or animal teeth, presumably worn as body decoration. Among traditional societies, beads often serve as social markers (indicative of one’s tribe or status within the tribe), or as gifts in reciprocal interactions with other groups (Kuhn & Stiner, 2007). Beads are also used in ritual activities such as burials (Vanhaeren & d’Errico, 2005; R.  White, 1993). The earliest evidence of beads dates to just before 100,000 ybp (Vanhaeren et al., 2006). As with ochre, there are a number of sites where the amount of beads unearthed is remarkable. For example, at Ksar’ Akil, Ucagizli, Fumane Cave, and

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Riparo Mochi, beads number from 500 to 1,000 (Douka, Bergman, Hedges, Wesselingh, & Higham, 2013; Peresani, Vanhaeren, Quaggiotto, Queffelec, & d’Errico, 2013; Stiner, 2003). At other sites there are fewer beads, but acquiring them required considerable travel or possibly trade with other groups. The 71 beads at Blombos came from 20 km away, while the 38 beads from Grotte de Pigeons originated about 70 km from the site (d’Errico et al., 2009; Henshilwood, d’Errico, Vanhaeren, van Niekerk, & Jacobs, 2004). Beads were either intentionally perforated (requiring skill and patience) or intentionally selected for proper size and appropriate naturally occurring perforations—qualities that were often rare in the environment (Henshilwood et al., 2004; Kuhn, Stiner, Reese, & Gulec, 2001; Stiner, 2003). Thus, as with ochre, in terms of the amounts gathered and the time and effort expended in procurement and modification, beads represent a costly behavior with little utilitarian use.

Caves

Penetrating into deep cave recesses for artistic, religious, or other potentially ritual purposes has been well documented for Homo sapiens during the Upper Paleolithic (40,000–10,000 ybp). Accessing deep cave sites was often risky and dangerous. For example, reaching the painted chambers at Montespan Cave required trekking through frigid waters for more than a kilometer. To access Nerja Cave in Spain, hominins had to negotiate a steep climb up a sheer rock face. The painted shaft at Lascaux required a 16-meter rope descent into pitch darkness, and the Salon Noir chamber at Niaux Cave was accessible only after traversing a 450meter passage and making a 200-meter climb. Compounding the danger was the fact that while making these ventures, hominins were carrying torches, artistic supplies, and they often had children in tow (see R. White, 2003, for summary). In ­addition, Homo sapiens often expended considerable time, energy, and resources in the deep cave chambers creating paintings or constructing ritual venues, such as the elaborate El Juyo “sanctuary” in northern Spain (Arias, 2009; Freeman & Gonzalez Echegaray, 1981). Thus, there is little question that Paleolithic spelunking was a costly endeavor. Although the most well-known and arguably the most impressive ritual use of caves occurred during the later Upper Paleolithic (Altamira, Lascaux, El Juyo, etc.), Homo sapiens started penetrating deep into caves at the very outset of the Upper Paleolithic. Cave paintings at Chauvet date to before 30,000 90

ybp (Chauvet, Deschamps, & Hillaire, 1996), and recent finds at El Castillo Cave in Spain push the earliest cave art back to around 40,000 ybp (Pike et al., 2012). A recent genetic analysis has confirmed that El Castillo was more likely created by CroMagnons than Neanderthals (Wood et al., 2014), which suggests that this form of costly ritual behavior was part of the Homo sapiens’ repertoire prior to their exodus from Africa, and indeed recent evidence confirms this. At Rhino Cave in Botswana (Southern Africa), evidence has been found for some of the earliest cave rituals, dating as far back as 70,000 ybp (Coulson, Staurset, & Walker, 2011). Rhino Cave is located in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana in southern Africa. It is situated high on the northernmost ridge of what is called Female Hill. Its prominent location (the Hills are the only major outcropping for over 100 km in any direction) prompted Coulson et al. (2011) to argue that it was a likely assembly site for hominin communities in the region. Though it is visually prominent, gaining access to the cave is not easy: One must climb over or squeeze between large boulders, crawl through a narrow passage, and then navigate down a steep drop leading to the cave floor. Though the cave is not deep, the surrounding boulders and high walls effectively block out any direct sunlight. Inside the cave, there is a natural snake-like outcropping. The outcropping was intentionally modified to enhance its serpentine qualities, and flickering torch light gives it the illusion of undulating movement, producing an environment highly conducive to the trance states associated with shamanistic rituals. It may also be significant that the serpent plays a prominent role in the creation myths of the San, who are indigenous to the region. The snake-rock is not the only curious aspect of Rhino Cave. There are also an unusually large number of burned and broken tools in the cave produced from colorful, nonlocal raw materials (“exotic” tools). These raw materials were transported to the cave from distances ranging from 50 to several hundred kilometers (Coulson et al., 2011). At the cave, the raw materials were fashioned into tools (points) and then intentionally destroyed and burned. From a practical standpoint, this behavior is odd and costly. Time, energy, and potentially valuable material resources were exhausted for no clear utilitarian gain. But, as Coulson et al. (2011) point out, these are precisely the hallmarks of human ritual. The modifications to the “serpent” outcropping have been dated to the Middle Stone Age

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(280–30 kya). The burned, broken points at Rhino Cave have been indirectly dated (using similar finds in the region) to around 70,000 years ago. Both climatological and genetic evidence indicate that the last 150,000 years in Africa were particularly unstable, leading to resource deprivations and population crashes among hominins (Ambrose, 1998; Li & Durbin, 2011; Scholz et al., 2007). Potentially in response to these stresses, some of the first evidence of extensive trade networks also emerges during this time (Ambrose, 2010; Ambrose & Lorenz, 1990). Given that intergroup rituals often play an important role in establishing and maintaining reciprocal trade alliances, Rhino Cave may have been a site where different groups gathered to spiritually cement social and commercial relations. Deep cave ventures are not only notable for their behavioral costs; the art left behind is significant as well. A number of researchers have argued that some cave art provides evidence of early shamanistic rituals (Hayden, 2003; Lewis-Williams, 2002; Whitley, 2006; Winkelman, 2010). Therianthropic images (human/animal chimera) found in many deep cave sites, such as the “sorcerer” image from Les Trois Freres or the “bird-man” image from Lascaux, are consistent with the shamanistic theme of “soul flight,” where in the midst of trance, the shaman’s soul leaves his/her body and unites with that of a spiritually powerful animal. Additionally, cave and rock art often depict geometric forms that are thought to represent the entopic images associated with the trance state central to shamanistic rituals. The remote location of much of this art also tends to support the shamanistic theory. According the shamanistic world view, deep cave venues are not only visually and acoustically conducive to trance induction but they also serve as sensitive entry points to the spiritual underworld. Finally, the universality of shamanistic practices among traditional societies suggests deep evolutionary roots—possibly indicating humanity’s earliest form of religious expression. Given the evidence from Rhino Cave and the antiquity of some cave art (dating to the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic), it is likely that shamanism did not emerge among Homo sapiens in Europe, but instead was a practice they brought with them from Africa.

Postmortem Processing

Postmortem processing, such as careful defleshing of bones or secondary burial, represents effortful,

nonutilitarian mortuary behavior compared to simple abandonment or disposal of the dead. However, some postmortem processing can be purely practical in nature, such as nutritive cannibalism. Practicality, not ritual, appears to explain most instances of postmortem processing prior to the Upper Paleolithic, including those documented at Gran Dolina for H. antecessor (Carbonell et al., 2010; Fernandez-Jalvo, Diez, Caceres, & Rosell, 1999), El Sidron and Moula Guercy for Neanderthals (Defleur, White, Valensi, Slimak, & CregutBonnoure, 1999; Lalueza-Fox et al., 2011), and Klasies River for Homo sapiens (Deacon, 2001). Only two instances from the Middle Paleolithic (250,000–40,000 ybp) vary from this pattern: (1) the defleshed skulls from Herto, Ethiopia, associated with Homo sapiens, and (2) the postmortem processing from Krapina associated with Neanderthals.

Herto Skulls

Dated to about 160,000 ybp, the three skulls from Herto, Ethiopia, represent some of the oldest Homo sapiens fossils (T. White et al., 2003). All three skulls have cut marks indicative of defleshing (Clark et al., 2003). Two of the skulls also show evidence of scraping or polishing, indicative of extensive hand­ ling or carrying (possibly in a natural fabric bag). Thus, the skulls were deliberately defleshed (whether the flesh was consumed or not is unclear) and then either handled or carried for some time after, possibly as part of ritual activity.

Krapina

The remains of over 40 Neanderthals, dated to around 130,000 ybp, were found at Krapina, Croatia. Some of the remains have cut marks indicative of secondary postmortem processing (Russell, 1987; Trinkaus, 1985). This conclusion was further supported in a later analysis of a single skull (Krapina #3; Frayer, Orschiedt, Cook, Russell, & Radov, 2006). Frayer and colleagues found that the 35 mostly parallel cut marks on this cranium were inconsistent with defleshing, cannibalism, scalping, or other known postmortem behavior. Instead, they interpreted the marks as funerary ritual behavior. The person performing the ritual would have placed the skull in his or her lap (most likely) and ­deliberately incised the cuts in a series of strokes going either front-to-back, vice-versa, or both. The most notable instance of what appears to be  ritual postmortem processing in the Upper

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Paleolithic is at Gough’s Cave in England. Homo sapiens remains found at Gough’s Cave (roughly 12,000 ybp) show the classic evidence of cannibalism; that is, butchery cut marks similar to those used on prey animals (Andrews & FernandezJalvo, 2003). However, instead of being smashed and broken in a manner typically associated with cannibalism, a few skulls were intentionally preserved and meticulously fashioned into bowl-like shapes (Bello, Parfitt, & Stringer, 2011). Care and effort were required to preserve and carefully modify the Gough’s Cave skulls, suggesting that they might have been seen as trophies or objects of veneration.

Burials

Intentional burial with evidence of ritual activity such as grave goods and decorated bodies would also qualify as costly, nonutilitarian behavior. Presently, the earliest claim of intentional burial is that of Sima de los Huesos or the “pit of bones” in the Atapuerca Mountains in north-central Spain, dated to 400,000 ybp. At the bottom of the pit, the remains of 30 or more individuals have been found, identified as Homo heidelbergensis but with many pre-Neanderthal characteristics (Arsuaga et al., 1997; Bischoff et al., 2007). Some have argued that the bodies were intentionally interred (Carbonell & Mosquera, 2006). However, there is evidence indicating that natural processes such as felid carnivory combined with mud flows into the pit are more likely explanations for the accumulation of bones (Andrews & Fernandez Jalvo, 1997; Fernandez Jalvo & Andrews, 2003). During the Middle Paleolithic, both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sometimes buried their dead (although the reality of Neanderthal burial has been questioned; see Gargett, 1989, 1999). Very little difference in how the species handled their dead is evident. Both species often put bodies in small pits and (apparently) placed simple, readily available grave goods (lithics, bones, and rocks) with the bodies (see Riel-Salvatore & Clark, 2001, for review). Considerable discussion has taken place regarding the degree of intention behind these burials (Pettitt, 2002). By contrast, however, Upper Paleolithic burials associated with Homo sapiens leave little doubt concerning ritual intent. At sites such as Sungir, Le Madeleine, Dolni Vestonice, Saint-Germain-laRiviere, or the famous “Red Lady” burial at Paviland, highly elaborate burials have been found. Bodies, often covered in red ochre and lavishly 92

adorned with bracelets, necklaces, and headbands containing tens to thousands of carefully manufactured beads and pendants, were interred with copious graves goods such as ceremonial tools, weapons, and animal bones. In some cases, hundreds to thousands of hours of labor were required to complete the burial (Dickson, 1992; Klima, 1988; Vanhaeren & d’Errico, 2001, 2005; R. White, 1993). In addition, at Cussac Cave in France, a rare deep cave burial has been found. Homo sapiens apparently lugged multiple bodies 200 meters deep into the cave (Aujoulat et al., 2002). Among traditional societies, such elaborate, effortful burials are typically associated with ancestor worship (Hayden, 2003, pp. 115–118, 132–133).

An Evolutionary Scenario

Combining archaeology and cognitive science, we can state a number of empirically grounded observations and from them outline a potential evolutionary scenario for the emergence of religion.

Step 1:  Moving Together

The earliest step toward religion was an elaboration of social rituals to include group-wide synchronous activities. This is based on the following observations. 1.  As primates, our hominin ancestors were highly social with a rich repertoire of ritualized behaviors for regulating social life. 2.  Synchrony is widespread in the animal world, and nonhuman primates show a limited capacity for synchronous movement. Committed bipedalism may contribute importantly to this ability. Hominins were fully terrestrial and bipedal by the time of Homo erectus (about 1.8 mybp). Thus, with the emergence of Homo erectus or shortly thereafter, hominins were singing, dancing, and chanting together. These rituals had important social bonding effects, but may not have had any clearly understood supernatural elements to them.

Step 2:  Intensifying the Ritual Experience

Four other observations point to a progressive intensification of synchronized ritual activity over time: 1.  Many important mental building blocks of religious cognition are present in rudimentary form in nonhuman primates, indicating that they also would have been present in our earliest hominin ancestors.

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2.  Increases in hominin brain size very likely led to the elaboration of these building blocks into a more human-like form beginning by about 500,000 ybp. 3.  By 300,000 ybp, hominins had control of fire. Campfires provided a compelling venue for social ritual activity and potentially enhanced the consciousness-altering effects of these activities. 4.  By 200,000 ybp, other ritually intensifying elements, such as the use of pigments to color bodies and artifacts, could be incorporated into group singing, dancing, and chanting. These four observations point to a progressive intensification of groupwide synchronous rituals beginning about 500,000 ybp. Fire and pigments would have contributed significantly to this intensification, heightening their social bonding and consciousnessaltering effects. Although rather singular and ambiguous, the Herto skulls and the postmortem processing at Krapina suggest that the supernatural was only obliquely and occasionally i­ncluded in these intensified rituals. More often, the collective ritual behavior of hominins from 500,000 to 70,000 ybp was highly spirited (though only vaguely spiritual) synchronous singing, dancing, and chanting around campfires, which resulted in strong social bonding effects, altered states of consciousness, and potential health and healing benefits (Rossano, 2006).

Step 3:  Adding the Supernatural

A further observation specifies approximately when the supernatural was added to group ritual activity. 1.  Ritual behavior appears likely at Rhino Cave in Africa, and the context of the cave is consistent with shamanism. It has been tentatively dated to around 70,000 ybp—a time of resource stress and increased intergroup interactions in Africa. This observation suggests that humanity’s oldest religious practice is shamanism, which arose in Africa at around 70,000 ybp. Shamanism may have been a response to increased intergroup interactions, both cooperative and competitive, arising from the resource stress brought on by deteriorating climatic conditions. Homo sapiens took shamanism with them from Africa to Europe.

Step 4:  Costly Rituals and the Neanderthal Challenge

As Homo sapiens faced the challenges of new territories and competitors (e.g., Neanderthals), their

s­hamanistic practices expanded and became more costly. This is supported by three observations. 1.  The earliest cave art, some with shamanistic themes, is solely attributable to Homo sapiens and dates to the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. 2.  Homo sapiens built larger, more frequent fires than Neanderthals, and in one case (Dolni Vestonice) a fire is associated with communal ceremony or festivity. 3.  Whereas Middle Paleolithic burials (both Homo sapiens and Neanderthal) are simple and largely devoid of convincing evidence of ritual or supernatural belief; in the Upper Paleolithic, only Homo sapiens’ burials become unambiguously elaborate, consistent with ancestor cults of traditional societies. These observations suggest that as Homo sapiens moved into Europe and encountered Neanderthals, the scale and intensity of some of their collective rituals reached a unique, unprecedented level. The powerful emotional bonding effects of these rituals may have given Homo sapiens a social advantage over Neanderthals in the form of larger, more or­gan­ized, and cooperative communities. Shamanism and ancestor cults were two religious elements contributing to the Homo sapiens’ social advantage. Admittedly, there is considerable and unavoidable speculation in this proposed scenario. However, there is also specificity to it that can lend itself to potentially testable hypotheses. For example, this model predicts that rituals become more costly and overtly religious where resource instability is high, intragroup cohesion is stressed, and intergroup interactions (both cooperative and competitive) are more frequent. Additionally, while group-synchronized rituals without religious elements should be fairly common, religious group rituals without synchronized movements should be quite rare.

Conclusion: Why Supernaturalize?

Religion is both belief and behavior, neither of which can be easily discerned in the remains of our long-extinct ancestors. Belief, however, has cognitive and neurological underpinnings, some of which may be simpler and more ancient, others more recent and derived. Likewise, behavior can leave archeological traces, whose chronology can be reconstructed. Elucidating religion’s prehistory therefore need not be mere fanciful storytelling. Relevant

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e­vidence can provide guiding parameters. This chapter has been an attempt to both identify relevant evidence from across a range of interconnected disciplines and piece together the guiding parameters emergent from that evidence. Undoubtedly, this review has neglected important pieces of the puzzle that could dramatically reshape the proposed evolutionary scenario. Even so, some important lessons can be drawn from what we presently know. First, despite its singularity, there is nothing to indicate that religion’s emergence is an awkwardly surprising event that ought to trouble the evolutionist. Its cognitive foundations are shared with other species, some quite widely, and its behavioral hallmark, ritual, has deep evolutionary roots. As with other apparent human oddities, such as language and music, the vexing question about religion is not from where its constituent elements arose, but how and why they were knitted together as they were. Second, debates over religion’s adaptiveness need to consider the level at which this function is thought to operate. For the individual, specific religious behaviors may not be adaptive. Venturing into a deep cave to contact spiritual forces could have been fatal 20,000 years ago, just as handling snakes can be today. But if personally risky actions and their associated beliefs create more cooperative, well-functioning groups, then the detrimental effects on the few may be offset by the benefits accrued to the many over time, especially under conditions of intergroup competition. Third, just as there is no compelling evidence for religion in any nonhuman species, there is little evidence of religion in any of our hominin ancestors or cousins either. Indeed, a recent review has concluded that only Homo sapiens engaged in the costly ritual activity characteristic of religion, and this activity became especially acute in the Upper Paleolithic as they encountered Neanderthals (Rossano, 2015). This may have both theoretical and predictive significance. Theoretically, it suggests that adding supernatural belief to ritual behavior is catalyzed by intergroup interactions, especially competitive interactions. If so, we would expect to see archeological evidence of religion as Homo sapiens moved into territories where other hominins were present (such as in Europe), but far less evidence (at least on initial arrival) in unoccupied territory such as the Americas. Finally, religion as it exists today is only minimally useful in understanding its evolutionary past. Institutionally regulated, theologically sophisticated global religions are recent developments that only 94

vaguely reflect the beliefs and practices that we would expect to find in our ancestors. Instead, the animistic, shamanistic, and ancestor worship practices prevalent among traditional societies provide a far better model. Importantly, these practices (unlike those of global religions) are seamlessly integrated into the social lives of their adherents. For traditional hunter-gatherers (and similarly, our hominin ancestors), religion is not practiced—it is simply lived on a daily basis. Thus, the relevant evolutionary question is not when (and why) did our ancestor become religious? It is when (and why) did their lives become “supernaturalized”? More specifically then, the evolutionary model being proposed claims that religion emerged when the supernatural was grafted onto already existing social rituals. Why add the supernatural? The answer is that it made rituals better. Ritualized behaviors have important trust-building, social bonding, health, and healing effects. Empirical studies have consistently found that all these effects are enhanced when the supernatural is incorporated into the ritual activities (for review/discussion, see Rossano, 2009, 2010, pp. 151–173). In an evolutionary context of increasing intergroup interactions and competition, groups whose ritual lives included the supernatural would have been more internally cooperative and well organized compared with more “secular” groups. Furthermore, most individuals within those supernaturalized groups would have enjoyed better health and reproductive success compared with most individuals in more “secular” groups. Religion emerged as a human universal for the simple reason that groups with supernaturalized social rituals outcompeted groups that lacked such rituals over the course of hominin evolution. For adaptive purposes, whether the gods are actually up there or not is secondary to believing they are up there.

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Mat t J. R ossano, Benjamin Van d ewalle

7

CH A PTE R

Adolescence and Religion An Evolutionary Perspective

Candace S. Alcorta

Abstract Throughout the world adolescence is deemed the appropriate life stage to “learn religion.” Nearly three-quarters of societies conduct adolescent rites of passage transmitting sacred rituals and beliefs. Neurophysiological changes that occur during adolescence render this an “experience-expectant” period for the transmission of religious schema and values. Brain regions critical to emotional, social, and symbolic processing mature, creating a plastic neural substrate for imbuing social and symbolic schema with emotional meaning and reward value. Religion in general, and adolescent rites of passage in particular, are optimally adapted for this task. Music-based ritual and emotionally evocative elements of religion optimize reinforcement learning. The costly and autonomically arousing ordeals of many rites ensure fear conditioning. Such learning shapes maturing neural networks, impacting choices and behaviors. Evolutionary anthropologists view religion as a costly signal of group commitment. Adolescent rites of passage are a powerful proximate mechanism for creating and maintaining cooperative, cohesive groups. Key Words: adolescence, religion, rite of passage, brain plasticity, experience, expectant, costly, signal

Introduction

The rise of religiously inspired global terrorism has been a hallmark of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Images of flag-waving jihadis rolling across vast swaths of desert have become dominant themes in the public media. These images are menacing, as they are meant to be. Yet, beneath many of the black balaclava that shroud the heads of these terrorists are the smooth countenances of young boys and the barely stubbled faces of teens. They are recent converts to a violently fundamentalist brand of Islam that conducts training lessons in beheading and promises, “Those who behead the infidels will receive gifts from God” (Abi-Habib, 2014, p. 1). Many of these young recruits are the orphaned children of those killed by the terrorists. Traumatized by the attack itself and the slaying of their families, these youth face a stark choice between conversion to the terrorist cause or death. Some recruits are

simply kidnapped; others are “sold” by impoverished and destitute families; still others voluntarily join the terrorists as local economies are shattered, secular schools are shuttered, and villages and their resources are seized. Once recruited, these youth are taken to camps where they undergo indoctrination. Reports from those who have escaped paint a grim picture. Recruits are first desensitized by watching videos of beheadings. The humiliation, torture, and beheading of captured combatants follows. Severed heads are passed around the group to further dehumanize the enemy, and decapitated bodies are publicly displayed. The young recruits are encouraged to revile and defile them. Boys learn decapitation techniques. Those who resist are tortured; those who try to escape are shot. The program is brutal and barbaric; it is also effective in desensitizing recruits, dehumanizing the enemy, and indoctrinating and training 99

young terrorists able and willing to kill, even if such killing requires them to sacrifice their own lives. These terrorists are not the first to fight in the name of religion. Numerous groups throughout human history have used religion to justify violence, warfare, and brutality (Juergensmeyer, 2003). Nor are they the first to exploit the relationship between adolescence, violence, and religion. That relationship has broad and deep roots (Alcorta & Sosis, 2013). Unraveling that relationship requires that we first understand it.

Adolescence

Any parent of an adolescent can tell you that this developmental period is a time of change. The most obvious changes are physical, as the onset of puberty initiates a cascade of hormones that accelerate growth, induce development of secondary sexual characteristics, and begin reproductive maturation. Yet, puberty itself is initiated by neuroendocrine “triggers” in the developing adolescent brain (Plant & Shahab, 2002). Adolescence has been described as a period “prone to erratic . . . and emotionally influenced behavior” (Dahl, 2004, p. 3). Adolescents are more impulsive and react with greater emotional intensity than either children or adults (Steinberg, 2007). They perceive events as relatively more stressful than individuals at other life stages, and show increased interest in and sensitivity to peers and social cues (Brenhouse & Andersen, 2011). During adolescence, both risk taking and novelty seeking increase, particularly among males (Dahl, 2004). Enhanced sensitivity to alcohol and drug abuse increases the risk of addiction, as well. Underlying these changes is a shift in the brain’s dopaminergic system that increases adolescent vulnerability to environmental stressors and puts them at greater risk for various mental disorders. All of these characteristics are more pronounced in males than females (Brenhouse & Andersen, 2011). These factors contribute to increased mortality rates, “with homicides, suicides, and accidents collectively accounting for more than 85% of all adolescent deaths” (Spear, 2000, p. 421). As brain development proceeds through adolescence, these risks gradually diminish.

Adaptive Functions

Many of the behavioral changes that mark adolescence, such as risk taking and novelty seeking, propel the individual away from the natal kin group and into the broader sphere of non-kin social and 100

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sexual interactions. This introduces new social roles and behaviors that differ both between sexes and across cultures. The interindividual play behaviors of childhood decline, and participation in coordinated and competitive group activities (e.g., dance, work, sports) increases. Coalitions, courtship, and competition become increasingly important (Alcorta, 2006). As adolescents move from predictable, kin-centered roles and relationships to the uncharted world of potential mates, collaborators, and competitors, they are faced with ongoing social judgments and numerous choices. Learning how to control impulses and emotions, determining who can be trusted and who cannot, identifying risks worth taking and when to take them, deciding when to subordinate immediate self-interest to the long-term interests of the group, and determining the best mating and fitness strategies within a particular socioecological environment are all behaviors that directly impact social and sexual success (Alcorta, 2009). It is “a period of life in which the sense of self changes profoundly” (Sebastian, Burnett, & Blakemore, 2008, p. 441). Some theorists have proposed that the noveltyseeking, risk-taking behaviors of adolescent males constitute adaptations for reproductive success in a competitive reproductive environment (Steinberg, 2008). The same novelty seeking that entices males to venture away from the natal group and seek a wider pool of mates also serves as the impetus for other evolutionarily important behaviors. Adolescent impulsivity, novelty seeking, and risk taking are the source of much human exploration and innovation. The exploitation of new resources, the exploration of new habitats, and breakthroughs in technology are all likely benefits that derive from these adolescent traits. The founders of Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook were all 20 years old at the time of start-up. These same behavioral attributes may temperamentally predispose adolescent males to participate in such high-risk endeavors as intergroup aggression and group defense. As in nonhuman primates, adolescent males in human societies constitute both the peripheral “fringe” and front guard of the social group. Adolescents and young adults make up the ranks of warriors and foot soldiers across human societies. Alexander the Great was 20 years old when he assumed leadership of the Macedonian army. The sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer (2003) notes that the vast majority of recruits to extremist religious organizations are predominantly young,

­ nmarried males who perceive themselves as maru ginalized by the dominant culture. From a physical standpoint, adolescent and young adult males are the fittest members of the group; from a reproductive standpoint, they are the most expendable. Their greater propensity for novelty-seeking and risk-taking behaviors predisposes them to assume this role, while their social powerlessness relative to older group males may compel them to do so (Thayer, 2008). Adolescence is not confined to humans alone. It is an important developmental period across mammalian species and is impacted by genetic, nutritional, and environmental factors. What differs about human adolescence is its relative length. In nonhuman primates, adolescence extends between 2 and 4 years; human adolescence continues over nearly a decade. This is followed by a “young adult” period of maturation before adulthood is reached (Brenhouse & Andersen, 2011). Such a prolonged period of maturation is costly. Identifying benefits that offset these costs begins with the adolescent brain.

The Human Brain

The behavioral changes that occur during adolescence result from ongoing neurophysiological changes in the adolescent brain. The biologist Linda Spear describes human adolescence as “second only to the neonatal period in terms of both rapid biopsychosocial growth as well as changing environmental characteristics and demands” (Spear, 2000, p. 428). Brain maturation during adolescence is extensive, involving emotional, social, and executive functions. The relatively slow and late maturation of these functions in humans is unique among primate species. The human brain is proportionally larger in comparison to body size than that of all other primates, and it is also the least developed at birth. Chimpanzees, with whom we share nearly 99% of our DNA, are born with brains approximately 40% of their final size at maturation. In contrast, humans develop 75%–80% of their total brain volume after birth. This development takes much longer in humans than it does in chimps. By the second year of life, only about 50% of human brain development is complete. The human brain does not reach its maximum size until adolescence. Thereafter, our brains are actually reduced slightly in size through the processes of myelination and “pruning” (Kolb, Forgie, Gibb, Gorny, & Rontree, 1998).

Neurons, Synapses, and Neural Networks

The average human brain is made up of approximately 100 billion neurons. Each of these neurons is interconnected with approximately 10,000 other neurons. When a stimulus activates a neuron, the neuron “fires,” sending an electrochemical signal that is transmitted to adjacent neurons across a small gap called the synapse. Repeated firing of adjacent neurons creates and strengthens the synapses between neurons, creating an associational network that is reactivated when the initial stimulus is again experienced. Synapses that fail to fire or fire only infrequently are eliminated, or “pruned” away, and their energy resources are reallocated to more active networks. These processes of “synaptogenesis” and “pruning” sculpt the genetically determined neural configuration with which we enter the world. As a result, “while genes provide the blueprint to construct the brain, experience sculpts the brain to match the needs of the environment” (Brenhouse & Andersen, 2011, p. 1698). The shaping of neural networks through experiential learning is not simply facilitated by experience; it depends on it. If stimuli do not initiate synaptic firing, the unused synapses are eliminated, or “pruned.” Laboratory experiments show that covering the eyes of newborn kittens in the first few weeks of life functionally blinds them. Without the visual stimuli needed to initiate synaptic firing in the maturing visual cortex, the excitatory neuronal pathways originally allocated to vision are reshaped through pruning to fulfill other sensory functions (Lynch, Larson, Muller, & Granger, 1990). Once neuronal networks have been shaped through synaptogenesis and subsequent pruning, myelin sheaths encase them, speeding up impulse transmission and creating the “white matter” of the brain. This process of growth, synaptogenesis, pruning, and myelination speeds up information flow in the human brain.

Patterns of Brain Development

Our brains do not grow and develop uniformly. Different brain regions mature at different times, with each successive region of maturation building on and integrating functional neural networks previously developed. Since different functional networks undergo maturation and pruning at different times, inputs experienced during infancy, childhood, and adolescence differentially impact the brain. As a result of this heterochronic growth pattern, neural changes that occur at earlier stages of Adolescence and Religion

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development impact later stages. Simultaneously, stimuli and experiences that activate brain functions during periods of maturation will have greater longterm impacts on the associational networks of these functions than inputs experienced either before or after this period of maximal neural plasticity (Kolb et al., 1998). During infancy, brain regions involved in sensory, motor, appetitive, and emotional processing undergo significant growth and development as the newborn learns to assess the environment, control movement, obtain sustenance, and bond with caregivers. This development lays the foundation for subsequent childhood learning that integrates these functions into more complex skills, including such things as interindividual play and language.

Adolescent Brain Development

Numerous brain changes occur during adolescence. Neural structures involved in emotional processing and memory peak in activity and regions responsible for our social, symbolic, and executive functions undergo maturation (Blakemore, 2008). This is accompanied by a shift in the brain’s dopaminergic reward system. These changes create a plastic neural substrate for experience expectant learning (Greenough 1986).

The Limbic System and Emotions

Many of the behaviors and vulnerabilities that mark adolescence derive from changes in the limbic structures of the brain. These structures, including the amygdala and hippocampus, are involved in both memory and the processing of emotional stimuli. Both of these structures reach peak volumes during adolescence, with male volume increases exceeding those of females (Spear, 2000). Whereas the hippocampus is central to the formation and consolidation of our explicit—or conscious—memories, the amygdala encodes and consolidates our implicit, emotional memories. The amygdala is involved in evaluating and processing both positive and negative emotions, assigning “weights” to stimuli (Phelps, 2004), but is particularly important in the appraisal of negative emotions and fear conditioning (LeDoux, 1996). Fear conditioning has been central to our survival as a species; as a result, our evolved negativity bias (Vaish, Grossmann, & Woodward, 2008) makes fear conditioning a particularly powerful motivator of behavior. The amygdala also plays a role in the conscious and unconscious processing of facial signals and 102

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judgments of trustworthiness (Adolphs, 2002). This is pronounced during early to mid-adolescence. Adolescents exhibit “greater brain activity in the amygdala than in the frontal lobe when engaged in a task requiring the subjects to identify emotional state from facial expressions, while adults conversely exhibited greater activation in frontal lobe than amygdala when engaged in the same task” (Spear, 2000, p. 440). The amygdala has direct interconnections with numerous brain structures, including the hypothalamus, responsible for regulating the body’s autonomic functions such as temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration. The amygdalahypothalamic connection creates a powerful two-way link between emotional appraisal and autonomic response. The amgydala also directly interconnects with the brain’s “pleasure center,” the nucleus accumbens, part of the ventral striatum. This brain region also undergoes maturation during adolescence and “has been posited to play a primary role in observed increases in adolescent sensation-seeking” (Larsen & Luna, 2015, p. 74). Release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the ventral striatum makes us feel good and motivates us to continue to engage in the behaviors that initiated its release. This “reward” response has evolved to ensure that we value and seek out things important for our survival. Some things, such as food, sex, and music, have intrinsic reward value and automatically elicit dopamine release. Cocaine and other drugs of abuse also activate such release, giving rise to the neurophysiology of addiction (Daw, 2007).

Prefrontal and Temporal Cortices

During adolescence, the temporal and prefrontal cortices of the brain peak in volume and subsequently shrink. In early to mid-adolescence, the temporal cortex reaches its maximum volume (Paus, 2005). This region’s primary function is the processing of social stimuli, including facial and gestural recognition, mental-state attribution, and music and language processing. The increased importance of social stimuli during adolescence reflects heightened temporal lobe activity. During mid-adolescence, the prefrontal cortex also attains its greatest volume. This region is the brain’s “executive center” and is critical for impulse inhibition, self-regulation, social judgment, personal decision-making, and our sense of self. It is also the locus of human abstract and symbolic

thought (Dumontheil, 2014). The prefrontal cortex is the preeminent association area of the brain, sending output and receiving input from all other brain regions (Robbins, 2000). Direct connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala ensure that emotional valuations are integrated into our social judgments and personal decisions. When this interconnection is disrupted, as it is in patients with “disconnect syndrome,” humans perform well on abstract reasoning tasks but are incapable of applying this reasoning to personal decision-making (Damasio, 1994). The temporal and prefrontal cortices also have direct interconnections with the insula, an ancient brain structure that plays many different roles. The insula functions in pain perception and taste and is involved in “combining sensory awareness with higher cognition” (Dennis et al., 2014). Interconnections between the insula and the temporal cortex peak during adolescence.

Dopaminergic Reward System

Although much human learning occurs through emotionally conditioned responses, we also learn through reward reinforcement. Neutral stimuli that do not have inherent incentive value can acquire value through association with stimuli that do. Brain-imaging studies of cocaine addicts show that, over time, previously neutral stimuli such as places and paraphernalia associated with cocaine use stimulate dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens, even in the absence of the cocaine itself (Daw, 2007). When neutral stimuli are repeatedly paired with stimuli that have innate reward value, the neutral stimuli is eventually able to initiate dopamine release in the absence of the inherently rewarding stimulus. As a result of this process of reinforcement learning, neutral stimuli can acquire reward value and motivate us to seek out specific experiences and engage in particular behaviors (Dehaene & Changeux, 2000). Fear conditioning and incentive learning drive our behavior and personal decisionmaking (Bechara, Damasio, & Damasio, 2000). Both are largely subconscious processes, but they play a critical role in weighting our behaviors and choices (Coricelli, Dolan, & Sirigu, 2007; Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes, 2008). The emotion- and reward-processing centers of our brains exert greater control over our decisions and behaviors during early and mid-adolescence as a result of relative differences in dopaminergic activity between these regions and frontal areas of the

brain. Social stimuli further influence such responses (Steinberg, 2008). Increased adolescent vulnerability to addictive substances and behaviors, the greater anhedonia of adolescents, and an increase in appetitive behaviors including food, sex, and music have been attributed to this difference (Spear, 2000; Steinberg, 2008). From mid to late adolescence, the ongoing maturation of the prefrontal cortex results in a “shift” in dominance of the dopaminergic system, with the prefrontal cortex assuming increased control over both emotion regulation and impulse inhibition (Spear, 2000).

The Experience-Expectant Adolescent Brain

The maturational changes that occur in the human brain during adolescence make this developmental stage an “experience-expectant” (Greenough, 1986) period for creating emotionally valenced associational networks among emotional, social, and executive functions. Heightened activity in emotionand reward-processing structures of the brain, and the dopaminergic “shift” in functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and ventral striatum optimize conditions for conditional and reinforcement learning. Simultaneously, the neural plasticity of the maturing temporal and prefrontal cortices facilitates the sculpting and strengthening of new associational networks linking social and executive functions.

Social Communication: From Signals to the Sacred

Learning the social skills required for group living is one of the greatest challenges humans face. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar has persuasively argued that it is precisely such social challenges that have driven increases in relative brain size in primates (Dunbar, 1996). Social challenges are particularly daunting during adolescence, as conspecific interactions increasingly shift from the shared interests of the natal kin group to those of non-kin collaborators, mates, and competitors. The neural, physiological, and behavioral changes that occur during adolescence prepare the individual to take on these new social and reproductive roles, but many of the social behaviors that optimize individual fitness must be learned. In contrast to learning how to hunt a gazelle, build a house, or solve a math problem, learning how to effectively judge, communicate, and interact with conspecifics is fraught with difficulties. Accurate Adolescence and Religion

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transmittal of a message from sender to receiver is complex and susceptible to both distortion and deception. As the genetic distance between communicators widens and the congruence of self-interest narrows, these problems increase and the potential for cheating and deceit escalate. Fitness costs of trial-and-error learning can be great: Misjudging collaborators results in lost time and resources; misjudging mates impacts reproductive success; and misjudging competitors can be lethal.

Signals as Social Communication

Signals have evolved as one solution to the social communication problem. The scent marking of dogs and the human smile are both signals that convey information about the state, condition, or intent of the sender. These signals communicate social information, but are relatively “closed” systems with limited scope and flexibility. They are also subject to mimicry and deception. Viceroy butterflies fool potential predators through their mimicry of the unappetizing Monarch, and females of the predatory firefly genus Photuris mimic the mating flashes of the related genus Photinus in order to lure males close enough to attack and consume them. Humans bluff, cheat, and lie in cards, war, and love.

Quality Signals

The evolution of “quality signals” that provide reliable information about the general condition of the sender is one solution to the deception problem. In birds, the intensity of plumage color is negatively correlated with parasite load—the brighter the plumage, the healthier the bird. The color brilliance of males is a quality signal, and females seek out males with the most brilliant plumage. In humans, facial symmetry, positively correlated with health, is a quality signal. Males and females worldwide find symmetrical faces more attractive (Scheib, Gangestad, & Thornhill, 1999). Quality signals that incorporate both genetic and learned components have also evolved. Such signals provide more flexibility to meet changing ecological demands. Male passerine birds are genetically “primed” to learn their particular species’ song but must be exposed to it during a specific developmental window to do so. Human music and language are similar ontogenetic traits. Although we are all born with the capacity to learn song and language, socialization during specific developmental periods is required to do so. Like birdsong and the songs of humpback whales, human song and language convey 104

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information regarding the condition and intent of the individual sender, but they also convey information regarding the social group. Quality signals benefit receivers by providing more reliable information, but they incur significant costs for the sender. Male peacocks with the longest, brightest tails and male songbirds with the largest repertoires not only expend more energy on the development and maintenance of these traits but also attract more predators than less showy individuals. The biologist Amotz Zahavi (1997) has proposed that high-cost signals such as these are adapt­ ive for signalers precisely because they “handicap” the sender. Since only the fittest peacocks and songbirds are able to successfully produce and maintain the longest, showiest tails and the largest and most captivating song repertoires, it would be impossible for lesser competitors to “fake” these signals.

Ritual

Ritual is the costliest of signals. Nonhuman ritual calls attention to such evolved quality signals as the peacock’s tail by displaying these elements within an intricate and highly stereotyped sequence of behaviors. Such displays incur significant costs in time, energy, and resources and expose signalers to great risks and potential predation. Yet, when the stakes are particularly high, as in competition and mating, the structure of ritual optimizes honest, reliable communication.

The Structure of Ritual

Ethologists have defined ritual as “behavior that is formally organized into repeatable patterns” (Smith, 1979, p. 51). Laboratory experiments show that the basic elements of ritual optimize effective communication (Rowe, 1999). The first step in all effective communication is alerting and engaging the attention of the receiver. Ritual achieves this through the element of formality. Formality frequently involves the exaggeration of ordinary traits and behaviors to make them appear “extraordinary.” The “eyes” of a peacock’s long, iridescent tail prominently displayed during his ritual dance, the changing body colors of male squid as they gently jet water over a potential mate, and the ornate garments worn by human brides all represent formal elements of ritual that engage and focus the attention of ritual participants. These signals not only capture the attention of the receiver but also elicit neurophysiological responses. Ritual’s creation of the “extraordinary” through the exaggeration and elaboration of encoded traits and

signals activates the alerting systems of the brain, including the basal ganglia, the amygdala, and the reticular formation. This focuses and directs attention, primes emotions, and prepares the body to react (Alcorta & Sosis, 2005). Once the receiver’s attention is focused, the sequence, pattern, and repetition of ritual optimize processing time for memory and learning. Repetition of a stimulus alters molecular chemistry at the cellular level, inducing both dendritic growth and synaptogenesis. Sequenced repetition allows for focus time and processing time, permitting the brain to recycle CREB, a protein crucial to longterm memory function. (Lynch et al., 1990). Ritual also impacts neuroendocrine function. Levels of neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, and hormones of both the sender and the receiver fluctuate during ritual, resulting in changes in the physiological, immunological, and behavioral responses of ritual participants. The release of noradrenaline in response to the formal elements of ritual, increases in dopamine resulting from ritual performance, and the recycling of CREB all impact affective state and learning. The biologist Russell Fernald’s studies of cichlid fish (Haplochromis burtoni) from Lake Tanganyika in Africa dramatically illustrate ritual’s ability to impact physiology (Fernald & Maruska, 2012). Agonistic displays between cichlid males induce major changes in the hormones, external appearance, brain neuron sizes, and even the gene expression of winners and losers. Aggressive and brilliantly colored black, yellow, blue, and red males almost instantly morph into much less aggressive drab brown “satellite” fish when ousted from their territories by rivals. If the “satellite” later acquires a new territory, his color, hormones, hypothalamic neuron sizes, and gene expression again change. Similar neuroendocrine changes in both senders and receivers have been documented across numerous species. The ritualized vocalizations of songbirds vary with seasonally fluctuating hormone levels and impact female oxytocin levels and sexual receptivity (Ball, 1999). In nonhuman primates, ritualized dominance and submission behaviors alter participants’ cortisol, dopamine, and testosterone levels (Sapolsky, 1999). The elaboration of simple signals into complex ritualized displays is costly, but these displays allow signalers and receivers to reliably and effectively communicate important social information within a relatively “safe” context. Ritual creates frameworks

of prediction and expectancy (Smith, 1979). It “provides individuals with some predictive grasp of their circumstances and thus enables them to make choices about their subsequent behavior” (Smith, 1979, p. 52). The greeting rituals of bonobos, the mating dance of sand hill cranes, and the classroom procedures of human college students all serve these functions.

Human Ritual

Human ritual is among the most elaborate and diverse across animal species. Cross-culturally it includes both secular and religious rituals, and exhibits a continuum of costliness.

Signals and Secular Ritual

Humans, like all other animals, are born with a repertoire of innate emotional responses to various classes of stimuli essential to survival. Human babies instinctively respond to smiles and frowns. Like our cousins, the bonobos and chimpanzees, humans eve­ry­where use hugs, kisses, and facial expressions to identify and convey basic emotional states. As one of the most social species on the planet, humans spend much of their lives interacting with others. Human societies include kin, but they also include fictive kin, acquaintances, strangers, and sometimes even foes. The size, variability, and complexity of human social groups contribute to our cultural and technological success. It is not surprising that ritual plays an important role in human lives. Secular rituals structure our lives and organize our societies. Their adaptive function is apparent and their benefits are clear. That is not so with the costliest of human rituals.

Religious Ritual

Of all the rituals humans perform, religious rituals are the most elaborate and costly. They are also the most puzzling. They entail beliefs that are counterintuitive and rites that are seemingly nonfunctional. They require the investment of time and resources, and may also entail suffering, sacrifice, and pain. To outsiders, religious beliefs and rituals often appear bizarre and fantastic. Talking totems, feasting ghosts, and omnipresent gods all defy logic and violate natural categories. Fasting, self-flagellation, and circumcision require self-sacrifice and inflict pain. Religious rituals may, and sometimes do, result in death (Turner, 1967). Yet for adherents, religious beliefs and the strange rituals that surround them are not only credible but also inviolate. At the heart Adolescence and Religion

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of these rituals and beliefs is the concept of the sacred. Understanding religion begins with understanding the sacred.

the ancient Greeks; today they are tourist sites. Sacred things must be created. Religious ritual is the means by which this occurs.

What Is the Sacred?

Adolescent Rites of Passage

Sacred symbols have been described as “the small stimuli that elicit a large response” (Wallace, 1966, p. 236). The sacred is set apart and forbidden (Durkheim, 1969/1915), enduring and powerful (Eliade, 1959), unquestionable and unfalsifiable (Rappaport, 1999). Sacred things stir our deepest emotions and elicit feelings of joy, terror, and awe.

Sacred Things Are Emotionally Charged

The deep emotional significance of the sacred is its central attribute. Sacred things—whether places, artifacts, or symbols—evoke intense emotions. They stir our souls and touch our hearts. The Christian cross, the Islamic Quran, and the Wailing Wall of Judaism all elicit deep emotional responses in adherents. Desecration of these sacred things is dangerous and brings strong, spontaneous responses from adherents. It is not just inappropriate to treat sacred things profanely; it is morally, and even viscerally repugnant.

Sacred Things Are Social Constructions

Sacred things not only elicit a deep emotional response in single individuals but also evoke these same emotions in others. Temporal lobe epileptics often experience intense emotion in response to various stimuli, but in the absence of a communal response, such experiences are deemed symptoms rather than sacred. It is through shared emotional response across congregations of adherents that the sacred is invested with its power and meaning. “Liturgical orders, even those performed in solitude, are public orders and participation in them constitutes an acceptance of a public order regardless of the private state of belief of the performer” (Rappaport, 1999, p. 121).

Sacred Things Are Cultural Constructions

Sacred things do not exist in nature waiting to be discovered. They must be created. The Christian Bible has no emotional or motivational significance for non-Christians, nor do the ancestral ghosts of the African Ndembu have sacred meaning for Christians. Even sacred places only attain their sanctity in relation to a particular sociocultural system. Delphi and the Parthenon were both held sacred by 106

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Religion is a universal human trait, and ritual is its behavioral manifestation. Of all religious rituals, adolescent rites of passage are the most ubiquitous and costly. These rites occur in approximately 70% of societies throughout the world (Lutkehaus & Roscoe 1995) and vary considerably from culture to culture. In some societies they involve single individuals, as in Judaism’s bar/bat mitzvahs. In other societies they encompass age-graded groups of adolescents, as in the male initiation rites of the New Guinea Ilahita. In still other cultures, these rites involve mixed-gender age-graded groups of adolescents, as in contemporary Christian confirmation programs (Lutkehaus & Roscoe, 1995; Paige & Paige, 1981). Some adolescent rites of passage are relatively brief; others last months or even years. Rites of the traditional Yamana and Halakwulup of Tierra del Fuego consisted primarily of the oral transmission of sacred knowledge from elder to youth (Eliade, 1994/1958). The Mukanda rite of the African Ndembu included kidnapping, seclusion, dietary and sleep deprivation, and prolonged psychological and physical torture, including scarification and genital mutilation (Turner, 1967). All adolescent rites of passage begin with a separation phase, include a transformative—or “liminal”—phase, and conclude with the reintegration of the initiate back into the social group (Turner, 1969). Universally, these rites also include what the anthropologist Maurice Bloch has called “the distinguishing marks of ritual” (Bloch, 1989, p. 21).

Chanting, Music, and Dance: The Distinguishing Marks of Ritual The heart of man has been so constituted by the Almighty that, like a flint, it contains a hidden fire which is evoked by music and harmony, and renders man beside himself with ecstasy. These harmonies are echoes of that highest world of beauty which we call the world of spirits, they remind man of his relationship to that world, and produce in him an emotion so deep and strange that he himself is powerless to explain it. —Becker (2001, p. 145)

Chanting, music, and dance are important elements of adolescent rites of passage throughout the world.

From the shamanic religions of the Siberian Chukchi, to elaborate Balinese bebuten trance rituals, to contemporary Pentecostalists in Africa, Asia, and the United States, these rhythmic drivers are a central feature of religious ritual. A survey of US congregations found music to be the single most consistent feature of contemporary US religious services (Chaves, Konieczny, Beyerlein, & Barman, 1999). Even the most fundamentalist sects retain music as an important part of communal ritual (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004), and terrorist jihadis instruct young initiates to sing their songs (AbiHabib, 2014). In many traditional societies, music is not only central to sacred ritual but also inseparable from it. The Igbo of Nigeria have but one word—“nkwa”—to describe both music and the sacred (Becker, 2001). Music is intimately interconnected with a sense of the sacred, the numinous, and the divine. Music not only represents the sacred but also calls it forth and embodies it. The ability of music to invest the profane with sacred significance by eliciting feelings of joy, fear, and awe lies at the heart of its role in all religions. When combined with communal ritual the intense emotions stirred by music become powerful motivational forces (Alcorta, 2008). Musical forms differ widely from culture to culture and even across subcultures within a society. Yet within each culture, the specific sounds and shared meanings of music are capable of eliciting strong emotions in listeners. “Music perception potentially affects emotion, influences the autonomic nervous system, the hormonal and immune systems, and activates (pre)motor representations” (Koelsch & Siebel, 2005, p. 578). Music’s alteration of affective states also impacts social judgment and cognitive processing style (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007). Decoding the culturally prescribed “meaning” of music entails the learning of emotional, autonomic, and cognitive associations, as well as the encoding of motor and sensory stimuli (Cross, 2003). Since the neural structures underlying these various functions follow different developmental trajectories, the cultural encoding of music is an ongoing developmental process. Across human cultures, the predominant locus for listening to and performing music is the group, and the dominant emotion experienced during musical experiences is happiness and joy (Becker, 2004). In addition to its inherent ability to evoke powerful emotional responses in listeners (Koelsch, 2010), music also enhances the emotions elicited by

nonmusical stimuli (Baumgartner, Lutz, Schmidt, & Jancke, 2006). When individuals share the encoded cultural meaning of music, the emotions evoked throughout the group and their associated autonomic and motor effects are also shared. This entrainment of mood and its associated autonomic responses has significant implications for the experience of empathy (Levenson, 2003). Listening to music alters our autonomic functions, including heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, immunological function, and neuroendocrine responses (Chanda & Levitin, 2013). It also activates the brain’s reward circuitry, releasing the neurotransmitter dopamine, the “feel good” chemical involved in reward processing, memory, and reinforcement learning. Music increases release of oxytocin, a neuropeptide critical to interpersonal trust and affiliation (Ross & Young, 2009). Oxytocin increases in-group favoritism and “to a lesser extent, out-group derogation” (De Dreu, Greer, Van Kleef, Shalvi, & Handgraaf, 2011, p. 1262), and “can facilitate amygdala-dependent, socially reinforced learning and emotional empathy in men” (Hurlemann et al., 2010, p. 4999). As the musicologist Ian Cross (2003) has noted: Music is not only sonic, embodied, and interactive; it is bound to its contexts of occurrence in ways that enable it to derive meaning from, and interactively to confer meaning on, the experiential contexts in which it occurs, these meanings being variable and transposable. (p. 108)

Music is also inherently mnemonic. Much like the scent of Proust’s madeleines, a phrase of music can transport us to a different place and time. Like language, music is at once genetic and cultural, individual and social. And, as with language, although music is individually experienced, it is culturally created. Emotive and mnemonic, singular and social, transitive and transposable, music is both “in and out of time.” It evokes our emotions, instantiates our experiences, and solidifies our social bonds. It is at once signal and symbol, emotive and abstract, and may well be the genesis of humanity’s symbolic capacity. Various nonhuman species, including passerine birds and humpback whales, regularly engage in song processing and production, and chimpanzees engage in tree drumming. Humans, however, are one of only a few species capable of synchronizing to the beat of music (Patel, Iversen, Bregman, & Schulz, 2009). This ability to synchronize to music allows us Adolescence and Religion

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to ­entrain our autonomic and emotional responses with others, a response positively associated with both ­empathy (Levenson, 2003) and cooperation (Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009).

Adolescence and Music

During adolescence, chanting, music, and dance take on increased social significance and emotional importance. We remember songs from our teenage years because they are emotionally charged (Levitin, 2006). The enhanced reward value of music during adolescence makes it an effective mnemonic and emotional element of ritual. For teens, music is both emotionally engaging and socially significant. Hip-hop, rap, country, and heavy metal are not just musical styles; they are significant social markers.

Rites of Passage, Emotion, and Sacred Pain

The music, chanting, and dance of religious ritual principally evoke positive emotions of affiliation and joy. Other components of religious ritual evoke quite different emotions. Shadowed forests and caves, darkened cathedrals, masks that distort and disfigure faces, and statues that bleed all engage innate responses that arouse our alerting systems, eliciting fear, disgust, and terror. Many adolescent rites further amplify these effects through food and sleep deprivation, the use of psychoactive substances, and pain-inducing psychological and physical ordeals (Alcorta & Sosis, 2005). The cognitive scientist Robert McCauley’s description of Baktaman initiation rites vividly illustrates such practices: The initiations bombard initiates’ senses in order to arouse their emotions. They are routinely deprived of food, water and sleep. They are repeatedly beaten and tortured. They are forced to eat what are, in their own estimation, all sorts of disgusting concoctions. They are forced to dance to the point of utter exhaustion. . . . Stimulating ritual participants’ senses is the most straightforward, surefire means available for arousing their emotions. The intuition is that the resulting levels of emotional excitement are often at least roughly proportional to the levels of sensory stimulation a ritual contains. These emotional responses are virtually always involuntary, and with particularly intense sensory stimulation, they are often difficult to control. (McCauley, 2001, p. 119)

These ordeals not only “grind down” the initiate’s self-identity but also alter his perceptions and blur 108

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the line between self and other. They “differentiate between an order, realm, mood, or state of being that is mundane, ordinary, or ‘natural,’ and one that is unusual, extra-ordinary, or ‘supernatural’  ” (Dissanayake, 1992, p. 49). Manny Twofeathers’s description of the Native American Sun Dance rites conveys these effects: I lay there on the ground, looking up into the sky. Then I handed Lessert my piercing bones. He got down on his knees next to me, and his father knelt by my left side. I felt both of them grab my chest and rub it with some dirt, because I was sweaty and slippery. This way their thumbs and fingers wouldn’t slip. They pinched my skin, and I felt as the knife went into my flesh. I felt a sharp, intense pain in my chest, as if somebody had put a red-hot iron on my flesh. I lost all sense of time. I couldn’t hear any sounds. I didn’t feel the heat of the sun. I tried to grit my teeth, but I couldn’t. . . . I prayed to the Creator to give me strength, to give me courage. . . . When I stood up, I did feel pain. I felt pain, but I also felt that closeness with the Creator. . . . The pain did not compare to what I was receiving from this sacred experience. . . . I was tied to the tree with that rope as securely as a child is tied to its mother by the umbilical cord. The only way off that cord was by ripping myself off. Every time I leaned back on my rope, I felt intense pain in my chest. It became a raw ache that reached all the way down to my toes. . . . It felt glorious and explosive. The energy was high and brilliant. . . . I went back, back. I looked at the tree and said silently, “Grandfather, please give me strength.” I ran faster and faster and faster. I hit the end of the line. I heard my flesh tear, rip, and pop. I saw the rope bouncing way up in the tree. It dangled there for a second, then dropped. While this was going on, I fell backwards. I had broken loose. . . . I was so happy, I let out a big yell. (Glucklich, 2001, pp. 147–148)

The strong autonomic responses and intense emotions elicited by such experiences may subsequently be suppressed, but are nearly impossible to erase (LeDoux, 1996).

Ultimate Sacred Postulates

Among the most puzzling elements of religion for nonadherents and evolutionary theorists alike are the sacred beliefs of a religion, what Rappaport (1999) has termed “ultimate sacred postulates.” These postulates encapsulate the foundational principles of a culture and supersede all other “truths.”

Ultimate sacred postulates differ greatly across cultures, yet they all “possess certain peculiar features” (Rappaport, 1999, p. 280). They are often counterintuitive, or even self-contradictory. They cannot “be derived from systems of higher logical type, for they themselves claim, as it were, to stand at the apex of the structures of discourse in which they appear” (p. 288). They are all impossible to verify objectively or logically, and equally impossible to falsify logically or empirically. They are, therefore, impermeable to logical or empirical proof. As a result, ultimate sacred postulates are unquestionable, unverifiable, and unfalsifiable. They are also boundless; for adherents, their truth holds in all times and all places. All of these properties render them awesome, powerful, and mysterious. In nearly all known cultures, ultimate sacred postulates encompass a belief in supernatural beings (Sosis & Alcorta, 2003). These supernatural agents take very different forms, but always possess extraordinary powers and regularly violate natural categories and laws. The supernatural agents of some religions, such as those of the Arctic Inuit, are embodied in sacred animal totems. In other cultures, such as the Ilahita Arapesh of New Guinea, supernatural agents are ghosts of the recently deceased. In monotheistic religions, such as Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, a single god is considered to have omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient powers. Such social omniscience is a distinguishing feature of the supernatural agents of all religions. These beings are “full access strategic agents” (Boyer, 2001) with knowledge of all your social behaviors and transgressions.

Ontogenetic Development of Religious Concepts

There is growing evidence that humans exhibit a developmental predisposition to believe in socially omniscient supernatural agents. This predisposition appears in early childhood and diminishes in adulthood (Bering & Bjorklund, 2004). Cross-cultural studies conducted with children between the ages of 3 and 12 indicate that young children possess an “intuitive theism” (Kelemen, 2004) that differentiates the social omniscience of supernatural agents from the fallible knowledge of natural social agents (Alcorta & Sosis, 2005). As children reach adolescence, these agents are increasingly viewed as agents capable of acting on such knowledge, as well (Barrett, 2000). Throughout the world, these innate predispositions to believe in powerful, socially omniscient

s­upernatural agents are shaped by the cultures in which they occur. Totemic animals that talk, incorporeal spirits that eat, and powerful gods capable of transforming themselves into swans and volcanoes are highly memorable. They grab our attention because they violate universal expectations about the world’s everyday structure. At the same time, they engage sets of cultural beliefs with significant socioecological associations. When these “counterintuitive concepts” are embedded within engaging narrative frameworks, they are easy to learn and remember (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004). Yet, recalling counterintuitive stories and believing in their veracity are quite different things. The Greek myths read by American schoolchildren are memorable, but there are no temples to Zeus in America. Clearly, such constructs as animal totems, ancestral ghosts, and anthropomorphic gods are not intrinsically sacred, nor even necessarily believable. How, then, do these ultimate sacred postulates and other sacred symbols come to achieve veracity, social validity, and motivational force?

Creation of the Sacred

The intense emotions evoked by religious ritual in general and adolescent rites of passage in particular are fundamental to the creation of sacred symbols. These rites provide a means whereby specific stimuli can be emotionally valenced by “run[ning] the proc­ess through the body theater” (Damasio, 1994, p. 156). The result is “a collection of changes in body state connected to particular mental images that have activated a specific brain system” (p. 144). The neurophysiological responses evoked, amplified, and intensified through ritual participation facilitate fear conditioning, reinforcement learning, and paradigm shifting. When these responses occur within a social context and are associated with sociocultural symbols, the symbols themselves are invested with reward value, emotional valence, and social meaning. Through this process, religious symbols are rendered sacred and imbued with personal significance and motivational force. The brain changes that occur during adolescence make this an “experience-expectant” period for creating sacred symbols and conditionally associating both with motivational reward value and emotion. The childhood predisposition to believe in supernatural agents has not yet diminished, but has, instead, evolved to incorporate a belief in agents capable of acting on such knowledge. During adolescence, ultimate sacred postulates are not only believable but also have motivational force. Adolescence and Religion

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Adolescents’ heightened emotionality, increased sociality, enhanced valuation of music, and increased capacity for abstract thinking offer fertile ground for sowing the seeds of the sacred. Maturation of brain structures specific to emotional, social, and symbolic systems provides the plastic substrate for creating symbolically triggered associational pathways between neural structures specific to cognitive, social, and emotional/reward functions. Simultaneously, the ongoing “shift” in the dopaminergic system from mesolimbic to prefrontal dominance creates an opportunity for assigning valuation to sociocultural stimuli through both conditioning and reinforcement learning. The psychologist Laurence Steinberg notes, “just as cognition has an important impact on emotion, emotion has an important impact on basic cognitive processes, including decision-making and behavioral choice” (Steinberg, 2007, p. 71).

Neurophysiological Effects of Religious Ritual

Not all adolescent rites of passage involve kidnapping, deprivation, and pain. Yet, even rituals that do not entail psychological and physical ordeals have neurophysiological impacts. Studies of adolescent Roman Catholic and Buddhist initiates demonstrate that the nature and intensity of ritual experienced during adolescence have both short- and long-term effects (Thananart, Tori, & Emavardhana, 2000; Tori, 1999). Individuals engaged in meditation and trance experience changes in brain wave patterns, heart and pulse rate, skin conductance, and other autonomic functions (MacLean et al., 1997). Repeated meditation impacts neuroendocrine levels, including testosterone, growth hormone, and cortisol, as well (MacLean et al., 1997). Participation in relatively low-arousal weekly Western religious services lowers blood pressure (Dressler & Bindon, 2000) and adolescent testosterone levels (Halpern, Udry, & Campbell, 1994), and is likely to affect the stress systems of the body (Koenig, 2008). As transformative experiences, adolescent rites of passage have the capacity to change the way adolescents perceive and respond to both themselves and the world around them. Ritual’s ability to evoke emotion, engender empathy, and promote affiliation make it an excellent tool for enhancing social cooperation. The ultimate sacred postulates communicated through the counterintuitive concepts and metaphorical narratives of religious ritual are 110

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not only effective costly signals and mnemonic devices but also define appraisal criteria for interpreting events and communicating behavioral norms for social judgments and interactions. They create common “frameworks of prediction and ex­ pect­ ancy” relevant to the new social and sexual roles and responsibilities of adulthood. As a result, they reduce ambiguity and anxiety, and facilitate social interaction. They also simplify decision-making, conserving time and energy that would otherwise be spent on the continuous calculation of risks and benefits for ongoing social discourse. Religious ritual’s capacity to create and emotionally valence abstract sociocultural symbols is the source of the sacred. The meaning of these symbols must be created and recreated, both cognitively and emotionally, in each new generation. This provides opportunities to adjust and change cultural precepts and values with changing ecological and social conditions. For the experience-expectant adolescent brain, these rituals provide motivationally salient social algorithms that enhance self-regulation, influence judgment and choices, and facilitate social interactions. The inculcation of such algorithms should also reduce anxiety and depression, enhance impulse inhibition and self-regulation, increase prosocial behaviors, and enhance in-group social interactions and cooperation. Is there any empirical evidence of such results?

Religion and Health

Over the past several decades, an accumulating body of research has found significant, positive correlations between adolescent health and religion (Cotton, Grossoehme, & Tsevat, 2007. The highest health risks for adolescents are not the communicable or chronic diseases that afflict children and adult populations, but are instead health risks associated with smoking, alcohol and substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, delinquency, stress-related mental health disorders, and other high-risk behaviors (Steinberg, 2008). As a result, much research has focused on studies examining the effects of religious beliefs and behaviors on adolescent mental health, prosocial values, and behavioral choices. An extensive literature review undertaken by the psychologists Michael Donahue and Peter Benson in 1995 showed “religiousness is positively associated with prosocial values and behavior, and negatively related to suicide ideation and attempts, substance abuse, premature sexual involvement, and

delinquency” (Donahue & Benson, 1995, p. 145). This finding was echoed in the 2003 National Study of Youth and Religion conducted by the sociologist Mark Regnerus and his colleagues (Regnerus, Smith, & Fritsch, 2003), and is supported by a more recent analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health (Add Health) (Nooney, 2005). Research indicates that prosocial rewards, such as those promoted through religion, predict longitudinal declines in adolescent risk-taking (Telzer, Fuligni, Lieberman, & Galvan, 2013). Studies conducted by Michael Inzlicht and his colleagues found reduced activation of the anterior cingulate cortex in response to anxiety-provoking conditions in religious adolescents; these findings support the hypothesis that “religious conviction provides a framework for understanding and acting within one’s environment, thereby acting as a buffer against anxiety and minimizing the experience of error” (Inzlicht, McGregor, Hirsh, & Nash, 2009, p. 385). The psychologist Sian Cotton and her colleagues at the University of Cincinnati’s Institute for the Study of Health echo these results: Evidence over the last two decades or so of research in this regard is fairly conclusive: in general, adolescents who have higher levels of religiosity and/ or spirituality fare better than their less religious or spiritual peers: those with higher levels of religiosity and/or spirituality have lower rates of risky health behaviors and fewer mental health problems—even when taking into account other factors that may affect health outcomes such as age, sex, or family income. (Cotton et al. 2007, p. 146)

This research provides empirical evidence for adolescent fitness benefits derived from religion. They underscore the importance of ritual participation in realizing these benefits, and identify a central role for self-regulation in decreasing high-risk adolescent behaviors that lead to decreased fitness. Additionally, they indicate an important role for religion in reducing anxiety and thereby minimizing the body’s stress response. Stress impacts both mental health and many chronic illnesses that do not physically express until later in life (Koenig, 2008). If religion is a protective factor for stress, then adult mental and physical health measures should reflect these effects. Studies of Western Christian adult populations do demonstrate significant, positive associations

b­ etween religious participation and mental/physical health. Even when such participation is confined to weekly church attendance, those who regularly attend exhibit better health and greater longevity than their fellow community members who do not (Hummer, Rogers, Narn, & Ellison, 1999; Matthews et al., 1998). This predominantly positive correlation between religious attendance and health has been demonstrated in numerous other studies, as well (for reviews, see Koenig 2008; Matthews et al., 1998; McCullough, 2001). Religious participation also positively correlates with various measures of mental health (see Murphy, Ciarrocchi, Piedmont, Cheston, & Peyrot, 2000), including lower levels of depression and higher measures of positive affect (Francis & Kaldor, 2002). Positive correlations exist between religious at­ tend­ance and longevity, as well (Hummer, 1999). A meta-analysis of religiousness and longevity found, “People who are highly religious have 29% higher odds of being alive at a given follow-up than do people who are less religious” (McCullough, 2001, p. 61). Some of these effects may result from the inverse correlation that exists between religious at­ tend­ ance and suicide (Matthews et al., 1998, p. 120). In his review of social and economic indicators of nations around the globe, the sociologist Phil Zuckerman notes that suicide rates are “the one indicator of societal health in which religious nations fare much better than secular nations” (Zuckerman 2005, p. 59).

Religion: A Costly Signal

The positive associations that exist between religion and health provide empirical evidence for individual fitness benefits of religion and support the proposed proximate mechanisms. From an evolutionary perspective, however, the most significant benefits of religion are likely to derive from its ability to promote intragroup cooperation and overcome problems of collective action (Bulbulia & Sosis, 2011; Irons, 1996; Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008; Sosis, 2006). Some researchers have argued that religion achieves these benefits by providing a “costly signal” that ensures honest, reliable social communication (Alcorta & Sosis, 2005; Bulbulia & Sosis, 2011; Sosis 2006).

Cooperative Benefits

Humans live in the largest, most complex social groups of any primate. These groups offer many genetic, cultural, technological, and competitive ­ Adolescence and Religion

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a­ dvantages (Alcorta & Sosis, 2013). As human social groups increase in size, however, new problems of free-riding, control, and cooperation emerge. Religion solves these problems by facilitating intragroup cooperation (Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003). Participation in religious rituals promotes such cooperation. Empirical research conducted over the past decade demonstrates that religious ritual is an effective tool for increasing group cooperation and cohesion (Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008; Sosis & Bressler, 2003; Sosis & Ruffle, 2003, 2004; Xygalatas et al., 2012). Additionally, prosocial behaviors are significantly and positively associated with adolescent religious attendance while juvenile delinquency is inversely related to it (Donahue & Benson 1995; Regnerus et al., 2003). Costly religious rituals also provide a mechanism for adjusting costs in relation to socioecological stressors. Intergroup aggression and warfare are among the greatest such stressors encountered in human populations. This is particularly true in prestate, predrone societies. The costliest religious practices should, therefore, occur in societies engaged in such aggression. Adolescent rites of passage are among the costliest of religious rituals. Cross-cultural research demonstrates that the costliness of these rites is positively correlated with intergroup violence; adolescent rites of passage that entail the most pain, violence, and bodily harm occur in preindustrial societies that exhibit the highest rates of warfare (Sosis, Kress, & Boster, 2007). Violent and painful initiation rites not only sanctify group values and neurophysiologically bond “brothers-in-arms” but also prime initiates’ response systems for threat, thereby producing higher levels of out-group aggression (Niehoff 1998). Military boot camps and paramilitary terrorist training camps effectively employ violence and pain to the same end (Nesser 2008). Extreme rituals do, indeed, promote prosociality (Xygalatas et al., 2012). Adolescents who participate in such rites are changed forever.

Conclusion

Although there remains considerable debate regarding the time of emergence of adolescence in human populations, dental evidence suggests that the prolonged period of human adolescence appeared “relatively late in human evolution,” around 300,000–800,000 years ago (Dean et al., 2001). The 112

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costs of prolonged adolescence are considerable. Adaptive benefits to offset these costs may have included the expansion of the resource base through exploration and innovation. The greatest benefits, however, are likely to have been realized in relation to intergroup conflict and group defense. Adolescent males are particularly well suited to this role, both physically and psychologically. They are also the most reproductively expendable members of the group. The oldest known archaeological evidence of human symbolic ritual is the ground and incised red ochre found at archaeological sites in South Africa dated around 100,000 years ago (Henshilwood, 2001; Marean, 2010; Marean et al., 2007). These sites also include sophisticated tool kits and evidence of a large, relatively sedentary population. Although it is impossible to know the purpose of the first human symbolic rituals, the environmental shift occurring at this time is likely to have increased competition between human groups. Under such circumstances, larger group sizes would have provided adaptive advantages in relation to technological innovation, resource extraction, and intergroup competition. Larger groups also represent a broader, deeper gene pool for dampening demographic fluctuations and avoiding genetic bottlenecks. Larger groups with many adolescent males represent potential “brothers-in-arms” for intergroup warfare and defense. Yet, as group size increases and genetic relatedness decreases, problems of cooperation and defection emerge. Costly religious rituals help solve these problems (Alcorta & Sosis, 2013). It is impossible to know when symbolic ritual first appeared in human evolution. Ritual is likely to have played an important role in human groups prior to the incorporation of symbolic elements. Humans are one of a very few “singing” primates. Like the “dueting” gibbons and most songbird species, and in contrast to our closest primate relatives, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees, humans also exhibit pair-bonded mating systems. Song-based mating rituals in early hominin groups may have constituted the genesis for symbolic ritual. The prolongation of human adolescence and selection for enhanced intragroup cooperation in large social groups are likely to have propelled its evolution. In contemporary Western societies and in Communist nations throughout the world, many of the functions served by religion in prestate societies have been transferred to specialized professionals trained and controlled by the secular state. In these societies, the validation and inculcation of social

b­ ehaviors are no longer religiously mandated and sanctioned, but are instead monopolized by the legal and educational powers of the state (Alcorta & Sosis, 2013). A professional military responsible for intergroup conflict eliminates the role of religious ritual in creating “brothers-in-arms.” Church at­ tend­ance in nearly all Western nations has steadily decreased over the past two decades (Norris & Inglehart, 2004). As a result, fewer adolescents experience the religious rites and rituals that traditionally served to define social roles and relationships, inculcate group values, and promote intragroup trust and cooperation. This shift from religiously inculcated value systems to secular systems of education and law is likely to promote greater individual freedoms and reduce religiously based in-group/ out-group conflict in a multicultural society. Yet, it also alters the dominant mode of transmitting social values during adolescence. In contrast to the highly structured and neurophysiologically engaging elements of religious ritual, the teaching mode of secular states is predominantly cognitive in approach. Adolescents developmentally primed to experientially shape emotionally weighted sociocognitive models must do so largely through personal trialand-error experiences. The individual models that result may or may not be shared by others, or even adaptive for the adolescent. Cross-cultural research indicates that how an individual interprets his or her experiences is an important determinant of stress (Flinn, 1999; McDade 2002). The mental models we employ to process our experiences not only focus our attention but also shape our perceptions and appraisals. When mental models are shared, social prediction, communication, and cooperation is facilitated. Whether a particular stimulus activates our stress response is as much a function of the way we view it as of the stimulus itself. Significant inverse correlations between adolescent religious participation and a host of behavioral and mental disorders, including anxiety, depression, addiction, and suicide, have been documented (Cotton et al., 2007; Donahue & Benson, 1995; Regnerus et al., 2003). Religion’s effectiveness in creating shared, value-anchored mental models that shape our perceptions, judgments, and social behaviors are likely to be central to these correlations of religion and health. The role of religion in human evolution is intimately intertwined with both the prolongation of human adolescence and intergroup competition.

An evolutionary understanding of the relationship between human adolescence and religion can shed light on the religiously inspired terrorism of the 21st century and offer insights into both its roots and proliferation. Fragile, corrupt, and failed states across the globe provide fertile ground for the rise of religiously inspired terrorism. Understanding the role religious ritual plays in shaping the adolescent social brain and in promulgating group trust and cohesion is an important first step in successfully turning back this rising tide.

References

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8

CH A PTE R

Religion and Morality The Evolution of the Cognitive Nexus

John Teehan

Abstract The relationship between religion and morality is a subject of widespread interest and intense debate: Is morality a product of religion? Can one be moral without religion? Can moral claims be justified outside of a religious context? These are important questions that have been subject to much investigation by theologians and philosophers, among others. Evolutionary studies provide a different way into this topic. Morality has long been a subject for evolutionary research, but an evolutionary approach to religion, based on research into the evolution of the brain, is a recent development, and one that is developing a substantial empirical grounding. Drawing on the insights from both of these fields, this chapter sets out the evolved cognitive mechanisms that constitute the nexus of religion and morality. In addition to providing insight into the nature of religious morality, this model may also help clarify the role religion played in human evolution. Key Words: religion, morality, evolutionary psychology, evolution, cognition

If there were no God, then all would be permitted.

This famous phrase from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov captures a popular sentiment concerning the relationship between religion and ­morality— namely, that religion provides a necessary grounding for moral obligations and values, providing the requisite motivation to get people to act against their self-interest or natural inclinations. This attitude finds expression in widely documented ­ antiatheist biases. Studies show that atheists are ­ among the least trusted groups in society, scoring lower than any other group in a study of whom you would trust to watch your children—a list that also  ­included “rapists” (Gervais et al., 2011)—and they  are the least likely to be elected president (Atheists, Muslims see most bias as presidential ­candidates, 2012). Renowned atheists, too, have recognized the close tie between religion and morality, even if they deny its necessity. Nietzsche, in his famous parable

The Madman (1882), foresaw the existential disorientation that would ensue following the realization that “God is dead.” While Nietzsche celebrated the moral freedom the decline of religion might afford, he feared that without a divine sanction for morality the masses would surrender to nihilism. Sigmund Freud (1927), who viewed religion as a collective “obsessive neurosis” that humanity needs to outgrow if we are to survive to civilizational adulthood, argued that religion played a vital role in establishing a moral code sufficiently strong to overcome the passionate cravings of the id. In an age of increased secularism and religious diversity, the necessary connection between morality and religion is more readily contested—that is, it is more readily conceded that a person need not be religious in order to live a morally upright life. But even when this is conceded by religionists, it is often argued that moral obligations are more coherent 117

within a religious framework; that only being grounded in an absolute good, such as the will of God, can provide the sense of moral realism that is implicit in our ordinary moral discourse. George Mavrodes speaks of the “queerness of morality, its absurdity” in a world devoid of any religious dimension (Mavrodes, 1986). It is not the purpose of this chapter to assess the philosophical arguments surrounding the necessity of religion for grounding morality. Instead, the aim here is to examine this nexus between religion and morality. For whatever philosophical conclusions one might draw, that there is a connection between religion and morality, and that this connection has deep roots, is not disputed. Our examination of this nexus is not concerned with conceptual or metaphysical questions but instead seeks to uncover its biological bases. That the relationship between religion and morality has its origins in biology may seem a controversial claim. However, there is a developing, multidisciplinary paradigm that sees the roots of religion grounded in our biological nature, and an outgrowth of our species’ particular evolutionary history. Whether this paradigm is referred to as evolutionary religious studies, or the bio-cultural study of religion, or the cognitive science of religion, its research project involves embedding religion within an evolutionary framework. So, a prel­ ude to our discussion will be to set out the basic elements of this evolutionary history. Although attempts to write the natural history of religion go back at least to David Hume (1757), the contemporary project is widely considered to have begun quite recently, with the publication of Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Lawson & McCauley, 1990) and Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Guthrie, 1993). Also central to the present discussion are evolutionary accounts of morality. This line of research is older than evolutionary religious studies, but the modern evolutionary framework for morality can be dated to 1964, with the seminal work of William Hamilton on kin selection (Hamilton, 1964). It is therefore important to keep in mind that this paradigm is quite new. However, a sufficiently extensive and robust body of data and experimentally grounded theory exist for us to speak of a general model for approaching both religion and morality from an evolutionary perspective. Once we have set out a basic evolutionary account of morality and of religion, we turn to the task of explaining how the nexus between the two ­developed. 118

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That religion came to take on a moral function within human societies is not challenged within evolutionary and cognitive studies of religion. There is, however, disagreement about when this nexus developed and just how important a role it has played in human evolution (and whether that influence has only impacted our cultural evolution or whether it may have influenced our biological evolution as well). We consider some of the issues in this debate, but I also present a case for seeing the nexus between religion and morality to be quite ancient, so much so that it may be difficult to understand religion without understanding its essentially moral function. Before we proceed, we need to clarify a key concept, and that is “religion.” It is too easy, and common, to speak of religion without stipulating what is being referenced. “Religion” strikes many as an unproblematic term that, even if hard to define precisely, is one of those phenomena where “we know it when we see it.” However, within religious studies “religion” is a highly contested term. Religious scholars point out that any ease of recognition is due to our bringing a default model of religion to bear on the question— and that model is Christianity. This model of religion is problematic, and not simply for its parochialism; this understanding of “religion,” even this understanding of Christianity, is a particularly modern and Western view. It is the product of a particular series of historical events arising during the early Modern period, starting with the Reformation and coming to fullness during the Enlightenment, and it bears all the interests and biases of that set of events (Taylor, 2007). These historical processes led to a new conceptualization of religion as a distinct sphere of activity and concerns—as a natural kind that could be separated out from other spheres of “secular” life. Such a conception of religion would have been unrecognizable to peoples and cultures predating modernity. Those things we use the term “religion” to denote were simply part of the lived experience and worldview of people and cultures outside the modern, Western, and Christianized world. Therefore, it is always a risk that those writing about religion will import inappropriate cultural assumptions when discussing religion as a general phenomenon, and this is certainly true of a project that seeks to uncover the origins of “religion.” Still, while care must be taken, with proper qualifications always in mind we can sufficiently define our subject matter so as to say something useful about religion, in general. In this chapter, the term “religion” refers to a communal set of beliefs, behaviors, and values that

involves some reference to entities or forces that transcend natural ontological categories—for example, gods, spirits, demons, ghosts, ancestors, karma, Tao, and so forth I do not mean to assert that this is the proper way to define “religion”; it is a stipulative definition, but one with sufficient traction with the wide variety of cultural practices and traditions that we would today deem religion to be workable for the present discussion.1

The Evolution of Morality

From an evolutionary perspective, the notion of acting, or refraining from acting, on the basis of considerations other than promoting one’s survival or reproductive interests can initially seem problematic. When such considerations actually serve the interests of another being, this poses a paradox: How can behavior that benefits another at the expense of one’s own reproductive success be the target of natural selection? In evolutionary studies, such behavior is termed “altruism,” defined as any behavior that benefits another individual at a cost (e.g., resources, time, energy, etc.) to the agent performing the action (Trivers, 1971). Altruists should not fare well in a competition with selfish individuals, yet humans are clearly capable of altruism; indeed, we could not have evolved as social creatures without having solved this apparent paradox. In fact, this issue is no longer considered paradoxical or a challenge to evolutionary theory, as numerous mechanisms have been identified that allow for the evolution of altruistic behavior.2 In 1964, William Hamilton rigorously set out a model for kin selection, demonstrating that costly behavior directed toward kin actually serves as a form of long-term genetic investment. Kin—not only offspring but other genetic relatives as well— carry copies of my genes. In aiding them in their reproductive pursuits, I also contribute to the propagation of copies of my genes. Actions that may be immediately costly to the agent but that contribute to the propagation of copies of the agent’s genes through the reproductive success of genetic kin may be targeted by natural selection. This notion of inclusive fitness allows for the development of kinbased systems of support (Hamilton, 1964). In discussing evolutionary approaches to moral psychology, we must keep in mind the notion of 1  See Ann Taves (2009) for the advantages of referring to practices “deemed religious” rather than “religious” practices. 2  The following is a rehearsing of a similar discussion in Teehan (2012).

“satisficing.”3 Evolution does not design optimal strategies but rather strategies that work well enough to enable an individual to outcompete others in an ecological niche. It therefore allows for a certain amount of error and waste. The cognitive processes that underlie kin selection work in a way that, in general and overall, tends to increase the inclusive fitness of agents. It is not always a simple matter to determine who is actually a genetic relative, so the triggers for kin selection must be broad, but not too broad. Although the heuristics for determining kinship work in a reliable manner (DeBruine, 2002; Jones, 2003a, 2003b), they also open up the pool of individuals who may benefit from kin altruism— namely, to those with phenotypic similarity, and those with regular physical proximity. However, even this expanded scope for kin altruism is limited in scope. Other strategies are required to facilitate the widespread cooperation found throughout the human species. Another key insight, first developed by Robert Trivers (1971) and furthered by numerous others, is the notion of reciprocal altruism (see, e.g., Axelrod, 2006; Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981; Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004; Gintis, 2000; Gurven, 2006; Nowak, 2006). In its simplest formulation, when altruistic behavior is reciprocated by the recipient of the action, the cost of the act does not actually count as a loss but instead can serve as an investment on future returns. Richard Alexander developed this basic strategy into the notion of indirect altruism (1987). Alexander argued that the reciprocation of the altruistic act might come through any number of indirect routes (indirect reciprocity). My investment of resources in an unrelated individual may benefit me if that individual contributes to a social good that has beneficial consequences for me or my kin. Even if the person I benefit does not directly contribute to my inclusive fitness, I may still reap benefits if my act contributes to my reputation as a generous and cooperative individual—that is, someone who has the means and inclination to benefit others. This marks me as a desirable partner in social exchanges, making me a more likely target for cooperative and altruistic behavior from others. The psychology of reciprocation (whether direct or, more often, indirect) assumes a central role in our moral psychology and is a key factor in the evolution of human sociality (Boyd & Richerson, 1988; Fehr & Gachter, 2002).

3 

See discussion in Dennett 1996.

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These strategies, however, are not sufficient to stabilize cooperation within a society. The selfish advantages to be gained by not reciprocating (cheating) or not contributing to the group (free-riding/ defecting) are too great to be left out of our psychology of cooperation. In addition to a predisposition to engage in altruistic acts, humans possess a keen sensitivity to cheaters—that is, a “cheater detection module” (Dunbar, 1997; Nesse, 2001; Vanneste, Verplaetse, Van Hiel, & Braeckman, 2007; Verplaetse, Vanneste, & Braeckman, 2007)—and are prone to punishing those who do cheat, even if this comes at a cost. There is a substantial literature indicating that punishment can raise levels of cooperation (Boyd, Gintis, Bowles, & Richerson, 2003; Ellingsen & Johannesson, 2008; Henrich & Boyd, 2001; Henrich et al., 2006; Price, Cosmides, L.  & Tooby, 2002).4 A reliable expectation of punishment increases the potential cost of cheating, reducing its value as a strategy. If cheating is less likely, then cooperation is less risky (i.e., reducing the chance of being cheated lowers the risk that one will not recoup on one’s altruistic act). However powerful punishment may be in discouraging cheating, it does not eliminate the possibility of cheating. Also, punishing a cheater has its own associated costs. It is much better to avoid investing in untrustworthy social partners. Therefore, being able to reliably signal that one is a reliable social partner, and therefore a good risk in terms of social investment, becomes a vital aspect of social exchange and of cultural life. The key here is that the signal must be reliable, so the obvious logic of costly-signaling theory is “for signals of commitment to be successful they must be hard to fake. Other things being equal, the costlier the signal the less likely it is to be false” (Irons, 2001, p. 298; see also Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997; Sosis, 2006; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003). While concise, and open to debate in terms of specific processes, this sketch of the basics of an evolved moral psychology should suffice as a workable, generally accepted model. Humans have an evolved predisposition to cooperate with others, are concerned about their reputations as social partners, and seek to signal their social value; we are acutely sensitive to the risk posed by cheaters and free-riders, and prone to punish those who fail to appropriately contribute to social exchanges. These are the 4  See Baumard (2010) for an alternative reading of the dynamics of punishment.

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psychological structures that form the basis of morality, many of which we share with our closest evolutionary cousins, the great apes (De Waal, 2008). From an evolutionary perspective, moral systems are means of promoting and rewarding prosocial behavior while discouraging and punishing socially costly behavior. It is vital to keep this conception of morality, which is distinct from philosophical definitions of morality, in mind as we continue. A significant implication of this model is that morality evolved as an in-group adaptation (Alexander, 1987; Cashdan, 2001; De Waal, 2008; Fiske, 2000,  2002; Ruffle & Sosis, 2006; Mahajan et al., 2011). Members of the in-group are most likely to trigger kin-based altruism; they are best positioned to provide support and engage in cooperative ventures, and they are similarly invested in the success of the group (since their inclusive fitness is also tied to the stability and cohesion of the group). Out-group members are not similarly situated, and in fact may stand in a competitive relationship with my in-group. Since they are not invested in the success of my group, and in fact may stand to gain from the failure of my group, they pose a risk to my in-group and, therefore, my inclusive fitness. Determining who is, and who is not, part of my in-group is a critical task in making decisions about cooperative and altruistic behavior. Humans have a well-known predisposition to form groups and to develop group identities, and to invest the divide between in-group/out-group with moral significance. Our evolved moral psychology is deeply biased toward the in-group, with a consequent relative moral insensitivity to the out-group. Evolutionary theory is not required to establish the existence of this in-group bias; social scientists have been exploring this for quite some time. What an evolutionary perspective adds is a framework for explaining how this bias came to be. It also indicates that this is not simply a moral or psychological weakness of improperly enculturated individuals, but is a cognitive adaptation that played an important role in the evolution of the species. Important additional support for the biological basis of this bias is being provided by a growing body neuroscientific studies (Avenanti, Sirigu, & Aglioti, 2010; Chiao et al., 2008; Chiao & Mathur, 2010; De Waal, 2008; Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002; Fiske, 2000; Han & Northoff, 2008; Hein, Silani, Preuschoff, Batson, & Singer, 2010; Mathur, Harada, Lipke, Joan & Chiao, 2010; Phelps et al., 2000; Richeson, et al., 2003; Van Bavel, Packer, & Cunningham, 2008; Xu, Zuo, Wang, & Han, 2009).

Before moving on, we need to consider how our evolved moral mind functions. The various strategies and biases we have discussed are not necessarily the processes that humans rely on when making moral judgments. For example, when faced with a decision about investing valuable resources into a child, parents are not doing a quick calculation of the likelihood of a genetic return on that investment (this may play into some such decisions, but it need not and—one hopes—typically does not). Parents may simply be acting out of a feeling of love or protectiveness. In this scenario, kin altruism is an ultimate cause; parental love is the proximate cause. Ultimate causes provide an evolutionary account of how it is that humans came to have the various proximate causes they have; but it is proximate causes that move us to act (Scott-Philips, Dickins, & West, 2011). In regard to morality, a great deal of recent research is focusing in on a particularly important proximate cause: empathy. Empathy has its roots in the wirings of the brain; researchers have identified at least ten areas involved in the various expressions of empathy (Baron-Cohen, 2011). Witnessing, for example, the suffering of another triggers neural patterns that encode similar experiences in the observer’s brain, and this generates compatible emotional reactions (De Waal, 2008, p. 286). Empathetic responses comprise two basic components: the ability to recognize the emotional state of another, or “cognitive empathy,” and a compatible emotional reaction, or “affective empathy” (Decety & Jackson, 2006; Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). When these two components are activated they can trigger “empathetic concern,” which prompts efforts to respond to the emotional state of the other (Decety & Cowell, 2014). While the developing research into empathy is fascinating, we do not need a detailed description of the neurological account. Two general points will suffice: (1) Humans are equipped with cognitive mechanisms for empathy that are bottom-up processes, which function automatically, quickly, and are generated outside conscious control; and (2) empathy functions as the proximate cause of moral behavior, playing a key role in triggering our moral intuitions. These two points are important parts of the explanatory story about the religion/morality nexus. In order to begin the explanatory story, we need to first recognize a limitation of morality as an evolutionary adaptation: Our moral psychology evolved to function in relatively small, homogeneous

groups, characteristic of human society for the greater part of our evolutionary history. This is not the way humans live today, and has not been such for thousands of years. The problem is one of extending this hunter-gatherer moral psychology to encompass the large, and largely anonymous, groups that humans inhabit. Humans, clearly, found ways to overcome this design limitation—an accomplishment that may be the uniquely defining human quality. No other creature on the planet has developed groups as large and as socially complex as homo sapiens sapiens (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). How we accomplished this is a significant topic for research, but at least one means for extending the reach of our evolved moral tools was the development of religions.

The Moral Function of Religion: The Standard Model

Evolutionary accounts of religion present various aspects of religious behavior and belief as products of mental tools that developed during the course of human cognitive evolution to solve a variety of fitness tasks. For example, the apparently universal belief in supernatural beings is attributed to the workings of a hyperactive agency detection device (HADD) and the mental tools that constitute our theory of mind (TOM). Human cognition is hypersensitized to the presence of agents in the environment, as agents are often a source of mortal danger. Surviving in a dangerous, uncertain world requires we be prepared to respond appropriately to sources of danger, and so evolution would favor cognitive skills that lead to a preponderance of false positives (mistakenly detecting the presence of an agent) over those prone to false negatives (failing to detect the presence of an agent). Detecting the presence of an agent triggers, among other tools, our TOM, and we anticipate what the agent might intend in order to effectively respond to that agent—and all of this happens at a prereflective, quick, and intuitive level. According to this account, the cognitive capability to conceive of supernatural beings is grounded in mental tools that were targeted by natural selection due to their contribution to survival/reproductive pursuits (Atran, 2002; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Barrett, 2004; Boyer, 2001; Guthrie, 1993; Tremlin, 2006). There is debate about how to characterize the relationship between evolution and religion: Is religion a byproduct, the accidental output of cognitive processes that evolved for other purposes? (Atran, Religion and Moralit y

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2002; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Boyer, 2001; Guthrie, 1993), or is religion an adaptation that played an active role in human evolution (Alcorta and Sosis, 2005; Bering, 2006; Bulbulia, 2004,  2009; Johnson, 2005; Johnson & Kruger, 2004; Wilson, 2002)? There does not seem to be any compelling reason to take an either/or approach to this issue. Indeed, the dispute seems to be based on differences in focus. Adaptationists are concerned with the role of religious systems in promoting stable and successful societies. Since human evolution is partly a story of social beings adapting to increasingly complex societies, anything that contributes to that project may function as an adaptation. This allows a role for culture in human evolution; for example: Cultural rules mandating cooperation between group members could exert ordinary selection pressures for genotypes that obey cultural rules. Social selection mechanisms . . . would have exerted strong selection against genes tending toward antisocial behavior. (Bell, Richerson, & McElreath, 2009, p. 17673)

If religion influences behavior in ways that impact inclusive fitness, then “psychological processes enabling humans to interpret certain natural events . . . as symbolic of supernatural intentions may have been subjected to selective pressures” (Bering & Shackelford, 2004, p. 733). Once such religious components became culturally shared, they may have assumed a role in the ongoing evolution of human cognition (Baumard & Boyer, 2013a, 2013b; Henrich et al., 2010). However, for religious beliefs to become culturally available they must first have become personally conceivable; that is, there must first have been cognitive processes that allowed the human mind to conceive of, for example, divine agents whose thoughts and desires could have consequences for human beings. How did humans come to possess such cognitive processes? The focus here is on the ultimate origins of religious beliefs, and in terms of ultimate causation, the byproduct view provides the most cogent account. The processes involved in TOM, for instance, certainly were not selected for their value in discerning the mind of God; they were selected for the advantage they provided humans in negotiating a world filled with dangerous agents. Being able to speculate about the mind of God is a byproduct of a tool selected to allow us to speculate on the intentions of predators and competitors. However, despite their origin as 122

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b­ yproducts, once these god-generating mechanisms (Shults, 2014) became a specieswide inheritance, it became possible for such ideas to be culturally shared, and so to assume an adaptive role in furthering human evolution. Whether religion is a biological or a cultural adaptation (or both), we need to understand how religion came to assume such an important role in human history. An important step in the development of religion as a culturally shared system of beliefs and behaviors is the development of belief in morally interested gods—and this is a natural, although not inevitable step (not all gods are conceived of as moral beings, but the ones that are come to assume a vital role in a culture’s moral system).5 When our TOM is triggered by the perception or belief in the existence of a supernatural being, we bring to bear the model of an intentional agent most significant to our experience (i.e., humans). In other words, we conceive of gods along the lines of persons, and this generates a set of inferences about what such beings may want, what may please them, what may anger them, what they may expect. Scott Atran (2002, p. 93) has written, “Gods and other supernatural beings are systematically unlike us in a few general ways— more powerful, longer lived, more knowledgeable . . . —and predictably like us in an enormously broader range of usual ways.” Since our understanding of human persons is informed by our evolved moral intuitions, it is an intuitively natural move to conceive of gods in similar moral terms. The moral mind of god is going to be similar to the moral mind of humans, as that has been shaped by evolution and informed by cultural factors (Atran, 2002; Barrett & Richert, 2003; Barrett, Richert, & Driesenga, 2001; Bering & Johnson, 2005; Gray & Wegner, 2010; Purzycki & Sosis, 2011; Purzycki et al., 2012; Teehan, 2010; Tremlin, 2006). Still, it will differ in important ways. As Pascal Boyer (2001, p. 155) points out, humans conceive of other humans as “limitedaccess strategic agents,” that is, when interacting with other humans we conceive of them as having imperfect access to our own thoughts and intentions. However, people tend to conceive of at least some gods as “full-access strategic agents” (p. 155). Gods are privy to all the relevant information in any social exchange—a very valuable attribute in 5  It is also not a necessary step, as I will outline in a later section of this discussion.

terms of policing moral behavior (Boyer, 2001). This is a cognitively natural way to process godbeliefs. Studies show that humans have quicker cognitive access to beliefs about God’s mind when the information has social significance (Purzycki et al., 2012). Shared belief in a supernatural being who is a morally interested party in the affairs of the community becomes a valuable social resource. Such a god may serve not only as the ostensible source of the group’s moral code but also, more importantly, as enforcer of that code. God-as-moral-enforcer makes the detection and punishment of cheating more certain. Keeping track of who is a reliable cooperator and who is prone to cheat within a large society may tax the cognitive capabilities of any individual, but it is readily conceived to be within the powers of a god. By making cheating more costly because it is more certainly detected, belief in moral gods reduces the risks associated with prosocial behavior and allows for the extension of our evolved moral intuitions—and this is just the sort of role cultures frequently assign to gods (Clark & Winslett, 2011; Johnson, 2005; Norenzayan, 2013). This model is based on the notion that “watched people are nice people” (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Bering & Johnson, 2005; Bering & Shackelford, 2004; Johnson & Kruger, 2004; Norenzayan, 2013; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007). As we discussed, one’s reputation as a reliable partner in social exchange is a key factor in social success, and so contributes to inclusive fitness. This has shaped our moral cognition. Research into cooperation using various behavioral economics games (e.g., Prisoner’s Dilemma, Ultimatum Game, Dictator’s Game) reliably shows that under conditions of anonymity, cheating behavior increases, but that even minimal signals of being watched—or the possibility of one’s behavior becoming known at a later date—suppresses cheating and increases prosocial behavior (Ellingsen & Johannesson, 2008; Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003; Nowak & Sigmund, 2005). Morally interested gods, then, can serve as cues to the evolved moral processes that govern social behavior and reputation management, even in situations when no other group member may be watching. This allows a cognitive strategy designed for small, homogeneous groups to function in large, heterogeneous groups. A growing body of empirical study demonstrates the efficacy of cultural beliefs in morally concerned gods in promoting prosocial behavior (Ahmed & Salas, 2011; Atkinson & Bourrat,

2011; Johnson, 2005; Johnson & Bering, 2006; Johnson & Kruger, 2004; McKay et al., 2011; Norenzayan, 2013; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007,  2011; Shariff & Rhemtulla, 2012). Of course, gods can only play this role if belief in them is commonly shared. It does little good to me to believe that god will punish you for cheating if you do not also share this belief. Signaling that one shares in the group’s religious traditions signals commitment to the god that oversees the social bonds of the group. It has been argued that the complexity, detail, and at times just plain strangeness of many religious rituals and beliefs allow them to serve as costly signals of commitment. William Irons (2001) writes: Most religions are expressed in elaborate rituals that are costly in time and sometimes in other ways. These rituals also provide extensive opportunities for members of a community to monitor one another’s commitments to the community and its moral code thereby facilitating the formation of larger and better-united groups. (p. 293)

Showing oneself to be proficient in such rituals signals that one has invested time and resources into the group and acknowledges a commitment to the group’s social code; in other words, it signals that one is a committed in-group member and therefore a reliable partner in cooperative ventures. Religious “behaviors, badges, and bans” (Sosis, 2006) come to serve as signals of in-group commitment, or “credibility enhancing displays” (Henrich, 2009), which trigger the suite of processes that underlie prosocial behavior (Alcorta & Sosis, 2005; Atran & Henrich, 2010; Bulbulia, 2004; Sosis, 2006; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003). Further support for the moral function of religion comes from priming studies. These studies test prosociality in terms of levels of trust, willingness to engage in costly cooperation, willingness to cheat and to punish cheaters, and so forth, using standard experimental conditions and behavioral games. To reveal the role of religion in prosociality, such games will include a religious prime—often a symbol, word, or phrase regularly associated with religion— presented either explicitly or implicitly—and meas­ ure what effect it has on the participant’s behavior. Such studies consistently show a significant, if varying, effect of religion on prosocial behavior; and this effect is often found to be independent of selfreported religiosity (Ahmed & Salas, 2011; Aveyard, 2014; McKay, Efferson, Whitehouse, & Fehr, 2011; Religion and Moralit y

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Norenzayan, 2013; Pichon, Boccato, & Saroglou, 2007; Saroglou et al., 2009; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007,  2011)6—indeed, some studies have even found this effect with self-identified atheists.7 The main point to be drawn by all this work from cognitive and evolutionary studies is that religions, as cultural institutions, developed to bind communities into socially cohesive, morally bonded communities as group size and complexity began to tax our evolved moral intuitions. Religions, then, came to play a pivotal role in human evolution. Groups with religion were more cohesive and so had an advantage over less cohesive, nonreligious groups. We find something recognizable as religion across the globe and throughout history because nonreligious groups lost out in the evolutionary struggle for survival (Atran & Henrich, 2010; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Haidt & Graham, 2010; Norenzayan, 2013; Teehan, 2010; Wilson, 2002). But as we discussed earlier, it is plausible that over and above this key contribution to cultural evolution, the social significance of religion as a mech­an­ ism for promoting cooperation and for reputation management may have created selection pressures for those cognitive predispositions that generate both religious beliefs and moral intuitions, and so may have contributed to human cognitive evolution. We now can explore the cognitive bases for the religion-morality nexus.

The Religion-Morality Nexus

The claim that the nexus of religion and morality is grounded on our cognitive architecture implies that this nexus is ancient, certainly predating the rise of the large, complex cultures that we have considered in our previous discussion. If religion played a moral role in the development of such cultures, then clearly the connection between religion and morality—as a code for regulating in-group interpersonal behavior—must predate these cultures. However, there are criticisms that this model of the moral 6  These studies are subject to criticism (see, e.g., RandolphSeng & Nielsen 2007); e.g., that the results are not transferable outside the experimental setting; that increases in prosociality disappear without the primes (Galen, 2012). This is a valuable insight, but does not undermine the prosocial impact of religion, as cultures are typically saturated with primes for religions (see Laurin et al., 2012); see also Saroglou (2012) for a response. A recent meta-analysis by Shariff et al. (2016) provides compelling evidence for the reliability of religious priming. 7   The evidence here is inconsistent; see Norenzayan (2013, 47–49) for a discussion.

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function of religion does not fit with the historical record—that the High Gods necessary to oversee the group’s moral code did not come onto the scene until well after the rise of the earliest civilizations. I believe this critique, while insightful, misreads the nature of the moral function of religion. A more detailed consideration of this critique is therefore called for, not only to set out a proper reading of morality and religion but also because this critique demands an addition to the standard model set out above. A more precise model of religion’s moral function will lay bare the deep evolutionary nexus of religion and morality. This critique of the standard model sketched above is set out most explicitly in a paper by Baumard and Boyer (2013a; see also Baumard & Boyer, 2015). They note that the model makes the following claims: (i) In some groups, people imagined high gods, powerful agents that monitored people’s behavior and punished those who did not obey their rules. (ii) These high gods prescribed prosocial behaviors towards ingroups and proscribed cheating. (iii) In general, people who think they are being monitored refrain from cheating or selfish behaviors. (iv) Therefore, members of groups that had beliefs in moral gods watching them would have engaged in more prosocial behaviors, which (v) allowed these particular groups to become larger because they could avoid the problem of widespread free-riding. (Baumard & Boyer, 2013a, p. 277)

They find this model basically sound, and empirically supported, with the major exception of step (ii): The gods of antiquity were generally not construed as being interested in people’s moral or prosocial behaviors. People did think the gods watched them, but that was to monitor the appropriate performance of rituals and sacrifices. As a result, there seems to be no reason to assume, as in steps (iv) and (v), that believers in such gods would have been more cooperative, or that this increased cooperation would have made their societies more successful. (2013a, p. 276)

This leads them to conclude that “later-emerging moralizing religions could not have been the magic bullet that made large-scale societies possible, because they appeared long after the first cities and kingdoms” (2013a, p. 276). There are two basic claims in this argument that we need to consider: (1) Most gods, even the High

Gods, were not concerned with the moral behavior of humans; and (2) those morally concerned gods—for example, the God of the Abrahamic ­religions—came far too late in history to account for the expansion of human groups from small hunter-gatherers to large, complex societies. This critique, if it stands, deals a fatal blow to the stand­ ard model. Indeed, it challenges the central theses of this essay, that the religion-morality nexus has ancient roots, and that it has played a causal role in human ­evolution. That this nexus has ancient roots is also contested by the religion scholar Rodney Stark. Stark (2001, p. 620) argues that for religion to have a moral function it is necessary to have a conception of god(s) as “deeply concerned with the behavior of humans toward one another.” In line with Baumard and Boyer, Stark points out that this is not how most societies view their gods. Therefore, he concludes, “the moral behavior of individuals would be influenced by their religious commitments only in societies where the dominant religious organizations give clear and consistent expression to divine moral imperatives” (p. 620; emphasis in original). In assessing this critique, we must first concede that gods need not be, and often were not, conceived as morally concerned. By “morally concerned,” I mean to indicate an understanding of a god as aware of and interested in the behavior of individuals under their domain toward other humans under their domain. Such gods need not be committed to a universal application of moral codes, but they are very interested in the moral code of the group that believes in them. Furthermore, such morally concerned gods are morally relevant in that their concern about moral behavior expresses itself in the distribution of rewards and punishment based on adherence to the group’s moral code. As the critics of the standard model point out, this is not necessarily how small-scale societies think of their gods. Recent supportive evidence comes from studies of a contemporary hunter-gatherer society, the Tyvan people of western Mongolia (Purzycki, 2011). Purzycki reports that the Tyvans understand their “spirit masters” to be very concerned with ritual and devotional practices, but not with “interpersonal human behavior” (p. 34)—that is, the gods of the Tyva are not morally concerned gods. Not only are the “small gods” of hunter-gatherer societies not necessarily morally concerned gods but neither were the “big gods” during the early periods of human civilization. Baumard and Boyer (2013a,

p. 276) assert, and Stark’s position concurs, that “the most successful ancient empires all had strikingly nonmoral high gods. This is the case for Sumer, as well as for the Greek, Roman, Aztec, and Inca empires and the Mayan kingdoms.” This too, we may concede—although it is a gross overgeneralization, as examples of morally concerned gods can be found in many of these civilizations.8 These gods, however, were often notably indifferent to the moral behavior of their groups, and dramatically unconcerned about their own moral standards. So, the criticism has weight: If morally concerned High Gods are necessary for the expansion from small scale hunter-gatherer societies to largescale civilization, then the historical record empirically refutes the standard model. There is a connection between High Gods and large-scale societies, but it appears that the development of local gods into High Gods follows from the development of larger scale societies.9 However, for the standard model to work, it is not the size of the god that is most important, but rather that the god is morally concerned. But here too, the anthropological evidence seems to refute the assumptions of the stand­ ard model, as local gods were often morally unconcerned. Must we conclude, then, along with Stark (2001, p. 619) that “the functionalist ‘law’ that religion sustains the moral order must be amended”? I do not believe this is the case, but it does require that we refine the standard model. To understand why we need not reject an ancient nexus between religion and morality, we need to note that the fact that a god is not morally concerned does not mean that the god is not morally relevant. A god who punishes transgressors of the moral code is a morally relevant god. Belief in that god may impact the behavior of group members in ways significant for prosocial behavior. But that is not the only way to be morally relevant; it may not even be 8  To provide just one counter to this claim: An indication that humans perceive god(s) as morally concerned is the complaint of divine injustice in response to undeserved suffering, i.e., the problem of evil. While often seen as strictly an issue for monotheisms that assert a morally concerned God, there is documentary evidence of humans charging the gods, or a specific god, with moral unfairness in early Sumerian and Egyptian sources, which counters the notion that these gods were all seen as morally indifferent. This predates the rise of moral Axial religions by centuries, if not millennia (see Laato & De Moor, 2003; Teehan, 2013). 9  See the valuable discussion of Norenzayan’s Big Gods thesis for nuanced assessments of this thesis and its critics (Norenzayan, 2015).

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the primary way gods are morally relevant. For a god to be morally relevant, it must be the case that the god reacts to human behavior in a way that may modify behavior toward increased prosociality. While the gods of small-scale societies may not care how you treat others in the group, they do care how you behave toward them—that is, they may not be concerned with moral behavior, but they are concerned with ritualistic/devotional behavior. If a group engages in ritual practices and believes that failure to perform the ritual or to perform it incorrectly leads the gods to withhold goods or impose punishment, then those gods become morally relevant. If violations of ritual practice, or observations of taboos, are believed to trigger a reaction on the part of the gods that has implications for the survival of the group (e.g., withholding resources, such as water, disrupting access to vital resources, or visiting natural disasters on the group), then correct observation of rituals and taboos becomes an existential concern for the entire group. The behavior of the individual can affect the gods such that the gods react in ways that are consequential for the whole. If this is the case, the behavior of each member of the group becomes an existential concern for every other member of the group. In this situation, individual religious behavior will come under social scrutiny and social control. This in turn creates social pressure on the religious behavior of individual group members. Gods need not be morally concerned to be morally relevant; they need only be existentially relevant. While morally concerned gods may be relatively rare in the ethnographic record, and late historically, existentially relevant gods are not. Archeological evidence suggests that basic elements of religious practice (e.g., ancestor worship and animism) can be found in the Upper Paleolithic (about 40,000 ybp; Rossano, 2009). This is roughly the period when Homo sapiens sapiens became the only remaining hominid species on the planet. Whether the beings that were the focus of such religious practices were spirits or ancestors, rather than gods, is not the point; it is the role of such beings in communal practices that placed constraints, or requirements, on individual members of the group that is significant. The evidence makes it plausible to conjecture that religion impacted human social organization and behavior at a very early period (Rossano, 2009, p. 131). That ritual practice and taboo observation are ubiquitous elements of religious practice from the 126

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earliest recorded groups up through the present time needs no argument. It is worthwhile, however, to consider the religion of the Tyva. While the spirit masters of the Tyva are relatively unconcerned with interpersonal behavior, they are “acutely concerned with ritual behavior and resource preservation” (Purzycki, 2011, p. 33). The socially relevant concern of the spirit masters is resource consumption— an existentially vital issue for a nomadic-pastoral people—and it is overexploitation of those resources that angers the spirit masters to actively punish (Purzycki, 2011, p. 41). The spirit masters then are existentially relevant, even if morally unconcerned. Ritual behavior also plays a morally relevant role in Tyvan society, independent of the anger of the spirit masters. An important behavioral rite involves offerings to the local spirit masters at designated sites, called ovaa. Purzycki tells us that the Tyvans do not believe that people who fail to make offerings at ovaa will be punished by the spirit masters (again, they only punish for violations of resources) yet this practice has social consequences. Ovaa are found on common traveling routes, situated such that behavior at the ovaa is publically visible, and these routes run through land owned by other Tyvan families (2011, pp. 40–41). Making the effort of investing time and resources to show respect for the spirit masters at the ovaa may serve as a signal of commitment to other members of a locally dispersed community. Purzycki followed up on this possibility and conducted a study on levels of trust among the Tyvans in relation to observing the ovaa rites. He found that “Tyvans who regularly engage in cairn rites are thought to be significantly more likely to live up to social obligations and reliably cooperate in an honest fashion” (Purzycki & Arakchaa, 2013, p. 385). This raises an important element of the religion-morality nexus. It might be objected that what this argument about existentially relevant gods shows is that religion impacts on ritualistic behavior, but the question is how—and when—does it come to influence moral behavior. Does this require belief in morally concerned gods? I believe it does not. The notion that religious rituals function as signals of commitment to the group, and thus serve a moral function, is a core component of the standard model. The investment of resources involved in religious practices signals that one is willing to invest in a social good and so marks one as a committed and therefore trustworthy partner in social exchange— and this is how the ovaa rites appear to function in

Tyvan society. However, part of the value of such practices, it was argued, is that they signaled a belief in a morally concerned god and therefore promoted moral behavior, even under conditions of anonymity. But if the religious practice targets a god who does not care about human behavior beyond proper ritual acts, how can this promote moral behavior, more broadly understood? In this situation, supernatural monitoring does not extend to how you treat your neighbor. However, there is another cognitive mechanism at work here. Moral behavior, as discussed, is often triggered by the engagement of our empathy systems. Moral religions manipulate these systems to extend empathetic concern to larger groups of individuals, using tactics such as rhetoric of fictive kinship (e.g., the tribes of Israel, the children of God) or explicit teachings: “Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? . . . And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me’ ” (Matthew 25:37–40).10 But religions can also trigger empathy in an implicit and more intuitively compelling manner by serving as a signal of in-group status—and this is not reserved only to moralizing religions with High Gods. Signals of group status have a powerful modulating effect on the activation of the empathy systems. We are more sensitive to the suffering of in-group members, we find them more trustworthy, and we are more willing to engage in costly helping. Outgroup status has a dampening effect on these systems. Communal participation in rituals serves as a means of signaling in-group status, even for individuals that might otherwise be strangers. That signal is processed in a way that heightens our empathetic sensitivity to others who participate in the ritual, and this primes our empathetic concern for such individuals, thus facilitating increased and extended prosocial behavior. There is also evidence that participation in synchronous movement, which is characteristic of many religious practices and has been linked to increased prosociality, also activates our empathy system (Behrends, Muller, & Dziobek, 2012; Cohen, Mundry, & Kirshner, 2014; Reddish, Bulbulia, & Fisher, 2014; Valdesolo, & DeSteno, 2011). This constitutes another component of the religion-morality nexus—and both of these components function independent of the moral concerns of the gods. When rituals involve gods that are 10 

All biblical quotations are from the NRSV..

e­xistentially relevant, these rituals take on added psychological significance, and so too does the behavior of those involved. Studies show that group identity and cultural beliefs become more salient under conditions of threat (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010; Greenberg et al., 1990). Religious rituals that are perceived to have existential relevance may raise the stakes involved in the ritual and intensify empathetic bonding. To the extent that religious practices modulate empathetic concern, they play a moral function. Small, homogeneous hunter-gatherer societies may not have needed the empathy-enhancing functions of religion to promote prosocial behavior; rituals may have evolved to serve other psychic functions. Still, the empathy-activating function of rituals and the ubiquity of religious rituals in human groups throughout history evince an ancient, specieswide, cognitively grounded nexus between religion and morality. Explicit beliefs in moral gods or in divine commands or even implicit cognition of supernatural monitoring are not necessary for religion to be morally consequential. Indeed, it may be that the empathy-modulating effect of religious behaviors, badges, and beliefs constitutes the cognitive preconditions for the development of morally concerned gods. This is admittedly speculative, but it may add an important element to the explanatory story of moral religions. What the historical record allows us to state confidently is that the small, homogeneous groups that constituted human societies for much of our history typically believed in local gods with minimal moral concern. With the rise of the first civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt we find evidence of belief in High Gods, with more extensive powers but not much more extensive moral concern. Then, during the Axial Age (c. 600–300 bce, though dating varies), we see the development of moralizing religions, such as Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Second Temple Judaism, which soon gives birth to Christianity. These religions are notable for more sophisticated conceptions of supernatural agents and a greater focus on moral behavior. Just what explains the sudden (in historical terms) appearance of so many moralizing religions, in different geographic locations, during this same period is an engaging topic.11 Here we are interested in the earlier movement from small groups with 11  See Botero et al. (2014) and Baumard et al. (2015) for recent competing explanations.

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local gods to large groups with High Gods, and this movement may require, as a precondition, that the religion-morality nexus already be in place. There is a clear evolutionary advantage to larger groups, given the role intergroup competition played in human evolution. However, larger groups faced the problem of extending moral intuitions that evolved to work in smaller groups. Communal rituals and other religious signals of commitment serve as empathy-triggers that can extend, or scale up, empathetic concerns to other in-group members, even if those individuals are otherwise strangers. This facilitates, without necessarily causing, the development of human society beyond limited kinbased or tribal models. But these religious practices can only be put to moral use in a growing society if they already had a moral function. It was due to there being a preexisting religion-morality nexus, expressed via rituals and taboos, and grounded in our moral cognitive architecture, that these practices were able to facilitate social expansion. With this in place, we can imagine that as groups grew larger, both in terms of population and in terms of geographic spread, an expansion of god concepts followed; indeed, research suggests that the content of god concepts is shaped by the conditions of the social ecology (Baumard, Hyafil, Morris, & Boyer, 2015; Botero et al., 2014; Purzycki, 2011; Purzycki & Sosis, 2011) and that these Big Gods in turn contributed to further scaling up of social development (Kiper & Meier, 2015; Norenzayan, 2013, 2015). The emergence of moralizing religions is a major consequence of the religion-morality nexus, but its influence goes further. Not only did it contribute to the rise of moral religions but also it served as a framework for the moral traditions promulgated by such religions. To see this, we need to turn to these moral religious traditions.

The Evolved Cognitive Framework for Religious Moral Traditions

From an evolutionary perspective, religions are cultural practices built on evolved cognitive and emotional predispositions, functioning to extend the efficacy of evolved moral intuitions. We can therefore expect the content of the moral traditions developed by religions to be shaped by ecological factors, such as environment, availability of resources, socio-economic conditions, historical era, etc. These ecological factors will give rise to the distinctiveness of religious moral practices and beliefs. That distinctiveness, however, will be constrained by our evolved 128

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moral-cognitive architecture. Evidence of the influence of these cognitive constraints should be discernible within these religious traditions. Specific to the moral function outlined above, these religions should all include teachings that encourage prosocial behavior and discourage cheating and defecting from the moral code. These moral codes should set out the norms of social behavior that facilitate successful social exchange and promote social cohesion (relative to the specific ecological niche of the group). All of this should be reinforced by supernatural agents who are assigned the role of supernatural monitor/punisher (although there certainly may be other aspects of a religious moral tradition and additional functions for their gods). This list of moral components forms the core of moral systems, in general. The involvement of a supernatural agent, as well as grounding the moral code in the intentions of that agent, adds the distinctly religious element. It should be readily apparent that this is just what moral religions do.12 However, since these moral functions are constitutive of moral systems in general, it might be objected that the common core of moral religions may simply reflect the adoption of cultural practices into religion, rather than evidence of a cognitive constraint on religious systems. To make the case for cognitive constraints, we focus on one particularly telling component of evolved morality—that it is an in-group adaptation that endowed us with a moral psychology predisposed to morally privilege members of the in-group, with a consequent decreased moral sensitivity to out-group members. If religious moral traditions are constrained by this evolved moral psychology, then this deep bias should also characterize moral religions. This is a valuable test case, for one of the ostensible advancements of moralizing religions over smaller scale religions is a universalizing moral code. Although we do find evidence of moral teachings in these religions that exhort us to a more generous and wide-ranging moral concern, a more careful appraisal will reveal a tension between an explicit admonition of universalism and an implicit moral tribalism. The most suitable test cases are the Abrahamic religions, for here the shift to more extensive moral communities is made explicitly and repeatedly within the sacred texts. These texts, then, provide us with a substantial body of data with which to test 12  For an extended discussion of this section, see Teehan (2010).

this hypothesis. I assert that we can find this moral constraint in the moral traditions of all religions, albeit to different degrees, although space does not allow for a detailed discussion. In fact, in order to focus our discussion we look at one moral tradition in particular: Christianity. There is a clear danger in using Christianity as our model, as noted earlier. Christianity has been used as the default model of “religion” since the advent of modern Western civilization, much to the detriment of other peoples and traditions, and to the detriment of religious studies (Taylor, 2007). So to be clear, Christianity is not presented as an exemplar of what a moral religion is or should be. Focusing on Christianity is appropriate in this case because it has been most insistent on its universal moral code. Both Judaism and Islam, of course, have a commitment to extending the boundaries of the moral community beyond narrow ethnic or ideological boundaries. For example, in Isaiah we are told that he was charged by God not merely “to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isa. 49:6). Similarly, in the Qur’an we read that “all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do good will have their rewards with their Lord. No fear for them, nor will they grieve” (Surah 2:63).13 However, the implicit in-group bias is readily detected in these traditions, as well. In Judaism, we find the limiting boundary of the in-group at the very inception of the religion/people: And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants after you. . . . As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant. . . . Every male among you shall be circumcised. . . . Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant. (Gen. 17:7–14)

Circumcision is just one of several distinct signals of identity/commitment within Judaism (e.g., Kosher regulations, Sabbath observations), and failure to adhere to these signals casts one out of the 13  Qur’anic verses are from The Qur’an, trans. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford University Press).

moral in-group. That there are different moral evaluations of in-group and out-group is also well attested throughout the Hebrew Bible. To take just one particularly dramatic example, consider that after receiving the divine command, “You shall not kill” (Exod. 20:13), Moses leads the Hebrew people to the Holy Land. On their journey they came across numerous out-groups, and these encounters demonstrate the biasing constraint of our moral psychology. How did the Hebrews treat the outgroups? “We smote him until no survivor was left to him. And we took all his cities at that time—there was not a city which we did not take from them— sixty cities. . . . And we utterly destroyed them . . . destroying every city, men, women, and children” (Deut. 3: 4–6). The tension between the moral command and the genocidal bloodbath is an expression of the cognitive tension between an explicit command processed by the deliberative, conscious, rational systems of our brain and the moral ingroup bias rooted in automatic, quick, and nonconscious processes. We readily find this tension within Islam as well. While all who believe in the one, true God are part of the moral community, this is clearly a bounded community, with all disbelievers (e.g., Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, atheists, agnostics) barred from the moral protection of God’s love: “If anyone kills a believer deliberately, the punishment for him is Hell . . . God is angry with him and rejects him” (Surah 4:93). But as to disbelievers: “I shall put fear into the hearts of disbelievers. . . . God punishes them severely—and the torment of the Fire awaits the disbelievers” (Surah 8:12–14). These moral prescriptions perform the role that evolved-religious morality is designed to play: discourage intergroup discord through supernatural punishing, distinguish between in-group and outgroup, and set up a moral distinction between those groups in order to discourage defection from the group. This same in-group/out-group moral dynamic exists within Christianity, as well. However, it does not reveal itself as clearly in the texts. In fact, in the texts we get a definitive rejection of this moral divide: “In Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. . . . There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:26–28). It has even been argued that Jesus shows us how to “escape from our own all-too-human evolutionary traps” (Chapman, 2004, 112; see also Religion and Moralit y

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Williams, 2005). However, a closer reading reveals that evolution gave shape to the moral contours of even Jesus’s teachings.14 To recognize this, we need to place Christianity in its ecological niche. Christianity developed from a small apocalyptic sect within Judaism, which was itself a minority population within a Hellenized Roman world. It emerged, along with Rabbinic Judaism, from the ashes of a catastrophic Jewish war with Rome that rendered traditional expressions of Judaism no longer feasible. An ill-defined group identity, as occurs during periods of social upheaval and transformation, creates personal and social anxiety. Such a situation is open to moral innovation, but also creates social confusion. During such a time, issues of identity formation are of crucial concern. Although the earliest canonical Christian documents—the letters of Paul—predate the war, Paul was already intensely focused on creating a distinct identity for Christians. The Gospels, which follow both Paul and the war, were also vehicles for accomplishing this task. What we find in the New Testament is a redefining of group-identity, and a redrawing of the in-group boundary, not the erasure of such a boundary. Christianity sought to establish an identity for itself as the proper heir to the promises of the covenant between God and humanity, which required that it distance itself from its Judaic roots without completely severing that connection. We find this being worked out, for example, in Jesus’s teachings on Sabbath practices, dietary laws, and circumcision—those signals of commitment to Judaism. In response to criticism of his disciples working on the Sabbath, a capital offense within Judaism, Jesus asserts that “the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath” (Matt. 12:3–8) and that “the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Of kosher regulations he teaches: “Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles a man” (Matt. 15:17). As to circumcision, the original signal of in-group status, Christianity proclaims, “For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart—it is spiritual and not literal” 14 

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(Rom. 2:28–29). Rejecting these practices signaled in an unmistakable way the rejection of commitment to the established in-group and the emergence of a new in-group. Establishing a new in-group identity requires a redefining of group boundaries, and a new moral code to promote group cohesion, as well as distinct signals of commitment. The New Testament makes it clear that this new in-group is founded in Christ. Matthew relates a story in which Jesus is told that his mother and brothers are looking for him. Jesus replies, “ ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother’ ” (Matt. 12:48–50). Jesus redefined the boundary of the group by rejecting family ties or ethnicity as a basis, disrupting traditional sources of moral identity. He fully recognized the upheaval this will cause and embraced it: Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace to the earth, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother . . . and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. (Matt. 10:34–37)

This is a costly demand for membership, and so the proposed benefit must be high: “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life” (Matt. 19:29). With this teaching, allegiance is withdrawn from traditional sources of authority, such as family or tribe, and transferred to the new group. Jesus rejects all established social relationships and centers the new group on allegiance to himself. In doing this he solidifies the moral bonds of that group, because he is no mortal man, but the Christ (i.e., a morally concerned supernatural being with the power to reward and punish), and the rewards are existentially significant: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25–26). But what of those who do not believe? Christianity developed an in-group identity that transcends traditional markers of identity and opens the in-group to all who believe in Jesus: “In Christ

Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith” (Gal. 3:26). However, defining an in-group, regardless of how broad, results in an out-group—in this case, those not “in Christ Jesus”—and there are consequences for being outside the Christian in-group: Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen! (Matt. 13:40–43)

Significantly, “evildoers” extends not simply to those who violate God’s moral commands, it also denotes those who fail to accept the word of Christ. He instructs his disciples, “if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomor’rah than for that town” (Matt. 10:14–15). Members of those cities that were destroyed by God for their moral failings will receive better treatment than those who simply fail to believe. We see here the moral logic of the in-group bias at work. Those who stand outside the group are morally suspect because they have not committed to the group, and so are not bound by the moral code that makes social interaction safe. The outgroup also represents an option for those tempted to leave the in-group, thereby weakening the solidarity of a group seeking to find its way in a challenging social environment; there must be powerful disincentives to defection. Christianity, despite explicit claims to universalism, bears all the marks of in-group/out-group mentality. Jesus himself expresses the epitome of such binary thinking: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23); and there are existentially relevant consequences for being on the right side.

Conclusion

An evolutionary approach to the cognitive bases of religion and morality allows us to set forth a model to elucidate the religion-morality nexus: Communally shared religious practices function as signals of ingroup membership and involve ­coordinated action,

both of which trigger the neural mechanisms that generate empathy, which serves as the proximate cause of much moral behavior. This imbues religion with deep moral significance. Furthermore, as the ingroup solves adaptive problems of surviving in a dangerous and hostile world, group identity—besides being morally significant—is existentially significant. Religion, as a powerful indicator of group identity, therefore, also possesses existential significance, particularly under conditions of threat or stress. These characteristics of religion are grounded in evolved cognitive and emotional predispositions, which make them intuitively and emotionally compelling and hence relatively immune to rational and empirical criticism—further intensifying their ability to shape behavior. As religious practices appear very early in the history of anatomically modern humans, religion has been uniquely positioned to impact gene-culture evolution, which has fortified both the cognitive and cultural bond between religion and morality. This model of the religion-morality nexus provides a framework for explaining the continuing relevance of religion in human affairs, both for good and for ill; its resiliency in the face of challenges from modern science and philosophy; and its seemingly inextricable involvement in human efforts to develop a meaningful worldview. These are all consequences of how the evolved religion-morality nexus has shaped our religious traditions, and our ethical projects.

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9

CH A PTE R

The Kin Selection of Religion

Bernard Crespi

Abstract This chapter describes an integrative hypothesis for the origin and evolution of human religious cognition and behavior. The hypothesis is based on kin selection, which leads to reduced competition and increased cooperation within family and small-scale groups and generates novel forms of psychological kinship that foster cooperation in larger scale groups. The “concept of God” is represented by one’s circle of kin and one’s ancestors, such that serving God and serving these individuals become synonymous. Kinship pervades, motivates and supports all of the major manifestations of religiosity. The primary selective pressures favoring religious phenotypes are social and ecological selective pressures within and between groups. Religiosity represents group-specific adaptations that mediate cultural-group survival and reproduction. The kinship theory of religion is consistent with diverse data from anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, psychiatry, endocrinology, and genetics. Key Words: religious, behaviour, inclusive fitness, kinship, ancestor

There is something sacred about kinship, as most social anthropologists who have studied its operation in the field are prepared to admit. —Myers (1975)

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that biological and cultural kinship form the core of human religious thought, behavior, and institutions. In doing so, I describe a simple model, centered on kinship, for how religion has evolved, step by step, under natural selection. This model can be broadly considered as a synthesis of Émile Durkheim’s and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown’s functionalist perspectives from anthropology, psychology, and sociology with empirical developments in evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, endocrinology, and genetics over the past 50 years. It is founded predominantly on theory and ideas from Hamilton, Alexander, Trivers, Steadman, Coe, Palmer, and Lahti (Alexander, 1974, 1987, 2013; Coe & Palmer, 2008, 2013; Hamilton, 1964; Lahti, 2009; Palmer,

Steadman, Cassidy, & Coe, 2008, 2010; Steadman & Palmer, 2008; Trivers, 1974). The ideas are straightforward and can be empirically tested. Their ramifications are important in that they conceptually unify the meanings of life in biology and spir­it­ ual­ity, and provide an intuitive foundation for consilience between them. First, I begin by explaining the causes of cooperation among animals, including humans, from basic behavioral-ecological and evolutionary theory. Second, I describe genetic relatedness, kinship, and inclusive fitness, and how they are associated with cooperative, and competitive, behavior. Third, I explicate the basics of behavioral ecology, the discipline whereby variation in ecology can be used to explain and predict variation in behavior, and the 135

social systems that result. In the context of this article, religion can, most generally, be regarded as a social system that derives from culture-specific ecological and social adaptation, through the effects of natural selection. Fourth, I discuss the roles of human cognition and affect (emotion and mood) in the origins and evolution of religious thought, behavior, and institutions. Fifth, in the spirits of Durkheim (1912) and Radcliffe-Brown (1952), I describe a sequence of hypothesized stages in the evolution of religion, whereby this set of adaptations evolves, step by step, under selection, centrally mediated by effects of kinship. I conclude with a brief synthesis and suggestions for empirical tests.

The Evolution of Cooperation

As conceptualized here, religion involves cooperation (in a broad sense of the word) in the context of some combination of morality with the sacred or supernatural. Cooperation between two or more parties, whereby they provide benefits to one another, evolves under three possible conditions (Crespi & Choe, 1997; Lehmann & Keller, 2006). First, cooperation may be mutualistic. In a mutualistic system, both parties gain in the short or long terms from the cooperative interactions, such that eschewing them, or engaging in selfish or exploitative alternatives, are simply not favored. Plants and pollinators represent a simple example, as do humans engaged in trade. Mutualistic systems often evolve in situations where the two parties are phenotypically different in some way or ways that lead them to be able to provide complementary resources or services to one another. However, they may also evolve when two or more parties can jointly benefit from collective action, performing tasks with higher efficacy than could be otherwise be achieved. Mutualisms are ecological, but also social, in that they evolve and are maintained only if one party cannot or does not “cheat,” exploiting the other by receiving benefits without providing gains in return. This situation is epitomized in the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game, whereby two parties acquire more benefits by both cooperating with one another than by both cheating, but one party would gain even more (than by joint cooperation) by cheating while the other cooperated (Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981). Strategies in the game can evolve toward mutual cooperation, rather than joint cheating (a lack of cooperation), but only if some means or mechanism exists to avoid or suppress cheating. This evolutionary game generalizes across many individuals to a 136

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“tragedy of the commons,” whereby a shared resource can be depleted if individuals each act in their self-interest rather than for the good of the group as a whole. In the study of religion, prisoner’s dilemma and tragedy of the commons situations are usually represented in terms of the “free rider problem,” referring to individuals who gain the benefits of religious cooperation without paying their fair share of the costs (e.g., Wallis, 1991). Hunter-gatherer groups, within which humans have spent the great majority of their selective, evolutionary history, are typically highly cooperative in mutualistic and egalitarian ways (e.g., Richerson & Boyd, 2001; Whiten & Erdal, 2012). Such cooperation is exemplified by extensive food sharing and cooperative, mutualistic divisions of labor, which have apparently evolved, at least in large part, in the ­ecological-economic contexts of selective pressures from starvation and malnutrition increasing the risks and effects of disease. As such, from an evolutionaryecological perspective, human hunter-gatherers should be considered as a species of great ape that has evolved complex, cooperative social-ecological adaptations, specific to their local environment and supported by large brains and cultural transmission of social and ecological adaptations (Crespi, 2014; van Schaik & Burkart, 2011). The more or less unique culture of each group can be conceptualized as an integrated set of “cultural survival vehicles,” adapted to local ecological and social conditions (Pagel, 2012; Palmer, 2010). These vehicles include, of course, different forms and manifestations of religion. More so than any other primate species, human adaptation is based around cooperating social groups, with most interactions being mutualistic. Second, parties may cooperate due to manipulation or repression (Alexander, 1974; Frank, 2003). Under this model, one party exerts partial or full control over the behavior of the other, but also depends on it, to some degree, for benefits. Examples include (1) lichens, comprising fungi and algae, with the former in control of resources; (2) dominance in paper-wasp nests, where the queen behaviorally suppresses worker reproduction and coerces individuals to work; (3) “policing” in honey bee workers, whereby worker-laid eggs are eaten by other workers; and (4) humans engaged in jointly beneficial ventures where one party is physically or socially dominant over the other. By this model, the parties are cooperating, though not as equals or free agents, and they are forced (with control taken away) or coerced (with costs actually or potentially

imposed on noncooperators) in some way to act more cooperatively. Humans, like other primates, exhibit asymmetries in physical power, information, abilities related to food acquisition and group defense, social status, and skills, including social leverage through friendship and kinship ties (e.g., Lewis, 2002; Smuts, 1985); these and other variables can, in principle, mediate cooperation due to manipulation or repression. Most commonly, however, the repression of competition and coerced manipulation toward cooperation are some function of the moral codes specific to each culture. Such codes are enforced, preor postemptively, by the group itself, or some subset of it, usually through aspects of religious cognition, behavior, and institutions. Generally, their role is to preclude or suppress behavior that is personally selfserving (with costs to others, or to the group more widely) or nepotistic (serving kin with costs to others, as described in more detail below) in ways that are detrimental to the interests of the group members, or relatively influential group members (Hughes, 1988). The supernatural or sacred nature of religious moral codes means that they can, in principle, be psychologically and culturally enforced by agents beyond human control, which instantiates fairness and equality in ways that are not subject to dispute or human dominance, with beneficial sequelae to most individuals, most of the time, from moral adherence. The third condition under which cooperation evolves is kinship (Hamilton, 1964). To a biologist, kinship is the sharing of alleles between two individuals due to descent of the alleles from a shared ancestor, such as their father or grandmother. Biological kinship is based on genetic relatedness; it is the probability that a specific allele in one individual (color it blue, conceptually) is also present in another individual. Genetic relatedness values depend on the nature of inheritance regarding the (blue) allele concerned. If the allele is on an autosome, then relatedness from parent to offspring, or vice versa, is onehalf, since meiosis leads to the random transmission of one allele or the other, at a locus, from one individual to the other (see Figure 9.1). Each additional meiotic link halves relatedness, to one-fourth for aunts and uncles with nieces or nephews, one-eighth for first cousins, and so on. We usually consider “distant” relatedness links, such as those beyond first cousins, as weak; however, from the standpoint of natural selection, links of even a few percent, corresponding to ­selection coefficients of this magnitude,

can generate substantial effects across evolutionary scales of time. In 1964, the eminent evolutionary biologist William  D.  Hamilton first demonstrated how genetic relatedness is expected to influence the evolution of behavioral interactions between relatives. Hamilton showed that individuals are expected to behave so as to maximize their “inclusive fitness,” which represents one’s own reproduction plus one’s effects on the reproduction of other individuals devalued by one’s genetic relatedness to them. Individuals should thus commonly provide benefits to nondescendent (as well as descendent) kin, because doing so increases their inclusive fitness. This mathematical logic corresponds to a gene’s eye view of natural selection; an allele may increase in frequency by having relatively beneficial effects on its bearer (compared to alternative alleles at a locus), and by having relatively beneficial effects (through the behavior of its bearer) on kin, who probabilistically also bear copies of the allele identical by in­her­ it­ance. Such natural selection involving kinship is sometimes called kin selection. The validity and universal applicability of inclusive fitness theory has been demonstrated in hundreds of studies (Abbot et al., 2011; Bourke, 2011); it is not controversial, and represents a simple extension of Darwinian evolutionary theory to the level of genes. For humans, the centrality of kinship systems to social and cultural behavior (e.g., Déchaux, 2008) attests to the longterm evolutionary importance of inclusive fitness effects in our species, despite postmodernist attempts to discredit kinship studies through political criticisms of the biological and anthropological sciences more generally. Kinship can favor cooperation via altruism, mutualism, or manipulation among kin. Altruistic behavior evolves under kin selection whenever an individual bears a cost in reduced personal reproduction that is outweighed by benefits to nondescendent kin. Mutualistic behavior is favored by kinship because it increases the fitness benefits from such cooperation, since aided individuals who benefit are kin. Additionally, kinship mediates the effects of cooperation by manipulation because, for example, subordinate individuals will be more likely to cooperate with, and help, a dominant individual who is kin than a dominant nonrelative (Trubenová & Hager, 2012). The strongest, most general prediction that one can make about behavior is that individuals are expected to (unconsciously) behave so as to maximize The Kin Selection of Religion

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Genetic kinship

Lineal kinship ‘ancestor’

‘all people in the culture’ Universal religious kinship

Cultural kinship

‘father’

‘father’ ‘all people in the religion’

Figure 9.1  Four major manifestations of kinship, which are associated with the origins and evolution of religion. The “Genetic kinship” pedigree shows genetic relatedness of one individual (filled square) to others for autosomes, as the proportion of the shape that is filled. “Cultural kinship” refers to psychological kinship that is culturespecific. “Lineal kinship” may be patrilineal, matrilineal, or both. “Universal religious kinship” involves monotheism and religions that are highly inclusive (can be readily joined), and include people from many cultures (with four shown here).

their inclusive fitness, barring mistakes and effects from evolutionary novelties (Alexander, 1979, 1987,  1989). Among humans, however, doing so most effectively need not always involve favoritism toward kin, or closer kin, at some cost to more distant kin and nonrelatives. Indeed, if every individual in a large social group sought unilaterally and unswervingly to maximize their own inclusive fitness, the result would be pervasively expressed conflicts of interest, and likely social/ecological disaster. What is important to bear in mind here is that although kinship usually engenders some higher level of cooperation in any specific instance, variation in kinship represents one of the strongest factors potentially generating social/behavioral divisiveness within groups, unless mechanisms are in place to ameliorate its disruptive effects. Variation in kinship is important because when variation is greater, individuals are more favored to provide benefits to, and cooperate with, closer kin, and are less favored to help others (more distant kin and nonrelatives). For example, at one extreme, we might have two sets of brothers in a group, with cooperative behavior restricted to within-brother dyads. Toward another extreme, we might have a set of four cousins, who should cooperate with each other more or less equally compared with nonrelatives. 138

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To understand kinship effects, it is thus essential to take into account both cooperation and conflict. Consider two specific cases. First, a child is related to its mother, and its full siblings, by one-half. Our focal child is, however, related to their own (eventual) offspring by one-half, and to the offspring of their siblings (their eventual nieces and nephews) by only one-quarter. This means that the child will be favored to value itself, genetically, twice as highly as it values each sibling. Children in sibships are competing for limited resources from their parents. In this situation, each child “wants” (i.e., has been subject to selection to take, or solicit) more resources from its mother (or father) for itself than for any sibling. Siblings thus compete with one another for parental resources, in a manner only partially constrained by their relatedness to one another (Bossan, Hammerstein, & Koehncke, 2013; Trivers, 1974). By contrast, the mother is equally related to each offspring, so her inclusive fitness is maximized, all else equal, by the same allocation to each. We have conflicting optima, and expect sib-sib and motheroffspring conflict. Who wins, if anyone, in this situation? It depends on who is in control of what aspects of the interactions, and on the strength of kin selection on each party. If only the mother could, in some ways,

use her privileged position as a primary source of childhood enculturation, and morals, to discourage or limit sibling competition, she could thereby reduce the degree to which copies of her genes interfere with their own transmission. This example illustrates how close kin are often also close competitors, and how all parties concerned can, in principle, benefit in inclusive fitness from reducing the level of wasteful competition between them. As a second case, consider a hunter returning to his village with a large prey item. He might either distribute it among his kin, according to degrees of genetic relatedness combined with benefits gained by each relative, or distribute it equitably among all village members. The former distribution would maximize his inclusive fitness, but only in the absence of a broader social network that provides mutualistic support by culturally motivated egalitarian food sharing. The hunter may, indeed, suffer a run of bad luck in hunting later on; if he had been relatively selfish and nepotistic, he would be less likely to gain help from others in this situation, and if one’s culture did not dictate sharing food more or less equally, the group as a whole would also be less likely to survive and prosper, relative to moreegalitarian groups. This example applies to “immediate return” food economies, as found in almost all hunter-gatherer groups. Such benefits from the “moral” sharing of food are ecologically based, and should be less pronounced in cultures with a higher predictability of food supplies. To a biologist, these applications of inclusive fitness theory, in the context of genetically based biological kinship, are straightforward. But anthropologists are well aware that biological genetic relatedness, and the actual kinship terms used by individuals in small-scale societies, are by no means always the same (see Figure 9.1). Why should this be so? A primary reason is that humans learn who their “kin” are from being told by others, usually in childhood. This information need not be biologically accurate, and should indeed reflect the inclusive fitness interests of the controlling party or parties, and/or the summed interests of the group as a whole. Referring to mother’s brother (or all fatheraged males in a group) as “father” may be genetically false, but it may, in some social and ecological contexts, be beneficial to both “fathers” and “offspring.” Similarly, calling some categories of cousins “siblings” may usually be incorrect genetically, but doing so can serve to prevent inadvertent incest, as

well as fostering closer kinship bonds between them. At an extreme, systems of “universal kinship” have developed in many cultures, whereby everyone in a large cultural group has a designated kin relationship to every other member, and everyone outside of the group is non-kin (Barnard, 1978). The key point here is that kinship is cultural and psychological, as well as biological (Bailey & Wood, 1998; Jones, 2000). Genetic relatedness, especially between parents and offspring, was the original context for the generation and maintenance of altruistic and mutualistic social bonds; it creates “bonded” relationships, motivated by neurological and endocrinological reward systems, whereby individuals provide for one another. But because humans learn (and are told) who their “kin” are, and are taught proper behavior toward kin and others in the group, kinship in our species is fundamentally psychological (Haig, 2011). Psychological kinship differs notably from biological kinship in that it is culturally malleable (e.g., Qirko, 2004) and can, in principle, promote close kin-like cooperation between any set of individuals in a group. Especially in matrilineal and patrilineal societies, links to shared common ancestors can also reinforce psychological kinship, because all individuals can trace themselves to the same parent or grandparent (or more distant) kin, thus making the group a single, expanded, “nuclear family” of a sort, with everyone exhibiting the same level of psychological genetic relatedness to an ancestor and to one another (see, e.g., Shiels, 1975) (see Figure  9.1). Indeed, as noted by Wallwork (1984), referring to the work of Durkheim: The clan is a kinship group with self-sufficient religious, political and economic functions. Within it, solidarity is maintained by real or fictitious consanguinity. Actual blood relatedness lies at the basis of these ties, but real consanguinity is less important . . . than shared beliefs about a common origin. (p. 5)

How does inclusive fitness maximization work, then, under both biological and psychological­cultural kinship? Its operation should depend on the social ecology more or less specific to each cultural group. At one extreme, where ecological selection (mainly from food and disease) and social selection (mainly from competing groups, as well as from competition within groups) for groupwide cooperation are weakest, individuals should be most likely to strive to maximize their (biological) inclusive fitness, subject to the effects of competition The Kin Selection of Religion

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with other individuals also trying to do so. At the opposite extreme, where ecological and social selection make extensive within-group cooperation essential to survival, individuals should be selected to generally treat all others within the group as close kin in order to reduce the socially divisive effects of genetic relatedness variation. In this general regard, perceptions and applications of kinship can be considered as culture-specific adaptations, as many anthropologists have described in their disciplinespecific ways. However, despite such variability in kinship term usage across cultures, one still expects strong selective pressure for treating kin according to their genetic relatedness, so much as possible in any situation or culture; all individuals will indeed benefit from doing so, so any cultural norm that supports the general and successful ability to maximize inclusive fitness should also spread and be maintained if it does not also generate overly socially divisive effects. What does psychological kinship have to do with religion? As described in more detail below, it is my thesis that religion represents a form of kinship at its psychological and conceptual-institutional core, but a special kind—one that is grounded in the ideas of the sacred and supernatural, and thus is more effective than biological kinship at promoting cooperative acts.

Behavioral Ecology of Human HunterGatherers

We have discussed kinship, and religion, in terms of adaptation. How, then, do adaptations evolve and generate diversity within and between species in traits such as social behavior, cognition, and aspects of culture? Behavioral ecology is a scientific discipline that seeks to explain adaptive variation in behavior from variation in ecology, within and across taxa. For example, most passerine birds defend territories to ensure access to sufficient food for rearing offspring, and their mating systems are socially monogamous because males benefit from helping to feed and defend the territory and offspring. The ecological situation (food for babies, and a territory that is defensible and contains such food) selects for the behavior (territoriality) and the social system (monogamy). Where food is not defensible, as in many seabirds, territoriality does not evolve. What is the behavioral ecology of humans? We are great apes with especially large brains that live in large cooperative and competitive social groups, 140

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who use tools extensively to procure food and transmit ecological and social information culturally. Despite these commonalities, and likely because of them, humans inhabit a vast diversity of ecological habitats, from rain forest to arctic, desert to high mountains. This ecological diversity is expected to generate behavioral and cultural diversity, as each group has evolved, under gene-based natural selection and cultural selection, a set of ecological adaptations that promote survival and reproduction under their particular conditions. Most of these ecological adaptations relate to procuring food, ameliorating abiotic forces, avoiding and surviving disease, and dealing with predators and competitors. Their diversity attests to the flexibility and effectiveness of cultural adaptations, and their key roles in producing the uniquely pronounced behavioral and social diversity of our species. So humans have myriad ecologies and consequent diversity in behavior and systems of sociality. Humans also compete with one another, both within and between groups. We have discussed competition within groups, in the context of inclusive fitness maximizing; competition between human groups appears to have been at least as potent a selective factor in human evolution, although the prehistorical evidence for such competition is indirect (Alexander, 1989; Bowles, 2009). What is important about between-group competition in humans is that (1) it should strongly select for within-group unity and cooperation and cultural adaptations for defense of the group as well as success in prevailing over other groups (Alexander, 1979; Lahti & Weinstein, 2005); (2) it should be at least as efficacious a selective pressure in ecologically favorable habitats as in harsh ones, since better environments can support higher population densities and generate stronger demographically based group competition for the best lands; and (3) it may often involve human groups that treat one another as different species (as indeed they can be, culturally and with regard to interbreeding) and have the capacity to eliminate one another completely. Many smallscale groups thus refer to themselves in some way as “The People,” indicating that other groups are not considered to be human at all. The upshot of these behavioral-ecological considerations is that the primary selective pressures affecting humans throughout most of their evolutionary history are expected to have been both ecological (especially food and disease) and social/ecological (other humans). The origins, evolution, and

diversity of religious beliefs, behaviors, and institutions must be set in these selective contexts in order to understand their variable application and relevance for different cultural groups. By what selective, evolutionary mechanisms would religious behavioral/ecological adaptations come about? Within the ecological and social contexts described above, religious adaptations would have evolved under both genetic and cultural selective processes, where “culture” is conceptualized as human-generated cognitive information and material objects that are transmitted through social learning and physical inheritance. Most broadly, human culture thus represents aspects of the environment—including other humans, and their ideas—that can be perpetuated vertically (i.e., across generations) and horizontally within groups, as well as horizontally between groups (Alexander, 1979). Like language, religious beliefs and behaviors thus evolve genetically as well as culturally; humans have evolved the genetic capacities for language (for example) and religiosity, but their expression depends on interactions between the effects of genes and the effects of environments. Genes “for” religion, which are evidenced by statistical associations

between allelic variation and variation in measures of religiosity, must therefore exist (e.g., Bradshaw & Ellison, 2008; Kandler & Riemann, 2013), since the cognitive capacity for religion has evolved, but their effects always depend on the environment in which they are expressed. Genes for religion should also, by the thesis described here, represent genes for perception, cognition, and behavior related to kinship and bonding. How, then, have they evolved?

Human Cognitive Ecology

The starting point for discussing the origin of religion must, of course, be what it is conceived to be, and what phenotypes were present just prior to its inception. As noted above, we are considering religion as some combination of morality with the sacred or supernatural. Morality here is indirect reciprocity, which evolved from mutualism and altruism among kin (Alexander, 1987) (Table  9.1), and the sacred or supernatural refer in some manner to gods and other immaterial presences, faith, magic, worship, and veneration. “Supernatural” and “religious” are usually contrasted with “natural” and “secular”; these distinctions need not exist as cultural divisions (and indeed do not exist in most

Table 9.1.  Roles of Kinship in Major Features of Religion and Its Components Phenomenon

Role of Kinship

Morality (indirect reciprocity) Maternal enculturation of moral behavior in offspring, using supernatural Animism

Morality evolved from kin-based mutualism and altruism

Totemism Ancestor worship Concept of God Monotheism

Universal religions

Mothers and offspring are genetically related by one-half; mother reduces conflict among offspring via religious enculturation, reducing interference among copies of her genes Animism involves kinship-like emotional bonds from humans to animals, plants, places, and landscapes that are important to survival and reproduction Totemism represents a cultural tradition that generates and maintains high levels of psychological-kinship bonding between distant relatives and non-kin, through sharing of a supernatural entity Ancestors, who created a group of people biologically as well as culturally, represent a supernatural moral conscience for proper behavior and perpetuation of traditions God represents a metaphor for one’s circle of biological and psychological kin, including ancestors. Serving God equates with serving one’s circle of kin, and maximizing inclusive fitness in one’s social context Religious systems with a single God are favored in situations with larger groups and stronger cultural group selection via direct competition. Monotheism unites the group around a single spiritual and secular leader, generating a single large tribe with lineal-ancestor-like family structure Universal inclusiveness favors larger, more-powerful religious groups via recruitment, with family-like structures and terminologies maintained, and inclusive fitness benefits to individuals (especially parents, and other adults in control of religious inculcation) through religious beliefs, practices, and institutions

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small-scale societies), but phenomena must still vary, somehow, in religious relevance or import. I consider some degree of morality to be present initially, prior to its combining with the supernatural or sacred, in part because conceptions of “fairness” have been demonstrated across multiple species of primate other than our own (e.g., de Waal, 2013). Cognitive and emotional traits that can be considered as necessary though not sufficient for the origin of religious thought, some of which are unique to humans, include the following: 1.  sharing of attention, since religion represents a group-level phenotype in most of its effects; 2.  empathic connections or bonds with others, whereby feelings or thoughts link one individual with another in a fitness-salient way, or link two or more individuals together in shared fitness-salient experience; 3.  capacity to establish, maintain, and remember a social relationship with specific others even in their physical absence, or after their death; 4.  theory of mind, the belief that other individuals or entities have minds, mental states, awareness, motivations, and agency comparable in some way to our own; 5.  ability to infer meaning and purpose from events in the world; 6.  imagination, the ability to generate or form a mental concept or image of someone or something that is not real or present; 7.  social learning, which forms the primary basis for cultural transmission of narratives, cultural norms, and ideas; 8.  language, which, like shared attention and social learning, is required for the sharing and transmission of cultural phenotypes with abstract content; and 9.  self-awareness, which is required for conception of the self as a mind or entity separate in some way from the body. Such lists of hypothesized preconditions for religiosity have been discussed before (e.g., Wade, 2009), but they have seldom been considered together in the context of a stepwise evolutionary proc­ess at the origin of religious phenotypes. It is essential to recognize, initially, that all of the nine phenotypes above evolved in selective situations entirely separate from religious ones. As in the evolution of other qualitatively new traits, the ­novelty must arise from some process of change or divergence in function (such as fins to legs at the 142

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origin of amphibians), or some combination of traits with new, emergent properties (such as the tendency to combine two actions, or ideas, with synergistic effects)—and in both cases, the initial, small, novel change must be selectively favored. Of the phenotypes above, imagination, theory of mind, and self-awareness appear most relevant to the origin of supernatural aspects of religious cognition, because they require something that is imagined and not material, constituting some element of mind or agency that is comparable to that of the self. The closest such entity may well be the “spirit” of a close relative who has recently died, because they indeed still exist in an immaterial way as thought-patterns and memories in the minds of the living (Lahti, 2009), with an emotional bond, forged by close kinship, connecting the survivor to the deceased (Bowlby, 1999). There is no good reason to believe that supernatural thinking and morality were connected with one another at the onset of supernatural thought; they presumably evolved in parallel at least initially (with morality present beforehand, as noted earlier), but then combined under some cultural and cognitive circumstances. Indeed, it is this combination that, under our definition, produced the first religious phenomena per se. What selective circumstances, then, might lead to these two phenotypes coming together? At this nexus in our scientific narrative of religious creation, it is important to address—and dispel—a biologically based conception of the origin of religion that I see as antithetical to evolutionary biology itself. Religion is thus seen by some researchers as arising as a spontaneous byproduct of other traits, as driven by the hyperactivity of agencydetecting mental modules, as canalized by evolved constraints on brain functions, or as maladaptive, nonadaptive, or delusional side effects of selection in other contexts (e.g., Atran, 2002; Atran & Henrich, 2010; Dawkins, 2006; Powell & Clarke, 2012). The primary difficulty with these arguments is that religiosity and religion represent central features of the cognitive and cultural landscapes of virtually all human societies, including hunter-gatherers who are believed to resemble our ancestors over tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. If religious cognition, rituals, and institutions were maladaptive, or neutral and under the radar of selection, their aspects could not have increased in frequency and it would certainly not be universal; this is precisely opposite to the pattern

expected under basic evolutionary theory (Bulbulia, 2004). There is no question, at least in my view, that humans have genetically evolved, adaptively, the capacity to conceive, enact, and experience religiosity and culturally evolved forms of religion that serve core functions in human societies. The questions are how this evolutionary process occurred, and most importantly how to find out.

The Origins and Early Evolution of Religious Thought and Behavior

We have discussed religion as an entity, but we must remember that it involves a mosaic of cognitive, behavioral, and cultural elements, connected by commonalities that include the sacred, supernatural, magical, and spiritual. It is the linking of these elements with cooperation and conceptions of morality or “proper behavior” that constitute the origins of religion. As described above, the general, proximate mechanisms whereby cooperation can evolve include mutualism, manipulation or repression, and kinship. Our goal thus becomes, in part, generating plausible and testable scenarios for how these three processes can join the supernatural or sacred with morality, in the frameworks of typical human social interactions structured by maximizing of inclusive fitness.

The Religious Brood

Consider the most basic of primate or human groups: a mother with her offspring. We have discussed above how patterns of kinship within such a family generate mixtures of cooperation with conflict: The mother is equally related to each of her offspring, and thus is selected to treat each equally in provision of resources (all else equal), but each offspring is selected to seek to obtain more resources than its sibling does, and more than the mother is selected to provide it. The system resembles a multi-way tug of war, in that relatedness values of one-half promote cooperation, but individuals are also unrelated for half of their genes, which promotes competition. Such competition is socially wasteful because energy and time are expended in the conflicts (e.g., fighting among siblings, tantrums in young children) that could be devoted to higher survival and reproduction of all individuals concerned; such conflicts indeed occur in some circumstances only because, on average, they generate a net inclusive fitness advantage to one party (the relative winner) at a cost to others. But the expression, intensity, and outcome of such conflicts depends on who is in control of cogni-

tion and behavior, and in this regard it is the mother who, especially in humans, has profound advantages. The mother is thus physically dominant over her young children and can physically repress competition between them; but more importantly, she is culturally dominant, being the primary source of social learning and enculturation. Human children have indeed evolved to “overlearn”—to accept cultural information more or less uncritically because its assimilation, rapid and copious, is crucially important to becoming a successful adult (van Schaik & Burkart, 2011). What this means is that as soon as children are old enough to understand, the mother can, and should, imbue children with any culturally based motivations for “proper” behavior (i.e., behavior in the interests of the mother, her kin group, and their social group more generally) that she can. The best motivations for good, “moral” behavior would instill a fear of retribution, generate strong and vivid memories, and work even when the mother was not present. These properties are met most directly by supernatural, religious agents, imagined or believed-in by the mother, that reside within her mind and the social/cultural ethos. In its simplest expressed form, such agents inhabit short narratives invented by the mother, her ancestors, or other group members. Such narratives are exemplified by the story from a Mayan boy of 6 or 7 years who urinated in the local river, and was told by his mother words he has never forgotten: “whoever does this, when he dies, he will not be able to go directly to heaven. The soul will be sent to the ocean in search of the urine . . . and must remove it from the ocean in order to be accepted into heaven” (Montejo, 2001, p. 189). This is religion, the supernatural plus morality, at its most basic. The mother tells an imagined story (that she was told as a girl—by her mother, in this case) with supernatural content, to instill “good” behavior in a relative. The origin of such stories only requires the ability to imagine some powerful agent (that need not exist), and the sense to invoke such an agent to motivate one’s young children, thereby increasing one’s inclusive fitness. Such stories can teach lessons in any relevant context: to reduce competition among siblings; to foster cooperation among kin or in one’s group more generally; to learn and remember the (“sacred”) the importance and properties of certain game animals, crops, or water supplies; or to honor one’s ancestors (and thereby help serve their interests, and those of the family and group more broadly). The tendencies of children to “naturally” The Kin Selection of Religion

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believe in divine agents from early ages (Bloom, 2007; Richert & Barrett, 2005) suggests that they have evolved to be sensitive to religious enculturation, perhaps due to the benefits thereby accrued. Within a group of siblings, supernatural proscriptions or other means of cognitive manipulation by the mother benefit her by reducing wasteful, competitive interference between copies of her genes in her offspring (Coe, Palmer, Palmer, & DeVito, 2010; Palmer et al., 2008); the process can also be beneficial to the offspring themselves to the extent that it motivates behavior that helps kin and one’s larger circle of (kin-dense) social significance, and thus teaches children how to maximize their inclusive fitness subject to the contingencies of kin-network and group-level social/ cultural cooperation as embodied in moral codes and ecological views of the world. This hypothesis is supported most directly by strong positive associations of parent religiosity with the prosocial behavior of their children, with clear benefits of religious enculturation for their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development (Bartkowski, Xu, & Levin, 2008). The process whereby the moral joins with the supernatural, to reduce competition between kin and increase cooperation between them, can be generalized and extended across generations, because oldergeneration individuals will always benefit from reduced competition among their descendants ­ (Coe et al., 2010; Coe & Palmer, 2008, 2013). This cultural mechanism should also work for psychological kin and nonrelatives in one’s group, in the frameworks of mutualism and repression of competition by religious agents, though the strength of such effects should vary depending on the strength of among-group (compared to within-group) ecological and social selective pressures (Lahti & Weinstein, 2005). This logic leads to the following question: Why are supernatural and sacred claims, stories, guides, and admonitions so effective at changing behavior when they cannot be objectively verified, and many individuals, especially adults, may secretly question their reality? Why is proper behavior, especially among adults, not sustained predominantly by other, nonreligious means such as forms of secular policing?

Powers of the Supernatural

Supernatural power and agency exhibit a number of properties that make them ideally suited for motivating human cooperation, compared to other 144

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mechanisms. First, supernatural authority, unlike human authority, cannot be questioned without casting aspersions on the foundations of the cultural identity of one’s group, one’s ancestors back to stories of creation, and the suite of traits that represent one’s “cultural survival vehicle” (Calhoun, 1980; Pagel, 2012). In historical times, such aspersions have been routinely punishable by death as “heresy.” In this context, religious and magical power and claims can be sustained as unconscious metaphors for their secular human equivalents, which are accepted as true because all or most individuals, or individuals in power (in hierarchical societies), usually gain from doing so (Palmer et al., 2010). Second, supernatural power is complete power; its agents are, or can be, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient, such that in principle one can never “get away” with transgressions, even within one’s thoughts (Rossano, 2007). These properties make supernatural policing socially “cheap” as well as effective; agents rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior are continually present, and indeed should become internalized into one’s moral conscience (e.g., Atkinson & Bourrat, 2011). By contrast, direct policing by humans is costly in requiring time and energy that could be devoted directly to the production of goods, services, and offspring; it is also potentially disruptive in that secular power can be abused in the service of nepotistic and personal selfinterest. Humans do, of course, engage in actual social and physical punishments of transgressions, but normally, in small-scale groups, they do so in the context of acting, more or less through consensus, on the agreed behalf of supernatural agents (e.g., Wadley, 1999), and often through shamans who mediate between the worldly and divine (Steadman & Palmer, 1994). Supernatural agents though, at their most effective, supremely motivate self-policing, the most effective way to suppress deviations from proper, moral behavior (Gintis, 2003). Third, supernatural agents are memorable and engaging (especially for children), and naturally generate cultural narratives that themselves serve as models for teaching and modeling proper behavior in the framework of one’s culture. It is these stories, most often oral cultural narratives, which embody, sustain, and transmit core cultural knowledge essential to a group’s survival and to maintaining its unique identity (e.g., Anthony, 2013; Coe, Aiken, & Palmer, 2006; Rink, 1875, pp. 86–87; Sugiyama, 2001). Stories with supernatural content are constrained in content only by human imagination, and even today,

in the broader contexts of narrative formation in literature, media, and the arts, they revolve around human social conflicts and confluences of interest with the near-universal triumph of good over evil. Humans learn social skills from such stories, and from the alternative scenario-building—as safe play in the mind—that they inspire (Alexander, 1989). Finally, supernatural agents are flexible and can take immaterial, human, animal, or landscape forms. They can explain, a-rationalize, be responsible for, or be thanked for any events that may transpire in human experience. They also motivate worship, considered here as social displays indicative of one’s own moral thought and behavior, which serve as mechanisms to instill and sustain optimism, confidence, unity of purpose, and cultural identity. Worship and prayer indeed appear to represent, at least in part, social placebos that are commonly effective (as are medicinal placebos, due to their optimizing effects on neuroimmune functioning; Humphrey & Skoyles, 2012) in leading to favorable social consequences, as are “nocebos” (belief in negative consequences; Hahn, 1997), when supernatural agents are disobeyed and displeased. Indeed, religious belief can exert a range of positive psychological and physical effects, including the enhanced health effects of religiosity reported across many studies (e.g., Koenig, King, & Carson, 2012). Supernatural agents are, of course, not always punishing or rewarding to humans; they may also be capricious, or indifferent, or exhibit other humanlike traits. In keeping with our behavioral/ecological, functionalist perspective on religious phenotypes as adaptations, such personality variation should reflect the nature of selective pressures to which different cultures are subjected, and how controllable such pressures are by collective human actions. Thus, more-punishing agents are expected where groups are selected in the context of avoiding collective misfortunes by cooperation, more-rewarding agents are expected when cooperation promotes more-beneficial events such as good harvests, and more-capricious, or disinterested, agents are expected when humans live under ecological and social conditions where collective, cooperative actions can have smaller impacts on fitness-related outcomes. Such considerations lead to clear cross-cultural, comparative predictions, as discussed in more detail below.

Synergism of the Supernatural with Moral

The previous section discussed a scenario for how morality may have initially merged with ­supernatural

agency and sacred content. How might these two phenotypes coevolve together? Major transitions in ecology and evolution are often driven by positive feedbacks, whereby a suite of changes occurs because two sets of causes or selective agents mutually reinforce one another as change proceeds (Crespi, 2004). In the early evolution of religion, the initial strengthening of moral systems by incorporating supernatural content would be expected, all else equal, to result in a social/economic surplus: As societies became more cooperative under the effects of this new, religious, adaptation, they would have become more prosocial and collectively productive. However, as in the evolution of social cooperation among other animals, the generation of new or increased social resources generates stronger selection pressures for gaining benefits through exploitation, and selfserving behavior, by some parties (Lahti, 2009). What this means is that higher, more broad-based levels of moral behavior should themselves select for enhanced and increased means of policing to prevent and reduce exploitation, which in turn should enhance and increase the role of the supernatural and sacred in punishing immoral behavior and rewarding the good. By this synergism hypothesis, morality and the supernatural may coevolve under positive feedback, at least during periods of disequilibrium when social/behavioral/ecological conditions are subject to culturally driven change. In principle, after the initial joint evolution of these two sets of phenotypes, periods of synergism could be prompted by changes in either one; for example, increased morality-based cooperation could evolve culturally due to greater external threats, or increased supernatural cultural content could evolve due to an influx of efficacious god-concepts from neighboring groups. This hypothesis, though conjectural, could be evaluated in phylogenetic frameworks and by testing its assumptions, such as economic benefits from more-effective moral systems.

The Origins of Gods The ancestor cult is the transposition to the religious plane of the relationship of parents and children. —Fortes (1959, p. 30)

The people of Nyansongoven view their religion as a set of demands made on them by the ancestor spirits. —Tatje and Hsu (1969)

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The supernatural and sacred can be applied to places, plants, animals, humans, and abstract or imagined entities. A more or less universal feature of these applications in small-scale societies is so-called animism, the belief or worldview that living creatures in nature, and particular places, are imbued with souls or spirits (e.g., Bird-David, 1999). Although it represents a facet of religiosity, animism remains somewhat separate from morality because it is not directly concerned with relations among humans; instead, its focus is bonds and connections between humans and nonhuman phenomena in the world that exhibit sacred or spiritual properties. Again, there are no Western distinctions here between “supernatural,” “natural,” and “not natural”; humans are simply an integral part of the world and, to humans, creatures and places are recognized as “sacred” to lesser or greater degrees. A simple behavioral/ecological explanation for animism is that it spiritually “tags” animals, plants, and places that are especially important, with regard to ecological considerations, for the long-term wellbeing of one’s cultural group (e.g., Anthony, 2013; Rose, James, & Watson, 2003) (see Table 9.1). These may be prey animals, medicinal plants, agricultural plants, water holes, streams, defensive positions, shelters, and any other aspects of the world that interact with any of these in functional or indicative ways. Such species and places, and the landscapes and ecological networks within which they are embedded, represent key sources of sustenance and survival; selection should strongly favor cultural means of teaching and learning about them via rituals, remembering their properties, protecting them via taboos and offerings, and fostering kinship-like emotional bonds with them as a mechanism to sustain the motivation to protect, conserve, and sustain. Indeed, in animism people can be said to “envision their connection to the animated agencies or ‘nature’ as bonds of sharing between relatives” (Campbell, 2015). Such psychological/ecological adaptations will be especially vital for a species that is fully capable, even as small-scale societies, of inflicting severe environmental degradation through tree-cutting, burning, overharvesting, and disrupting sources of water (e.g., Diamond, 2005). Moral considerations come into play for avoiding tragedies of the commons, although here the indirect reciprocity is more indirect than for human social interactions themselves. The Australian aboriginal “dreamtime” ethos represents an especially clear example of the ecological bases of these forms of religious cognition 146

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and behavior, in that ecological conditions in the Australian deserts are among the harshest on earth, strengthening selection for cultural/moral/supernatural mechanisms fostering survival. Indeed, as described by Rose et al. (2003, p. 3), totemism among aboriginals in New South Wales “articulates a system of kinship with the natural world,” with relationships “based on enduring solidarity, responsibility and care,” where individuals forbear to hunt, or burn, due to the sacredness of ecologically crucial sites. These ideas trace back directly to RadcliffeBrown (1945, 1952), one of the first anthropologists to consider religious and kinship systems as interrelated, functional, and adaptive components of culture, from social and ecological perspectives. They may also help us in understanding current human emotional bonds with nature and motivations to protect and conserve the natural world based on spirituality, beauty, and human well-being. A sacred water-hole, or the spirit of goannas, may be supernatural, but we would not necessarily consider them as godlike. “God” has developed as a concept that is more or less closely attached to humankind-forms, and its origin appears to stem from another near-universal feature of religiosity in small-scale societies: the worship of ancestors (e.g., Tatje & Hsu, 1969; Shiels, 1975; Steadman, Palmer, & Tilley, 1996). As such, ancestor worship represents a key nexus in the evolution of religion, which for the first time directly combines kinship with socially interactive morality and the supernatural or sacred. The “ancestor” in ancestor worship can have any of several meanings, beyond its generic one as genetic forebearer. First, an ancestor can be a deceased relative who, even if no longer living, may not be considered as “dead” until everyone who knew and loved them has died (Stegeborn, 1999, p. 271). Second, an ancestor may be a deceased relative, or a cultural group member, who has earned this designation as a sign of honor, through having contributed especially highly in some way to one’s cultural group or circle of kin (e.g., Plath, 1964, p. 303). Third, an ancestor may be an ultimate, distant progenitor of one’s cultural group who was instrumental in its foundation. Across all of these contexts, “worship” of ancestors refers to obedience, ac­ cept­ ance as a moral conscience, subservience, emotional bonding, supplication, ­ provision of sacrifice, and the performance of rituals; all of these forms of worship display to living kin, and others in one’s group, moral character and a willingness to follow the traditional rules of

c­ooperative behavior, as well as reinforcing one’s own cognition of kinship ties, service, and emotional support (e.g., Coe & Palmer, 2008; Plath, 1964; Steadman & Palmer, 2008; Wadley, 1999). As noted by Radcliffe-Brown (1945): Rites can therefore be shown to have a specific social function when, and to the extent that, they have for their effect to regulate, maintain and transmit from one generation to another sentiments on which the constitution of the society depends. (p. 35)

Ancestors are similar in some ways to the spir­it­ual agents who would punish our Mayan boy for defiling his local river, but they differ in functionally important ways. Thus, ancestors do not just represent supernatural, unquestionable moral authorities and arbiters; they also, literally as well as figuratively, created the living and their culture, and they carry the bonds of kinship and the power of the extended, cooperative family circle of kin into the realm of the sacred (Alexander, 2006,  2013; Crespi & Summers, 2014; Lahti, 2009). They can also do so at multiple levels, given the hierarchical structure of pedigrees and phylogenies: For example, among native peoples of the Late Intermediate Period (1000–1400 ce) of the central Andes, one finds archaeological evidence of local kin-group (i.e., household) ancestor worship, ancestor worship at higher levels whose descendants encompass a broader group, and sacred “founding” ancestors at the highest level (Mantha, 2009). In principle, each of these levels of ancestors would hold sway, through human intermediaries, over a larger and larger set of more and more distant kin, whose collective, cooperative actions may be selected for— invoked by the relevant ancestors—in functionally salient contexts: at the highest level, defense of the entire group; at intermediate levels, building large structures or time-limited agricultural work; and at the lowest levels, local tasks and day-to-day problemsolving. At each level, cultural/psychological kinship, as well as biological kinship, structure and motivate the cooperative activities; failure to obey the ancestors is expected to bring dis­as­ter from supernatural sanctions or wrath, and may well bring it through nonsupernatural effects of noncooperation. More generally, religious rituals focused on ancestors strengthen kinship links (Rossano, 2010, p. 148; Steadman et al., 1996) and foster cooperation broadly (Fischer, Callander, Reddish, & Bulbulia, 2013) through demonstrating social solidarity and awareness of shared pasts and fates. Other central facets of many traditional religions,

such as totemism, which involves the assignment of animal or plant “tags” to individuals within networks of kinship-associated lineages, also generate and maintain links to common ancestors, and generate a new form of psychological kinship whose bonds connect humans both with each other and with important features of their local ecology and landscapes (their totems). Totemism can thus serve as “cultural mechanisms aimed at building and sustaining social relationships between close and distant kin,” by encouraging “family-like cooperation between distant kin” (Palmer et al., 2008, p. 724) (see Table 9.1).

The Concept of God Certain types of psychological security found in a relationship to a personal God in the West are found only in relation to the actual family in Japan. —DeVos (1958, p. 402)

We all have some concept of God, be it an allpowerful white-robed figure above the clouds or a mysterious agent who created the heavens, earth, and underworld. How and in what social context, though, would the original concept of God most likely have arisen? I suggest here, following Alexander (2006, 2013) and Crespi and Summers (2014) that the concept of God arose as a metaphor for one’s circle of kin and social significance—one’s kinship and cultural network, if you will, including ancestors. Under inclusive fitness theory, the “meaning” or “goal” of life is service toward this circle of kin, and our culturally bonded nonrelatives, where “service” means altruism, cooperation, and mutualism that  maximize one’s inclusive fitness within the constraints and selective contingencies of one’s larger social and cultural context. Under religious moral codes and obligations, the meaning or goal of life is, similarly, service to God (or gods), who represent core concepts and figures within one’s social and cultural ethos. The concept of God can thus be seen, fundamentally, as a metaphor for our circle of biological and psychological kin and family, extended across pedigrees and affines, and into the past to powerful, inspiring ancestors. As described by Alexander (2006): To the extent that the concept of God actually arose as a metaphor for the kindred, or circle of kin, then—perhaps surprisingly, at first—the evolutionary version of the meaning of life becomes synonymous with the religious version of the meaning of life. In both cases the meaning of life is to serve God.

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By this line of reasoning, the first human-styled gods derived from ancestors, who, as described above, motivated cooperation among their descendants, thereby reducing competition between them, and thus generating, and sustaining, a suite of traits that enhanced cultural survival and spread (Coe et al., 2010). These first gods, often likely as founding ancestors, “created” their followers both genetically and culturally, and then, under our functionalist perspective, evolved culturally, in their effects, to foster ecological and social benefits to survival and reproduction. Such benefits accrue through such features as rituals, animism, forms of ancestor worship, and totemism, which are more or less well matched, adaptively, to local ecological and social conditions (see Table  9.1)—until, of course, such conditions change.

Ecological Revolution and the Explosion of Kinship Most religions teach that God is the power that watches over and guides their particular group. Gods apparently began as tribal gods (which we can consider as “kin circle” gods), and it is obvious but unfortunate that they have never ceased being such, even if particular religions (in effect, large and sometimes fragmented tribes) have become huge and widely distributed (that is, God was, and still is, a way of winning by promoting a particular kind of collective good feeling that makes a group a more formidable force against threatening or competitive human groups). —Alexander (2006)

The human agricultural transitions, which took place in parallel at various sites across the globe, revolutionized human ecological and social structures within an evolutionary blink of an eye (Gowdy & Krall, 2015). Thus, these revolutions all led to much larger group sizes, economies based on territory and property, and social hierarches founded on wealth and power (e.g., Lahti, 2009). These political and economic transformations led, in turn, to systems of human cooperation (and competition) based more on repression and coercion, and less on mutualism and genetically based kinship, although the agents of repression were commonly based around kinship through leadership by a ruling family and lineage. Local kinship, and local ancestorbased gods, certainly still exerted effects, but became more or less subservient to the power of emerging states, which often involved a merging of religious 148

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with political/economic power (even if leaders did not also become declared hereditary gods, as described in what follows). The transition from huntergatherer to agriculture-based social and religious systems was thus profound in scope, but intermediate religious systems, centered on superior ancestral gods who were uniquely able to serve and protect both ruling families and all others within the group, have been described that neatly bridge the transition (Shiels, 1980). A key consequence of the agricultural transition is that the emergence of leaders, coincident with states, creates conditions where specific living humans, and their ancestors and descendants, can become self-appointed and culture-appointed gods or godlike figures, thereby consolidating and retaining power through the manipulative co-option of god concepts coupled with political instruments of repression. Such leadership becomes increasingly important as groups become larger, which results in greater potential for within-group conflicts (strengthening selection for repressive leadership) as well as greater potential for coming into conflict with other groups that have different, incompatible gods and leaders. A leader’s subjects may also, however, benefit from leadership in a mutualistic way (relative to less effective central control) if their leaders are effective in retaining and acquiring land and other resources. What are the expected roles of kinship in religiosity, as these changes proceed? As groups increase in size, bondedness, identity, and kinship at the level of the functional political groups (incipient or actual states) should become more and more psychological and cultural, and less and less based on genetic relatedness, although long-term ancestral (actual or supposed) genealogical links, such as those linking each of the twelve tribes of Israel, or those linking Mormons with the “lost” tribes of Israel (Dziebel, 2007, p. 53) may gain importance and define group identities. Importantly, such developments coincide with the emergence of monotheism, whereby one all-powerful god excludes all others, along with the emergence of inclusiveness and universality, whereby individuals can freely join a religion, at least for some faiths in this period such as Islam and Christianity (see Figure 9.1 and Table 9.1). Both of these historical processes reinforce the emerging primacy of psychological kinship over genealogical kinship, although cultural “markers” of long-term ancestry, such as skin color and language, may also mediate whether psychological kinship is effective in unifying particular groups.

In the context of psychological reactions to such factors as skin color and language, and more generally, it is important to recognize that with the advent of agriculture and cities, changes to manifestations of culture and religion began to happen sufficiently rapidly that they should represent much more cultural than genetic evolution. The selective pressures that drive changes in religion thus primarily involve cultural group selection, whereby groups with particular means of agricultural production and transport, methods of warfare, and patterns of in­her­it­ ance and marriage—and their interrelated forms of religiosity that support cultural and demographic success, especially in group-versus-group conflicts— gain advantages over others. Monotheism can thus be considered as a cultural/religious adaptation to especially strong conflicts between groups, where single, strong leaders, both supernatural and secular, and effective systems of motivation and punishment from both levels of authority, provide adaptive cultural advantages (Johnson, 2005; Lahti, 2009). Given an increasing prevalence and severity of conflicts among groups, the inclusiveness of religions may also provide benefits in that conquered people can be culturally, religiously assimilated, and others can also be motivated to join through perceived advantages to doing so. Both mechanisms thereby increase the power of groups with such religious systems and facilitate their spread. Monotheistic, inclusive religions may support unique forms of psychological kinship, in that all worshipers become equally related (indeed, ideally, related by unity) “siblings” in a huge family with a shared moral code supported by a single, all-powerful, and unquestionable God. Such structures generate systems of potential universal fairness (Lahti, 2009), and to the extent that they also support nuclear and extended family structures (which indeed most do), they are ideally suited for the individual maximization of inclusive fitness through behavioral effects at both the local and cultural group levels. Larger, morecooperative families make for larger, stronger, morecooperative and successful religions, as well as states. That said, larger more culturally d ­ iverse religions may also be more prone to “cultural speciation” by splintering and splitting along ideological grounds, or indeed along kinship and leadership inheritance-based lines, as between Shia and Sunni. An important final consideration regarding the recent evolution of religiosity and religious institutions is that it is often difficult or problematic to conceptualize “adaptation” in these circumstances,

because (1) human social-cultural environments have changed so rapidly that maladaptations are expected, such that the cognitive architectures of religion, expressed in novel environments, can give rise to behaviors that are nonoptimal for some or all parties; and (2) cultural group selection can be considered “adaptive” in the framework of groups with particular cultural traits increasing in size (and these traits increasing in frequency) more than less­successful groups and traits, but such changes need not result in any increases to individual well-being, especially when they happen too fast for genetically based ecological and social adaptation to keep pace. Indeed, there is no question that some or many cognitive and affective aspects of psychological kinship, as embedded and expressed in religions of recent societies, evolved under nuclear-family, extendedfamily, small-group, and tribal social conditions, which are different in some ways from the situations that people have faced for the past few hundred to several thousand years. These differences need not be profound, because humans have always lived among mixtures of close and distant kin as well as non-kin. However, humans are faced now with one clearly daunting evolutionary/religious novelty: huge, highly armed, religious nation-states driven by ­parochial moralities and supported by irreconcilable ­supernatural beings. Evolutionary theory can, I think, be useful here in emphasizing, in a humanistic if not necessarily a scientific way, the core commonalities of religions, especially their shared bases in service to one’s circle of kin and service to God, their roles in helping humans to fit harmoniously into their environments, and their ability to motivate forms of altruistic and mutualistic helping that need not be driven by fear of shared enemies or the dehumanization of people harboring other faiths. It is perhaps the teaching to children of such ideas, in conjunction with their enculturation into cultures of their own groups, which provides the most realistic hopes for a future in which the costs of religious and cultural conflicts do not overwhelm their benefits from cooperation.

Conclusions and Prospects

Like all other cultural phenotypes, human religion and religiosity have evolved, subject to the facts that human psychological phenotypes and human cultures vary, and that some variants are perpetuated more readily than others. I have described a theory that considers religion as one core facet of human “cultural survival vehicles,” which originated and The Kin Selection of Religion

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evolve predominantly in the contexts of human kinship. Indeed, under this theory, religiosity fundamentally represents and embodies forms of genetic, psychological, and cultural kinship, whereby individuals become bonded together in prosocial relationships that are family-like and mutualistic, but can be even more effective than families at fostering cooperation. In this framework, forms of religiosity should vary among cultural groups in direct relation to the ecological and social selective pressures to which they have been subjected, and in direct relation to the nature of kinship systems themselves. This general prediction makes for straightforward cross-cultural tests (e.g., see Tatje & Hsu, 1969; Shiels, 1975, for nonphylogenetic analyses; Botero et al., 2014; Watts et al., 2015, for phylogenetic tests), which are likely to be most effective among huntergatherer and other small-scale groups, and earlyagricultural groups, for which recent evolutionary novelties and mismatches should not confound results. Other forms of tests for these ideas can most usefully center on the endocrinological basis for religiosity and kinship-related cognition and affect, which should be broadly overlapping (Crespi & Summers, 2014). Most notably, the hormone oxytocin, which mediates bonding between humans in various contexts (Crespi, 2016), is associated with religiosity, spirituality, empathy, and morality, as well as perception of kinship (Crespi & Summers, 2014; De Dreu & Kret, 2016; Fischer-Shofty, Levkovitz, & Shamay-Tsoory, 2013; Grigorenko, 2011; Holbrook, Hahn-Holbrook, & Holt-Lunstad, 2015; Sasaki, Mojaverian, & Kim, 2015; Walter et al., 2012; Zak, 2012); it should thus represent a proximate nexus for the joint expression and evolution of kinship and religion. For all such analyses, it will be essential to consider proximate causal factors in their environmental contexts, since what evolves genetically is culturally dependent capacities for religious phenotypes, rather than any sort of deterministic effects. The main conclusion of this chapter is that religion represents a set of culture-specific behavioralecological adaptations founded on expansions in conceptualization of kinship. As such, kinship, and its genetic, endocrine, and neurological underpinnings, become crucial to understanding how religious beliefs, behavior, and institutions have evolved. These ideas generate strong consilience of evolutionary theory with religiosity, and provide a foundation for advancing our understanding of religious cooperation, conflict, and personal belief that is based in scientific inquiry but encompasses the diversity and meanings of spiritual experience. 150

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Mantha, A. (2009). Territoriality, social boundaries and ancestor veneration in the central Andes of Peru. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 28, 158–176. Montejo, V.  D. (2001). The road to heaven: Jakaltek Maya beliefs, religion and the ecology. In J.  A.  Grim (Ed.), Indigenous traditions and ecology: The interbeing of cosmology and community (pp. 175–196). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Myers, M. G. (1975). Kinship, religion, and the transformation of society: The 1975 Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Teaching Award address. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University. Pagel, M. (2012). Wired for culture: Origins of the human social mind. New York, NY: Norton. Palmer, C.  T. (2010). Cultural traditions and the evolutionary advantages of noninnovation. In M.  J.  O’Brien, & S.  J.  Shennan (Eds.), Innovation in cultural systems: Contributions from evolutionary anthropology (pp. 161–174). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Palmer, C. T., Steadman, L. B., Cassidy, C., & Coe, K. (2008). Totemism, metaphor and tradition: Incorporating cultural traditions into evolutionary psychological explanations of Religion. Zygon, 43, 713–729. Palmer, C. T., Steadman, L. B., Cassidy, C., & Coe, K. (2010). The importance of magic to social relationships. Zygon, 45, 317–337. Plath, D. W. (1964). Where the family of God is the family: The role of the dead in Japanese households. American Anthropologist New Series, 66, 300–317. Powell, R., & Clarke, S. (2012). Religion as an evolutionary byproduct: A critique of the standard model. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 63, 457–486. Qirko, H. (2004). Altruistic celibacy, kin-cue manipulation, and the development of religious institutions. Zygon, 39, 681–706. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1945). Religion in society. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 75, 33–43. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1952). Structure and function in primitive society, essays and addresses. London, UK: Cohen & West. Richerson, P., & Boyd, R. (2001). The evolution of subjective commitment to groups: A tribal instinct hypothesis. In R. M. Nesse (Ed.), The evolution of commitment (pp. 186–220). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Richert, R. A., & Barrett, J. L. (2005). Do you see what I see? Young children’s assumptions about God’s perceptual abilities. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 15, 283–295. Rink, H. (1875). Tales and traditions of the Eskimo, with a sketch of their habits, religion, language and other peculiarities. London, UK: Blackwood. Rose, D., James, D., & Watson, C. (2003). Indigenous kinship with the natural world in New South Wales. New South Wales, Australia: NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. Rossano, M. J. (2007). Supernaturalizing social life: Religion and the evolution of human cooperation. Human Nature, 18, 272–294. Rossano, M.  J. (2010). Supernatural selection: How religion evolved. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Sasaki, J.  Y., Mojaverian, T., & Kim, H.  S. (2015). Religion priming and an oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) polymorphism interact to affect self-control in a social context. Development and Psychopathology, 27(1), 97–109. doi:10.1017/S0954579414001321

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Shiels, D. (1975). Toward a unified theory of ancestor worship: A cross-cultural study. Social Forces, 54, 427–440. doi:10.1093/ sf/54.2.427 Shiels, D. (1980). The great ancestors are watching: A crosscultural study of superior ancestral religion. Sociology of Religion, 41, 247–257. Smuts, B.  B. (1985). Sex and friendship in baboons. New York, NY: Aldine. Steadman, L. B., & Palmer, C. T. (1994). Visiting dead ancestors: Shamans as interpreters of religious traditions. Zygon, 29, 173–189. Steadman, L. B., & Palmer, C. T. (2008). The supernatural and natural selection: Religion and evolutionary success. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Steadman, L.  B., Palmer, C.  T., & Tilley, C.  F. (1996). The universality of ancestor worship. Ethnology, 35, 63–76. Stegeborn, W. (1999). Wanniyala-aetto. In R. B. Lee, & R. H. Daly (Eds.), The Cambridge encyclopedia of hunters and gatherers (pp. 269–273). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sugiyama, M.  S. (2001). Narrative theory and function: Why evolution matters. Philosophy and Literature, 25, 233–250. doi:10.1353/phl.2001.0035 Tatje, T., & Hsu, F. L. K. (1969). Variations in ancestor worship beliefs and their relation to kinship. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 25, 153–172. Trivers, R.  L. (1974). Parent-offspring conflict. American Zoologist, 14, 247–262. Trubenová, B., & Hager, R. (2012). Reproductive skew theory. In eLS. Retrieved from http://www.els.net. doi:10.1002/ 9780470015902.a0023661 van Schaik, C. P., & Burkart, J. M. (2011). Social learning and evolution: The cultural intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 366, 1008–1016. doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0304 Wade, N. (2009). The faith instinct: How religion evolved and why it endures. New York, NY: Penguin. Wadley, R. L. (1999). Disrespecting the dead and the living: Iban ancestor worship and the violation of mourning taboos. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5, 595–610. Wallis, J. L. (1991). Church ministry and the free rider problem: Religious liberty and disestablishment. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 50, 183–196. Wallwork, E. (1984). Religion and social structure in The Division of Labor. American Anthropologist, 86(1), 43–64. doi:10.1525/ aa.1984.86.1.02a00040 Walter, N. T., Montag, C., Markett, S., Felten, A., Voigt, G., & Reuter, M. (2012). Ignorance is no excuse: Moral judgments are influenced by a genetic variation on the oxytocin receptor gene. Brain and Cognition, 78, 268–273. doi:10.1016/j. bandc.2012.01.003. Watts, J., Greenhill, S.  J., Atkinson, Q.  D., Currie, T.  E., Bulbulia, J., Gray, R.  D. (2015). Broad supernatural punishment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B, 282, 20142556. Whiten, A., & Erdal, D. (2012). The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 367, 2119–2129. doi:10.1098/rstb.2012.0114. Zak, P. J. (2012). The moral molecule. New York, NY: Penguin/ Dutton.

10

CH A PTE R

The Coevolution of Religious Belief and Intuitive Cognitive Style via Individual-Level Selection

Michael N. Stagnaro and David G. Rand

Abstract This chapter introduces a novel theory for the coevolution of religious belief and intuitive cognition. The theory bridges the byproduct and functionalist perspectives on the evolution of religion, without requiring selection at the level of the group. It starts with the byproduct position that cognitive mechanisms yielding advantages unrelated to belief gave rise to early protoreligious beliefs, and associated empirical evidence that intuition supports belief while deliberation breeds skepticism. It argues that once byproduct-induced early beliefs became prevalent within a community, those who questioned would face sanctions from committed believers (for example, out of fear that those who questioned belief would anger the gods/ancestors, bringing harm to the community). This sanctioning of belief questioning creates individual-level selection pressure to believe and, thus, individual-level selection pressure for intuitive cognition and against deliberative cognition. In this way, religious belief and intuitive cognition can be maintained by natural selection, without creating group-level benefits. Key Words: evolution, religion, dual-process model, cognitive style, intuition, deliberation

The question of religion’s origin and what functions, if any, it serves has a long history in philosophy and the social sciences (Durkheim, 1959/1912; Hume, 1907; Jung, 1970). More recently, evolutionary theorists and cognitive scientist have begun to consider the origin of religion (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Barrett, 2004; Bloom, 2007; Boyer, 2001; D. Wilson, 2002). While various theories have been proposed to explain the evolution of religion, it remains a hotly debated topic. In this chapter, we summarize existing theories, and then propose a new theory that integrates evolutionary and cognitive accounts of religion, tying together past findings while making novel predictions. In efforts of the evolutionary behavioral sciences to explain the origin of religion, two major camps have developed over the past several years: those who claim that religion serves/served a function

and thus has been remained in the population due to the benefits it provides/provided (the functionalist position: Sosis, 2003; D.  Wilson, 2002), and those who claim that aspects of our cognition, selected by evolution, produced religious belief as an emergent byproduct, providing no fitness advantage in and of itself (the byproduct position: Atran, 2002; Bloom, 2007; Boyer, 1994). Along with these two positions is an extension of the byproduct camp that has gained much attention in the cognitive science of religion literature, a collection of theories that combine byproduct accounts with aspects of cultural group selection (Norenzayan, 2013; Shariff, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2010). Before introducing our own theory, we describe the logic behind each of these positions and discuss some of the questions that scholars have raised about each of them.

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The Functionalist Position

Participating in religious rituals and espousing religious beliefs requires individuals to bear many costs such as lost time, spent resources, and even physical pain. The fact that religion is so widespread despite these costs has convinced those in the functionalist camp that religion must have served an adaptive function. Functionalists argue that anything requiring such severe costs to one’s direct reproductive fitness (e.g., giving up a child to the celibate life of the clergy) or immediate loss of resources (e.g., the burning of crops to a higher god) could not develop accidently or be maintained over time (Sosis, 2003). Thus, they argue that religious beliefs must provide some significant benefit to its holders, enabling religion not only to survive but also to flourish for much of human history (Bulbulia, 2004). Importantly for this theory, these fitness benefits could not have simply come from religiously associated activities such as, say, communal prayer. Such benefits as the positive mental health effects from social bonding or the physical health benefits of purity laws cannot alone give rise to religion. These potentially beneficial components of religion could be decoupled from religious belief and the costs that religion entails. Only by tying the benefit to the actual act of religious belief, the functionalist perspective argues, can one make sense of how such a costly phenomenon came about and was maintained. The benefits of religious belief can be broadly divided into two general categories: health/well-being benefits and social/communal benefits. The former represent the relatively immediate gains one receives from engaging in religious activities and beliefs (e.g., improved physical and mental health, a sense of purpose, and coping with loss; Koenig, King, & Carson, 2012); the latter represent what are broadly described as social solidarity theories—benefits that come from the prolonged and communal implementation of religion (e.g., the signaling of cooperative intent, or protection from free-riders; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003; D. Wilson, 2002).

Health Benefits

A large body of work shows a positive relationship between physical/mental health and religious belief (Koenig & Cohen, 2001; Koenig, King, & Carson, 2012). One strand of evidence focuses on the relationship between religiosity and mortality. A number of meta-analyses have explored this relationship, showing that religious samples appear to 154

live longer compared with nonreligious samples (McCullough, Hoyt, Larson, Koenig, & Thoresen, 2000; Powell, Shahabi, & Thoresen, 2003). However, a number of these studies have received substantial criticism (Sloan, 2008): Along with presenting almost exclusively correlational data, much of this research has focused on church attendance among healthy populations. Thus, their results are difficult to draw conclusions from beyond the most basic claim that religious participation may protect healthy individuals from death, saying nothing about religious belief or controlling for alternative causes such as social support (Powell et al., 2003; Sloan & Bagiella, 2001). In an attempt to break from this pattern, several studies have investigated religion’s effects on clinical populations and measured religiosity directly. In one such study, researchers investigated the effects of religious belief on HIV prognosis. The authors compared patients who upon receiving a diagnosis of HIV increased in their levels of self-reported religiosity to those who decreased them. They found that an increase in religiosity is associated with a better prognosis over a 4-year period, even after controlling for age, gender, race, education, church attendance, initial viral load, medications, and a number of other relevant variables (Ironson, Stuetzle, & Fletcher, 2006). In another study, Blazer (2012) looked at the effects of religious beliefs on mental health. Researchers followed a sample of depressed and nondepressed religious individuals over 10 years and assessed how religiosity affected their depressive symptoms. They reported that participants who viewed religion as “highly important” were 76% less likely to show an episode of major depression during the follow-up visit. They also reported that this relationship persisted after controlling for religious attendance and denomination (Blazer, 2012). Many other studies have found positive relationships between religion and physical and mental health (Carrico et al., 2006; Friedlander, Kark, &  Stein, 1986; Livingston, Levine, & Moore, 1990;  Zamarra, Schneider, Besseghini, Robinson, & Salerno, 1996). However, it is difficult to distinguish between benefits from actual religious belief and benefits from activities associated with religion, such as community involvement and practices such as meditation. Thus, the relationship between actual belief and health benefits remains unclear; and, as mentioned above, it is essential to distinguish between activities associated with

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r­ eligion and actual religious belief, since the former cannot provide a clear explanation for how largescale religion has endured. Along with issues of religiously correlated behavior, researchers have also raised concerns regarding the methodology and accuracy in much of the religious health literature (Sloan, 2008). These concerns include focusing on health averages among populations that differ by denomination without showing variation on level of religiosity—such that claims of improved health outcomes may be more about the particular demographics recruited (i.e., educated or community-oriented individuals); reporting health results for populations that happen to be religious, but whose religious beliefs have nothing to do with the research question; looking at how religious beliefs influence medical decisions (e.g., organ donation, abortion decisions) rather than how they directly result in health outcomes; and the overwhelming prevalence of correlational research with comparatively little experimental evidence. All of these concerns suggest that there may not be a great deal of evidence of real health improvements resulting from religious belief (Sloan & Bagiella, 2001). One attempt to combine these findings into a coherent explanation is through the theory of motivated meaning-making (Inzlicht, Tullett, & Good, 2011). This theory states that religion is widely prevalent because it creates meaning in people’s lives, in ways that combat serious psychophysical threats such as anxiety, depression, and distress (Inzlicht & Tullett, 2010). Under this hypothesis, meaning is defined as “the perceived coherence between one’s beliefs, goals, and perceptions of the environment” (Inzlicht et al., 2011). The benefits of religious belief is through its ability to give purpose and direction to life, which mitigates such negative experiences as uncertainty, dissonance from errors, and the experience of feeling lost, all of which have been linked with anxiety (Gray & McNaughton, 2000). Religion thus calms the brain’s distress response, increasing its resistance to such serous health threats. A more explicitly evolutionary account has attempted to address the question of religion’s function by associating religious practices with the improved health outcomes of early humans. McClenon (1997) hypothesized that religious beliefs could have been adaptive for our earliest ancestors due to their relationship with altered states of consciousness and susceptibility to hypnosis. Those more susceptible to hypnosis and altered states of consciousness

could have enjoyed greater access due to the healing powers provided through the placebo effects associated with early religious and shamanistic ritual (Csordas & Kleinman, 1990; Kleinman, 1980; Rapkin, Straubing, & Holroyd 1991). McClenon argues that, given the evidence that susceptibility to hypnosis has a genetic basis (Duke, 1969; Morgan, 1973; Morgan, Hilgard, & Davert, 1970), those who received greater health benefits were more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on the genes associated with openness to religiosity and susceptibility to hypnosis (McClenon, 1993, 1997). Though this theory poses an interesting mech­an­ ism for early religious function and transmission, there are several questions it must answer. For example, if selection pressures drove a population to be hypersusceptible to hypnosis and suggestion, then that population would also be highly vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. This concern may be outweighed by the health benefits one would receive; however, the susceptibility to manipulation might leave religious populations more vulnerable to exploitation. In sum, though there is much research on the health benefits of religious belief, it is difficult to say with any certainty how much one can credit belief with improved health outcomes. Furthermore, while there are various theories regarding how this relationship between religion and improved health could lead to the development and propagation of religion, questions exist regarding the evolutionary logic underling these theories.

Social Benefits

Social solidarity theories of religion (Sosis & Alcorta, 2003) are focused on the problem of how cooperators find each other and maintain successful cooperative endeavors while avoiding exploitation by free-riders. The idea that religion promotes social cohesion—therefore serving some adaptive function—was heavily influenced by Emile Durkheim (1959/1912). However, the scholar most associated with this theory in recent years is David Slone Wilson (Wilson & Sober, 1994; Wilson, 2002). Wilson argued that because of its strong focus on morals and ethics, religion deemphasizes the individual and promotes the well-being of the group. Individuals who have internalized these morals and fear supernatural punishment, he claims, will act prosocially, thereby promoting group solidarity and cooperation. Wilson goes on to say that though some individuals will free-ride

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and cheat the system, they will also destabilize the community. Thus, groups with free-riders will be outcompeted by groups of solely cooperative members, which will lead to the stabilization of cooperation (D. Wilson, 2002). Despite its intuitive appeal, some critics have raised questions about the legitimacy of this theory (Dawkins, 1981; Grafen, 1984; Pinker, 2012) due to its reliance on competition between groups, or “group-level selection.” Some scholars have questioned whether the conditions necessary for sufficient selection at the level of the group were satisfied during ancestral human evolution (e.g., because human groups were permeable and cross-migration was possible) (Pinker, 2012). Proponents of group selection, on the other hand, have argued that these conditions were met, particularly in the context of cultural (rather than genetic) evolution (Choi & Bowles, 2007; Henrich, Boyd, & Richerson, 2008). In this chapter, we do not take a strong position on this issue, which has a long and bitter history in the evolutionary sciences (Dawkins, 1979; Henrich, Boyd, & Richerson, 2008; Okasha, 2006; Pinker, 2012). Instead, we simply note that some theories require group-level selection, and point out that claims involving group-level selection are controversial. Others advocating for a social benefit to religion have turned to theories that attempt to show how religion can stabilize cooperation at the level of the individual. Two main categories of these theories are those that use costly signals and those who use index signals. The costly signaling theory of religion views the costly aspects of religion as “honest signals” of communal commitment. That is, costly religious acts are viewed as signals that would not be worth sending unless the signaler was a true religious believer. In this way, religious practices offer a sign that distinguishes the sender from individuals who are nonbelievers and, therefore, potential free-riders (i.e., those unable or unwilling to send the signal) (Sosis & Alcorta, 2003). Zahavi (1975) was the first to discuss the idea of costly signaling and framed it as a “handicap.” The classic example is that of a peacock’s tail. Due to its size, the tail hampers the bird both when walking and in flight. A peacock of lesser quality would not be able to avoid predation and competition with such a costly tail, so if an adult male possesses the “handicap” of such a tail it is an honest signal of its genetic quality (Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997). Those who promote the idea of religious costly signaling equate the example above with costly 156

r­eligious beliefs (Sosis & Alcorta, 2003). Broadly speaking, they see the costs religious believers are willing to pay (e.g., time and material resources) as honest signals that they hold true belief and are thus trustworthy cooperative partners, especially when the religious beliefs include the fear of supernatural punishment and promise of supernatural reward. Those who do not believe, and therefore would not be afraid to free-ride, they argue, would either be unable or unwilling to pay these costs for religious participation (Bulbulia, 2004; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003). Under this view, agents go through a cost-benefit analysis when deciding whether to join a religious group or not. Religious costs (e.g., hours of prayer, weekly tithing) act as deterrents that increase the price of religious participation. Balanced against those costs are the potential gains (both in the current world and after death) that supernatural agents may bestow in exchange for religious participation. Those who actually believe in the religion thus include these gains in their cost-benefits analysis, while nonbelievers do not. As a result, it is only worth participating for those who hold, and participate in, true belief – thus signiling honestly (Sosis & Alcorta, 2003). To the extent that the religion stipulates cooperation and commitment to the religious community, those with true belief will feel compelled to cooperate whereas nonbelievers will free-ride, and the signaling mechanism will distinguish between the two. A serious issue with this theory is whether religious belief is actually advantageous. If some of the benefits from religious belief are real (e.g., being trusted by others to cooperate) in the sense that those who pay the costs and gain the benefits do better than those who do not, then even nonbelievers would have an incentive to join the group. If, on the other hand, the gains from religious belief are not real (or are insufficient to outweigh the costs), then religious participation would be a net loss and believers would be outcompeted by nonbelievers (Murray & Moore, 2009). The only way a costly signaling account would be able to explain religious belief, therefore, is if the (material, not subjective or “heavenly”) costs of religious participation were for some reason smaller for believers than for nonbelievers—which could make it worthwhile for believers to signal, but not nonbelievers (keeping the signal honest). It is unclear, however, why this should be so. Thus it is not clear how religion as costly signal could get off the ground. The second category of signaling theories involves what are known as index signals. Index signals are

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honest not because they are costly but because they are directly observable and thus are hard or impossible to fake (Smith & Harper, 2003). For example, the size of an animal could be considered an index signal of that animal’s strength. Because larger animals are almost always stronger, observing their size is an index of their strength. Index versions of religious signaling involve directly observable acts as true commitments on face value. Religious behavior as a “hard to fake signal” was first discussed by Irons (1996). He framed religion’s costs as a commitment device that signaled true membership of a community that emphasized cooperation. Religious rituals and emotions were learned over the life span, which made them extremely difficult for outsiders to fake. Irons (2001) conjectured that exposing the self to numerous contexts of scrutiny would show that one was not a free-riding individual. Though reputational assessment is an effective way to maintain cooperation, why would one need the costly features of religion in the first place? If people can simply keep track and gossip about the behavior of other group members, why go through the costs of ritual and belief? If it is because knowing religious rituals signals approval from cooperative communities (i.e., cooperative communities have accepted this person and taught them the ritual), why then do they need to be so costly? For this to work, it seems reasonable that one would only need a code and not a costly price to secure cooperation, which goes back to the explanations above regarding costly and noncostly signals and their concerns. An alternative theory involving some elements of signaling is Henrich’s (2009) theory of credibility enhancing displays (CREDs). The CREDs theory argues that the perceived validity of an agent’s claim is increased through engaging in an accompanying and relevant action (or “CRED”). Imagine observing an individual claiming that orange mushrooms are safe to eat versus observing the claim accompanied by the individual actually eating orange mushrooms. Simply believing the claim exposes the receiver to being manipulated; but when the claim is accompanied by an action, it carries more weight. Because such situations are common, it is advantageous to have a heuristic that attaches more weight to a claim when it is accompanied by a consistent action. Through a process that is somewhat akin to byproduct theories, people then apply this heuristic when assessing others’

r­ eligiosity: When you observe someone engaging in religious rituals, it provides a stronger signal that that person is a true believer, compared with just the claim of belief. Furthermore, if the religion’s teachings prescribe trustworthiness, then people who engage in observable rituals are more likely to be trusted and selected as cooperative partners, giving them a selective advantage. Thus, religious CREDs are perceived as signals of the sender’s trustworthiness. The CRED attribution makes sense in the mushroom example above, where the costs of being wrong are real and directly tied to the action. In the context of religion and social interactions however, the associated costs and benefits are less clearly linked (i.e., one could engage in religious rituals but still choose to be untrustworthy). Thus the CREDs signaling account shares some of the concerns discussed above regarding the other signaling theories. To address these concerns, Henrich (2009) makes the argument that through the process of cultural group selection such a signal could be stable. In sum, it is clear that religion provides some benefits to the community as well as the individual, and that selection must be acting on some mech­an­ ism to maintain this complex and costly phenomenon. The level and mechanism that selection is acting on, however, is not clear. In the following section we summarize an alternative theory that provides a different view of religion’s development.

Byproduct Explanation

In recent years an alternative theory, the byproduct view, has argued against the position that religion serves an adaptive function. This view claims that certain low-level features of human cognition, selected by evolution, gave rise to the fundamental building blocks for religious belief. These cognitive features act as theoretical third variables between religious belief and the selective benefits for those who display them, and are the actual causes of the origin of belief, rather than the supposed benefit beliefs conferred (Atran, 2002; Bloom, 2007; Boyer, 2008). There are a number of cognitive features associated with this process, including the ability to recognize other minds (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). This cognitive ability, often referred to as theory of mind, allows humans to predict and understand other individuals around us, allowing people to engage in complex social interaction and cooperative endeavors (Dennett, 1989). Theory of mind abilities also

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come with the tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman agents and may intuitively lead us to see intention where there is none (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007). Thus this propensity tilts the scale from seeing lucky coincidence to seeing divine intervention. Another associated feature is the hyperactive agent detection device (HADD) (Barrett, 2000; Guthrie, 1993), which provides benefits by erring on the side of detecting agency in ambiguous contexts. Misinterpreting wind rustling in the trees for a bear (a false positive) is less costly than misinterpreting a bear rustling in the trees for the wind (a false negative). Thus as above, this erring on the side of overdetection may also lead people to attribute random events and outcomes to unseen agents such as angels and demons. Yet another cognitive ability associated with religion is our natural ability to see statistical relationships and infer causation. This tendency is essential for understanding how the world works. There are times, however, when our tendency to attribute causes will become overly sensitive and drive people to see causal relationships where there may be none. This phenomenon has been documented in the ritual acts of both clinical and nonclinical populations, and is referred to as magical thinking (Boyer & Liénard, 2008; Markle, ‎2010). These spurious connections may give some the impression that there is purpose or order to the universe and that this order can be maintained or manipulated through ritual patterns of behavior. A final example of a cognitive feature that provides benefit while simultaneously increasing our susceptibility to some religious beliefs is our susceptibility to minimally counterintuitive narratives (MCI) (Boyer, 1994). Here, certain stories get preferential treatment by accessing features of cognition that selectively weigh novel and surprising information over mundane and common information. There is a benefit for allocating greater attention to surprising content and remembering events that violate our expectations; however this also works for stories that depict concepts that violate our intuitions (e.g., a talking bush, a man who can control lightning), while not being overly counterintuitive (e.g., a dog that reads minds, lives between dimensions, and communicates through color). The MCI theory states that these stories will have an advantage in retention and propagation and that many religious ideas fit this template (Boyer, 1994, 2001). 158

These examples, along with others (mind body dualism [Bloom, 2007], teleological reasoning [Kelemen, 1999]) show just how generative the byproduct theory has been, leading to many fruitful hypotheses and a large body of literature (Bloom, 2004; Boyer, 2001; Norenzayan, 2013). This theory elegantly and cohesively presents an explanation for how religious beliefs could have first come into being, why these beliefs are so prolific, and why they share such a similar structure across populations. It also manages to decouple the selective benefits accompanying religion from its actual collective practice and beliefs. The byproduct theory explains the evolution of different cognitive features via individuallevel selection, which then gives rise to religion as an accidental byproduct. In this way, the byproduct theory overcomes the group-selection criticisms associated with much of the functionalist position. Despite all of these benefits, the byproduct position is not without its own issues. This theory does not shed light on questions like these: How do these byproducts lead to such large-scale and complex phenomena as formal religious traditions with their laws and rituals? And, why are rituals with scaled-up costs not outcompeted by rituals that are less costly? One proposed answer is the cultural groupselection based theory of “big gods” (Norenzayan ­ & Atran, 2004; Norenzayan et al., 2014; Shariff et al., 2010). The authors of this theory use the byproduct position to get religion off the ground. They then argue that the differential development of these byproducts through cultural learning and intergroup conflict results in prosocial norms and morals, eventually stabilizing into more formal religions. As some societies grew in size, their religions increasingly ­espoused gods of greater knowledge, ability, and concern for human morality. This escalation of god ­concepts gave these religions differential advantages by activating group members’ innate reputation concerns with the belief of being monitored by these “big gods.” As such, certain religions were able to maintain prosocial behavior in contexts where constant visibility would be unlikely—a key benefit in an increasing population. We would expect to see individuals who do not believe in “big gods” arising in the population and exploiting believers. However, these authors argue that due to the increased cooperative benefit of belief in big gods, groups in which nonbelievers have taken over would be outcompeted by intact groups of believers. Thus, through cultural learning and grouplevel selection, large-scale religious belief could stabilize (Norenzayan et al., 2014; Shariff et al., 2010).

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An Individual-Level Selection Account of the Coevolution of Religious Belief and Intuitive Cognitive Style

In this chapter, we add to the discussion of the evolution of religious belief by offering a novel theory for the coevolution of religious belief and intuitive cognitive style. Our theory bridges the byproduct and functionalist perspectives, without requiring selection at the level of the group, and uses evidence from evolutionary, cognitive, and social psychology as well as anthropology, sociology, and religious studies. Our theory starts with the byproduct position, arguing that cognitive mechanisms yielding advantages unrelated to belief gave rise to early protoreligious beliefs. We then argue that once these early, protoreligious beliefs came to dominate within a community, those who questioned or challenged aspects of belief faced sanctions from those who internalized belief without question (because, for example, the believers feared that the actions of those who question belief would anger the gods and bring harm to the community). This communal support for belief (and sanctioning of belief questioning) would then create an individual-level selection advantage to being a believer and, as a consequence, an individual-level selection advantage for intuitive cognition, which supports belief, and selects against deliberative cognition, which breeds skepticism. Thus, our theory attempts to explain how, although initially arising over time in accordance with the byproduct account, religious belief could become advantageous and even flourish as an adaptation in its own right. Importantly, we are not arguing for a contrast between a religious mindset and an atheistic one— as atheism was likely completely absent in early societies—but instead between a greater or lesser acceptance of the rituals and details of belief of one’s group. That is, the difference between one questioning and trying to understand the religious ontology presented by the group versus one accepting this information unchallenged and unchanged. In the next section we work through our account in more detail.

A Brief Introduction to Dual Process Theory

Dual process theory (DPT) has identified two broad styles of cognitive processing: one that is fast, automatic, intuitive, nonconscious, and effortless, and another that is slow, controlled, conscious, and effortful (Kahneman, 2011). This distinction is a

fundamental tenet of cognitive psychology (Allport, 1954; Evans, 2003,  2008; Evans & Stanovich, 2013; Kool, McGuire, Rosen, & Botvinick, 2010; Posner & Snyder, 1975), has been the focus of intensive research (Botvinick & Cohen, 2014; Cohen, Dunbar, & McClelland, 1990; Kahneman & Treisman, 1984; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977), and has deeply influenced thinking in the behavioral and neurological sciences more generally (Bear & Rand, 2016; Crockett, 2013; Cushman, 2013; Fudenberg & Levine, 2006; Hare, Camerer, & Rangel, 2009; Kahneman, 2003,  2011; McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein, & Cohen, 2004; Rand, Greene, & Nowak, 2012; Stanovich & West, 2000; Zaki & Mitchell, 2013). Individuals vary in the extent to which they rely on intuitive versus deliberative processing, an individual difference that is referred to as one’s “cognitive style” (Frederick, 2005). Critically for the purposes of this chapter, a good deal of recent evidence shows that intuitive thinking is associated with religious belief, and that as a result, people with an intuitive cognitive style are more religious on a number of different dimensions (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Pennycook, Cheyne, Seli, Koehler, & Fugelsang, 2012; Shenhav, Rand, & Greene, 2012). We discuss this evidence in detail below.

Starting Off with Byproducts and Starting off Intuitive

Many in the dual systems literature have argued that the automatic/intuitive processes are evolutionarily older, predating the more deliberate/reflective processes (Epstein, Pacini, Denes-Raj, & Heier, 1996; Evans, 2003, 2008; Stanovich & West, 2000). In a similar vein is the suggestion that our early ancestors were likely much more intuitive than modern-day humans. A reliance on intuitive cognition was likely fostered by the intimate, small-scale social makeup of early humans’ communities (Johnson & Earle, 2000): People have been shown to rely on intuitive thinking when they are confident about their understanding and see little evidence to question their beliefs (Thompson, Turner, & Pennycook, 2011), when explanations are simple and easy to understand (Gilbert, 1991; Gilbert, Krull, & Malone, 1990), and when the greater community validates these beliefs (Haidt, 2001; Stanovich, West, & Toplak, 2013). All of these features are similar to the “group think” of a homogeneous, intimate population (Janis, 1982; Tsintsadze-Maass & Maass, 2014), much like what is

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believed to be true of early human communities. All of these factors point to the high likelihood that early humans relied more heavily on intuitive processes than modern humans. This early reliance on intuitive thinking links to the earliest aspects of religious cognition through the substantial evidence showing the cognitive mechanisms associated with the byproduct explanation for religion (discussed previously) are also highly associated with intuitive cognition. Magical Thinking, for example, has been associated with intuitive cognitive style (Aarnio & Lindeman, 2005; Markle, 2010; Wolfradt, Oubaid, Straube, Bischoff, & Mischo, 1999). Examples include agent detection and anthropomorphism, which have both been shown to be a robust, effortless, and automatic feature of our psychology (Epley et al., 2007; Guthrie, 1993), in line with other heuristic models of intuitive cognition (Morewedge & Kahneman, 2010). As well, through the violation of intuitively held inferences, religious narratives have superior sticking power in culture (Boyer, 2001; Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, & Schaller, 2006). Thus, there is evidence that the underlying cognition of early protoreligion was intuitive cognition.

Intuitive Belief Grew in Prominence and Importance

We suggest that, although initially arising as byproducts of intuitive cognition, these early protoreligious beliefs became increasingly incorporated into working cultural narratives and causal explanations. This would have resulted in two forms of value provided to these early communities. The first is the sense of security found in the ability to explain the world, predict events, and seemingly control their environment (Boyer, 2001; Vail et al., 2010). Evidence shows that these feelings of control and understanding contribute strongly to why people value and feel committed to their religious beliefs (Inzlicht & Tullett 2010; Preston & Epley, 2005; Vail et al., 2010). The second is the benefits that are believed to directly come from the enacting of religious rituals (e.g., a successful crop, rain during drought, a successful birth). Though these ritual acts may have nothing to do with the benefits attributed to them, through an accidental pairing of cause and effect reinforced by cultural narrative and cognitive biases, those who hold the belief will value these rituals due to the benefits they are thought to provide (Hill, 2011; Mbiti, 2015; Robin, Blackmore, & Latsch, 2005; M. Wilson, 1954). Religious belief, 160

born out of adaptive intuitive byproducts, would therefore provide value—both from perceived benefits presumed to be accessed through rituals and from a sense of control and understanding, which have value in their own right. Due to this value, these beliefs would have commanded respect and protection within the community.

Belief Questioning as Group Threat

As a result of the perceived value of religious beliefs to the community, questioning or disrespecting them would be threatening to believers. In the context of challenging or questioning religious explanations and knowledge, evidence shows people experience dissonance when religious beliefs are threatened or scrutinized (Van den Bos, Ameijde, & van Gorp, 2006; Ysseldyk, Matheson, & Anisman, 2011) and are motivated to compensate and protect these beliefs in a number of ways (Birgegard & Granqvist, 2004; Jost et al., 2014; Magee & Hardin, 2010). Studies have shown that when in-group members fail to respect or maintain significant group values and beliefs, they receive negative reputational sanctions from other group members (Marques & Paez, 1994; Marques, Robalo, & Rocha, 1992; Marques & Yzerbyt, 1988). These in-group “deviants” lose social standing and even fall below out-group members, who show the same absence of concern but are not held to the same standard, especially in the case of values unique to the group (Abrams, Marques, Bown, & Henson, 2000; Marques, Abrams, & Serôdio, 2001), and this has been suggested to be an important feature of religious fundamentalism (Finlay, 2014; Ysseldyk, Matheson, & Anisman, 2010). In the more specific context of questioning or undervaluing religious ritual, negative reactions seem likely to be even stronger and driven more by self-preservation, as religious rituals are often thought to ensure most of the important aspects of life (Balée, 1985; Maher, 1999). Across history, religious rituals were integral for physical health (M.  Wilson, 1954), success in food acquisition (Hill, 2011; Robin et al., 2005), and the healthy birth and development of children (Mbiti, 2015). A great significance is often placed on correctly learning, executing, and transmitting these rituals (Lantz & Turner, 2003; Newcomb, 1956), and so practice of and respect for rituals are of the upmost importance. A large body of evidence examining existing small-scale societies suggests that early religious

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communities attributed a majority of the misfortune they experienced to an angered spirit, dead ancestor, witch, or sorcerer, all capable of supernatural punishment (Bering & Johnson, 2005; Johnson & Bering, 2006). There are numerous examples from the ethnographic literature of communities who are deeply concerned with and afraid of these agents’ ability to exert supernatural punishment for violated taboos, failed rituals, and other religious transgressions (Ndyuka of South America: Geschiere, van Velzen, & van Wetering, 1991; the Chuuk: Fischer, 1950; the Lao Hmong: Scott, 1986; Ugandans: Mair, 1934; the Bemba of Zambia: Richards, 1940; and the Eskimo, Athabascan, Ge, and Tupi: Hultkrantz, 1981) (Bering & Johnson, 2005). These punishments do not stop at the individual transgressor and can be passed on to their offspring (Bering & Johnson, 2005; Gorer, 1938; Lebra, 1966). Such threats provide a clear incentive to keep one’s distance from—and especially refrain from reproducing with—a “marked” group member. Thus, maintaining religious practices and beliefs would have served as a strong signal of how an individual cared for themselves as well as the group. Failing to maintain practices believed to minimize negative group outcomes, or even failing to show significant concern for the harm they represent, would have been seen as a serious threat to the community—a threat that would be met with social consequences.

Responding to Group Threat

Posing a threat to the community, especially in the context of this early evolutionary environment, would have come with serious costs (Jordan, 2003; Marques & Paez, 1994; Williams, 2007). Failing to take the community’s ritual beliefs seriously would come across as reckless and dangerous, and could have been met with collectively imposed punishment (Finlay, 2014; Rokeach, Toch, & Rottman, 1960), shunning (Miller, 1988), being exiled from the community (Gruter & Masters, 1986; Hostetler, 1984; Williams & Zadro, 2005)—a sentence in early human history that was likely fatal (Pinker, 2011; Spoor & Williams, 2006)—or death (Peters & De Vries, 1976). An important point here is that the community would not be punishing a deviant individual out of simple preference for group conformity. As mentioned previously, these punitive actions would be driven by pure self-interest. In a collective-action

problem the group works together to achieve a common goal, and the benefits can degrade as individuals do better by free-riding. This free-riding does little to affect the individual benefits of the other members until a critical number of group members free-ride, making it difficult to mobilize action before it is too late. In contrast, here the goal (i.e., the god’s favor) can manifest and “benefit” ­eve­ry­one as long as no one transgresses. Once a single transgression takes place, everyone, including the deviant member, is at risk of losing the full benefit. This makes the incentive to correct the deviant member’s behavior highly salient and attractive. If the community is depending on the gods to favor them by delivering rain for their crops, all members needs to be on board successfully appeasing the gods and maintaining the ritual. If your belief states that an angry god will provide no rain, the lack of respect or full value of a belief from a single group member could cost you the crops and thus your food supply. If your belief system states that a cursed person can contaminate community endeavors and partners with their poor luck, an angry spirit, or a deity’s disfavor (Tannenbaum, 1993), there is a clear self-interested reason to shun and avoid them. Therefore, failing to strongly and consistently signal one’s belief in these early protoreligious rituals and community concerns would be individually costly. This creates individual-level selection pressure to fully believe and respect the traditions and rituals—or at least to convincingly signal to others that you do.

Deliberation Leads to Higher Likelihood of Religious Questioning

We argue that this pressure to appear like a fully committed believer puts individual-level selection pressure on people not to be too deliberative. Being highly deliberative is associated with questioning authority (Kemmelmeier, 2010), questioning commonly held assumptions, and assessing the quality of arguments (Stanovich & West, 1997). Hence those higher in deliberative thinking are more likely to disregard norms and traditions, as well as question the status quo (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004). Though these qualities are often valued in modern society, during an earlier period in human history they would have greatly increased the likelihood of a person seeing holes, contradictions, logical violations, and inconsistencies in folk wisdom and religious traditions (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Pennycook et al., 2012; Shenhav et al., 2012).

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Therefore, we argue that such people would have been at a disadvantage by placing strain on a commitment to the community’s beliefs. There are two ways that being higher in deliberation could result in a person appearing lower on committed belief: (1) Positive belief questioning, that is, belief questioning that involves active displays, such as the questioning of norms and traditions, suggesting alternative actions, pointing out of inconsistencies or contradictions in rituals or beliefs, or deviation from a prescribed orthodox ritual and/ or action; and (2) Negative belief questioning, this is belief questioning that involves the absence of displays, such as the lack of emotion when engaging in ritual, the avoidance or slow response in ritual participation, shortcutting ritual acts, the withholding of resources or lip service to belief activities, or the lack of presented sincerity and absorption in ritual. Both of these types of behaviors disrupt the credibility of the signaler by indicating that they question or are not fully committed to the belief or take these actions and ideas seriously. However, it is likely the latter (negative belief questioning) that would have particularly characterized deliberative individuals. Being higher in deliberation and, by association, intelligence (Frederick, 2005), we might expect such an agent to attempt to signal full belief if failing to signal earned them a serious cost. However, evidence shows that people are highly tuned to emotional sincerity (Anderson, DePaulo, Ansfield, Tickle, & Green, 1999; Ekman & O’Sullivan, 1991), especially in the domains of moral (Critcher, Inbar, & Pizarro, 2013) and cooperative (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; Frank, 1988) interactions. This has been found to be true both when tracking interactions in the present (Friedman & Miller-Herringer, 1991; Gross & Levenson, 1997; Yamagishi, Tanida, Mashima, Shimoma, & Kanazawa, 2003) and in the past (Mealey, Daood, & Krage, 1996; Oda, 1997). Thus, attempting to pass as an intuitive religious agent (i.e., faking deep sincerity and strong devotion), especially over the course of a person’s life span and in the context of small gossipy groups (Dunbar, 2004), would be extremely difficult. Showing that this relationship between religious belief and cognitive style is more than theoretical, research on cognitive style and ability has shown a consistent negative relationship with levels of religiosity, superstition, and belief in the paranormal (Aarnio & Lindeman, 2005; Pennycook et al., 2012). There is also causal evidence suggesting that 162

intuitive style is driving this relationship (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Shenhav et al., 2012). Early work investigating this relationship conceptualized an individual’s cognitive ability as their understanding of scientific knowledge, focusing on the scientific community (Leuba, 1921). Modern-day replication of this work found roughly 40% of American scientists reporting belief in the existence of God, compared with approximately 90% of the general population (Larson & Witham, 1997). This relationship only strengthens when looking at top scientists in different fields, with belief in the existence of a god dropping to roughly 7% (Larson & Witham, 1998).

IQ

Over time, researchers have moved to a more quantitative representation of intelligence based on IQ or the “g factor” (general intelligence factor) (Neisser et al., 1996). Nyborg, (2009), testing a broad sampling of US citizens (N = 3,742), showed a decrease in religious belief systematically paired with an increase in IQ scores (atheists: 1.95 IQ points above agnostics, 3.82 points above liberal religious individuals, and 5.89 points above dogmatic religious individuals). In a separate study, Lynn, Harvey, and Nyborg (2009) contrasted 137 countries (N = 6,825) to demonstrate that religiosity across nations also varied with that nation’s average IQ. Countries with the lowest levels of belief virtually all exhibited the top IQ scores. Further, this result has been found to replicate in a large meta-analysis of 63 studies, providing strong evidence of robustness (Zuckerman, Silberman, & Hall, 2013). Looking at global variation in cognitive ability, the Flynn Effect documents a rise in mean IQ scores—up to 13.8 points—over the past several decades both in and out of the United States (Flynn, 1984, 1987). The steady increase in IQ has led some researchers to make comparisons with the systematic drop in global religiosity (Lynne, Harvey, & Nyborg, 2009). Some polls report a modest drop with an average decrease of 9% of belief (Gilani, Shahid, & Zuettel, 2012; Global index of religiosity: http://www.wingia.com/en/news/win_gallup_international_ae_religiosity_and_atheism_index_ao_ reveals_atheists_are_a_small_minority_in_the_ early_years_of_21st_century/14/), while others discuss a more substantial drop for specific communities (Lynn et al., 2009). To investigate whether this relationship is just a function of personality type or access to education,

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Lewis, Ritchie, and Bates (2011) compared US participants’ (N = 2,307) religiosity and intelligence (IQ score) while controlling for both education and a number of personality traits (e.g., fundamentalism, openness to experience). They report the same negative relationship between religiosity and intelligence even after controlling for these other factors. Kanazawa (2010) found similar results using two larger data sets (roughly N = 15,000 and N = 4,500), also controlling for age, race, gender, earning, and education. These results suggest that the relationship between religiosity and IQ cannot be explained by education or particular personality characteristics. Despite the work already cited, debate on education’s role in this relationship has continued, with some claiming education has a moderating effect that interacts with participants’ religious background (for discussion, see Ganzach, Ellis, & Gotlibovski, 2013; Ganzach & Gotlibovski, 2013).

Need for Cognition

Another measure that has been used to assess cognitive ability is need for cognition (NFC), represented by the tendency for an individual to engage in and enjoy the act of thinking (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982). Though little research has been conducted comparing NFC and religiosity, what research there is has been mixed. One study looked at the relationship between religious doubt and a construct similar to NFC—“integrative complexity”—showing a positive relationship between these two constructs (Hunsberger, McKenzie, Pratt, & Pancer, 1993). However, another study that investigated NFC directly along with several religious variables, including religious doubt, reported a weak relationship (Hunsberger, Alisat, Pancer, & Pratt, 1996). Gauthier et al. (2006) also investigated the role of religious doubt, NFC, and life satisfaction and found no relationship between NFC, religiosity, or religious doubt. Other work shows a negative relationship between NFC and correlates of religiosity such authoritarianism (Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein, & Jarvis, 1996). These mixed results between NFC and religiosity has been attributed to several shortcomings with the measure, most notably its selfreport design (Frederick, 2005).

Cognitive Style

In contrast to these measures of cognitive ability (IQ, g-factor) or preference for complex thinking (NFC), cognitive style refers to how much deliberative (slow, conscious, and effortful) verses intuitive

(fast, nonconscious, effortless) thinking people engage in (Frederick, 2005). The cognitive reflection task (CRT) has become a prominent measure of cognitive style in the dual process literature and assesses how participants approach information to solve problems (Frederick, 2005). Though evidence shows cognitive style is correlated with IQ (r = .43 with the Wonderlic Personnel Test; r = .44 with the SAT), and somewhat weaker with NFC (r = .22), several studies show that much of the variance is still unaccounted for both for classic measures of bias (Stanovich & West, 2007, 2008) and on the CRT (Pennycook et al., 2012; Shenhav et al., 2012). This evidence shows that beyond the raw computational power of IQ, there is something more that distinguishes participants’ cognitive style. Early work on this topic focused on the relationship between education, cognitive style, and paranormal belief (Aarnio & Lindeman, 2005; Lindeman & Aarnio, 2006, 2007). This work consistently shows analytical thinking is significantly negatively associated with paranormal belief, and intuitive thinking significantly positively associated. The first study to directly test the relationship between religiosity and cognitive style was by Shenhav et al. (2012). In the first two studies (Study 1: N = 882; Study 2: N = 321), the authors show a consistent positive correlation between intuitive cognitive style and religiosity, even after controlling for two IQ measures as well as age, gender, education, and several personality variables. The third study (N = 373) primed either cognitive style in a positive or negative light. They showed that priming intuition as positive or deliberation as negative resulted in higher reported religiosity. Conversely, the opposite priming (deliberation positively/intuition negatively) resulted in lower reported levels of religiosity. Another body of work examining this relationship extended these findings to included paranormal beliefs and investigate underlying mechanisms. In two separate studies (Study one: N = 237, Study two: N = 287) Pennycook et al. (2012) found a relationship between cognitive style and religiosity showing a negative relationship between participant’s propensity to deliberate and their levels of religiosity and religious participation, and the same relationship for paranormal belief. The authors used both the CRT and secondary measures of bias involving base-rate conflict problems (Pennycook et al., 2012). In a third study the authors replicated these results and provided some insight to the

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­ nderlying mechanisms. Pennycook, Cheyne, Barr, u Koehler, and Fugelsang (2014) again found the negative relationship between religiosity and deliberation and showed that religious participants were worse at both overriding stereotypes in favor of the base-rate information and deciding when stereotype override should happen via conflict detection. Recently, Finley, Tang, and Schmeichel (2015) argued that this relationship between cognitive style and religiosity maybe in fact be due to order effects, and only emerged when cognitive style was meas­ ured prior to religious belief within the experimental session. In response, Pennycook, Ross, Koehler, & Fugelsang (2016) showed that the significant negative relationship between deliberative cognitive style and religiosity is observed even when religiosity was measured in an entirely different session from cognitive style. In addition to this follow-up replication, Pennycook et al. (2016) also conducted a meta-analysis of 18 studies showing that this effect was not driven by presentation order. Thus there is compelling evidence of a true correlation between cognitive style and religiosity, above and beyond any possible order effects. Experimental evidence beyond that of Shenhav et al. (2012) of a link between analytic thinking style and religious disbelief comes from Gervais and Norenzayan (2012). The authors carried out five experimental studies (total N = 659), each using progressively subtler primes of deliberative cognitive style, from images of artwork, to a linguistic task, and down to the style of font questions were written in. Each time, this manipulation resulted in participants reporting lower religiosity scores in the deliberation prime condition. This evidence further establishes a clear and robust causal relationship between individual level of religiosity and cognitive style. Taken as a whole, this work provides strong and consistent evidence that religious thinking has a robust relationship with cognitive style. Not only does the evidence validate the claim that religious individuals are more intuitive than those of low or nonbelief but also it suggests that cognitive style has a causal effect on religious belief. Thus, being higher on deliberation drives people to be lower on religious belief and should therefore increase the chances that one would question aspects of belief and therefore receive social sanctioning. Though this evidence comes from modern laboratory studies, and we can never definitively say what the social/cognitive conditions were throughout our 164

evolutionary history, these data still provide meaningful information regarding religious cognition and helps to guide our theory.

Selection Pressure Against Deliberation

Given that deliberation tends to undermine religious belief, the adoption of, and strong commitment to, religious beliefs within a community creates selection pressure against deliberating. To see why, consider a situation where agents benefit from group participation, but nonbelievers are ostracized. Although deliberative agents want to maintain their group membership, they are at a unique disadvantage due to their higher likelihood of belief questioning, making them more likely to threaten the group, provoking a response, and thus leading them to lose out on the cooperative benefits. Thus the direction of (individual-level) selection is against deliberating and for maintenance of intuition. Groups of initially intuitive agents acquire religious beliefs, which puts deliberative belief questioning agents at a disadvantage when they appear in the population, due to the difficulty for such agents to credibly communicate religious belief. Here, irrational costly beliefs act as a litmus test to identify those who are true (and therefore intuitive) believers from those who would question communal religious beliefs. One might argue that there are two paths by which deliberative agents could still invade such a population: (1) if some intuitive individuals became tolerant of (continued to cooperate with) deliberative agents, and (2) if deliberative agents were somehow able to pass as believers. Addressing the first concern, there are two ways invasion through tolerance would be prevented. First, tolerance of belief questioning by intuitive agents should also be seen as a threat to the community and, thus, negative. We would expect nontolerance of belief questioning by community members and a negative reputation given to tolerant individuals as subtly condoning this behavior. As mentioned earlier, this is similar to yet importantly different from simply punishing to enforce social norms and punishing those who do not punish (Boyd & Richerson, 1992). Here, punishing tolerant believers (essentially second-order free-riders) is punishing those who tolerate behavior that is perceived to threaten one’s well-being, and thus is a behavior that would be perceived as either self-destructive (since tolerant members would be at a perceived loss as well) or malicious, but either way a threat to the group. Therefore, agents who are low

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on deliberation, yet tolerant of belief questioning, should still pay a cost. Second, there is evidence that intuition supports cooperation whereas deliberation promotes selfishness (Kanazawa & Fontaine, 2013; Rand, 2016; Rand et al., 2014; Rand et al., 2012; Yamagishi, Li,  Takagishi, Matsumoto, & Kiyonari, 2014). Therefore, tolerating and including deliberative individuals in one’s dealings is likely to be costly, whereas exclusively interacting with intuitive agents should be beneficial. Thus, agents who are tolerant of deliberation should also do worse over time, in a purely strategic sense. Regarding the second concern of deliberative agents invading through faking intuitive belief, we have already discussed the evidence that faking sincerity and commitment is extremely difficult (Anderson et al., 1999; Critcher et al., 2013; Ekman & O’Sullivan, 1991); especially for the uniquely irrational and counterintuitive claims made by many religious beliefs (Boyer, 1994). A second way that deliberators would be prevented from successful manipulation is through the double cost of selfmonitoring and self-inhibiting. Evidence shows that self-monitoring is central to emotional deception (Grieve, 2011). Self-monitoring requires cognitive resources (Baumeister, Hutton, & Tice, 1989), and is especially costly when in the service of deception (DePaulo et al., 2003; Pontari & Schlenker, 2000). Self-inhibition has also been well documented to be cognitively costly (Heatherton & Wagner, 2011; Muraven, Tice, & Baumeister, 1998; Ward & Mann, 2000). Thus, deliberative individuals who are attempting to regulate their responses of skepticism and belief questioning, while simultaneously generating false signs of fully committed belief and maintaining self-monitoring, would be experiencing significant cognitive costs that would result in a substantial disadvantage compared with intuitive agents.

The Scaling-Up of Religion

So far, our theory provides an account of the evolution of small-scale protoreligion through the development and stabilization of intuitive cognitive style, which prevents the rise and subsequent invasion of belief questioning. It may also be the case that “runaway selection” (Fisher, 1915) occurred, whereby the strong preference of the community for intuitive faith led to the evolution of ever­increasing levels of intuition—above and beyond the basic level of intuitiveness that was adaptive given

the environment, as described in byproduct explanations—and correspondingly more extreme and elaborate religious rituals and practices. Here the more intuitive the agent, the more emotional, extravagant, and committed their professions of faith could be. Though sometimes costly, it could be that these shows of religious devotion would receive more respect and admiration from the community. Thus, an incentive could develop where greater displays of blind devotion would receive greater benefits from the community. Conversely, when an individual strays from the community of believers by raising questions, and consequences are delivered, the importance of one’s membership may become more salient and result in others’ reacting by “overconformity” to the norms. This response would ensure the signal of belief and group membership (Brinkerhoff & Burke, 1980). Either way this would also raise the bar, changing the norm for what is considered “true devotion,” leading to a feedback cycle through which the complexity of religion was scaled up over time.

Summary of the Theory

We have presented a two-stage theory of the coevolution of intuitive cognitive style and religious belief. The first stage involves individual-level selection for cognitive mechanisms that yield real advantages unrelated to belief, and give rise to the foundation of early protoreligious beliefs as an accidental byproduct. The second stage involves individuallevel selection for an intuitive cognitive style that supports belief and opposes deliberative cognition that breeds skepticism (where again, skepticism is defined not as atheism but as a greater likelihood of questioning the rituals and details of belief one is taught by their group). Through this stabilization of intuitive cognition and a runaway preference for increasingly intuitive devotion, we can see religious ritual ramp up from early protoreligious levels to larger-scale versions.

Potential Questions and Concerns

In this section, we attempt to address three potential concerns: first, whether it is realistic to assume that a person surrounded in a single ideology can become critical of their teachings and worldview; second, whether deliberation is so essential to an individual or group such that it could not be hampered; and third, the apparent counterevidence of seemingly deliberative religious traditions and individuals.

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The first question asks whether it realistic to assume someone surrounded by a religious community, without access to alternative explanations could in fact question aspects of their religious belief. Though uncommon, there is substantial research that shows that people can experience challenges and loss of faith, even in highly intimate and homogeneous populations (Harris, 2015; Hogg, Adelman, & Blagg, 2010). Several studies have shown that people who were raised in exclusively religious communities can question aspects of their religious teachings, question the consistency of their religious leaders, and find inconsistencies that put them at odds with the community (Brinkerhoff & Burke, 1980; Roozen, 1980). This is not just the case for religious institutions, but also for strongly ideological communities where questioning the authority of an ideological leader or teaching comes with the highest of consequences (Harris, 2015) or in contexts where little is known of the outside world (Bering & Johnson, 2005). Thus, despite the lack of alternative explanations or experiences, and faced with extremely high costs, a small number of members of strongly insular religious communities can come to question aspects of their beliefs. This being said, we recognize that much of the evidence presented in this chapter is from lab experiments and WEIRD populations (Henrich et al., 2010), ethnographic evidence from modern times, and religious scripture written by literate and developed civilizations. We recognize that a major limitation of this work—and the field as a whole—is a limited understanding of the ancestral environment (in which alternative explanations to religion were likely unavailable). However, with that acknowledgment in mind, our prediction again is NOT that deliberation leads to a loss a faith wholesale. Instead, we claim that deliberation leads to belief questioning, and it is this act of questioning aspects of belief and pondering alternatives—even those within a religious framework, that we argue will lead to costly social consequences. The second question asks whether a community of intelligent people was necessary for survival. We agree that some amount of a deliberative cognitive style was needed for people to adapt and thrive in past environments and that there would have been selection pressure to be increasingly deliberative. We argue, however, that this would have only been allowed up to the point before it caused individuals to question aspects of religious beliefs. Individuals would have been motivated to reach this threshold 166

as much as their belief system allowed. As the ability to disengage from the community of belief increases (a later event in our cultural/evolutionary history), we should expect to see an increase in deliberation, as disengagement allows deliberative individuals to avoid punishment. Therefore, we are not arguing for a uniform low level of deliberative ability, but just deliberation held to a point that allows for religious belief. Lastly we address the question of religious reasoning, highlighting for some the seeming in­con­ sist­ency between the dual-process findings and these between religion differences in deliberation (Oviedo, 2015). Some have gone so far as to argue that deliberation can in fact be used to draw a distinctions between intuitively simpler belief concepts, like magic, and more complex and refined content such as religious dogma (Pyysiäinen, 2004; Whitehouse, 2004). We view this concern as being more about modern religions (i.e., over the last few thousand years), and thus less related to the argument present in our chapter, which focuses on early development of small-scale human societies and protoreligious beliefs. Though there is evidence that some more modern examples of deliberative religious communities exist, we believe that this has likely been enabled by more recent social factors, such as individuals’ ability to move between groups and the exposure to different belief systems.

Predictions

We acknowledge that the social cognitive religious landscape has changed over time and current religious belief is not identical to that of the early ancestral environment. That being said, the theory we have introduced here does make several modernday predictions. Though these predictions are based on a modern version of religious belief, there are still aspects of religious cognition that we believe can provide evidence for our theory. The following are five testable predictions generated by the above theory. 1.  Seeming deliberative is perceived as being less religious. A key feature of this theory is that people are more likely to question religious belief when higher on deliberation, as shown earlier (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Pennycook et al., 2012; Shenhav et al., 2012). It may also be the case that people actually use other individual’s level of deliberation as indicative of their strength of belief. We predict that when people have access to

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different cues of another individual’s cognitive style, they will use these cues (consciously or nonconsciously) to predict their level of religiosity, such that the more deliberative a person is perceived, the less likely that person will appear dedicated to religious ideas and hold religious beliefs. 2.  Religious individuals are more concerned with cognitive style than nonreligious individuals. Earlier we argued that religious people could view cognitive style as predictive of how likely an individual is to believe in religious teachings and take them seriously. Given that we have presented strong evidence that religious individuals highly value religious beliefs, and deliberation breeds skepticism of such beliefs, we would expect religious people to be attentive to this feature compared with nonreligious individuals. Nonreligious individuals who are the most skeptical that such beliefs and traditions are important would be less attentive to a person’s potential for belief. For those individuals low on belief, we would expect them to track cognitive style or ability to the extent they expected a person to be competent for some specific role (doctor, mechanic, etc.). Thus, we predict that a religious individual will preferentially attend to a person’s apparent cognitive style even in contexts where there is no need to assess such a feature. Conversely, we predict that nonreligious individuals would only attend to cognitive style or ability when it is relevant to assess competence for a particular task. 3.  Religious communities punish in-group members more than out-group members for questioning religious belief. We have argued that religious believers would shun or punish nonbelievers due to, among other reasons, the high likelihood that they would disrespect traditions and thus attract the ire of the gods. This would suggest that for an individual, nonbelievers within the group should be viewed as more dangerous compared with nonbelievers outside of the group. We have presented evidence that people do in fact punish in-group members for violating group norms (Marques et al., 2001; Marques et al., 1992). We predict that group members will punish these “deviant” members even more severely when (1) the group is made up of religious believers, and (2) the violation is done against a religious tradition. In these cases, group members will punish ingroup violators more harshly than out-group members, and more harshly than in-group

­ embers who commit comparable nonreligious m norm violations. 4.  Displaying disbelief will be punished in the same way as other group-threatening acts. As discussed above in prediction 3, if it is the case that disrespecting religious beliefs is seen by those who hold them as truly threatening to the community, we should expect to see evidence of punishment comparable to other serious group-threatening offenses (e.g., the spreading of disease, violence against community members). We predict that violating norms through rejecting religious beliefs, either piecemeal or in total, would be punished as harshly as other serious community-threatening acts throughout history. We should also see punishment for these acts decrease as their perceived communal harm decreases over time. 5.  Religious individuals attempt to come across as more intuitive toward in-group members. If predictions 1, 2, and 3 are true, then people within religious communities should at some level be aware of these features and make an effort to accentuate their level of intuitiveness when among in-group members. We predict that among religious in-group members, intuitive believers will attempt—consciously or nonconsciously—to accentuate their level of intuitiveness. This level of perceived intuitiveness should be greater compared with when these individuals are around nonreligious in-group members or out-group members. Given the argument above, however, individual cognitive style may moderate the success of this relationship in that only those with an intuitive cognitive style may successfully achieve intuitive accentuation.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we briefly covered the two major theories of the evolution of religion—the functionalist and the byproduct accounts—as well as the newly developing theories that marry the byproduct position with the prosocial benefits religion can produce when stabilized via group selection. We then presented our own novel theory for the evolution of religion. This theory stabilizes religious belief, using cognitive style as the underlying mech­an­ism of selection. It first involves individual-level selection of cognitive mechanisms yielding real advantages unrelated to belief, which give rise to early protoreligious belief as an accidental byproduct. This is followed by individual-level selection for an intuitive cognitive style, which provides the support for belief through

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selecting against the deliberative cognition that breeds skepticism. Then through a process of runaway selection for increasingly intuitive devotion, religious ritual ramped up from the early protoreligious levels to larger scale religious phenomena. This theory does not attempt to address all questions in the investigation of the evolution of religion and is viewed as accompanying (and complementing) other theories, such as cultural group-selection theories of Big Gods and CREDS (Henrich, 2009; Norenzayan, 2013). However, we hope that it is able to provide further answers to the stabilization of religious belief such that these other theories find its foundation useful in explaining religion’s evolution. Finally, we point out that the theory we have proposed has implications beyond religion. Though early protoreligion likely had all of the sufficient features to generate the phenomenon discussed previously, other kinds of groups could also show a similar phenomenon. There are a number of strongly ideological communities that hold central beliefs as their core unifying feature (e.g., extremist political groups, white supremacist groups, far left environmental groups). We predict that, as with religion, those who are more deliberative will be more likely to question aspects of these core beliefs and traditions and thus will be more likely to experience rejection and shunning. Like religion, over time we would expect to see the makeup of strongly ideological groups be mostly composed of intuitive individuals. In sum, we have presented a novel theory for the coevolution of religious belief and intuitive cognitive style. Our theory adds a certain functionalist twist to byproduct theories: Once the forces outlined in byproduct theories have caused those you interact with to adopt religious beliefs, it becomes individually adaptive (i.e. “functional”) for you to believe as well, lest you incur social costs. Furthermore, given that deliberative cognitive style undermines religious belief, this selection pressure to believe also creates selection pressure against deliberation. This framework thus explains both why religious belief is widespread and maintained over time and why humans are often less deliberative than it seems we ought to be.

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11

CH A PTE R

The Early Origin of Religion Its Role as a Survival Kit

Kenneth V. Kardong

Abstract Natural selection works to cull features from a population, if those features are negative and return no biological advantages, Yet religion pervades. Human culture so reasonably plays a positive, supportive role in biological survival; looking to primitive religions to discover these biological roles of religion has the advantage of viewing religion at its most fundamental, before becoming embellished and encrusted with secondary social roles. Successful traditions and cultural customs persist because they improve the survival of individuals practicing them. Celestial punishments may await the mortal sinner, but in this world, biological sins matter most because they can send an individual to an early grave without passing along genes or adaptive customs to offspring. Religion functions as a survival kit; in its beliefs, ceremonies, and myths are bundled basic knowledge that directs one to meet the challenges posed by the environment. Key Words: proximate, ultimate, biological role, unconscious intent, taboo, dogma, pig, survival kit

Socrates used to say that men lived to eat, but that he ate to live. —Diogenes (c. 300 bce)

Religion is a natural phenomenon, meaning that religion, its fundamentals, and its gods arose for biologically adaptive reasons. Descent with modification, as Charles Darwin (1859) worded it, brought humans their religion through the action of natural selection. Consequently, it is reasonable to take a Darwinian approach to explain religion in human societies. Religion demands vast resources and consumes large attention and time within a culture. With such a large investment by society, religion is not exempt from natural selection. A great presence means that it must bring great biological benefits. If not, then expect natural selection to cull such a costly behavior from the population. Religion essentially pervades all human activities, from primitive to technologically advanced societies. So what survival value does it bestow? To answer, I focus on primitive societies because their religion is typically simple, 174

unadorned, and at an early stage in its evolution, where its direct service to survival may be more clearly viewed. But this is not an easy question to answer, as various legitimate intellectual approaches by various disciplines bring different expectations to the analysis of religion. Different perspectives can then seem to work at cross purposes (e.g., evolutionary approaches vs. psychological approaches). So let us begin by meeting these potential obstacles ­head-on.

Proximate Versus Ultimate

Most attempts to identify religion’s reason for being have cited the cozy comforts of psychological cheer it bequeaths—an escape from dull melancholy, to supply optimism, to celebrate collective euphoria, as a bond in society, to provide plausible answers to  troubling questions of existence, to help face

death,  and so on (Durkheim,  1972, pp. 28–36; Montagu, 1968). Perhaps. But these are immediate satisfactions, proximate causes driven by behavior, psychology, and physiology. We might better ask, “Why do these immediate cozy comforts exist in the first place?” Consider the epigraph to this chapter, attributed to Socrates. Why do we eat? Some persons are driven by their falling blood sugar levels or by tantalizing smells that arouse an appetite and look for a ready meal. But there is another reason, no less significant—namely, that we indulge our hunger to eat in order to survive. These deeper reasons are ultimate causes, supported by survival imperatives (Mayr, 1965). Hence, when we approach scientific explanations (Hempel, 1965, p. 504) of religion, we should be clear of our intents, proximate or ultimate. One is not better than the other; rather, they are composed of different expectations of evidence. Here, as I declared earlier, I take an evolutionary approach— that is, an ultimate approach.

Evolutionary Sequence

Most structures and behaviors serve multiple roles in society. So does religion. But we must be careful about which of these roles we pick as a possible ultimate reason for religion’s debut in human society if we are to unravel the guiding forces of natural selection that bring it to where we meet it today. Let me give an example from biology. One need not be an aerodynamic engineer to guess that bird feathers aid flight. However, flight was probably not the original adaptive function that feathers served. Small feathers likely evolved initially as body insulation, as hair did independently in mammals.1 But once present for thermoinsulation, lightweight feathers provided suitable material from which aerodynamic surfaces next evolved. Although we likely associate feathers with flight, they still serve birds today in their original function—to maintain warmth. Further, feathers fluff and spread to display bright, distinctive colors—at least in most males—during courtship and territorial rivalries. Avian social displays evolved as an add-on function on top of feathers already present for earlier adaptive reasons. We can sort out which adaptive function came first, which next, and which later—insulation, flight, display. If we mistakenly pick one of these later add-on roles, we shall produce a muddled argument for feather evolution. 1  I am aware of alternative hypotheses, but the point is the order of appearance, by whatever start.

Similarly, human customs also accumulate biological roles, layer upon layer, secondary roles on top of primary roles. If we pick a contemporary secondary feature of a current religion in technologically advanced societies to discuss its evolution, then we similarly risk making a mistaken argument. That is a further reason why first examining religion in technologically simple primitive societies is beneficial. Their religious practices are likely to be less embellished with secondary roles.

Working Definitions

Considerable effort, including several complete books, has given attention to the formal meanings of  evolutionary terms (e.g., Rose & Lauder,  1996, p. 511). Here that may be more than necessary since for most readers the meaning is intuitive, but a few working definitions may be helpful. An adaptation is a characteristic of an organism that is biologically advantageous to it in its natural environment. The characteristic may be structural, behavioral, or social. For birds, their wings, migration, and courtship are, respectively, examples of structural, behavioral, and social adaptations. For humans, upright posture, hunting, and warfare might similarly be examined as adaptive characteristics. By advantageous, in this evolutionary context, I mean that the adaptation helps the organism stay alive, prosper, and reproduce. By asking for its adaptive advantage, we are searching for the reasons the feature results in a higher probability of survival and reproduction. Thus we speak too of its survival value. If survival falters, reproductive success falters, and transmission of these features from generation to generation falters. The feature subsequently diminishes in a population and eventually disappears. Here the biological role, or sometimes just role, identifies how the form and function of a feature performs in an environmental context in order to contribute to the organism’s survival. By environment I mean the external world that touches individual lives. Thus, environment includes the larger ecosystem, immediate habitat, and local society. If the environment changes, then the rules of the evolutionary contest change. That is why understanding evolution is, in part, a task of understanding the environment. Religion pervades all aspects of culture, so the two cannot easily be separated nor can their intertwined boundaries be delimited. Perhaps this is why some definitions become bloated and unhelpful. Some define religion as a system wherein the individual “realizes himself or herself ” more fully as an individual. But a definition so expansive defines nothing. The Early Origin of Religion

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On the other hand, too narrowly defined—“belief in a supernatural spirit”—leaves out what most would include, such as dogmas and rituals. Let’s work with this: Religion is focused on supernatural being(s) and the beliefs, myths, and rituals inspired by or serving that supernatural being(s). Basically, gods that inspire dogma serviced by ritual constitute religion.

Uncertain Novelty to Embedded Tradition

What becomes a religious practice might debut as a suspicion, a hunch, an initial caprice. If a simple suspicion turns one against a food and initiates avoidance, a taboo is born. We may eat a food and soon thereafter feel nauseated; an animal that stings or bites is understandably circumvented in the future. Sometimes only a suspicion is needed to put avoidance into practice. When unsubstantiated suspicion founds an aversion, we call it a superstition. These learned avoidances from experience are later passed to offspring. Memes are ideas or behaviors copied from person to person as part of current fashion (Dawkins, 1976). By themselves, memes are not intrinsically adaptive; they are just catchy ideas or fashions. Alone and in isolation, they have no intrinsic longevity. Their evolutionary longevity depends on their contribution to survival. Consequently, most superstitions and memes are an evolutionary dead end. If they lack natural selection’s favor, they perish. But, if we are searching for the sources of new behaviors, superstition and memes might be initial routes by which a novelty debuts. From here, a new taboo may emerge; from a rumor, a cherished myth may grow. But these superstitions persist for the long term and settle into a society’s religious customs only if they critically bring some survival benefit. Otherwise they are likely to be only transient, culled by natural selection. However, when tracking a novelty to embedded tradition we do NOT need to depend on conscious guidance by human effort. Humans are usually unaware of the practical benefits of religion and its gods. Here we meet a precarious tipping point. The subsequent settling of a newborn behavior into embedded tradition does not require the further participation of conscious human effort. This is the pivotal point in this chapter if we are to understand the evolution of religion and of its defining characteristics, so let me develop it further. Likely most people believe that religious practices we see today were founded originally by conscious intent and deliberately inserted into human culture, thereafter passed along across vast generations. One philosopher summarized this view by 176

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boldly proclaiming that “religion is Man’s greatest invention” (Eric Hoffer). Almost certainly this is not true, at least not for the biological evolution of most religious practices. Customs evolved painfully—survival of the fittest—over many generations in directions that were seldom controlled by conscious human design acting out of an awareness of the adaptive function served by particular customs. In this, there is nothing odd or unusual. Consider the evolution of an anatomical adaptation such as the giraffe’s long neck. The short-necked ancestors of today’s giraffes did not yearn for the treetop fruits and leaves beyond their short grasp, caucus on the matter, and then consciously contract with nature for changes to lengthen their necks (and legs) to achieve a better reach. Once appearing in ancestors, a novelty such as a long neck does or does not confer improved performance on the individual possessing it. If performance improves, then, on average, that individual more effectively fits with available resources in its environment and so enjoys a greater chance of survival, successful reproduction, and endowing its offspring with the same trait. A natural culling process is now underway. Those with the new favored characteristic tend to survive, whereas those without tend to be less successful. The result is descent with modification. In human societies, the culling and pruning of unfavorable characteristics proceeds without fanfare or even the notice of those affected. The cause-andeffect relationship between an anatomical feature or social custom and the biological benefits conferred is seldom appreciated. An example might help clarify this central point.

Pigs—Feared or Favored Feared

Pigs are neither intrinsically filthy (any more than cattle or chickens) nor intrinsically clean, yet in some parts of the world pigs are loathed, and in other parts loved. In the Middle East, pig taboos have become part of ancient cultures, practiced by Hebrews, some Egyptians, Sumerians, and later Muslims. As the anthropologist Carleton Coon (1954) put it, the pig in the Middle East “cannot be let or put to useful work, nor milked not shorn.” Pigs do well in forests, but not in grasslands— compared to ruminants—because grassland plants tend to be high in cellulose and resist efficient digestion. As Marvin Harris (1974, p. 277) summarized, “To prohibit raising of pigs was to encourage raising of grains, tree crops, and less costly sources of animal protein.” Compared to other available domestic

animals, pigs are not well suited as food sources of a nomadic people in this dry, rugged environment. Yet a pig, when prepared as food, could be a succulent, appetizing meal. An individual may be easily tempted to pour much time and energy into raising pigs, but this would be unsound for these reasons of husbandry and ecology. Consequently, considerably adaptive value follows from practicing strong taboos that counter the temptation to raise and eat pork. Beyond ecological detriments, pigs in the Middle East also historically presented medical problems, as they are reservoirs of parasites potentially deadly to humans. Improved 19th-century microscopes, clinical medicine, and laboratory sciences aided in discovering that some pork contained heavy infestations of thousands of tiny encapsulated parasites, christened trichinae. It could be a potential scourge; passed from pigs to humans in lightly cooked meat, the trichinae parasites could be ravaging, although not immediately. Weeks might pass before symptoms first appeared in humans. These symptoms could be mild, flu-like, severe, or even deadly. The connection between pork eaten and symptoms arising weeks later made conscious recognition of the medical danger difficult. Certainly suspicions might be raised, but where was the evidence? Without the tools of modern science, the answer was nowhere to be found. Custom and religious tradition fixed taboos against pigs and, by reference to honored prophets or a forceful god, gained the imposing enforcement of their spiritual authority. Scientific authority was unknown, but divine sanction was universally understood. Those determined to continue feasting on pork more often reaped less return for their husbandry efforts and suffered more from disease. Consequently, even if unaware of the risks, considerable adaptive value followed to those practicing strong pig taboos that turned human efforts away from unsound ecological and medical dangers and to husbandry of more suitable animals with more efficient husbandry and fewer risky medical threats.

Favored

In ecological contrast to Middle Eastern deserts, tropical forests provide a different survival context and, therefore, different selective pressures on human populations within. This is especially true if medical threats present no significant dangers to choice of available foods. Instead of placing them on a taboo list, the practice in New Guinea tropical forests of enthusiastically raising favored pigs is

easily understood, at least before contact with outside European technologies and farming methods. Hundreds of years ago, the peoples of New Guinea descended from seafaring groups traced back to the mainland of Southeast Asia. Pigs probably ­arrived with them. But here in these tropical forests of the islands, parasite-free pigs were a huge resource. Crops raised on slash-and-burn farms provided food, but shelf-life was short in the hot, humid forests. If spoiling foods were fed to pigs, then they would not go to waste and could be used to build the pig herd. Pigs also helped clean up the camp by consuming human waste and debris. In a sense, they were “piggy banks” storing calories that could be withdrawn later at slaughter to supplement an occasionally thin diet or in ceremonial diplomacy with neighbors (Rappaport, 1968, p. 149; Sorenson, 1972, 1976). The larger point is that in different environments, different outcomes may evolve. Pigs are the common denominator in Middle East deserts and New Guinea forests, yet the way they are incorporated into respective local religions is quite different—feared (Middle East) or favored (New Guinea). The reason is the different environmental contexts. Natural selection does not work in isolation from the environmental backdrop. Quite the opposite. The interaction between a human feature (e.g., anatomical, behavioral) and the local environment determines whether such a feature brings biological profits or problems. This interaction determines the outcome of subsequent descent with modification.

Basic Liturgy Taboos and Dogma

Within a local society, taboo and dogma dictate activity; a god—or gods—does the enforcing. If passed through the culling hand of natural selection, a taboo becomes more than a suspicion. It returns, as we have seen with tropical pigs, adaptive benefits. And as also argued earlier, the incorporation of a taboo into religious systems is seldom informed by human awareness of the adaptive benefits and, therefore, is not driven by conscious effort. Dogma serves the role of encouraging, even insisting on, observance of taboos and other religious practices. But, biologically, this does not work if there is room to doubt. This is because a doubting Thomas is a dead Thomas, or at least the rational disciple is a skeptic at risk (and without knowing it). Yet spiritual doubts reside in us all. We might occasionally question, challenge, and harbor suspicions about religious teachings. Even Mother Teresa admitted to early spiritual The Early Origin of Religion

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doubts. But if religious practices bring ecological benefits, then these beliefs must be practiced faithfully if survival is to be their reward. To doubt is to risk practicing myths without enthusiasm, without conviction, and, consequently, without effect. Religion represents a very advantageous biological adaptation in primitive societies to environmental demands. Ironically, those practicing religion almost universally remain unaware of or at least unmoved by the adaptive value of their beliefs. Seldom do religious prescriptions depend for their authority on persuasiveness or awareness of actual ecological disasters ahead that befall anyone who breaks them. Most persons practicing religious doctrine are unaware of the threatened medical or ecological disasters. Instead, supernatural consequences weigh on the minds of the potential sinner, fill their thoughts, and enforce faithful practice of taboos and dogma. It could not be otherwise. Local religious practices in primitive societies evolved hundreds—and in some cases, thousands— of years ago without enlightened benefits of medical or ecological sciences to guide them. The germ theory of disease, microscopes, x-ray imagery, laboratory tests, and much more are relatively recent on a human timescale. Long ago, such “medical treatment” was unavailable; “religious treatment” provided the only guide and enforcement of adaptive practices. If science was unavailable, then a conscious appreciation of risks would be unavailable. Cause and effect are decoupled. What authority, then, would enforce the faithful practice of adaptive taboos and dogma? The answer is “God.”

Supernatural—God, Gods, Sacred Ancestors

The long arm of secular law has a limited reach. Quietly and unobserved, a Hebrew or Muslim may ignore the chief or king’s worldly laws imposing taboos and act beyond detection to satisfy a hunger, such as slaughtering a forbidden pig and enjoying a tasty meal. Only a pervasive supernatural being— god, gods, sacred ancestors—could impose the discipline needed to reliably practice survival taboos and dogmas. Accepting a god means accepting the self-restraint of a spiritual inspector watching your everyday practices—day and night, birth to death. In most primitive societies, accepting a god also means having an intimate observer of your private thoughts before they turn into action that may be biologically unsound. Secular authority cannot reach so deep into sequestered temptations. Instead, that is the biological role for a god. 178

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Obviously, the person engaged in day-to-day behaviors must accept without question or hesitation the divine discipline of the supernatural. If not, that is where natural selection comes into play. Those ignoring the demands of a god are apt to engage in practices that, unknown to them, deliver dire consequences; such persons more likely perish early, leaving the faithful to prosper. No doubting Thomas, please.

Survival Kit

It may help to look further at some specific, adapt­ ive, religious taboos and dogmas. Religion functions as a survival kit to help individuals endure hostile neighbors or hostile habitats. In the beliefs and ceremony of religion are the bundled behaviors, personal beliefs, basic knowledge, and solutions ready at hand to be deployed to meet the challenges posed by the immediate environment.

Value System

A proven value system is one tested and tried over many generations against local environmental demands. Values and beliefs at odds with survival fail; those sustaining advantageous customs survive. Sorting and sifting refines, shapes, and eventually produces a settled system of values that support social customs. Religion securely preserves this value system in its myths, ceremonies, and sacred beliefs. This ensures that the tested experiences of previous generations are passed to those in the current generation, who in turn deploy them for their own survival. Taboos and doctrines are handed down and enter each new generation through religion. Codified within religions are the successful values that animate members of a culture and so harmonize them with the social and environmental demands they confront. Whether pigs are loved (New Guinea) or loathed (Middle East) is a moral concern, conserved within and transmitted through religious values. Each new generation born into an unforgiving environment need not freshly discover the value system that will protect and serve it well, as that is already at hand within the religious doctrines of the local people. Religion not only preserves, it also promotes adaptive customs. The value system of a tribe—we should call it by name: a doctrine—is not just a collection of fanciful beliefs. Doctrines inspire codes of conduct that in turn support adaptive customs. It must be taken seriously because it must be practiced faithfully. God or gods provide the authority to back doctrine, give it force, and make it binding. Religion supplies the

right doctrines in support of beneficial customs and, in so doing, gains further adaptive value.

Enemies

Threats to survival may come from hostile neighbors with whom a local group competes for critical resources, or they may come from a challenging physical environment. Religion contains the sanctioned practices to meet such enemies. For example, in local regions of New Guinea, the TsembagaMaring are a clan that live in relatively crowded forest resources and defend their garden plots vigorously (Rappaport, 1968). Warfare and the threat of warfare are intimate parts of Tsembaga-Maring life. Antagonists are usually closely matched, and seldom are many warriors killed. But if one side is routed, the result can mean death for most men, women, and children on the losing side. The territory of the vanquished is eventually incorporated into that of the victors or their allies. The specifics of the warfare are intricate but generally require sufficient resources, such as pigs, to solidify diplomatic support from allies and to physically strengthen the warriors of the clan. This requires a sufficiently large pig herd, raised up over several years, to produce the war chest that will be needed as the clan prepares for battle. Thus there develops a cycle between relatively short times of warfare and longer times of truce during which the pig herd is grown and allies courted. Religious ritual plays an indispensable role in inspiring and running the cycle. Glorified sacred ancestors inspire the living to push the cycle along. Ritual helps bring the clan through a well-defined series of steps in which social roles and functions are laid out and the contribution of each person to the coming warfare effort demarcated. Like the acts in a play, completion of one ceremony is the cue for the next. Roles are defined, paced, and synchronized through ritual. Further members of the clan develop a social cohesiveness, unified in purpose. If slack in preparing for warfare, then better-supplied and better-provisioned neighbors place the clan at biological risk. But if the cycle is successful and warfare is effective, then the territory is held and the land remains available to raise resources that sustain the clan and ensure its current survival (Rappaport, 1968). Sometimes the physical environment itself is the “enemy.” The immediate prize is not territory, but accommodation to the threats posed by a harsh environment. For example, in the dry and environmentally hostile deserts of central Australia, the Aboriginal peoples must find vital resources across

this vast landscape. To do this, they depend on a religious system directly overlaying the bleak topography of their world and on which they depend for their survival. Their religious system harbors a “survival kit,” a systematic body of knowledge about the landscape, all codified within their particular myths and legends. Also codified within this survival kit are the practiced customs that provide the passports of peaceful passage through the lands of neighbors, thereby avoiding the chance of physical conflict. The smallest subdivision of the Aboriginal tribe is the family—man, woman (or women), kids. Raising crops is chancy, as rain varies considerably. In some years, there may be as much as 17 inches of rain (45 cm). In other years, as little as 2 inches (5 cm) of rain may fall. Generally, Aborigines disperse at the end of their summer to take advantage of widely distributed boom sites that flourish in response to the previous months’ rains. Near the end of winter, as sites dry, Aborigines congregate around more permanent water areas with their country. Rain is the single most important factor in their parched environment. Around such lingering pools of water, edible acacia gum, seeds, fruits, mangongo nuts, bulbs, roots, insect grubs, and small animals make up most of the diet. However, most pools eventually dry with the passing of the rainy months. When this happens, water and other resources become dispersed, inconspicuous, and difficult to find. Yet aboriginal peoples do find these scarce resources in times of need, with remarkable talents. The anthropologist T. G. H. Strehlow (1947) records how his aboriginal friend, without aid of compass or equipment, led their journey across what to Strehlow looked to be a featureless landscape in the middle of the Western Desert of Australia: In 1932 my [Aboriginal] guide. . . when taking me across the southern Pintubi area where most of the waters were either deep holes in the ground or clefts in sunken boulders scattered in the mulga thickets, located these difficult sites with astounding precision. We would often travel “blind” through thick mulga scrub for several hours, and then halt suddenly before a soak or rock-plate invisible even from a distance of fifty yards.

How is this possible? Each Aboriginal individual descends, so their belief goes, from one of several ancestral spirits inhabiting the country of the tribe. All those sharing descent or special association with common ancestral spirits participate in their own private system of ritual and myth, a local religious sect, a “totemic cult lodge” (Berndt, 1974; Berndt & The Early Origin of Religion

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Berndt,  1965). The cult lodge is a partnership between religion and real estate, a systematic body of critical knowledge about navigation in the local landscapes to locate scarce resources. This knowledge is not written down on maps, but instead codified vividly into mythology and celebrated in ceremony. During dry times of the year, tribal members must search for water and for the lingering foods it sustains. Timing of movements and knowledge of resource locations are all important for their survival. The religion of the cult lodge supplies this critical information about when to travel and where to find resources. But such knowledge can be extensive, complex, and a challenge to commit to memory. Yet, the Aboriginal world is full of natural objects—waterholes, rock outcrops, gorges, cliffs, hills, and other landmarks as well as various animals. These become the totems that populate the Aboriginal world and around which are built their vivid myths. Particular ancestral spirits, they believe, remain “alive” within the totem, custodian of the sacred site into which the spirit transformed. These myths are of two kinds: site myths (landmarks) and traveling myths. Site myths center on some natural feature. For example, one describes the creation of a deposit of red ochre used today by some southern Aborigines in circumcision ceremonies. The legend holds that this deposit formed when a giant ancestor opened veins in his arms to obtain blood for an initiation ritual. Blood ran forth, forming pools, and the stained soil transformed into ochre deposits. A fist strike or kick from the same ancestral giant left many steep-sided gorges, cliffs, and other distinctive natural landmarks throughout the country. Embedded colorfully in the myth are the distinctive and memorable exploits of a formidable ancestor. Useful ochre deposits are celebrated and identifying topographical features mark the location cited. Traveling myths are complementary to the site myths. Traveling myths record the travels of legendary ancestors, who left behind tangible evidence of their wanderings in the form of permanent waterholes, salt deposits, and so on. For example, among some northern tribes, myth tells of Dingari—a group of ancestral spirits, sometimes depicted as women, other times as men—who wandered through the ancient desert performing rites and meeting forces and characters along the way. Part of the myth describes, in sequence, their journey along one route tracing a path through part of the Western Desert. Frightened by lightning, they seek shelter in a cave, where they come upon an old woman who, 180

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for initiation rites of novices, made four ritual holes in the ground that became rockholes. Next these mythological ancestors, using torches through the night, find water and make soaks. Enemies see sacrilege in these women and put them to death, and their bodies are discarded in a grove of trees. Continuing, the spirits make a chain of wells and soaks and discover moist sand, and next dig a trench. A giant old woman appears, her footprints forming rows of waterholes. As the myth further unfolds, weapon strikes form another waterhole around which water fowl and other animals congregate. In italics, I note very tangible resources the myth identifies, in sequence to be encountered by an Aboriginal person today. All this practical information resides in an otherwise fairy-tale story. The site and traveling myths are vivid, embellished, even rambling, but when reduced to essentials they follow in connected geographical order a chain of successive locations through the country and provide a road map to reach them. Told fully with graphic—even grim—embellishments, the myths fill and excite the imagination, thus more likely to be remembered. The biological advantages become clear. These Dingari myths mention the order and nature of the resource: cave, rockholes, water, grove of trees, wells, soaks, moist sand, trench, waterholes, and, finally, a waterhole that must be sizable as water fowl reside there. In the fully told myth are details of how to reach these sites and approximate distances between them. When rains fail and resources become scarce, an Aboriginal man sets off with his family, moving from one waterhole to the next, each with its associated wild larder of game and plant life. He finds his way by using his knowledge of the country, drummed into him as a child in the form of myths about heroes who wandered the same lands, visited established watering sites, marked with distinctive landmarks he himself now uses to guide his way. Religious ceremony inculcates these legends and gives them their sanctity and respect. It sets these myths and the information they harbor firmly into memory (Birdsell,  1971; Gould,  1969; Lawrence,  1971; Tindale, 1974).

Religion as a Survival Kit

Religion certainly plays a social role in primitive societies, fundamentally through its adaptive services. It sets forth a value system, a moral code with instructions from mythical exploits of ancestral spirits or gods, with both good and bad examples of behavior. It is an adaptive moral code, at least for primitive

peoples who must wisely exploit resources in an uncertain and challenging environment. Perhaps the most important biological role of primitive religions is in codifying a systematic body of knowledge about the environment, a local library serving the local people. That knowledge, faithfully observed, inspires rituals, promotes myths, and relates survival behaviors to one area and so to the natural resources of the land. Ultimately, biological success depends on religion, including its taboos and myths. Failure of local religion means loss of survival practices, and extinction for the tribe. In short, religion is a survival kit that establishes insurance against temporary misfortune, sanctions adapt­ive lifestyles, and inventories local resources (Kardong, 2010).

References

Berndt, R.  M. (1974). Australian Aboriginal religion. Leiden: Brill. Berndt, R. M., & Berndt, C. H. (Eds.). (1965). Aboriginal man in Australia. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Birdsell, J. B. (1971). Ecology, spacing mechanisms and adaptive behaviour in Aboriginal land tenure. In R.  Cromcombe (Ed.), Land tenure in the Pacific (pp. 334–361). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Coon, C. S. (1954). The story of man. New York, NY: Knopf. Darwin, C. (1859). The origin of species by means of natural selection; or, The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for  life (R.  M.  Hutchins, Ed.). London: John Murray. (Encyclopaedia Britannica reprint 1952.) Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Durkheim, E. (1972). The elementary forms of the religious life. In W. A. Lessa & E. Z. Vogt (Eds.), Reader in comparative religion. New York, NY: Harper and Row. Gould, R. A. (1969). Subsistence behaviour among the Western Desert Aborigines of Australia. Oceania, 39(4), 253–274. Harris, M. (1974). Cows, pigs, wars, and witches: the riddles of culture. New York, NY: Random House. Hempel, C.  G. (1965). Aspects of Scientific Explanation. New York, NY: Macmillan. Kardong, K. V. (2010). Beyond God: Evolution and the future of religion. Amherst: Prometheus Press (Humanity Books). Further discussion of these ideas may be found in this book, and from which sections have been taken or paraphrased for use in this chapter. Lawrence, R. (1971). Habitat and economy: A historical perspective, in D. J. Mulvaney & J. Golson (Eds.), Aboriginal man and environment in Australia (pp. 249–261). Canberra: Australian National University Press. Mayr, E. (1965). Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Montagu, A. (1968). Man Observed. New York, NY: Putnam. Rappaport, R.  A. (1968). Pigs for the ancestors: Ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea people. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rose, M.  R., & Lauder, G.  V. (Eds.). (1996). Adaptation. San Diego: Academic Press. Sorenson, E. R. (1972). Socio-ecological change among the Fore of New Guinea. Current Anthropology, 13(3–4), 349–383. Sorenson, E. R. (1976). The edge of the forest: Land, childhood, and change in a New Guinea protoagricultural society. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Strehlow, T.  G.  H. (1947). Aranda traditions. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Tindale, N. B. (1974). Aboriginal tribes of Australia: their terrain, environmental controls, distribution, limits, and proper names. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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12

CH A PTE R

The Elephant in the Pews Reproductive Strategy and Religiosity

Jason Weeden, Robert Kurzban, and Douglas T. Kenrick

Abstract When it comes to religiosity and its lifestyle correlates, the typical assumption is that the causal arrows run primarily from religiosity to morals to one’s own behavior. In contrast, this chapter argues that differences in sexual and reproductive lifestyles can substantially influence individual choices regarding religious involvement and related beliefs. Religious groups provide attractive benefits to high-­commitment, high-fertility strategists, but are simultaneously less helpful or harmful to low-commitment, low-fertility strategists. The chapter reviews evidence showing not only that sexual and reproductive variables have relatively large statistical relationships with religiosity in modern, developed societies but also that the causal role of these sexual and reproductive variables helps to account for various longitudinal and correlational patterns involving religiosity. Human life is driven by concrete, fitness-relevant concerns, and contemporary differences in religiosity are no exception. Key Words: religiosity, church, attendance, reproductive, strategy, sociosexuality, sexual, moral, causality

The developed world contains tremendous differences in religiosity, both within and between societies. According to the 2014 wave of the US General Social Survey—a long-standing survey project measuring demographics, attitudes, and behaviors—29% of US adults attend religious services about once per week or more, while 34% attend less than once per year. In Europe, there is a line of countries from France to Finland where fewer than 10% attend services weekly, but also countries that have similar or even greater rates of attendance than the United States (for example, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Portugal) (Manchin, 2004). Wealthy AsiaPacific countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, often have low average religious attendance, though South Korea and Singapore look more like the United States, with around 30% of people there attending services at least weekly while around a third to a half attend once per year or less according to data from the 2010–2014 wave of the World Values Survey. 182

Our focus in this chapter is on individual differences within modern, developed societies. In particular, we ask, What are the major factors that lead some adults to develop and maintain active participation in religious groups and lead other adults to avoid such groups? We are assuming that the vast majority of people are psychologically capable of either being heavily involved with religion or living without it, and that, in modern, developed societies, the vast majority of people face realistic options of affiliating with religious groups or not. Given that, why are some of these adults actively involved with religious groups while others avoid them almost entirely? There are many factors that might contribute to these differences. The most commonly cited is parental inheritance. Some people grow up in households with churchgoing parents; others do not. Indeed, there is a substantial statistical relationship between parental attendance and offspring at­tend­ance, though, as we show, it might not be as large or straightforward as many would guess.

Here we highlight another set of large but frequently overlooked statistical relationships with religiosity in modern, developed societies—individual differences in the adoption of high-commitment, high-fertility reproductive strategies versus lowcommitment, low-fertility reproductive strategies. People who go to church regularly are more likely than the nonreligious to have few sex partners and higher numbers of children, to have married and not divorced, to avoid cohabitation and sexual activity when not married, to avoid bars and recreational drugs, and so on (Weeden, 2015; Weeden, Cohen, & Kenrick, 2008; Weeden & Kurzban, 2014). In addition, closely related to both religiosity and these kinds of lifestyle patterns are a range of moral and political views—on premarital sex, abortion, divorce, recreational drugs, and related lifestyle issues (Kurzban, Dukes, & Weeden, 2010; Quintelier, Ishii, Weeden, Kurzban, & Braeckman, 2013; Weeden, 2003; Weeden et al., 2008; Weeden & Kurzban, 2013, 2014). Why are these patterns so often overlooked in explaining individual differences in religiosity? There are at least two reasons. First, researchers often do not appreciate how much larger relationships between religiosity and lifestyle variables are than relationships between religiosity and many other widely discussed correlates. Second, researchers often assume that the causality runs almost entirely from religious differences to sexual and reproductive differences. On the usual telling, religiosity begins the causal arrow, affecting various beliefs and moral commitments, leading in the end to lifestyle differences. Lifestyle differences are assumed to be primarily effects rather than causes of both religious differences and moral differences. However, there are reasons to doubt the usual telling. In this chapter, we review research on the tremendous drop in average attendance rates among young adults, and how a focus on the lifestyle changes associated with sexual maturity can shed important light on these patterns. We also review studies comparing sexual and reproductive variables with variables such as age, gender, personality features, cooperative morals, and disease avoidance. This research routinely finds that sexual and reproductive items not only have relatively large correlations with religiosity, but that these relationships are large enough to substantially or even fully mediate the correlations between religiosity and a variety of other variables. In other words, to the extent that age, gender, and personality have a causal effect on individual differences in religiosity,

these variables likely do so in large part via their effects on more centrally relevant differences in sexual and reproductive lifestyles and morals. This implies a strong causal role for sexual and reproductive variables in explaining individual differences in religiosity. We view religious involvement and restrictive sexual and reproductive morals as tools. These tools are used or avoided contingently to advance different lifestyles. Contrasting sexual and reproductive strategies lead people in modern, developed societies to actively adopt or reject religious involvement (along with related religious beliefs and moral positions). As we explain, we view human social life as driven not by vague abstractions, but by concrete, competitive, fitness-relevant goals (Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, & Schaller, 2010). Strategic conflicts can arise from diverse and competing sexual and reproductive strategies—when, for example, long-term mating strategies are threatened by short-term mating strategies (Schmitt, 2005). Moral conflicts can be less about regulating one’s own behavior, and more about manipulating incentives and alliances that might affect other people’s behavior (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2009,  2013). Explanations that people give for their own choices can serve as strategic narratives—self-presentational efforts meant to advance one’s concrete social goals. Assuming that people’s own expressed beliefs and lifestyles are straightforward effects of their religiosity is—given the modular organization of human minds and the biased, underinformed, self­presentational nature of conscious beliefs—about as sensible as assuming that political spokespersons routinely give straightforwardly accurate information about their bosses’ closed-door meetings and strategic motives (Kurzban, 2010). Combining such considerations, we think the typical account misses strong, nonreligious influences on sexual and reproductive lifestyles (influences such as age, gender, physical attractiveness, local sex ratio, and more), and misses how the resulting lifestyle differences can then affect people’s decisions to affiliate with or avoid religious groups. It misses how conflicting interests feed into c­ onflicting moral views. It misses how people actively pick and choose among religious groups and religious and moral beliefs to create coalitions and selfpresentational narratives in support of their own lifestyle interests. In short, it misses the causal arrows flowing from competing lifestyle interests into moral and religious differences. The Elephant in the Pews

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Recognizing the Elephant (Hint: Size Matters)

Discussions of religiosity’s correlates sometimes suffer from effect-size blindness. Various relationships are noted—with age, gender, personality variables, sexual behaviors, and so on—without any acknowledgment that some of these relationships are far larger than others. In this section we discuss a number of correlates of religiosity. Further, and crucially, we review studies that have examined mediation patterns among correlates of religiosity. In places like the contemporary United States, which variables take center stage, and which are mostly sideshows?

Parental Attendance

A genuinely sizable difference between adults who are more religious and less religious is that the more religious are more likely to have had religious parents. In various waves from 1983 to 2008, the US General Social Survey (GSS) has asked respondents to recall their mother’s and father’s levels of church attendance when the respondent was “a child” or “growing up.” Parental church attendance overall had a .27 correlation with the adult respondents’ own levels of church attendance, a relationship that was stronger among younger members of the GSS sample (e.g., .33 for those under 30) and weaker for older sample members (e.g., .19 for those 70 or older). Another large sample, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (we refer to it as the “Longitudinal Survey”), has followed a representative US group from their teens to their late 20s, and also surveyed the sample members’ parents

directly in the initial wave. In this sample, the correlation between frequency of parental church at­ tend­ance when the sample members were teenagers and the sample members’ own frequency of church attendance was .48 when sample members were 17, but dropped to around .29 at ages 25 and later (Weeden, 2015). It may surprise some that these correlations are not more substantial, but in large and representative samples, correlations for behavioral items at around .28 are impressive. Yet there is more that these samples reveal. Information on sexual history, children, marriage, divorce, cohabitation, and drinking also substantially predicts differences in religious attendance, producing a multiple correlation of roughly .32 in the GSS and .31 in the Longitudinal Survey at age 26 (Weeden, 2015). So, lifestyle profile is at least as good a predictor of sample members’ church at­tend­ ance as is their parents’ church attendance. Further, these lifestyle features are only weakly related to parental church attendance. In the Longitudinal Survey, for example, parental church attendance when the sample members were teenagers had only a .13 correlation with overall religiously relevant lifestyle differences at age 26 (Weeden, 2015). Moreover, lifestyle information helps fill a striking hole left by parental inheritance accounts. Despite the considerable correlation between adults’ attendance and their parents’ attendance in the Longitudinal Survey, adults in their 20s attended religious services on average far less than their parents. Table 12.1 breaks this down. While 39% of the Longitudinal Survey sample had parents who went to church every week, at age

Table 12.1.  Correspondence Between Religious Attendance of Parents in 1997 (When Offspring Were Teenagers) and Offspring at Age 26 Parents in 1997: Neither attended more than “once or twice” a year Offspring at age 26: “Never” or “once or twice” Offspring at age 26: “Less than once a month” to “about twice a month” Offspring at age 26: “About once a week” or more frequently Totals

Parents in 1997: In between

Parents in 1997: At least one attended “about once a week” or more frequently

Totals

24%

19%

18%

61%

4%

7%

11%

22%

3%

4%

10%

17%

31%

30%

39%

Source: From Weeden, J. (2015). Losing my religion: An analysis of the decline in religious attendance from childhood to adulthood. In D. J. Slone & J. A. Van Slyke (Eds.), The attraction of religion: A new evolutionary psychology of religion (pp. 73–91). London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. Used with permission by Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

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Jason W eeden, Robert Kur zban, D ougl as T. Kenrick

26 only 17% of the sample were themselves attending weekly. Even among those who had parents who went to services every week (39% of the sample), only about one in four were attending weekly at age  26, while almost half were attending once or twice per year or less. While there is a substantial correlation between parental attendance and adult offspring attendance, most young adults raised by regular churchgoers are not themselves regular churchgoers. Part of the explanation is that many young adults start partying, having casual sex, and living together outside marriage in their teens and 20s. In the Longitudinal Survey sample, the most frequent churchgoers tended strongly to be those whose parents attended church frequently and who themselves had traditional lifestyles; the biggest avoiders of religious groups were those with less restricted sociosexual lifestyles, whether raised religious or not (Weeden, 2015). As shown in Table  12.2, the drop in church attendance among those with churchgoing parents was tremendous for those with unrestricted lifestyles (involving more premarital sex, drinking, cohabitation, etc.). This drop occurred very quickly for those with unrestricted patterns at age 18 and more slowly for those with unrestricted patterns at age 26. If one assumes that the causality runs predominantly from religious differences to lifestyle differences,

then the story is that some powerful but unidentified force depresses—by half—church attendance rates at the time people approach sexual maturity, and this unexplained drop in attendance causes unrestricted lifestyles among some young adults. A more plausible conclusion, of course, is that the developing allure (for some more than others) of unrestricted lifestyles is a substantial cause of the  drop (for some more than others) in church attendance—that is, that lifestyle differences arising from nonreligious sources can be a cause of people’s decisions to abandon their prior involvement with religious groups.

Cooperation

What other differences are there between those who are more and less religious? Increasingly, researchers have highlighted the relationship between religiosity and cooperation (Atkinson & Bourrat, 2011; Johnson & Bering, 2006; Johnson & Kruger, 2004; Norenzayan, 2013; Norenzayan et al., 2015; Schloss & Murray, 2011; D.  Wilson, 2002). Indeed, when we gathered data from students at four American universities (N = 902), there were significant correlations between frequency of church attendance and moral attitudes toward things such as shoplifting (.22), telling small lies to friends (.20), cheating on exams (.16), and not helping friends (.15) (Weeden et al., 2008).

Table 12.2.  Average Times-per-Year Attendance Rates, with the Sample Split into Approximate Halves on Parental Attendance, Lifestyle Profile at Age 18, and Lifestyle Profile at Age 26

Parents high; Restricted at 18; Restricted at 26 Parents high; Unrestricted at 18; Restricted at 26 Parents low; Restricted at 18; Restricted at 26 Parents high; Restricted at 18; Unrestricted at 26 Parents low; Unrestricted at 18; Restricted at 26 Parents high; Unrestricted at 18; Unrestricted at 26 Parents low; Restricted at 18; Unrestricted at 26 Parents low; Unrestricted at 18; Unrestricted at 26

Percent of sample

Parental attendance

Attendance at age 18

Attendance at age 26

17.1%

51

39

30

8.2%

49

20

17

11.4%

5

15

13

11.4%

48

29

11

10.5%

4

8

10

12.7%

46

16

9

10.0%

5

10

6

18.7%

4

6

5

Source: From Weeden, J. (2015). Losing my religion: An analysis of the decline in religious attendance from childhood to adulthood. In D. J. Slone & J. A. Van Slyke (Eds.), The attraction of religion: A new evolutionary psychology of religion (pp. 73–91). London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. Used with permission by Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

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Yet these correlations with cooperative morals were considerably smaller than correlations with sexual and reproductive morals, such as views on abortion (.53), casual sex (.50), homosexuality (.49), and divorce (.34). In fact, when we controlled for these kinds of items, the correlations between religiosity and cooperative morals became near-zero and nonsignificant. Anyone positing a fundamental causal link between cooperative morals and religiosity is left the task of explaining how it is that sexual and reproductive morals can sever the statistical link entirely. We checked this result using adults from roughly 90 countries from the World Values Survey. Across the full sample (N = 296,959), a combined measure of moral views on lying, stealing, and related areas had a .074 correlation with frequency of church at­ tend­ ance (Weeden & Kurzban, 2013). But for sexual and reproductive morals, the correlation was .322. When we used both moral items simultaneously to predict church attendance, cooperative morals became a small negative predictor (−.035) while sexual and reproductive morals were somewhat larger (.335). People who tended to avoid churches in the World Values Survey sample were not specifically people with loose cooperative morals, but those with unrestricted sexual and reproductive morals who nonetheless disapproved of lying and stealing. Some cooperation theorists might object that they are really talking about belief in God rather than church attendance. But the World Values Survey sample showed the same pattern for belief in God. The correlation between cooperative morals and belief in God was .074; for reproductive morals, on the other hand, it was .278 (Weeden & Kurzban, 2013). When we used both simultaneously to predict belief in God, cooperative morals became slightly negative (−.030) while reproductive morals became somewhat larger (.288). We found similar results across a range of religiosity measures (viewing religion or God as important in one’s life, prayer, belief in heaven, hell, souls, and so on).

Age, Cohort, and Gender

Some other commonly discussed correlates of church attendance are very basic demographic features we investigated using the GSS 1989 to 2006 (N = 21,131). We confirmed well-known correlations showing that older people attended more frequently than younger people (.16), earlier cohorts attended more frequently than later cohorts (−.16), and women attended more frequently than men (.13) (Weeden et al., 2008). 186

Importantly, there were also substantial correlations between church attendance and number of past sex partners (−.28), having married and never divorced (.20), and number of children (.16) (Weeden et al., 2008). When we controlled for age, cohort, and gender, these sexual and reproductive correlates shrank somewhat (to −.23, .17, and .10, respectively). However, when we controlled for the sexual and reproductive variables, the correlations with age, cohort, and gender became especially small (.06, −.06, and .05, respectively). Assuming that correlations between church attendance and age, cohort, and gender are signs of causation flowing from age, cohort, and gender to church at­tend­ ance (a pretty safe assumption), this suggests that age, cohort, and gender have their effects on church attendance in large part through their larger effects on lifestyle differences. In short, younger men do not have low-commitment, low-fertility lifestyles because they are less religious; instead, these lifestyle differences motivate young men to avoid religious groups. Similarly, settling down and raising children encourages religious involvement. The causal arrow runs from lifestyles to religiosity in important ways.

Personality Features

Certain personality features also correlate with church attendance. When we looked at college students (N = 902), we found significant relationships between church attendance and sensation seeking (−.16), self-control (.12), agreeableness (.11), and conscientiousness (.11) (Weeden et al., 2008). Yet there were larger correlations with sexual and reproductive variables like sociosexual attitudes (−.36), past number of sex partners (−.28), and desire for marriage and children (.19). Further, consistent with the above findings, these correlations remained robust when we controlled for personality features, but controlling for sexual and reproductive variables entirely eliminated the correlations between church attendance and variables like sensation seeking (−.01), self-control (−.02), agreeableness (−.01), and conscientiousness (.02). To the extent one views these personality items as early in the causal stream, these mediation patterns suggest that sexual and reproductive patterns are situated in the causal stream after personality, but before religiosity.

Disease Avoidance

Another proposed contributor to individual differences in religiosity (and specifically in religious conservatism) is disease avoidance, with religiosity thought to serve as an honest signal of separation

Jason W eeden, Robert Kur zban, D ougl as T. Kenrick

from out-groups members who might carry novel pathogens (Fincher & Thornhill, 2012). Indeed, studies by Tybur and colleagues (2010; Tybur, Inbar, Güler, & Malho, 2015) have found individual-level links between pathogen disgust/avoidance and religious measures. However, these links were fully mediated when the far larger correlate of sexual disgust was entered into their models. In addition, Hackman and Hruschka (2013) found that the US state-level association between pathogen prevalence and religiosity was entirely attributable to sexually transmitted disease rates rather than nonsexual pathogens, an association that itself was mediated by teen birth rate.

Summary

Individual differences in religiosity are fundamentally related to individual differences in sexual and reproductive patterns (at least in modern, developed societies). This relationship is revealed by analyses of large and diverse samples that, crucially, have compared effect sizes and mediation patterns involving some of the most widely discussed alternatives. Not only are individual differences in sexual and reproductive patterns the largest nonreligious correlates of individual differences in religiosity that we know of, but these sexual and reproductive differences substantially mediate a host of widely discussed smaller correlates, from gender and age, to personality measures, to cooperative morals, to pathogen avoidance. Further, the relationships between religiosity and sexual and reproductive variables are often so large that it is difficult to imagine a third variable that itself would fully mediate these relationships; we know of no research identifying correlates large enough to be plausible candidates.1 1  A full mediator (M) of a given correlation between X and Y will have correlations with X and with Y that, when multiplied, approximate the correlation between X and Y. So, if X and Y have a correlation of .30, then a potential candidate for M will have a correlation with X and a correlation with Y that are both around .55 (because .55 times .55 equals .30). When examining large and fullpopulation-representative datasets, such relationships are enormous and rare. For example, in the Longitudinal Survey data, frequency of church attendance at age 26 correlates with an overall sexual and reproductive lifestyle profile at .31 (N = 5,405) (Weeden, 2015). A potential mediator would have around a .56 correlation both with church attendance and with the lifestyle profile. This approximates the size of the correlation between participant’s attendance at age 26 and those same participants’ attendance a mere 4 years earlier at age 22, which is .54. It would be big news indeed to find a previously unknown simultaneous correlate of church attendance and sexual/ reproductive lifestyles that approaches this size (unless, of course, someone simply created a scale combining sexual and religious items—given a name like “purity”—that might technically do the trick, but would fail to add new insight).

Any account of individual differences in religiosity in modern, developed societies that ignores sexual and reproductive patterns, or views them as footnotes or trivial side-effects, is ignoring the elephant in the pews. Still, while recognizing the elephant in the pews is pretty easy, the harder part is figuring out what it is doing there. We now turn to this question.

The Reproductive Religiosity Model

A common account of religiosity and its moral and behavioral correlates goes roughly as follows: Religious involvement is passed on from parents to children. Being involved with religious groups causes people to adopt a set of interconnected beliefs about the desires and commands of divine entities, morality, how one ought to live, the rewards and punishments that await various choices, and so on. These beliefs are then fundamental influences on people’s own behavior. This common account is at best incomplete. For example, it is misleading when it comes to parentchild resemblance on church attendance. As we just discussed, for example, the large majority of young adults who had regularly churchgoing parents are not themselves regular churchgoers. Further, the account assumes that the morals and lifestyles of religious worshipers stem from having sat through repetitive sermons, yet makes no comparable assumption regarding the beliefs and lifestyles of nonreligious people. In Western countries, for instance, people who regularly attend religious services typically have conservative moral and political views on premarital sex, abortion, and related lifestyle areas; but it is also the case that people who do not attend religious services equally typically have liberal views on these areas (Weeden & Kurzban, 2014). Why do the relatively homogeneous views of religious conservatives require explicit training in churches, while the equally homogeneous views of secular liberals only require having grown up with less religious parents? Our own work has proposed new ways to think about the complex relationships among religiosity, sexual and reproductive morals, and sexual and reproductive lifestyles (Kenrick, 2011; Kurzban, 2010; Kurzban, Dukes, & Weeden, 2010; Weeden, 2003,  2015; Weeden, Cohen, & Kenrick, 2008; Weeden & Kurzban, 2013, 2014). We propose that differences in sexual and reproductive lifestyles can be substantial causes in addition to effects of religious differences in modern, developed societies. While holding certain religious beliefs and ideologies The Elephant in the Pews

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might have some influence on people’s behaviors, people also tend strongly to be motivated reasoners, picking and choosing narrative elements that advance their social goals. Social learning is important, but rather than just passive recipients, people are often active agents, seeking out experiences, affiliations, and narratives that advance their deep agendas while avoiding those that do not. Moral positions are social phenomena that are more about influencing other people’s behavior than one’s own. Religious involvement in modern, developed societies does not primarily involve memetic infections or costly sacrifices or self-interest-quashing behavioral modification, but is in large part a tool used (or avoided) in service of one’s self-interest. The basics of our view are simple. We have proposed the reproductive religiosity model. The central point is that involvement in (or avoidance of ) religious groups in modern, developed societies is in substantial part motivated by whether religious involvement advances one’s own sexual and reproductive strategy. Religious groups typically provide benefits that are especially helpful to high-commitment, high-fertility strategists and often less helpful (or harmful) to low-commitment, low-fertility strategists. And so religious groups disproportionately attract and retain high-commitment, high-fertility strategists and repel low-commitment, low-fertility strategists. There remains much unsaid by our model. For example, we do not take a position on how it came to be that religious groups in modern, developed societies typically provide benefits that are especially helpful to high-commitment, high-fertility strategists. We simply note that they do and that these kinds of benefits strongly influence who chooses to seek out or avoid religious involvement. The benefits for high-commitment, high-fertility strategists fall roughly into two categories. First, members of religious groups tend to endorse moral positions that place increased social costs on those engaging in promiscuous behaviors. These positions condemn a range of specifics, from partying and casual sex to birth control and abortion to cohabitation and divorce. High-commitment, high-fertility strategists benefit from these moralizations in a number of ways. The moralizations increase the costs of (and thus discourage) other people’s promiscuous behaviors—behaviors that are especially disruptive to committed partners producing larger families. Encouraging one’s own partner to increase ties with a moralizing group assists with mateguarding, increasing monitoring of and social costs 188

for one’s mate’s lapses. Further, religious groups can serve as lobbying groups that pressure members of wider social groups to act in ways favoring highcommitment, high-fertility strategists. The second category of benefits relates to tangible services and assistance. Religious groups often provide babysitting, daycare, schools, and so on. They often take up monetary collections for members experiencing various hardships (spousal death, loss of job, and so on). They often involve less coordinated benefits, like bringing by family meals when a parent is sick. These kinds of benefits are especially helpful to parents with young children. In these ways, religious involvement can be thought of as a social tool that is often useful for high-commitment, high-fertility strategists, but typically involves more costs than benefits to lowcommitment, low-fertility strategists. But it is a complex and opaque tool—the range of benefits and harms are multifaceted and not necessarily ­apparent to those who have not observed them ­firsthand. Our model predicts that those most attracted to religious groups will be those who both have a use for the tool (because they are high-commitment, high-fertility strategists) and know that the tool would be useful (because they have prior experience with religious groups). Those avoiding religious groups might either have no use for the tool (because they are low-commitment, low-fertility strategists) or not know its value despite potentially benefiting from it (because they have little prior experience). Indeed, this provides a fairly accurate description of the religious attendance patterns of young adults in the sample from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (Weeden, 2015). As we showed previously in Table 12.2, those who had high-attendance parents and had more restricted lifestyle patterns in their teens and 20s maintained relatively high attendance rates, averaging around 30 times per year at age 26. In contrast, those with high-attendance parents who had more unrestricted lifestyle patterns in their teens and 20s averaged a mere nine times per year, despite having parents who themselves averaged 46 times per year. Those with low-attendance parents but restricted lifestyle patterns averaged 13 times per year, despite having parents who themselves averaged only five times per year. Decisions to avoid religious groups are as important in explaining religiosity’s correlates as are decisions to affiliate with religious groups. In the Longitudinal Survey sample, for example, much of

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the correlation between religious attendance and lifestyles is driven by the fact that those with more unrestricted lifestyles have very low attendance rates, even when their parents had high attendance rates. Similarly, the political and moral splits between religious conservatives and secular liberals have a lot to do with the fact that people with liberal lifestyle views rarely choose to maintain or develop substantial involvement with religious groups. One does not need to suppose that the relatively homogeneous patterns among religious worshipers derive from extensive training, while the equally homogeneous patterns among religious avoiders do not—one can explain both by understanding that religious groups attract those with high-commitment, high-fertility strategies, while simultaneously repelling those with low-commitment, low-fertility strategies.

Complex, Multidirectional Causality

Religiosity in modern, developed countries is highly correlated with moral and political views relating to premarital and casual sex, abortion, homosexuality, divorce, getting drunk and using recreational drugs, using birth control, and so on (Weeden et al., 2008; Weeden & Kurzban, 2013, 2014; Weeden & Sabini, 2007). Religiosity is also substantially related to differences in sociosexual attitudes, desires for marriage and children, and behavioral measures such as number of past sex partners, number of children, marriage, divorce, nonmarital cohabitation, and frequency of drinking and recreational drug use (Weeden, 2015; Weeden et al., 2008; Weeden & Kurzban, 2014; Weeden & Sabini, 2007). In addition, these kinds of lifestyle measures are substantially related to moral and political views on sexual and reproductive matters (Kurzban et al., 2010; Quintelier et al., 2013; Weeden, 2003; Weeden & Kurzban, 2014; Weeden & Sabini, 2007). Many discussions of religiosity in relation to morals and behavior assume a simple causal model with religiosity early in the causal chain, itself influenced primarily by one’s upbringing. Being involved with religious groups causes people to adopt various beliefs—many of them moral beliefs—about a variety of topics in social life. The Ten Commandments, for example, specifically refer to murder, adultery, stealing, and bearing false witness against a neighbor. Last in the causal chain are behaviors, which are influenced by these kinds of moral beliefs and reinforced by the belief that watchful and powerful gods will reward the good and punish the bad. We do not argue that there is no causality from religiosity to morals or from religiosity and morals

Sexual and reproductive lifestyles

Expressed beliefs regarding sexual and reproductive morals, religious doctrine, etc.

Religious attendance/involvement

Figure 12.1  Causal flows among lifestyles, religious involvement, and related expressed beliefs regarding morals and doctrines.

to one’s own behavior. Instead, we argue that it is considerably more complicated. Figure  12.1 provides a simple graphic for these complex relationships. In this section, we address some of the aspects of these causal flows.

Causality Between Lifestyles and Religious Involvement

There are numerous factors that influence sociosexual attitudes/lifestyles and fertility patterns. Some are individual features like gender, age, physical attractiveness, and socioeconomic status. Others are local societal and ecological features like economic development, sex ratio, legal and moral sanctions, and environmental stress and dangers. For different individuals at different developmental stages in different social and ecological environments, complex sexual and reproductive differences can arise from a variety of sources. Crucially, then, a given individual’s own lifestyle at a given time produces important incentives affecting whether that individual might continue with or seek out religious involvement or, just as importantly, avoid religious involvement (assuming a time and place where religious groups tend to assist people with high-commitment, high-fertility lifestyles and hamper those with low-commitment, low-fertility lifestyles). That is, lifestyle choices substantially influence religiosity choices. Various lines of evidence support the notion of causal flow from lifestyles to religiosity. The substantial drop in religious attendance among young adults The Elephant in the Pews

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is closely related to emerging sociosexual patterns (Weeden, 2015). As we argued above, a parsimonious explanation is that sexual maturity, combined with a variety of individual and social influences, lead many in developed societies toward less restricted lifestyle patterns, and this in turn causes many to avoid religious involvement, even when raised by churchgoing parents. An explanation relying on religion’s causal influences must, in contrast, leave the drop in religious involvement as an unexplained phenomenon unrelated to the powerful behavioral shifts brought on by sexual maturity. Age differences in religious attendance are substantially mediated by sexual activity, marriage, divorce, and children (Weeden et al., 2008), and longitudinal studies find that attendance increases following marriage and child birth and decreases following divorce (McCullough, Enders, Brion, & Jain, 2005). In addition, differences in sexual, marital, and fertility behaviors and attitudes substantially mediate gender differences in religious at­tend­ ance (Weeden et al., 2008). That is, sexual and reproductive factors provide an empirically plausible pathway through which age and gender exert their causal influence on religious involvement. The larger differences between younger men and older women are found in lifestyle patterns; the smaller differences in religious involvement are explainable by virtue of these larger lifestyle differences. Seen another way, younger men with high-commitment, high-fertility patterns have religious attendance rates similar to older women; older women with low-commitment, low-fertility patterns have religious attendance rates similar to younger men. Changing lifestyle patterns within the United States over the last quarter-century substantially mediate drops in attendance across cohorts (Weeden et al., 2008). Again, the bigger differences between generations are in lifestyle patterns rather than religious attendance, and the larger lifestyle differences can explain the smaller religious differences. Reduced attendance has not led recent generations to have more sex partners, less marriage, and fewer kids; these lifestyle changes have led to reduced at­ tend­ance. Beyond mediational evidence indicating causal flow from sexual and reproductive matters to religiosity, Li, Cohen, Weeden, and Kenrick (2010) found experimental evidence as well. They had university students rate various online dating profiles ostensibly from fellow students on their own campus. Subjects presented with numerous attractive same-sex ads expressed increased belief in God 190

relative to those viewing fewer attractive same-sex ads. This effect arguably arises from self-presentational efforts to give themselves an edge in a highly competitive mating environment—when there are a lot of attractive members of one’s sex, the benefits of a nonmonogamous lifestyle are lowered. Being involved with religious groups can also affect lifestyles. These causal influences can go beyond passive socialization. Religious groups often provide assistance for high-commitment, highfertility lifestyles. Being raised within religious groups provides more knowledge of and better access to that assistance. Being raised religious can therefore increase incentives to engage in such lifestyles. Further, members of religious groups often monitor and place moral costs on promiscuous behavior. Living in social groups dominated by such moralizers creates tangible social incentives to reduce prom­is­cu­ity. Various other causal factors have different entry points into the religion-lifestyle relationship. Parental religious involvement primarily affects offspring religious involvement, which results in small downstream effects on offspring lifestyles. On the other hand, age, cohort, and gender primarily affect lifestyle patterns, which results in small downstream effects on religious involvement.

Causality Involving Expressed Beliefs

The relationships between expressed beliefs and related behaviors also exhibit complex causality. For example, sexual and reproductive morals are closely related to sexual and reproductive behaviors. Do people avoid promiscuous sex because they adopt moral views against it? Or do they express moral views to fit their own lifestyle preferences? Surely both occur. In part, people might be more likely to avoid behaviors that violate their own expressed moral positions because other people increase moral punishment on hypocrites (Kurzban, 2010; McDermott, Schwartz, & Vallejo, 2015; Weeden & Kurzban, 2014). Announcing a moral position, then, affects one’s own costs of engaging in those behaviors. On the other hand, people might adopt moral views in line with whether they themselves benefit from those moral views (DeScioli, Massenkoff, Shaw, Peterson, & Kurzban, 2014). We suggest that high-commitment strategists benefit from increasing the moral costs of promiscuous behavior, while low-commitment strategists benefit when those costs are low, and that these incentives affect the adoption of a range of competing moral and

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political views (Kurzban, 2010; Weeden & Kurzban, 2014). One causal clue here is that while gender correlates very strongly with sociosexual preferences (e.g., the emotional closeness desired before having sex), women are only somewhat more conservative than men on sexual moral items (e.g., whether casual sex is morally wrong) (Weeden & Kurzban, 2014; Weeden & Sabini, 2007). This is consistent with the view that gender has a direct effect on sociosexual attitudes, which then affect sexual morals, leaving a small residual correlation between gender and sexual morals. Similarly, there is surely also bidirectional causality involved between lifestyles and religious doctrine. Might some Catholics reject the pope’s authority on sexual and reproductive lifestyles because they are drawn to less-committed and lower-fertility lifestyles? Might some “biblical literalists” be motivated by their own interests to emphasize some passages and ignore others? Might claims to know with certainty the content of God’s desires be selfdeceptive narratives that advance proponents’ own lifestyle agendas? In addition, views assuming that causality flows mainly from religious involvement to religious beliefs neglect not only the large extent to which people change levels of religious involvement over time but also the extent to which people shop around and change the religious groups with which they affiliate. Might many gays and lesbians attracted to religious involvement seek out congregations that express more accepting views on gays and lesbians? Might some American Buddhists or Unitarian Universalists or Baha’i be drawn there by the relative lack of strict lifestyle pronouncements? Might highly educated individuals disproportionately seek out moderate and liberal Protestant denominations over fundamentalist ones in large part because of varying positions on lifestyles and tolerance? Such moves are plainly plausible, yet this does not imply a lack of causal flow from religious involvement to expressed beliefs. Equally plainly, being involved with a religious group can encourage the expression of doctrinal and moral beliefs that are consistent with fellow worshipers.

Evolutionary Foundations

We are not making claims about the early evolution of religious cognition or the pay-offs that affected the historical spread of particular religious ideas or traditions, so the reproductive religiosity model is not, then, an “evolutionary” one in that sense. We are largely agnostic on such matters. To be clear, we

strongly doubt that the factors that are currently dominant in driving individual differences in religiosity in modern, developed societies are the same factors that were dominant in driving the early development of religious cognition. Instead, our account is “evolutionary” in the sense that we view religious involvement as one of the many modern tools used by humans in pursuing their ancient evolutionary goals—in this case, goals relating to contingent, competing sexual and reproductive strategies. Indeed, our own commitment to evolutionary ideas was one of the original motivators in investigating whether something as fundamental as reproductive strategy could really be a mere tail wagged by the dog of passively acquired religious ideas. Underlying the reproductive religiosity model are a number of more general foundations from evolutionary psychology. We review some of them in this section.

Human Motives Relate to Tangible, FitnessRelevant Goals

While nonevolutionary psychology often posits fundamental human motives without regard to their functions—self-esteem, self-actualization, need for conformity, need for structure, and so on—evolutionary work has sought to tie human motives to ultimate, tangible, fitness-relevant goals. So, for example, when our research team (Kenrick et al., 2010) revisited Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs, we replaced and expanded Maslow’s less tangible sections to arrive at a fairly concrete list: immediate physiological needs, self-protection, affiliation, status/esteem, mate acquisition, mate retention, and parenting. While people do have phenomenological experiences of a search for meaning and related intangible matters, the argument is that these kinds of pursuits can typically be traced back to mechanisms in service of more fundamental and concrete goals or needs. Further, complex pursuits often serve more than one tangible goal. We assume that complex social behaviors, such as affiliating with religious groups, are likely to have psychological foundations that are primarily about achieving these kinds of tangible, fitness-relevant goals, and that, in all likelihood, multiple goals are called into play. Religious groups might be attractive because they assist individuals with some combination of physiological needs, self-protection, affiliation, social status, mating, and parenting. Though religious experiences might have a wide range of apparent (proximate, conscious) motives The Elephant in the Pews

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such as wanting to be closer to God or finding meaning in one’s life, we are inclined to view such motives in typical cases as ultimately serving more tangible ends. In a related vein, when we see correlations between religiosity and reproductive strategy, we are inclined to view the reproductive goals as fundamental motives. In other words, as a first guess, in line with our more basic views about human motives, we would find it more plausible that people adopt or reject views on God and God’s desires for human life based on assisting their own reproductive strategies, rather than adopting reproductive strategies out of a fundamental desire to please God.

Morality Serves Strategic Social Functions

Another general point relates to the functions of moral positions. Very often, moral beliefs are assumed by researchers to serve the function of guiding the believer’s own behavior. Such a view, however, fails to draw a satisfying contrast between the ordinary preferences that guide one’s own behaviors and the additional social implications brought into action by moralizing some nonpreferred behavior. DeScioli and Kurzban (2009, 2013) have argued that many researchers fail to recognize the important distinction between conscience and condemnation when it comes to morality. The former is about regulating one’s own behavior; the latter is about regulating others’ behavior. Expressing moral positions goes beyond self-regulation and involves complex social maneuvers relating to, for example, recruiting third parties to help punish moral violators. So, a professional musician might condemn the evils of illegal downloading, or a business owner might condemn the evils of taxes and regulation. Or someone with a high-commitment, high-fertility strategy might condemn the evils of promiscuity. Given such views, when we find that certain moral beliefs reliably correlate with religiosity, as an initial matter we are unlikely to assume that those moral views exist primarily to regulate individuals’ own behaviors. Instead, supporting and opposing moralizations of various behaviors are part of wider strategic efforts to manipulate other people’s incentives.

The Varieties of Sexual and Reproductive Strategies

One of the keys to the reproductive religiosity model is recognizing the strategic conflicts that arise from different lifestyles. Though clashes over sexual matters are often viewed as “symbolic” or “victimless” 192

fights, an evolutionary perspective reveals the tangible stakes for competing strategies. Evolutionary researchers have focused on contingent variation in sexual and mating strategies, often contrasting short-term mating, in which biological fathers invest little in resulting offspring, with long-term mating, which involves higher levels of sexual fidelity and subsequent investments by fathers in the couples’ children (Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Gangestad & Simpson, 2000; Kenrick et al., 1990). Various factors affect the trade-offs between these kinds of strategic options and regularly produce both between-sex and within-sex variation. In addition, life history theory has examined tradeoffs in maximizing offspring quality versus offspring quantity (Hill & Kaplan, 1999; Kaplan & Gangestad, 2005).2 The result is that human mating, sexual, and reproductive strategies exhibit high levels of variation as individual, social, and ecological differences drive a range of contingent trade-offs (Schmitt, 2005). Within and between societies, we see a variety of monogamous, polygynous, and polyandrous strategies; restricted and unrestricted sociosexual strategies; fast life history strategies with higher numbers of offspring born to younger parents and slow life history strategies with lower numbers of offspring born to older parents; and so on. A crucial point in understanding the reproductive religiosity model is that some aspects of people’s varying sexual and reproductive patterns produce strategic conflicts. Mainly, strategies emphasizing committed, long-term reproductive partnerships can be undermined by high levels of societal prom­ is­cu­ity (Kenrick, 2011; Kurzban, 2010; Kurzban et al., 2010; Weeden, 2003, 2015; Weeden et al., 2008; Weeden & Kurzban, 2013, 2014). Women seeking 2  Importantly, concepts of sociosexuality and life history strategy have different implications. It is often the case, for example, that people with restricted sociosexual lifestyles (dominated by either monogamous or polygynous long-term partnerships) have relatively high numbers of children. But this situation does not equate with “fast” life history strategies just because these arrangements tend to produce more children, given that high levels of paternal investment in children help offset the trade-off between number of offspring and resources per offspring. It is also not necessarily “monogamous” given that highly committed, long-term polygynous strategies appear in many societies. It is also not enough to simply refer to these as restricted sociosexual strategies, because sociosexuality is not a concept that includes necessary implications about fertility levels. Our uses of the phrases “high-commitment, high-fertility” and “low-commitment, low-fertility” are our attempts to avoid these conceptual pitfalls.

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male partners who will remain devoted and help provide for higher numbers of children are threatened by unrestricted female rivals. Men intending to heavily invest in their partners’ children are threatened by male rivals seeking extra-pair paternity. For both sexes, searching for a desirable longterm mate is harder in a society with larger portions of unrestricted strategists. Such strategic conflicts imply self-interested concerns with other people’s sexual and reproductive lifestyles, revealing the tangible stakes driving some people to want to interfere with other people’s personal lives. If moralizing promiscuous sexual behavior creates added incentives against promiscuity, then committed strategists would benefit from the wider adoption of such restrictive morals (Kurzban, 2010). If the presence of young children might lead formerly unrestricted women to seek devoted mates, or if the increased chance of unintended childbearing might reduce some people’s likelihood of engaging in promiscuous behaviors, then restricting other people’s access to family planning services like abortion would serve the interests of committed strategists (Weeden, 2003). To the extent that promiscuous sexual activity often occurs in the context of recreational drug use, committed strategists would benefit from increasing the legal costs of recreational drug use (Kurzban et al., 2010; Quintelier et al., 2013). And, of course, in all these cases, it would be in the interests of many unrestricted strategists to resist the committed strategists’ efforts to increase the costs of unrestricted lifestyles (Weeden & Kurzban, 2014).

Self-Explanations as Strategic Social Narratives

A long history of findings in psychology indicates that people often do not have reliable conscious awareness of their actual motives, even though they routinely claim to (Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2014; Kurzban, 2010; Weeden & Kurzban, 2014; T.  Wilson, 2002). Moreover, the (often fictitious) stories they tell about themselves are systematically skewed in favor of versions that paint themselves to be competent, generous, principled, and so on— stories that advance their tangible goals in social life. When it comes to religion, the point is that taking introspective accounts at face value is potentially treacherous. In line with contemporary views on self-presentation and modular minds, we are inclined to view public stories about one’s own motives not as straightforward factual accounts, but as strategic social narratives. People’s consciousness might

genuinely believe such narratives, but it is more likely that these narratives are in large part effects of wanting to advance social agendas rather than simple causes of those agendas (Weeden & Kurzban, 2014). As researchers, when we want to explain people’s differences in religiosity, moral views, lifestyles, and so on, we usually have to piece together our own accounts. In these accounts, people’s narratives are themselves social behaviors that need explaining, rather than a secure, causal, cognitive foundation on which our explanations may rest. This line of thinking opens up new possibilities in explaining religious beliefs. Perhaps, in largely Christian societies, when high-commitment, highfertility strategists are also wealthier, they might seek out religious affiliations that selectively ignore biblical passages discussing the perils of wealth while selectively emphasizing passages discussing lifestyle traditionalism. Perhaps, in largely Christian societies, low-commitment, low-fertility strategists might avoid religious groups, but still maintain nominal Christian affiliations to reduce the possibility of being subject to discrimination against non-Christians. Perhaps claims of belief in God and textual authority are in part social narratives that seek to dampen individual responsibility for imposing unwanted moral costs on others’ lifestyles. Perhaps denials of belief in God and textual authority are in part social moves that seek to undermine these kinds of responsibility-dampening narratives. Though the New Testament speaks frequently on helping the poor and the sick, and repeatedly claims that the wealthy are especially unlikely to go to heaven, White Christians in the United States are in fact less likely than non-Whites and non-Christians to support government assistance for poverty and healthcare (Weeden & Kurzban, 2014).3 Further, while both the Old Testament and the New Testament are silent on abortion and provide only vague and contradictory clues as to when life begins, abortion views are one of the strongest correlates of religiosity and of “biblical literalism” in the United States. A way to help make sense of the non sequiturs in biblical literalism is to reverse the usual causal story. Perhaps something like the following is the closer to the dominant causal chain: Highcommitment, high-fertility strategists in the United States, for self-interest-based reasons, often affiliate 3  We view this puzzle as related to the fact that White Christians have better access to private support networks that make government support less necessary for themselves (Weeden & Kurzban, 2014).

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with Christian groups and are often opposed to abortion rights. To advance their own relative ­reproductive positions, they seek to impose their desired lifestyle restrictions on their social competitors. They also seek to dampen their own individual responsibility for such impositions by claiming that their motives are simply to follow the literal ­commands of God and the Bible. Their conscious minds believe the strategically motivated narrative. Their social competitors, in contrast, resist these moves. They support abortion rights and, further, seek to undermine the religious narrative—­ sometimes arguing that the Bible does not take an antiabortion position, sometimes arguing that the Bible is divine but not intended literally, and sometimes arguing that the Bible is mostly fables and that God does not exist. In short, perhaps the supposedly fundamental beliefs on both sides are often contingent, strategic narratives called on in service of conflicting sexual and reproductive lifestyles (Weeden & Kurzban, 2014).

Relationship to Some Other Evolutionary Theories of Religion

Some evolutionary work has related to the early cognitive foundations of religion (e.g., Atran, 2002; Boyer, 2001). We find these accounts broadly plausible. However, they relate to the evolution of nearuniversal religious capacities in humans and have little to say about current individual differences in religiosity—except perhaps for a slice of the variance that Norenzayan and Gervais (2013) have termed “mind-blind atheism,” relating to those with poor mentalizing abilities. Memetic accounts from Dawkins (2006) and Dennett (2006) have focused on current individual differences. This perspective views religious ideas as self-serving entities that encourage their own replication without (much) regard to the harms they impose on their human hosts. We are skeptical of such views, for reasons that are in part related to the reasons we are skeptical of passive socialization accounts more generally. The analogy between memes and viruses ought to serve as a reminder that humans actively attempt to combat pathogens through an array of complex physiological and behavioral mechanisms. Imagining that human minds absorb whatever ideas happen to be floating around in their social environments without regard to fitness interests is like imagining bodies without immune systems. Humans are actively engaged in seeking out ideas that advance their interests and rejecting those that do not. 194

Perhaps the most active current evolutionary research on religion involves cooperation theories. The main idea, with variations, is that beliefs in invisible, rule-enforcing agents increase believers’ ingroup cooperation, that this cooperation provides advantages to believers and/or their groups, and that these advantages have been crucial for the evolution and current ubiquity of religious beliefs and large-scale cooperation (Atkinson & Bourrat, 2011; Johnson & Bering, 2006; Johnson & Kruger, 2004; Norenzayan, 2013; Norenzayan et al., 2016; Schloss & Murray, 2011; D. Wilson, 2002). Norenzayan’s Big Gods (2013), for example, summarizes his research on the relationship between religion and cooperation. As he stresses, his ideas relate primarily to the temporary salience of religious norms among religious believers, rather than religiosity more generally, which he says does not systematically relate to prosociality in modern, developed societies. The foundational findings on which his claims are based involve how religious primes cause religious people (but not nonreligious people) to be moderately more cooperative in economic games (as long as the beneficiary of the cooperation has not been identified as a member of a religious out-group). We agree that religions involve in-group cooperation, costly signals, binding rituals, organizational hierarchies, and so on. So do college fraternities and sororities, modern militaries, Freemasons, and Elks Lodges, not to mention organized criminal gangs. Finding that members of groups are more cooperative when reminded of their groups, as long as they can assume that the beneficiaries of that cooperation are probably members of such groups as well, does not strike us as particularly powerful evidence on which to rest strong claims about religion’s origins. But we do think there are promising aspects of cooperation accounts of religion. There are important and interesting ideas about the spread of particular religions in relation to group size and commerce; there are important and interesting ideas about the internal functioning of cooperative groups generally and religious groups in particular (Norenzayan, 2013; Norenzayan et al., 2015). Our account of individual differences in religiosity has little to say on such matters. Nonetheless, we think that cooperation accounts are unlikely to have much to say about individual differences in who is currently attracted to and repelled from religious groups in modern, developed countries. In a way, cooperation theorists like

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Norenzayan (2013) concede this, viewing their theories as relating primarily to the temporary salience of religious ideas among believers rather than to more stable measures of religiosity. Further, our findings have shown that the small relationship between religiosity and cooperative morals is fully mediated by sexual and reproductive morals (Weeden et al., 2008; Weeden & Kurzban, 2013). And, while sexual and reproductive morals are far larger correlates of religiosity in modern, developed societies than they are in modern societies that are less developed, it is nonetheless also true that cooperative morals are particularly weak predictors of religiosity in these lessdeveloped societies (Weeden & Kurzban, 2013). Indeed, questions relating to evolutionary and historical origins are often very different from questions of current individual differences. After all, as is often pointed out, the capacity for religious cognition and religious involvement are probably nearuniversal in humans (barring the presence of, say, developmental disorders). Most of us who are atheists today probably do not need to go back farther then our own parents or grandparents to find ancestors who were religious for most of their lives. Further, various developed societies that have experienced a decline in religiosity have not done so uniformly within their populations—that is, it is not that everyone used to go to services every week and now they all go once a month. Instead, it’s that they have moved from higher means with lower variance to lower means with higher variance. We are addressing that high variance. We are trying to understand why, among individuals in modern, developed societies, who are almost all capable of (and live in societies that contain the realistic option of ) being highly religious, many are and many are not. Our model does not rely on a particular account of the evolutionary origins or historical development of religions. We are trying to answer different kinds of questions: How are we to understand the widely varying patterns among individuals within modern, developed societies? Given the range of alternatives that exist for a given individual—however those alternatives came to exist—why do people in modern, developed societies head in such fundamentally different directions when it comes to involvement with religious groups? We are not saying that competing sexual and reproductive strategies are the only drivers of individual differences in religiosity, or that they are equally important for every time, place, group, or individual. Instead, we are saying that, on average, in modern, developed societies in particular, sexual and

reproductive strategies are particularly important on the whole in understanding why many are attracted to and many others are repelled from religious groups. Are some people in modern, developed societies motivated by factors other than or in addition to reproductive strategy in their decisions regarding religious participation? Of course. Are some religious groups less focused than others on traditional lifestyles? Of course. Do competing sexual and reproductive strategies provide a robust account of current individual differences in religiosity in less developed places such as Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia? Probably not (Weeden & Kurzban, 2013). Do correlational patterns in colonial America look like the patterns in modern America? We do not know, but we would be surprised if they did.

Conclusion

Whereas much evolutionary work has focused on the early origins and development of religious cognition, evolutionary approaches can also make a major contribution to understanding individual differences in religiosity in modern, developed societies. Evolutionary processes at biological and cultural levels have produced human minds with the capacity to engage with religious ideas and groups as well as a range of traditions and institutions underlying different religions. For individuals in modern, developed societies, then, religious ideas and groups are among their immense range of tools available to advance ancient social goals. Although we do not view religion’s only role as advancing high-commitment, high-fertility reproductive strategies, as an empirical matter it is clear that sexual and reproductive patterns are especially strong correlates of religiosity in modern, developed societies. The common account of these patterns sees religiosity as largely a product of passive socialization, with the sexual and reproductive patterns as downstream effects of religious beliefs and related moral positions. In our view, people are active agents in advancing their evolutionary goals, seeking out social affiliations, moral positions, and public narratives that benefit their own interests. Religious socialization is important, but not because people routinely follow whatever path is laid before them. Instead, religious socialization is important primarily because it provides increased knowledge of the uses and benefits of a complex and opaque social tool—religious groups are often useful to high-commitment, highfertility strategists, but it takes some degree of exposure to religious groups for individuals to recognize The Elephant in the Pews

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this. Later in life, if people with knowledge of the uses of religious involvement nonetheless live lives for which it is not useful, then they abandon the tool. If it later becomes useful again, they might pick it back up. Human sexual and reproductive lifestyles are no mere tails wagged by the dog of religious backgrounds.

References

Atkinson, Q. D., & Bourrat, P. (2011). Beliefs about God, the afterlife and morality support the role of supernatural policing in human cooperation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32, 40–49. Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York, NY: Basic Books. Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review, 100, 204–232. Dawkins, R. (2006). The God delusion. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Dennett, D. C. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. London, UK: Viking. DeScioli, P., & Kurzban, R. (2009). Mysteries of morality. Cognition, 112, 281–299. DeScioli, P., & Kurzban, R. (2013). A solution to the mysteries of morality. Psychological Bulletin, 139, 477–496. DeScioli, P., Massenkoff, M., Shaw, A., Peterson, M.  B., & Kurzban, R. (2014). Equity or equality? Moral judgments follow the money. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 281, 2014–2112. Gangestad, S. W., & Simpson, J. A. (2000). The evolution on human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 573–644. Hackman, J., & Hruschka, D. (2013). Fast life histories, not pathogens, account for state-level variation in homicide, child maltreatment, and family ties in the U.S. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34, 118–124. Hill, K., & Kaplan, H. (1999). Life history traits in humans: Theory and empirical studies. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 397–430. Kaplan, H. S., & Gangestad, S. W. (2005). Life history theory and evolutionary psychology. In D.  M.  Buss (Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 68–95). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Fincher, C. L., & Thornhill, R. (2012). Parasite-stress promotes in-group assortative sociality: The cases of strong family ties and heightened religiosity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35, 61–119. Johnson, D., & Bering, J. (2006). Hand of God, mind of man: Punishment and cognition in the evolution of cooperation. Evolutionary Psychology, 4, 219–233. Johnson, D.  D.  P., & Kruger, O. (2004). The good of wrath: Supernatural punishment and the evolution of cooperation. Political Theology, 5, 159–176. Kenrick, D.  T. (2011). Sex, murder, and the meaning of life: A psychologist investigates how evolution, cognition, and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature. New York, NY: Basic Books. Kenrick, D. T., Griskevicius, V., Neuberg, S. L., & Schaller, M. (2010). Renovating the pyramid of needs: Contemporary

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extensions built upon ancient foundations. Perspectives in Psychological Science, 5, 292–314. Kenrick, D. T., Neuberg, S. L., & Cialdini, R. B. (2014). Social psychology: Goals in interaction (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson. Kenrick, D. T., Sadalla, E. K., Groth, G., & Trost, M. R. (1990). Evolution, traits, and the stages of human courtship: Qualifying the parental investment model. Journal of Personality, 58, 97–116. Kurzban, R. (2010). Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite: Evolution and the modular mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kurzban, R., Dukes, A., & Weeden, J. (2010). Sex, drugs and moral goals: Reproductive strategies and views about recreational drugs. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 277, 3501–3508. Li, Y.  J., Cohen, A.  B., Weeden, J., & Kenrick, D.  T. (2010). Mating competitors increase religious beliefs. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 428–431. Manchin, R. (2004). Religion in Europe: Trust not filling the pews. Accessed online at www.gallup.com/poll/13117/religioneurope-trust-filling-pews.aspx McCullough, M. E., Enders, C. K., Brion, S. L., & Jain, A. R. (2005). The varieties of religious development in adulthood: A longitudinal investigation of religion and rational choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 78–89. McDermott, M. L., Schwartz, D., & Vallejo, S. (2015). Talking the talk but not walking the walk: Public reactions to hypocrisy in political scandal. American Politics Research, 43, 952–974. Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Norenzayan, A., & Gervais, W.  M. (2013). The origins of religious disbelief. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 20–25. Norenzayan, A., Shariff, A. F., Gervais, W. M., Willard, A. K., McNamara, R. A., Slingerland, E., & Henrich, J. (2016). The cultural evolution of prosocial religions. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, 1–19. Quintelier, K.  J.  P., Ishii, K., Weeden, J., Kurzban, R., & Braeckman, J. (2013). Individual differences in reproductive strategy are related to views about recreational drug use in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Japan. Human Nature, 24, 196–217. Schloss, J.  P., & Murray, M. (2011). Evolutionary accounts of belief in supernatural punishment: A critical review. Religion, Brain and Behavior, 1, 46–99. Schmitt, D. P. (2005). Fundamentals of human mating strategies. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 258–291). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Tybur, J.  M., Inbar, Y., Güler, E., & Malho, C. (2015). Is the relationship between pathogen avoidance and ideological conservatism explained by sexual strategies? Evolution and Human Behavior, 36, 489–497. Tybur, J.  M., Merriman, L.  A., Caldwell Hooper, A.  E., McDonald, M. M., & Navarrete, C. D. (2010). Extending the behavioral immune system to political psychology: Are political conservatism and disgust sensitivity really related? Evolutionary Psychology, 8, 599–616. Weeden, J. (2003). Genetic interests, life histories, and attitudes towards abortion. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Weeden, J. (2015). Losing my religion: An analysis of the decline in religious attendance from childhood to adulthood. In D. J. Slone & J. A. Van Slyke (Eds.), The attraction of religion: A new evolutionary psychology of religion (pp. 73–91). London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Weeden, J., Cohen, A. B., & Kenrick, D. T. (2008). Religious attendance as reproductive support. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29, 327–334. Weeden, J., & Kurzban, R. (2013). What predicts religiosity? A multinational analysis of reproductive and cooperative morals. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34, 440–445. Weeden, J., & Kurzban, R. (2014). The hidden agenda of the political mind: How self-interest shapes our opinions and why we won’t admit it. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Weeden, J., & Sabini, J. (2007). Subjective and objective measures of attractiveness and their relation to sexual behaviors and sexual attitudes in university students. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 36, 79–88. Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, T.  D. (2002). Strangers to ourselves: Discovering the adaptive unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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13

CH A PTE R

Religion An Evolutionary Evoked Disease-Avoidance Strategy

John A. Terrizzi Jr. and Natalie J. Shook

Abstract This chapter argues that religion is, in part, an evolved disease-avoidance strategy. That is, many of the major world religions are a consequence of a system of psychological mechanisms that has evolved to promote disease avoidance. As person-to-person contact is a significant route of contamination, the behavioral immune system encourages avoidance of other people, especially individuals who may be sick or harboring pathogens. Consequently, the behavioral immune system promotes the adoption of socially conservative cultural value systems, which support avoidance of and prejudice toward outgroup members. Indeed, the evidence indicates that religiosity is stronger in areas of the world that have a higher pathogen load. Additionally, individuals who are more sensitive to disgust and are more concerned with contamination exhibit more religious conservatism. Viewing religion from a diseaseavoidance perspective helps explain why many religions are rife with purity rituals and often promote out-group avoidance. Key Words: religion, behavioral immune system, disgust, prejudice, contamination, conservative

Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. —Psalm 51:2 New Revised Standard Version

May the Gods’ company make me clean, and Vasus make rue pure by song. Purify me, ye General Gods; O Jatavedas, make me pure. —Rig Veda Book 9, Hymn 67, Line 27

O you who believe! When you rise up to prayer, wash your faces and your hands as far as the elbows, and wipe your heads and your feet to the ankles. —Qur’an 5:6

Blessed are you, O Lord, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us through your commandments and has commanded us concerning the washing of hands. —Traditional Jewish Prayer

Purity rituals play a significant role in many major world religions, including Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. The current chapter argues that 198

the themes of purity and cleanliness that are profuse in many religions are not merely symbolic representations of absolution, but rather a product of an

evolved human psychology. That is, religious purity is an emergent property of a psychological system (i.e., the behavioral immune system), which is an evolved solution to the adaptive challenge of infectious disease. Accordingly, religion promotes the avoidance of infectious disease by encouraging avoidant social attitudes and behavior. More specifically, religion appears to be, at least in part, an evolved disease-avoidance strategy. This chapter will outline some of the evidence that supports the disease-avoidance function of religious conservatism. Viewing religion as a disease-avoidant strategy helps to explain why the world’s most popular religions (i.e., Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam) incorporate purity rituals within their faiths, why religious conservatism (e.g., religious fundamentalism) is correlated with prejudice, why different regions of the world are more religiously conservative than others, why women are more con­serv­a­tive than men, and why religious obsessions often accompany obsessivecompulsive disorder. Finally, limitations and future directions for this area of research are discussed.

Religion and Purity

Durkheim (1995/1915) defined religion as an amalgam of traditions and values that bind people together. It functions as a cultural value system that provides followers with a roadmap to the sacred life. It provides guidance for how to live a moral life. One theme that plays an important role in defining the sacred is purity. In many religious traditions, moral purity can be summed up with the old adage “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Indeed, cleansing rituals and themes of moral purity are abundant across many religious traditions. In Christianity, sin is characterized as a stain or defilement (Ricoeur, 1967) that should be washed away both physically (e.g., baptism) and symbolically (e.g., confession). Additionally, references to hygiene (e.g., “Any fabric, woven or knitted material, or any leather article that has been washed and is rid of the mold, must be washed again. Then it will be clean.” Lev. 13:58) and moral purity (e.g., “The Lord has recompensed me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight” Ps. 18:24) are found throughout the Old Testament. The Bible also provides religious followers with advice about food consumption, making it explicit that consuming some substances can contaminate the body. For example in Deuteronomy, readers are advised to “not eat any detestable thing” (14:3). The dietary laws that are given in Deuteronomy provide evidence that reli-

gious purity may not just be symbolic (i.e., promote moral purity) but may also be physical (i.e., promote health). The symbolic purification and references to purity are not confined to Christianity. Similar themes are seen in Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. Within the Hindu faith, some followers make pilgrimages to bathe their entire bodies in sacred rivers such as the Ganges (Flood, 1996). The attainment of Brahman, or eternal consciousness, is achieved by ridding the self of impurities. In Islam, it is strictly forbidden to engage in prayer while unclean (Gade, 2010). The Qur’an specifies guidelines for ritual purification (e.g., hand washing) that practitioners must engage in prior to prayer (4:43, 5:6). Similarly, purity rituals such as hand washing rituals and kosher laws are observed in Judaism (de Lange, 2010). For example, Judeo scripture forbids the consumption of pork. In Deuteronomy, it is stated, “The pig is also unclean; although it has a divided hoof, it does not chew the cud. You are not to eat their meat or touch their carcasses” (14:8). One notable exception to the link between religion and purity is Tantra. In its most extreme version, Tantra has been described as a disgusting religion (Ellis, 2011). Ardent Tantric practitioners have been known to consume human waste (e.g., feces, urine, and phlegm) as a part of their religious practices. Ellis notes that the reason that Tantra is perceived to be disgusting is because from a biological and evolutionary perspective, it is maladaptive to consume bodily waste that could contain pathogens. It is, thus, no surprise that Tantra is a minority religion. According to the Pew Research Center (2012), Christianity (31.5%), Hinduism (15%), Islam (23.2%), and Judaism (0.2%), which are saturated with ritual purification and references to purity, account for a majority of the world’s religious landscape (69.9%). Douglas (1966) argues that religious purity is symbolic, serving an organizational function of distinguishing right from wrong (i.e., instituting group norms, rules, and taboos) and keeping categories pure. From this perspective, religious purity provides a means of establishing social structure and generating social norms. For example, Douglas suggests that kosher laws (e.g., separate utensils for meat and dairy) are a symbolic means of keeping categories (e.g., meat and other food products) separate. Although Douglas’s perspective provides a functional explanation for religious purity, it fails to consider the embodied nature of disgust and purity. Rather than providing a general organizational function as Douglas proposes, religious purity may Religion

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be constrained by the physical nature of the human emotion of disgust and a more domain-specific function (i.e., disease avoidance). Many of the categorical distinctions that Douglas outlines have the potential for serving evolutionarily adaptive functions (e.g., incest avoidance and disease avoidance). Others have argued that many religions have emerged from the physiology of disgust (Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2008). More specifically, some have suggested that “relgiocultural” values regarding food consumption (e.g., kosher laws) not only help preserve category distinctions but may also facilitate disease avoidance (e.g., not allowing potentially contaminated raw meat products to come into contact with other foods; Johnson, White, Boyd, & Cohen, 2011). Disgust may serve a more crucial function in religion than a mere categorical or or­ gan­ i­ za­ tional function (Graham & Haidt, 2010; Haidt, 2012). Fuller (2013) suggests that religion cannot be fully understood unless we consider the biological substrates from which it originates. One of the biological (and psychological) substrates that seem to play important roles in the generation of culture is the behavioral immune system (BIS), particularly the emotion of disgust (Miller, 1997; Schaller, 2006).

Disease Threat and the Behavioral Immune System

Although they do not operate on the same cognitive plane as humans, just like all other biological organisms, pathogens (e.g., viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc.) are “designed” to pursue the evolutionary goals of survival and, more importantly, reproductive success (Dawkins, 1989/1976). Unlike humans, however, pathogens achieve these goals by hijacking the bodies of host organisms, commandeering their resources, and using them as a means to spread themselves to other potential hosts (e.g., via sneezing and coughing; Nesse & Williams, 1994). An unintended consequence of pathogens’ survival strategies is that they can cause the host organism to get sick and potentially die, which inhibits reproductive success. This presents the host organism with a unique adapt­ive challenge—disease threat. As a result, there is a natural selective pressure for organisms that are equipped with physiological and behavioral mech­ an­isms to defend against pathogenic contamination. The most obvious evolved solution to disease threat is the biological immune system, which acts as an internal security system that systematically identifies and removes unwanted pathogens from the body. The consequence of the competing goals 200

of hosts and pathogens is that they enter into an evolutionary arms race in which pathogens attempt to decode the hosts’ biological firewall and the hosts attempt to engineer an increasingly less penetrable system (Nesse & Williams, 1994). However, the biological immune system is not the only evolved solution to the adaptive challenge posed by infectious disease. The other defense is the BIS (Schaller, 2006). The BIS has been described as a suite of psychological mechanisms that promote prophylactic behavior. The BIS is the organism’s first line of defense against infectious disease. Whereas the biological immune system removes pathogens once they have entered the body, the BIS encourages organisms to avoid situations (i.e., people, places, and things) that could make them sick in the first place. When individuals encounter potentially contaminated stimuli, the BIS automatically induces adaptive affective (e.g., disgust), cognitive (e.g., contamination-related thoughts), and behavioral (e.g., avoidance) reactions that promote disease avoidance. Disgust is arguably the most recognized and studied component of the BIS.

Disgust

Disgust is a cross-culturally recognized emotion (Ekman et al., 1987) that is thought to have evolved to protect individuals from bodily contamination, including the ingestion of spoiled food and parasitic infestation (Curtis & Biran, 2001; Oaten, Stevenson, & Case, 2009). Darwin (1872) was one of the first to study emotions from an evolutionary perspective. He described disgust as a sensation that is activated by revolting tastes either actual or imagined. Disgust, however, is not limited to the gustatory (e.g., taste of sour milk) and olfactory (e.g., smell of garbage) senses. Rather, it can be conceptualized as a psychological defense mechanism that can be activated by a range of sensory information that insinuate a disease threat. This includes auditory (e.g., clearing throat), visual (e.g., vomit), and tactile (e.g., sticky substance) sensory data. For example, participants have been shown to perceive wet stimuli as being more disgusting than dry stimuli, presumably because more biological substances may be present on a wet stimulus, thus posing more of a disease threat (Oum, Lieberman, & Aylward, 2011). Likewise, Curtis, Aunger, and Rabie (2004) found that visual stimuli indicative of infectious disease (e.g., a reddish green stain) are experienced as more disgusting than nondisease-relevant stimuli (e.g., a blue stain). Although disgust is believed to be an evolved disease-avoidance mechanism that most individuals

John A. Terrizzi Jr., Natalie J. Sh ook

experience, there is significant variation in disgust reactivity and sensitivity across individuals. Thus, like most psychological constructs, disgust sensitivity can also be assessed as a chronic personality trait (e.g., Haidt, McCauley, & Rozin, 1994; Tybur, Lieberman, & Griskevicius, 2009). Nettle (2006) suggested that individual differences in personality can best be understood in terms of their trade-offs in regard to Type I and Type II errors. Individuals who are sensitive to disgust are preoccupied with thoughts of contamination. They are prone to Type I, or false-positive, errors (i.e., perceiving something as a disease threat when it is not) and are hypersensitive to disgusting stimuli. Accordingly, the cost of being highly sensitive to disgust (i.e., having an overactive BIS) is that potentially viable resources will be neglected due to fear of contamination. On the other hand, those who are less sensitive to disgust are vulnerable to Type II, or false-negative, errors (i.e., failing to perceive infectious stimuli as a disease threat), which could result in infection and, ultimately, death. According to error management theory, since decisions are often made in uncertain conditions, evolved psychological mechanisms should favor errors or biases that confer an adaptive advantage (Haselton & Buss, 2000). Given the severe consequences of the Type II error, evolution may have favored a strategy in which Type I errors are preferred. Indeed, Rozin, Millman, and Nemeroff (1986) found that participants avoid food products (e.g., chocolate shaped like feces and sugar packets labeled cyanide) even when they know they are not really contaminated. This magical contamination provides some evidence that individuals are motivated to avoid Type II errors in regard to disease threat. Nevertheless, there remains a tremendous amount of variability in disgust sensitivity and BIS reactivity. Several measures have been developed to tap into these individual differences, such as disgustsensitivity (Haidt et al., 1994; Olatunji et al., 2007; Tybur et al., 2009), fear-of-contamination (Burns, Keortge, Formea, & Sternberger, 1996), and germ-aversion (Duncan, Schaller, & Park, 2009) questionnaires. In sum, the emotion of disgust and disgust sensitivity are primary components of the BIS and appear to be evolved solutions to the adaptive challenge of infectious disease. However, the influence of this emotion and individual differences in BIS reactivity may have more far reaching implications than affecting individuals’ responses to potentially contaminated stimuli. They may play a crucial role

in the generation of culture and social attitudes that promote disease avoidance. Of particular interest for this chapter, disgust may be intimately linked to beliefs about purity, both moral and physical.

Disgust and Purity

In Shakespeare’s (1926/1623) Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is so ashamed of her role in plotting the murder of King Duncan that she furiously washes her hands to cleanse her sins. This type of symbolic purification is reminiscent of the religious purification practices that were previously outlined. One possible explanation for the relation between moral and physical purity is that it is a metaphorical consequence of embodied cognition. In other words, we are minds housed in bodies and thus are bound to experience the world psychologically through our physical sensory experience (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Because disgusting things make us sick, they are bad. Sin is bad; therefore, it is disgusting and impure. Haidt (2003) described disgust as a moral emotion concerning purity related to social norms (e.g., taboos) and moral transgressions (e.g., betrayal, cruelty, and hypocrisy). Emergent evidence has linked physical and moral purity, supporting the idea of embodied moral disgust. Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) found that when participants’ moral purity was threatened (e.g., recalling a time when they committed a moral transgression), they were more likely to want to physically cleanse themselves (e.g., use an antiseptic wipe). It is important to note, however, that others have had difficulty replicating this effect in cross-cultural (e.g., Spanish) samples (Gámez, Díaz, & Marreo, 2011; Earp, Everett, Madva, & Hamlin, 2014). In a subsequent study, Zhong, Strejcek, and Sivanathan (2010) found that the act of cleansing led to participants making less harsh moral judgments about controversial issues, such as abortion and pornography. Similarly, Schnall, Haidt, Clore, and Jordan (2008) demonstrated that inducing disgust by exposing participants to varying amounts of fart spray (e.g., none, four sprays, or eight sprays) resulted in increased severity of moral judgments (e.g., reactions to eating a dead family dog). Conversely, priming cleanliness (i.e., deactivating disgust and contamination concerns) resulted in less severe moral judgments (Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008). Thus, the physical experiences of bodily contamination and cleansing can affect moral evaluations. The former promotes harsher moral evaluations and the latter encourages moral acceptance. Religion

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The embodied nature of moral impurity may help explain religious purification. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that embodied moral purity and religion share an underlying cognitive architecture. Preston and Ritter (2012) demonstrated that priming participants with cleanliness enhanced their ­perceived value of religion. More specifically, participants who were asked to type a statement that evoked personal purity (e.g., my hair feels clean, my breath is fresh, etc.) self-reported that their religious values were more important to them than participants who were primed with dirtiness (e.g., my hair feels oily, my breath stinks, etc.). Furthermore, they illustrated that the relation between religious values and purity is bidirectional. Not only did purity evoke religious value but also priming participants with religious values (i.e., completing a scrambled sentence task that involved religious words) evoked purity, as more purity-related words were generated in a word-stem completion task compared to a control condition. In another series of studies, Ritter and Preston (2011) demonstrated that challenging Christian participants’ religious beliefs by having them copy passages from either the Qur’an or Dawkins’s (2006) The God Delusion caused them to perceive a beverage (e.g., a concoction of lemon juice and water) as more disgusting compared to a control condition that copied the preface of a dictionary. In a second study, they demonstrated that having participants wash their hands prior to tasting the beverage eliminated the effect. In other words, the ritual of physical cleansing removed the moral disgust that was evoked by contrary religious ­hostility. The disgust-related perceptual bias that accompanies religiosity, however, is not confined to morality. Saroglou and Anciaux (2004) found that it also affects humor. More specifically, they demonstrated

that more religious people (e.g., those who believe more strongly in religion and believe that god is important) are less likely to appreciate disgusting humor (e.g., “What is the pinnacle of greed? Vomiting through your teeth so you can keep the biggest pieces” [p. 274]). That is, they rated jokes involving disgust as less funny than “clean” jokes. Together this evidence suggests that there is at least a symbolic relation between disgust and religion. Terrizzi, Shook, and Ventis (2012), however, proposed that the relation is not merely a symbolic side effect of the BIS, but rather serves an evolved functional purpose of promoting disease avoidance. This hypothesis was tested following Tybur and colleagues’ (2009) three domains of disgust. Two of these domains—pathogen and sexual disgust—function as disease-avoidance mechanisms. Pathogen disgust encourages the avoidance of potentially contaminated objects, people, or situations, and sexual disgust promotes the avoidance of maladaptive sexual encounters (e.g., exposure to sexually transmitted infections). However, the third domain—moral disgust—does not serve a disease-avoidance function. It is primarily concerned with moral transgressions (i.e., social contract violations). Thus, if the religious virtue of moral purity is merely symbolic, religious conservatism should only be correlated with moral disgust and not pathogen or sexual disgust. The data, however, suggest that the reverse is true. Across multiple indicators of religiosity, the disease-avoidant components of disgust (i.e., pathogen disgust and sexual disgust) were correlated with religious conservatism, but moral disgust was not (see Table 13.1; Terrizzi et al., 2012). This pattern of results suggests that the relation between disgust and religion is not symbolic, but may in fact serve a functional purpose (i.e., disease avoidance).

Table 13.1.  Correlations of Disgust Measures with Religiosity r Religious Measures Intrinsic External Internal Christian Orthodoxy Literal Affirmation Restorative Interpretation

Disgust Sensitivity

Pathogen Disgust

.28** .28** .28** .36** .27** .15*

.22** .20** .24** .26** .29** .08

Sexual Disgust .36** .30** .32** .24** .30** .16*

p < .05. p < .01. Source: Terrizzi et al. (2012). Reproduced with permission from Taylor & Francis Ltd. and www.tandfonline.com.

*

**

202

John A. Terrizzi Jr., Natalie J. Sh ook

Moral Disgust .08 .05 .03 -.05 .01 .07

Disease Threat and Social Behavior

As a result of the infectious nature of pathogens and their ability to use humans as vehicles for transportation (see Nesse & Williams, 1994), other human beings are a significant source of contamination. Diamond (1997) suggested that germs, more so than guns or steel, enabled the European colonizers to conquer new lands. Indeed, historical evidence suggests that a significant portion of the Native American population was killed via exposure to smallpox and other infectious diseases when Europeans colonized the Americas (Dobyns, 1983). Given that person-to-person contact is a significant source of contamination, it follows that people who pose a significant disease threat should evoke disgust or contamination concerns. Cross-cultural research on disgust elicitors has provided some initial support for this claim. For example, evidence suggests that many of the cross-cultural elicitors of disgust (e.g., vomit, urine, feces, pus, and blood) share two key features (Curtis et al., 2004; Curtis & Biran, 2001). First, they are all sources of contamination, and second, they are byproducts of the body. Furthermore, recent evidence indicates that exposure to people who pose a disease threat (e.g., an individual with a runny nose) versus a physical threat (e.g., a person carrying a gun) activates the biological immune system (Schaller, Miller, Gervais, Yager, & Chen, 2010). Not only can social interactions activate the biological immune system but also the biological immune system can evoke disgust and contamination concerns. Miller and Maner (2011) found that individuals who had recently been sick were more avoidant of potentially contaminated others (e.g., individuals with physical disfigurements). Thus, the BIS and the biological immune system seem to be interconnected and serve to protect the individual from exposure to other people who are potentially ill or contaminated. Schaller and Duncan (2007) argued that the BIS should encourage the preference of in-group members over out-group members, because outgroup members pose a greater disease threat (i.e., they may harbor pathogens to which in-group members have not previously been exposed, and thus have no immunity). Indeed, evidence suggests that individual differences in BIS strength (i.e., disgust sensitivity and contamination concerns), as well as the activation of the BIS (i.e., induced disgust and disease threat), are predictive of avoidance of and negativity toward out-group members. For example, Faulkner, Schaller, Park, and Duncan (2004) found that trait-level contamination

c­ oncerns (e.g., perceived infectability) and induced contamination concerns (e.g., exposing participants to a disease threat) increased negativity toward foreigners (i.e., immigrants). Similarly, Navarrete and Fessler (2006) found individual differences in disgust sensitivity were positively correlated with attitudes toward in-group members (e.g., Americans) and negatively correlated with attitudes toward out-group members (e.g., foreigners). Subsequent research has shown that individual differences in and activation of the BIS are linked to avoidance of and prejudice toward a wide range of out-group members, including individuals who are obese or sexual minorities (Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009; Park, Schaller, & Crandall, 2006; Terrizzi, Shook, & Ventis, 2010). Like disgust, religiosity has long been correlated with prejudice toward out-groups.

Religion and Prejudice

The relation between religion and prejudice has long perplexed religious scholars. It has been known for a long time that religiosity is positively correlated with prejudice toward out-group members. For example, Allport and Kramer (1946) demonstrated that White individuals who reported having a religious affiliation exhibited more prejudice toward African Americans than those who reported no religious affiliation. More recently, both religious orthodoxy and religious fundamentalism have been associated with prejudice toward outgroups (e.g., homosexuals; Rowatt, Wade, Tsang, Kelly, & LaMartina, 2006; Terrizzi et al., 2010). In an attempt to explain the relation between prejudice and religiosity, Allport and Ross (1967) argued that there were two types of religious orientation: extrinsic (i.e., using religion to achieve an end) and intrinsic (i.e., regarding religion as an end within itself ). They argued that those who use their religion to guide their behavior (e.g., intrinsically motivated) would not be prejudiced, whereas those who use religion for its social benefits (e.g., extrinsically motivated) would be prejudiced. Consistent with their hypothesis, they found that extrinsic religious orientation was predictive of prejudice, whereas intrinsic was not. Since then, several researchers have replicated these findings (e.g., Strickland & Weddell, 1972), and in some cases have found negative relations between intrinsic religious orientation and prejudice (Allen & Spilka, 1967, Duck & Hunsberger, 1999). Batson and colleagues (1993), however, argued that the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic Religion

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religious orientations did not solve the issue of why religiosity predicts prejudice. They posited that intrinsic religious orientation would be positively associated with prejudice toward proscribed groups (i.e., prejudices that are tolerated or allowed by the church). Indeed, evidence suggests that both extrinsic and intrinsic religious orientations are positively associated with prejudice toward homosexuals (Fisher, Derison, Polley, Cadman, & Johnston, 1994). Beck (2006) suggested that disgust might stand in the way of the ethic of love that Judeo-Christian values are believed to promote, because disgust promotes avoidance and negativity toward norm violators. However, this relation between religion and prejudice may be more than skin deep. One possible explanation for the relation between prejudice and religion is that it is an artifact of disgust and the BIS. It may be that religion emerges from the BIS as a functional, evolutionarily evoked disease-avoidance strategy. That is, the BIS may promote the emergence of cultural value systems (e.g., religion) that encourage the avoidance of out-group members who could potentially pose a disease threat.

Social Conservatism and Disease Avoidance

The BIS may have broader implications for social interactions than merely promoting out-group avoidance and negativity. It may, in fact, play an important role in cultural evolution. Miller (1997) described disgust as “one of our more aggressive culture-creating passions” (p. xii), suggesting that disgust may play a significant role in the construction of social norms and the maintenance of social hierarchies. In particular, disease threat is likely to encourage the adoption of socially conservative value systems that promote strict adherence to social norms and avoidance of out-group members. Supporting evidence indicates that individual differences in disgust sensitivity, germ aversion, and fear of contamination are predictive of a wide range of socially conservative value systems (e.g., rightwing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, religious conservatism, collectivism, and political conservatism; Terrizzi, Shook, & McDaniel, 2013). Moreover, evidence suggests that social conservatism and the BIS may share some underlying neurocircuitry. Recently, Ahn and colleagues (2014) found that neurological reactions (e.g., activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia) when exposed to disgust-related stimuli (e.g., pictures of mutilated bodies) were predictive of individual’s political ideology. 204

Additionally, evidence seems to indicate that socially conservative value systems function as diseaseavoidance strategies by promoting prejudice toward out-group members. For example, Terrizzi et al. (2010) found that priming disgust (i.e., having participants imagine eating maggots) increased prejudice toward homosexuals for social conservatives (i.e., political conservative individuals) but not social liberals. Furthermore, Hodson and Costello (2007) demonstrated that right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation mediated the relation between interpersonal disgust and negative attitudes toward immigrants. Thus, the BIS may encourage the development of social and cultural value systems that promote avoidance of and negative attitudes toward out-group members. Evidence for the interpersonal disease-avoidance function of social conservatism has also been demonstrated in religious conservatism. Terrizzi et al. (2012) demonstrated that religious conservatism mediates the relation between disgust sensitivity and prejudice toward sexual minorities. More specifically, across two samples, they showed that the relation between BIS strength (e.g., disgust sensitivity) and prejudice was attenuated when religious conservatism was controlled (see Figure  13.1). Together, this evidence suggests that disgust sensitivity plays an important role in shaping social interactions (e.g., prejudice and avoidance) and constructing social value systems (e.g., social conservatism) that encourage behavior which historically would have proven adaptive in avoiding disease threats. In other words, disgust sensitivity may prepare individuals to develop negative attitudes toward and avoid others who could pose a potential disease threat.

Parasite Stress and Regional Differences in Sociality

Research examining regional differences in sociality also supports the relation between the BIS and socially conservative values. Parasite-stress theory suggests that the selective pressure of infectious disease should result in the emergence of social attitudes and values that reduce disease exposure (Thornhill & Fincher, 2014a, 2014b). Accordingly, social value systems, particularly socially conservative values, should vary regionally as a function of disease richness (i.e., number of infectious diseases) and parasite-stress (i.e., years lost to infectious disease). Indeed, the research that has examined cultural differences in sociality has echoed the individual differences research, providing convergent evidence

John A. Terrizzi Jr., Natalie J. Sh ook

R1

R2

R3

R4

Religious Fundamentalism .44**

BI1 .41**

Sexual Disgust

BI2 Behavioral Immune System

Pathogen Disgust

.18*

Prejudice toward Bisexuals BI3

Fear of Contamination

BI4

Figure 13.1  Religious fundamentalism partially mediates the relation between the behavioral immune system and prejudice toward bisexuals. Source: Terrizzi et al. (2012). Reproduced with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.

that supports the disease-avoidance function of con­serv­a­tive social values. For example, some evidence indicates that historical rates of disease prevalence are predictive of social conformity (e.g., right handedness) and collectivism (Fincher, Thornhill, Murray, & Schaller, 2008; Murray, Trudeau, & Schaller, 2011). Moreover, the relation between parasite-stress and collectivism is partially mediated by genetic variation, specifically variation in the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR; Chiao & Blizinsky, 2010). This research provides some initial evidence that areas of the world with high parasite loads may select for genes that promote social conservative attitudes (i.e., collectivism). It is important to point out, however, that the evidence for genetic mediation has been criticized by Eisenberg and Hayes (2011) for failing to consider a null model. According to their reanalysis of Chiao and Blizinsky’s data, there is not enough evidence to reject the null model (i.e., there is no evidence of mediation). In addition to promoting social conservatism in the form of collectivism, Fincher and Thornhill (2012) have demonstrated that historic disease threat is also predictive of stronger family ties and religiosity. More specifically, they found that regional differences in parasite-stress (i.e., years lost due to infectious disease) were positively correlated with religious participation and value (e.g., proportion of population that has a religious affiliation other than

agnostic, atheist, or nonreligious; Thornhill & Fincher, 2014b; see Figure 13.2). Moreover, this correlation was very robust in that it remained significant even after controlling for potential third variables (e.g., gross domestic product per capita). These findings are consistent with the individual differences research that has linked disgust sensitivity and perceived vulnerability to disease to religious conservatism (Terrizzi et al., 2012). More importantly, however, these results extend the individual differences research by providing naturalistic evidence that in regions of the world that have more hostile parasitic environments, people are more likely to gravitate to religion, which presumably serves a disease-avoidance function by promoting assortative sociality (i.e., avoidance of out-groups). Thornhill and Fincher (2014b) also proposed that infectious-disease richness (i.e., number of infectious diseases) should predict religion richness (i.e., number of religions). In areas of the world that have a large diversity of infectious disease, people should avoid out-group contact as a means of avoiding potential infection. Consequently, they should remain in smaller groups rather than banding together, resulting in a greater diversity of religious and cultural values. Through promotion of outgroup avoidance, the diversity of religions increases disease avoidance. As expected, infectious-disease richness was positively correlated with religion richness (see Figure 13.3). Importantly, this relation was Religion

205

Religious Participation & Value

5.0

2.5

.0

Jordan

Nigeria Ghana Pakistan Morocco Indonesia Tanzania Bangladesh Zimbabwe Egypt Algeria Malta Mali Burkina Faso El Salvador Iraq Philippines Zambia Rwanda Uganda Ethiopia Saudi Arabia Trinidad & Tobago S Africa Turkey Brazil Iran Dominican Republic Venezuela Ireland Colombia Peru Singapore Poland Mexico United States India Chile Cyprus Romania Argentina Thailand

Bosnia & Herzegovina Portugal Canada Italy Kyrgyzstan Slovakia Macedonia Azerbaijan AustriaCroatia Moldova United Kingdom Spain Uruguay S Korea Belgium Albania Ukraine Serbia Hungary Lithuania –2.5 Netherlands Luxembourg Slovenia Norway Iceland Russia France Belarus Finland Andorra Czech Republic Sweden Japan Latvia Denmark Estonia

Vietnam China

–5.0

–2.5

.0

2.5 Combined Parasite Stress

5.0

7.5

Figure 13.2  Religious participation and value as a function of combined parasite stress. Source: Thornhill and Fincher (2014b). Reproduced with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.

significant even after controlling for potential confounding variables (e.g., gross domestic product per capita and democracy). Thus, these data provide further evidence that religion serves a disease-avoidance function by promoting assortative sociality.

Sex Differences in Behavioral Immune System Functioning and Religiosity

In addition to regional differences, research on sex differences also supports the relation between the BIS and religious attitudes. Throughout our evolutionary history, males and females have faced different adaptive challenges. For example, there are welldocumented sex differences in parental investment (Trivers, 1972). More specifically, for women the initial investment that is required to produce offspring is approximately 9 months of physical investment (i.e., pregnancy), whereas for men it can be as little as the amount of time that it takes to copulate. As a result of this disparity in parental investment, females more so than males must be especially cautious when choosing a mate (Beaulieu, 2007). As such, women prefer mates who have access to economic resources and a willingness to invest those 206

resources in potential offspring (Buss, 1989; Miner & Shackelford, 2010). There is also evidence that women choose partners that have “good genes.” For example, women find the smell of men with greater facial symmetry to be more attractive than their asymmetrical male counterparts (Gangestad & Thornhill, 1998). The BIS may play an especially important adapt­ ive function for females by ensuring that they avoid costly mating errors. Indeed, research has shown that pathogen disgust sensitivity predicts women’s preference for masculine faces (DeBruine, Jones, Tybur, Lieberman, & Griskevicius, 2010). Some have argued that women prefer masculine faces because masculinity signals immunocompetence (i.e., disease resistance; Folstad & Karter, 1992; PentonVoak & Perrett, 2000). Others, however, have argued that while the immunocompetence hypothesis seems viable, there is limited empirical support for it (Scott, Clark, Boothroyd, & Penton-Voak, 2012). Rather, it may be that the preference for masculine faces is a secondary consequence of a preference for healthy mating partners. The BIS may also discourage copulation that will not result in viable

John A. Terrizzi Jr., Natalie J. Sh ook

7 Papua New Guinea Indonesia Nigeria

6 Cameroon

India

Number of Religions (Ln)

5

4

3

2

1

Congo (Kinshasa) Philippines

Brazil China

Tanzania Jordan Sudan Malaysia Ethiopia Myanmar Ghana Cote d’Ivoire Nepal Colombia Solomon Isl Vietnam Australia Chad Central African Republic Laos Peru Zambia Kenya Russia United States Vanuatu Burkina Faso Congo (Brazzaville) Madagascar Uganda S Africa Thailand Botswana Benin Angola Mozambique Liberia Bolivia Gabon Venezuela Togo Argentina Mongolia France Mexico Ecuador Senegal Bangladesh Taiwan Pakistan Timor–Leste Sierra Keibe United Kingdom Paraguay Cambodia Mali Zimbabwe Micronesia Puerto Rico Guinea-Bissau Suriname Panama Portugal Martinique Brunei Cuba Nicaragua Honduras Guinea Guyana New Zealand Netherlands Singapore Italy Chile Canada Japan Sri Lanka Netherlands Antilles Belgium Norway Costa Rica Guatemala Trinidad & Tobago New Caledonia Bhutan Jamaica Iran Saudi Arabia Gambia Aruba Bahrain Fiji Iceland Sweden Oman Belize Kyrgyzstan Equatorial Guinea Rwanda Eritrea French Polynesia N Mariana Isl Dominica Tajikistan Cayman Isl Belarus N Korea Niger Egypt Palau Syria St Vincent & Grenadines Seychelles Iraq Greece Turkey Grenada Azerbaijan Sao Tome & Principe Antigua & Barbuda Luxembourg Andorra Malta Tonga Czech Republic Bermuda Estonia Bahamas Kuwait Algeria Moldova Gibraltar Anguilla Greenland Marshall Isl Mauritania Jordan Romania Croatia Liechtenstein San Marino Slovakia Djibouti Hungary Maldives Montserrat Kiribati Comoros Macedonia St Helena Switzerland Morocco Cook Isl Virgin Isl Bosnia & Herzegovina American Samoa

Monaco

160

180

200

220

240

260

Disease Richness Figure 13.3  Number of religions as a function of disease richness. Source: Thornhill and Fincher (2014b). Reproduced with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.

offspring, especially at peak ovulation. For example, Fessler and Navarrete (2003) found that sexual disgust sensitivity varies across the menstrual cycle, encouraging women to avoid maladaptive mating choices (e.g., incest and bestiality). Religion also discourages certain maladaptive mating practices, as well as endorsing specific sexual attitudes and orientation. Indeed, both the Bible and the Qur’an provide specific guidelines for sexual behavior. For example, the Bible strictly forbids incest (Lev. 18:6–13), bestiality (Lev. 20:15), and homosexuality (Lev. 20:13). Likewise, the Qur’an also prohibits specific sexual acts, including sex during menstruation (2:222), incest (4:22–24), and homosexuality (7:80–84). Consequently, religiosity has been shown to moderate sexual attitudes. Rowatt and Schmitt (2003) showed that religiously con­ serv­a­tive individuals were more likely to be interested in long-term mating relationships, exhibited attenuated sexual desires, and reported having fewer sexual partners as compared with less religiously

conservative individuals. Interestingly, some research has shown that women endorse higher levels of religiosity than men (Thompson, 1991), which seems to align with evolutionary arguments for females being more selective in mate choices. Moreover, evidence suggests that women may have a stronger BIS than men. Research indicates that women are more vulnerable to contaminationrelated obsessions and perceived vulnerability to disease compared with men (Duncan et al., 2009; Olatunji, Sawchuk, Arrindell, & Lohr, 2005). Furthermore, data indicate that women exhibit a greater sensitivity to core/pathogen disgust and sexual disgust compared with men and that individual differences in disgust sensitivity fully mediate the sex differences in contamination-related obsessions, which could explain why women are more vulnerable to obsessive-compulsive disorder (i.e., women are more likely to have an overactive BIS relative to men; Druschel & Sherman, 1999; Duncan et al., 2009; Olatunji et al., 2005, Tybur, Religion

207

Bryan, Lieberman, Caldwell, Hooper, & Merriman, 2011; Tybur et al., 2009). The sex difference in disgust sensitivity is particularly strong with regard to sexual disgust compared with pathogen or moral disgust (Tybur et al., 2009). Furthermore, sexual disgust varies across the menstrual cycle (Fessler & Navarrete, 2003), suggesting that it has a physiological component in that it peaks during ovulation. Thus, it may serve an adaptive function by encouraging women to avoid making costly mating errors. Sex differences in BIS functioning may have broader implications that reach beyond mating strategies. Although both men and women are vulnerable to infectious disease, women may have reason to be especially cautious, as they are the bearer of offspring. Profet (1992) provides an excellent review of the literature on pregnancy sickness, suggesting that it functions as an adaptive mech­an­ism that helps pregnant women avoid exposing their gestating offspring to harmful toxins. In addition to a proneness to nausea, Fessler, Eng, and Navarrete (2005) demonstrated that pregnant women exhibit higher levels of disgust sensitivity in their first trimester than later trimesters, which could be an adaptive strategy for avoiding teratogens. As other people, particularly out-group members, are a significant source of contamination, the BIS may prepare women to be particularly wary of out-group members, especially during peak ovulation. McDonald, Navarrete, and Sidanius (2011b) have argued that for women, prejudice is motivated to avoid sexual coercion whereas for men, prejudice is motivated by resource acquisition. Indeed, Navarrete and colleagues (2010) found that women’s prejudice toward out-group members is evoked by the fear of sexual assault whereas men’s prejudice is motivated by aggressive threats. Furthermore, these sex differences in prejudice seem to have biological roots, as the intergroup bias exhibited among women varies with the menstrual cycle such that women exhibit greater prejudice toward out-groups when they are at their most fertile (McDonald, Asher, Kerr, & Navarrete, 2011a). One way the BIS could promote the avoidance of potentially dangerous out-group members is by preparing women to be more socially conservative (e.g., religious and collectivistic). Hofstede (1980) found that women tend to be more collectivistic than men. Likewise, Mortenson (2002) demonstrated that women tend to identify more with a collectivistic cultural orientation whereas men tend to identify more with an individualistic orientation. As previously noted, women also tend to report 208

higher levels of religiosity than men (Thompson, 1991). Thompson suggested that these sex differences can be explained by socially constructed gender orientation (i.e., adherence to gender stereotypes are consistent with religious values). Terrizzi, Clay, and Shook (2014), however, suggested that the observed sex differences in collectivism and religiosity are the result of sex differences in BIS functioning. Across four studies, they demonstrated that sex differences in social conservatism (i.e., collectivism and religious conservatism) were mediated by individual differences in BIS strength. That is, women were more religious and collectivistic than men because they were more sensitive to disgust and concerned with disease threat relative to men. Thus, the BIS appears to prepare women to be religious (and collectivistic), potentially as a means of protecting against disease or reproductive threat.

Psychopathology and Religious Obsessions

Viewing religion as a disease-avoidance strategy may also help explain why religious obsessions often accompany obsessive-compulsive disorder. Boyer and Liénard (2006) describe ritualistic behavior as an emergent property of evolved precaution or hazardmanagement systems. From this perspective, psychological disorders that involve rituals, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, can be viewed as malfunctions within a domain-specific precautionary repertoire that originally evolved to avoid a specific threat (e.g., infectious disease). Indeed, there is evidence linking the BIS (e.g., disgust) to a wide variety of psychological disorders (e.g., phobias, eating disorders, anxiety disorders; Olatunji & McKay, 2009). In particular, disgust sensitivity has been strongly implicated in obsessive-compulsive disorder, specifically concerns regarding hygiene (e.g., hand washing) and interpersonal contamination obsession (Olatunji, Williams, Lohr, & Sawchuk, 2005). Moreover, disgust and contamination obsessions have the same underlying neurocircuitry (e.g., activation of the basal ganglia and areas of the prefrontal cortex; Husted, Shapira, & Goodman, 2006). Thus, an overactive or dysfunctional BIS may predispose individuals to obsessive behavior and obsessivecompulsive disorder. Some research suggests that religious dogmatism (e.g., strict adherence to religious texts) may be a risk factor for obsessive-compulsive disorder. For example, Abramowitz, Deacon, Woods, and Tolin (2004) found that individuals who are highly religious are more likely to exhibit characteristics that are indicative of obsessive-compulsive disorder

John A. Terrizzi Jr., Natalie J. Sh ook

(e.g., less tolerance for ambiguity, more washing obsessions and compulsions, and inflated sense of personal responsibility) compared with nonreligious individuals. In fact, there is a subtype of obsessivecompulsive disorder, scrupulosity, which is characterized by religious obsession (Greenberg, Witztum, & Pisante, 1987). Thus, dysfunction in the BIS may explain why religious obsession is a common feature in obsessivecompulsive disorder. That is, an overactive BIS may further increase an individual’s tendency toward religious conservatism, which emphasizes moral and physical purity. Olatunji, Tolin, Huppert, and Lohr (2005) were able to demonstrate in a nonclinical sample that religious obsessions (e.g., fear of punishment from god) are predicted by disgust sensitivity. Moreover, this relationship remained significant even after controlling for other emotions, such as fearfulness. These data seem to support Boyer and Liénard’s (2006) thesis that cultural rituals are born out of evolved hazard-management systems. In this case, religious obsessions and compulsions seem to emerge from the BIS and thus may have roots in anxieties about disease avoidance.

Conclusion

Religion is a cross-cultural human phenomenon that is deserving of a naturalistic explanation. One of the evolved psychological systems that has undoubtedly played a role in the cultural evolution of religious values is the BIS. The BIS can explain a wide variety of religious phenomena that other perspectives have been unable to successfully explain. Viewing religion as an evoked disease-avoidance strategy helps explain why most religions have some form of ritual purification practices. It also helps explain why religiosity is associated with prejudice (Terrizzi et al., 2012), why there are regional differences in religious beliefs (Fincher & Thornhill, 2012; Thornhill & Fincher, 2014b), why women are more religious than men (Terrizzi et al., 2014), and why religious obsession is a common theme in obsessive-compulsive disorder (Olatunji, Williams, et al., 2005). Although the BIS seems to have broad explanatory power in regard to religious beliefs, this is still a relatively new area of research with plenty of important work yet to be done. Future research should focus on further elaborating the relationship between the BIS and religiosity. Although the work linking parasite-stress to regional differences in religious practice has been conducted on a cross-cultural level (Fincher & Thornhill, 2012;

Thornhill & Fincher, 2014b), research regarding individual differences has primarily focused on Christianity. Thus, in the future, researchers should focus on exploring the relationship between BIS strength and other religions. It should also be noted that the BIS is not the only evolved psychological system that has been implicated in religion. For example, recent evidence suggests that religious insensitivity (e.g., burning of the Qur’an) is more evocative of anger than disgust (Royzman, Atanasov, Landy, Parks, & Gepty, 2014). This is consistent with the sociofunctional nature of these emotions. They prepare us to be prejudiced toward out-group members (e.g., members of other religions) to serve different functional purposes (Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005). Anger is an approachoriented emotion that prepares organisms for conflict (e.g., competition for scarce resources), whereas disgust is an avoidance-oriented emotion that encourages disease avoidance. Some aspects of religion may be less explicable from a disease-avoidance perspective. For example, the BIS may not be able to explain the belief in a god or gods or why people pray. This is not to say that such phenomena cannot be explained from an evolutionary perspective. Some researchers have suggested that belief in god(s) and prayer may be a byproduct of the attachment system, which explains why gods are often conceptualized as parental figures (see Kirkpatrick, 2005). Thus, rather than originating from a solitary psychological system, it is more likely that religion is a byproduct of a kaleidoscope of evolved psychological mechanisms (Boyer, 2001). In sum, religion is a cross-cultural human phenomenon that is deserving of a naturalistic evolutionary explanation. The BIS is an evolved psychological system that is particularly powerful in its ability to explain a number of religious phenomena. Across a variety of research methods, measures, and populations, a growing body of literature has linked the BIS to religious conservatism. Together, these results suggest that the relationship between purity/ disgust and religion is not merely symbolic or coincidental, but rather serves an adaptive domainspecific function of promoting disease avoidance. Viewing religion in this light helps explain many religious phenomena that could not previously be explained with any one theoretical approach. It helps explain the cross-cultural nature of religious purity, the relation between religion and prejudice, regional variation in religiosity, sex differences in religious conservatism, and the relationship between Religion

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religiosity and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Thus, it may be that religion originally emerged, at least in part, as an evolutionarily evoked disease-avoidance strategy.

References

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14

CH A PTE R

Religion as a Means of Perceived Security Testing the Secure Society Theory

James R. Liddle

Abstract Despite the ubiquity of religion, religiosity varies substantially at the individual and societal levels. This chapter presents a study that sought set to replicate and extend previous findings regarding Norris and Inglehart’s (2004) secure society theory of religiosity, which states that religiosity varies with the extent to which one feels secure in one’s environment. The relationship between individual perceptions of societal security—as opposed to national indicators of societal security—and religiosity has not previously been investigated. The study analyzed data from the General Social Survey, supplemented by Federal Bureau of Investigation and US Census data. The results indicated that the extent to which one feels safe walking around one’s neighborhood at night predicts religiosity, even when crime rate, poverty rate, age, sex, and race are controlled statistically. Additionally, time series analyses of data from 1980 to 2012 provided partial support for the secure society theory, with neighborhood fear and poverty predicting future religiosity. Key Words: religiosity, secularization, secure society theory, general social survey, time series analysis

Introduction

Despite the apparent universality of religion, the degree of religiousness (i.e., religiosity) varies across individuals, societies, and time. For example, Sweden and Denmark are among the least religious nations (excluding nations with state-imposed atheism, which do not accurately represent the religiosity of the populace), with studies reporting a range of 46%–85% of Swedes and 43%–80% of Danes as nonbelievers in God (Zuckerman,  2007). These percentages may be large when compared to other nations, but they also highlight the substantial variability in religiosity at the individual level. Even though these societies are highly secular, there is a substantial portion of highly religious individuals in these populations (Zuckerman, 2008). Furthermore, this predominant secularism has not been constant throughout these nations’ histories, as Zuckerman (2008, p. 125) notes regarding the late 1700s and 1800s: “there is no question that heartfelt, faithful

Christianity was discernibly pervasive in various parts of Denmark and Sweden,” and “ever since sociologists began collecting data on religion in Denmark and Sweden—which, admittedly, really wasn’t that long ago—the clear pattern has been that of decline, in both belief and participation.” Besides Denmark and Sweden, developed, postindustrial nations tend to exhibit lower religiosity than less-developed nations (Norris & Inglehart,  2004; Zuckerman, 2009). The United States, however, appears to be an exception. Recent estimates of the percentage of atheists, agnostics, or nonbelievers in the United States range from 3% to 9%, which places the United States 44th—between Portugal and Albania—on a list of the top 50 countries with citizens self-identified as such (Zuckerman,  2007). Nevertheless, US religiosity has been declining in recent decades. An analysis of the 1990, 2001, and 2008 waves of the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) indicates that the percentage of

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Americans designated as religious “nones” (i.e., those who do not identify with any particular religion) increased from 14.3 million (about 8 percent of the population) in 1990 to 34.2 million (15 percent) in 2008 (Kosmin & Keysar, 2009). How can we explain this individual, societal, and temporal variability in religiosity? Although historical and cultural factors play a role in shaping individual and societal religiosity over time, it can also be useful to analyze religion from an evolutionary psychological perspective.

Evolutionary Psychology and Its Application to Religion

Evolutionary psychologists argue that the mind is composed of a large number of evolved mechanisms shaped over evolutionary history to solve specific, recurrent adaptive problems of survival and reproduction. Although the number of evolved mechanisms that exist and the typical scope of such mechanisms (i.e., domain-specific vs. domain-general) are subjects of debate, a less controversial aspect of this view is the description of evolved mechanisms as information-processing mechanisms sensitive to specific types of information (i.e., environmental stimuli, physiological activity, output from other parts of the brain), and that this information is processed, resulting in a specific type of output (i.e., physiological activity, input to other mechanisms, or manifest behavior) (Buss, 2011). From this conceptual foundation, one can examine religious beliefs and behaviors by considering the possible evolved psychological mechanisms that produce such output. Identifying the types of information—particularly environmental input— that influence religiosity can aid in identifying the mechanisms involved in producing religious beliefs and behaviors, as well as the functions of these mechanisms. This can aid in determining whether religious beliefs and behaviors are produced by specialized mechanisms or as the byproducts of other evolved mechanisms (i.e., output that is merely a consequence of a mechanism’s design rather than output that a mechanism is specialized to produce). Although this chapter presents a test of a theory of religiosity that was not developed by evolutionary psychologists, an evolutionary perspective can be useful in understanding the theory’s predictions and interpreting findings related to this theory.

Secure Society Theory

Norris and Inglehart (2004) proposed a theory of secularization that may explain the variability in 214

James R. Liddle

r­ eligiosity between nations as well as societal changes in religiosity over time. They argue that a key factor driving secularization is the level of security provided by a society, which influences individuals’ “existential security,” or “the feeling that survival is secure enough that it can be taken for granted” (p. 4). Their theory is referred to throughout this chapter as secure society theory. Secure society theory is built on two premises, referred to by Norris and Inglehart (2004) as “the Security Axiom” and “the Cultural Traditions Axiom” (pp. 13–18). The Cultural Traditions Axiom does not play a large role in the theory’s explanation of secularization, but emphasizes that the religious worldviews of a society continue to influence that society’s culture even as that society moves toward secularization (e.g., the Protestant work ethic). More relevant to explaining religious variability over time is the Security Axiom, which states that variability exists between societies with regard to the level of security (i.e., people’s vulnerability to risks and dangers, such as environmental disasters, diseases, crime, human rights violations, poverty, etc.), and that societal shifts from agrarian to industrial and from industrial to postindustrial improve societal security. The first stage of modernization (agrarian to industrial) lifts developing nations out of extreme poverty, aiding the most vulnerable portions of the population and improving the standard of living. As societies develop, there are improvements in nutrition, sanitation, access to clean water, healthcare, and education as well as improved mass communication. These changes have a positive impact on individuals’ perceptions of security (i.e., existential security). Norris and Inglehart (2004) acknowledge that societal development does not inevitably lead to greater security, at least not for all citizens. This makes sense when considering secure society theory from an evolutionary perspective. If the psychological mechanisms that produce religious beliefs and behaviors are sensitive to societal security, then even a prosperous, developed nation can have a religious populace if cues to insecurity are present. For example, certain events can have significant negative impacts on any nation regardless of the level of development (e.g., natural disasters, war, recession), and will impact individuals’ perceptions of security. Economic inequality is also is an important variable, as a substantial portion of the population may continue to suffer from threats to their security while a small “elite” class of citizens reaps the benefits of development.

Using the Security Axiom and Cultural Traditions Axiom as their foundation, Norris and Inglehart (2004) hypothesize that the variability in security between societies, resulting from varying levels of development and historical events, can partially explain the variability in religiosity between societies, with greater security leading to increased secularization. More specifically, they predict that greater security will result in weaker religious beliefs, values, and participation, and that differences in religiosity will be most pronounced between agrarian, industrial, and postindustrial societies. This relationship between religiosity and security is based on the argument that as individuals’ perceptions of security increase, their need for religion decreases, as religion—particularly supernatural beliefs—provides a coping mechanism for living in less secure and unpredictable conditions. That supernatural beliefs afford coping with uncertainty was hypothesized by Malinowski (1954) and has since been supported by a variety of studies. For example, regular church attendance is linked to a reduced incidence of depression, suggesting greater ability to cope with stress (McCullough & Larson, 1999), and several studies indicate that individuals compensate for uncertainty, ambiguity, and reduced feelings of control through superstitious (Burger & Lynn, 2005; Case, Fitness, Cairns, & Stevenson,  2004; Keinan,  2002) and religious (Frijters & Baron, 2010; Kay, Gaucher, McGregor, & Nash, 2010; Kay, Moscovitch, & Laurin, 2010; Kay, Whitson, Gaucher, & Galinsky, 2009) beliefs and behaviors. Whitson and Galinsky (2008) have even shown that the experience of lacking control can increase the perception of illusory patterns, including developing superstitions and forming illusory correlations about stock market data. From an evolutionary psychological perspective, these findings suggest that religion functions as an adaptation (i.e., that religious beliefs and behaviors are designed output of psychological mechanisms responding to environmental threats), a view implicit in secure society theory and further considered in the discussion later. Norris and Inglehart (2004) expand on the hypothesized relationship between security and religiosity by noting that societal changes in security are not expected to have an immediate impact on individuals’ religiosity, but instead that these effects should take time to have an impact. If secure society theory is correct, changes in religiosity over time may correspond to societal changes in security. Identifying this relationship requires consistently

gathered data over an adequate length of time. Evidence regarding the hypothesized relationship between security and religiosity is discussed next.

Evidence Supporting Secure Society Theory

Norris and Inglehart (2004) conducted a series of analyses to test secure society theory. Their primary source of data for religiosity was the pooled World Values Survey/European Values Survey conducted in four waves from 1981 to 2001. These data provided information about 76 nation-states. However, not all nations were included in each wave, so timeseries analyses were limited to the 20 societies for which data were included in each wave. The specific measures of religiosity included religious participation, both collective (attending  religious services) and personal (prayer frequency), religious values (the importance of religion in one’s  life), and religious beliefs (belief in God, heaven/hell, life after death, and existence of the soul). Regarding societal security, Norris and Inglehart (2004) categorized societies as agrarian (n  = 23), industrial (n = 33), and postindustrial (n =2 3) based on the Human Development Index, a 100-point scale of societal modernization published annually by the United Nations Development Program. This measure combines levels of knowledge (adult literacy and education), health (life expectancy at birth), and standard of living (real per capita Gross Domestic Product [GDP]). Additional measures of security/development drawn from a variety of sources included the proportions of the population living in rural and urban areas, the Gini coefficient of economic inequality, access to mass communications, the number of HIV/AIDS cases, access to an improved water source, immunization rates, the distribution of physicians, and average life expectancy at birth. Norris and Inglehart (2004) first examined differences in religiosity between agrarian, industrial, and postindustrial nations. As hypothesized by secure society theory, religious participation, values, and beliefs were strongest in agrarian societies and weakest in postindustrial societies (see Table 14.1). For example, 54 percent of respondents in agrarian societies reported praying every day, compared to 34 percent and 26 percent of those living in industrial and postindustrial societies, respectively. Norris and Inglehart (2004) then conducted correlational analyses between the various measures of security/development and religious behaviors (attending religious services and prayer frequency). These results also supported secure society theory,

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Table 14.1.  Religiosity by Type of Society

Religious Participation Attend church at least weekly Pray “every day” Religious Values Religion “very important” Religious Beliefs Belief in life after death Believe that people have a soul Believe in heaven Believe in hell Believe in God

Agrarian

Industrial

Post-Industrial

Eta

Sig.

44 52

25 34

20 26

.171 .255

** ***

64

34

20

.386

***

55 68 63 59 78

44 43 45 36 72

49 32 44 26 69

.229 .169 .094 .228 .016

* *** * *** n/s

Note: * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001; n/s = not significant; The significance of the difference between group means is measured by ANOVA (Eta). Source: Norris and Inglehart (2004, p. 57).

with each societal indicator correlating with both religious participation and prayer frequency in the predicted direction: as societal conditions improve, religiosity decreases. The correlations ranged in strength from .41 to -.74. For example, the Human Development Index was negatively correlated with both religious participation and prayer frequency, r = -.53, p < .001. Norris and Inglehart (2004) also examined historical trends regarding religiosity, specifically the annual trends in regular (weekly) religious service participation from 1970 to 1998 for 13 European societies. For each society, the year of the survey was regressed on the proportion of respondents reporting weekly religious service attendance. Every model resulted in a negative regression coefficient, and this result was statistically significant for nine of the societies. Although these results show that religiosity is in decline in these European societies, the analyses did not address the causal effect of societal security on these declines. Finally, Norris and Inglehart (2004) note that the United States appears to represent an exception to their theory. Although United States religiosity is declining, it remains an outlier compared to most postindustrial nations. The high level of religiosity observed in the United States seemingly contradicts secure society theory, as the United States is a successful postindustrial nation. However, when the United States is analyzed in terms of societal indicators of security, the high rates of religiosity are less anomalous. For example, Norris and Inglehart highlight that the United States exhibits greater 216

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economic inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) than any other postindustrial nation included in their analyses. They further state that: Many American families, even in the professional middle classes, face risks of unemployment, the dangers of sudden ill health without adequate private medical insurance, vulnerability to becoming a victim of crime, and the problems of paying for longterm care of the elderly. (p. 108)

Although Norris and Inglehart do not analyze these additional factors and their relationship to religiosity statistically, they make a strong case for the value of secure society theory for understanding religiosity in the United States and throughout the world. Nevertheless, it is important to consider additional evidence regarding the validity of secure society theory.

Additional Supporting Evidence of Secure Society Theory

Since Norris and Inglehart’s (2004) initial presentation of their theory, several researchers have further tested secure society theory either implicitly or explicitly. For example, Paul (2005) tested the hypothesis that popular religiosity is beneficial to society by examining rates of religious belief and practice along with several indicators of societal health and dysfunction (homicide, youth suicide, sexually transmitted disease prevalence, teen pregnancy and birth, and abortion rates) in 18 developed democracies, including the United States. Paul (p. 7) concluded that “higher rates of belief in and

worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies.” Furthermore, the United States is an outlier regarding most societal indicators of dysfunction, with homicide rates, STD infection rates, early adolescent pregnancies, and abortion rates much higher than in the other countries analyzed. Given that the United States is an outlier among prosperous democracies on several indicators of societal security, it is important to consider whether the observed relationship between religiosity and security is driven primarily by the inclusion of the United States in statistical analyses. This possibility was considered in a later study by Paul (2009), in which analyses similar to those conducted earlier (Paul, 2005) were performed with and without the United States included. The newer study also included the creation of a Successful Societies Scale (SSS) based on over two dozen indicators—several of which were used in Paul’s (2005) study—and a Popular Religiosity versus Secularism Scale (PRVSS) comprising seven measures of religiosity and secularism (absolute belief in a supernatural creator deity, biblical literalism, religious service attendance, prayer frequency, belief in an afterlife, self-reported agnosticism/atheism, and acceptance of human descent from animals). Higher scores on the SSS indicated less societal dysfunction, and higher scores on the PRVSS indicated higher levels of secularization. Results indicated that scores on the SSS positively correlated with scores on the PRVSS, with the United States included (r = .71, p < .001) and excluded (r = .53, p < .01), although the relationship is larger with United States inclusion. These results are consistent with secure society theory, as many of the societal measures are indicators of societal security (e.g., homicides, incarcerations, life expectancy, infant mortality, human poverty index), and the relationship with religiosity is not driven by data from United States. A study by Rees (2009) further tested secure society theory with an analysis of 55 countries. This study also tested alternative explanations for changes in religiosity: the traditional modernization theory of secularization and rational choice theory, the latter of which states that secularization occurs “due to competition for attention from secular services and the provision of unattractive products by the monopoly of religious providers” (Rees, 2009, p. 2). After establishing economic inequality—measured by the Gini coefficient—as a reasonable proxy for

personal insecurity given its correlation with several societal indicators of security, Rees developed a model with economic equality and variables related to the alternative explanations of secularization (governmental and social regulation of religion, religious fractionalization, and per capita GDP) as predictors of religiosity. The results supported secure society theory, indicating that even after controlling statically for other variables, economic inequality remains a unique predictor, and was indeed the strongest predictor of religiosity. Barber (2011) provided further support for the link between economic inequality—as well as other variables likely to influence existential security— and religiosity. As a measure of religious disbelief, Barber relied on the proportion of the population reporting that they do not believe in God, as compiled by Zuckerman (2007) for 137 countries. Barber controlled for the effect of living in Communist societies (where religious beliefs are criminalized) and Islamic states that observe Sharia law (where atheism is criminalized). Independent variables included economic development measured in terms of the proportion of the labor force employed in agriculture and third-level education enrollment, economic security measured in terms of the Gini coefficient and the level of personal taxation (a proxy for the extent of the welfare state), and health security measured in terms of the severity of 22 parasites (i.e., “pathogen prevalence”) as reported by Fincher and Thornhill (2008). The results indicated that religious disbelief was correlated with all the independent and control variables, and these variables were all predictors of religious disbelief in regression analyses, explaining 75 percent of the variance in disbelief. Pesta, McDaniel, and Bertsch (2010) provided an indirect test of secure society theory by creating an index of well-being for the United States, using the 50 states as the units of analysis. They identified six subdomains of subjective well-being for which state-level data were available: religiosity, health, crime, education, income level, and g, or general intelligence. Although religiosity was included because of its documented positive effect on wellbeing (see Pesta et al., 2010), correlational analyses indicated that religiosity was positively correlated with the only subdomain representing lower wellbeing—crime—and negatively correlated with every other subdomain representing greater wellbeing. In other words, although religiosity has beneficial effects on well-being at the individual level, higher levels of religiosity are associated with lower

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state-level well-being. This apparent contradiction is consistent with secure society theory, as individuals living in states with stronger indicators of lower well-being (e.g., higher crime rates, lower health, lower education, etc.) are expected to display greater religiosity in an effort to cope with these conditions. Finally, a study by Solt, Habel, and Grant (2011) analyzed economic inequality and religiosity over time, providing a test of the temporal component of secure society theory (i.e., changes in societal security result in changes in religiosity over time). Solt et al. analyzed data over a 50-year period, from 1955 to 2005. Grant’s (2008) Aggregate Religiosity Index (ARI), which provides a single value of national religiosity for each year based on available survey data, was used as the measure of religiosity, and economic inequality was measured by the Gini coefficient. Per capita GDP was also included in their analysis. To test the effects that these variables have on each other over time, Solt et al. analyzed these data with vector autoregression, a form of time-series analysis that comprises a series of regression equations. Each variable under consideration serves as the predictor in one of the equations. More specifically, a timelagged version of each variable serves as a predictor to determine whether it can predict future values of the other variables. The analyses indicated that GDP per capita negatively predicts future religiosity, whereas economic inequality positively predicts future religiosity (i.e., as inequality increases, future religiosity increases). However, the time lag considered in this analysis was only one year, as preliminary analyses indicated this was the most appropriate time lag. Therefore, although the results are in the direction hypothesized by secure society theory, such a brief time lag may not provide an appropriate test of secure society theory’s hypothesis regarding gradual historical change in religiosity.

The Present Study

A major limitation of the previous research on secure society theory is the lack of direct data addressing existential security (i.e., people’s personal perceptions of security). Instead, religiosity has been linked to societal indicators of security. Though the latter type of investigation is important for testing secure society theory, as existential security should be correlated with societal conditions, it is necessary to demonstrate the relationship hypothesized by Norris and Inglehart (2004) between personal perceptions of security and religiosity. Another limitation of previous studies is the lack of time series analyses, because secure society 218

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theory hypothesizes that changes in security over time will lead to changes in religiosity. Although Norris and Inglehart (2004) analyzed historical changes in religiosity, they did not investigate the hypothesized causal relationship between security and religiosity over time. Solt et al. (2011) attempted to address this, but their time-series analysis relied on a time lag of just one year. Although their results supported the hypothesized causal relationship between changes in security and religiosity, the brief time lag does not reflect with the gradual (i.e., generational) changes hypothesized by secure society theory. The study presented in this chapter attempts to address these limitations as well as replicate previous findings regarding secure society theory by analyzing religiosity, societal security, and perceptions of security in the United States from 1972 to 2012 through analysis of data secured by the General Social Survey (Smith, Marsden, Hout, & Kim,  2013) and data provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (US Department of Justice and FBI, 2014) and the US Census (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith,  2013). Because secure society theory hypothesizes a negative relationship between societal security and religiosity, another way of framing this is that secure society theory hypothesizes a positive relationship between societal insecurity and religiosity. This is how the hypothesized relationship was framed in the present study, given the variables available for analysis. The present study tested three hypotheses. By including a measure of personal perception of insecurity, the present study tested the hypothesis that personal perceptions of insecurity are positively related to self-reported religiosity (Hypothesis 1). This personal measure was analyzed along with societal indicators of insecurity used in previous studies (crime rates and poverty rates) to test the hypothesis that both personal perceptions and societal indicators of insecurity predict self-reported religiosity (Hypothesis 2). Finally, religiosity and insecurity were analyzed at the national level over time to test the hypothesis that insecurity positively predicts future religiosity (Hypothesis 3).

Data Sets and Variable Selection

To test the secure society theory as it applies to religiosity in the United States, data were obtained from several data sets. These data sets, and the relevant variables from these data sets that were analyzed in the present study, are described in what follows.

The General Social Survey

For variables regarding religiosity, and one variable regarding perceptions of societal insecurity, the present study relied on data obtained from The General Social Survey (GSS). This sociological survey was conducted almost annually from 1972 to 1994 (excluding 1979, 1981, and 1992, due to funding limitations), and biennially from 1994 to the present (although data beyond 2013 were not yet available at the time this study was conducted), by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC), and provides a valuable source of time-series data on American demographic characteristics and attitudes on a wide range of topics. The GSS is a 90-minute, in-house interview of a probability-based sample of noninstitutionalized US adults at least 18 years old. From 1972 to 1993, for each year the survey was conducted, the target sample size was 1,500 participants, with actual sample sizes ranging from 1,372 in 1990 to 1,613 in 1972. Since 1994, the GSS has been administered to two samples each year the survey is conducted, each with a target sample size of 1,500 participants. Total sample sizes range from 2,765 in 2002 to 2,992 in 1994. Aside from an oversampling of black participants in 1982 and 1987 (statistically controlled for in the present study’s analyses), there has been no oversampling in other periods. The 1972–2012 GSS data set consists of a total of 56,355 participants (25,804 men, 30,551 women) after correcting for an oversampling of black participants. The mean age of participants is 44.37 years (SD = 17.00, range = 18-89). The majority of participants (82.2%) are identified as white (n = 46,328), with 6,906 participants (12.3%) identified as black and 3,120 participants (5.5%) identified as “other.” The primary religious identifications of participants are as follows: 32,289 Protestant, 14,533 Catholic, 1,111 Jewish, and 5,994 “none.” The residence of participants is coded into nine regions; this unfortunately reduces the amount of regional variability in religiosity and security that can be analyzed, but provides more detail than data at the national level. The questions in the GSS are of two broad types: Participants either simply provide an answer and the interviewer is responsible for assigning the appropriate code to the response, or participants are given a hand card with a list of possible responses from which to choose. In 2002, the GSS switched from printed questionnaires to computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), but hand cards are still provided to participants for relevant questions.

Religiosity Measures

The following variables from the GSS were used as measures of religiosity for the present study. Although other variables related to religion are available in the GSS, the presented variables were chosen because they were included in the greatest number of surveys from 1972–2012. Religious Attendance Participants were asked “How often do you attend religious services?,” and responses were coded on a scale of 0 to 9 (0 = “Never,” 1 = “Less than once a year,” 2 = “About once or twice a year,” 3 = “Several times a year,” 4 = “About once a month,” 5 = “2–3 times a month,” 6 = “Nearly every week,” 7 = “Every week,” 8 = “Several times a week,” 9 = “Don’t Know” or no answer). Participants were not provided a hand card with these options, but interviewers were instructed to use these categories as probes, if necessary. This question has been asked every year the GSS has been administered, resulting in 29 years for which data have been collected over a 40-year period (valid n = 55,821; 534 cases of “Don’t know” or no answer). Participants tend to overstate the frequency of church attendance, in both the GSS and other surveys, such as Gallup polls (Hadaway, Marler, & Chaves,  1993). The principal investigator of the GSS has acknowledged this issue and explains it as a result of three factors: social desirability bias, telescoping, and participants relying on a broader interpretation of “attend[ing] religious service” (Smith, 1996). However, these data can still be used to analyze changes over time and relationships with other variables because the difference between reported attendance and actual attendance (which has been more accurately measured with time diary studies) has remained consistent in recent decades (Chaves, 2011). Prayer Frequency Participants were asked “About how often do you pray?” and responses were coded on a scale of 1 to 6 (1 = “Several times a day,” 2 = “Once a day,” 3 = “Several times a week,” 4 = “Once a week,” 5 = “Less than once a week,” 6 = “Never”). Participants were not provided a hand card with these options, but interviewers were instructed to use these categories as probes, if necessary. The GSS began asking this question in 1983, but it was not included in 1986 and 1991, resulting in 18 years for which data have been collected over a 29-year period (valid n = 27,816; 324 cases of “Don’t know” or no answer).

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These data were reverse-coded in the present study so that greater values indicate higher levels of prayer frequency. Additionally, for data from 1983, “Never” responses were collapsed with “Less than once a week.” This was recommended by Smith (1988) due to an unusually high number of “Never” responses coded in that year. Although the wording of the question and instructions for interviewing and coding were not changed, it is possible that the discrepancy was due to inadequate interviewer training or inadequate care by the coding supervisor. Biblical Fundamentalism Participants were asked “Which of these statements comes closest to describing your feelings about the Bible?,” and responses were coded on a scale of 1 to 4 (1 = “The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word,” 2 = “The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word,” 3 = “The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men,” 4 = “Other” [volunteered]). The first three options were provided to participants on a hand card. The GSS began asking this question in 1984, but it was not included in 1986, resulting in 18 years for which data have been collected over a 28-year period (valid n = 27,618; 349 cases of “Other,” 644 cases of “Don’t know” or no answer). These data were reverse-coded in the present study so that greater values indicate higher levels of fundamentalism. Responses of “Other” were excluded from analyses due to a lack of information about how to interpret these responses. Strength of Affiliation Participants who indicated any religious preference were asked “Would you call yourself a strong (preference named) or a not very strong (preference named)?” and responses were coded on a scale of 1 to 4 (1 = “Strong,” 2 = “Not very strong,” 3 = “Somewhat strong” [volunteered], 4 = “No religion”). Participants were not provided a hand card with these options, but interviewers were instructed to use these categories as probes, if necessary. Interviewers were instructed to refer to the religious preference previously identified by the participant when asking this question. If participants indicated that they follow no religion, this question was not asked. The GSS began asking this question in 1974, and it has been asked every year since, resulting in 27 years for which data have been collected over a 38-year period (valid n = 51,436; 1,797 cases of 220

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“Don’t know” or no answer). These data were ­reverse-coded in the present study so that greater values indicate a greater strength of affiliation. Also, the order of the “not very strong” and “somewhat strong” categories were switched to more accurately reflect a scale of increasing religiosity.

Religiosity Component

To facilitate analyzing the effects of several variables on religiosity, the present study considered whether religious attendance, prayer frequency, biblical fundamentalism, and strength of affiliation could be combined into a single religiosity composite variable. A principal components analysis was conducted on these variables, with extraction based on Eigenvalues greater than 1. The number of factors to extract was not fixed beforehand. Two measures of sampling adequacy, Kaiser-Myer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett’s test of sphericity, indicated that it was appropriate to proceed with principal components analysis, as KMO was greater than 0.5 (KMO = 0.760) and Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant (p < .001). The four religiosity variables were all correlated. A principal components analysis yielded a single component with an Eigenvalue of 2.44, explaining 61.04 percent of the variance. The second largest Eigenvalue was 0.69 and, therefore, was not extracted. The principal component communalities were .690 for religious attendance, .629 for prayer frequency, .436 for biblical fundamentalism, and .687 for strength of affiliation. Thus, the majority of the variance in these variables is accounted for by a one-component solution, although variance in biblical fundamentalism is not accounted for as strongly as the other variables. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to consider these four variables as part of a single religiosity component. Therefore, a single religiosity variable was constructed by first calculating z-scores for each of the four GSS variables (since their scales of measurement are not uniform) and then calculating the mean of these z-scores. The four standardized variables exhibited strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = .79). For each valid case in the GSS data set, a single “religiosity” value was calculated. Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent analyses presented rely on this religiosity composite variable. The number of original religiosity variables used to create the values for the composite variable varies by year, since some surveys from 1972–2012 only include a subset of the four variables. As a result, the religiosity composite variable is most strongly influenced by religious attendance (n = 55,821), followed

by strength of affiliation (n = 51,436), prayer frequency (n = 27,816), and biblical fundamentalism (n = 27,618). This may also partially explain why variance in biblical fundamentalism was the least accounted for by the one-component solution.

Measuring Societal Insecurity

One variable from the GSS was used to assess participants’ perceptions of societal security. Specifically, participants were asked “Is there any area right around here–that is, within a mile–where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?” and responses were simply “yes” (coded as 1) or “no” (coded as 2). The GSS began asking this question in 1973, but it was not included in 1975, 1978, 1983, and 1986, resulting in 24 years for which data were collected over a 39-year period (valid n = 33,652; 253 cases of “Don’t know” or no answer). The data for this “fear” variable were reverse-coded in the present study to match the other variables assessing societal insecurity (described below), with higher values indicating a greater degree of insecurity.

Control Variables

The following control variables were included in a subset of the present study’s analyses because of their relationships with religiosity: sex, race, and age. These relationships were tested in the present study through a series of preliminary analyses described later. Several studies indicate that women are, on average, more religious than men; women express a greater interest in religion (Sasaki, 1979), are more strongly committed to their religions (Bensen, Donahue, & Erickson, 1989), and report more frequent religious attendance (Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993). These trends are consistent across denomination and type of religious belief system (Stark & Bainbridge, 1985). This relationship is also found in the 1972–2012 GSS data. An analysis of sex and the religiosity composite variable indicated that women are more religious (M = 0.14, SD = 0.82) than men (M = -0.15, SD = 0.84), t(56,188) = -40.52, p < .001, mean difference = -0.29, 95% CI [-0.30, -0.27], Cohen’s d = 0.34. Although the relationship between race and religiosity has not been examined as extensively as the relationship between sex and religiosity, researchers have found evidence of differences ­between African Americans and white Americans, with African Americans exhibiting greater religiosity (see Levin, Taylor, & Chatters,  1994). This relationship was tested in the 1972–2012 GSS

data. A one-way analysis of variance indicated a difference in religiosity between races, F(2, 56187) = 437.75, p < .001. However, the effect size is very small, η² = 0.02. Nevertheless, a post hoc Tukey test indicated that African Americans reported higher religiosity (M = 0.28, SD = 0.77, 95% CI [0.27, 0.30]) than both white Americans (M = -0.03, SD = 0.85, 95% CI [-0.04, -0.02]) and nonwhite others (M = -0.07, SD = 0.81, 95% CI [-0.10, -0.04]). Finally, several studies have found a relationship between age and religiosity in the United States (Bahr,  1970; Chaves,  1991; Firebaugh & Harley,  1991; Hout & Greeley,  1990), although there is debate as to what is driving this relationship (see Argue, Johnson, & White, 1999). An analysis of the 1972–2012 GSS data indicated a correlation between age and religiosity, r(56,040) = .18, p < .001. However, as with race, the effect size is quite small, r2 = .03.

Uniform Crime Reports

In addition to the fear variable from the GSS, societal insecurity was assessed by measuring regional crime rates, as the frequency of crime in one’s surrounding area arguably influences one’s perception of societal insecurity. These crime rates were obtained from Crime in the United States (CIUS), an annual report published as part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report program (UCR; US Department of Justice and FBI, 2014). Like the variables from the GSS, these data were ideal for the purposes of the current study because of the availability of data over a substantial time period, as well as the consistency of measurement over time. These data are available as early as 1930, but the present study only used data corresponding to the time period for which religiosity data from the GSS are available (i.e., 1972–2012). The UCR divides reported crimes into two broad categories: violent crimes and property crimes. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR as offenses involving force or the threat of force, and this category consists of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Property crime consists of burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson, specifically when there is no force or threat of force against the victims. However, statistics regarding arson are not included in the UCR summary data of property crime because of limited participation by local law enforcement agencies, as well as variance in data collection procedures by agencies that do

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participate. Although the CIUS reports provide data on each type of crime just listed (except arson), the present study relied on data from the broader categories of violent crime and property crime. To control for varying population sizes between states, the current study relied on crime rate data reported in CIUS, rather than the absolute number of crimes reported. For each state and each year, CIUS provides a violent crime rate and property crime rate that is calculated as the total number of crimes reported in each category divided by the total population. These data are presented as the rate per 100,000 inhabitants. These data sets do not provide a perfect record of how many crimes are committed, as they are limited to those crimes discovered by or reported to law enforcement agencies. Therefore, changes in the values reported over time only partially describe changes in the actual frequency of crimes committed. Data from the GSS are not provided by state, but rather by region. Therefore, prior to analysis, state-level data on violent crime and property crime were converted to region-level data by calculating means for the states corresponding to each region (e.g., for each year, violent crime data from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were converted to a single mean value for the “Middle Atlantic” region). These converted data were then added to the GSS data set.

Current Population Survey

Data regarding the percentage of the United States population in poverty, by state and by year, were  obtained from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC; US Department of Commerce,  2013) of the Current Population Survey (CPS). Poverty is calculated based on a series of dollar value thresholds, and these thresholds are determined by family size and the number of resident children under 18 years old (DeNavasWalt, Proctor, & Smith, 2013). To be categorized as “in poverty,” the family’s total income (before taxes and tax credits) must be less than the applicable threshold, which is updated annually based on the Consumer Price Index to account for inflation. If the family’s total income is below the threshold, then every individual in the family is considered to be in poverty. The ASEC provides data from 1980 to 2012 on the number of people in poverty in each state and the poverty rate for each state (i.e., the number of poor divided by the state’s population). The poverty rate is presented as the rate per 100,000 inhabitants. 222

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As with the crime data, the poverty rates were converted to region-level data by calculating mean rates for the states corresponding to each GSS region. These converted data were then added to the GSS data set.

Time Series Data Set

To test Hypothesis 3 of the present study, regarding societal insecurity predicting future levels of religiosity, a separate data set was constructed using several of the variables described previously. In this data set, each “case” was a year, resulting in 41 cases representing the years 1972–2012. Violent crime rate, property crime rate, and poverty rate data were added to the data set by calculating the mean of the state values for each year. The neighborhood fear variable from the GSS was also added to this data set by calculating the mean responses for each year in the 1972–2012 GSS data set. The religiosity composite variable was added to this data set by calculating the mean values for each year in the 1972–2012 GSS data set. Given the already limited number of cases available in this data set for time series analysis, the fact that there are several years in which the GSS has not been administered is a considerable problem. Therefore, missing values of neighborhood fear and religiosity in the time series data set were replaced by calculating the median of the nearest value above and below the missing value. For example, a religiosity value of 0.0457 was created for the year 1992 by calculating the median of the existing values from 1991 and 1993. This method of missing value replacement was chosen based on the assumption that values for these variables are unlikely to change substantially in the short term, from year to year, and therefore the missing value for any given year can be reasonably estimated as falling in between the values of neighboring years.

Results Religiosity and Individual Perceptions of Societal Insecurity

To test Hypothesis 1, that individuals’ perceptions of societal insecurity are positively related to their reported religiosity, an independent samples t-test was conducted to determine the effect of neighborhood fear (i.e., one’s fear of going outside at night in their neighborhood) on the religiosity composite variable. This analysis was conducted to take advantage of the greatest number of cases in the GSS data set, as the subsequent regression analyses described later, which use several variables, are limited by the number of

cases with valid data for all variables. The t-test was significant, t(33,554) = -15.57, p < .001, mean difference = -.15, 95% CI [-.16, -.13], Cohen’s d = .17. Participants who indicated they are afraid to walk around their neighborhood at night had higher religiosity scores (M = 0.09, SD = 0.83) than those who were not afraid (M = -0.05, SD = 0.83). In other words, as hypothesized, higher perceptions of societal insecurity are related to higher levels of religiosity. To further test Hypothesis 1, a series of chisquare tests of independence was conducted using to investigate whether the relationship between the religiosity composite and fear would obtain for each of the four original religiosity variables from the GSS (religious attendance, prayer frequency, biblical fundamentalism, and strength of affiliation). To facilitate the analysis of religious attendance and interpretation of the chi-square test results, the attendance categories “never,” “less than once a year,” and “about once or twice a year” were collapsed into a “low attendance” category, and the categories “nearly every week,” “every week,” and “several times a week” were collapsed into a “high attendance” category. Other categories of attendance were not included in the chi-square test, as they arguably represent “moderate” levels of religiosity. The chi-square test of independence for religious attendance was significant, χ2(1, n = 23,681) = 101.51, p < .001. However, the effect size, as measured by Cramer’s V (φc), was quite small, φc = .07. Those who indicated that they are afraid to walk around their neighborhood at night were more likely than expected to report high levels of religious attendance (O = 4,747, E = 4,350; std. residual = 5.7), and they were less likely than expected to report low levels of religious attendance (O = 4,496, E = 4,873; std. residual = -5.4). Those who indicated that they are not afraid were more likely than expected to report low levels of religious attendance (O = 8,017, E = 7,640; std. residual = 4.3), and they were less likely than expected to report high levels of religious attendance (O = 6,441, E = 6,818; std. residual = -4.6). In short, security and religiosity are not independent of each other and, as hypothesized, higher perceptions of societal insecurity are related to higher levels of religious attendance. To facilitate the analysis of prayer frequency and interpretation of the chi-square test results, the categories of “never,” “less than once a week,” and “once a week” were collapsed into a “low prayer frequency” category, and the categories of “several times a week,” “once a day,” and “several times a day” were collapsed into a “high prayer frequency” category.

The chi-square test of independence for prayer frequency was significant, χ2(1, n = 17,835) = 157.58, p < .001. Again, the effect size was small, φc = .09. Those who indicated that they are afraid to walk around their neighborhood at night were more likely than expected to report high prayer frequency (O = 4,939, E = 4,567; std. residual = 5.5), and they were less likely than expected to report low prayer frequency (O = 1,626, E = 1,998; std. residual = -8.3). Those who indicated that they are not afraid were more likely than expected to report low prayer frequency (O = 3,802, E = 3,430; std. residual = 6.4), and they were less likely than expected to report high prayer frequency (O = 7,468, E = 7,840; std. residual = -4.2). In short, as hypothesized, higher perceptions of societal insecurity are related to higher prayer frequency. Regarding biblical fundamentalism, it was not necessary to collapse any categories because responses were recorded in three categories: belief that the Bible is (1) the literal word of God, (2) the inspired word of God, or (3) a book of fables. The chi-square test of independence for biblical fundamentalism was significant, χ2(2, n = 17,550) = 78.89, p < .001. The effect size was small, φc = .07. Those who indicated that they are afraid to walk around their neighborhood at night were more likely than expected to view the Bible as the literal word of God (O = 2,462, E = 2,204; std. residual = 5.5) and less likely than expected to view the Bible as a book of fables (O = 972, E = 1,095; std. residual = -3.7). Those who indicated that they are not afraid to walk around their neighborhood at night were more likely than expected to view the Bible as a book of fables (O = 1,975, E = 1,852; std. residual = 2.9) and less likely than expected to view the Bible as the literal word of God (O = 3,469, E = 3,727; std, residual = -4.2). The “inspired word of God” category showed a significant difference for the “afraid” group, but no significant difference for the “unafraid” group. It is difficult to interpret the effects for this category because it arguably represents a moderate level of religiosity, but for the less ambiguous categories, as hypothesized, higher perceptions of societal insecurity are related to greater biblical fundamentalism. To facilitate the analysis of strength of religious affiliation, the categories of “no religion” and “not very strong” were collapsed into a “low strength” category, and the “strong” category was unchanged and used as the “high strength” category. The “somewhat strong” category was not included in this analysis, as it represents a vague, volunteered response,

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and few participants belong to this category in the first place. The chi-square test of independence for strength of affiliation was significant, χ2(1, n = 27,787) = 155.66, p < .001. The effect size was small, φc = .07. Those who indicated that they are afraid to walk around their neighborhood at night were more likely than expected to report strong religious affiliations (O = 5,110, E = 4,608; std. residual = 7.4), and they were less likely than expected to report weak religious affiliations (O = 5,766, E = 6,268; std. residual = -6.3). Those who indicated that they were not afraid were more likely than expected to report weak religious affiliations (O = 10,247, E = 9,745; std. residual = 5.1) and less likely than expected to report strong religious affiliations (O = 6,664, E = 7,166; std. residual = -5.9). In short, as hypothesized, higher perceptions of societal insecurity are related to stronger religious affiliations.

Does Societal Insecurity, at the Individual and Regional Level, Predict Religiosity?

To test Hypothesis 2, that both individual perceptions of societal insecurity and regional factors indicative of societal insecurity positively predict religiosity, multiple linear regression analyses were conducted. Two regression models were computed to determine whether regional societal insecurity as measured by violent crime rate, property crime rate, and poverty rate, along with individual perceptions of societal insecurity as measured by the GSS fear variable, predict religiosity when controlling for age, sex, and race (dummy coded with “African American” and “other” entered into the model, and “white” omitted to serve as the reference category). Two models were computed to avoid issues of multicollinearity because of the large correlation between violent crime rate and property crime rate, r(27,526) = .58, p < .001. Model 1 excluded property crime rate. The variables were entered into the model in two blocks: The first block (the partial model) included the control variables, and the second block (the full model) introduced the societal insecurity variables. This allowed for determining whether the inclusion of the societal insecurity variables contributed to the model fit. The partial model predicted and explained about 8 percent of the variance in religiosity, adjusted R2 = .081, SE = 0.79, F(4, 27523) = 607.66, p < .001. All of the control variables contributed to the model, and their coefficients were all positive, which is consistent with the previous literature and preliminary analyses described in the 224

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Method section. The standardized coefficients (β) indicated that age was the strongest predictor (β = 0.185, p < .001). The next strongest predictor was sex (β = 0.168, p < .001), followed by the African American racial category (β = 0.133, p < .001), and, finally, the “other” racial category (β = 0.012, p = .046). The full model was also significant and explained about 10 percent of the variance in religiosity, adjusted R2 = .097, SE = 0.78, F(7, 27520) = 425.57, p < .001. Using a criterion of VIF values less than 10, there were no apparent issues of multicollinearity in the full model, as all VIFs were less than 1.2. The change in explained variance was significant, ΔR2 = .017, ΔF(3, 27520) = 168.04, p < .001, indicating that the collection of societal insecurity variables contributed to the model beyond the control variables. The control variables all remained significant predictors in the full model, and although their coefficients changed slightly, their relative strengths as predictors remained the same. Aside from the “other” racial category (β = .016, p = .005), all of the control variables were stronger predictors of religiosity than the societal insecurity variables. Among the societal insecurity variables, poverty rate was the strongest predictor (β = 0.119, p < .001), followed by violent crime rate (β = 0.027, p < .001) and neighborhood fear (β = 0.013, p = .027). As hypothesized, all of the coefficients for the societal insecurity variables were positive, indicating that as both individual perceptions of societal insecurity and regional factors indicative of societal insecurity increase, religiosity increases. Model 2 excluded violent crime rate. The variables were again entered into the model in two blocks, following the same procedure as Model 1. As block 1 was identical to that of Model 1, the results of the partial model were identical and are not repeated here. The full model was significant and, like Model 1, explained about 10 percent of the variance in religiosity, adjusted R2 = .098, SE = 0.78, F(7, 27520) = 425.96, p < .001. Using a criterion of VIF values less than 10, there were no apparent issues of multicollinearity in the full model, as all VIFs were less than 1.2. The change in explained variance was significant, ΔR2 = .017, ΔF(3, 27520) = 168.67, p < .001. The control variables all remained significant predictors in the full model, and although their coefficients changed slightly, their relative strengths as predictors remained the same. Aside from the “other” racial category (β = 0.017, p = .003), all of the control variables were stronger predictors of religiosity than the societal insecurity variables.

Among the societal insecurity variables, poverty rate was again the strongest predictor (β = 0.122, p < .001), followed by property crime rate (β = 0.028, p < .001) and neighborhood fear (β = 0.013, p = .035). As hypothesized, all of the coefficients for the societal insecurity variables were positive, again indicating that as both individual perceptions of societal insecurity and regional factors indicative of societal insecurity increase, religiosity increases.

Does Societal Insecurity Predict Future Religiosity?

To test Hypothesis 3, that both perceptions of societal insecurity and factors indicative of societal insecurity can predict future levels of religiosity at the national level, a time series analysis was conducted. More specifically, this hypothesis was tested through the use of vector autoregression (VAR; Sims, 1980)— following the methodology of Solt et al. (2011)— using the statistical software program STATA 12.1. The VAR equation is similar to that used in multiple linear regression. However, the VAR model consists of n equations, where n is the number of variables investigated (Stock & Watson,  2001). In each equation, one of the variables takes a turn as the criterion and is predicted by lagged values of itself, all other variables, and a serially uncorrelated error term. Each equation is then estimated by Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression. This is referred to as a standard, “reduced form” VAR, which is the type of VAR used in the present study. For these analyses, violent crime rate and property crime rate were combined into a “total crime rate” variable to avoid issues of multicollinearity, as running separate models with each type of crime is less feasible in this case because of the number of equations involved in a single model. The total crime rate variable was constructed by first standardizing the violent crime and property crime data in the time series data set into z-scores. The total crime variable was then computed as the mean of the two standardized variables. Model selection criteria are used to determine the best lag length for the VAR model. The most common criteria used are the Akaike (AIC), Schwarz-Bayesian (BIC), and Hannan-Quinn (HQ) (Zivot & Wang, 2003). These criteria are produced in STATA after specifying the variables to be included in the VAR and inputting a set number of potential lags. The recommended procedure is to choose the lag for which the selection criteria values are minimized (Lütkepohl, 2005). For the present study, although a lag of 8 years was found to best

minimize the selection criteria (AIC = 3.55, HQIC = 3.82, SBIC = 4.52), this model failed to pass the Lagrange multiplier (LM) test for autocorrelation, χ2(16, n = 25) = 36.28, p = .003. Despite collapsing violent and property crime into a single variable, there was still an issue of multicollinearity. The LM test output indicated that a lag of 10 years should be chosen. Although the selection criteria values were slightly larger (AIC = 3.99, HQIC = 4.24, SBIC = 4.98), this model passed the LM test, χ2(16, n = 23) = 17.82, p = .33. These analyses relied on a separate time series data set, with 41 cases representing the years 1972–2012. However, with a lag of 10 years and poverty data only going back to 1980, the VAR model was limited to analyzing 23 cases, from 1990 to 2012. The variables entered into the VAR equations were total crime rate, poverty rate, neighborhood fear, and the religiosity composite. In this data set, these variables reflect values at the national level, as the values are means of state- or region-level data for each year. The VAR model can be illustrated as follows: Religiosityt = a10 + a11Religiosityt-10 + a12 TotalCrimet-10 + a13Povertyt-10 + a14Feart-10 + e1t TotalCrimet = a20 + a21Religiosityt-10 + a22 TotalCrimet-10 + a23Povertyt-10 + a24Feart-10 + e2t Povertyt = a30 + a31Religiosityt-10 + a32 TotalCrimet-10 + a33Povertyt-10 + a34Feart-10 + e3t Feart = a40 + a41Religiosityt-10 + a42 TotalCrimet-10 + a43Povertyt-10 + a44Feart-10 + e4t Because STATA does not provide standardized coefficients as part of the output for VAR analyses, prior to running the VAR model, the poverty rate, fear, and religiosity variables were transformed into zscores. Thus, the unstandardized coefficients provided by STATA can be interpreted in the same way as standardized coefficients (i.e., how many SDs the criterion changes for every 1 SD change in the predictor). The total crime rate variable was not transformed as it already represents the mean values of two standardized variables, and thus approximates a standardized variable itself (M = 0.00, SD = 0.97). The results of the VAR model indicated that all four equations were significant predictors of their respective criteria, explaining 76 percent of the variance in religiosity, 73 percent of the variance in total crime, 72 percent of the variance in poverty rate, and 55 percent of the variance in neighborhood fear (all ps < .001). The primary portion of the model to consider for the present study is the equation for

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predicting religiosity. For this equation, the strongest predictor was neighborhood fear (β = 0.46, p = .003), followed by poverty rate (β = 0.30, p = .03). Both coefficients were positive, indicating that, as hypothesized, increases in fear and poverty predict an increase in future religiosity (specifically, religiosity 10 years later). However, counter to expectations, total crime rate did not predict future religiosity. Thus, the results provide only partial support for Hypothesis 3. It is also worth noting from the other equations that religiosity is a significant predictor of future increases in crime (β = 0.58, p = .001) and future increases in neighborhood fear (β = 0.89, p = .003). These results were not hypothesized, yet they suggest the possibility of a feedback loop between religiosity and societal security, which is considered in more detail in the following section.

Conclusions, Limitations, and Future Directions

The present study tested three hypotheses derived from Norris and Inglehart’s (2004) secure society theory of religiosity, with the goal of explaining variations in religiosity within the United States at both the individual and societal level. Hypothesis 1 was supported; individual perceptions of societal insecurity, as measured by reporting whether one was afraid to walk around their neighborhood at night, were positively related to religiosity. Individuals who reported that they were afraid were more religious than those reporting they were not afraid, as indicated by a religiosity composite score comprising religious attendance, prayer frequency, biblical fundamentalism, and strength of religious affiliation. This relationship remained when examining each religiosity measure separately. Hypothesis 2 was also supported, providing further evidence for the positive relationship between societal insecurity and religiosity. Neighborhood fear, violent crime rate, property crime rate, and poverty rate all predicted religiosity, even after controlling for the effects of each other and the variables of sex, age, and race. Hypothesis 3 was partially supported, in that neighborhood fear and poverty rate (but not crime rate) predicted levels of religiosity 10 years later. As with the previous analyses, there was a positive relationship, indicating that increases in societal insecurity predict increases in future religiosity. Interestingly, religiosity was also positively related to future crime rate and neighborhood fear. These results were not predicted by secure society theory, and it is unclear why increased religiosity would 226

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lead to increases in actual societal insecurity (i.e., higher crime rates). However, the relationship between religiosity and perceived societal insecurity (i.e., neighborhood fear) is more readily interpretable as indicative of a feedback loop, in which religiosity is both influenced by perceptions of insecurity and influences those perceptions. In other words, it may be that not only are people who perceive greater societal insecurity likely to be more religious, but people who are more religious are likely to perceive greater insecurity. Given the overall support found for the hypotheses in the present study, what conclusions can be reached regarding the relationship between societal insecurity and religiosity? Overall, the apparent relationship is consistent with the secure society theory. Perceptions of insecurity, whether assessed directly (through neighborhood fear) or indirectly (through regional crime rates and poverty rates, which are likely to influence the perceptions of people living in those regions), are positively related to religiosity: The less secure one perceives society to be, the more religious they are, now and 10 years later. However, the present results do not allow one to make strong inferences regarding causality. The chisquare tests of independence indicated that religiosity and perceptions of societal insecurity are not independent of each other, but this does not mean that a causal relationship necessarily exists. Likewise, the multiple regression analyses indicated that societal insecurity variables uniquely predict religiosity, but their predictive power is merely an indication of the relationship between the variables, not an indication that the predictors cause changes in religiosity. The time series analysis provides the strongest evidence for causality in the present study by showing that some aspects of insecurity predict future levels of religiosity, but technically the results only indicate that the variables are related, as with the other multiple regression analyses performed earlier. From an evolutionary psychological perspective, the present study’s results indicate that the mechanisms (or a subset of the mechanisms) associated with religious beliefs and behaviors are sensitive to environmental input regarding societal insecurity, and these mechanisms respond to increased insecurity by strengthening religiosity. This is consistent with Norris and Inglehart’s (2004) proposed function of religion as a coping mechanism activated by perceptions of societal insecurity. However, this does not necessarily support the idea that religion is produced by a specialized psychological adaptation.

A  possible alternative explanation is that there are mechanisms designed to cope with unpredictable and unsafe environments by increasing one’s perception of control, as this may serve as a buffer against helplessness or negative affect (Case et al.,  2004). This may occur regardless of the existence of religious beliefs; indeed, experimental manipulations of perceived control have been found to elicit increased superstitious behavior (Keinan,  2002) and illusory pattern perception (Whitson & Galinsky,  2008). However, given the existence of religious beliefs, particularly beliefs that provide meaning for events or circumstances that may otherwise seem unpredictable, religion in this context may be best viewed as an “exaptation,” serving as a form of compensatory control (Kay et al., 2010) even though religious beliefs and behaviors were not necessarily originally selected for this purpose. This interpretation leads to the question: Why would the illusory perception of increased control be adaptive? Norris and Inglehart (2004) suggest that perceptions of control are useful in unpredictable and unsafe environments because “Individuals experiencing stress have a need for rigid, predictable rules. They need to be sure of what is going to happen because they are in danger—their margin for error is slender and they need maximum predictability” (p. 19). This does not explain what is going on, however, because the superstitions, perceptions of illusory patterns, and religious beliefs do not provide “maximum predictability.” They provide the illusion of increased control without actually increasing one’s control over events. If one’s margin for error is slim, it seems ill-advised to invent meaning behind events just to reduce negative affect. After all, natural selection does not care how happy or sad you are, and these feelings are only useful to the extent to which they motivate solutions to adaptive problems. When dealing with threats in the natural environment, the most accurate interpretation of one’s control would be favored, as this would allow one to allocate limited resources appropriately. However, Kurzban (2010) offers an interesting evolutionary explanation for the phenomena described earlier, which are examples of what he calls “strategic ignorance.” The key to explaining why inaccurate information may sometimes be favored is the fact that humans deal with more than just the natural environment: We are an extremely social species, and we have spent much of our evolutionary history living in small groups in which we depended on each other for survival. It is important that others view

you as being a valuable member of the group; therefore, it is important to persuade others that you are more valuable than you actually are. Rather than consciously lying, an effective method of persuasion is to believe the inaccurate information yourself. Although this explanation is speculative, there are a variety of phenomena that it can potentially explain (see Kurzban, 2010), including the illusory perception of control in unpredictable and unsafe environments.

Limitations of the Present Study

Although it is not technically a limitation of the present study, this section begins with addressing the small effect sizes obtained from the tests of Hypotheses 1 and 2, because these small effects may be partially explained by some of the limitations of this study. For example, one of the weaknesses of using archival data is that the data were collected without the present study’s hypotheses in mind. As a result, the variables used in the present study regarding societal insecurity were not ideal. The question assessing insecurity in the GSS (neighborhood fear) was very specific and, arguably, only assesses a small portion of overall perception of societal insecurity. Therefore, the effect of neighborhood fear on religiosity should not be misconstrued as the effect of overall perceptions of societal insecurity on religiosity. More comprehensive measures of perceived societal insecurity would provide a clearer picture of how this perception is related to religiosity and would possibly result in a larger effect size. Another limitation that may have reduced the effect sizes is the lack of state-level data from the GSS. Because the GSS participants were only identified as belonging to one of nine regions, the statelevel data on crime and poverty rates obtained elsewhere had to be converted to the same nine regions for analysis. To the extent that crime and poverty affect one’s perceptions of insecurity, it is likely that the effect weakens the further away the crime and poverty are from the individual. Because some of the GSS regions contain as many as eight states, one should expect the crime and poverty data to only partially represent one’s perception of insecurity in their local environment. It is therefore encouraging that, despite this lack of precision, the insecurity variables in the present study were all significantly related to religiosity in the hypothesized direction, and it is likely that data more specific to one’s local environment would produce a larger effect size. Although the effect sizes identified in the time series analysis were larger, there was a limitation to

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this portion of the study as well: namely, the restricted number of observations. Although the data used in the present study span several decades, the time lag of 10 years used in the vector autoregression model resulted in 23 observations. Therefore, the results of these analyses should be interpreted with caution, as they may not accurately describe the relationship between religiosity and insecurity over time. The results were promising in that they were, for the most part, in the hypothesized direction, but studies analyzing this relationship over a longer period of time are necessary before making any strong conclusions.

Future Directions

The results of the present study support the hypothesis that perceptions of societal insecurity influence religiosity, which serves as a useful foundation for future studies to investigate the possible causal nature of this relationship. Several possibilities for building on the present results are described in what follows. The present study relied on measures that arguably assess one’s perceptions of societal insecurity. An important next step for future studies would be to develop a more direct measure of this perception. By constructing a scale that is specifically focused on measuring perceptions of societal insecurity, researchers could assess the relationship between these perceptions and religiosity more accurately. Additionally, assuming such a scale is constructed and validated, researchers could design experiments to test whether these perceptions cause changes in religiosity. For example, researchers could prime participants to have an increased perception of insecurity, perhaps by exposing them to either real or fabricated news stories regarding crime in their local environment. The effectiveness of the prime could be assessed by measuring differences between groups on the societal insecurity scale, and researchers could then investigate whether such primes lead to an increase in reported religiosity relative to participants who are primed to have a decreased perception of insecurity. Similarly, given the possible feedback loop between religiosity and perceptions of insecurity suggested by the results of the time series analysis, researchers could prime participants’ religiosity and subsequently have them complete the societal insecurity scale. This would allow one to test for causality in the opposite direction—i.e., to test for an increase in perceived insecurity relative to participants who are not primed with religious ideas and concepts. 228

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Finally, future studies can investigate the possible benefits of increased religiosity as a result of increased societal insecurity. Assuming an effect on religiosity is found when priming societal insecurity, one could investigate whether this effect is strengthened in a group setting. If Kurzban’s (2010) argument regarding strategic ignorance applies to this phenomenon (i.e., increased religiosity leads to increased perceptions of control, which makes one appear more valuable to the group), one could hypothesize that the presence of others may strengthen this effect. This line of reasoning could also be extended to investigating effects in the context of cooperative/competitive games; perhaps people are more willing to cooperate with individuals who react more strongly with compensatory control in the face of insecurity.

Conclusion

This chapter presented evidence consistent with the secure society theory of religiosity. There appears to be a relationship between societal insecurity and religiosity in the United States over the last 40 years. Although the nature of this relationship is still unclear, the present study builds on previous research by illustrating that this relationship is not driven solely by societal conditions, but by individuals’ perceptions of societal insecurity. Given the number of studies that now reliably demonstrate a relationship between societal indicators of insecurity and religiosity, it is important to move forward by more directly assessing perceptions of societal insecurity at the individual level. The present study serves as a useful foundation for moving research forward in this way. Although religiosity is influenced by a variety of factors, further investigation of perceptions of societal insecurity may provide insights regarding variations in religiosity at the individual and societal level.

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Malinowski, B. (1954). Magic, science and religion, and other essays. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. McCullough, M.  E., & Larson, D.  B. (1999). Religion and depression: A review of the literature. Twin Research, 2, 126–136. Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and secular: Religion and worldwide politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Paul, G.  S. (2005). Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies. Journal of Religion and Society, 7, 1–17. Paul, G. S. (2009). The chronic dependence of popular religiosity upon dysfunctional psychsociological conditions. Evolutionary Psychology, 7, 398–441. Pesta, B. J., McDaniel, M. A., & Bertsch, S. (2010). Toward an index of well-being for the fifty U.S. states. Intelligence, 38, 160–168. Rees, T. J. (2009). Is personal insecurity a cause of cross-national differences in the intensity of religious belief? Journal of Religion and Society, 11, 1–24. Sasaki, M. (1979). Status inconsistency and religious commitment. In R. Wuthnow (Ed.), The religious dimension: New directions in quantitative research (pp. 35–156). New York, NY: Academic Press. Sims, C. A. (1980). Macroeconomics and reality. Econometrica, 48, 1–48. Smith, T.  W. (1988). Timely artifacts: A review of measurement variation in the 1972–1988 GSS (GSS methodological report No. 56). Chicago, IL: National Opinion Research Center. Smith, T. W. (1996). A review of church attendance measures (GSS methodological report No. 88). Chicago, IL: National Opinion Research Center. Smith, T. W., Marsden, P., Hout, M., & Kim, J. (2013). General social surveys, 1972–2012: Cumulative codebook. Chicago, IL: National Opinion Research Center. Solt, F., Habel, P., & Grant, J. T. (2011). Economic inequality, relative power, and religiosity. Social Science Quarterly, 92, 447–465. Stark, R., & Bainbridge, W. (1985). The future of religions. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stock, J. H., & Watson, M. W. (2001). Vector autoregressions. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 15, 101–115. US Department of Commerce. (2013). Current population survey, 2013 annual social and economic (ASEC) supplement. Washington, DC: US Census Bureau. US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). (2014). Uniform crime reports: Crime in the United States. Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ ucr-publications#Crime Whitson, J.  A., & Galinsky, A.  D. (2008). Lacking control increases illusory pattern perception. Science, 322, 115–117. Zivot, E., & Wang, J. (2003). Modeling financial time series with S-PLUS. New York, NY: Springer. Zuckerman, P. (2007). Atheism: Contemporary rates and patterns. In M. Martin (Ed.), Cambridge companion to atheism (pp. 47–67). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Zuckerman, P. (2008). Society without God: What the least religious nations can tell us about contentment. New York: New York University Press. Zuckerman, P. (2009). Atheism, secularity, and well-being: How the findings of social science counter negative stereotypes and assumptions. Sociology Compass, 3(6), 949–971.

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15

CH A PTE R

Charismatic Signaling How Religion Stabilizes Cooperation and Entrenches Inequality

John H. Shaver, Gloria Fraser, and Joseph Bulbulia

Abstract This chapter describes an evolutionary model of religion called “charismatic signaling.” The theory focuses on features of religion that express automated within-group cooperation—that is, cooperation that does not rely on strategic reasoning or explicit social prediction. The model is interesting because it explains otherwise puzzling features of religious systems. Such puzzles range from intrinsic religious motivations to ritual human sacrifice as evolved adaptations for social coordination. An additional virtue of the model is that it explains the reliability of cooperation with strangers who cannot observe or assess cooperative intentions directly or by reputation. The chapter describes the intellectual motivations for charismatic signaling theory and outlines ethnographic and historical puzzles the theory solves. Key Words:  evolution, cooperation, costly signaling, charismatic signaling, aposematic signaling, ­religion, syncretism, ritual

Overview

We begin with a few definitions. People use the term “religion” in various ways. By “religion,” we stipulate the following meaning: beliefs and practices regarding the supernatural. By “religious systems,” we mean the designs—genetic, developmental, neurological, ecological, institutional, and so forth—that express and transmit religion in human populations. Clearly, religious systems are complex; we should not suppose there is a single explanation for such complexity. By “cooperation,” we mean coordinated social interaction directed to mutually benefiting outcomes. Our focus is on human cooperation, specifically its coevolutionary dynamics with religious systems.1 Why are religious systems commonplace across human cultures and history? Adaptationists posit that religious systems—genetic and cultural— evolved as part of a larger matrix of designs 1  Note: cooperation does not imply “morally good”; gangs cooperate to harm others.

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(linguistic, political, technological, and others) to enable large-scale cooperation (Geertz, 2010; Sosis & Alcorta, 2004). Across species, cooperation at the scale observed in humans is a biological singularity. So great are the evolutionary challenges to largescale cooperation that it has evolved in only one lineage. Because religious systems are intricate, and evolved at different points during the long epochs of hominin history, there can be no simple evolutionary story of religion. One reason that adaptationists are interested in evolution is that it affords a strategy for discovery called “reverse-engineering” (Bulbulia, Geertz, et al., 2013; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). If biocultural systems evolve in response to persistent selection pressures, then we might better explain their mechanisms by considering the functional problems these systems evolved to address (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Imagine alien archaeologists from a posthuman future discovering traffic lights. In the absence of a functional context, the aliens might think these machines were ornaments, entertainment devices, or

perhaps unusual clocks. However, if the aliens were to understand the functional demands for regulating traffic, they might better unlock functional designs. Indeed, were they not to have found traffic regulating systems, the aliens might set off in search of them, predicting that such systems were realized to address the functional demands of traffic control. Consider a functionalist approach to religion, which illustrates how reverse-engineering can be a fruitful strategy for investigating religious systems. David Sloan Wilson (2005) randomly selected 35 religions from the Encyclopedia of World Religions. Despite the ostensibly otherworldly character of these religions, Wilson found evidence of practical utility. For example, the Agudat Yisra’el, formed in the 12th century, were effective in uniting transnational communities of Orthodox Jews across Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, and offered support to followers during economic distress. That is, the Agudat Yisra’el were a practically effective social institution for enabling cooperation across ethnolinguistic boundaries. Wilson (2005) notes: “Of all the religions in the random sample, the one that initially posed the greatest challenge to the group-level adaptation hypothesis was Jainism. As old as Buddhism, Jainism is famous for its ascetic values. Jain renouncers wear masks to filter the air that they breath, carry a broom to sweep the path in front of them, and have dozens of food restrictions to avoid killing any tiny creature” (p. 399). Wilson observes that despite the manifest impracticality of Jain asceticism, Jain piety coordinates behavioral norms across the communities to which they belong. Jain renouncers will not enter households that fail to meet their standards of religious purity. A renouncer’s rejection of a household is a mark of public shame. Thus, asceticism in this tradition supports community-wide standards of religious purity: Though ostensibly impractical, the practice reveals tacit social-functional benefits (Wilson, 2005). Jain ascetics benefit, the Jain worshipers who support them benefit, and Jainist groups flourish. The general point is this: Knowledge of selection pressures on biological systems enables evolutionary researchers to formulate testable hypotheses about functions, in this case the functional benefits of ascetic culture to Jains (Bulbulia, Geertz, et al., 2013). Scientific theories focus narrowly on specific features of the natural world. We have noted that religious systems are complex. Hence, no single evolutionary explanation of religion should be expected to explain every feature of religion (Bulbulia, 2014). Additionally, although most evolutionary theories

explain features of religious systems by positing functional benefits, aspects of religious systems may be evolutionary byproducts of traits that evolved for other purposes (Boyer, 1994; Foster & Kokko, 2009; Guthrie, 1993; Richerson & Newson, 2008). For example, the human nose did not evolve its bridge to facilitate the placement of eyewear (Gould & Lewontin, 1979). Viral theories of religion hold that religious ideas evolved to propagate; adaptive features benefit the ideas, not the people who commit to them (Bulbulia, 2013). To take an evolutionary approach to religion requires careful consideration of alternatives to functionalist explanations (Bulbulia & Frean, 2010; Sosis, 2009). Here we describe a theory called charismatic signaling (Bulbulia, 2009). In what follows, we explain how the theory clarifies otherwise puzzling features of religion. We explain these puzzles by reverseengineering the problem of cooperation in large societies. We define a “large society” as a cooperative network whose partners are unable to observe each other. Charismatic signaling explains how religions evolve to support anonymous cooperation. We begin by providing background for those who are unfamiliar with the evolutionary problem of cooperation.

Section I:  Religion Facilitates Cooperation by Suppressing Cheating: Costly Signaling Theory

A popular misconception of evolution by natural selection is captured by Herbert Spencer’s concept of “survival of the fittest.” This phrase is useful because it highlights the role of competition in the evolution of biological complexity. However, the phrase is also liable to mislead. Living systems exhibit much cooperation—supporting the survival of others, at risk and cost to self-interest. From genes to nation-states, competition is tamped at every level of biological organization (Maynard-Smith, 1993; Nowak, 2006). How does cooperation evolve if evolutionary dynamics ratify designs that optimize fitness? Evolutionary biologists begin to answer this question by pointing out that cooperative benefits are often not zero-sum; one agent’s gain need not imply another’s loss. Where there are mutual benefits to cooperation, evolutionary dynamics may select for cooperation-assurance mechanisms. The conditions under which cooperation evolves were originally given a precise mathematical formulation by William Hamilton and Robert Trivers (Hamilton, 1964; Trivers, 1971). George Price (1972) clarified Charismatic Signaling

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how selection at different levels of biological organization can give rise to complex hierarchical designs. Not only did these theories clarify the conditions under which cooperation may evolve but also they clarified the conditions under which cooperation is evolutionarily unstable. A condition where cooperation is unstable is when the expected benefits of defection exceed those of cooperation. This obstacle to cooperation may be called “the problem of cheating.” From the vantage point of any given agent, payoffs for our exchange are structured as follows: I defect, they cooperate > We all cooperate > We all defect > I cooperate, they defect.

If We cooperate, we would do better. However, whatever they do, I do better by defecting. For example, the benefits we enjoy as citizens are made possible through taxation. With taxation the government is able to fund parks, roads, hospitals, police, and waste disposal, among other lifeenhancing services. Should I pay my taxes? I, and any one of us, would do better by not paying our taxes if others continued to pay. Moreover, I, and any one of us, contributes only a fraction of the overall tax intake. Were I to defect, life would remain unchanged for others, and I would be better off. However, the same payoffs apply to everyone else. The outcomes if all defect are dire. Yet even then, I would do better by defecting than by cooperating. My taxes would (still) do no appreciable good, leaving me worse off. Generalizing, where the probable benefits of unilateral defection exceed the probable benefits of unilateral cooperation, there is an evolutionary problem of cheating. The evolutionary problem of cheating is often expressed as a “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” which clarifies key functional demands on the evolution of cooperation. Imagine Alice and Bob are captured by the police for a serious crime they jointly committed. The authorities lack sufficient evidence to put both away for the crime, however there is enough evidence to convict the pair for a lesser offense. The officers offer each partner a deal whereby turning state’s evidence, or turning the other in, results in a lesser conviction. We present the options from the vantage point of Alice, noting that the structure of the deal is the same for Bob. If Alice were to give state evidence (i.e., talk), and Bob were to remain silent, then Alice would go free. If both Alice and Bob remain silent, both go to jail for 2 years. If Alice were to talk and Bob were to also talk, then each would receive 6 years in jail. If Alice were not to talk 232

and Bob were to talk, then Alice would receive 10 years in jail. Again Bob faces the same dilemma. What should Alice (and Bob) do to optimize years out of prison? If both were to remain silent, then both would receive only 2 years. However, Alice could do better by talking no matter what Bob does. Hence the dilemma. Defection (here, turning one’s partner in to the authorities) is the single best strategy in a one-off Prisoner’s Dilemma: it is the best strategy no matter what the other may do. Note that mutual cooperation, which involves both prisoners acting against their own self-interest, is the strictly efficient strategy; it is the strategy that when played in combination with the other strategy brings the greatest payoff. Yet neither prisoner has an incentive to follow the strictly efficient strategy. Instead, defection dominates. A large class of social interactions involves conflicts of interest of this kind (Frank, 1988; Schelling, 1960). The problems posed by two-party interaction and cooperation are generally referred to as a “twoperson Prisoner’s Dilemma,” with three or more people this cheating problem is known as an “nperson Prisoner’s Dilemma” (Binmore, 2007), and a cheating problem in large groups—as it affects the unrestrained consumption of goods—is often called the “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin, 1968, p. 1244), or common pool resource dilemmas. Functional designs that evolve to facilitate cooperation in the face of these obstacles must meet two demands: (1) they must adjust the payoffs of interaction so that mutual cooperation, on average, pays better than defection; and (2) they must enable partners with cooperative strategies to interact with each other, and where there is strategic variation, to avoid interaction with noncooperators.

Cooperation Where Discriminating Information About Partners Is Reliable and Available

How does cooperation evolve when threatened by the evolutionary problem of cheating? Hamilton (1964a, 1964b) defined a general solution to the cooperation puzzle; he observed that if costs are repaid in benefits that exceed the ratio of relatedness between two individuals (rB > C), then cooperative strategies may evolve. Hamilton initially took this solution to apply to genetically related individuals, but later extensions revealed its generality (Nowak & Sigmund, 2005; West, Gardner, Shuker, & Reynolds, 2006). Many researchers interested in the evolution of human cooperation have argued that reputation

John H. S haver, Gloria Fraser, J o seph Bulbulia

and punishment mechanisms allowed for the emergence and stability of human ultrasociality. Imagine that Alice and Bob, despite the obstacles to cooperation, stay silent and are released from prison in a few years. Now, Alice and Bob have each developed a reputation for being a reliable partner in crime; each knows that if they were to be caught again, the other has cooperated in the past. That is, each has a reputation for cooperation. Reciprocal altruism describes how punishment and an exchange of roles allows for the stability of two-party cooperation (Trivers, 1971). In the reciprocal altruism model, Alice first provides resources to Bob, and at a later date Alice receives resources from Bob. The model assumes that at the first instance of cooperation, Alice has more resources than Bob, and later their roles are reversed, such that both parties benefit during periods of relative need. For reciprocal altruism to evolve, individuals must avoid providing resources to those who do not repay generosity. On top of this, Alice and Bob must regularly reverse roles; the benefits for Bob to cheat Alice, after Alice had cooperated with Bob, would otherwise be too high. Though reciprocal altruism may explain stable cooperation in repeated interactions, its scope is limited to familiar conspecifics. Indirect reciprocity explains how cooperation may scale up to include unfamiliar partners (Alexander, 1987; Nowak & Sigmund, 2005; Panchanathan & Boyd, 2004). The core idea is that exchange networks may overlap. Returning to the prisoner’s dilemma, imagine that a third individual, Curtis, were to observe Alice cooperate with Bob, and, at a later date, were to assist Alice because she cooperated with Bob. By the same token, imagine Curtis were to observe Alice cheat Bob, and in light of this cheating, withdrew his interest in cooperating with Alice downstream to her cheating. The case we have imagined introduces the potential for reputation to adjust the rewards and punishments of cheating. Notably, human interaction occurs in contexts where individuals observe and convey information to others. Reputations enable prediction, reward for cooperative pasts, and punishment for antisocial behavior. Though such models extend the core of the mutualistic model, they are nevertheless restricted to settings in which information gradients are both reliable—that is, not corruptible—and available. A key problem for reputation gradients is that people might pollute them to satisfy their own self-interests (Nowak & Sigmund, 2005). Rivals may (and do) falsely accuse. Though reputations enable indirect reciprocity, they also create

second-order trust problems. Reputation and thirdparty reciprocity addresses evolutionary problems of cheating, but only partially.

Costly Behaviors Index Quality

If direct and indirect reciprocity effectively address the evolutionary problem of cheating, and cooperation is mutually beneficial, then why is cooperation among unrelated partners not more commonplace across nature? Social interaction occurs in the presence of two types of uncertainty: First, there is uncertainty about how others will act; second, there is uncertainty about the costs and benefits of our action. These problems are not independent. When predicting what others will do, an agent must evaluate how others evaluate costs and benefits. Typically, we cannot estimate the direct fitness consequences of our actions, nor can we estimate how others estimate the fitness consequences of their actions. Where social prediction is hazy, we might default to safety. Alice might defect on Bob because she cannot assess Bob’s strategic profile. She is unable to know—with certainty—whether Bob understands the interaction will be repeated, or that there will be reputational consequences to defection, or that Bob understands that Alice understands these things. Signaling theory was developed to explain how partners address problems of strategic uncertainty. The theory builds on insights from the economics literature on conspicuous consumption. In his Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen (1899) argued that conspicuous consumption, such as the purchase of expensive country club memberships, large mansions, rare art, and lavish clothing, reliably signals wealth. “Differences between one person and another in the degree of conformity to the ideal in these respects can be compared, and persons may be graded and scheduled with some accuracy and effect according to a progressive scale” (Veblen, 1899; as cited in Bliege Bird & Smith, 2005, p. 33). Put simply, expensive purchases may communicate wealth because only those with wealth can afford expensive objects. Conspicuous consumption is hard to fake if you are not wealthy. Later, economists speculated that hard-to-fake signals solve social prediction problems by enabling exchange partners to predict the responses of others (Frank, 1988). Around the same time, biologists speculated that hard-to-fake signals evolve to address evolutionary problems of cheating (Zahavi, 1977; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1999). Zahavi explained that the extravagant displays and ornaments found throughout the Charismatic Signaling

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animal kingdom evolved to communicate information relevant to social interactions ranging from sex to killing (Zahavi, 1977; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1999). Ornaments communicate health and fitness, properties relevant to mate choice. Consider female mate choice among barn swallows, a small monogamous species of bird. Male barn swallows attract females by displaying their proportionately large tails. Females visit several males and view their tails before choosing which to mate with. Both controlled experiments and observations in the wild show that female barn swallows prefer males with longer tails (Møller & Gregersen, 1994). Conspicuous movements and noise-making—leaping, crying, approaching—among prey in response to predators also signals health and fitness, which for predators is relevant to deciding which prey to chase. Striking, wasteful, and highly vivid morphologies and behaviors have evolved across a wide area of biological taxa (Clutton-Brock & Albon, 1979; FitzGibbon & Fanshawe, 1988; Møller & Gregersen, 1994). Sometimes biologists use the term “costly signal” to describe honest signaling, but the term “costly” can lead to confusion. Instead, the key observation is that there is an indexical relationship between a signal and that property it communicates. Alice says it is “Wednesday,” but it could be Tuesday. This is because the terms are arbitrary. However, Alice cannot purchase a lavish Hollywood home on a modest income. The home purchase indexes wealth. Where indexical signals enable cooperative interaction, evolutionary dynamics may ratify and elaborate them to solve cooperation problems. Note the term “honest” may be misleading too. To evolve, honest signals need not be infallible. Alice might be clever enough to project the home purchase and deceive others. Where the costs of trusting another are high, we might expect greater scrutiny. The greater the incentive to project a deceptive signal, the greater the expected demands on its reliability. Costly signaling theories of religion were developed as extensions of the biological literature on costly signaling. The idea is that religious expressions and behaviors function to reliably predict cooperative futures by reliably indexing cooperative intentions (for a review, see Bulbulia & Sosis, 2011). For example, William Irons (1996, 2001) observed that religious communities are highly cooperative, and evolving stable cooperation requires assurances against cheating. Irons also noted that being a practicing member of a religious group often entails considerable costs. Religious behaviors, in particular, carry substantial material, temporal, and 234

opportunity costs. Moreover, religious rituals can be physically dangerous. Irons argued that religious behaviors evolved as assurance mechanisms and theorized that only those who are genuinely committed to a religious group will undertake such costs. The costs associated with sending commitment signals are offset by the benefits of increased cooperation. If Irons is correct, then higher levels of religious commitment across communities would be expected to be associated with higher levels of in-group cooperation, and vice-versa. That is, religiously motivated cooperation and ritual costs would be expected to be positively correlated. There is much evidence in support of Irons’s claims. For example, Richard Sosis and Eric Bressler examined the survivorship of 19th-century secular and religious communes in the United States. They found that among religious communes, the number of costly obligations demanded of members predicted commune survival (Sosis, 2000; Sosis & Bressler, 2003). Similarly, Sosis and Ruffle found that the members of religious kibbutzim were more cooperative than their secular counterparts (Ruffle & Sosis, 2007; Sosis & Ruffle, 2003). The differences in cooperation across kibbutzim appears to be motivated by the higher levels of ritual obligations on religious relative to secular kibbutzim. Additionally, using data from the Human Relations Area Files, Sosis and colleagues found that, con­sist­ ent with costly signaling theory, societies engaged in warfare were more likely to impose on members the costliest of initiation rites (Sosis, Kress, & Boster, 2007). Other evolutionary anthropologists have observed a similar relationship between ritual ordeal and cooperation: Within the same ritual festival, painful rituals are associated with greater charity toward a religious group than are rituals that lack pain (Xygalatas et al., 2013; see also Power, 2016).

Religious Behaviors Index Cooperative Motivations Because Religious Beliefs Affect Expectations

Evolutionary signaling theories of religion were first proposed by human behavioral ecologists (Irons, 1996; Sosis, 2003). Behavioral ecologists posit that human behavioral diversity can be explained as local adaptive optima in response to ecological variation. Behavioral ecologists have tended to ignore cognition to focus on behavioral plasticity (Smith & Winterhalder, 1992); their focus is squarely on behavior (Sosis & Bulbulia, 2011). However, some explanation is needed for why religious behaviors index cooperative traits.

John H. S haver, Gloria Fraser, J o seph Bulbulia

It has been proposed that because religious beliefs posit supernatural forces and agents, religious people have expectations about the consequences of their actions that differ from people who do not believe (e.g., Norenzayan, Henrich, & Slingerland, 2013). Specifically, religious people expect their actions will please or anger the gods or ancestors. Depending on their conception of the supernatural, religious people may act prosocially from intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Though it has long been argued that religion motivates prosocial behavior, presumably the gods do not reward cooperation and punish cheating in this world. In the absence of a mechanism for reliably identifying religious commitments, religious beliefs cannot evolve as solutions to the problem of cheating. However, where there are mechanisms for reliably signaling religious beliefs, then the combination of religious beliefs and hard-to-fake behaviors may evolve cooperation. Costly religious signals may evolve to index cooperative motivations and to predict cooperative futures. This is because there is an indexical relationship between religious behaviors and the cooperative states of mind that believing in supernatural worlds affords those who genuinely believe (Bulbulia, 2004a, 2004b). Costly signaling theory’s core claim is as follows: Religious beliefs adjust strategic expectations and religious behaviors signal the strength of religious beliefs, enabling religious cooperators to avoid cheaters and assort reliably (Bulbulia & Sosis, 2011).

Section II:  Religion Evolves Cooperation by Suppressing Uncertainty: Charismatic Signaling Theory

Costly signaling theory can help explain the stability of cooperation among people who may readily observe each other. It explains how partners may find motivation to cooperate using reputation gradients. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, with the rise of large-scale civilizations, cooperation among unfamiliar partners became a common feature of human life. Since at least the last ice age, human cooperation has extended to partners who cannot readily observe one another. Such partnerships have long existed across ethnic and linguistic boundaries (Turchin, 2013). Archeological evidence suggests religion played a role in the human transition to urban lifestyles: Shrinal complexes, stratified elite priestly classes, and substantial public investment in religion anticipated urbanization in the areas of primary urban genesis (Wheatley, 1971). It has been proposed that

the darker sides of religion, such as human sacrifice, evolved as cultural systems that legitimized state authority (Carrasco, 2000; Watts, Sheehan, Atkinson, Bulbulia, & Gray, 2016; Wheatley, 1971). Classical signaling theory explains cooperation within groups whose members can track reputation gradients. Charismatic signaling offers an account of how religious culture scales up to drive and stabilize cooperation among strangers who cannot observe each other’s costly behaviors and hard-to-fake expressions directly or convey/assess information about cooperative reputations.

Cooperation Is Threatened by Risk, Not Solely by Cheating

The charismatic signaling model of religion begins by noting that cooperation is not threatened solely by cheating. Cooperation that maximizes outcomes for partners may still be risky if cooperating is costly when another defects. Why would another defect if all could benefit by cooperating? The threat to cooperation derived from uncertainty is nicely illustrated by a parable from philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau about a stag hunt: “If it was a matter of hunting a deer, everyone well realised that he must remain faithful to his post; but if a hare happened to pass within reach of one of them, we cannot doubt that he would have gone off in pursuit of it without scruple” (Rousseau, 1755; Skyrms, 2004). Evolutionary economists call the general problem of risky cooperation a “stag hunt.” In a stag hunt there are two equilibria: all defect, or all cooperate. The problem, presented from my vantage point, is structured as follows. We cooperate > I cooperate, you defect > We defect > I defect, you cooperate.

If you cooperate, I can do no better than to cooperate. If you defect, I can do no better than to defect. There is no problem of cheating in a stag hunt, but there is a problem of risk. To cooperate, I need to predict you will cooperate too, and vice versa. It turns out that the optimal equilibrium— we cooperate—is evolutionarily unstable (Binmore, 2008; Rubinstein, 1989). Why would you not predict that I will cooperate when there is no threat from cheating and cooperation works to our mutual interests? Recall that the problem confronting Alice and Bob is how to predict what the other will do. In this example, each is offered $90 for defecting; however, if both cooperate, each will receive $100. If one defects while the other cooperates, the defector could Charismatic Signaling

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have done better. It might not be a failure of nerve that motivates defection in this setting. If you were able to predict that another was going to defect, you would be sensible to defect too. After all, no point going home empty-handed. Risks to cooperation, or stag hunts, define the payoff structure for many social interactions (Calcott, 2008). Cooperative whale hunting in Lamalera, Indonesia, offers a naturally occurring example of a stag hunt (Alvard & Nolin, 2002). A successful whale hunt returns a tremendous amount of energy, but whale capture is risky and requires extensive coordination. To capture a whale, several men—on several boats—work together. When a whale is harpooned, the animal swims and dives to exhaustion. Prior to exhaustion, whaling vessels can get towed far out to sea, men can get thrown from their boats, and boats occasionally sink: “By almost any standard, whale hunting is dangerous” (Alvard & Nolin, 2002, p. 539). Such risks are often mitigated because many boats give support to the harpooning vessel. A decision to whale hunt, however, carries the opportunity costs of safer, more reliable, and less risky fishing. Alvard and Nolin (2002) describe cultural factors that assure cooperative prediction in Lamaleran whale hunting. First, an extensive set of norms governs the distribution of whale portions. These norms reduce risk because potential hunters know that if successful they will be rewarded with satisfactory division of the return (Alvard & Nolin, 2002, p. 547). Second, the norms associated with whale hunting are well established and stable. The predictability of the hunt further mitigates risk. Finally, rituals appear to function as prehunt communication devices. Prior to the whale-hunting season, villagers gather for Tobo Nama Fata, a celebration that involves the crews and heads of local clans. The ritual enables the relevant parties “to discuss any mishaps, accidents, slights, and problems from the previous whaling season, clear the air of any ill will, and suggest solutions for the upcoming year. In this regard, [the ritual] is a formal forum for the discussion and establishment of norms” (Alvard & Nolin, 2002, p. 549). But why should the performance of rituals reduce perceptions of risk? How are norms established by ritual? Recall that costly signaling focuses on the link between religious behaviors and religious beliefs. Costly signaling theory explains how religion enables strategic prediction in settings where cheating threatens mutually advantageous exchange. By contrast, charismatic signaling focuses 236

on the link between features of religious culture and the suppression of strategic reasoning. This theory explains how religious people opt for cooperation in settings where uncertainty threatens mutually advantageous exchange. The key to cooperative prediction is automating cooperative responses. The key is to prevent the second-guessing of partner intentions. Though much of the evolutionary literature has focused on theory of mind and extrinsic motivations—people expect the Gods will punish defection—charismatic signaling focuses on the role of intrinsic cooperative motivations and predicts the evolution of cultural systems that drive cooperative behaviors relatively automatically, without relying on partner-specific strategic evaluation (Bulbulia, Frean, & Reddish, 2012).

Religious Niche Construction Stabilizes Cooperation Threatened by Risk

Many species alter their environments. Birds migrate, bees build hives, prairie dogs dig burrows, and beavers construct dams. These alterations can, and often do, affect selection. The process by which organisms alter the conditions on which selection operates is called “niche construction” (for discussion, see Odling-Smee, 2007; Vandermeer, OdlingSmee, Laland, & Feldman, 2004). At the most general level, niche construction: occurs when an organism modifies the feature-factor relationship between itself and its environment by actively changing one or more of the factors in its environment, either by physically perturbing factors at its current location in space and time, or by relocating to a different space-time address, thereby exposing itself to different factors. (Odling-Smee, Laland, & Feldman, 2003, p. 41)

The charismatic signaling model posits that religious niches evolved from “feature-factor” adjustments in support of stabilizing cooperation. Crucially, the charismatic signaling model posits that the mechanisms responsible for cooperation among strangers partially reside outside of the relevant agent’s control, in charismatic institutions (Bulbulia & Sosis, 2011). We define charisma in Max Weber’s sense of a perceived quality of a person or situation that tends to evoke strong obedience and loyalty (Weber, 1958). Specifically, the model claims that charismatic features evolve to structure cooperative motivation by modulating socioaffective cognition to suppress risk sensitivity and strategic second-guessing of others’ prosocial intentions (Bulbulia & Schjoedt, 2010).

John H. S haver, Gloria Fraser, J o seph Bulbulia

Charismatic signaling theory makes the following core claim: Religious cultures automatically express cooperative behaviors, desensitizing those exposed to religious ecologies to the risks of ­ ­cooperation’s failure.

Evidence That Religious Ecologies Produce Automated, Nonreflective Cooperative Responses

There is mounting evidence that people respond to religious and anthropomorphic cues by opting to act cooperatively (Shariff, Willard, Andersen, & Norenzayan, 2015; Van Elk et al., 2015). Notably, such responses do not appear to rely on religious beliefs (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007), and careful designs show that suggesting religious symbolism operates outside conscious awareness (RandolphSeng, 2007; Randolph-Seng & Nielsen, 2008). This finding is consistent with a broader literature showing that symbolic contexts evoke cooperative responses (Bulbulia et al., 2012; Seger, Smith, & Mackie, 2008; Smith, Seger, & Mackie, 2007), and that the most powerful religious motivations are intrinsic (Bulbulia, Osborne, & Sibley, 2013; Sosis, 2003). For example, recent studies show that strangers wearing diffuse signals are trusted more, and entrusted with more money in multiplayer trust games, than those not wearing such signals (McCullough, Swartwout, Shaver, Carter, & Sosis, 2016). Again, these effects appear to be automated and general; nonbelievers and the members of other religious groups trust people more when they are displaying religious cues than when they are not (Hall, Cohen, Meyer, Varley, & Brewer, 2015). Notably, features of religious ecologies that align body postures also evoke automated prosocial responses. For example, Hove and Risen (2009) found that participants who coordinated their finger tapping reported an increased liking of one another (see also Miles, Nind, & Macrae, 2009). Such effects appear to generalize outside the synchronous group. Reddish and colleagues assigned participants to several groups of varying levels of  synchrony and asynchrony (including a nomovement condition; (Reddish, Bulbulia, & Fischer, 2014). The researchers also varied conditions in which a target for charity was selected from the experimental in-group or from outside of the group. Consistent with previous research, it was found that synchronous body movements enhanced prosocial behaviors. Additionally, those who moved synchronously were equally likely to give to someone outside of their participant condition as they were to

someone from within. These findings reveal that the effect of synchrony is not discriminating in favor of known participants, or members of the in-group, but rather extends to anonymous individuals (see also Reddish, Tong, Jong, Lanman, & Whitehouse, 2016). Similar effects have been observed in naturally occurring rituals, where observers who are invested in a ritual showed elevated heart rhythms in response to unfamiliar performers in the ritual (Konvalinka et al., 2011).

Charismatic Signaling Theory Makes Sense of Ethnographic and Historical Puzzles Puzzling Features of Syncretism Explained: Why Conversion Is Incomplete

Currently, the most popular theory of religion and large group cooperation is the “Big Gods Hypothesis” (Norenzayan et al., 2013). It argues that beliefs in a moralizing, all-knowing punishing god or gods facilitated social evolution in large groups, from fear of crossing Big Gods. Further, this model posits that those Big God religions that were the most successful at promoting cooperation came to dominate the global religious landscape. Though it is true that most of the world’s people nominally adhere to one of a few major religious traditions, today there are a diversity of Islams, Buddhisms, and Christianities. In many important ways, the people who are all nominally Christian, for example, practice a very different religion from one another. Catholicism, as practiced in Europe and the United States, is in many fundamental ways different from the Catholicism of Latin America with its greater relative devotion to the Virgin Mary and saints, in addition to its incorporation of traditional spirits (Levine, 2009). Indeed, in the many places of the world where the Big God religions have gained converts, belief in indigenous ancestral spirits remains. What has developed across the world are syncretic religions, or religious systems that are a blend of traditional and introduced religious elements. The charismatic signaling model helps to make sense of syncretism, and explain why conversion to Big God religions is incomplete. For example, throughout the Pacific, many cultures adopt both the Christian God and a host of traditional entities, such as ancestor spirits. Upon colonization, nearly all Pacific peoples retained their old gods and religion; however, traditional beliefs were refitted within the larger framework of Christianity (Shaver, 2012). This marriage of Christian and traditional culture continues to the Charismatic Signaling

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present. For example, in contemporary Fijian villages, supernatural beliefs consist of the following syncretic blend of Christian and traditional beliefs: most Fijian villagers believe that the ancestors are directly responsible for the supernatural blessings and punishment laid on villagers and that the Christian God plays only an indirect role in day-today affairs. The charismatic signaling model helps to explain why members of indigenous populations retain aspects of their traditional system: to overcome problems of risk that exogenous institutions are not, or not yet, equipped to overcome. Moreover, the charismatic signaling model explains the integration of religions in peaceful areas. Nominal conversion to Christianity often meant access to important Western resources (Shaver, 2015), but was presumably not effective for overcoming local coordination risks. Variations in religious beliefs are predicted to be less important for successful cooperation than the symbolic properties of charismatic religious ecologies that arose in response to local threats to efficient, mutually beneficial coordination across ethnolinguistic fault lines.

The Puzzle of Why the Gods Punish Etiquette Violations Explained: Why the Gods Care About the Seemingly Mundane

Many evolutionary theories of religion posit that supernatural monitoring and punishment encourage cooperation (Roes & Raymond, 2003; Swanson, 1964). These theories hypothesize that religion enables cooperation by virtue of supernatural punishments of immoral behavior or rewards for moral acts. Ethnographic data, however, illustrate that gods’ concerns often extend beyond obvious breaches of morality and include norms of etiquette. For example, Table  15.1 illustrates the most frequently mentioned things that Fijian ancestor spirits want people to do, and those that the ancestors do not want one to do, according to 30 Fijians living in a rural village on the island of Vanua Levu (for more details on data collection procedures, see Shaver, 2012). The items are listed in rank order; items at the top of Table  15.1 were the most frequently listed concerns, and those at the bottom were concerns less frequently listed. Many of the concerns of the ancestors are moral concerns (e.g., stealing), but many of their concerns are instead focused on etiquette. Indeed, “calling out before you enter a house” was the most frequently listed concern among things that the ancestor spirits want Fijians to do. Why would adherence to protocol, 238

Table 15.1.  Concerns of Fijian Ancestor Spirits Things the ancestors want you to do

Things the ancestors do not want you to do

Call out before you enter a house Love one another Respect people Respect elders Ask before stealing Share Dress traditionally in the ­village

Steal

Present kava Care and look after relatives Call those who walk past your house for food or a rest

Be noisy in the village Wear a hat in the village Gossip Shout Always think of oneself Women to wear pants (as opposed to traditional dress) Fight within the lineage Ride a horse within the village Be arrogant

and not just moral focus, draw the attention of the supernatural? Supernatural entities care about etiquette because following proper etiquette enables reliable social prediction by reducing risk among communities of believers. Consider an ethnographic description of the arrival of Christianity in Fiji. In 1835, British Wesleyan missionaries arrived on the shores of what was to become Fiji, under dire orders to convert a highly warlike society whose members sometimes practiced ritualized cannibalism. Though the most powerful chief at the time, Cakabau, nominally converted in 1854 (with the majority of the population converting shortly thereafter), in 1867 there remained pockets of militant resistance to Christianity, particularly in the Navosa highlands of the main island. Determined to convert these highland warriors, the missionary Thomas Baker came to the village of Nabutatau with seven of his Fijian followers. According to Fijian folklore, Baker and his compatriots were killed and cannibalized, not because of their belief in a Christian God, nor from their direct lack of reverence for the Fijian ancestor gods, but rather because Baker touched the village chief ’s head. Fijians believe that chiefs have more mana than lower-ranking people. They also believe that mana is collected in the human head, and thus the chief ’s head in particular should never be touched. Baker was killed and eaten for a breach of sacred etiquette, not for his “moral failings” as a Christian. The majority of evolutionary theories of religion focus on how supernatural concerns of morality, and punishments to breaches of morality, enable

John H. S haver, Gloria Fraser, J o seph Bulbulia

c­ ooperation. However, these theories ignore the fact that the concerns of supernatural entities often extend far beyond obvious issues of morality. Indeed, supernatural entities are often very concerned that group members adhere to very specific sets of behavioral etiquette. The charismatic signaling model explains why etiquette is perceived as a moral breach: Breaches to etiquette pose a threat to coordination. Adherence to a broad set of norms—across various types of social interaction—helps resolve risks to cooperation in ways similar to the Tobo Nama Fata in Indonesia. By providing information to anonymous individuals who engage in various forms of interaction, etiquette reinforced by supernatural sanctioning enables cooperation across large groups.

The Puzzle of Mythologies of Group Fates: Why Gods Punish the Group for Individual Transgressions

Charismatic signaling predicts that cultural mythologies of group fates, and not merely individual fates, should evolve and motivate prosocial behaviors (Bulbulia, 2004a). The ethnographic record makes clear that gods are frequently understood to affect group rather than individual destinies (Bulbulia, 2004a). As an example, in Fiji, ancestor gods are believed to punish and reward the group due to the actions of an individual (Shaver & Sosis, 2014). In the villages where Shaver conducts research, three men, from three different families, recently died in relatively quick succession. People in the village believe that these deaths were the result of one man’s insistence that he build on sacred land. Many were punished for the violation of one. Similarly, during the course of Shaver’s fieldwork, a man in his late twenties suddenly fell very ill. Informants indicated that his illness came about because the uncle of this man failed to observe ritual etiquette, roughly 50 years earlier. Group gods, at first glance, appear problematic for the charismatic signaling model. If punishments are levied at the group as a result of individual action, the problem of cheating emerges once more: Why not act in self-interest and let the group pay the price? Because commitment to a group god conveys information to other members of a social group in ways that individual gods cannot. By demonstrating commitment to supernatural entities that benefit the group, an individual communicates commitment to the group and appears beneffective (Trivers, 1971). Likewise, conviction that individual infractions are paid by the group communicates an individual’s trustworthiness in ways that belief in individual level punishments cannot.

The Puzzle of Religion and Stratification: Why Large-Scale Cooperation Is Correlated with Social Inequality

An important question in the study of human history is how social stratification evolved. Most individuals within religious groups are expected to benefit from increased levels of cooperation, but it is clear that the costs and benefits of religiously motivated cooperation are not the same for all members of the population (Bulbulia, Shaver, Greaves, Sosis, & Sibley, 2015; Cronk, 1994; Shaver & Sosis, 2014). Throughout the course of human history, however, elites have modified environments to elucidate greater fear and awe, as well as cooperation among the masses. Environmental modifications have often required the recruitment of the large labor pools necessary to construct monumental works. Such enforced cooperation may benefit elites more than those who serve them. But why would those who receive less accept such inequality? Across the social sciences, researchers have argued that religious elites facilitated the rise of political elites, who in turn rewarded (otherwise useless) priestly castes with disproportional access to the goods of centralized power (Carrasco, 2000). The evidence suggest that priests legitimized social inequality (Burkert, 1996; Girard, 1997). As such, religious elites offered values and beliefs in support of central power, whereas political elites furnished resources and protection to priestly classes (Wason, 2008). It has been proposed that cooperation is less likely to disintegrate when a religious leader evokes socioaffective responses that remove questions of legitimacy from contemplation, and displaces ultimate responsibility to the gods (Bellah, 1967, 2011). However, historians also find evidence of large-scale ritual killing at the dawn of human civilizations (Brown, 1991; Carrasco, 2000; Davies, 1981; Hughes, 1991; Puett, 2002). This suggest a link between the emergence of ritual human sacrifice and stratified power hierarchies (Hubert & Mauss, 1897). It remains unclear how ritual killing becomes linked to legitimization. Did legitimizing mythologies in support of inequality receive reinforcement from ritual killing, facilitating the transition to institutionalized social inequality? If so, why? We conjecture that a special case of charismatic signaling may be blatant aposematic signaling (badASS), which focuses on the role of priestly castes in the cultural evolution of institutional human inequality. The model builds on the observation that Charismatic Signaling

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political control requires mechanisms for legitimization. To deter challengers, “away-signals” evolve to reliably convey power (Zahavi & Zahavi, 1999), which evolved cooperation through (credible) fear of elites. The evolution of priestly castes and horrific human sacrifice is comparable in core respects to the evolution of Tarantula hawk wasps (Hymenoptera: Pompilidae). These organisms, large brightly colored invertebrates that inhabit the southwestern United States, are “among the most conspicuous insects on earth” (Schmidt, 2004). Though the wasp’s venom is not lethal, its sting tops the subjective pain scale (Schmidt, 1995) and has been described as “totally unacceptable.” Experts advise the best response to a sting is to “lie down and start screaming” (Simon, 2015). The wasp’s capacity to deliver debilitating suffering is thought to have evolved as part of an adaptive complex consisting of gaudy coloration, unmolested foraging, and a long lifespan. Tarantula hawk wasps are not merely bad-asses, they are conspicuous bad-asses. Lineages that have coevolved in proximity to these beasts have evolved a host of adaptive responses, ranging from mimicry to avoidance. From the flamboyant coral red of poisonous granular frogs (Oophaga granulifera) to the gaudy purple spines of crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) and the bright stripes of the “most colorful and charismatic” Pachyrhynchid weevil (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) (Tseng, Lin, Hsu, Pike, & Huang, 2014), organisms evolve to communicate power through spectacular displays. Biologists call this aposematism, from the Greek apo “away” and sema “sign”—away signaling (Wallace, 1891). Thanks to a newly created cross-cultural database purpose-built to test evolutionary hypotheses about religion (Watts et al., 2015), researchers were able to apply Bayesian phylogenetic methods to a geographically and socially diverse sample of 93 traditional Austronesian cultures (Watts et al., 2016), thus disentangling the historical sequence by which ritual sacrifice and social complexity coevolved. Watts and colleagues found that human sacrifice stabilized social stratification only after some moderate social stratification has arisen. Aposematic signaling fits additional evidence that ritual killing facilitated the transition to urban life in the seven areas of independent urban genesis outside the Pacific. Consider the following: Mesopotamia Royal tombs at Ur show that young children and courtesans were buried with rulers; these victims were part of what appear to be elaborate funerary 240

rituals. They were struck with sharp objects, heated, embalmed with mercury, and dressed and laid ceremonially in rows (Baadsgaard, Monge, Cox, & Zettler, 2011). Notably, all royal tombs show evidence of human sacrifice, from four or five to as many as 75 accompanying the principal deceased person to the grave (Pollock, 1991). Kuijt (1996) proposes that Natufians practiced ritual human sacrifice in order to symbolically and physically link communities and limit the perception or reality of social differentiation (Kuijt, 1996). Indus Valley Early art depicts human sacrifice, however archaeological evidence remains unclear. One reference suggests Indus valley people were aware of human sacrifice, but that it was discouraged rather early and discontinued (Klostermaier, 1984). North China Plains Preliminary evidence suggests that human sacrifice may have helped to legitimize Shang political control over the population and to consolidate alliances between the Shang and their allies in wars against alien polities (Shelach, 1996). Additionally, the Shen appear to have practiced a rite of human sacrifice, apparently by clubbing, as evidenced by the crushed and mutilated condition of bodies in mass graves (Bishop, 1933). Egypt In Egypt, it appears that ritual human sacrifice was mainly retainer sacrifice—predynastic kings were buried with servants. The phenomenon of human sacrifice appears to have been short-lived (Morris, 2007; Van Dijk, 2007). Yoruba Territories of Southwestern Nigeria Archeological evidence is scarce; however, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, human sacrifice appears to have functioned to legitimize Yoruba political power. Specifically, it has been argued that human sacrifice glorified the status of elites in Yoruba society as a means to justify inequality between slaves and other members of the tribe (Awolalu, 1973; Ojo, 2005). Central Andes Decapitation was a common form of ritual sacrifice in the ancient Andes—a large number of physical remains of trophy heads are found in the archaeological record anticipating the rise of central politi-

John H. S haver, Gloria Fraser, J o seph Bulbulia

cal authority (Conlee, 2007; Toyne, 2015; Verano, 1997). Notably, there is a near absence of bodies with heads in the archaeological record of ritual sacrifice in this region (DeLeonardis, 2000). Scholars have argued that political power and ritual violence conspired to promote institutionalized social inequality in the Andes (Swenson, 2003). Mesoamerica Ritual human sacrifice is widely thought to have supported the rise of elite political authority, to maintain the subservience of their subjects, and to communicate their prestige and domination to neighboring polities as a type of external propaganda (Carrasco, 2000; Pitcavage, 2008). Some quantitative analyses suggest that human sacrifice may have played a role in ideological integration (Winkelman, 1998). Other Regions There is additional evidence for human sacrifice across many regions of secondary urban genesis, such as Greece (Burkert, 1996), Rome (Beard, North, & Price, 1998; Rives, 1995), and subcontinental India (Vesci, 1992). However, further crossdisciplinary research involving archaeologists, historians, and data scientists is needed to test the generality of the model. In each case presented here, ritual human sacrifice seems to be a short-lived phase in the rise of institutional social inequality. For example, in Egypt the practice was replaced by interning Shabti figurines within the tomb of the deceased. These figurines acted as servants in the afterlife, supplanting the need for subsidiary burials (Wengrow, 2006). As such, future work must consider the destabilizing potential of ritual human sacrifice, as well as the possibility that human sacrifice stabilized social stratification.

Reprise

The evolution of cooperation is threatened, in part, by cheating—the taking of a cooperative benefit without offering a corresponding service. Signaling theory was first developed to explain how religious costs function as signals that authenticate cooperative motivations, enabling those with cooperative intentions to assort. Religious behaviors and expressions convey information because they index beliefs in supernatural worlds where cooperation is perceived to be rewarding. Religious motivations need not be limited to extrinsic punishments. Religious

rewards may also operate through intrinsic motivations. A key informational demand in costly signaling theory, however, is the scrutability of potential partners. To evolve, partners require the capacity to reliably identify religious behaviors and expressions directly or to track evidence of religious piety indirectly. Charismatic signaling explains how religious cooperation may scale up to support cooperation across networks in which partners cannot observe each other or reliably track reputations. Charismatic signaling begins by distinguishing the evolutionary problem of cooperative cheating from the evolutionary problem of cooperative risk. For risky coordination, conditional payoffs yield two optimal strategies: (1) cooperate if others cooperate (the optimal strategy); or (2) defect if others defect (the risk averse strategy). In unstructured coordination dilemmas, the optimal equilibrium is not evolutionarily stable because cooperation’s stochastic failure results in risk-aversion. Charismatic signaling accounts for cooperation’s stability in coordination dilemmas by reverse-engineering risk-aversion. The model posits the evolution of systems that automate cooperative responses to avoid strategic secondguessing of risk avoidance in others. The model proposes that religious cultures evolve to automate social coordination by synchronizing affective responses across social networks. We have presented evidence in support of charismatic signaling theory, observing that ritual cultures evolve to synchronize affective responses to enable social prediction among strangers. Notably, such cultures appear to have supported the rise of py­ram­ i­dal societies, with elite priestly classes whose functional role was to legitimize central political power and coordinate economic exchange across ethnolinguistic fault lines. The stepwise growth of priestly classes before the independent global emergence of urban societies is well explained from the advantages of religious culture to large-scale economic trade, a point that has long been conjectured in the history of religions (Wheatley, 1971). Charismatic signaling offers a theoretical basis for the conjecture grounded in evolutionary dynamics. The model also explains the puzzling force of religious etiquette, as a core mechanism for social coordination. The case we present for charismatic signaling here is largely abductive. We present otherwise puzzling historical and ethnographic cases that charismatic signaling explains. We note that abductive reasoning is critical to scientific progress (Harman, 1965). Two words of caution: First, more focused testing of the model remains ahead. Abductive Charismatic Signaling

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reasoning is critical for progress, but it is not sufficient for progress. Second, we do not claim that signaling theory explains all of human cooperation or all of religion. Again, outside of traditional theology, there are no scientific models of everything. The evolution of cooperation literature paints a portrait of human biological and cultural evolution in which multiple tessellating systems evolved in support of cooperative exchange (Henrich, 2015; Sterelny, 2011; Turchin, 2005). Though limited, the main advantages of the charismatic signaling model are that it (1) accounts for automatic, nonreflective, and coordinated expression of cooperative tendencies among those exposed to religious settings and regimes, and (2) explains the sequence of cultural states leading from egalitarian religion to the rise of stratified priestly classes, to the rise of large-scale urban forms, with their characteristic blends of anonymous cooperation and persistent inequality, which have come to define the social worlds humans inhabit today. Both puzzles have been raised separately throughout the course of modern reflection. A tradition from Durkheim (1995) through to McNeill (1995) has raised the first, while another from Foustel del Coulanges (2010/1890) through to Carrasco (2000) has raised the second. Charismatic signaling clarifies how both puzzles find answers when addressed together, and by reverse-engineering evolutionary problems of risky coordination: Religious systems evolved to coordinate social action by suppressing strategic second-guessing about whether others will reciprocate.

Acknowledgments

This project was funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation (0077), and the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund (VUW1321).

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16

CH A PTE R

The Evolution of Religion and Morality

Azim F. Shariff and Brett Mercier

Abstract Modern world religions are steeped in moralizing. This chapter argues that this conspicuous feature of religion can be explained by the common functions of both religion and morality to regulate individuals’ behavior in the ultimate service of the group. Cultural evolution selected for religious elements that synergistically work together to morally compel individuals to (1) engage in prosocial behavior toward in-group members, and (2) form large and monogamous families. The chapter reviews the psychological and anthropological literature on how religion contributes to generosity, trust, prejudice, fertility, and monogamy. Finally, it discusses how this religiously entwined morality differs from that of the nonreligious. Key Words:  religion, morality, evolution, cultural evolution, sacred values

Introduction

Most people in tested countries believe that morality is inseparable from religion. Of the 39 nations in a 2014 Pew poll, in 23 of them—including the United States—a majority of people agreed that one cannot be moral without believing in God (Pew Research Center, 2014). Even for those who do not agree that religion is necessary for morality, it is hard to deny the moralistic role religions play in the world. We tend to take it for granted that religions are soaked in moral injunctions and judgments. There is, however, no necessary connection between the supernatural thinking at the core of religions and morality. Indeed, anthropologists and archeologists have found that early religions and those still practiced by small bands of foragers tend to be nonmoralistic (Boehm, 2008; Roes & Raymond, 2003; Stark, 2001; Swanson, 1960). Furthermore, moral sentiments clearly preceded religion. Instincts toward fairness and reciprocity are rooted deeply in our mammalian lineage (De Waal, 2013). Capuchin monkeys famously reject unequal pay (Brosnan & de Waal, 2003), unrelated vampire bats will share food (Wilkinson, 1984), and rats will expend 246

­ rofound effort to ease the distress of nonkin conp specifics (Bartal, Decety, & Mason, 2011). How, then, did these two concepts—morality and ­religion—come to be so closely entwined that a majority of the world now believe them to be inseparable? What effect has religion had at encouraging people to act in accordance with moral norms, and further, how has it come to shape what those norms prescribe in the first place? And why? This chapter aims to address these questions, both theoretically and empirically. In what follows, we review the research linking religion and the various psychological phenomena that fall under the umbrella of morality—including issues of prosociality, trust, prejudice, and mating norms. First though, we seek to establish the theoretical connection between religion and morality based on three key insights: 1.  Morality has typically concerned subsuming self-interest to group-interest. 2.  Cultural evolution has favored cultures whose members espouse this type of groupinterested morality.

3.  Religions have been particularly effective vehicles for encouraging people to espouse this group-interested morality. In unpacking these points, we introduce several critical concepts for understanding the nature of religion and morality. Finally, we distinguish the proximate psychological mechanisms that underlie religious and nonreligious moralities.

Theoretical Groundwork Morality has typically concerned subsuming self-interest to group-interest

Before continuing, we must hazard a definition of morality. As Graham and colleagues have argued, such definitions are challenging, and should be approached warily, as they easily invite culturalspecific biases (Graham, Meindl, Beall, Johnson, & Zhang, 2016; Graham et al., 2011). For example, prominent figures in moral psychology such as Turiel (1983) have narrowly confined the definition of morality to primarily include matters of justice and welfare. As cross-cultural research has shown, this conception of morality excludes numerous moral concerns endorsed by people outside of liberal Western descendants of a specific philosophical tradition (see Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1987; Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). In an analysis of the evolutionary history of religion—which spans the temporal depth and ­ geographic breadth of human civilization—this ­ problem of exclusion looms particularly large. A definition of morality has to be sufficiently elastic to envelop not just the often contradictory injunctions endorsed by liberal Western democracies and violent terrorist organizations in modern times but also the injunctions followed by ancient civilizations of millennia past. Thus, we employ Haidt and Kesebir’s (2010) descriptive definition of moral systems: Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible. (p. 800)

Several points should be made about this definition. Importantly, it is descriptive rather than normative. Many of the moral virtues emphasized by religions are unlikely to mirror the attitudes of the reader. However, excluding those currently unfashionable injunctions from a discussion of morality leaves an incomplete picture of the full relationship between religion and morality. This definition,

then, includes currently socially desirable behavior—such as generosity and honesty—alongside socially endorsed out-group derogation—such as prejudice and violence. The second note about this definition is that it allows for variation and change in what is held to be moral. Though there are core moral foundations, moral systems can stretch to include very local norms and practices. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this definition puts the regulation of social behavior at the core of morality. As Haidt and Kesebir (2010, p. 798) put it, “moral thinking is for social doing.” The main service of morality is to rein in selfish behavior and enable social life. The cross-species behaviors driven by what scientists describe as “moral instincts,” such as kin selection and reciprocity (discussed below), involve “altruistic” behaviors in which organisms appear to deviate from their typical repertoire of self-interested behavior to benefit others. It is these moral instincts—selfish from the perspective of the gene, but selfless from the perspective of the host—that enable the social lives of ants and chimpanzees. Among humans, the moral emotions such as compassion, shame, and contempt are all social emotions, which sustain a system of reputation monitoring that greases the wheels of group life (Haidt, 2003). In that sense, the normative rules that people are instructed to follow are not just from the group, but for the group. How, though, did this become the business of religions?

Cultural evolution has favored cultures whose members espouse group-interested morality

Scholars who adopt functionalist approaches to religion hold that the way religions look today is neither the metaphysical product of supernatural inspiration nor the random consequence of accidents of history. Instead, religions, like organisms, have been shaped by selection. After this starting point, theorists diverge as to which forms of selection primarily explain religion. Some take an adaptationist approach and argue that religious beliefs have been genetically selected for due to the adaptive consequences these beliefs have. Others take a byproduct approach, arguing that religious beliefs are not adaptations themselves, but rather the “spandrels” of other cognitive adaptations. This debate has ping-ponged back and forth for over a decade through dozens of papers (e.g., Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Johnson & Bering, 2006; Murray & Schloss, 2010; Sosis, 2009; Shariff, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2009). Since the debate is further explored in other chapters in this

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volume (e.g., Kirkpatrick, this volume; Liddle & Shackelford, this volume), we do not extensively ­relitigate it here, save for the discussion of cultural evolution, which is critical to understanding how religion was drawn into the moral morass. Ever since Darwin (1871), attempts to explain large-scale human cooperation have often fallen back on arguments about group-level selection. D. S. Wilson and Wilson (2007) pithily summarize what many have noted in the evolution of cooperation: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary” (p. 345). Selfishness triumphs over altruism within groups because the free-rider with the “selfishness gene” (or rather the genes that lend themselves to a selfish phenotype) would be able to exploit the generosity of those with the “altruistic genes” without reciprocating. This would give the free-rider a genetic advantage that would ultimately pervade the group and displace the altruists entirely. However, a group full of altruists who were able to cooperate would be able to form a more cohesive and stronger group that would triumph over inchoate groups of uncooperative freeriders. Thus, selection at the group level can explain the emergence of altruistic behavior in a way that selection at the individual level cannot. What the Wilsons dismiss as “commentary” is where the interesting debates begin. How was large-scale altruism wrangled out of this arrangement of individual costs and group benefits? The Wilsons and others (Haidt, 2012; Nowak, Tarnita, & Wilson, 2010) propose genetic group selection (GGS) as the solution. But GGS remains an embattled proposition (see Abbot et al., 2011; Pinker, 2012) and is particularly ill suited to the conditions during which large-scale cooperation emerged in human history. One of the reasons for this is that selection between groups requires quite stable behavioral variation between groups. This gives group selection something to select between. The problem is that human groups had porous membranes and extensive genetic mixing—mixing that would undermine any behavioral variation rooted in genetic differences. In other words, if there ever developed a group of genetic altruists that was able to triumph over groups of genetic free-riders, these genetic free-riders would end up mating with the genetic altruists. And since “selfishness beats altruism within groups,” those with the free-riding genes would have within-group fitness advantages and the free-riding genes would 248

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invade the altruistic group, making it altruistic no more. In recent decades, cultural evolution has emerged as a more viable explanation for the emergence of large-scale cooperation—and the role of religions in this emergence—than GGS accounts (a full treatment of the challenges of GGS accounts in explaining human cooperation exceeds the scope of this chapter, but see Davis, 2014; Henrich, 2004; Pinker, 2012, for discussions). Cultural evolution stabilized large-scale cooperation through the combination of cultural learning processes and cultural group selection. Cultural learning processes are sets of psychological mechanisms that humans have evolved in order to rapidly acquire social information (Boyd &  Richerson, 1985; Henrich & Boyd, 1998). Importantly, these learning processes can produce the type of stable between-group behavioral variation that GGS cannot, and that is required for group selection. People tend to have frequency-­ dependent learning biases that lead them to preferentially adopt the information and imitate the behavior of the local majority. Thus, whereas the constant flow of new group members would lead to the dilution of any genetic differences between groups under a GGS model, under a cultural evolutionary model, these new members would rapidly adopt the norms of their adoptive group—creating stable cultural (if not genetic) differences between groups. The presence of these stable differences produces the variation that is the grist of selection. Once this variation exists, group-level selection favors those groups whose norms and behaviors allow them to outcompete the other groups. This can occur through the violent displacement of one group over another (intergroup competition), through demographically outbreeding another groups’ population (demographic swamping), and/ or through the voluntary assumption of one group’s practices and beliefs by other groups (prestige-­ biased group selection) (Henrich, 2001). In each case, nonrandom factors determine which groups ­triumph and proliferate, and which groups either voluntarily or forcibly adopt the qualities of more successful groups or die out altogether. The scope of human cooperation, then, is understood to have been kindled in the gene, but fully realized only through culture. Cultural learning processes allowed groups to establish their own local, stable equilibrium. These equilibriums featured a great variety of customs, norms, and behaviors. Those groups whose norms made them most able to

outcompete, outbreed, and/or outinfluence neighboring groups are the groups that were favored by cultural group selection. And today we see the legacy of those group-beneficial, “moral” norms. Religions were where many of those norms coalesced, and religions were exposed to the same selection pressures. Those religions that were the best vehicles for groupbeneficial norms were the ones that survived being pushed through the sieve of cultural evolution. Religions have been particularly effective vehicles for encouraging people to espouse this groupinterested morality Thus far we have resisted providing a definition of religion. Under a cultural evolutionary framework, the best way to understand “religion” is not as a fixed concept with clear definitional boundaries and necessary and sufficient components, but rather as a flexible family category of interrelated phenomena that come together in a cultural package (Norenzayan et al., 2016). Because these cultural packages are the product of evolutionary processes, their contents will be in flux, shaped by the selection pressures of the particular time and place. For example, one common feature of many of today’s world religions is the belief in an allpowerful and omniscient god. However, this belief has by no means been a ubiquitous, let alone defining, feature of religions. As mentioned above, archeological and anthropological evidence from early religions in small-scale societies and from those religions practiced by today’s surviving foragers suggests that most religions throughout history have featured small gods with limited powers of perception and punishment. Beliefs in the more omniscient, more morally concerned, and more powerfully judgmental “big” gods—like that of the Abrahamic religions—are theorized to have more effectively served as deterrents to unethical behavior (see the next section for a larger discussion). Thus, it is hypothesized that belief in these larger gods was driven by the increasing pressure for large-scale cooperation as human group sizes expanded during the Holocene (Norenzayan, 2013; Roes & Raymond, 2003; Shariff, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2009). The belief in monitoring and punishing supernatural agents thus serves as one element that— through increasing internal cooperation—lent groups a competitive advantage in the gauntlet of cultural group selection. Recall that success in group selection is achieved via intergroup competition, dem­ o­ graphic swamping, and prestige-biased

i­mitation and adoption. Thus cultural selection will, in general, favor those elements that increase or sustain ingroup cohesion (by, for example, limiting cheating, free-riding, and in-fighting), success in direct group competition (e.g., increased bravery, competitive intensity, strength in numbers), dem­o­ graphic output (e.g., fertility, survival, sustaining large populations), and increasing prestige over other groups (e.g., advertising group success). Importantly, however, it is the linking of multiple such elements into cultural packages called “religions” that has afforded those elements a power greater than the sum of their parts. Consider, for example, another psychological phenomenon frequently exploited within religions: sacred values. Building on the work of Tetlock (2003), Ginges, Atran, and colleagues show that decisions made about sacred values are psychologically different from everyday decisions about profane values (Atran & Ginges, 2012; Ginges, Atran, Medin, & Shikaki, 2007). Instead of being prone to cost-benefit calculations about trade-offs, reasoning about sacred values is resistant to compromise. Offers to trade material goods in exchange for the abandonment of sacred values can often lead to a “backfire effect” whereby the more that is offered, the more entrenched commitments to the sacred values become (Ginges & Atran, 2009; Ginges et al., 2007). These studies on sacred value reasoning have typically been conducted in the context of conflict, such as land in the Israel-Palestine conflict (Ginges et al., 2007) or the right of Iran to nuclear autonomy (Dehghani et al., 2010), but have been shown to also apply to the violation of religious rules (Berns et al., 2012). All societies promote cultural rules about dietary restrictions, hygiene ­ practices, mating conventions, and other behaviors crucial to the stability and health of the group. By coating these rules in the sheen of religion, the decision about following them was converted from being a utilitarian one, open to cost-benefit analysis, to a nonnegotiable one about sacred taboos. Breaking rules against eating risky pathogen-prone foods can be easily justified if one is hungry enough, but much harder if avoiding these foods is a sacred value whose violation constitutes a threat to one’s moral and religious identity. Sheikh, Ginges, Coman, and Atran (2012) have shown that the more people engage in religious ritual, and the more salient those religious rituals are, the more people are prone to see values as sacred. The researchers argue that religious rituals

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are effective tools for converting mundane values into sacred ones, essentially using existing sacred values to infuse hitherto nonsacred ones. Thus, by coming into orbit with each other under a single system, the various elements that constitute religions were able to mutually reinforce each other. To take one example, cultural norms that encouraged fertility (discussed below) no doubt conferred an advantage in demographic swamping. But these norms would become still more effective when tied to a divine edifice—converted into nonnegotiable sacred values, reinforced by religious ritual, and backed by supernatural authority, monitoring, and judgment. Religions thus emerged as synergistic packages of effective tools for compelling group-beneficial behaviors. Other groups could then voluntarily or forcibly adopt (albeit with imperfect fidelity) a readymade package of traits that had been culturally selected to function together to make the group more competitive. The aim here is by no means to argue that ­religions have been the sole source of these groupbeneficial elements—cultural norms and institutions fully unrelated to religion certainly played a part insofar as they too could increase within-group cohesion, between-group competitive success, fertility, and so forth. Nor is it to argue that religions were solely shaped by selection pressures for those group-beneficial elements—psychological constraints (see Atran & Norenzayan, 2004) and accidents of history have both guided the path along which religions have developed. Instead, we are arguing that certain types of religions have had a recurrent presence throughout human history because of the contributions they made to encouraging individuals to engage in behaviors beneficial to the group, even if costly to the self. Religions that less effectively galvanized people into group-beneficial behaviors were more likely to be consigned to the trash heap of cultural evolutionary history.

Reviewing the Evidence

Above, we have argued that religions have become intimately entwined with morality because they have been preferentially selected to serve the purpose most typically associated with morality: the benefit of the group. Those religions that most effectively encouraged individuals to redirect their behavior from self-interest to group-interest were the religions that afforded their host groups the best chance of outsurviving neighboring groups. In this section, we present converging evidence from 250

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­ ultiple disciplines showing that religions encourm age these types of group-beneficial behaviors.

Prosociality Prosocial Behavior

Maintaining high levels of internal prosocial behavior and minimizing levels of internal antisocial behavior (i.e., behaviors like cheating or stealing, which benefit the self at the direct expense of others) are crucial to the survival of large groups (Chudek & Henrich, 2011; Seabright, 2010). That religion makes people act more ethically and less selfishly has been long asserted, but empirical evidence supporting this claim has accumulated only in recent decades. Numerous surveys have investigated the association between trait religiosity and various measures of helping behavior. Most have found positive correlations; the more religious tend to report higher rates of charitable giving and volunteering (Koenig, McGue, Krueger, & Bouchard, 2007; Monsma, 2007; Smidt, 1999). For example, data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey indicates that 91% of those who attended religious services once or more per week reported donating to charity, whereas this figure was only 66% for those identifying as secular, who rarely attended religious services and who explicitly say they have no religion (Brooks, 2003). Other datasets report comparably sized charity gaps of roughly 25% to 35% between religious and secular respondents (Brooks, 2006; Wuthnow, 1999). This increased level of giving is not simply a result of religious people giving more to religious charities, as most research indicates that, compared with the nonreligious, religious people are more likely to report giving to secular charities and to give in greater amounts (Brooks, 2006; Wuthnow, 1999). Moreover, these findings generalize beyond just formal donations to charity. Religious people also report being more likely to donate blood; help the homeless, poor, or elderly; volunteer for civic and neighborhood groups; and give money to their friends and family. These results led Brooks (2006) to conclude that “religious people are, inarguably, more charitable in every measurable way” (p. 40, emphasis in original). Looking at criminality, religiosity is also related to fewer reports of criminal behavior—an effect that appears to be stable across developmental periods (Baier & Wright, 2001; Salas-Wright, Vaughn, & Maynard, 2014). Longitudinal research suggests that religion may be having a causal effect on

r­ eported criminal behavior, as changes in religiosity are associated with future decreases in reported criminal behavior, but not the other way around (Pirutinsky, 2014). Meta-analytically combining several dozen of these types of studies yields a modest but significant positive relationship between religiosity and prosociality (Kelly, Kramer, & Shariff, 2020). However, in addition to predicting higher self-reported prosocial behavior and lower self-reported criminality, religiosity also predicts self-enhancement, including socially desirable responding (Sedikides & Gebauer, 2010). Thus, self-report data alone are not enough to distinguish whether religious people actually are more prosocial, whether religious people are only more likely to claim to have high levels of prosocial behavior to appear good to others, or whether those concerned with appearing good overreport both religious commitment and prosocial behavior. Though peer reports of prosociality corroborate selfreports—that is, the reports of friends and colleagues also reveal a positive relationship between religiosity and prosociality (Saroglou, Pichon, Trompette, Verschueren, & Dernelle, 2005)—these testimonies are also privy to biases. Positive social stereotypes about religion may lead individuals— and particularly religious individuals—to unknowingly perceive and report their peers to be more ­prosocial than is accurate (cf. Galen, 2012). In attempts to circumvent these limitations, ­researchers have tried to go beyond self-report measures of prosociality and measure the effects of religious belief by directly observing behavior in controlled laboratory experiments, such as anonymous economic games and experimentally contrived opportunities for helping. In contrast to the positive correlation found for self-report measures, meta-analyses of studies using these behavioral tasks reveal no relationship with trait religiosity behavior (Kelly, Kramer, & Shariff, 2020). The inconsistency between the results on these tasks and those on self-report measures complicates conclusions that the religious are more prosocial. However, the focus on religiosity—as a unitary disposition—may disguise the full picture of how religion affects prosocial behavior. First, religion is a multifaceted construct. Different beliefs have emerged for different reasons. Thus, not all religious beliefs may encourage prosociality, and some may even mitigate it. Second, the situation matters. The effects of religion on increasing prosocial behavior may only occur in the face of certain cues.

In terms of the specific aspects of religion that may elicit prosociality, much theorizing has focused on the idea of omniscient, morally punitive supernatural agents (Johnson, 2005,  2015; Johnson & Krüger, 2004; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007). Such agents would deter ethical transgressions out of the threat of supernatural punishment. Evidence supporting this hypothesis has begun to accumulate. For example, mirroring the general null findings on behavioral tasks, Shariff and Norenzayan (2011) found that self-reported belief in God was unrelated to students’ cheating behavior laboratory task. However, when plumbing deeper into the type of God believed in, the researchers found that participants who believed in an angry, punishing God were less likely to cheat, whereas those who believed in a loving, compassionate God were more likely to cheat. Priming research (discussed in greater detail below) has similarly found that activating thoughts about the punitive aspects of religion increases prosocial intentions, whereas activating thoughts about religion’s benevolent aspects does not (Yilmaz & Bahçekapili, 2016). In fact, research by DeBono and colleagues found that having Catholics reflect on the forgiving nature of God led them to steal more than had they reflected on God’s punitive nature or the forgiving nature of a human authority figure (DeBono, Shariff, Poole, & Muraven, in press). In an attempt to investigate these effects outside of the laboratory, Shariff and Rhemtulla (2012) examined crime rates across several dozen countries. Once elements like economic differences were controlled for, the belief in God did not correspond to crime rates. However, when looking distinctly at religious punishment and benevolence, countries with a greater proportion of people who believe in hell tended to have lower crime rates, whereas countries with a greater proportion of people who believe in heaven had higher crime rates. Together, these findings suggest that it might not simply be belief in God that leads to moral behavior, but belief in a punishing God concerned about moral choices. As mentioned above, although the null effects on behavioral tasks may indicate that religious people are not actually more prosocial, another possibility is that laboratory research underestimates the true level of religious prosociality because it lacks the situational factors that contribute to religious prosociality in the real world. Researchers have thus tried to experimentally simulate those situational factors by using a variety of priming

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techniques, which activate thinking about religious concepts in the moment. For example, researchers have variously subliminally flashed religiously related words (e.g., Johnson, Rowatt & Labouff, 2010; McKay, Efferson, Whitehouse, & Fehr, 2011), had participants read religious passages (e.g., Carpenter & Marshall, 2009; Yilmaz & Bahçekapili, 2015), or had participants listen to the Muslim call to prayer (Aveyard, 2014; Duhaime, 2014). A recent meta-analysis of these types of religious priming studies found that reminders of God and other religious concepts consistently make the religious (though not the nonreligious) behave more prosocially (Shariff, Willard, Andersen, & Norenzayan, 2015). Specifically, placing religious people in a religious context tends to make them more charitable (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007), cooperative (Xygalatas, 2013), trusting (Hadnes & Schumacher, 2012), and honest (Randolph-Seng & Nielsen, 2007), and less likely to engage in unethical behavior such as cheating (Aveyard, 2014). In a compelling demonstration of the effect of the religious situation, Malhotra (2010) examined religious people who attended religious services on Sundays. These people gave significantly more to charity than the nonreligious—but only on Sundays, when their religious services made their beliefs salient. In sum, although there is some evidence suggesting that religious people are dispositionally more prosocial, it appears that religious beliefs often need to be combined with a religious situation to increase prosociality. Why might this be the case? The ultrasocial environments on which our species has long relied have made us ultrasensitive to our social reputations (Van Vugt, Roberts, & Hardy, 2007). Though people will ethically transgress when they believe themselves to be anonymous, they have evolved to be hyperaware of detection such that even very subtle cues of being watched in otherwise anonymous situations leads to marked increases in prosocial behavior (Bering, McLeod, & Shackelford, 2005; Haley & Fessler, 2005; Hoffman, McCabe, & Smith, 1996). Reminders of the believed existence of monitoring supernatural agents could likewise trigger people’s reputational sensitivity, shifting them from the permissive cover of anonymity to the deterring glare of being watched (Johnson, 2015; Norenzayan, 2013; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007). Indeed, just as arousing thoughts of God prompts people to engage in prosocial behavior, it also prompts feelings of social surveillance (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012). 252

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A second situational feature long predicted to promote social solidarity and encourage prosocial behavior is the highly conspicuous religious ritual (Durkheim, 1912). Rituals such as dancing, chanting, fire-walking, and sacrifices have historically been regarded as an evolutionary puzzle, given their often extraordinary demands of time, resources, or pain (Irons, 2001). In a historical analysis of 19thcentury communes in the United States, Sosis and Bressler (2003) found that not only did religious communes tend to outlast secular ones but also the key predictor of the longevity of religious communes was the presence of costly rituals. The researchers concluded that the combination of (1) providing costly demonstrations of commitment and (2) the emotional weight of experiencing the numinous in rituals allows these events to deepen trust and cooperation within the group. To directly test this idea, Xygalatas et al. (2013) examined participants in a Hindu religious festival in Mauritius that involved performing both low-ordeal (e.g., singing and praying) and high ordeal (e.g., dragging carts by hooks through the skin) rituals. After the high-ordeal ritual, those participating in—and observing—the ritual donated more money to their temple and reported a more inclusive social identity (compared with performing or observing a lowordeal ritual). Additionally, the amount donated was directly related to how painful the performers and observers believed the ritual was (see also Soler, 2012, for similar findings). Psychologists have conducted controlled experiments in attempts to delineate the specific features of rituals that encourage prosocial behavior. Though it is difficult for these lab studies to emulate the types of painful and emotional ordeals that Xygalatas et al. (2013) cite as a key feature of rituals, researchers have found compelling prosocial effects from even the more mundane features that reoccur in religious rituals, such as synchrony. For example, in one study, participants who performed actions in sync with each other reported higher levels of similarity, trust, and connection, and were more likely to cooperate on a task compared with other participants who performed the same actions out of sync (Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009). Other research has found that synchronized actions lead to higher levels of group affiliation, compassion, and rapport (Hove & Risen, 2009; Vacharkulksemsuk & Fredrickson, 2012; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2011). Several of these effects have recently been conceptually replicated with children as young as 14 months (Cirelli, Einarson, & Trainor, 2014; Wen, Herrmann,

& Legare, 2016). Many of these researchers have cited the perception of similarity as the mechanism that translates synchronic behavior into prosocial behavior.

Trust

Importantly, Wiltermuth and Heath (2009) found that synchronic behavior not only encourages people to be more generous to others but also increases the level of trust people have in the behavior of others. Both sides of the equation are important for social cohesion (Knack, 2001; Seabright, 2010), and a widespread belief in a supernatural agent that deters normative transgressions offers an effective method for increasing trust among coreligionists. If you can credibly assume that a potential cooperation partner believes that they face supernatural judgment for cheating, you can more confidently trust that they will not cheat. And participation in religious rituals has been widely theorized as a way to communicate credible commitment to the faith (Atran & Henrich, 2010; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Sosis, 2004; Sosis & Ruffle, 2003). Several behavioral studies speak to the relationship between religiosity and trust. Sosis and Ruffle (2003) showed that, compared with those at a set of secular kibbutzim, men at a religious kibbutzim in Israel contributed more to a public goods game. The public goods game—which reserves the worst payoffs for individuals who choose to contribute when the rest of the group does not—is a good test as it requires participants to make assumptions about the behavior of other group members. And, con­sist­ ent with the hypotheses about the effect of rituals, the frequency of ritual participation among the men at the religious kibbutzim was positively related to how much they believed the other group members would contribute (i.e., trust). Another economic game, pithily called the Trust Game, tests similar assumptions between dyads. Players are better off if they can trust each other, but they can maximize their winnings in the game if they exploit the trust of the other participant. Tan and Vogel (2008) found that the more religious the participant, the more trusting they were, the more trusted they were, and the more trustworthy they proved to be. If religiosity is used as a gauge of perceived trustworthiness, at the far end of this spectrum are atheists. Scriptural texts reserve specific ire for these nonbelievers. The Book of Psalms warns that “They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that does good.” (Psalms 14:1).

Similarly, the Qur’an puts plainly, “Indeed, the worst of living creatures in the sight of Allah are those who have disbelieved” (8:55). There is interpretative disagreement about whether the Muslim hadiths command putting apostates—those who deconvert from Islam—to death as penalty (O’Sullivan, 2001). Regardless, eight Muslimmajority countries reserve the death penalty as the maximum punishment for apostasy (The Law Library of Congress, 2014), and in a recent poll, seven of 23 countries contained majorities who reported support for putting atheists to death (Pew Research Center, 2012). Though such penalties obviously do not exist in the United States, public opinion still effectively bars atheists from high political office. Forty percent of Americans admitted they would never vote for a qualified atheist for president (Gallup, 2015). Psychological research has shown that this wariness of atheists is indeed underscored by moral distrust. Gervais, Shariff, and Norenzayan (2011) have shown that atheists are strongly implicitly associated with distrust. This effect is stronger among the more religious, but the relationship between religiosity and the implicit distrust of atheists is mediated specifically by the belief that people behave better when they believe they are watched by God. Furthermore, these researchers found that though study participants were reticent to have an atheist in a job that required trust (e.g., a babysitter), this hesitation was not found for a job unrelated to trust (e.g., a waiter). Recent research from our lab attempted to disentangle the trust effects of religious identification— claiming affiliation with, say, Christianity—from the effect of belief in God (Shariff, Simpson, Clark, & Rios, 2020). Christians consistently preferred a believing Muslim over a fellow Christian who reported not believing in God. Indeed, people more readily trusted a believing member of a religion they had never heard of than a nonbelieving member who affiliated with their own religion. As in Gervais et al. (2011), these effects were strongly predicted by the belief that people behave better when they believe God is watching them. The strong distrust of atheists follows directly from a moral system that rests on shared beliefs in the sacred basis of moral rules. Such a system of religious prosociality works best in communities with a high degree of religious conformity. Rates of atheism have begun to creep up in religious-majority countries such as the United States (where 3.1% of the population admits to the label of atheist—double the proportion in 2007; Pew, 2015b). However, the

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implicit and explicit penalties people face around the world for apostasy and irreligion have long served as effective barriers to doubt and desertion.

Parochiality and Prejudice

Though the antipathy toward atheists is clear, results are less so when it comes to other outgroups. The studies on synchrony discussed above have found that in addition to stimulating cooperation with ingroup members, they can also make people more likely to engage in aggressive behavior against an outgroup (Wiltermuth, 2012a,  2012b; though see also Reddish, Bulbulia, & Fischer, 2014). Hobson has found similar effects when teaching participants novel lab-based simulations of religious rituals (Hobson, Norton, Gino, & Inzlicht, 2015). The idea that religions would evolve to favor elements that amplified not just prosocial behavior but also parochial prosocial behavior, is consistent with a cultural group selectionist framework. With a few exceptions, including one described at the end of this section, a group’s members must be selective in their prosociality in order to ensure relative success over neighboring groups. A group that is promiscuously prosocial, with its members willing to extend the same level of trust and cooperation to any partner regardless of their partner’s group affiliation, leaves itself open to being exploited by members of other groups. In cultural group competition, the groups who bear the costs of prosocial behavior but do not receive the benefits are less likely to triumph over groups that practice a parochially directed prosociality that only benefits themselves. As a result, cultural evolution favored normative systems that encouraged selectivity in prosociality, with the ingroup favored over others. Nevertheless, though asserting that religions tend to encourage outgroup hate and prejudice can be fashionable, the evidence for this claim is not yet conclusive. Some research has demonstrated that the prosocial effects of religiosity appear to be parochially directed toward in-group members. For example, Yinon and Sharon (1985) varied the apparent religion of a door-to-door charity solicitor to see what effect this would have on charitable donations by observant and nonobservant Israeli Jews. Overall, observant Jews donated more than their nonobservant counterparts, but this effect was especially pronounced in conditions when the solicitor for the donations wore a large religious head-covering. Indeed, in conditions when the solicitor went bareheaded, the effect weakened and sometimes ­reversed. 254

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Priming research has found that activating thoughts of religious concepts—either through subliminal presentation (Johnson, Rowatt, & Labouff, 2010) or by conducting the study outside of a religious building (Labouff, Rowatt, Johnson, & Finkle, 2012)—increases the dislike of out-groups. This finding matches those of correlational studies that typically show religiosity related to higher levels of ethnic prejudice (Hall, Matz, & Wood, 2010). However, more recent work has debated whether such results generalize to other religions—namely Buddhism. Some research has shown that priming Singaporean Christians and Buddhists with concepts from their own religion increased negative attitudes toward homosexuals, consistent with the above research; however, unlike this previous research, it had no effect on the attitudes toward religious, national, or ethnic out-groups (Ramsay, Pang, Shen, & Rowatt, 2014). Meanwhile, Clobert, Saroglou, and Hwang (2015) have found that priming Buddhist concepts decreases prejudice against ethnic and other outgroups, among both Christians and Buddhists, in both the West and in Taiwan. Still other studies have found more nuanced effects. An intriguing set of experiments by Preston and Ritter (2013) found that, though activating thoughts about “religion” led participants to preferentially give to and cooperate with an in-group member, priming participants with “God” led to the inverse pattern: more generosity and cooperation with out-group members. These different aspects of religion—the institutional and the devotional—appear to have led to diametrically opposed reactions. The finding is consonant with an earlier field study in which Israeli Jews were asked about the heroism of Baruch Goldstein, an AmericanIsraeli suicide terrorist who murdered 29 Muslim worshipers (Ginges, Hansen, & Norenzayan, 2009). Compared with neutral, when respondents were first asked about their synagogue attendance (thereby activating thinking about the communal aspects of religion), they showed increased support for Goldstein’s action as heroic. On the other hand, when previously asked about their frequency of prayer (activating the personal, devotional aspects of religion), respondents showed marginally less endorsement for Goldstein’s actions, compared with neutral. Another field study investigated the effect of participation in the Hajj—the annual sacred Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca—on attitudes toward outgroups (Clingingsmith, Khwaja, & Kremer, 2009). Given the overly large group of individuals eager to

go on the Hajj, a lottery system was enacted in Pakistan to randomly select a subset that would be able to go. Thus, the researchers had a natural experimental setup that emulated random assignment to a control group of eager participants that stayed home and a heretofore identical experimental group that actually went on the Hajj. Those who experienced the Hajj emerged more tolerant not just of different sects within Islam, but also of other religions and ethnicities. And though history is replete with many ready and terrible examples of violent interreligious intolerance, examples of religiously inspired tolerance are not much more difficult to find. One notable instance is described by Stark (1996) in his analysis of early Christianity. Stark notes that the altruistic treatment that third-century Christians extended to non-Christian pagans—especially in taking care of plague victims and giving to the poor—resulted in many converts who ended up more loyal to the compassionate Christians than to their own communities. These conversions joined higher fertility rates (discussed later) in growing the ranks of the fledgling Christian religion during a critical time. The example shows that extending altruism to outgroup members can lead to group advantages, at least in some situations. In sum, the research on religion’s relationship to parochialism and prejudice paints a mixed picture. An overly coarse view of “religion” may be responsible for obscuring the possibility that different aspects of religion may be activating impulses in different directions. Future work will help further delineate the circumstances that guide the religious in their complex treatment of outgroups.

Conflict

That the existing research is ambivalent as to whether religion kindles out-group hate may be perplexing to readers who have seen the waves of religiously inspired violence that have washed over the first decades of the 21st century. Though a full examination of the relationship between religion and this violence deserves its own stand-alone treatment (see Kiper & Sosis, this volume), the model presented here can nevertheless give us insights into some of the moral mechanisms that can sustain conflicts already kindled. First, from the group-focused, cultural evolutionary perspective, the individual’s participation in conflict is prosocial. Violent intergroup conflict has been a staple of human history, and cultures that were best able to motivate individuals to fight and

sacrifice for the group maintained critical advantages in intergroup competitions (Zefferman & Mathew, 2015). Like other institutions such as fraternities and militaries, religions incorporate mechanisms that increase individuals’ commitment to one’s fellow group members (e.g., synchronic rituals, exploiting kin-based psychology; see Crippen & Machalek, 1989). However, religions offer particular advantages related to morality. Earlier in this chapter, we reviewed the research on sacred values. In combat, the sacralization of otherwise pedestrian values and places can create a moral commitment to fighting that goes beyond all rational calculation (Ginges & Atran, 2011). For example, we discussed how Ginges and colleagues have revealed how the psychology of sacred values is directly contributing to the seemingly interminable Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Ginges et al., 2007). Pinker (2011) has argued that the European wars for religion that followed the Protestant Reformation were themselves so prolonged because the sacred commitments prevented either side from negotiating a surrender. As the fervor of the Reformation gave way to the Enlightenment, religion’s loosening grasp shifted the motivations for war from the sacred to the secular, stimulating a long period of relative peace in Europe. Recent survey research supports the argument that the sacralization of military conflicts changes their character. Interviews with Moroccans from communities that had seen high rates of jihadi selfradicalization show that those who hold Sharia to be a sacred value are much more willing to make costly sacrifices (Atran, Sheikh, & Gomez, 2014). These authors relate these findings to the ability of 1,500 devoted actors of the sacredly committed Daesh to capture Mosul from 30,000 Iraqi soldiers fighting for “typical reward structures, like pay and promotion” (Atran et al., 2014, p. 17703). Yet unpublished research from our lab shows that similar effects are by no means absent among American civilians; those who view the United States as embodying a sacred Christian mission are more supportive of controversial foreign policy engagements, such as the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq (even after controlling for religiosity and political identification; Kramer, Yilmaz, Bahcekapili, & Shariff, 2020). A second, closely related, moral mechanism by which religions can contribute to violent conflicts is through the perceived moral authority of a deity. Bushman found that Christians who read a violent

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passage were more inclined to aggression themselves when the passage was said to originate from the Bible (versus an ancient scroll) and when the violence was sanctioned by God (versus when there was no mention of God; Bushman, Ridge, Das, Key, & Busath, 2007). Happily, divine authority cuts both ways; when religious fundamentalists under mortality salience were exposed to compassionate messages from religious scripture, they showed reduced out-group aggression and support for military aggression (Rothschild, Abdollahi, & Pyszczynski, 2009). Notably, similarly compassionate messages from nonreligious sources did not produce the same effect. Thus, as with sacred values, divine authority can motivate the religious to a degree that more secular sources cannot.

Family Values Fertility

Although evolution has very effectively outfitted organisms with powerful sexual urges to motivate them toward reproductive success, humans have long sought to disconnect sex from reproduction. The earliest forms of known birth control reach back four millennia to Egypt’s middle kingdom. Indeed in Ancient Greece, silphium—a plant speculated to have been a highly effective contraceptive—was valuable enough to have been featured on coins, command its weight in silver, and ultimately be harvested to extinction (Riddle & Estes, 1992). Thus, whereas rabbits and other organisms are happy to breed until they fill their environment’s carrying capacity, humans have elected to stymie this Malthusian destiny. In recent decades, birth rates in nearly every OECD country have declined to the point where they have fallen below replacement levels in all but 5 of the 34 countries (OECD, 2014). Faced with their individual citizens’ choices to eschew large families, governments and other national agencies have sought a number of strategies to stem collapsing fertility. This includes appealing to their citizens’ sense of duty to the group, such as Russia’s patriotism-laden “Procreation Day,” Singapore’s “National Night,” and Denmark’s “Do It For Denmark” ad campaign. Although birth rates are generally declining, this decline has been slower for the religious. Even after controlling for relevant factors, religious countries tend to have higher average birth rates (Blume, 2009; Kaufmann, 2010). Religious individuals tend to have more children than the nonreligious, and among those who are religious, increased devotion is associated with higher levels of fertility (Zhang, 256

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2008). These differences are not fully attributable to other factors known to be related to fertility, such as low levels of education and income and rural urbanity. In the United States, the fertility rate among the religiously unaffiliated is 1.7 children per woman (suggesting that the number of religiously unaffiliated is only growing due to deconversion from other religions), whereas the rate is 2.7 for Christians and 3.1 for Muslims (Pew Research Center, 2015a) For Mormons, the rate is 3.4, or exactly double that of the unaffiliated rate (Lipka, 2015). The rate among the American Amish may be as high as twice the Mormon rate (Greksa, 2002; Hurst & McConnell, 2010). A 2000 Israeli study found that whereas the national rate was 2.66, the subset of ultraorthodox Jews had an average of 7.6 children per woman (Berman, 2000). What about religious belief encourages fertility? First, religions often directly command adherents to have children (e.g., “be fruitful and multiply” Gen. 1:28), and highly religious individuals are more likely to report that they consider religious teachings when making decisions about having children (Sigalow, Shain, & Bergey, 2012). Moreover, many religions such as Islam and Catholicism have rules explicitly prohibiting abortion and birth control, and followers who adhere to these rules tend to have higher fertility rates (Knodel, Gray, Sriwatcharin, & Peracca, 1999). Religions may further encourage fertility by discouraging women from choosing career paths that lead to lower fertility (Amin & Alam, 2008; Fortin, 2005). This can happen through explicit prevention of women in the work force, or through internalized norms such as benevolent sexism, which reinforces traditional gender roles (Glick, Lameiras, & Castro, 2002; Burn & Busso, 2005). Finally, in the modern era of very low fertility, the religiously sanctioned social isolation of sects like the aforementioned Amish and ultraorthodox Jews can insulate them from the cultural norms encouraging smaller families. Divine commandments about fertility, contraception, and abortion sacralize and thus moralize what would otherwise be morally neutral decisions people made about family planning (it is not surprising, then, that governments keen on increasing their sagging national fertility rates are appealing to moral values of duty and patriotism). Though the religious may be motivated to follow these pronatalist norms due to divine commandment and the pressure of related cultural expectations, the ultimate reason that the norms exist can be traced back to cultural evolution (Norenzayan et al., 2016).

Groups that produced larger populations could outcompete those with smaller populations. Additionally, quickly reproducing subgroups within a population should be more likely to expand their share in, and eventually overtake, the larger population. In addition to the compassion they extended to out-groups (discussed earlier in this chapter), adherents of early Christianity managed to rapidly expand in its early centuries due to relatively much higher fertility rates than neighboring communities. Note that high fertility norms are not an inherent feature of religions, as the example of the Shakers—religiously required to avoid sex entirely—illustrates. “Mother Ann” Lee, an early leader in the sect, shared her revelations about the sinful nature of Adam and Eve’s sexual congress, and God’s wish that the small community forsake marriage and the “doleful works of the flesh” (Evans, 1859). Although conversion swelled the numbers of the Shakers in the early 19th century, the barren celibacy led their numbers to dwindle from that peak. They currently have only four members living in a small community in Maine (Williams & Wertkin, 2006). In contrast to this, religions with strong pronatalist tendencies have thrived. For example, Pew (2015a) predicts that Islam’s high fertility rate will allow it to surpass Christianity as the world’s largest religion by 2070, with over 3 billion adherents. That year one will probably be lucky to find a single Shaker remaining—underscoring the differential cultural success of different moral norms regarding reproduction.

Monogamy

Given sex differences in obligatory parental investment, men have a higher ceiling for reproductive success than do women. Whereas pregnancy and nursing limit the number of offspring a woman can produce in a given amount of time, the number of offspring a man can produce is theoretically only limited by the number of women he can impregnate. The consequence is that a minority of men can monopolize the reproductive opportunities with a society’s women, leaving a large group of men shut out from sex and reproduction entirely. The competition for these men to be counted among the reproductively successful can lead the men to engage in violent and risky behavior. Several studies have shown that compared with their married counterparts, unmarried men are significantly more likely to engage in risky and violent behavior, including crimes like murder, rape, and theft (Baker & Maner, 2008; Daly & Wilson, 1990; M. Wilson & Daly, 1985).

This violent desperation takes a large social toll. Even after controlling for level of economic development and other factors, the percentage of unmarried men is a strong predictor of a society’s crime rate (Henrich, Boyd, & Richerson, 2012). Thus factors that suppress male-male within-group competition improve the group’s collective prospects. Among these are cultural norms and institutions that limited polygamy. Indeed, historical analyses of polygamy and monogamy norms indeed find that societies that permitted men to take multiple wives had higher crime rates and more warfare than their monogamy-preaching counterparts (Bacon, Child, & Barry, 1963; White & Burton, 1988). This historical record also shows that though widespread now, monogamy norms have been rare (White et al., 1988). The broad modern adoption of monogamy norms is largely the product of the spread of Christianity (Henrich et al., 2012). Big God religions, which appealed to an authority ranking above the highest status males (who were most able to violate norms limiting sexual opportunities), provided an ideal vehicle for fostering compliance with these norms. As we have seen with other phenomenon, the sanctifying of the bonds of marriage has allowed religions to tie the rules into a larger edifice of sacred values, reinforced by the judgment of coreligionists and backed by (the belief in) supernatural punishment. What would otherwise be utilitarian decisions about one’s love life have become coated in the sacralized and moralized glaze. Today, in comparison with nonbelievers, the religious tend to have fewer sexual partners (Billy, Tanfer, Grady, & Klepinger, 1993) and lower rates of premarital sex (Beck, Cole, & Hammond, 1991) and lose their virginity later (Rostosky, Regnerus, & Wright, 2003). They are more likely to get married (Thornton, Axinn, & Hill, 1992), and once they do, they tend to have more stable and happy marriages (Lehrer & Chiswick, 1993) and are less likely to get divorced (Call & Heaton, 1997). Furthermore, even controlling for marital satisfaction, religiosity is associated with lower rates of infidelity (Atkins, Baucom, & Jacobson, 2001; Whisman, Gordon, & Chatav, 2007). Morals regulating family values—high-fertility and stable monogamous marriages—thus have culturally adaptive utility for increasing group size and harmony. All else equal, cultures that more effectively limit polygyny and maximize progeny outcompete those that do not. Compliance with these norms has been bolstered by tying them in with the

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other interlocking beliefs, norms, and behaviors that form a religion.

Religious and Nonreligious Moralities

Many readers—especially (though not only) the less religious—will find their own values at odds with some of the behaviors trumpeted here as moral. As explained in the introduction, morals differ across time and place. Numerous studies have recently focused specifically on how the religious and the nonreligious differ in their moral views (Shariff, Piazza, & Kramer, 2014). These studies have revealed systematic differences in the meta-ethical basis for determining what makes things moral in the first place.

Differences in Moral Foundations

Haidt and Joseph’s (2004) moral foundations theory holds that people’s moral values rest on a handful of foundations that people use to determine what is wrong and right. Three of these foundations—authority, loyalty, and purity—are described as “binding foundations” because they function to bind people into cohesive and functional groups. The other two foundations—harm and fairness—are described as “individualizing” foundations that serve instead to respect the integrity and security of individuals. Though there is broad agreement on the endorsement of these individualizing foundations, endorsement of the binding foundations sees more disagreement (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; van Leeuwen, Park, Koenig, & Graham, 2012). The divergence in opinions on the binding foundations has been traced back to relatively recent shifts in values following the Enlightenment, which saw religious orthodoxy challenged by the ideas of scientific rationalism and absolute monarchies challenged by the ideals of liberalism. As this happened, the importance of authority, obedience, and purity became deemphasized as the bases of moral behavior, giving way to a greater emphasis on individual liberty. This shift has not occurred to the same degree across all groups. Today, those who lean toward the left of the political spectrum endorse the binding foundations much more weakly than the political conservatives on the right (Graham et al., 2009). Van Leeuwen and colleagues have interestingly showed that people in countries with low pathogen prevalence—where the threat of infection is less oppressive—also show relatively lower emphasis on the binding foundations (van Leeuwen, Park, Koenig, & Graham, 2012). This is argued to 258

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be the product of the necessity of more restrictive cultural rules in high pathogen areas, where individually permissive behavior (e.g., rule breaking, novelty seeking, sexual promiscuity) brings a higher risk of infection (Fincher & Thornhill, 2012). Religiosity itself is an independent and positive predictor of support for the binding foundations— with those who frequently attend religious services much more likely to endorse these foundations, especially purity, than those who rarely do (Graham & Haidt, 2010; Shariff, 2015). This pattern is con­ sist­ent with our argument that religions serve group binding and beneficial functions. The receding of religious commitments among the non- and weakly religious affords them the opportunity to eschew obedience to group structures in the pursuit of individual liberties.

Differences in Meta-Ethics

The religiosity difference in moral foundations may also reflect an even more fundamental difference in the meta-ethical model people use to determine not just what is right or wrong, but why things are right or wrong in the first place. Research by Piazza and colleagues has shown that the religious are much more likely to base their moral decision-making on rules—often ones based on divine commandment. On the other hand, the morality of the nonreligious is much more likely to be based on calculations about the actual suffering and happiness that actions cause (Piazza, 2012; Piazza & Landy, 2013; Piazza & Sousa, 2014). Thus, even for the areas on which there is a moral agreement between theists and nontheists— behaviors based on the harm and fairness foundations—there are systematic differences in what motivates the moral decision-making of the two groups. For example, Piazza and Landy (2013) asked participants whether committing various typical ethical violations (cheating, lying, etc.) was morally permissible if it “will produce greater good than bad consequences.” The nonreligious were much more likely to agree, whereas the religious were much more likely to say that violating the rule was impermissible even if it resulted in a net utilitarian benefit. This finding is consistent with experimental work conducted by Saslow and colleagues (2013) that directly investigated how differences in religiosity relate to motives toward generosity. These researchers showed that compassion played a proportionately larger role in motivating the generosity of the less religious participants than it did that of the more religious. One

study, for instance, showed that a compassion induction increased generosity on the dictator game for less religious participants, but had no effect for the more religious participants. In the neutral condition, the more religious participants were more generous than the less religious ones, but this difference disappeared when the groups were induced to feel more compassion. In general, the more religious people are, the more driven they are by moral rules, whereas those who are less religious are more responsive to the consequences of their behavior. The commitment to sacred rules governed by divine authority grounds religious morality in an objectivity that is more stringent than that seen in nonreligious morality. Goodwin and Darley (2008) found that the religious are more likely to agree that if two people disagreed about a moral belief, then (at least) one had to be mistaken. The nonreligious, in contrast, were more likely to believe that neither party need be mistaken and, instead, the moral belief could be dependent on each individual’s culture and perspective. This difference has recently been supported by priming research. Experimentally activating religious thinking leads people to see moral decisions as more objective and less subjective (Yilmaz & Bahçekapili, 2015; remarkably, the reverse causal pathway was also found—when people are persuaded to see morality as more subjective, they become less confident in their belief in God). Though more work needs to be done, this body of research points to a bifurcation of different moral psychologies—one based on divine rules shaped by the demands of group cohesion, and the other driven more by concerns about maximizing wellbeing and minimizing suffering. Both of these motivations for moral behavior have their costs and advantages. Priming studies have shown that seeing morals as objective facts increases charitable behavior (Young & Durwin, 2013) and deters willingness to steal, whereas exposing people to arguments for a subjective, relative basis for morality increases cheating (Rai & Holyoak, 2013). Thus, there are concrete behavioral benefits to seeing morality as composed of unshakable rules. On the other hand, rules can often be inflexible, leaving them prone to becoming outdated and overly narrowly relevant—especially in diverse and dynamic communities. Furthermore, the forging of many of these rules in intergroup competition means that local and parochial “us versus them” interests have typically been selected over universal ones. Greene (2013) has persuasively argued that the utilitarian approach that seeks to maximize the

greatest good for the greatest number can serve as a universally applicable “meta-morality” that can transcend provincial divisions. Thus, that religions have been effective at encouraging moral behavior does not mean that they are the only, most effective, or ideal system for doing so across all places and times.

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter, we have argued that the relationship between religion and morality stems from the roots of both concepts in cultural evolution. The moral precepts of successful religions have been shaped by—and serve—the need to subsume the interests of the individual to the interests of the group. Religions themselves represent constellations of elements—such as supernatural punishment, group rituals, and sacralization—working synergistically together to compel the behavior of the religious adherents. We have reviewed evidence from several fields showing how religion is related to these groupbeneficial behaviors. It should be stressed, however, that this body of research is itself still evolving. Future work may reinforce, clarify, or overturn the findings described here. Furthermore, of the research that has been conducted, too much has relied on too small a sample of the world’s religious population to be considered representative. Though more and more exceptions have been recently emerging (e.g., Aveyard, 2014; Duhaime, 2014; Hadnes & Schumacher, 2012; Henrich 2010; Henrich et al., 2010; Ramsay et al., 2014; Sosis & Ruffle, 2003; Xygalatas et al., 2013; Yilmaz & Bahçekapili, 2015), most of the survey and experimental studies have been conducted on Christians—and often just Western Christians. Thus, though most large religions feature recurrent elements, generalizations made on the basis of these studies should be met with caution. We encourage researchers to remedy this limitation, whether it be through fieldwork, the participation of researchers in underrepresented areas, or cross-cultural collaboration. A second weakness of the evidentiary base is the lack of rigorous historical research—again with notable exceptions (Norenzayan et al., 2016; Sosis & Bressler, 2003; Stark, 2001). Just as there has been a practice of cherry-picking extracts from scripture to make broad characterizing claims about religion, there is a similar temptation to cherry-pick historical examples to support one’s argument. Quantitative analyses of historical databases like the Standard Cross Cultural Sample (Murdock & White, 1969)

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have offered ways around this, and more substantive databases—which will allow the testing of a broader range of hypotheses—are in the works (see religiondatabase.org). A final word of caution pertains to Panglossian panadaptationism. As in genetic evolution, not ­eve­ry­thing that culturally exists is culturally a­ daptive, let alone the best of all possible worlds. Cultural learning mechanisms such as the conformity bias push group members toward adopting a uniform set of norms and behaviors. These stable equilibria can become entrenched, preventing more optimal solutions from ever making inroads (Richerson & Henrich, 2012). Moreover, as various once adaptive elements become linked in religious “packages,” they can be sustained long past their expiration date. These maladaptive elements can become a drag on the group despite being sustained as part of the larger cultural complex. In a rapidly changing world, both of these issues may be at play in religions and the moralities they support.

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CH A PTE R

The Roots of Intergroup Conflict and the Co-optation of the Religious System An Evolutionary Perspective on Religious Terrorism

Jordan Kiper and Richard Sosis

Abstract This chapter reviews the cultural evolution of religious terrorism since the late nineteenth century and explores how terrorists have effectively exploited religious systems to pursue their political goals. Religious systems are adaptive complexes that efficiently respond to rapidly changing socioenvironmental conditions and successfully motivate prosocial and sacrificial behavior by engaging evolved psychological capacities. Ongoing religious terrorism differs from previous waves of terror by manipulating religious systems in order to frame political conflicts, organize combatants, and render collective violence as sacred. By taking an evolutionary perspective of religious terrorism, scholars can begin to shed light on the ultimate and proximate mechanisms of collective violence and the manner in which religion contributes to contemporary terrorist activity. Key Words:  coalitional aggression, collective violence, intergroup conflict, moral disengagement, ­parochial altruism, religious system, religious terrorism, revenge

Introduction

The academic study of terrorism faces two recurring questions. The first is the conceptual issue of what constitutes terrorism (e.g., Primoratz, 2013), and the second is the explanatory query of what causes it (e.g., Crenshaw, 1981; Sandler, 2014). The first question asks under what conditions an act of violence, such as revolutionary violence or guerrilla warfare, can be considered terroristic, while the second one asks why and how terrorism occurs—and therein how it might be prevented. By several accounts, the second question presupposes the first (e.g., Reitan, 2010; Schinkel, 2009). Obviously we must know what terrorism is—how it is defined and demarcated—before we can know what causes it. However, in evolutionary analyses there is often a close connection between the explanation of a phenomenon and its conceptualization (Daly & Wilson, 1983; Tinbergen, 1963). For example, religion is a notoriously fuzzy category

(see Sosis, 2009), but evolutionary explanations of behaviors related to such things as ritual, counterintuitive beliefs, the sacred, and so forth (e.g., Alcorta & Sosis, 2005) have helped to clarify the conceptualization of religion. In this sense, evolutionary theory can broadly unify even the most disparate and variegated social phenomena under the umbrella of a single perspective (e.g., Mayr, 1961). The same is true for the conceptual and explanatory questions of terrorism. As we aim to show in this chapter, terrorism and its demarcation from other forms of violence become clearer once we appreciate the selectionist logic of coalitional aggression and evolutionary patterns of intergroup conflict. Likewise, if under such conditions we recognize the adaptive value of religion and its relationship to psychological and sociopolitical risk factors for collective violence, we begin to understand how the recent proliferation of religious terrorism has occurred. 265

In response to the opening questions, then, we propose that religious terrorism is a form of collective violence that is, in turn, a subset of intergroup conflict and, ultimately, coalitional aggression. With that said, an ultimate explanation of why humans engage in coalitionary killing includes scholarly terrain that is already well traversed by evolutionists (e.g., Durrant, 2011; Kelly, 2005; Potts & Hayden, 2008; Wrangham, 1999). The less traversed territory, and by far the more significant issue for this chapter, is how the proximate causes of coalitional aggression and other behavioral propensities for violence come together to support intergroup conflict in the form of terrorism. Equally important is the question of how terrorism comes to be supported under the guise of religion. To that end, we distinguish “religion,” a term that is too often reduced to mere belief (Sosis & Kiper, 2014), from what is known as the “religious system.” The latter is an adaptive complex comprising recurrent constituents, such as supernatural agent beliefs, ritual, music, and emotionally charged symbols, that not only emerged and coalesced throughout human history but also evolved culturally to interact with human cognition, emotion, and behavior to increase survivability in changing environments (Sosis, 2019). Collective violence is any instance of intergroup conflict that is characterized by a person or group intentionally harming another group of people as such (World Health Organization [WHO], n.d.). We argue that religious terrorism is a form of collective violence that has coopted the religious system in particular ecological, sociopolitical, and historical contexts, and thereby used the system’s constituents to support acts of violence against noncombatants or soft targets. Our discussion proceeds as follows. After preliminary examinations of coalitional aggression, parochial altruism, and intergroup conflict, an analysis of collective violence and its proximate causes is delineated, including a brief consideration of moral disengagement. We then provide a sketch of the function and history of terrorism, and stress the importance of four waves of terroristic activity that have followed the establishment of the Westphalian state. Building on these issues, we then identify the most significant aspects of the religious system that get co-opted by terrorist organizations to overcome collective action problems and sanction collective violence.

The Evolutionary Roots of Terrorism

As a first approximation, the claim that terrorism— whether as a contentious political movement (e.g., Beck, 2008), militaristic strategy (e.g., Bockstette, 266

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Jertz, & Quandt, 2006), or mode of selfradicalization (e.g., Teich, 2013)—can co-opt the religious system is based on several observations that are considerably developed in the course of this chapter. We begin here, in this section, by addressing several observations regarding the evolutionary roots of ­terrorism.

Coalitional Aggression

The first is that terrorism is a form of intergroup conflict, which is rooted in human evolution by way of coalitional aggression. Observed in chimpanzees and humans alike, coalitional aggression occurs whenever members of one group deliberately inflict physical harm on one or more conspecifics of another group (e.g., Bowles, 2009). Given the shared quality of coalitional aggression in chimpanzees and humans, and provided the principle of parsimony in biology, coalitional aggression was likely selected in the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans (Boehm, 2012a, 2012b). Since then, coalitional aggression has become adaptive in human populations, some have argued (e.g., McDonald, Navarrete, & Van Vugt, 2012), for reasons that shed light on human proclivities for war. For one thing, coalitional aggression was arguably advantageous for most of human history, whenever there were power asymmetries between groups and one group faced a low-risk and highbenefit outcome in attacking another (Johnson & MacKay, 2015; Roscoe, 2007; Wrangham, 1999). Such attacks were likely necessitated by competition for mating opportunities (Wrangham, 1999), natural resources (van der Dennen, 1995, 2002), territorial disputes (Wilson & Wrangham, 2003), or deterring future transgressions (Boehm, 1984; McCullough, 2008). For instance, coalitional attacks among traditional societies are still often prompted by irresolvable conflicts or threats concerning mating opportunities, food acquisition, or safety among kith and kin (Boehm, 2012b). Another set of reasons why coalitional aggression was likely adaptive throughout human history is that it yielded higher reproductive payoffs than otherwise and minimized the risks of violence by offsetting the costs and risks among the group (Rusch, 2014). Given these advantages, ancestral humans probably aggressed against neighboring groups whenever it was reproductively advantageous to do so (e.g., Johnson & MacKay, 2015). In turn, the threat of coalitional attacks by predatory out-groups probably selected for out-group avoidance and ingroup attachment (Van Vugt, 2011). With regard to

evolved psychology, this would entail the acquisition of a suite of traits, such as preferences for ingroup phenotypes and tribal markings (see Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001), which heightened cooperation within groups and strengthened vigilance toward out-groups (e.g., Choi & Bowles, 2007; Rusch, 2014; Van Vugt, 2009). Culturally speaking, groups were likely to have enacted social mechanisms, such as rites of passage or collective rituals, to inculcate group identity and strengthen group commitments. This resulted in a dual propensity for engaging in coalitional aggression and reciprocating with in-group members (or familiar and reciprocating out-groups) above unknown out-groups (Durrant, 2011). Provided this scenario, a complex of psychological mechanisms and behavioral propensities for ingroup approach and out-group avoidance has been advantageous for groups, largely due to the role of coalitional aggression throughout human evolution (e.g., Tooby & Cosmides, 1988). Remarkably, those basic propensities can still be witnessed today: People cross-culturally tend to be highly affective, favorable, and cooperative with kith and kin. Yet they are also weary of strangers and in most cases show an innate apprehensiveness toward outgroups, which would minimize out-group contact and therefore reduce the threat of coalitional aggression (e.g., Rusch, 2014). Hence, a proclivity in humans that contributes to intergroup violence today, such as terrorism, is preferential altruism toward in-groups and habitual avoidance of—or aggression toward—unfamiliar or threatening outgroups.

Parochial Altruism

The second observation is that intergroup conflict is also rooted in parochial altruism, a behavioral propensity whose evolutionary history is akin to coalitional aggression. Parochial altruism is defined as favoring one’s in-group above out-groups (see Bernard, Fischbacher, & Fehr, 2006). Darwin (1871) originally alluded to the potential adaptiveness of this behavior in the Descent of Man, when he noted that strong in-group morality might not always benefit the individual moralist, but it would benefit the moralist’s in-group whenever they faced between-group competition (p. 157). In such circumstances, parochial altruism—or what Darwin originally called “in-group love”—would enhance intragroup trust and cooperation, giving groups, broadly defined, an advantage in competing for valuable resources. Albeit a remarkable insight,

­ arochial altruism as a potentially adaptive behavior p was nevertheless overlooked until evolutionary biologists considered the mutual benefits of it alongside coalitional aggression. In terms of its evolution, parochial altruism now appears to have probably been group selected because it allowed communities to maximize cooperation and, given the risk of predatory out-groups, cooperatively defend against coalitional threats (e.g., Glowacki & Wrangham, 2013). Besides this selectionist logic, several lines of evidence support the adaptive value of parochial altruism. First, game theoretic simulations demonstrate that groups of parochial altruists consistently outcompete groups of pure altruists or parochialists (Choi & Bowles, 2007; Garcia & van den Bergh, 2011; Rusch, 2014). Second, as groups in economic games become more parochially altruistic, egalitarian norms emerge, such as strong reciprocity (see Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004), which allow groups to cooperate more than others and thus outcompete them (e.g., Parks, Joireman, & Van Lange, 2013). Third, because parochially altruistic communities cooperate more than others, they often outlive less cooperative communities (e.g., Mcfarlan, Walker, Flinn, & Chagnon, 2014). Fourth, archeological evidence of demarcated communities during and after the Neolithic suggests an increased frequency of both coalitional aggression and parochial altruism, thus entailing the likelihood of their coevolution (e.g., Bowles & Gintis, 2011; Choi & Bowles, 2007). If coalitional aggression and parochial altruism coevolved, then the two constitute an important behavioral complex, and arguably preadaptation, for intergroup conflict, which bears on conflicts today. It is very likely, after all, that coalitional aggression was not only adaptive in ancestral populations but also continues to be an adaptive strategy for most cultural groups today, such that groups with “warrior males,” who are trained to engage in coalitional aggression against outgroup threats, outlive groups that do not (e.g., Bowles, 2009; Van Vugt, 2009). Relatedly, the rather “tribal inclination” of humans to categorize individuals according to group membership—and to treat out-group members indifferently or malevolently and ingroup members benevolently—is potentially an inclination that still contributes to in-group cooperation and the avoidance of threatening outgroups, which would be quite adaptive in terms of group competition, as Darwin once suggested (see McDonald et al., 2012).

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Intergroup Conflict

Another important observation is that when humans exercise coalitional aggression in highly organized and cooperative groups, they engage in intergroup conflict (Rusch, 2014). Otherwise known simply as “war,” intergroup conflict is more precisely defined as the planned and executed hostilities between two relatively defined groups and can range from unconventional warfare (e.g., raids, guerrilla fighting, gang violence) to conventional warfare (e.g., state militaries engaged in armed conflict). Intergroup conflict has been a major reproductive threat to human communities for most of recorded history (e.g., Laing, 1984), though some argue that humanity overall is becoming steadily more peaceful (see Pinker, 2011). In terms of its evolution, intergroup conflict grew out of coalitional aggression and became prevalent throughout most of the world after the Neolithic (e.g., Fry, 2007; Kelly, 2000). During that time, five factors appear to have combined with coalitional aggression and parochial altruism to engender intergroup conflict: the demand for collective defense; social hierarchies and the increased capacity for systematic attacks on neighbors; population growth and the exhaustion of local resources; and climactic disturbances (e.g., Reuveny, 2007). Given the overlap of these factors with sedentary communities, intergroup conflict became more common with human settlements, defined territories, and especially the spread of agriculture. After the Neolithic, intergroup conflict became such a threat in virtually every part of the world that communities could not be sustained or developed without defenses against ambushes, battles, and raids (e.g., Kelly, 2000; Otterbein, 2004). Kelly’s (2005) cultural evolutionary stages of intergroup conflict complement our discussion thus far. The first was an era during human evolution that exhibited infrequent to intermittent coalitionary killing, where attacks on neighbors became highly fitness relevant. The second was an era of conflict avoidance, beginning between 14,000 to 12,000 bp, wherein the development of strong intragroup relations became favored to deter predatory out-groups. The third era, which began about 4,000 bp and persists to our time, is the rise of intergroup conflict and the cultural transformation of male coalitions into rather permanent “violence cadres”—that is, militarized groups of male warriors designed to defend one’s in-group and aggress against threatening out-groups. Once this phenomenon emerged, military culture evolved thereafter, 268

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with most cultures entering a persistent preparedness for war, including the development of weapon technologies, organizational tactics, and social hierarchies (e.g., Bowles, 2008, 2009). In turn, military culture has contributed to a cycle of population growth, wars, population decline, peace, population growth, wars, and so forth, which has further contributed to the cultural evolution of war (e.g., Turchin, 2006). Several environmental circumstances have triggered intergroup conflict (see Gat, 2006. First, when subsistence is threatened or the competition for nourishment is intensified, as in times of population expansion or environmental stress, groups resort to conflict (see also Reuveny, 2007). Second, propensities for dominance and related signs of hierarchical status can add to intergroup displays of power, such as wanton resource exhaustion and social stratification, which can indirectly contribute to war (e.g., Pinker, 2011; Turchin, 2006). Third, revenge-cycles are due to the psychological propensity for revenge, which was selected to deter transgressions in ancestral environments but contributes to enthusiasm for war and often runs rampant in societies with a history of conflict (Boehm, 1984; McCullough, 2008). Fourth, security dilemmas characterized by power asymmetries and runaway effects in intergroup credibility displays, such as stockpiling weapons, can push groups toward increased distrust, eventually giving way to intergroup conflict (e.g., Posen, 1993). Fifth, worldviews can justify intergroup violence and exacerbate perceived threats of outgroups (e.g., Hybel, 2012).

Collective Violence

The picture that emerges thus far is that the evolutionary roots for intergroup conflict are coalitional aggression and parochial altruism. Further, as intergroup conflict evolved culturally into warfare writ large, it has been recurrently triggered by six environmental or cultural conditions. With that said, a related observation can now be advanced. Terrorism is a form of intense parochial altruism and unconventional warfare that, although triggered by the above conditions, constitutes a distinct kind of intergroup conflict. Specifically, terrorism is a kind of collective violence—the indiscriminate targeting of members of another group as if they were combatants or deserving of aggressive retribution. Being a kind of collective violence, which is again a subset of intergroup conflict, is what makes terrorism so morally objectionable and criminal in our era of human rights.

On that score, the United Nations (1994) observes a legal distinction that is relevant to our analysis. Terroristic activity, unlike other forms of “legal” warfare, is an act of intergroup conflict that is committed by nonstate actors who deliberately attack or victimize noncombatants, whether in the context of self-described revolution, liberation, or self-determination, and is designed, as such, to kill or maim innocent victims in order to provoke public fear and to manipulate political structures. As many social scientists observe (e.g., Hoffman, 2006; Kilcullen, 2009; Sageman, 2004), terrorist activity along these lines ensues in environments where the following conditions are present: • Minority groups striving for independence or collectively feeling threatened by a more powerful nation-state (Hoffman, 2006). • Leaders using ideologies, such as religion, to unite the community and to justify acts of intergroup conflict (e.g., Juergensmeyer, 2003; Kiper & Sosis, 2016a; Pape, 2005). • Individuals who would not otherwise engage in violence, such as the elderly, supporting attacks due to feelings of revenge or because local violence cadres provide communal benefits (e.g., Iannaccone & Berman, 2006; Juergensmeyer, 2003). • Surpluses of young unmarried males having little or no socioeconomic mobility and countenancing local or traditionally sanctioned forms of violence (e.g., Howe & Jackson, 2008; Thayer, 2009). • Populations, generally segregated or occupied by foreign powers, having experienced chronic social injustices or expressing acute frustrations about recurrent victimization or perceived humiliation by an out-group (e.g., Taspinar, 2009). • Densely populated communities experiencing subsistence grievances or believing their economic prospects are limited by a seemingly threatening out-group (e.g., Gassebner & Luechinger, 2011). Given the similarities of these conditions to those of intergroup conflict, it is evident that the causes of terrorism overlap with those of war, especially those involving revolutionary struggles (Lutz & Lutz, 2008). Thus, the ultimate causes of terrorism are those of intergroup conflict, as rooted in coalitional aggression and parochial altruism. However, as critical theorists note, terrorism is not simply a revolutionary tactic akin to guerrilla warfare (Jackson, Jarvis, Gunning, & BreenSmyth, 2011). In the same way, we suggest here

that terroristic activity is a variety of collective ­violence. To clarify that distinction, consider the following. Collective violence occurs most often in the context of intergroup conflict and includes torture, indiscriminate bombings, massacres, mass rape, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, all of which are aimed at attacking a group of people as such (WHO, n.d.). For this reason, collective violence is what makes terrorism, like torture and ethnic cleansing, an international crime: It violates the laws and customs of acceptable warfare by seeking to humiliate and degrade the dignity of an entire population (see Robertson, 2013). Of course, there is admittedly a grey area between freedom fighters using guerrilla tactics to humiliate and contest the power of an unjust regime and terrorists wantonly attacking combatants and noncombatants alike (see Lutz & Lutz, 2008). Yet the grounds between resistance, revolution, or liberation and terrorism become clearer with an understanding of nonstate intergroup conflict that employs collective violence. For whenever selfproclaimed freedom fighters resort to attacks on another group of people as such, those fighters engage in collective violence (Barkan & Snowden, 2007). Therefore, the key to understanding terrorism and demarcating it from other kinds of intergroup conflict is recognizing it as collective violence undertaken by nonstate actors.

Moral Disengagement

In line with the above, we arrive at another observation. As noted by social psychologists, most persons must disengage their reluctance to harm conspecifics if they are to engage in collective violence (Fiske, 2004). By doing so, actors practice moral disengagement, a psychological process of coming to believe that moral standards do not apply to oneself in particular contexts (Bandura, 1999). Besides these conditions, social psychologists focus on three preconditions that contribute to moral disengagement: collective predispositions for revenge, war propaganda fomenting violent ideologies, and community leaders encouraging hostility.

Collective Predispositions for Revenge

Collective predispositions for revenge are likely to occur in cultures where intergroup conflict has been chronic and unhealed traumas from prior wars remain prevalent. Such conditions are especially ripe for collective violence when accompanied by social injustices that have gone unresolved, leaving people with a sense of victimization and insecurity

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(DiVietro & Kiper, 2018; Staub, 1999). In these conditions, a phenomenon known as “accusation in a mirror” often ensues (see Marcus, 2012): • Individuals of a group, P, who have been victims of historical trauma or social injustice, fear they will be individuals of some outgroup, S, who are accused of plotting against P. • In defensive aggression or what they see as a justified revenge, P aggresses against S, often indiscriminately and in the very form P accused S of plotting. Prior to the Rwandan Genocide, for instance, Hutu leaders accused Tutsis of plotting to massacre Hutus, which many Hutus used as a pretext for collective violence (Marcus, 2012). Likewise, Nazi allegations of Jewish conspiracies for global domination were used as a widespread justification for anti-Semitic legislation and sanctioned persecution (Eastwood, 2012). In the same way, many religious terrorists have accused the West of plotting to destroy Islam, which has served as a rallying cry for collective violence against Western nation-states, including its civilians (e.g., Leiken, 2005).

War Propaganda

War propagandists are critical in fomenting violent ideologies that contribute to support for collective violence (e.g., Benesch, 2012; Kiper, 2020). Such instigators are most effective in communities where life conditions are difficult, and where people experience relative deprivation such as lack of sufficient resources, police and security, positive social connections, or positive self-identities (Staub, 1999). In these conditions, instigation is strengthened by a controlled media and what the community believes are genuine social crises, which together allow propagandists to promote destructive ideologies within a “crisis frame” that calls for intergroup violence and even collective violence (Oberschall, 2012; Wilson & Kiper, 2020). Those ideologies include scapegoating out-groups, promoting “better-world ideologies” (which promise a better world once a targeted out-group is removed), legitimating hierarchies and justifying subordinations, and portraying oneself as righteous and opponents as evil (Staub, 1999). Most human beings are indeed reluctant to harm conspecifics in normal circumstances, and that is a propensity overridden by a set of psychological conditions that go along with war propaganda, allowing even “ordinary men” to engage in collective violence (see Browning, 1992; Kiper, 2015). These include the perpetrator believing that the would-be victim is 270

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deserving of violence (Aquino, Reed, Thau, & Freeman, 2007), adopting an ideology that justifies violence (e.g., Dunbar, 2003), and diffusing responsibility among a cohort of perpetrators (e.g., Zimbardo, 2007). A further mechanism is dehumanizing the enemy or denying him or her of humanness (Harris & Fiske, 2006). Finally, in times of war, xenophobic propaganda that exacerbates parochial altruism contributes to disengaging moral considerations for the targeted out-group (e.g., Choi & Bowles, 2007).

Community Leaders

Prior to the onset of collective violence, community leaders play a critical role in quelling or encouraging between-group hostilities (Saxon, 2012). In particular, leaders can intensify hostilities and often do so whenever it maintains or enhances their power and status, which can be especially dangerous in stratified societies (Staub, 1999). In such societies, leaders tend to go unchallenged and thus, during times of conflict, create violence cadres, such as terrorist organizations, to terrify the target out-group (and often resisters in the in-group), and indoctrinate society writ large with reasons for supporting or tolerating collective violence (Oberschall, 2012). We discuss these factors in further detail in subsequent sections.

The Cultural Evolution of Terrorism

From a cultural evolutionary perspective, terrorism is not a recent phenomenon born out of religious fanaticism (e.g., Harris, 2004), but rather a form of collective violence that is sanctioned not by the state or third-party sympathizers (as with many liberation movements) but rather by its practitioners. As a mode of intergroup conflict, terrorism has evolved culturally alongside political states as a weapon against the sovereignty of the nation-state. Given that terrorism is also a form of collective violence, it is not so different from other kinds of unconventional warfare that are designed to weaken so-called enemy populations, including acts such as ethnonationalistic violence (Primoratz, 2013). As a point of illustration, ethnonationalist leaders have sanctioned indiscriminant ethnic cleansings, massacres, and genocides (see Dojcinovic, 2012). In these cases, ethnonationalistic violence is designed to “terrorize” an ethnic minority in its entirety; and such violence is, in fact, caused by the same factors and conditions outlined in previous sections (e.g., Staub, 1999). Here we arrive at another key observation for our discussion. Terrorism differs from ethnonationalistic violence in terms of its function, risk factors, and cultural evolution, which we address in turn.

Function

According to Crenshaw (2003), the function of terrorism is to empower weak political entities by means of illegitimate force, as understood in terms of the sovereignty of nations and the nation-state’s monopoly on force. Such force, as practiced by terrorists, is typically carried out by an organization composed of nonstate actors who attempt to weaken and manipulate a more powerful political entity, such as an empire or nowadays a nation-state, by threats of unpredictable and indiscriminate violence (e.g., Hoffman, 2006). Although such organizations employ unconventional methods of war, such as guerrilla fighting, their main tactics center on ­ attacking the noncombatants of an enemy nationstate in order to force that state’s leaders to undertake sociopolitical courses they would not otherwise take (Schmid, 2004). Typically, these courses involve outcomes in a geopolitical struggle over land or the nation-state’s influence on cultural matters (e.g., Juergensmeyer, 2003). The most common exploitations by terrorists include assassinating political figures, kidnapping and ransoming citizens, and inflicting unpredictable harm on noncombatants through civilian-centered bombings and mass shootings (Lutz & Lutz, 2008). Contrary to other forms of collective violence, terroristic attacks on noncombatants are intended to affect not only the would-be victims but also—and most importantly—those who witness the attack via mass media (see Kiper & Sosis, 2016b). After all, terrorism is first and foremost a form of psychological warfare that is designed to exploit soft targets and mass media to frighten victims and weaken political opposition (e.g., Chalk, 1996). Witnessing terrorism typically results in either heightened levels of distress after the attack or elevated anxiety that contributes to “catastrophizing” or overgeneralizing the threat of another terrorist incident (Bonanno, Brewin, Kaniasty, & La Greca, 2010). These effects include elevated stress (fast-acting epinephrine) or anxiety (slow-acting corticotrophin) that can lead to longterm cognitive changes (e.g., hippocampal changes, immune system suppression, growth hormone inhibition, inhibition of reproductive functions, and gastrointestinal shutdown). They also contribute to the survivors’ avoidance of out-groups, attachment to in-groups, and threat-compensation behavior such as agoraphobia, out-grouping, isolation, and even suicide (see Sinclair & Antonius, 2012). Achieving these effects through psychological warfare on noncombatants further separates terrorism from the guerrilla warfare of revolutionaries. For

instance, although revolutionaries practice guerrilla fighting to frighten and weaken their enemies (e.g., through ambushes, insurgencies, or bombings), they do so to paralyze combatants specifically, and not civilian populations in their entirety. Furthermore, terrorism functions on the threat of repetitive and unpredictable attacks in civilian spaces, as committed by highly organized violence cadres, whose covert methods make it resilient to retaliation using conventional warfare. As Hesterman (2014) observes, deliberately attacking the soft targets of a nation-state and avoiding military engagement are common characteristics of terrorists. Still, clandestine states may (and often do) financially back terrorist organizations; but when doing so, states intentionally distance themselves from terrorists to deny criminal culpability, and terrorists, in turn, do the same to increase their own economic power base (e.g., Hoffman, 2006). As such, terrorist organizations often resort to undertaking criminal acts, such as trafficking or drug dealing, to fund their political agendas (e.g., see Rollins & Wyler, 2013). When successful, terrorist organizations can therefore grow more powerful than other violence cadres, such as paramilitaries, and attract disenfranchised individuals who seek empowerment as members (see Atran, 2003, 2006). Consequentially, terrorist cells can function much like other criminal organizations whose aims are to increase their own strength through illegal means and to weaken opposing yet legitimate power ­structures.

Risk Factors

Several risk factors contribute to the selection of terrorist organizations in certain environments (see Horgan, 2014; Moghaddam & Marsella, 2003). Terrorists overall appear to be extremely parochially altruistic due to histories of conflict and various kinds of ideologies or war propaganda advocated by local leaders (e.g., Crenshaw, 2010; see also Dojcinovic, 2012). Further, most individuals who join terrorist organizations identify with a minority group whose ideology includes the exercise of justice and revenge against an occupying or threatening out-group (Silke, 2003, pp. 37–40). Besides these, one of the most prominent risk factors is a perceived power discrepancy between the would-be terrorist’s group and a political entity, usually because of rapid sociocultural changes and the prospects of losing a traditional way of life or land (e.g., Crenshaw, 2003,  2007). In many cases, then, terrorism is selected as a “weapon of the weak” that

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offers a strategic advantage in the practice of collective violence against a powerful nation-state (see Thornton, 1964). Like most “ordinary men” who engage in collective violence, terrorists are not psychologically unstable but instead relatively normal individuals (e.g., Krueger, 2007). In fact, contrary to popular belief, what characterizes terrorists is neither poverty nor lack of education but rather high levels of motivation to achieve the social political goal of their organization (e.g., Atran, 2010). It is here that we see the importance of the evolutionary roots for intergroup conflict and the unfortunate human potential for collective violence during war. Terrorist organizations recruit by appealing to peoples’ propensities for protecting one’s in-group and aggressing against what appears to be a genuine out-group threat. Terrorist leaders usually frame these threats within a crisis frame that insinuates in-group victimization. Likewise, violent responses to the entire out-group, who are said to be collectively responsible for victimization, are legitimated by equating the commission of violence with previous wars or revolutions (Jenkins, 1990). In so doing, terrorists offer a better-world ideology that promises worldly and otherworldly rewards for killing out-group members. Motivations for collective violence are further enhanced by the diffusion of responsibility among the terrorist organization (Schillinger, 2016), the prestige of terrorist leaders who often locally go unchallenged in their calls for violence (Schmid, 2011), and the community’s acceptance of antagonistic ideologies that dehumanize the out-group (Matusitz, 2014). This can be witnessed by ISIS’s rather successful recruitment strategy of appealing to Islamic fundamentalism, antiWestern rhetoric, and a purported cosmic struggle that renders recruits with an existential sense of purpose (e.g., Cottee, 2015; McCoy, 2014). As the above example illustrates, terroristic motivations are also born out of genuine anxieties due to rapidly changing sociocultural systems, experiences of unjust governments, exploitive economic systems, relative deprivation, or discriminatory policing systems. These are, in fact, often brought about by natural disasters, imperialism, colonialism, or war (Lutz & Lutz, 2008). Along these lines, wouldbe terrorists may be motivated by a lack of social mobility within their densely populated community and the related opportunity of attaining social status and existential purpose through terrorist cells (Taspinar, 2009). Furthermore, terrorism is a risk factor in places where acts of extreme government repression or ongoing warfare incentivize violent 272

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r­ esistance movements as opposed to nonviolent opposition and democratic modes of political change (Crenshaw, 2003). As Benesch notes (2012), these factors are especially dangerous in cultures with a history of armed conflict that experience a social crisis such as acts of governmental injustice, economic depressions or recessions, or invasion. Additional cultural characteristics for terrorism are a history of nationalism, the onset of rapid modernization, and governments that prove to be unable to curtail terrorism (Lutz & Lutz, 2008). Of course, these factors are nothing new to many large-scale agricultural societies and the emergence of powerful states. From the onset of empires to the development of the modern nation-state, terrorism has been a weapon of the weak and has undergone four waves of cultural evolution (see Rapoport, 2003). Prior to the first wave, there existed what one might call “primal terrorism,” such as that of the Sicarii or Jewish daggermen of the 1st century who killed supporters of Rome, and the Assassins or medieval Nizari Ismalis of the 11th century who targeted oppositional leaders in Persia or Christian Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land. Yet because of their limited reach, these violence cadres may not constitute genuine terrorist organizations. For even though they attacked soft targets for political ends, the Sicarii and Assassins could neither challenge the absolute state sovereignty of their enemies nor mobilize media to propagate fear. Those respective factors arose only after the development of the Westphalian state in the 17th century and the onset of mass media in the late 19th century. According to Rapoport (2003), these factors are the necessary conditions for terrorism, and they did not coalesce until the development of the global system and its interconnected mass media in the 1880s. Once that occurred, terrorism emerged as a mode of intergroup conflict that used collective violence to challenge modern nation-states and, due to its effectiveness, has evolved since then in four waves.

Four Waves

According to Rapoport (2003), the first wave of terrorism occurred in eastern European and Central Asian cultures, where Marxists and anarchists, respectively, opposed the growing economic exploitations by capitalists and the rising power of the ­nation-state. To encourage opposition, Marxists and anarchists modeled liberation ideologies similar to those of the American and French Revolutions and adopted violent strategies to achieve their goals. For instance, the anarchists followed the Sicarii and

Ismalis by killing oppositional leaders. In so doing, anarchists discovered that they could use the recent developments of printed mass media to further discredit the nation-state by revealing the latter’s weaknesses. In particular, anarchists presumed that because the nation-state would lose its legitimacy if it could not prevent attacks on its leaders, it would be further delegitimated if it could not prevent attacks on its citizens (Garrison, 2007). As a result, anarchists engaged in indiscriminate attacks on the population that, having been widely reported, were expected to hasten the fall of the nation-state—a method known as “propaganda by the deed” (see Fleming, 1980). In response, President Theodore Roosevelt called the actions of anarchists “terrorism” and, like several leaders after him, appealed for an international effort to prevent such “crimes against the nations” (Rapoport, 2003, p. 52). The second wave took place from the early to mid-20th century amid the anticolonial movement, wherein attempts were made both to delegitimate colonial states and force imperial powers to withdrawal from colonized territories (Rapoport, 2003). In these circumstances, terrorists once again made appeals to liberation ideologies and adopted the strategy of killing not only oppositional leaders but also colonial populations within the territory destined for liberation (see Chaliand & Blin, 2007). However, unlike the previous wave, second-wave terrorists used radio broadcasting and print media to portray their collective violence as a necessary means toward liberation (Kaplan, 2010, pp. 35–36). It was during this phase that “terrorism” and “freedom fighting” became especially blurred and, arguably, combined with liberation and the end of colonialism. Accordingly, the combination of targeting oppositional leaders, employing minimal collective violence, and mobilizing mass media to legitimate self-determination were together highly effective in ending imperialism and establishing new states in former colonial territories such as Ireland, Cyprus, and Algeria. Evolving out of the above phase, third-wave terrorism combined with the ensuing Cold War, once again making terrorism a clear threat to noncolonial nation-states. During that time, the United States and Soviet Union engaged in several covert “ghost wars” throughout the Third World (Coll, 2004), where formerly colonized countries that had striven for national independence but had not reached full self-determination were forced either to side with one of the superpowers or to maintain a course for establishing territorial authority (Kaplan, 2010,

pp. 37–38). The result was the emergence of many state-sponsored terrorist organizations that characterized their struggles as liberation (Rapoport, 2003, pp. 56–57) yet were better armed than their predecessors; they blurred the lines of intergroup conflict and collective violence by using guerrilla tactics and attacking combatants and noncombatants alike. Moreover, their use of collective violence was more extreme than previous phases—such as kidnappings, ransoming, torturing, or massacring—and television coverage made it possible for international audiences to witness such crimes. Consequentially, an international response to terrorism led by the United States, Britain, and Israel undertook military and financial means to isolate and weaken terrorist organizations. As Rapoport observes (2003, pp. 57–59), many so-called liberation fronts either maintained terroristic threats and lost local or international support, eventually “burning out,” or they renounced collective violence altogether, thus ceasing to be a terrorist organization and even achieving international recognition. The fourth wave is the recent surge of religious terrorism, as characterized by organizations such as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS. While religion has often played an important role in warfare (see Armstrong, 2014), it is a rather salient feature of contemporary terrorists, even so-called secular organizations such as the Tamil Tigers, who exercise extreme ideologies and perform seemingly religious rituals (see Roberts, 2014). Besides embracing religion, what makes fourth-wave terrorists unique is their effectiveness. Through vastly organized networks, they engage in military battles with nationstate armies, undertake guerrilla operations, and embrace blatant acts of collective violence such as kidnappings, ransoming, and massacres, which have terrorized the citizens of nation-states unlike previous phases. And unlike third-wave terrorism, today’s terrorists are able to exercise a great deal of control over their own propaganda by exploiting the Internet and social media. Hence, fourth-wave terrorists—and an emerging fifth wave that uses technological warfare—are able to engage in sophisticated intergroup conflict that combines collective violence and religion, making it more successful in recruiting and organizing coalitions, and thereby more challenging to nation-states than ever before (see Global Terrorism Index, 2015).

Co-opting the Religious System

So why has the last wave of terrorism strongly embraced religion? To answer this question, we turn to

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our final observation. Because religion can unite communities and promote cooperation among organizations to overcome collective action problems (see Atran, 2006,  2010; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003, 2008), it can be co-opted to support and encourage parochially altruistic group behavior, especially when conditions demand for it. Unlike previous waves, fourth-wave terrorists face significant collective action problems such as overcoming intense sociopolitical competition, maintaining a collective identity amid growing globalized (and pluralistic) environments, and discouraging defection. And because defection is the greatest threat to the longevity and effectiveness of terrorist organizations (see Berman, 2009), terrorist leaders have turned to local religious traditions to encourage group commitments. In this sense, religion is not the ultimate cause of fourth-wave terrorism, which, in many ways, is an after-effect of Cold War conflicts in the Third World and cultural developments between nation-states and nonstate organizations that oppose them (see Rapoport, 2003). Instead, religion is an important proximate mechanism for supporting intergroup conflict and justifying collective violence that many fourth-wave terrorists have ­embraced.

The Religious System

Besides being a fuzzy category, religion is an evolving complex that includes more than mere belief, including behavioral repertoires and local traditions (Sosis & Kiper, 2014). When analyzing religion, we thus take an adaptationist approach and examine religion as a complex adaptive system (see Alcorta & Sosis, 2005; Purzycki et al., 2014; Sosis, 2009). As such, “religion” is taken to be a dynamic complex consisting of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral adaptations and constituent elements that have coevolved throughout human history to support extensive human cooperation and coordination. The complex that emerges from these adaptations and constituents is a self-organizing structure that allows adherents to structurally coordinate with one another and thereby adapt to varying environments. Constituents include “ritual, myth, taboo, emotionally charged symbols, music, altered states of consciousness, commitment to supernatural agents, and afterlife beliefs among others” (Sosis, 2009, pp. 319– 320). By engaging in these constituents, adherents signal group commitments, establish trust, and promote cooperation (e.g., Alcorta & Sosis, 2013). The religious system can be further characterized in functional terms. The constituents of the system, 274

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such as ritual and counterintuitive supernatural beliefs, are flexible microstructures that coevolved and perpetually network together for the survivability of the macrostructure, which, in this case, is the religious community that adapts to dynamic social, political, and economic conditions (see Kiper & Sosis, 2014). Like all systems, the religious system requires energy to function and it is specifically fueled by ritual activity (Sosis, 2019) that is motivated by religious concepts generated and constrained by evolved cognitive modules (e.g., hazardprecaution system, hyperactive agency detection, theory of mind; see Barrett, 2004; Lienard & Boyer, 2006) and human behavioral propensities (e.g., costly signaling, reciprocal altruism; see Bulbulia & Sosis, 2011). By participating in rituals, adherents reinforce the meanings of religious concepts, “naturalize” social conventions, and signal group commitments (Rappaport, 1999). Furthermore, by adhering to social conditions, adherents create a shared ethos and instill cooperation and coordination within the group. Finally, group cooperation and coordination is the output of the religious system, from which adherents experience positive or negative environmental feedback that is expressed in their health and well-being, survival, and reproduction (Kiper & Sosis, 2014, 2019; Sosis, 2019). Understood in this light, one appreciates why human communities throughout history have used the dynamics of religion not only to benefit adherents but also to promote cooperation and coordination. As Durkheim (1995/1912) observed: Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices that unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those adhere to them. (p. 62)

Sacred things created in the religious system are given symbolic significance, moral meaning, and power through the performance of communal rituals (Durkheim, 1995/1912, p. 462). Such performances communicate significant information that is conducive to promoting trust and engage both evolved neuroendocrine responses that intensify emotions and autonomic functions that reinforce the learning and recall of learned tenets (Alcorta & Sosis, 2013). Communities throughout history have taken advantage of these dynamical features to reinforce group obligations and extreme behaviors on behalf of the group. Similarly, terrorist organizations have adopted the religious system to use its rituals, rites of passage, and counterintuitive beliefs

to organize combatants, frame conflicts, and render violence as being sacred.

Ritual, Rites of Passage, and Counterintuitive Beliefs

Of all the constituents of the religious system, communal rituals provide groups with the most adaptive benefits, largely by means of establishing cooperation through performance. Rappaport (1999, p. 24) defines ritual as “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers.” Adherents adopt such invariant performances, which tend to be quite costly. Besides the physical and temporal demands of the ritual itself, costs include accompanying beliefs (the expressions and declarations expected of adherents), badges (socially demanded religious attire and bodily alterations), and bans (observed taboos and sacrifices; Sosis, 2006). Because the demands of rituals are hard to fake (e.g., Bulbulia, 2004), given that only members who are committed to the group’s way of life are likely to perform them (see Irons, 2001), they act as legitimate “membership costs” for group members to signal their group loyalties. Accordingly, communal rituals serve as effective channels for conveying group commitments, building group trust, and thereby overcoming collective action problems (Sosis, 2003; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003, 2008). A noticeable feature of fourth-wave terrorism is that it parallels the rise of fundamentalism throughout the world; both movements have embraced religious ideologies of so-called traditional values, scriptural literalism, and high ritualistic demands on adherents. Provided that rituals are understood as costly signals (i.e., hard-to-fake signals that correlate with the qualities of the signaler), three factors appear to have motivated the rise in ritual requirements for fundamentalists and fourth-wave terrorists: the growing risk of apostasy generated by mass media technologies, multicultural openness in Western societies, and resource competition among modern multicultural nation-states (Sosis & Alcorta, 2008). Indeed, the highly demanding rituals among religious terrorists signal hard-to-fake ingroup loyalties. To illustrate, a common ritual for fourth-wave terrorists is to give video testimony of one’s faith and life prior to attacks, thereby committing the would-be terrorist to violence (Atran, 2003). The result of such rituals is trust among terrorists and, above all, the unlikelihood of defection, which is vital to the success of their clandestine activities (e.g., Hassan, 2001; Pape, 2005).

Perhaps the most important ritual for instilling group commitments is a rite of passage. Such rites are important for marking life transitions and ­rendering individuals with collective identities (e.g., van Gennep, 1960). During rites of passage, initiates learn what constitutes the sacred and acquire deeply emotional associations with group symbols whose meanings are embodied through grueling trials that accompany the ritual such as circumcision, sacrifice, or torture (see Sosis, 2004). Because most rites of passage occur during adolescence (when brain cortices are still developing and individuals are most sensitive to social ideals), they reshape the brains of  ­ adherents and render them with both group commitments and social identities (Alcorta, ­ 2006, 2008). Rites of passage among violence cadres, such as initiations akin to boot camp, “fuse” adherents (i.e., they come to see their personal and group identities as equivalent), creating “bands of brothers” who are willing to die for one another, and teach adherents to respond violently to threats against group symbols (e.g., Whitehouse & Lanman, 2014). It has been noted that the religious rites of passage employed by communities of fourth-wave terrorists render not only adherents but also local adolescents with a desire for martyrdom (see Atran, 2003). In addition to rituals and rites of passage, counterintuitive beliefs in supernatural agents and an afterlife are important incentives for persons within most religious systems. Supernatural agents are often believed to access socially strategic information about adherents and to both monitor and enforce community-defined moral behaviors, especially those concerning in-group cooperation (see Schloss & Murray, 2011). Through repeated ritual performances, adherents come to internalize counterintuitive beliefs about supernatural agents, such as gods, demons, or ghosts, which tend to include ideas about nonmaterial rewards and punishments in an expected afterlife (Sosis, 2003). Supernatural beliefs appear to be strong motivators for fourthwave terrorists who commit acts of collective violence under the belief that they are divinely sanctioned to do so and will be rewarded for their actions in an afterlife. Thus, one of the ways to deter terrorism is to expose children and adolescents to alternative notions about supernatural agents and the afterlife before they are indoctrinated with beliefs that incentivize violence.

Framing the Conflict

Although the religious system is not the cause of most conflicts, it nevertheless facilitates organized

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violence in at least three additional ways. First, counterintuitive religious beliefs about supernatural forces engaged in a struggle of good and evil can be used to translate local political conflicts into cosmic struggles (Juergensmeyer, 2003). In other words, by transforming a 21st-century political struggle into a cosmic struggle, terrorist leaders motivate adherents to perceive themselves as participating in collective violence with divine significance, which not only heightens feelings of parochial altruism but also allows for moral disengagement. Along these lines, the US Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication (CSCC) recently commented that the power of ISIS recruitment is the simple message that Muslims are everywhere being threatened and ISIS is the divine solution (Cottee, 2015). Second, myths and taboos can be used to morally justify intergroup conflict (e.g., Sosis, Phillips, & Alcorta, 2012). This is usually done by legitimizing one’s own cause as being consistent with the myths and taboos of one’s tradition, and effectively demonizing opponents whose way of life is inconsistent with one’s own. Finally, afterlife beliefs can be used to instill notions of eternal rewards for participating in violence. These spiritual rewards usually involve benefits in the afterlife that cannot be matched in this world. The 9/11 hijackers, for instance, believed they “would meet in the highest heaven” (Lincoln, 2003, p. 98), which presumably motivated and rationalized their actions.

Organizing Combatants

In many regards, fourth-wave terrorists are not very different from other communities at risk for intergroup conflict and collective violence. What makes them different, however, is the use of religious ritual as an important mechanism for banding terrorist organizations together. Yet ritual is liable to extreme progroup behaviors and the collective execution of violence as an extended sign of group commitment. Many scholars suggest that religious ritual is effective in intergroup conflict because it evolved to promote collective action in the face of predatory outgroups (e.g., Johnson, 2008). Rituals and communal trust account for the group acceptance of extreme behaviors. By increasing the costs of membership in times of crisis, such as wars, groups provide a means to convey trust and coordinate collectively (e.g., Sosis, Kress, & Boster, 2007). Terrorists exploit the ability of religion not only to create tight social bonds among adherents, typically through communal ritual and shared counterintuitive beliefs (Sosis et al., 2012), but also to forge 276

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extended communities of support. Terrorists rely on extended anonymous communities that share in religious rituals for material and sociopolitical support. Support from an extended community is often vital for terrorist organizations. The publicity of terrorist attacks is often the key to maintaining the support of extended communities. As Atran (2010, p. 278) observes, “With publicity, even failed terrorist acts succeed in terrorizing; without publicity, terrorism would fade away.” Shared religious beliefs, however, may not be enough to ensure such support. For example, Ginges, Hansen, and Norenzayan (2009) found in surveys and a priming experiment among Palestinians and Israeli settlers that attendance at religious services was positively related to support for suicide attacks. Moreover, they similarly found increased support for martyrdom among attenders of religious services in six countries, representing six different religions, including Indian Hindus, British Protestants, and Mexican Catholics. Intriguingly, in all of these studies the frequency of prayer itself did not predict support for out-group violence and parochial altruism; only frequency of attendance at a house of worship did. As the authors note, attending religious services likely enhances coalitional commitments.

Sacred and Profane

Because the creation of the sacred and profane through ritual renders objects, events, and symbols with highly emotional significance (e.g., Durkheim, 1995/1912), it can be exploited by terrorists who wish to sanctify violence (e.g., Lincoln, 2014). In particular, through the use of intense rites of passage, individuals can be transformed socially into warriors (e.g., boot camp), instilled with feelings of communitas for compatriots (e.g., Turner, 1969) and a sense of the sacred, for which they are willing to give their lives (e.g., Hassan, 2001). Through rituals terrorist organizations also come to see their lands as holy, which often makes them nonnegotiable in economically rational terms (Sosis, 2011). Furthermore, when transgressed by out-groups, sacred lands are therefore defended at all costs because transgressions on them are seen not only as direct threats but also as repugnant acts (see also Ginges & Atran, 2009; 2011). Remarkably, the sacred is in many cases encountered as physical space (Eliade, 1959). As noted by Pape (2005), most suicide terror campaigns center on a dispute over land and an ensuing intergroup conflict against an occupying power that must be

removed from the homeland. In these conditions, religious symbolism can be used to represent land and conflict, and homelands in these conflicts are almost always publicly perceived as sacred. Such sacralization of land is an adaptive strategy aimed at increasing coalitional commitment (Sosis, 2011); and sacralizing land is not very difficult. Pape (2005, p.  85) observes that “although boundaries may be ambiguous and history may be contested, the homeland is imbued with memories, meanings, and emotions.” Religious rituals sustain memories, shape meanings, and foster these emotions. Religion’s reliance on such emotionally evocative symbols also ­explains why religious terrorist groups are more successful than secular ones in mobilizing their forces (Bloom, 2005). Religious terrorists do not appeal to rational political arguments to win public approval; they rely on sacred symbols imbued with emotional power to enlist followers in their cause.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have taken an evolutionary approach to the conceptual and explanatory questions of terrorism to show that terrorism is a kind of collective violence, and that collective violence is a subset of intergroup conflict and coalitional aggression. Although coalitional aggression is the ultimate explanation for why humans engage in warfare, the latter emerged out of a history of intergroup conflict, as rooted in the evolved psychology of parochial altruism and the cultural evolution of human social groups. Some of the proximate mechanisms of intergroup conflict that contribute to collective violence include histories of warfare or occupation, perceived humiliation, feelings of revenge, densely population communities with subsistence grievances, and leaders who justify violence. In these circumstances, leaders and authority figures play a prominent role in providing ideologies of moral disengagement. While all of these factors contribute to forms of collective violence, such as ethnonationalist conflicts, terrorism differs in terms of its cultural history. Terrorism emerged as a violent response to the power and influence of nation-states, and acts of “terror” in the modern sense were not possible until the development of mass media in the late 19th century. From that time onward, terrorism underwent four cultural shifts that correspond to four historical periods and technological media developments: anarchism/print media, anticolonialism/radio, the Cold War/television, and post–Cold War religious terrorism/Internet. Otherwise known as fourth-wave terrorism, religious terrorism ­appears

to have adopted the religious system in order to overcome collective action problems and coordinate the activities of would-be warriors, who are more effective than ever in engaging nation-states in armed conflicts and managing their own propaganda using mass media technologies. When we examine religion from an evolutionary perspective, we see that it is not simply a set of beliefs but rather a complex adaptive system that includes recurrent constituents such as counterintuitive beliefs and rituals. These constituents can be powerful motivators of human behavior insofar as they have coalesced throughout human history and evolved culturally to interact with human cognition and emotion to increase survivability in varying environments. As such, terrorists have exploited the religious system to frame and justify current political conflicts as cosmic struggles, organize combatants and extended communities of support, and render collective violence as sacred. In practical terms, our analysis complements other disciplinary observations about ending terrorism. As noted in the latest Global Terrorism Index (2015, p. 65), “the West has . . . frequently responded to the threat of terrorism with the use of violence. Such violence has, all too often, been indiscriminate, and has had a tendency to exacerbate conflict dynamics rather than contribute to sustainable peace.” We believe evolutionary theory can shed light on how to deal with terrorism by better understanding what terrorism is and what causes it. If combative strategists ignore the underlying evolutionary roots of terrorist activity, they will likely fail in ending terrorism because they underappreciate the important psychological, behavioral, and cultural drives behind terrorist activity.

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CH A PTE R

Selected to Kill in His Name Evolutionary Perspectives on Religiously Motivated Violence

Yael Sela and Nicole Barbaro

Abstract Religion motivates, exacerbates, and even justifies violence. In this chapter, we argue that religious beliefs regarding violence—particularly those of monotheistic, Abrahamic faiths—are shaped by evolved psychological mechanisms. Further, we argue that religiously motivated violence is most likely to occur in evolutionarily relevant contexts. Guided by sexual selection theory and parental-investment theory, we first provide an overview of human sexual selection from an evolutionary perspective. We discuss how and why an evolutionary perspective—and principles of sexual selection and parental investment in particular—may provide a richer understanding of religiously motivated violence. Next follows an overview of research addressing several types of religiously motivated violence such as mate guarding and controlling behaviors, wife beating and uxoricide, honor killing, child abuse and filicide, male and female genital mutilation, war, and terrorism. Finally, we highlight the parallels between religiously motivated violence and evolved psychological mechanisms for violence, concluding with suggestions for future research. Key Words:  evolutionary psychology, religion, violence, sexual selection, parental investment

An evolutionary perspective has informed explanations of violence throughout the animal kingdom (Newton-Fisher & Thompson, 2012). Violence is the behavioral output of evolved psychological mechanisms designed to solve particular adaptive problems, and it reliably occurs in specific contexts (Buss & Shackelford, 1997a). Evolutionary psychological research has revealed several functions that violence may have served over human evolutionary history, and the contexts in which violent behavior is most likely to occur (Buss, 2005; Buss & Shackelford, 1997a; Kaighobadi, Shackelford, & Goetz, 2009; Liddle, Shackelford, & WeekesShackelford, 2012; Shackelford & WeekesShackelford, 2012). The general contribution of the extant research is the understanding that violence is the behavioral output of evolved psychological mechanisms designed to solve particular adaptive problems and, thus, violence reliably occurs in specific contexts (Buss & Shackelford, 1997a). 282

Evolutionary psychological research typically has explored the contexts and predictors of violence within the theoretical framework of sexual selection (Buss & Shackelford, 1997a). It is reasonable to hypothesize that other human psychological factors may exacerbate violence within already violenceprone contexts. In this chapter, we implicate religious beliefs as psychological factors that may motivate and exacerbate violence. We argue that religious beliefs are shaped by preexisting, conditionally violence-promoting psychological mechanisms, and that religiously motivated violence is likely to occur in contexts that elicit violent responses. Essentially, we argue that religion makes violence worse—religious beliefs, practices, and norms lower the threshold for violence, and explicitly promote and justify violent actions in evolutionarily relevant contexts. To solidify this argument, we provide an overview of human violence from an evolutionary psychological perspective and

we discuss how the theory of sexual selection can be drawn on to understand various forms of religiously motivated violence. We conclude with a discussion of directions for future research that could potentially provide evidence to test the argument that religion motivates and exacerbates violence.

Evolutionary Psychological Perspectives on Violence

Human violence is not a novel phenomenon. Evidence indicates that violence has occurred throughout human evolutionary history (Pinker, 2011). Archeological evidence indicates violent deaths among early humans, including indicators of clubbing (Ferguson, 1997), arrowheads and barbs (Smith, 2007), and mass killings via blows to the head (Keeley, 1996). Further evidence of humans’ violent history comes from examining specialized tools whose function was not just hunting game, but also inflicting violence on other humans (Smith, 2007). The historical writings of many societies worldwide describe interpersonal violence (Keeley, 1996), and upon transitioning from nomadicity to permanent settlements, humans erected costly fortification structures to defend against out-groups (Smith, 2007). Given humans’ deep evolutionary history of violence, it is reasonable to suspect evolutionary functions underpinning such psychology and behavior. A substantial amount of violence occurs within species throughout the animal kingdom—including humans. An evolutionary perspective can provide profound insight as to why, when, and where violence is most likely to occur. Violence, and the contexts in which it occurs, can be primarily explained in light of two evolutionary theories: sexual selection theory and parental investment theory (for a review, see Liddle et al., 2012).

Sexual Selection Theory

Sexual selection theory refers to “the advantages that certain individuals have over others of the same sex and species, in exclusive relation to reproduction” (Darwin, 1871, p. 256). Sexual selection is directly related to the reproductive success of individuals within a species, arising from intrasexual and intersexual competition for access to mates. Sexual selection gives rise to traits that facilitate reproduction, but these same traits are sometimes costly to an organism’s survival. For example, traits such as the antlers of stags, the horns of antelopes, and the tail of peacocks are energetically costly to develop and maintain, but are essential for attracting and

a­cquiring mates. Because these traits facilitate reproductive success—at the cost of reduced survival prospects—such elaborate traits and adornments can only be maintained by sexual selection. Competition for mates can occur via intersexual and intrasexual selection. Intrasexual selection refers to competition between members of the same sex for sexual access to members of the other sex. Intrasexual selection has resulted in the evolution of animal weaponry such as antlers, horns, and claws (Emlen, 2014), and in humans, increased male body size and substantially greater male upper body strength (e.g., Lassek & Gaulin, 2009). Male-male competition in humans—notably driven by men’s motivation to secure sexual access to females—has resulted in the evolution of predictable patterns of aggression (Daly & Wilson, 1988), facilitated by jealousy (Buss et al., 1992, Easton & Shackelford, 2009) and many other psychological traits (see Schmitt et al., 2003). Intersexual selection refers to the process by which the mate preferences of one sex influence the selection of traits in the opposite sex—a “co­evolutionary tango” between the sexes (Schilthuizen, 2014). In most sexually reproducing species, males compete for sexual access to females (Bateman, 1948). Because females typically invest substantially greater time and energy into rearing offspring (Trivers, 1972; see “Parental Investment Theory” section), females are more selective when choosing mates and, consequently, males evolve traits that females find attractive. This asymmetry results in males evolving elaborate coloring, adornments, and other traits that attract females, whereas the corresponding females of a given species typically do not evolve the same traits. Intersexual selection has resulted in the evolution of male traits such as the peacock’s elaborate tail, vibrant coloration in birds and fish, and many kinds of bird vocalizations (Andersson, 1994) and courting behaviors (Coleman, Patricelli, & Borgia, 2004). Intrasexual selection and intersexual competition afford a more comprehensive understanding of violence within species, and specifically—as we argue here—provides a rich, theoretical framework for investigating religiously motivated violence in humans.

Parental Investment Theory

In most sexually reproducing species, males are more likely to engage in violent intrasexual competition than are females. Parental investment theory (Trivers, 1972) can explain the robust sex difference in violent behavior, the underlying psychology that Selected to Kill in His Name

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produces these behaviors, and psychological mechanisms designed to solve adaptive problems of violence. Parental investment theory refers to the allocation of resources to offspring at the expense of other potential resource allocations (e.g., survival, mating effort, additional offspring). Because of the differences in size and required energy costs for developing sperm and ova, males and females often differ substantially with regard to the minimum obligatory investment necessary for offspring survival and reproduction. In humans, the minimum obligatory parental investment for men can end with a single copulation and ejaculate. For women, however, parental investment requires at least nine months of pregnancy, and often several years of nursing. Sex differences in minimum obligatory parental investment result in differing optimum reproductive strategies for men and women (Parker, 2006). The reproductive success of a man is limited by the number of matings he secures with fertile women. For women, however, ova production is limited and, thus, reproductive success is limited by the time and energy required to rear offspring (Bateman, 1948; Trivers, 1972). Women are therefore more selective when choosing a mate due to the greater energetic costs associated with selecting a poor quality mate, such as investing valuable resources into offspring with a lower probability of survival and/or future reproductive success. The sex that provides greater obligatory investment—typically female— tends to avoid violent confrontations because the costs associated with injury and death negatively impact their reproductive success (e.g., a woman being unable to care for current or future offspring). However, the less investing sex—typically male— tends to pursue competitive, sometimes violent, behavioral strategies because men can reap greater benefits from successful competition with same-sex rivals for sexual access to women, thus potentially siring numerous offspring. Parental investment theory’s predictive power is particularly evident when examining species in which the discrepancy in minimum obligatory investment is reversed between the sexes. Examples of these so-called sex-role-reversed species include Australian cassowaries (Ghiglieri, 1999), Mormon crickets, pipefish seahorses, and Panamanian poison arrow frogs (Trivers, 1985). In such species, males invest more than females in their offspring and, accordingly, males are more selective when choosing mates, whereas females compete with each other— often violently—for sexual access to males. 284

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Explaining Male Violence Against Other Men

Liddle et al. (2012) review and apply sexual selection theory and parental investment theory to violence, presenting evidence to suggest that violence among nonhuman animals is not arbitrary or pointless. Rather, violence appears to be determined by unconscious cost-benefit calculations. Cost-benefit calculations underpin the majority of human violence. Human and nonhuman animals possess evolved psychological mechanisms for violence, and these mechanisms motivate violent behavior in response to specific environmental inputs in which, on average (i.e., over evolutionary history), the benefits of violent interactions outweigh the potential costs. Liddle et al. (2012) describe several environmental inputs that these mechanisms may be sensitive to, and how these inputs affect the likelihood of engaging in violent behavior. Differences in male and female reproductive strategies, resulting from sex differences in reproductive biology, have profound, downstream consequences for interpersonal psychological and behavioral processes. In accordance with parental investment theory, males of most animal species, particularly mammals, are overwhelmingly more prone to violence than are females (Ghiglieri, 1999). Because females are, on average, more selective than males when choosing a mate, female mate choice limits males’ sexual access to females (Bateman, 1948; Trivers, 1972). In humans, risky competition often involves violence, predominantly between men (Daly & Wilson, 1988). The robust sex difference in violent behavior is likely because violence can be a more effective means for men, relative to other forms of nonviolent competition, to overcome sexual rivals and acquire resources that women prefer in their mates (Buss & Shackelford, 1997a). Cross-culturally, men are more likely to be the perpetrators, and targets, of violence (Archer, 2004,  2009; Burbank, 1992; Buss, 2005; Daly & Wilson, 1988, Ghiglieri, 1999; Hyde, 1986; Lester, 1991). Sexual dimorphism in humans—men are heavier (Ghiglieri, 1999) and taller (Holden & Mace, 1999) than women—suggests a history of effective polygyny in which the variance of reproductive success has been greater in men than women (Buss & Shackelford, 1997b). Lower paternal investment, and increased reproductive variability in men (compared to women), further facilitate aggressive and violent male intrasexual competition for mates (Archer, 2009; Campbell, 2005).

Principles of intrasexual competition and intersexual selection further clarify the relationship between violence and mating success (Archer, 2009; Daly & Wilson, 1988; Liddle et al. 2012). Male intrasexual competition is intimately related to status and reputation. Women prefer mates of high status, which serves as an honest signal of a man’s potential ability to provide for a woman and her offspring. Historically, men of high status have had greater access to food, superior territory, and stronger social support (Buss, 2005). Perpetration of violence against other men is one way in which men can navigate status hierarchies and achieve high status (Buss & Shackelford, 1997a). Consequently, high-status men have greater sexual access to women, a phenomenon that has been documented among many tribal societies (Chagnon, 1988, 1992; Daly & Wilson, 1988) and in the United States (Buss, 2011; Campbell, 1993; Ghiglieri, 1999; Palmer & Tilly, 1995).

Explaining Male Violence Against Women

Evolutionary theories, using principles of intersexual selection and differential obligatory parental investment, afford insight to the circumstances in which men perpetrate violence against women (Goetz, Shackelford, Starratt, & McKibbin, 2008). In humans, fertilization and gestation occur within females, consequently resulting in paternity uncertainty for males. That is, men are never fully certain that their offspring are, in fact, genetically their own. Because men often invest heavily in their putative offspring (Chrastil, Getz, Euler, & Starks, 2006; Trivers, 1972), the costs of cuckoldry—the unwitting investment into genetically unrelated offspring—can be substantial (Leivers & Simmons, 2014). Cuckoldry has posed an adaptive problem for men throughout human evolutionary history (Pham & Shackelford, 2014). A cuckolded man benefits his rival at a serious cost to his own fitness due to the diversion of his finite resources away from his current or future genetic offspring. Contemporary, worldwide, empirical evidence documents nonzero paternity rates (i.e., cuckoldry), ranging from 1% to 30% (Goetz, Shackelford, Platek, Starratt, & McKibbin, 2007; Voracek, Haubner, & Fisher, 2008). Cross-cultural, historical, and behavioral evidence indicate that over evolutionary history, paternity uncertainty was an adaptive problem faced by ancestral men (see, Anderson, 2006; Buss, 2000; Daly, Wilson, & Weghorst, 1982; Goetz & Shackelford, 2006, 2009;

Thornhill & Gangestad, 2008; Shackelford, 2003; Shackelford & Goetz, 2007; Euler & Weitzel, 1996; Platek, Keenan, & Mohamed, 2005; Voracek et al., 2008). Because cuckoldry was a recurrent feature of human evolutionary history, strong selection pressures have been imposed on men to guard their paternity. Male psychological mechanisms—such as male sexual jealousy (Buss, 2000)—have evolved to combat problems associated with detecting and preventing cuckoldry. Because of the substantial costs associated with cuckoldry, men may resort to violent and coercive behavior directed toward women to guard their paternity, and to maintain, regain, or secure exclusive sexual access to their inpair ­partner.

Religion Exploits Evolved Psychological Mechanisms

Recent theoretical arguments posit that religions, or religious beliefs and practices, are an exploitation of evolved psychological mechanisms designed to detect status, particularly among men. For example, Garcia (2015) argues that qualities of dominant “alpha” males were imported onto Gods—specifically, Gods of the Abrahamic religions (i.e., Christianity, Judaism, and Islam). Put differently, God was created in the image of man, rather than God creating man in his image. Across the animal kingdom—including human and nonhuman primates—dominant males judiciously deploy violence as a means to intimidate subordinates, acquire territory, control female sexuality, and maintain rank and status within the group. As previously discussed, violence has often served as an effective means to these goals (Buss & Shackelford, 1997a), and dominance and status are intimately intertwined with violence. It has been argued that when humans transitioned to nationstate societies, religion—specifically, monotheistic religion (i.e., devotion to one god)—was implicated as a means to regulate great masses of individuals and to regulate interactions between nation-states. During this transition in human history, in particular, monotheistic religions expanded and flourished (Johnson & Earle, 2000; Wright, 2010). Human and nonhuman primates (particularly, great apes) live in hierarchical societies. The dominant individual of the group—typically, a male—is responsible for regulating and controlling group behavior. As human groups grew exponentially in size, the power of a single dominant God subsumed the role of the traditional alpha male, including his Selected to Kill in His Name

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a­ssociated dominant and violent traits (Garcia, 2015). Thus, there is a good case to be made that the dominant God of the Abrahamic religions is merely an extreme, all-powerful, elevation of a mortal alpha male. Participation in monotheistic religions, rather than polytheistic religions (i.e., worshiping several gods), entails submission to a single god, which parallels behaviors enacted toward alpha males in human and nonhuman primates particularly well. In the Abrahamic religions, God serves as the protector of the in-group, regulates female sexuality, justifies—and promotes—violence toward outgroups, and requires submission to him that is maintained through his dominance (i.e., force or threat of force) and prestige (i.e., freely conferred deference) (Garcia, 2015). The exorbitant influence of religion is maintained arguably because of our deep evolutionary history of living in hierarchical societies. Sexual selection, in particular, has given rise to evolved psychological mechanisms designed to detect and navigate status and dominance, and to regulate in-group/out-group interactions.

Sexually Selected Underpinnings of Religiously Motivated Violence

Sexual selection theory and parental investment theory afford an evolutionary explanation of the underlying psychology of violent human acts, as well as the contexts in which violent acts are most likely to occur. It is worth noting that, as with any evolutionary explanation for particular psychological processes and behaviors, it is not imperative that individuals be consciously aware of the evolutionary roots underlying their psychology and behavior. Psychological mechanisms that promote violent behavior in response to particular environmental inputs (e.g., threats to one’s status, indications of partner infidelity) are selected for over evolutionary history if, on average, these mechanisms result in greater replicative success of the genes that built them—regardless of individuals’ conscious awareness or unawareness of the ultimate evolutionary reasons for their psychology and resulting behavior. With this in mind, we turn to an examination of specific religious beliefs and how these beliefs may exploit preexisting psychological mechanisms designed to promote context-dependent violence.

Partner-Directed Violence

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v­ iolence is not reserved only for male rivals—it is also directed at women, and especially at romantic partners. Accordingly, it is expected that men’s ­religiously motivated violence toward a romantic partner will occur in contexts where a man’s exclusive sexual access to his romantic partner is threatened. It is also expected that the religious justifications for partner-directed violence will be explicit, and that these justifications will be rooted, ultimately, in evolution by sexual selection. Mate retention behaviors function to thwart a romantic partners’ infidelity, and can range from vigilance of a romantic partner to perpetrating physical violence against the partner (Buss, 1988; Buss & Shackelford, 1997b; Sela, 2016). Although both men and women perform mate retention behaviors, men often use more violent behaviors than women when guarding their partner (Buss, 2005; Daly &Wilson, 1988). In 2001, 20% of reported incidents of nonfatal violence against women 12  years or older were perpetrated by an intimate partner (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003). If ­partner-directed violence does not prevent or correct a partners’ infidelity or defection, a man may resort to even more extreme measures, such as killing his partner, to effectively eliminate rival males’ sexual access to her (Buss, 2000, 2005). Between 1976 and 2005, 30% of female homicide (“femicide”) victims were killed by an intimate partner, making it the largest class of victimoffender relationship (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2007). Previous research has identified contexts in which men are more likely to be violent, such as the perceived risk of partner infidelity (Goetz, Shackelford, Romero, Kaighobadi, & Miner, 2008). Mate killing can also repair a man’s reputation. In many cultures (e.g., cultures of honor; Nisbett & Cohen, 1996), cuckolded men are viewed as emasculated and, thus, killing an unfaithful partner is a means by which a man can repair his reputation (Buss, 2005; Daly and Wilson, 1988). Men direct violence at their partner, ultimately, to avoid the devastating costs associated with cuckoldry. Male sexual jealousy is often the proximate mechanism motivating men’s partner-directed violence; it is among the most frequently cited causes of men’s partner-directed violence, both physical and sexual (e.g., Buss, 2000; Daly & Wilson, 1988; Daly et al., 1982; Dobash & Dobash, 1979; Dutton, 1998; Frieze, 1983; Gage & Hutchinson, 2006; Russell, 1982; Walker, 1979). Accordingly, it is expected that men’s perpetration of partner-directed violence, motivated by male sexual jealousy, should be

s­ anctioned by religion—especially in the contexts of sexual conflict (e.g., real or perceived infidelity, offspring from previous relationships, a wife’s refusal to have sex with her husband). Religious texts promote, and justify, men’s perpetration of partnerdirected violence in sexual contexts: • Leviticus 20:10–121: “And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death. And the man that lieth with his father’s wife hath uncovered his father’s nakedness: both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. And if a man lie with his daughter in law, both of them shall surely be put to death: they have wrought confusion; their blood shall be upon them. Both parties in adultery shall be executed.” • Deuteronomy 22:22: “If a man be found lying with a woman married to a husband, then they shall both of them die.” • Matthew 5:31–32: “It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement. But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.” • Quran 4:152: “[T]hose of your women who commit illegal sexual intercourse, take the evidence of four witnesses from amongst you against them; and if they testify, confine them [i.e., women] to houses until death comes to them or Allah ordains for them some [other] way.” • Quran 4:34: “[T]he righteous women are devoutly obedient [to Allah and to their husbands], and guard in the husband’s absence what Allah orders them to guard [e.g., their chastity, their husband’s property]. As to those women on whose part you see ill-conduct, admonish them [first], [next], refuse to share their beds, [and last] beat them [lightly, if it is useful].” Religious texts such as the Bible and Quran instruct men to stone, burn, torture, and poison women who are suspected of extramarital sex. Men are instructed to punish wives that commit infidelity (actual or imagined), and exhibit—vaguely All biblical quotations are from the King James Version. All quotes from the Quran are taken from the Hilali-Khan translation, available online from http://muttaqun.com/files/ PDF/The_Holy_Quran_English_Arabic.pdf.

­efined—promiscuous behavior (e.g., “play the d harlot” or “commit whoredome,” Ezekiel 23:1–49; If they do not “lower their gaze [from looking at forbidden things], and protect their private parts [from illegal sexual acts] . . . draw their veils all over Juyubihinna [i.e., their bodies, faces, necks and bosoms]”; Quran 24:31). Both the conviction of the crime and the execution of the punishment are at men’s discretion (e.g., Quran 24:6). Some current manifestations of these practices are brutal beating and killing of wives for showing skin (e.g., a husband recurrently beat his wife, and finally killed her with a knife and cut her into pieces after she refused to cover her face with a veil outside the house, saying this was the best way to “punish [her] for rebelling against Allah’s orders”; Jafri, 2013b), or leaving the house without permission (e.g., a husband axed his wife after she “insulted him” by staying out overnight. He asked her to loudly recite the Kalimas—Islamic texts—before killing her, and told police he killed his wife to make her “a lesson for other women who do not obey their spouses”; Anonymous, 2013). Religious codes of conduct are also enforced on women by designated groups of men (convenient for the husbands while they are away from their wives). For example, every year “chastity squads” of the morality police unit in Iran forcefully arrest and fine thousands of citizens, especially woman and adolescents, for not following the Islamic dress code (e.g., Cohen, 2011). Further, extramarital sex is a public offense in Iran, punishable by stoning to death (Razavi, 2006; public stoning videos of alleged adulteresses are available online3). Another example is the Jewish Modesty patrol in ultraOrthodox neighborhoods in Israel. The modesty patrol beat, spit, and hurl stones at women and girls who wear clothing deemed provocative, or who have allegedly consorted with men other than their husbands (Associated Press, 2008). The Abrahamic religious texts deem it socially acceptable, expected, and even justified for men to be overt in their violent mate guarding behaviors. In this way, some men gain an advantage in intersexual competition (e.g., by more effectively controlling their partner and preventing her infidelity). Men may also gain an advantage in intrasexual competition by retaliating more harshly—and with fewer reputational costs—against male rivals than would

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3  Stoning to death of a couple in Afghanistan—http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=jJkYJ3cbxh0; Afghan woman executed for adultery—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ed0TZN2Egk.

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otherwise be permissible (e.g., “Both parties in adultery shall be executed”; Leviticus 20:10–14). By endorsing and promoting partner-directed violence, religious texts offer men a socially acceptable, justified solution to the adaptive problem of cuckoldry (i.e., increasing paternity certainty). Men’s religiously motivated, partner-directed violence also reduces male-male competition over women because religiously prescribed violence severely limits women’s autonomous behavior. A husband’s right to confine, beat, torture, and murder his wife for her infidelity is just one set of examples by which religiously motivated violence exploits an unfortunate suite of men’s evolved psychology.

Genital Mutilation

Male and female genital mutilation is any permanent modification of the external genitalia that involves the ablation of tissue (WHO, 2017). Male genital mutilation includes superincision (longitudinal bisection of the dorsal skin), circumcision (removal of the entire foreskin), and castration (removal or crushing of one or both testes or the penis). The most common male genital mutilation today is male circumcision, which is mandated in the Bible (e.g., Genesis 17:10–14, Exodus, 12:48; Josh 5:2) and instructed by Islamic hadiths4 and fatwas5 (e.g., AlMunajjid, n.d.a, n.d.b), and is therefore practiced by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Female genital mutilation includes hoodectomy (removing the clitoral hood), vaginal infibulation (narrowing of the vaginal opening by cutting and repositioning the inner or outer labia), excision (partial or total removal of the clitoris and the labia minora, with or without excision of the labia majora), and clitoridectomy (partial or total removal of the clitoris) (WHO, 2017). Female genital mutilation is prevalent worldwide, especially in Africa. Female genital mutilation is permissible, and some say encouraged, in the following hadiths: “Circumcision is Sunnah for men and an honorable thing for women” (Musnad Ahmad); “Cut off only the foreskin [outer fold of skin over the clitoris; the prepuce] but do not cut off deeply [i.e., the clitoris 4  The Hadith is a record of traditions or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. This collective body of Islamic traditions is revered and received as a major source of religious law and moral guidance, second only to the Quran. (Hadith. 2013. In Britanica.com. Retrieved September 1, 2013, from http://www. britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/251132/Hadith.) 5  A fatwa is a formal legal opinion given by an Islamic legal authority (Mufti) in answer to an inquiry by a private individual or judge (Fatwa, 2013).

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itself ], for this is brighter for the face [of the girl] and more favorable with the husband” (Mu`jam alTabarânî al-Awsat6); “A woman used to perform circumcision in Medina. The Prophet (peace be upon him) said to her: Do not cut severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband” (Book 41, Number 52517). Religious authorities in countries where female circumcision is common encourage the practice by conveying to their—often illiterate—female audience that female circumcision is a religious requirement (Slack, 1988). Despite the variability in the execution of genital mutilation, each type presents health risks (e.g., bleeding and infections) and reproductive costs (e.g., infertility). It is unlikely that damaging or removing mechanically, neurally, and endocrinologically specialized, healthy sexual tissue is neutral with respect to its evolved function (Wilson, 2008). For men, if genital mutilation impairs success in sperm competition (i.e., when sperm from two or more males simultaneously occupy a female’s reproductive tract and compete to fertilize ova) by affecting sperm delivery (see Wilson, 2008, c.f. Morris & Krieger, 2013), we expect an associated fitness benefit somewhere else. In certain circumstances, it might advantage men to reduce the functionality of their own sperm competition adaptations (e.g., penis anatomy, ejaculate adjustment by way of arousal, and even reduced female partner satisfaction) if these men secured some other benefit that would aid them later, and without which they would be worse off. Wilson (2008) argues that there is an underlying and common function to genital mutilation: providing hard-to-fake signals of compliance with the social assignment of reproduction. Conflict over paternity may favor men who invest preferentially in spouses with female genital mutilation and cooperate preferentially with peers who submit to male genital mutilation (Wilson, 2008). Wilson generated and tested several predictions from this functional, sexual conflict hypothesis of male and female genital mutilation. He found that male genital mutilation was associated with polygynous societies at high risk for extramarital sex, but that male genital mutilation appeared to reduce this risk. He also found that male genital mutilation is performed by a nonrelative in public view of other men, and that a genitally mutilated man gains access to social and 6  Al-Tabarani, quoted in Al-Albani (1983; see also Keller, 1997). 7  http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/ abudawud/041-sat.php.

sexual privileges that may outweigh the costs associated with genital mutilation. Wilson’s findings suggest that genital mutilations may impair the evolved capacity for extra-pair fertilizations, thereby decreasing paternity uncertainty and reproductive conflict. Benefits of trust and social investment from powerful, married men outweigh the costs of genital mutilation.

Honor-Killing

Honor-killing is the murder of a family member (typically, a woman) by one or more other members (typically, men) because the individual has brought shame to the family by “straying from the righteous path of God.” Women have been killed for refusing to enter a pre-arranged marriage (e.g., Jafri, 2013a; Mirza, 2008), committing adultery (actual or alleged), being in a relationship that displeased their relative (e.g., Spolar, 2005), or being raped (often by another family member; e.g., Mirza, 2008). The observed male-bias in killers is consistent with men’s general tendency to be more violent than women, and with fathers being more prone to violence than mothers due to paternity uncertainty. The methods of honor-killing often reflect “overkill” (e.g., using excessive methods, more than would be reasonably necessary to kill) and often include bludgeoning, mutilation, burning, and dozens of stabbings per victim (Chesler, 2009, 2010; Mirza, 2008). Intense torture and overkill involved in honorkilling suggest that there may be a unique psychology to honor-killing, requiring a special justification (i.e., religious motivation8). An especially strong emotional motivation may be needed to commit an honor-killing because there are powerful, evolved psychological mechanisms designed to care for, and protect, offspring or other kin in most circumstances. Because of these strong kin-focused psychological mechanisms, honor-killing appears deeply counterintuitive: Parents, siblings, cousins, and uncles killing their kin is an evolutionary paradox. However, as is the case with genital mutilation, there may be associated long-term reproductive benefits—to the killers. Overkill methods suggest that there may also be an important communicative element to honor-killing, such as upholding the honor, and therefore the status, of men within their family and community. If a man’s reproductive success depends on his (and his family’s) status and 8  A literature search yielded not even one case of an honor killing that was not committed by a religious adherent and for a nonreligious reason.

reputation, and these are jeopardized by another family member (e.g., his daughter is accused of having sex before marriage, besmirching the father’s and family’s reputation; Quran 24:2, 17:32), then it is expected that a man will attempt to repair his own and his family’s reputation, sometimes by any means necessary. If honor-killing is an acceptable practice in the community, honor-killing is a socially sanctioned way of restoring a man’s social reputation and status. Several passages in the Bible and the Quran justify, and even require, honor-killings: • Deuteronomy 22:13–21: If a man decides that he “hates” his wife, he can claim she wasn’t a virgin when they were married. If her father can’t produce the “tokens of her virginity” (bloody sheets), “then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die.” • Deuteronomy 22:23–24: “If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her [t]hen ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die.” In other words, if an engaged virgin is raped in the city and does not cry out loud enough, then the men of the city must stone her to death. • Ezekiel 23:1–49: Two sisters who were guilty of committing “whoredoms in their youth” by pressing their breasts and bruising “the teats of their virginity.” One of the sisters “played the harlot” as she “doted her lovers . . . . Thus she committed her whoredoms with them, with all them that were the chosen men of Assyria and with all on whom she doted. With all their idols she defiled herself. Neither left she her whoredoms brought from Egypt; for in her youth they lay with her, and they bruised the breasts of her virginity and poured their whoredom upon her,” etc. As a punishment (they “executed judgment upon her”), one sister was stripped, her children were taken from her, and she was killed with a sword. The other sister was tortured by cutting her nose and ears off, and she was made to “pluck off ” her own breasts, then she was raped and mutilated, and finally, stoned to death. • Leviticus 21:9—“And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.” • Quran 4:15, 34 (see examples in the section “Wife Beating, Killing, and Raping”). • Quran 24:2 “The fornicatress and the fornicator, flog each of them with a hundred Selected to Kill in His Name

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stripes. Let not pity withhold you in their case . . . if you believe in Allah . . . [a]nd let a party of the believers witness their punishment. (This punishment is for unmarried persons guilty of the above crime, but if married persons commit it [illegal sex], the punishment is to stone them to death, according to Allah’s Law).” • Mirza (2008) reviews several relevant sahih hadiths9 that include statements such as: “No one commits adultery while still remaining a believer, for faith is more precious unto Allah than such an evil act!,” “A woman came to the prophet and asked for purification by seeking punishment . . . [She] admitted she was pregnant . . . When the day arrived for the child to take solid food, Muhammad handed the child over to the community . . . [H]e had given command over her and she was put in a hole up to her breast, he ordered the people to stone her. Khalid b. alWalid came forward with a stone which he threw at her head, and when the blood spurted on her face he cursed her.” According to these religious texts, adulterers and fornicators lose their rights and human value, bring great shame on their families, and should be punished with flogging, mutilation, and stoning to death. The victims’ children suffer as well, eliminating any reproductive success that forbidden copulation might otherwise offer. Further, the punishment for such actions is public and difficult to fake. Honor-killers will often announce their actions and goals publicly to the community. For example, after the 16-year-old Jordanian girl Kifaya Husayn was raped by her 21-year-old brother, her uncles persuaded another brother that she must die because she had disgraced their family by being raped. This 32-year-old brother bound her to a chair, told her to recite an Islamic prayer, and then slashed her throat. He then ran out into the street, waving the bloody knife, crying: “I have killed my sister to cleanse my honor” (Choo, 1998). It is important to note that the goal of honorkillings, unlike intimate partner violence for example, is to save or repair the honor and reputation of the victim’s family, rather than for animosity or wealth (Mirza, 2008). Honor-killers often love the girl as their own (daughter, sister, niece, etc.), but commit the killing because they view it to be their moral obligation to save their family honor, erase 9  Used in classification of the hadiths, it is the highest level of authenticity given to a narration. (Sahih, 2013).

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damaging stigmas, and restore their religious piety (Mirza, 2008). Following the honor-killing, family members usually mourn and cry for the victim (even the killers themselves), but feel their actions are justified and necessary for all involved parties (Mirza, 2008).

Child Abuse and Filicide

Children are at the greatest risk of physical abuse and murder (filicide) if they live with a stepparent, even after controlling for potential confounds such as socioeconomic status (Daly & Wilson, 1985, 1988, 1998; Wilson, Daly, & Weghorst, 1980). This increased risk of abuse and filicide by stepparents has been documented across diverse cultures (Bjorklund & Pellegrini, 2002; Daly & Wilson, 1988, 1998). The risk of abuse and filicide is greater for children living with a stepfather than a stepmother (e.g., Daly & Wilson, 1994; WeekesShackelford & Shackelford, 2004). Accordingly, it is expected that among cases of religiously motivated child abuse and filicide, a higher proportion of perpetrators will be stepparents rather than genetic parents, and that fathers will be more violent than mothers. Because stepparents are already motivated to harm—or care less for—genetically unrelated children (stepchildren), stepparents might exhibit violent behavior more intensely if they have religious justification. Religious texts offer (violent) guidelines about parenting: • Exodus, 21:15: “And he that smiteth his father, or his mother, shall be surely put to death.” • Exodus, 21:17: “And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.” • 2 Kings 2:23–24: “[A]nd as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.” • Proverbs, 13:24: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” • Proverbs, 19:18: “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.” • Proverbs, 22:15: “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.” • Proverbs, 23:13–14: “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the

rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.” • Proverbs, 29:15: “The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.” • Hebrews, 11:17: “By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son.”

emotional consequences. It is expected that religiously motivated infanticide might occur in similar conditions (i.e., when she is young, poor, and unpartnered), and perhaps at a higher frequency, due to increased (religious) social acceptance and support for the mother after the fact. It would also be expected that some infanticidal mothers provide explicitly religious explanations for the killings.

The Bible instructs parents to beat their children with rods, and even kill them, as a sign of parental love, discipline, salvation, and devotion to God. It may also be reasonable to expect higher rates of child-directed violence in religious (vs. nonreligious) contexts. Further, high-risk situations such as cohabiting with a stepparent may be even riskier in religious (vs. nonreligious) contexts. Religiously motivated child-directed violence is underreported (e.g., there is no national statistic of this phenomenon), perhaps because it is more acceptable to use physical punishments in religious communities (Heimlich, 2011). For example, Ellison and Bradshaw (2009) found that conservative Protestants spank their children more frequently than do other Christian believers, and that religious beliefs (in a hierarchical God and in Hell) are associated with differences in punishment. Religiously motivated child-directed maltreatment, including physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and medical neglect, is an urgent yet understudied social issue (for a review, see Heimlich, 2011). Another context-specific risk for child-directed violence is maternal infanticide: a biological mother killing her infant. High-risk factors include a mother’s young age, low paternal investment prospects (e.g., a mother is unpartnered or with a man other than the infant’s father), a mother’s perception of the infant’s low-quality (e.g., illness, deformities), and her assessment of unfavorable child-rearing circumstances (e.g., multiple births, economic hardships) (Daly & Wilson, 1988). Young, poor, unmarried mothers are most likely to kill their newborns (e.g., d’Orban, 1979; Putkonen, WeizmannHenelius, Collander, Santtila, & Eronen, 2007)—a pattern that reflects unconscious, evolved decisionrules in women regarding resource allocation strategies (Daly & Wilson, 1988). However, even in societies where infanticide is less condemned, killing an infant can be extremely upsetting for the mother (Daly & Wilson, 1988). Although evolved psychological mechanisms influence infanticide, having a proximate justification (i.e., religious justification) may facilitate the mother’s behavioral decision and

Masturbation and Birth Control

Other examples of religious doctrines exacerbating violence in contexts relevant to sexual selection are masturbation and birth control. Regarding masturbation (e.g., as a means of avoiding impregnation), in the book of Genesis (38:8–10), Judah tells Onan to “go in unto thy brother’s wife” after the brother is killed. But, “Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and . . . when he went in unto his brother’s wife . . . he spilled it on the ground. . . . And the thing which he did displeased the Lord; wherefore he slew him also.” In other words, both masturbation and birth control are punishable by death, according to this passage. First, masturbation has been hypothesized to increase ones’ sperm-competition ability (e.g., Baker & Bellis, 1995). It therefore may be in the interest of men to condemn other men for masturbating, but practice masturbation themselves. Second, if men secure their exclusive sexual access to their partner (as religious rules explicitly instruct), then we expect them to object to any form of contraception because the likelihood of cuckoldry is low and, therefore, their investment in their partner’s offspring is more likely to provide replicative benefits rather than costs.

War and Terrorism

Religion promotes and justifies violence toward out-groups. The following religious passages provide guidelines for behavior during war. Religious texts instruct the soldiers to kill all the men, children, and non-virgin women. Young, virgin women, on the other hand, should be raped and acquired as sex slaves. Men possess evolved psychological mechanisms that motivate the elimination of their competitors, young and old (especially out-group members) and to copulate with fertile women. The following religious passages provide justification for such behavior: • Numbers 31:1–54: Under God’s direction, Moses’s army defeats the Midianites. They kill all the adult males, but take the women and children captive. When Moses learns that they left some alive, he angrily says, “Have you saved all the Selected to Kill in His Name

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women alive? Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” • Leviticus 20:13–14: In the cities that God “delivers into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones . . . shalt thou take unto thyself.” • Zechariah 14:1–2: “God will make ‘all nations’ fight against Jerusalem. The women will be ‘ravished’ and half its people enslaved.” • Judges 21:11–23: “Ye shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that hath lain by man. And they found among the inhabitants of Jabeshgilead four hundred young virgins, that had known no man by lying with any male: and they brought them unto the camp. . . . [A]nd they [the Israelites] gave them [the Benjamites] wives which they had saved alive . . . and yet so they sufficed them [the Benjamites] not.” To complete the number of virgins (one per Benjamite), they were instructed to ambush “the daughters of Shiloh [when they] come out to dance in dances, then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife of the daughters of Shiloh. And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them wives, according to their number, of them that danced, whom they caught.” The last passage, in particular, is explicit about the conditions under which kidnapping and raping women of an out-group is required: when there is a shortage of reproductively valuable women. Sex-ratio is an important indicator of increased sperm competition risk (e.g., greater number of potential rival males), and men are expected to be especially violent when sexual access to reproductive-aged women is limited. If men are capable of severe violence when attempting to secure mating opportunities, we should not be surprised at the extremities of violence when promised the ultimate, supernatural reward: dozens of beautiful virgins at their disposal. The Quran promises the ultimate reward for participating in terrorism, specifically (including suicide-terrorism; see Sela & Shackelford, 2014): • 3:151–157: “We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. . . . O you who believe! Be not like those who disbelieve (hypocrites) and who say to their brethren when they travel through the earth or go out to fight: ‘If they had stayed with us, they would not have died or been killed,’ . . . It is 292

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Allah that gives life and causes death. And if you are killed or die in the Way of Allah, forgiveness and mercy from Allah are far better than all that they amass (of worldly wealths).” • 4:74: “Let those (believers) who sell the life of this world for the Hereafter fight in the Cause of Allah, and whoso fights in the Cause of Allah, and is killed or gets victory, We shall bestow on him a great reward.” • 4:91: “You will find others that wish to have security from you and security from their people. Every time they are sent back to temptation, they yield thereto. If they withdraw not from you, nor offer you peace, nor restrain their hands, take (hold of ) them and kill them wherever you find them. In their case, We have provided you with a clear warrant against them.” • 59:2: “Allah’s (Torment) reached them [disbelievers] from a place whereof they expected it not, and He cast terror into their hearts so that they destroyed their own dwellings with their own hands and the hands of the believers.” • 4:95: “Allah has preferred in grades those who strive hard and fight with their wealth and their lives above those who sit (at home). Unto each, Allah has promised good (Paradise), but Allah has preferred those who strive hard and fight, above those who sit (at home) by a huge reward.” • 37:40–48: “the chosen slaves of Allah [i.e., the true believers of Islamic Monotheism)] For them there will be a known provision [in Paradise], . . . In the Gardens of delight [Paradise] . . . [B]eside them will be Qdsirdt-at-Tarf [chaste females (wives), restraining their glances (desiring none except their husbands)], with wide and beautiful eyes.” • 44:51–54: The pious (faithful Muslims) “will be in place of Security (Paradise). . . . And we shall marry them to Hur (very fair females created by Allah as such, not from the offspring of Adam, with intense black irises of their eyes and intense white sclera) with wide, lovely eyes.” The descriptive details of young, beautiful, virgin women with healthy-looking eyes that grant exclusive sexual access to the devoted Muslim who fights with his life for Allah are consistent with men’s evolved mating preferences for women (e.g., Conroy-Beam, Buss, Pham, & Shackelford, 2015)— cues indicating youth and fertility.

Future Directions

An evolutionary psychological perspective has been fruitful in identifying the evolved psychological mechanisms—and their relevant contextual

inputs—that facilitate violent behavior. A scientific appreciation of the proximate role of religious beliefs as a moderating factor of violence is crucial to understanding and, ultimately, minimizing violence. We have provided preliminary theoretical groundwork of how religion motivates, exacerbates, and justifies violent behavior. Such an endeavor, however, is only useful if it guides new avenues of empirical study. What follow are some examples of how an evolutionary psychological perspective, in general, and a sexual selection framework, specifically, can be profitably applied to future research investigating religiously motivated violence. Several examples discussed in this chapter relate to reputation and honor of men, in particular. It has previously been suggested that “cultures of honor” contribute to the differences in regional violence (e.g., in the United States; Nisbett & Cohen, 1996). Nisbett and colleagues have speculated that the psychological mechanisms underpinning cultures of honor may have been theft of property. Using a sexual selection framework, however, offers a different explanation: Placing cultures of honor in a mating context, Shackelford (2005) suggested that the adaptive problem may have been theft of wives, more so than property. Psychological mechanisms of mate retention may be exacerbated in displays of culture of honor behaviors. If manifest behavioral indicators of a culture of honor are the output of evolved psychological mate retention mechanisms, then the extent to which rates of female infidelity remain higher in the southern United States than elsewhere in the nation may account for the persistence of honor culture in the present day (Shackelford, 2005). In addition to the social mechanisms identified in recent research—for example, collective representations that condone violence, such as laws (Cohen, 1996) and media representations (Cohen & Nisbett, 1997), and institutional nonstigmatization of violence (Cohen & Nisbett, 1997)—regional differences in female infidelity rates might also account for the persistence of a culture of honor in the present-day southern United States. There are also known regional differences in religiosity (Newport, 2013; Putnam & Campbell, 2010), whereby religion may facilitate the persistence of cultures of honor. The argument presented in this chapter posits that religion motivates and exacerbates violence by exploiting preexisting psychological mechanisms. Correlational and experimental studies could provide evidence for this argument. For example, individuals of different monotheistic religions could be compared to atheists in regard to endorsements of

violence, particularly male violence against women, such as the use of sexual coercion and physical violence in romantic relationships. Experimental research could compare an individual’s acceptance of, and justification for, male-perpetrated violence against women following experimental priming of religious beliefs or religious artifacts (vs. neutral controls). Researchers studying group conflict may also benefit from the inclusion of religiosity in their investigations. For example, one could investigate whether in-group prosociality and the perpetration of out-group violence increases as a consequence of religious priming by employing aggression paradigms—such as noise blasts toward another participant—in the research lab. We primarily focused on men’s religiously motivated violent behaviors, but women also perpetrate violence. Although female aggression is more often indirect and social, rather than direct and physical (e.g., Archer, 2004; Björkqvist 1994; Campbell, 1999), in some contexts such as infanticide, women are the primary perpetrators of violence. When examining the influence of religion on female-perpetrated violence, it is important to consider the adaptive problems women have faced over evolutionary history with reference to sexual selection and parental investment, and the possible (violent) solutions to these problems. Religious women might be motivated to execute violence under similar conditions as nonreligious women but, perhaps, to a greater degree. Do religious communities excuse female violence under these circumstances? Do religious texts promote female social aggression, such as gossip and derogation of other women, for not being religious or virtuous enough, as would be predicted by intrasexual competition?

Conclusion

Human violence, in general, is rarely committed arbitrarily and without reason. Violent behaviors often have an evolutionary, functional explanation (violent behaviors stemming from psychological abnormalities notwithstanding). Violent behavior is most likely to occur in contexts in which, over deep evolutionary history, the potential fitness benefits of violence outweigh the potential costs. Similarly, violence committed in the name of religion is rarely arbitrary; rather, religious texts condone, or even command, violence in evolutionarily relevant contexts—including cases of infidelity, threats to one’s status, reproductive success, or fitness in general. These parallels between evolutionarily relevant contexts of violence and contexts in which religious Selected to Kill in His Name

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texts instruct violence is unlikely to be coincidental, but rather a reflection of the evolved psychological mechanisms that detect and navigate status hierarchies in social species (Garcia, 2015). The status of religious texts as a moral guide to life provides justification for particular forms of violence, which may serve as additional input to the suite of evolved psychological mechanisms that ultimately guide behavior. Evolved psychological mechanisms that facilitate acts of violence—given specific environmental inputs—do not function in a vacuum. Humans have evolved psychological mechanisms for cooperation as well, and we should expect conflict between mechanisms that facilitate violence and those that facilitate cooperation (Kurzban, 2010). Although the complex interactions between evolved psychological mechanisms are only beginning to be understood, it is probable that mechanisms promoting violence must sometimes “compete” with mechanisms that deter violence. If religious texts and beliefs serve as inputs for decision-making, these inputs may increase the likelihood of violence—for example, toward women and out-group members—in the relevant contexts. There remains a great deal to be understood regarding the interaction of religious beliefs and evolved psychological mechanisms. What is clear, however, is that we cannot afford to ignore the role that religion plays in exacerbating, motivating, and justifying violence. An evolutionary psychological perspective can provide a foundational framework to better understand how and why religiously motivated violence occurs.

Acknowledgments

Portions of this chapter are based on works by Sela, Shackelford, and Liddle (2015, 2016).

References

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CH A PTE R

19

Supernatural Beliefs and the Evolution of Cooperation

Pierrick Bourrat and Hugo Viciana

Abstract Studies have found an association between the content of beliefs in the supernatural and increased cooperation in social groups. “High Moralizing Gods”, “fear of supernatural punishment”, and “supernatural monitoring” have been claimed to permit greater social cohesion through the specific epistemic engagement they produce in the minds of those who hold certain religious beliefs. However, the evolutionary pathways linking these religious features with cooperation remain unclear. Focusing on the example of belief in supernatural sanctioning, this chapter delineates different mechanisms by which beliefs in supernatural entities could, in principle, lead to greater cohesion and emphasizes the different predictions each evolutionary mechanism affords. It thus reassesses several studies that have been interpreted as supporting or as failing to support one or some of these cultural evolutionary processes. Finally, it proposes several avenues by which research addressing the link between cooperation and specific forms of belief in supernatural entities could be strengthened. Key Words:  prosociality supernatural punishment, religious, belief, vigilance, adaptationism, ­cooperation, Big God, High God

Background: New Wine in Old Bottles?

Philosophical debate regarding the utility of specific religious beliefs has existed for almost as long as philosophy itself. Whereas Plato (427–348 bce) thought that certain false supernatural myths could anchor social harmony in the perfect republic, other philosophers such as Blaise Pascal (1629–1662) concluded that belief in the Christian God was a good bet for the individual, even if the belief happened to be false—an idea known as Pascal’s Wager. During the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Baron D’Holbach and Denis Diderot rejected the “false religion” that injected fear in the masses for the exclusive benefit of priesthood while pleading for a decoupling of morality and particular religions. On the contrary, other public intellectuals such as Edmund Burke (1729–1797) considered morality and a specific form of religious belief inseparable. With the advent of scientific anthropology and sociology, opposing sides also formed. In one camp,

those such as Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) emphasized the social utility of the more external, ritualistic components of religious forms, whereas others such as Edward Tylor (1832–1917) highlighted what, in their view, was a weak link between morality and religion in most preagricultural societies, affirming that even if certain specific contents of religious beliefs encouraged morality, other beliefs such as those associated with ancient animism were mostly “unmoral” (Tylor, 1871/2010, p. 326). It was only during the second half of the 20th century that this issue was addressed through more systematic means and empirical research. Combined with an evolutionary approach, empirical research allows for a detailed formulation of what are, in principle, falsifiable hypotheses. An adaptationist methodology (Andrews, Gangestad, & Matthews, 2002) can be put to use to confirm or disconfirm functionalist accounts. The positive effects of holding certain beliefs on the spread of these ideas must 297

then be scrutinized. Such corroboration or falsification of hypotheses can only be attained by assessing a number of possible mechanisms of diffusion and maintenance in the population. Evolutionary psychology offers a framework for formulating hypotheses as well as new tools for testing them (Pinker, 2011). This research strategy has already achieved some progress in understanding the social effects of beliefs in the supernatural. However, as we shall see, important aspects may need further work requiring the use of innovative methods.

Evolutionary Accounts of Religious Belief Based on Cooperation

Belief in some form of supernatural entities is a cultural phenomenon found in every human society (Benedict, 1938; Brown, 1991; Murdock, 1945), as are moralistically enforced norms and rules (Brown, 1991, p. 139; Turiel, 2002). In recent years, a body of work has attempted to provide an evolutionary account of the origins and maintenance of these phenomena. Whereas a prominent account on the evolution of religion considers that beliefs in supernatural agents are mainly a byproduct of human cognition, others have presented hypotheses in which such beliefs are regarded as some form of adaptation, at the level of the individual or the group (Bourrat, 2015c; Viciana & Bourrat, 2011). The role of “supernatural monitoring,” “supernatural punishment,” “Big Gods,” and “High Moralizing Gods” in the evolution of cooperation has received particular attention (Atkinson & Bourrat, 2011; Bourrat, 2015c; Johnson & Krüger, 2004; Norenzayan, 2013; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007; Watts et al., 2015). Several studies claim that the greater prevalence or activation of these beliefs may predict greater cooperation. However, several questions remain. Are certain forms of beliefs in the supernatural an adaptation linked to increased cooperation? Or are they epiphenomenally linked with cooperation (i.e., their specific content has no meaningful causal impact on social cohesion and the enforcement of morality)? And how can a cultural evolutionary perspective inform research on this topic? The anthropologist Evans-Pritchard wrote: Generalizations about “religion” are discreditable. They are always too ambitious and take account of only a few of the facts. [. . .] Sweeping generalizations reached by dialectical analysis of concepts . . . [should be] abandoned if favour of limited conclusions reached by inductive analysis of observed facts. (1954; quoted in Swanson, 1964, p. viii)

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Here we want to depart slightly from this type of admonishment by considering the details of some potentially valuable theoretical “generalizations.” It is worth looking at these generalizations in the context of the evidence presented in a series of empirical studies. To complete Evans-Pritchard’s statement, one could argue, paraphrasing Immanuel Kant, that theoretical generalizations without ethnographic and sociological analysis are empty, but ethnographic analysis without theoretical generalizations is blind. Evolutionary cultural adaptationism can play an important role in adequately specifying and assessing a number of hypotheses. Importantly, although there are several mechanisms by which beliefs in supernatural entities could increase cooperation, these mechanisms are not clearly differentiated in the literature (for a notable exception, see Schloss & Murray, 2011). This is problematic because, once differentiated, these mechanisms lead to unique predictions regarding the actual processes at play. As a result, not distinguishing these processes obscures the underlying causal and evolutionary mechanisms operating between beliefs in the supernatural and cooperation.1 In this chapter, we distinguish different mechanisms by which beliefs in supernatural entities could have increased cooperation and been selectively advantageous. We review some of the evidence for and against hypotheses about supernatural beliefs as causally responsible for increased cooperation. We analyze these results with the theoretical underpinnings of adaptive evolution, but also with alternative hypotheses. Rather than presenting an exhaustive overview of the literature, we review a few examples mostly focusing on the exploration of the fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis in relation to cooperation. This helps illustrate why the theoretical distinctions we propose are important. Finally, we suggest a few avenues that, if pursued, would permit a better understanding of the links between cooperation and specific beliefs in the supernatural.

Terminology

If we are to consider the hypothesis that religious beliefs evolve as a result of their effect(s) on 1  Several of the hypotheses about beliefs in supernatural entities make predictions not only for large-scale societies but also for smaller-scale ones—something that is not adequately appreciated. One of us has also published work on how the predictions may differ at the collective level and at the individual level concerning cooperation related to religious beliefs. Both types of predictions are not equally supported (see Bourrat, Atkinson et al., 2011).

c­ ooperation, we want to be precise about the nature of the hypothesis. Here we focus on the different hypotheses surrounding supernatural sanctioning and increased cooperation. Thus, before entering into the heart of the matter, we need working definitions of the terms “belief,” “supernatural punishment,” “supernatural agent,” “god,” “Big God,” and “High Moralizing God,” because each one of these concepts has been used in work evaluating the link between supernatural belief and cooperation. There is overlap among these terms, which is one reason why some authors have seemingly used some of them interchangeably.2 We make these distinctions for the practical purpose of using terms consistently and as a point of anchor throughout the chapter. Some might disagree with the particular categorization outlined in this chapter. What is most important here, however, is consistency; only through the consistent use of concepts can hypotheses be clearly constructed in terms of falsifiability. We begin with the concept of “belief.” “Belief ” is both a widely used concept and also a generally poorly defined one (Kurzban, 2011). It is sometimes noted that the usual understanding of belief is full of philosophical paradoxes. What one person really believes can be difficult to pinpoint if one has too loose a concept of “belief,” not only because one person’s beliefs can differ from what this person openly claims (as in the phenomena of duplicity, excessive politeness, or lying; see Kuran, 1997) but also because it may not be obvious what one’s beliefs imply. For instance, does a belief in numbers and common rules of addition and subtraction specifically imply that one believes 327 minus 52 equals 275? If Lois believes that Superman has rescued her, does she believe then that Clark Kent is a superhero? Beliefs, however, are normally considered to have content—that is, they reflect the understanding of only a specific aspect (and not others) in the perception of a given reality. The “morning star” and the “evening star” describe different aspects of the same object, namely Venus, even though some ancient Greeks still believed them to be different objects. According to recent research in developmental psychology, children can minimally understand this 2  The reader might think at first that proposing a sharp distinction between each of these terms is largely a semantic question that has no real conceptual or empirical traction. As this chapter makes clear, distinguishing between these concepts is crucial to tease apart the mechanisms linking beliefs in supernatural entities and cooperation.

“aspectuality” associated with others’ beliefs (also called intensionality) at least as early as 4–5 years old (Rakoczy, Bergfeld, Schwarz, & Fizke, 2015). Nevertheless, the existence of multiple cognitive phenomena that can be associated with the psychological concept of belief suggests that there is not one single reality that corresponds to a belief (Gendler, 2008). For the purposes of this chapter, we consider a belief to be any mental representation or brain process that can be ascribed some particular content or aspectuality in relation to other cognitive processes such as memory, communication, or ­decision-making.3 Regarding the term “entities,” we mean here both agents (e.g., God) and nonagential objects or concepts (e.g., Hell). Concerning the notion of “supernatural punishment,” we consider in this chapter that it represents a punishment that results from the causal powers of an entity that is nonobservable. For example, going to hell because one does not comply with some moral doctrine is considered a supernatural punishment. One subset of supernatural punishments comprises supernatural punishments professed by supernatural agents such as gods, spirits, and ancestors, who can be defined following Boyer (2001, p. 6) as nonobservable4 agents with some ascribed causal powers. Closely related to the notion of supernatural punishment is the notion of supernatural monitoring. We consider that supernatural monitoring represents the monitoring of one’s behavior or thoughts by at least one supernatural agent. The notion of “supernatural agents” is broad and includes ghosts, gods, Big God, and High God. Ancestors, spirits, or Santa Claus are all supernatural agents, and believing in them might prima facie be the result of some evolutionary process one might attempt to explain. In his 2013 book, Ara Norenzayan gives an important place to what he calls Big Gods. By contrast to what one might call “minor gods,” Big 3  Particularly relevant here is the possibility that one or several of these mental representations, or brain processes with ascribed content, can have a causal role in increasing the probability that individuals act cooperatively. 4  This is a working definition for the purpose of this article. Prima facie, the important distinction to note here is that between nonobservable and nonobserved. Germs and other natural entities can be observed even if they are not observed. Supernatural entities here are defined as not objectively observable. To the extent that they were objectively observable, they would then be, according to this definition, natural entities. For the similarities and differences between the cognition of natural nonobserved entities such as germs, and supernatural nonobservable entities such as spirits, see Harris (2012, Ch. 8).

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Gods are, according to Norenzayan (2013, pp.  7–8), “powerful, omniscient, interventionist, morally concerned gods.” Attributing these properties to Big Gods implies that such gods could not be easily fooled or mocked, as some more minor gods are in different societies. Their assumed “bargaining power” is thus stronger than that of minor deities. It should be noted that the notion of a Big God corresponds roughly to the notion of a High Moralizing God, which is the term used in the Ethnographic Atlas (EA) (Murdock, 1967a) and the  Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) (Murdock & White, 1969), on which many of the claims linking cooperation and beliefs in supernatural agents rest (see below, Section 4). In the EA and the SCCS, a High Moralizing God is defined as a type of High God, that is, “a spiritual being who is believed to have created all reality and/or to be its ultimate governor, even though his/her sole act was to create other spirits who, in turn, created or control the natural world” (Murdock, 1967b, p. 160), and is specifically supportive of human morality (Roes & Raymond, 2003). Most predictions about the role of beliefs in supernatural agents, however, do not explicitly link the fact of believing in one single creator of the natural world and human cooperation.

Searching for the Ethnographic “Big Picture”

Although many (perhaps most) in the scientific study of religion have followed Durkheim (1912/1979) in putting special emphasis on the more ritualistic aspects of religious forms (e.g., Sosis & Kiper, 2014), the content of specific religious beliefs has also been intensely studied in relation to its effects on social cooperation. An important body of evidence has been produced in this domain. Perhaps the most influential and pioneering work in this respect was that of Guy Swanson. Swanson’s The Birth of the Gods (1960) sought to corroborate a number of hypotheses on the spread and nature of beliefs in the supernatural with data from the wide ethnographic record as presented in one of the first versions of Murdock’s (1957) “World Ethnographic Sample.” Contrary to Edward Tylor’s earlier stance (1871), Swanson found that the supernatural and moral domains were not entirely unconnected in small-scale societies. However, perhaps his most enduring result (also replicated a number of times: Davis, 1971; Peregrine, 1996; Sanderson & Roberts, 2008; Stark, 2001; Underhill, 1975) was the finding that “High Gods” were 300

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­ isproportionately found in societies with three or d more layers of hierarchical structure in terms of distinct “sovereign groups” (e.g., the household, the village, the tribe). Of these societies, however, only a fraction of them presented High Gods that were also moralizing gods (some of these gods being relatively uninterested in humans). Are religious beliefs, however, necessarily connected with moral sanctioning, even when disconnected from the idea of a High God? The short answer is “no.” Christopher Boehm (2008) conducted an analysis of 43 ethnographies that index the behavior of 18 hunter-gatherer societies specifically selected to be relatively representative of the Late Pleistocene “way of life.” He found that supernatural sanctioning of actions often regarded as immoral behavior (e.g., lying, cheating, stealing, murder) was present in all 18 societies. However, none of these behavioral categories was condemned by supernatural means in all 18 societies. In fact, only “incest” was supernaturally sanctioned in at least half of these societies, closely followed by “murder,” which was condemned by supernatural sanction in 8 of the 18 societies. In striking opposition to this, 13 societies had some form of supernatural sanctioning related to food. Other forms of supernatural sanctioning of taboos and rituals had similar frequencies. High Moralizing Gods, concerned with human social life in general, have been linked to a series of social and ecological characteristics in a number of correlational studies. Studies searching for the ecological factors affecting the differential survival of religious beliefs generally work around the hypothesis that certain religious beliefs may positively affect the way that populations cope with environmental stress. This creates a feedback loop by way of which the belief persists in the population. They follow the work of John Snarey (1996), who found that among societies with coded data in the SCCS, those located in environments of water scarcity were more likely to profess beliefs in a supreme deity concerned with moral wrongdoing. More recently, Botero et al. (2014) modeled the effect of a broader range of ecological variables on the presence or absence of belief in moralizing gods in different societies while replicating the main finding by Snarey. Among those studies searching for social determinants, Roes and Raymond (2003) found a statistically significant 0.29 Kendall’s τ correlation between society size and presence of belief in High Moralizing Gods among the societies included in the SCCS (but see the section “Cognitive

Causal Mechanisms” below) for more on the variable “number of jurisdictional hierarchies beyond the local community” mentioned earlier and which they used as a proxy for society size). Dominic Johnson (2005), after controlling for world region and type of religion and applying Bonferroni corrections for multiple testing, analyzed the SCCS and found that the number of jurisdictional hierarchy levels beyond the community level and the lending of money were positively correlated with the presence of a High Moralizing God in a given society. Interestingly, he did not find a positive correlation with the variable “compliance with society norms,” although this variable has been deemed unreliable. Neither was there a statistically significant relationship with the variable “loyalty to the local community.” Using the SCCS, Bourrat, Atkinson & Dunbar (2011) failed to find correlations between belief in broad supernatural punishment (where they included belief in High Moralizing Gods, but also other variables, such as belief in witches, or the evil-eye) and ethnographically recorded measures of high levels of individual norm compliance (see the  section “Cognitive Causal Mechanisms” for a distinction between individual cooperation and ­ ­collective-level cooperation). Others have claimed to find stronger support for the idea that a certain type of religious belief is specifically connected to the moral order. Rodney Stark (2001), using data from the 1990–1991 wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) and his own theological analysis of the importance of a personal God in different contemporary world cultures, found that in those societies in which the importance of a personal God (as opposed to an impersonal force or other theological constructs) is more present, those respondents that affirmed that God was more important in their lives tended to condemn more strongly certain actions, such as buying a stolen good, failing to report damage caused to a parked car, or ingesting marijuana. Interestingly, he found that the self-reported importance of God in one’s life was a more predictive factor than church attendance (which generally failed to reach statistical significance). Atkinson and Bourrat (2011) found a similar, stronger pattern when looking at the aggregate data of five waves of the WVS across 87 countries (n = 355,298). In their study, beliefs in supernatural concepts such as Heaven, Hell, and a personal God (as opposed to an impersonal spirit or life force) were associated with stronger moral ­condemnation of actions. The correlation remained significant after controlling for region, level of e­ ducation, type

of religion, and frequency of attendance at religious services.5 These studies, however, are correlational and, for the most part, confront one famous difficulty in the study of human history—the so-called Galton’s problem (Naroll, 1965). Francis Galton highlighted that it is not possible to infer ecological causality from observed cultural patterns if one does not first exclude the influence of a simpler form of cultural diffusion in explaining these patterns.6 Whereas some of the authors of the aforementioned studies controlled for world region in their statistical modeling, this is still a crude proxy for absence of cultural contact. In fact, the epistemological challenge that Galton’s problem presents—namely, excluding all possibility of contact as a previous stage to test the model—may be impossible to satisfy in all but a few cases. A recent study in Austronesia introduced Bayesian phylogenetic methods to control for patterns in the direction of the appearance of moralistic supernatural sanctioning (Watts et al., 2015). They found that one of the reasons why complex societies have High Moralizing Gods more often may be because they have had more chances to enter into exchanges of their surplus with monotheistic Muslim societies, from which they would have borrowed their concept of a High God through a process analogous to what linguists call “calquing.” Studies using self-report from large social surveys confront the additional problem of basing what they take to be a measure of prosociality from self-report. However, it is an important point that can be defended, both on conceptual and empirical grounds, that it is not the same to condemn one behavior and to act morally. In other words, moral action and moral judgment are two partially independent phenomena. Moral hypocrisy is a phenomenon that has been shown to be relatively prevalent in a number of famous psychological studies (see Kurzban, 2011). Furthermore, the fact that in certain (mostly Western) societies those individuals who tend to acknowledge that God is more important in their lives also tend to more strongly condemn certain antisocial actions suggests a social desirability bias—a bias which, incidentally,

5  Although see Weeden & Kurzban (2013) who found that the effect of religiosity on cooperative morals disappears when controlling for reproductive morals. 6  Famously, Galton criticized Edward Tylor’s causal linking of patrilinearity and social complexity on the basis that patrilinearity could have simply spread from earlier societies independently of the causal explanation favored by Tylor.

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has been found to be prevalent among religious people (Sedikides & Gebauer, 2009).

Evolutionary Mechanisms Polybius, the second century bce Greek observer, highly valued the attention the Roman community devoted to its dead. The honor descendants publicly devoted to their most famous ancestors in funeral processions pressured them to measure up to the progenitors’ example or else be considered unworthy. “Secret fears” (hadelois phobois) and respect for punishment experienced in or emanating from Hades, where the manes dwell, Polybius added, restrained the magistrates. Considering the civic virtue evident in Roman government, Polybius thought, the Greeks had erred in scuttling their ­religion. (Bernstein & Katz, 2010, p. 210)

The Greek historian Polybius considered Roman ­religious beliefs to be an important part of the explanation of the success of their institutions. Elaborating a plausible account of how beliefs may persist in a population as a result of their social effects requires specifying these mechanisms, including some form of feedback loops. How can cultural beliefs linked to the supernatural evolve to sustain some form of increased cooperation? Having settled the ground by showing part of the big picture linking specific beliefs in the supernatural and human morality, we now review different processes or types of evolutionary mechanisms, with different degrees of plausibility, by which certain specific beliefs in the supernatural could lead to different forms of cooperation. By cooperation, we mean here any social behavior that can be exploited by another individual (i.e., is subject to free-riding or cheating). Classically, if a cooperator pays a cost c to contribute to the production of a good b shared by the members of a community (often including the focal individual), it becomes tempting and evolutionarily advantageous to receive b without having to pay c (Bourrat, 2015d). It is thus expected that in a single community, whenever a situation of that sort arises, cheaters or “free-riders” will invade the population, which often results in overexploiting the resources and leads to a tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968). Thus, without means to stop cheaters from invading the population, cooperation at the community level will not evolve. Cheaters can be stopped from invading the population either through adaptations or byproducts of other evolutionary processes (Schloss 302

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& Murray, 2011). In any case, the means to stop cheaters from invading are sine qua non conditions for cooperation to evolve. When the population is structured such that individuals can only interact with their neighbors, it is expected that the cheater strategy will not always invade the population. A comparison between the spread of cheating and the spread of viruses may be of use here. Consider the following evolutionary mechanism by which the decrease in virulence can be explained. If a pathogen transmitted from one individual to the other exploits its host quickly and thus gains a faster growth rate, this strategy will be profitable as long as there is a sufficiently large supply of hosts (Bull, 1994). When hosts become scarce, it becomes evolutionarily advantageous to pay the cost of not reproducing and preserving the host in order to gain the benefit of having more hosts to colonize later. In what follows, we explore the space of possibilities for mechanisms that, analogously, have an effect of restraining cheaters from invading the population through certain beliefs in the supernatural.

The Crudest Hypothesis

Let us start simply. Perhaps the crudest hypothesis linking supernatural beliefs and cooperation is the view that beliefs in supernatural entities can prevent individuals from defecting if it is believed that defecting will be punished, thus inflicting a cost on the individual that defects (see Table  19.1). Since punishing is costly and therefore subject to second-order defection, transferring the cost of punishing to a supernatural entity arguably solves this problem. Obviously, as an evolutionary argument, something is lacking; this mechanism per se does not prevent first-order defection from evolving. Suppose a population in which everyone is motivated to pay c by the threat of punishment by a supernatural entity. But a new variant (a “mutant” in terms of evolutionary dynamics) who is not afraid to be punished arises. Because this individual does not pay c, its fitness is superior to other noncheating individuals. As a consequence, we can predict that it will invade the population and disrupt any large-scale social cohesion. In other words, even if the supernatural punishment hypothesis were theologically sound, it still would lack something to constitute a strategy that can evolve and sustain cooperation. By itself, the fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis is insufficient to explain why belief in supernatural entities would be associated with

Table 19.1.  Different Evolutionary Hypotheses Linking Supernatural Sanctioning and Cooperation Hypothesis

Supernatural Beliefs

Crude supernatural punishment

Belief in supernatural entities (agents, concepts, objects) Belief in supernatural entities (agents, concepts, objects)

Hypersensitive agency detection device (HADD) and theory of mind (TOM) in the case of beliefs in supernatural agents;

One byproduct–one adaptation fear of supernatural punishment

Belief in supernatural entities (agents, concepts, objects)

Sense of fairness (?) Any cognitive process that potentially can make the cost of cooperation incompressible, such as a developmental constraint HADD and TOM in the case of beliefs in supernatural agents; Cognitive process managing reputation

Double-byproduct supernatural monitoring One byproduct–one adaptation supernatural monitoring

Belief in supernatural agents

HADD and TOM

Belief in supernatural agents

HADD and TOM

Cultural group–level fear of ­supernatural punishment

Belief in supernatural entities (agents, concepts, objects)

All of the above

Double-byproduct fear of supernatural punishment

Cognitive Processes Potentially Involved

Type of Evolutionary Explanation Not an evolutionarily stable strategy Byproduct at the individual level Byproduct at the group level

Partially byproduct and partially adaptive at the individual level Byproduct at the group level Byproduct at the individual level B-product at the group level Partially byproduct and partially adaptive at the individual level Byproduct at the group level Byproduct or adaptive at the individual level (but difficult to explain) Adaptive at the group level

higher levels of cooperation, because it does not represent a solution to first-order cheating. To be considered a serious contender, it must be supplemented. One way is to suppose, as is frequently observed, that the punishment will occur in the afterlife (e.g., going to Hell for eternity or being reincarnated as a nondesirable creature). Although this solution seems appealing at first, it is fallacious. Of course, if a selection process is at work, any delayed and often nonobservable benefit or cost will have no causal effect on the selective process at work, especially if the benefit is to come after the life cycle of the individual (i.e., the “afterlife”). Again, imagine one mutant that did not believe they would be punished in the afterlife and as a result would act accordingly and not pay c. This mutant would thrive and invade the population, without being punished in the material world. Thus, cooperation under this model is not stable and does not represent a solution to first-order cheating. One of the earliest arguments of that sort can be found in the writings of Pascal in what has been called Pascal’s wager (Hacking, 2001), as mentioned earlier. Pascal’s wager does not represent, per se, an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Byproduct Hypotheses

A more sophisticated form of the fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis is to suppose that by lacking belief in supernatural punishment, an individual would necessarily incur some other cost. Such loss would be costlier than the benefit earned by not paying c, which is the cost of restraining from reaping the benefits because of the fear of supernatural punishment. For instance, if we suppose that the belief in supernatural punishment is one effect of a cognitive process among other effects (something like a byproduct) and that not holding this belief would necessarily involve other changes that would have negative fitness consequences for those individuals, then fear of supernatural punishment could represent a solution to first-order cheating.7 This would be a result of constraints imposing costs on those deviating from the specific belief in 7  In fact, under this model, when considering more than one trait, the cost c is a constraint on which it is impossible to cheat evolutionarily. This is because the benefit potentially gained by cheating would necessarily involve a cost at a later time that is greater than the benefit gained when the whole fitness of the individual is taken into account. Thus, once all costs and benefits that are inherently tied together because they originate from the same cognitive processes are taken into account, the so-called cheaters would do worse than the so-called cooperators.

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the supernatural. Thus, under this model, firstorder cheating with respect to cooperation would decrease fitness overall. Of course, one important question in regard to this type of hypothesis is whether beliefs in supernatural punishment can be byproducts of cognitive processes that have evolved for other purposes. In addition, it seems unlikely that among all the beliefs in supernatural punishment one individual can have, each one would be the result of cognitive processes that would make them impossible to forsake without disrupting their underlying cognitive processes (with overall negative individual fitness consequences). In other words, it is unlikely that each belief in supernatural punishment is the byproduct of other vital cognitive processes. However, that could be the case for some of them, at least in principle. Suppose for instance that the fear of supernatural punishment is, in some societies, part of the normal cognitive development of children, almost in a similar way as language. As a result, unlearning this particular instance of fear of supernatural punishment would be nearly impossible in the same way that unlearning a mother tongue is impossible. If this hypothesis were to be verified, it could explain why cooperation is facilitated in large-scale societies by beliefs in supernatural punishments. It would also predict, for instance, that people who started to believe in a given supernatural punishment when they were young and people who started to hold this belief as adults may not pay the same cost in forsaking the belief. This would be because acquiring the belief young would constrain adult psychology to a greater extent than acquiring the belief later. Byproduct hypotheses abound, and it may be challenging to disentangle them from purely adaptationist hypotheses. Another potential cognitive process that could satisfy a byproduct hypothesis, in the case of the belief in supernatural punishment, is to invoke the causal role played by other cognitive processes through which humans develop a sense of fairness, and which can lead them to hold certain intuitive beliefs related to supernatural punishment. Such is the case, for instance, of the intuitive beliefs about immanent justice that may be easily triggered when a person commits a morally wrong action (see Baumard & Chevallier, 2012). Such a sense of fairness or moral balance could have evolved to prevent individuals from being exploited (for an elaboration of this idea, see Baumard, André, & Sperber, 2013). However, once in place, it is possible to imagine that after observing somebody committing a

­ isdeed, beliefs in supernatural punishment may m have become a salient idea (and one that one may not be interested in running the risk of disproving). These hypotheses can find their root in the socalled byproduct theory of religion first put forward in its modern form by cognitive anthropologists such as Pascal Boyer (e.g., Boyer, 2001) and cognitive psychologists such as Justin Barrett (e.g., Barrett, 2004). We refer to this as the “classical byproduct theory of religion.” The classical byproduct theory of religion is based on the assertion that humans often come to believe in supernatural agents because of hypersensitive agency detection, which results from the asymmetric fitness cost of missing an agent in their environment (potentially very high cost) compared with believing there is an agent in the environment when there is none (quite low cost). Further, as the theory states, humans believe that supernatural agents care about human affairs because humans have a “theory of mind” (TOM) module, which assigns intentions and goals to the agents they interact with (whether supernatural or not). In the same way as missing an agent in the environment when there is one could be extremely costly, failing to attribute certain intentions to the agents one interacts with would represent a high evolutionary cost, higher than the cost of attributing intentions to agents that do not exist. Following this theory, beliefs in supernatural agents that have intentions represent nothing more than a predictable byproduct of human cognitive processes. It should be noted that the classical byproduct theory of religion and the byproduct hypotheses with respect to fearing supernatural punishment presented in the previous paragraphs need not oppose each other. It is compatible to suppose that, due to the TOM module and the hypersensitive agency detection devices (HADDs) of the brain, individuals detect agency and give them intentions in the environment (classical byproduct theory) and that, because of their intuitive sense of fairness, for instance, they come to fear being punished for misdeeds. However, these hypotheses are not equal in their predictions with regard to cooperation. In fact, the classical byproduct theory of religion does not predict that certain beliefs in the supernatural increase cooperation (Baumard & Boyer, 2013). On the other hand, under the byproduct hypothesis established on a preexisting evolved moral sense or other cognitive constraints, cooperation could, at least in principle, come for free, because fearing the  supernatural entity causally responsible for

r­eestablishing justice may result in some forms of increased cooperation.8 The putative evolutionary processes we have presented here, namely the developmental-constraint hypothesis and the sense-of-fairness hypothesis, represent only two possible cognitive processes by which cheating may be constrained by specific beliefs in supernatural punishment (by some agent or others), but there may be many other mechanisms involved. The common feature of all these mechanisms would be that the fear of supernatural punishment that transforms the short-term (or local) fitness benefit gained by cheaters into a long-term fitness cost would result from a byproduct of other cognitive mechanisms. The fear of supernatural punishment, under this generic hypothesis, is a first-order byproduct of cognitive processes evolved for other purposes, and cooperation is a secondorder byproduct of the primary byproducts. We refer to this generic hypothesis as the “double-byproduct fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis” (see Table 19.1). Note, however, that ecological and cultural differences should be invoked to account for why the belief in supernatural punishment should be more important for cooperation in some societies than in others.

Adaptationist Hypotheses

Johnson and Bering (2006) have put forward another hypothesis regarding the evolution of belief in supernatural punishment; instead of regarding the cognitive mechanisms that lead to cooperation as byproducts of other cognitive processes, their hypothesis supposes that belief in supernatural punishment is an adaptation at the individual level with the function of managing reputation. The reasoning underlying this hypothesis is as follows: With the emergence of human language, it became possible to learn information of the kind “who did what to whom” without directly observing it. This in turn led to the emergence of reputation. Reputation has important consequences for human fitness. Thus, the hypothesis is that a lower threshold for believing in the possibility of supernatural punishment could be co-opted by natural selection and prevent cheating behaviors, which if observed by other members 8  Thus, under this hypothesis, developing a sense of fairness by natural selection imposes a constraint by subjectively increasing the cost of cheating in relation to the possible benefit earned. Not having a sense of fairness would impose overall high fitness costs due to the conditions (i.e., selective pressures) that make cooperative mutualism evolutionarily plausible.

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of the group could lead to a lower reputation and, consequently, lower fitness for the individual. Although this hypothesis is different from the double-byproduct fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis, it can also be reformulated more generally in terms of costs and benefits on fitness. Whereas under the double-byproduct fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis, the short-term benefit of cheating is constrained by fearing supernatural punishment due to some cognitive constraints that evolved for different purposes, in this case it is constrained by a cognitive mechanism that is an adaptation. Without this adaptation, individuals would incur a much greater fitness cost in the long term (through a lowered reputation). Of course, it would be difficult to separate empirically the doublebyproduct fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis from the latter hypothesis one might want to call “one byproduct–one adaptation fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis” (see Table  19.1) because they make largely the same predictions.9 Yet another closely related hypothesis should be added—namely, the implicit monitoring hypothesis. Under this view, beliefs in supernatural agents do not elicit a “fear” in supernatural punishment, but rather “hack” a cognitive module that tracks whether one is being watched. There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that being watched makes individuals more cooperative (e.g., Bateson, Nettle, & Roberts, 2006; Bourrat, Baumard & McKay., 2011; Haley & Fessler, 2005; Mifune, Hashimoto, & Yamagishi, 2010). The idea underlying supernatural 9  Perhaps one way to separate them would be to test whether fears of supernatural punishment are more strongly experienced in nonsocial contexts. If a difference between the social and nonsocial conditions is observed, that could be considered evidence that a cognitive mechanism specially designed to intervene in particular contexts has been selected. The rationale is that fear of supernatural punishment would be more advantageous in nonsocial contexts (or at least when individuals believe they are not in a social context) rather than in social ones in which other cognitive mechanisms already exist to manage reputation, since some experiments have shown that people are more prone to be cooperative when they know they are observed (e.g., Gächter & Fehr, 1999; Wedekind & Milinski, 2000). This is because only in contexts believed to be nonsocial by the focal individual could this individual be tempted to cheat. Besides this empirical method that would perhaps help distinguish the two hypotheses, some might consider the double-byproduct hypothesis more parsimonious than the one byproduct–one adaptation hypothesis. In fact, the rationale goes, unless one would have empirical reason not to believe so, the relation between fear of supernatural and cooperation should be regarded as resulting from a byproduct of human cognition rather than from an adaptation for reputation management.

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monitoring is similar to that of the fear of supernatural punishment hypotheses. There is again an adaptationist account and a byproduct account. Beliefs in supernatural agents could, as a byproduct, make individuals feel watched more often and thus lead them to cooperate more (double-byproduct hypothesis). Or, being watched performing an uncooperative behavior could have, on average, deleterious consequences on reputation and thus fitness. Hence feeling monitored supernaturally by agents could be an adaptive strategy (one byproduct–one adaptation hypothesis). Again, it would be hard to distinguish them empirically.10 Furthermore, there is the difficulty of empirically distinguishing fear of supernatural punishment hypotheses involving specific beliefs about the type of agent (e.g., High Moralizing Gods) from simple supernatural monitoring. To do so would require one to contrast the effects of beliefs on supernatural agents that inspire fears and supernatural agents that do not. A final hypothesis linking supernatural beliefs and cooperation states that beliefs in supernatural punishment increase within-group cooperation in competition between cultural groups (see Table 19.1). Competition can be understood as competition for access to resources or, more generally, as a struggle for persistence. It is possible to conceive that different beliefs in supernatural entities by the members of a cultural group lead to different outcomes at that level. Under this hypothesis, the reason why an individual of a particular culture would believe in supernatural punishment is because it would have been transmitted as a result of having been advantageous for their cultural group in the past (the belief would have allowed the group to persist longer in competition with other cultural groups). Persistence of a cultural group can be understood in two different ways. It can mean persistence of the biological individuals having the beliefs or merely the persistence of the cultural traits themselves. In the latter case, cultural group selection could occur even without the death or reproduction of a single biological individual. By persistence of a cultural group, unless stated otherwise, we mean the former case, in which beliefs are tied to biological fitness.11 Of course, at a purely 10  See previous footnote for a rationale on how to distinguish both cognitive mechanisms. 11  In this chapter, we have decided to focus on the problem of cooperation in relation to supernatural belief when it is applied to biological individuals. Thus, unless stated otherwise, we consider the costs and benefits brought about by behaviors (whether having cultural or biological origin) relative to biological individuals.

c­ ultural level, some “ideas” or beliefs are more likely to “survive” in the mind of their “hosts” and can be organized in “groups” and transmitted from one individual to another within the group and even beyond. But it is not always clear what sort of cultural entities could serve as a basis by which to measure fitness at that level. Following the cultural group hypothesis of fear of supernatural punishment, beliefs in some particular supernatural entities can have a lasting impact on within-group cooperation and prevent groups from dissolving, and can increase within-group cooperation and intergroup hostility. Although this hypothesis considers cultural groups to be the unit of selection, it should be regarded as an alternative way to explain the evolution of cooperation in which the time scale of the events occurring between groups is typically hard to represent from the point of view of individuals (see Bourrat, 2014,  2015a,  2015b). Ultimately, everything could be represented from the point of view of individual fitness, in which case the cost of cooperation would not be represented as lifetime costs and benefits but rather over many generations. Thus, for example, a cost could be paid by an individual at generation N and lead to a benefit at generation N + 3—that is, received by the descendants of this individual. In classical models of cooperation, costs and benefits are represented over the lifetime of an individual (e.g., West, Griffin, & Gardner, 2007). This hypothesis is compatible with all the other hypotheses mentioned in this section. What is regarded as a byproduct in the short term could produce a selective advantage when considering long-term effects in settings with multiple cultural groups. Before moving on to the next section, it should be noted that none of the evolutionary hypotheses provided in this section emphasize the role for High Moralizing Gods or Big Gods in the sense that fear of punishment could be inspired potentially by any supernatural entity and monitoring by any agent. Furthermore, it should be stressed that several of the hypotheses presented specifically focus on supernatural agents as opposed to simply supernatural entities. Many beliefs in supernatural entities could have a similar effect as beliefs in supernatural agents on cooperation. Some hypotheses, like the supernatural monitoring hypotheses, specifically predict that supernatural agency is a distinctive feature that could permit increased cooperation between the members of a group, but there is nothing in the hypotheses that predicts that particular supernatural agents would have a privileged effect, except perhaps that

escaping the monitoring of (but also the punishment from) a Big God who knows everything at any point in time is necessarily harder than from other gods, and this might lead to a stronger effect on cooperation. But beyond this putative effect, any belief in supernatural agents believed to be in the vicinity of an individual could, following this hypothesis, lead to a higher degree of cooperation. It remains to be shown, especially concerning hypotheses of individual-level cooperation, whether and how specific beliefs in god(s) and other supernatural entities link with cooperation. A plausible, although speculative, link between cooperation and supernatural entities is that the degree to which individuals cooperate in a given society is caused by the degree to which they are “primed” in the society. The prediction would be, assuming no or a limited habituation effect, that being primed more often or with more arousing signals (such as minimally counterintuitive concepts; see Boyer, 2001) would lead to an increased level of cooperation. But to our knowledge, this line of research has not been pursued.

Cognitive Causal Mechanisms: Can We Get Down to the Specifics?

The effort to link prosociality with specific types of beliefs in the supernatural has a natural counterpart in laboratory research in social psychology, where randomized groups can be put to different treatments in experiments that search for causal explanations. Similarly, cognitive anthropologists conducting experimental fieldwork may be able to implement quasi-natural experiments to study the effects of certain variables related to religiosity, including belief, on behavior. Although vindicating the social utility of the fear of supernatural punishment is an idea that can be traced back several centuries, its much more recent revival in cognitive science may have been spurred by a series of studies on the prosocial effects induced by minimal implicit cues of being watched. In a prototypical study on the effect of implicit social monitoring, a participant is brought to a setting in which there are subtle cues in the background that may remind one of being watched (e.g., a pair of eyes in the wallpaper of a computer screen, a photograph of two eyes posted on a board). The treatment is often considered successful if, in the subsequent measured behavior (the dependent variable of the experiment), their conduct appears more prosocial (e.g., offering money to a third party, cheating less if given the opportunity) as compared with the participants in control groups (e.g., Bateson et al.,

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2006; Haley & Fessler, 2005; Mifune et al., 2010; see also Bourrat, Atkinson et al., 2011, in which the proxy for prosociality is not a monetary reward but moral compliance). Extrapolating from these results, it could be expected that cultural representations, such as external cues that served the function of being watched by some form of supernatural agent, could have a similar effect. In developmental psychology studies, the observed effect of putative supernatural “watchers” on the behavior of children was announced as an early seed of a naturally ­exploitable disposition to pay attention to these kinds of cues (Bering 2006; Piazza, Bering, & Ingram, 2011). Different forms of religious priming have thus been applied as the independent variable in dozens of randomized controlled studies to elicit some form of measurable prosocial effect. A recent metaanalysis (Shariff, Willard, Andersen, & Norenzayan, 2016) found that the effect size of religious priming on prosocial behavior in these types of studies oscillated near a Hedge’s g = 0.27, p < .001, 95% CI [0.15, 0.40]. Taking possible publication bias into account resulted in g = 0.18, p = .001, 95% CI [0.04, 0.32]. It was also found that larger studies showed, on average, smaller effects. It has been claimed that the best explanation for the observed effects in religious priming studies could be the effect of believing one is being watched by supernatural agents. Even if we accepted that other explanations are ruled out, further questions remain. If monitoring (and potentially fear) and reputational psychology are operating here, one could in principle study causation. This leads to the following questions: Are mental representations about supernatural agents in some sense causing prosociality? Or is prosociality simply an effect of being reminded that there are other fellow believers who may enforce the norm? If the former, then what are the necessary requisites for a specific belief in the supernatural to fulfill this function? And can this function be fulfilled in the absence of other contextual elements (Viciana, Loverdo, & Gomila, 2016)? In some priming experiments, the causal link between the observed increase in prosociality and the belief in a “watching” supernatural agent is not straightforward. Specifying the aspects of the religious belief that, ex hypothesi, could be effective may be even more difficult. It is, however, crucial to understand that “religious” priming can include different types of cognitive processes. Even if we restrict ourselves to the effects of holding certain beliefs, specifying the characteristics of those beliefs can be seen as a 308

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l­egitimate goal if one wants to articulate a thesis linking religious belief and cooperation. The nature of the element that does the priming and its possible dissociation with other similar cues is key to pinpointing the cognitive causes at work. Sometimes the priming can be explicit, as when making participants read a certain passage of a sacred text (Carpenter & Marshall, 2009). At other times it can be implicit, as when making participants unscramble sentences including references to the words “divine,” “sacred,” “spirit,” or “God” (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007). Still, in all these cases the possible causal pathways to explain the observed effects can be multiple. Ara Norenzayan’s team and colleagues, for instance, have attempted to falsify the hypothesis that the observed effects in the priming studies can be produced through simple associational “ideomotor” processes (Bargh, Chen & Burrows, 1996). Even if their arguments are compelling, there are still other possible causal hypotheses that could account for the observed effects in terms of cognitive processes. For instance, Bourrat and Mckay, in an unpublished study, tried to disentangle the fear of supernatural monitoring hypothesis (in which the monitoring was not necessarily done by a divine figure) from the fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis. They detected no difference between the conditions involving priming with natural agents or priming with supernatural agents. This, in our opinion, highlights the problem of dissociating similar (but not identical) proximate mechanisms and the possibility that in many studies claiming to document a link between religion and cooperation, the real causal link does not in fact involve a belief in supernatural agency. If the priming is based on a contextual difference anchored in the real environment where participants live, the observed effects tend to be stronger, but the possibility for disentangling the cognitive causes is even more challenging. Field studies in cognitive anthropology have sometimes found substantial effects of religiosity on measures of prosociality. For instance, Sosis and Ruffle (2003) investigated the differences to common-pool dilemmas in religious and secular kibbutzim in Israel and found that individuals in religious kibbutzim tended to claim less from the common pool, thus coordinating better in an economic game. The effect was mediated by frequency of synagogue attendance, which, in a sense, points to a Durkheimian explanation highlighting the importance of ritual for ­cooperation.

Similarly, Dimitris Xygalatas (2013) tested the effects of religiosity in Mauritius using commonpool dilemmas (following Sosis & Ruffle, 2003). For this study, in each pair of participants, one participant had to answer the economic dilemma in a temple (a religious setting), whereas the other participant performed the task in a restaurant (a secular setting). Those participants in the temple gave more prosocial responses by withdrawing less from the common pool, which resulted in a bigger reward for the two of them playing the economic game. They also appealed more often to “justice” while justifying their choices, although self-reported religiosity was not a predictive factor. Erik Duhaime (2011) also studied the effect of contextual reminders of religiosity on prosocial behavior in economic games. He administered an economic dilemma (a version of the ultimatum game) to Muslim shopkeepers in Marrakech during the adhan, the very audible call to prayer in which the greatness of Allah is invoked. The study, which involved real money, revealed an important effect of this religious reminder on the prosociality of the participants. And yet, fairly allocating the real contribution of the different possible cognitive causes at work here is anything but simple. Could specific beliefs in the supernatural be acting through the mental representation of some form of a personal all-powerful agent? It is difficult to negate that these more naturalistic studies may still point to the contribution of ritualistic participation and that only further work can settle the issue. Lastly, how do these different psychological findings scale-up from the measures observed either in the lab or, in fewer cases, in the field, to large-scale social dynamics? (Atkinson, Latham, & Watts, 2014). Do the effect sizes observed in these studies hold at different levels of social complexity? Two different aspects would benefit from further corroboration. First, the persistence of the effect through time—as a stimuli is repeated often in time, what does this do to its effect on prosociality? There may be reasons to expect some proportional diminution of the effect, if only due to habituation (Sparks & Barclay, 2013). Second, different types of effects could reasonably be expected when the behavior in question is related to a high-stakes situation or a low-stakes situation. Similar dissociations have been found, for instance, in the literature on conformity, with normative conformity being more common, in principle, when the person is in a lowstakes situation in relation to an economic reward (Baron, Vandello, & Brunsman, 1996). In addition,

the psychology of deterrence through punishment may suggest that additional factors play a role and are important: How the certainty and proximity of the supernatural punishment is cognitively calculated may play a role, since delayed, uncertain punishments normally have a weaker deterrence effect than more certain, closer in time punishments (Kleiman, 2009). So-called Sunday effects (Norenzayan, 2013) have been reported in relation to a measured increase in cooperative tendencies (Malhotra, 2008) or a decrease in anticooperative tendencies (Edelman, 2009), as observed in highly Christian areas in the United States. This could be used in favor of the argument that, as the relevant stimuli are much stronger than in the lab and are enhanced by their actual societal context, the effects will tend to scaleup in important ways. However, the same observed Sunday effect could also be at least partly attributed to causes besides holding certain specific beliefs in supernatural agents, and it could be related to social monitoring due to engaging in the weekly ritual of attending mass on Sundays. Before concluding, we note that the notion of cooperation is also an ambiguous one when relating it to supernatural beliefs. “Individual cooperation” and “collective-level cooperation” can be distinguished here in meaningful ways (Bourrat, Atkinson et al., 2011). The distinction is as follows: When individuals engage in collective-level cooperation, it is not straightforwardly possible to defect with respect to the benefit brought about by the cooperative behavior, whereas it is possible when individuals engage in individual cooperation. One example of collective-level cooperation is the use of money in a society. A given individual cannot reap the benefit of using money without having to be part of the  ­ ­ cooperative game—namely, using money. Furthermore, once money is in place, any individual born in this society will be nolens volens using it. A generic example of individual cooperation is when an individual does not steal someone else’s goods when he has the opportunity to do so. This distinction can be applied to the putative effects of religious belief on cooperation. In any situation in which there is no or a very limited possibility to gain a benefit from defection for individuals, there is no reason to expect natural selection to be at work at that individual level, and one will have to suppose the adaptation, if any, to be at the group or cultural level. Furthermore, cooperation will have to refer to collective-level cooperation, not individual-level cooperation. However, in some

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s­ tudies proposing to test individual-level fear of supernatural punishment, the proxies used to measure cooperation have been collective-level cooperation variables. For instance, Johnson (2005), testing the one byproduct–one adaptation fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis, used a variable measuring the number of jurisdictional hierarchies beyond the local community and money (two variables in the SCCS) as proxies for cooperation. One could suppose a causal link between these two variables and “individual-level” cooperation by hypothesizing that community-level cooperative “games” (such as the use of money) must have started from individuallevel forms of cooperation. Thus, one could argue, even if the proxies used to measure individual-level cooperation are collective-level forms of cooperation, because collective-level forms of cooperation initially require individual-level forms of coop­ eration, they are still tracking societies in which individual-level cooperation is stronger. However, ­because—as we have shown—the links between religious beliefs and cooperation (both forms) are multiple and can be potentially explained in many different ways, we claim that these variables should not be regarded as good proxies for individual cooperation. Furthermore, they should be restricted, when possible, for testing hypotheses involving group-level traits. It is true that, given the relatively low number of variables measuring cooperation in some ethnographic sources or surveys, for lack of anything better, one might be constrained to use collectivelevel variables of cooperation as proxies for individual cooperation. That said, when both individual cooperation variables and collective-level cooperation variables are available, if one intends to test a hypothesis at the individual level, one ought to use individual cooperation variables to avoid the aforementioned problems. This point is worth mentioning, given a recent study based on Bayesian phylogenetic methods to indirectly test two forms of the fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis in 96  Austronesian cultures (Watts et al., 2015). In this  study, political complexity (measured by the number of jurisdictional hierarchies beyond the local community) was the dependent variable in the analysis, with the prediction that beliefs in moralizing gods would lead to higher levels of political complexity. They found that the presence of High Moralizing Gods does not systematically precede highly complex societies (whereas broad supernatural punishment does). 310

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The study is particularly interesting because it may be the most serious attempt to date to control for the already mentioned Galton’s problem in this area. However, the link between political complexity and individual cooperation is not immediately obvious, and without further analysis this result only yields evidence against a cultural group version of the fear of supernatural hypotheses (already an interesting result, though).12 We hope this helps to acknowledge the multiplicity of fear of supernatural punishment hypotheses. To the credit of Watts et al. (2015), it is unclear whether the level of analysis used in this type of study (whole culture) could efficiently test any other hypothesis than a form of the cultural group level hypothesis, as Bourrat, Atkinson et al. (2011) emphasized.

Future Avenues of Research

We have shown how the study of the evolution of religious beliefs can benefit from being more explicit in terms of evolutionary mechanisms. The cultural stability of the causal cognitive chains (Sperber, 2006) leading to certain forms of religious belief can be produced by different types of processes. Not being able to pinpoint these processes can be an obstacle in the explanation of cultural phenomena. Adaptationism (both cultural and biological) can be a useful tool in the delimitation of hypotheses. Of course, corroborating an adaptationist hypothesis can be particularly challenging (as we think we have sufficiently shown). However, rejecting an adaptationist hypothesis also first requires a correct understanding of the logic behind the proposed evolutionary mechanisms, and it is not always clear what the null hypothesis should be. Among the ground not covered in this chapter, there is room for interesting further research on the origins of religious beliefs related to the supernatural sanctioning of morality. Other alternative hypotheses we have not been able to deal with for lack of space may explain some of the interesting ethnographic associations found. First, other research in evolutionary psychology points to possible different 12  Roes and Raymond (2003) used a proxy for society size, with the rationale that, based on the work of Richard Alexander, believing in high moralizing gods allowed groups to become larger and decrease their probability to fission by imposing some form of impartial moral rules. But Watts et al. (2015) do not make the sort of distinction we presented in the previous section and cite Johnson (2005), who seems to test the one byproduct–one adaptation fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis. It is thus not entirely clear which evolutionary mechanism they are targeting.

explanations for the salience of supernatural monitoring. Psychological processes that are more domain-general than reputational psychology have been shown to produce similar effects. This has been the case, for instance, in research related to the phenomenon of unconscious vigilance and emotional arousal (Holbrook, Sousa, & Hahn-Holbrook, 2011). More directly related to the fear of supernatural punishment, even if this fear was ineffectual in terms of enforcing cooperation, error management theory (Haselton & Nettle, 2006) predicts that information that can have detrimental effects on the fitness of individuals will be, ceteris paribus, more salient. This can lead to this information being communicated more often, either because of its increased conversational relevance (Tofalvy & Viciana, 2009) or simply due to its increased memorability. It can also have a higher cultural persistence due to the fact that individuals give some weight to the credibility of these beliefs. This is what a study led by anthropologist Daniel Fessler found: His team analyzed participants’ acceptance of different types of statements in two online studies and found that statements framed around hazards instead of benefits tended to be more credible, a phenomenon that Fessler termed “negatively biased credulity” (Fessler, Pisor, & Navarrete, 2014). Subsequently, they analyzed two different sources of cultural data: urban legends on the Internet, and beliefs related to the supernatural in the Probability Sample Files of the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), a collection of ethnographic reports specially selected to be representative of the wide diversity of studied human cultures. They found that beliefs having to do with the possibility of some hazard were more likely to be widespread and recorded than other beliefs. An interesting possibility is thus that the widespread diffusion of the fear of supernatural punishment in world cultures is a byproduct of this more general cognitive phenomenon (For a similar effect in cultural diffusion related to the perception of risk, see Moussaïd, Brighton, & Gaissmaier, 2015). Other explanatory pathways not examined in this chapter deserve to be mentioned. Cultural ­evolutionary accounts of the prevalence of certain religious beliefs, but focusing either on different mechanisms or different religious beliefs, could be attempted. It is in principle a possibility that certain forms of religious belief are some form of evolved device for the benefit of some (but not all) individuals. In a modern form of the “religion is for the priests” outcry of the atheist Enlightenment,

e­volutionary mechanisms of this quasi-parasitic process could be explored. Other known cultural patterns, such as the pruning of pantheons of gods and their convergence toward a High God in the midst of p ­ olitical processes of ethnographic unification, as described by Robert Wright in his book The Evolution of God (2009), can be more difficult to formulate through general evolutionary mechanisms. However, Wright’s idea that the religious belief in brotherly love tends to be developed and amplified in response to the necessities of political leaders on the ground may deserve further exploration by evolutionary-minded social scientists.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have examined how the evolution of specific beliefs in the supernatural can be linked to the evolution of cooperation. In recent years, this area has received increasing empirical treatment. And, as we hope to have transmitted, some of the above-given findings are truly fascinating. However, we have also shown the tremendous obstacles that this enterprise has to face. First, it is advisable to specify causal hypotheses in relation to a well-delineated evolutionary framework. Whether it is a byproduct hypothesis or an adaptationist one, it is necessary to embed the hypothesis that one aims to test into an adequate causal narrative. Cultural adaptationism might provide a logically coherent and empirically fruitful framework, but it also offers a sober perspective on the adequacy of the current evidence in this area. Although we have pointed to the difficulty in ­determining the specific content of beliefs in the ­supernatural in recent experimental studies, valuable estimates on the cognitive effects of activating some forms of belief in the supernatural have been ­produced (Sharif et al., 2015). New data analysis tools in ecological and cultural phylogenetic studies also provide us with important information to select between hypotheses (Watts et al., 2015). Nevertheless, the link between the cognitive/individual level and  the group level remains somewhat elusive. Furthermore, as we have shown, these levels are sometimes not even correctly distinguished in ­theoretical terms, such as when group-level cooperativeness measures are presented as individual-level cooperativeness measures. While current research tools can still be refined to better capture the elements of the specific hypotheses linking the contents of cultural beliefs and cooperation, we also believe that more intermediate

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level studies are missing in the current literature. The plausibility of some of the cultural phylogenetic mechanisms we discussed could increase by developing new case studies (even of the sociological or historical kind) in which the interesting ecological forces may be at play, even if these forces act over a short period of time. This future research should focus more on the situated effects of beliefs on behavior. In a sense, this could amount to some form of reconciliation between research trends focusing almost exclusively on the cognitive aspects of belief and those trends focusing almost exclusively on the more ritualistic side of religion.

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20 CH A PTE R

A Socioevolutionary Approach to Religious Change

Ryan T. Cragun and J. E. Sumerau

Abstract A number of scholars have suggested that religion may be explained using evolutionary theory and, in particular, natural selection. Much of this research suggests that behaviors encouraged by religions are beneficial while failing to illustrate a causal relationship between religiosity and these behaviors. This chapter challenges these approaches, arguing that religion is primarily a social phenomenon and that any health or evolutionary benefits that might indirectly derive from religions are actually attributable to the behaviors themselves: Religions have simply co-opted those behaviors. Additionally, it argues that natural selection alone is a problematic approach to understanding religion and suggests that Darwin’s notion of artificial selection be integrated into any attempts to use evolution to explain religion. We use examples from a variety of religions to illustrate how a socioevolutionary theory of religion that incorporates natural and artificial selection is preferable to approaches that rely exclusively on natural selection. Key Words:  social construct, secularization, social theory, socioevolutionary theory, artificial selection

Over the past two decades, efforts to develop evolutionary conceptualizations of religion have proliferated at dramatic rates (Bloom,  2012). Eschewing distinctions between physical and social scientific phenomena (Berger & Luckmann, 1967), these developments have attempted to integrate the two in pursuit of an evolutionary biological, social, and psychological understanding of physical and social realities. In so doing, however, there has developed a tendency to rely on simplistic social models that fail to account for the complexity of contemporary or historical social realities (Sanderson, 2007) and attribute explanatory power to religion in places where other forms of social organization (i.e., secular clubs, movement organizations, and leisure groups) produce the same results, without comparison to these other types of collectives (Bloom, 2012; Moore & Leach, 2015). Considering that social dynamics significantly influence the

manner in which people make sense of social, biological, and psychological data, theory, and findings (see, e.g., Butler, 1999; Dececco & Scarce, 1999; Foucault, 1978), an evolutionary approach to religion (or any social phenomena) will ultimately require wrestling with the ways social dynamics underlie human understandings of the natural and social world (see also Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Rather than engaging with social complexities, current evolutionary approaches to religion tend to involve efforts—explicitly or implicitly—to pick and choose elements of social theories (mostly established before the 1960s and 1970s) that fit into existing evolutionary traditions. In so doing, scholars—intentionally or otherwise—subordinate social dynamics to established evolutionary belief systems and traditions within biological and psychological disciplines. Rather than offering an empirical framework for an evolutionary approach to religion (or 315

other elements of social life), these efforts “edit” or “revise” existing and historical social realities to bolster already established biological and psychological arguments (see Fausto-Sterling,  2000, for similar patterns in relation to biological approaches to sexualities). Although these efforts have revealed many ways in which evolutionary concepts may be integrated with social phenomena in the pursuit of greater understanding, going forward scholars should consider integrating social realities into evolutionary discussions instead of continuing to subordinate, ignore, or deny social realities in order to create an evolutionary theory of religion and/or social life that seems compelling. Although the subordination of social realities to evolutionary frameworks should be abandoned for the purpose of developing empirically valid socioevolutionary frameworks, we would caution that turning the tables would not provide a solution to the problem. As our medical science colleagues have recently noted, there are many cases where social factors and processes result in biological and psychological changes in humans (see, e.g., Link & Phelan,  2010; Nowakowski & Sumerau,  2015; Rosich & Hankin, 2010). Rather than subordinating one field to the other in any variation, emerging health models reveal that bio-social-psychological processes are intertwined and inseparable from one another (Nowakowski,  2014). In this chapter, we thus argue for the integration and incorporation of social realities into biological and psychological perspectives in order to outline an integrated socioevolutionary approach to social and physical realities embedded within our contemporary world. Rather than providing an exhaustive literature review in this chapter, we limit our own citations to reviews and collections that focus on religion and evolution from biological, psychological, and sociological perspectives. In so doing, we simultaneously provide readers with tools for critically examining existing literature on evolutionary frameworks while using this chapter to outline a path forward for these studies. Our approach here builds on an exhaustive study of existing evolutionary frameworks, which we suggest would be useful for scholars from any field of study. In the tradition of analytic induction (Prus, 1996), we seek to refine existing findings into an integrated framework for evolutionary examinations of religion from any field or perspective. To this end, we use religion as a case for articulating ways in which biological, psychological, and sociological approaches may be integrated into 316

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e­ xisting evolutionary frameworks. We draw on existing evolutionary and sociological studies of religion to demonstrate some ways to rectify existing gaps in evolutionary approaches via the incorporation of sociological understandings, as well as some ways to address existing gaps in sociological studies via evolutionary frameworks. Throughout this chapter, we encourage others interested in evolutionary, biological, psychological, sociological, and religious studies to reflect on the ways an integrated bio-­social-psychological approach to religion could further our understanding of social and physical change in humans and human society over time.

What Is Religion?

Our examination of existing evolutionary literature concerning religion reveals that an optimal starting point for elaborating an integrative approach to religious evolution may lie in the definition of religion itself. As Bloom (2012) notes, how one defines “religion” likely has a prominent impact on what findings one will gather in relation to religion (see also Cragun, 2015). If, for example, one defines religion as “a theoretical framework for making sense of the natural world,” then both evolution and science would qualify as religions. If, on the other hand, one defines religion as a set of shared rituals and assumptions specific to a given community, then public education systems and political elections would qualify as religions. We do not mean to suggest that either of these are satisfactory definitions of religion per se; we mention them as illustrations to demonstrate the importance of defining religion before one seeks to make sense of how or why religion operates in the social and physical world. Most evolutionary literature that focuses on religion appears to work from one of three definitions. In most cases, scholars define religion as “a shared set of beliefs and practices that bind people together socially, physically, and psychologically” (see, for example, Sanderson,  2007). Borrowing from and often citing theoretical insights proposed over 100 years ago by Emile Durkheim and others (see Durkheim, 1912), such a definition creates a catchall category wherein many different things can be called religion. For example, a person active in a bisexual rights movement likely shares political beliefs and protest activities with others in the group that bind them to the whole, making their involvement with that movement “religion” by this definition. Similarly, a person born and raised in the same family unit may share ideologies and rituals with

other family members that bind the whole (e.g., meanings of holidays and accompanying family traditions, like lighting fireworks on New Year’s Eve). We hypothesize that most people (including most scholars) do not think of these examples as manifestations of “religion.” As a result, this definition suggests that religion explains many social and physical phenomena which are, by any reasonable measure, not attributable to religion. Carried to its logical conclusion, this definition could be used to suggest that there is no need for religion at all since religion, by this definition, is simply one of many forms of social organization that provide shared assumptions and rituals that connect people to one another, along with social movements, political parties, families, friendship networks, and so forth. If religion is, in function, no different from any of these other social organizations, then religion is not, in any way, special. And if that is the case, why have theories specific to religion? The second most common definition of religion offered in evolutionary texts frames religion as individual and/or collective meaning that provides order to the world (see, for example, McNamara,  2006a). Echoing notions of “the religion of civility” proposed by Symbolic Interactionists in the 1950s and 1960s (see Goffman,  1967), this definition again creates a vague catchall space wherein religion can be said to mean or represent almost anything. If, for example, someone finds meaning that provides order in the world from the guitar their grandmother gave them as a child, then their relationship to that guitar would represent a religion. Or if someone is a dedicated fan of a particular soccer or football team and finds meaning and identity in believing that team is the best team in the world, that would qualify as religion. Similarly, if one were to learn and adopt statistical methods for conducting research, that too would qualify as religion, as it results in learning and adopting a shared set of meaning that provides order to the world. Most people, including most scholars, would not consider these things as “­religion.” Of course, we have not seen any of the previously cited texts refer to anything like the above examples as “religion,” but rather they have used this overly broad definition whenever their research findings suggest that deriving meaning from what most people would consider “religion” matters. In other words, this overly broad definition of religion is employed when scholars explore the sacred

e­ lements of people’s interactions, habits, and rituals. But this understanding, again carried to its logical conclusion, tells us nothing about “religion” as commonly understood. This definition, when examined critically, also suggests that religion does not matter over or above anything else that provides meaning and order to someone since it is applicable to a wide variety of activities people engage in regularly. As noted by Bloom (2012) and suggested by Richerson & Boyd (2005), another way religion is defined in evolutionary texts is via assumption. In such cases, religion is never actually defined in the text even though the text spends nearly every page seeking to analyze religion in relation to evolution (another term often undefined in the texts). In such cases, however, careful analysis of the ways studies and findings are interpreted by the authors reveals that religion has been implicitly defined in one of the two ways noted earlier, which ultimately leads us right back to the problem that most evolutionary approaches to religion are not studying what most people would consider “religion” but rather are explaining research findings through the use of the term “religion.” Considering that religion is often a taken-for-granted system of meaning and power in many societies currently and historically (see Edgell et al., 2006), perhaps it is not surprising that the same pattern has dominated evolutionary approaches to religion to date. This also makes sense when it is recognized that the vast majority of scientists (and other academics) in American universities are religious themselves (see Gross & Simmons, 2009). Since existing evolutionary approaches to religion capture “social activity” and not anything specifically “religious” in the more widely recognized sense (Cragun, 2015), we currently know very little about what (if any) role religion might play in evolution (Bloom, 2012). Rather, we know that many things that long-term social organizations provide people—including but not limited to social support, a sense of belonging, meaning and order, and shared rituals—are important elements of social and physical evolution and evolutionary history. In fact, social scientists have long documented many ways that both religious and secular organizations accomplish all these goals in many arenas throughout the world (see Schwalbe et al., 2000, for ethnographic examples in a wide variety of contexts). Rather than explaining religion using a conceptual framework based in evolution or explain evolution using religion, previous studies may be better

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c­haracterized as examples of scholars injecting a phenomenon they refer to as “religion” into evolutionary patterns, whether or not actual religion itself plays a role in these mechanisms (see also Bloom, 2012). Given the problems with these definitions, the role of religion in evolution, as well as how well evolutionary frameworks explain religion, remain open questions. To begin answering this question, researchers must adopt a definition that captures the field or domain of religion as most widely understood, instead of a variety of practices that may or may not be accomplished in relation to religion. To this end, social scientific studies of religion provide some help. In a review of scholarship concerning religion and science, for example, Cragun (2015) notes that the social forms referred to as religious all share common components despite significant variations in specific meanings, assumptions, beliefs, and practices. Specifically, what these traditions have in common is that they in some way relate to “the supernatural,” which is defined as spirits or essences that exist outside the natural, empirical, or observable world. Whereas any ideology or social organization will fit into the commonly used definitions noted earlier, we may call such ideologies or organizations “religion” only if they in some way relate to the supernatural. Throughout this chapter, we thus use “religion” only when this definition applies, and we suggest others seeking to develop evolutionary frameworks do the same so that we may begin to learn about religion rather than the ways people explain any given activity in religious terms (see also Dundes, 1988).

Evolution in a Religious Context

Before turning to our evaluation of existing literature on evolution and religion, we need to note another finding we discovered when analyzing this literature. As we studied existing work on religion and evolution, it became increasingly clear that social theory in these frameworks appeared to end somewhere around 1970. Specifically, scholars exploring religion and evolution drew on sociological theories—like structural functionalism, role theory, and exchange theory—that were fashionable prior to the 1970s (i.e., when only white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, and predominately religious scholars were fully allowed in science; see Collins, 2005). While these theoretical frameworks are still taught to students and the public to provide a historical foundation for science, they are rarely 318

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taken seriously as explanatory frameworks anymore because they posit a world where either minorities do not exist or systemic societal inequalities are natural and inevitable (Collins,  2005; see also Kleinman, 2007). Although the use of these frameworks appears curious on the surface (especially when sociologists of evolution use them; see Sanderson,  2007), it makes more sense when we contextualize the elaboration of evolution as a theoretical framework. Like most scholars, we trace the origin of evolutionary frameworks to Darwin’s publication of The Origin of the Species in 1859. While there was considerable debate about the merits of evolution at the time, most of the scientific community adopted evolution as a creditable theoretical framework for living things by the 1870s, and the 1930s saw the expansion of this framework into general ac­cept­ ance with the modern synthesis. Although scholars employing evolutionary perspectives on religion rarely mention this context in their scholarship, it is telling that most of the social theory they draw on to build evolutionary approaches to religion was written during the same time period (i.e., between 1850 and 1950). As a result, any contemporary integration of evolutionary and social theories must ascertain the context wherein these beliefs, assumptions, or ideas (i.e., theories) arose in the first place. Although we could cover any number of contextual factors that may have influenced the development of existing evolutionary traditions, we will limit our discussion to the racial, gendered, sexual, and religious context at the time for the sake of brevity, as these dynamics compellingly illustrate the problems with using “traditional” (i.e., pre1970) theories to build a contemporary explanatory framework for religion that draws on evolution. Attention to these contextual factors illustrates some of the significant problems within traditional evolutionary theories, but we have not seen evidence that the debunking of some elements of evolutionary frameworks renders the central premise of evolution (i.e., the propensity for biological and social change via processes of selective adaptation, mutation, and inheritance) less important. In fact, we argue in what follows that revising problematic elements of evolutionary frameworks will allow evolution to better guide and make sense of the entirety of biological and social reality. In terms of racial context, it is important to note that evolutionary theories (from the 1850s to the 1970s) arose in the midst of systematic racial

i­nequalities and oppression wherein much of science was built on the marginalization and even ­torture of people of color (see Collins, 2005). Not surprisingly, recent years have consistently demonstrated that many racial elements of evolutionary theories are wrong when tested empirically because they were based on (false) assumptions that different races should be differently valued and human races were more racially distinct biologically than we actually are (Collins, 2005). Recent scholarship has demonstrated that cluster analyses of genetic genotypes and phenotypes result in precisely the number of races those conducting the cluster analyses tell the tests to find (see Long et al.,  2009). This scholarship makes it clear that “race” is not genetically meaningful but rather is an illusion (or social construction) predicated on prejudicial interpretations of data rather than any concrete biological (or social) distinction between people (see also Hunley et al., 2009; Rosenberg et al., 2002). While some scholars now argue biological variations between “races” are meaningless and others argue that they are important adaptations, the point is that evolutionary theories about race continue to be revised due to the realization that variation is much more complex than science recognized or racial politics allowed in the past. Similarly, waves of theory and research have been built on the assertion (by Darwin and others) of sexual dimorphism and sexual selection. The ex­ist­ ence of intersex people, transgender people, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and asexual people throughout natural history clearly reveals that modern science got this one wrong from the start (see, e.g., Butler  1999; Foucault  1978; Karkazis  2008). As medical schools and other scientific centers adjust to the realization that some of our past biological and social theory is based more clearly on heteronormativity (Schrock et al.,  2014), cissexism (Westbrook & Schilt,  2014), and patriarchy (Johnson,  2005) than empirical realities, we once again find ourselves needing to revise existing elements of evolutionary frameworks to incorporate the non-heterosexual, non-cisgender, and nonmale-dominant realities throughout contemporary and historical social and natural worlds. Luckily, the main premise of evolutionary frameworks does not need gender and sexual hierarchies any more than it needed racial inequalities. Rather, we are seeing evolutionary explanations (in social and physical sciences, and especially in medicine) become more empirical and provide better answers to biological

and social reality by moving away from past assumptions that ignored racial, sexual, and gender minorities. Although never addressed to our knowledge, the social influence of race, gender, and sexualities on the elaboration (or evolution) of evolution reveals the necessity of taking context seriously when seeking evolutionary frameworks for existing phenomena. To this end, what role might religious context have played in traditional evolutionary frameworks to date? Considering that most scientists in America are religious, what are the odds that religious assumptions find voice in evolutionary frameworks intentionally or otherwise? If race, gender, and sexualities are any indication, it seems likely. To this end, we should note that evolutionary frameworks arose at a time when religion held powerful sway over societies across the world, and at a time when science often sought the legitimacy and power granted by religious approval (Foucault,  1978). It is thus not surprising that many early scientific theories (including but not limited to early incarnations of evolution, structural functionalism, exchange theory, and social Darwinism) often mirrored JudeoChristian teachings in the Western world by positing an ordered, linear natural world wherein nature was always moving forward to the next destination in a balanced and reasonable (i.e., intelligently designed) way. In this tradition, scientists echoed preachers and other clergy by defining, for example, racism and other social systems as “natural” or “functional” adaptations to the ongoing “progress” in the social and biological world. Nature, according to these formulations, much like a deity, had a plan, and the plan worked, which meant that things that hurt people or the natural world (like slavery or industrialization) were ultimately fine because they were part of the plan. As a result, we would suggest that evolutionary scholars who only draw on “traditional” social theories in their works are likely falling victim (intentionally or otherwise) to the religious influences (i.e., the search for an ordered reality based on a balanced and progressive plan) early evolutionary claims reflected. In much the same way that early evolutionary theories posited (or believed in) a world without intersex, transgender, lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, and other types of people (and animals) socially defined as different or inferior, early social theories erased these people from debates (i.e., formal frameworks), data collection (i.e., surveys and experiments), and existence (i.e.,

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­ istorical and natural records). If we truly seek an h empirical evolutionary framework capable of guiding social and physical science, we would be wise to maintain awareness of social context in order to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Learning from Existing Evolutionary Approaches to Religion

As noted previously, existing evolutionary approaches to religion have, to date, rarely considered sociohistorical context and occasionally make use of a vague notion of religion as “anything” that binds people together. Despite these shortcomings, such studies provide useful insights to developing a comprehensive socioevolutionary approach to religion. As a result, it is important to explore the primary findings of this literature in relation to religion itself to gather clues for extending these lines of research in fruitful directions. To this end, we begin by examining research that focuses on two of the three ways religion and evolution have been examined together, as detailed by Feierman (2009a). These studies explore (1) how religion facilitates evolution or aids in human survival and (2) whether religion uses evolved cognitive mechanisms that facilitate evolutionary adaptations and benefits for human beings. In so doing, they outline biological processes that are enhanced via specific types of practices and rituals and within specific communities of meaning and belonging. Such studies reveal important elements of human social interaction that facilitate greater human health and well-being. As a result, these studies examine important types of social activity that should be explored in a wide variety of settings, contexts, and situations. Notable examples of evolutionarily useful behaviors can be found in a wide variety of biological studies. Researchers note consistent positive health benefits achieved by people engaging in regular, shared activities with like-minded others (McClenon, 2006), reveal specific neurological reactions and stimulation via collective ritual practice (Newberg,  2006; Azari,  2006), and demonstrate ways social pressure within groups can enhance notions of character and morality sanctioned in a given society (Emmons & McNamara,  2006). Furthermore, biological researchers have noted many ways that social behaviors often found in religious traditions and settings may enhance biological, social, and psychological functioning (see, e.g., Feierman, 2009b for a selection of such studies). In 320

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all such cases, biological researchers have noted many social behaviors that may be positive in an evolutionary sense. While biological studies reveal some useful activities for evolution, they typically fall short in their attempts to integrate religion. Throughout the examples noted earlier, for example, researchers construct their findings as evidence for the evolutionary function of religion when, in reality, they have found evidence for the evolutionary function of any setting that provides a sense of belonging. In so doing, they argue that religion itself is rooted in biology and that religion has adaptive biological functions. Their data, however, do not support these claims. Rather, their data (like our description earlier) suggest the behaviors (and, by extension, the biological results of such behaviors) are what matter, not religion. As noted by McNamara (2006b), there is no way to capture any explicitly or purely religious effect on biology—an admission that recognizes the more accurate understanding of religion being related to the supernatural. Considering that each of the behaviors noted previously (and many others outlined by biological researchers; see also McNamara, 2006c) can be found in many different types of social organizations (religious and secular), explaining their effects in relation to religion requires, for lack of a better phrase, a “leap of faith.” Rather than discarding these findings, however, science as a whole might do well to use them as a foundation for attempting to learn what (if anything) religion itself does biologically. One method could involve comparing secular and religious groups that facilitate the same positive behaviors to see whether the biological results are the same or different. The few studies that have done this (c.f. Galen & Kloet, 2011) have shown the same positive benefits resulting from secular and religious groups, illustrating that most of the findings noted thus far are not exclusive to religion but rather are benefits derived from participation in any organization that provides a sense of belonging. Another opportunity could be found in using the activities themselves (rather than religion) as an explanation for the social aspects of humanity and biological development. In fact, this type of activity focus is consistently supported in the data provided by this field and could thus lead to useful interventions wherein groups and communities (religious or otherwise) could be taught to implement biologically useful activities within their environments. We would thus argue that biological studies concerning religion and

e­ volution provide a foundation for both ascertaining what exactly (if anything) is useful about religion itself and learning about the ways secular or nonreligious people have developed similar behaviors to religious people throughout history. Although often using different methodologies, evolutionary psychologists (as well as anthropologists from both cultural and physical disciplines) find similar patterns in their studies. Once again, these studies often reveal many behaviors that are biologically and psychologically adaptive and positive, but the researchers leave their data behind to make the claim that their findings say something about “religion” (see also Bloom, 2012, for a similar finding in a systematic review of evolutionary psychology and religion). Once again, however, we argue that there are useful insights to be found in these psychological studies once it is recognized that the studies do not, in fact, inform us about anything unique to religion. In fact, evolutionary psychologists often add insights concerning belief and belonging that may be especially useful in studies of religion. Since evolutionary psychologists tend to echo biologists in terms of adaptive behaviors, we will focus here on belonging and belief specifically. In terms of belonging, evolutionary psychologists demonstrate clearly that feeling as if one belongs to a specific community or group can have dramatic effects on social, psychological, and biological wellbeing (see, e.g., Barkow,  2006; Bloom,  2012; Richerson & Boyd, 2005 for examples and previous studies). It is clear that humans derive benefits from connection to others, and organized groups may provide both a sense of connection to something beyond the self and connections from generation to generation. As a result, participation in organized groups—especially those with shared belief systems passed down through time, such as religion, science, and families—increases well-being by incorporating the self into a larger whole (i.e., limiting isolation), into a larger narrative (i.e., providing order and meaning), and into a wider network (i.e., providing resources and help). As a result, participation in social organizations, religious or otherwise, creates a sense of belonging that is beneficial for humans from a wide variety of backgrounds, traditions, and sociohistorical contexts. It is important to note that focusing our studies on belonging may help address one of the largest lacunae in contemporary evolutionary arguments about religion. Whereas religions can be very

e­ffective in generating a sense of belonging for people who participate in and are welcomed by them, they are equally effective at isolating those they disagree with, demonizing those they decide do not belong, and creating symbolic boundaries that keep others from gaining the same sense of belonging (see Sumerau et al., 2015). Whereas evolutionary approaches to religion typically focus on the former half of this equation (see Kirkpatrick, 2004), the latter half is equally important when we consider that religions (and especially monotheistic traditions) are often built on boundaries that exclude as many people as they welcome. If we focus on belonging instead of religion, however, our explanations allow us to make sense of why some people actively avoid religion or turn to other social organizations when shunned by religion. Like their religious counterparts, they are seeking belonging while demonstrating that belonging does not only come from religion. Similar to our observation about behaviors, we thus suggest that researchers focus on the ways different types of social organizations promote belonging rather than limiting their focus to religion itself. Existing studies in evolutionary psychology also provide useful insights into belief, which is especially important because neither behavior nor belonging requires religion. Belief in something supernatural, however, is the hallmark of religious phenomena, and evolutionary psychologists have been the only scholars to explore this aspect in evolutionary terms. Rather than finding verification for arguments that equate behavior and belonging to “religion,” however, studies of belief have been mixed. In some cases, belief seems to matter a lot, but in others it appears to be the opposite (see Bloom, 2012 for a review; Moore & Leach, 2015). In fact, Bloom’s (2012) review suggests that when belief matters it is often in a maladaptive rather than adaptive capacity. Considering that supernatural belief is the only element explored by evolutionary scholars that could be considered exclusively religious, the mixed findings in this regard leave us with more questions than answers. According to Bloom’s (2012) review of evolutionary psychological studies of religion, belief plays little role in moral development or effects, but Bloom also cautions scholars to avoid thinking this means belief is irrelevant. Rather, as noted by Wright (2009), people often appeal to belief to justify behaviors that are more commonly caused by situational and ideological factors. In this

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way, belief may not be important to evolutionary processes, but it may be very important to people seeking a way to explain their behaviors, large-scale patterns and adaptations (like evolution), or any other aspect of life. Furthermore, belief may provide the glue that leads people to develop behaviors and belonging via religious rather than secular organizations. In any case, the inability of scholars to demonstrate any explicitly evolutionary aspect of religion does not necessarily mean that religion is not useful evolutionarily. Rather, it suggests that religions are accomplishing similar things to other organizations (i.e., behaviors and a sense of belonging) that have likely been very important in human evolution. Recent attempts to integrate sociological and evolutionary frameworks suggest some ways scholars could shift from granting religion explanatory power to focusing on the behaviors and sense of belonging captured in biological and psychological data (see, e.g., Niedenzu et al.,  2008; Sanderson, 2007). While these endeavors currently suffer from the same issues as their biological and psychological counterparts (i.e., granting religion explanatory power when other means can create the same results, limiting their use of social theory to pre-1970s ideas, and rarely saying anything about supernatural belief ), they demonstrate the usefulness of paying attention to the ways social factors influence both evolution and religion. Specifically, their articulations echo some biological arguments that neither culture nor biology alone will suffice if we seek to fully understand human evolution (see also McNamara,  2006a). As a result, it may be useful to explore what biological, psychological, and sociological discussions about evolution and religion have in common. In so doing, we may gain a foundation for elaborating an empirically consistent socioevolutionary approach to religion. To this end, it is noteworthy that each of the perspectives outlined thus far reveals consistent positive biological and psychological responses to specific types of behavior and feelings of belonging. Behavior and belonging may thus be especially important elements of bio-social-psychological experience capable of guiding examinations of evolutionary mechanisms in a wide variety of social arenas. We may thus extend previous conceptualizations of religion by directing attention to the ways such traditions shift and change over time in pursuit of structural and interactional patterns that facilitate behaviors and belonging for changing populations. 322

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As a result, we could begin to focus on the selections made by religions and facilitated by social and environmental changes to remain relevant (or believable) in society. In order to accomplish this redirection of focus, however, we will need to revise two common patterns in existing literature concerning evolution and religion. First, biological, psychological, and sociological evolutionary perspectives try to explain religion in terms of natural selection. While natural selection is an important element of human evolution writ large, it becomes problematic when extended to religion because it assumes (without evidence) there is something natural (i.e., not caused by humankind in any way) about religious transformations over time, which religions survive or fail, and the existence of religion itself. Considering that religious transformations over time are usually tied to social changes, that religions fail or survive based on violence or other social maneuvering processes, and that no one is born religious, seeking to explain religion (or other social institutions) by “appeals to nature” (Scott & Lyman, 1968) turns science into a faith-based enterprise rather than an empirical endeavor. Understanding religion from an evolutionary perspective, as we explain in the next section, will thus require shifting our focus from natural selection to either artificial selection (Darwin, 1859) and/or combinations of artificial and natural selection processes to account for the unnatural elements of religious change over the course of time. Alongside the overreliance on natural selection as an organizing concept, biological, psychological, and sociological evolutionary frameworks currently adopt negative interpretations of “free-riders” (i.e., people or animals that resist the norms of a given community, time period, or environment). Once again, while the limitation of nonconformity makes logical sense in relation to animal societies, wherein communal and pack mentalities are necessary elements of survival adapted over time, this concept becomes problematic when extended to humans because it assumes conformity (or community investment) is necessary, favorable, and positive for human evolution. Considering that many of the most positive social changes in history—including but not limited to technological, political, artistic, scientific, and medical innovations—emerged as a result of nonconformity on the part of free-riders, and further considering that conformity has not been shown to be necessary for human survival, arguments that religion may be adaptive because it

may cut down on free-riders are problematic at best. In fact, it may well be the case that religion is maladaptive because it may stall innovation by discouraging nonconformity within human populations (Cragun & Kosmin,  2013; Kanazawa,  2010). Empirically verifiable evolutionary conceptualizations of religion will thus need to let go of JudeoChristian beliefs about the importance of con­form­ ity and embrace the possibility of free-riding as an adaptive feature in the human case. It is with each of the aforementioned lessons concerning definitions, context, and previous treatments of religion and evolution that we turn to possible ways forward in the search for evolutionary frameworks capable of making sense of religion and other social phenomena. Importantly, we see the lessons contained in previous studies as important foundational observations for an empirically verifiable evolutionary approach to religion. Furthermore, as we discuss later, the answers to gaps in this literature actually lie at the foundations of evolutionary frameworks pushed aside in the midst of the “biological fundamentalism” that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Butler, 1999).

Remembering Darwin

In reviewing the existing literature linking religion and evolution, we have illustrated several noteworthy problems. Addressing these may appear daunting on the surface, but recalling Darwin’s (1859) initial insights about evolution and elaborating evolutionary frameworks may solve all of the issues noted thus far. While Darwin’s work has been tremendously influential across scientific communities, there has been a tendency to only focus on half the story—in much the same way that some monotheistic religious traditions pick and choose which scriptural passages are worth paying attention to. If, however, we turn back to Darwin’s initial conceptualization of the world, we find a balanced sociobiological system eerily similar to the models gaining prominence in contemporary medical and interdisciplinary fields. To begin, we need to note the importance of natural selection for any evolutionary approach to biological and social phenomena. In brief, natural selection refers to processes whereby traits, mutations, variations, migratory patterns, and other phenomena are or are not passed throughout generations of living things over time in relation to or because of natural forces, such as seismological

shifts or climactic variation. In natural selection, some qualities and patterns of behavior are better suited to certain environments, increasing the odds of producing or helping to produce offspring. This synthesis with existing environmental conditions, natural resources, and genetic patterns results in a higher presence of those qualities and/or patterns of behavior. Existing evolutionary approaches to religion correctly note the importance of natural selection for creating and sustaining environments and bodies that provide varied levels of benefit to certain practices and experiences within human populations. Alongside natural selection, however, Darwin’s initial conceptualization of evolution relied on ongoing (in some ways symmetrical) processes of artificial selection. Artificial selection refers to processes whereby traits, mutations, variations, migratory patterns, and other phenomena are passed on or dropped out throughout generations in relation to social (or unnatural) forces, shifts, and reproductive (sexual or otherwise) efforts. As a result, qualities and patterns of behavior privileged in a given social or environmental context accomplish more positive results and increased presence via their synthesis with existing social norms, conditions, resource distributions, and opportunities. Following Darwin, natural and artificial selection processes may operate independently, cumulatively, or cooperatively over the course of time. In all such cases, however, both processes are continually operating in relationship to one another throughout the world. While it is difficult to empirically ascertain or demonstrate independent examples of natural or artificial selection (i.e., cases where we can fully rule out all possible social effects on natural changes or fully rule out all possible natural effects on social changes), examples of cumulative and cooperative artificial and natural selection are easily spotted throughout our world. As a result, it may be useful to consider a couple of examples of the interrelationship between natural and artificial selection processes. When, for example, animals emerge in our world in varied colors or shapes, such variation may be attributed to natural selection processes (i.e., some colors may provide benefits over others). However, when a company later opens a plant for the production of human goods or resources in the environment of these animals, and that plant produces chemicals that change the appearance of or resources in the environment, we may see the animals

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(humans included) shift their behaviors, colors, shapes, or practices in varied ways (as in the peppered moth). The adaptations would be artificial selection processes caused by the entrance of an unnatural element (i.e., the plant) into their environment. When, however, their reproductive processes pass on these adaptations to the next generation, we see a cooperative artificial and natural selection effect as the animal’s artificial adaptations become integrated into their natural development at a genetic level. While we could posit some artificial selection process before this example begins or both artificial and natural selections ongoing after this example indefinitely, the point remains that biosocial experience tends to blend artificial and natural selection processes that allow species to adjust to natural and unnatural shifts in their environments and physical bodies. We can also posit this relationship in the opposite direction (especially in relation to social changes and institutions, like religions). If, for example, a certain group of people banded together and formed a nation through conquest, discovery, or any other social process, we have an artificial selection process wherein their newly formed organizational type (e.g., Islam) will change the shape of the world. After the artificial selection takes place, the natural environment will adjust to the presence of this group of people in varied ways (e.g., reduction of pig populations). This would be an outcome of natural selection, wherein the nature around the new nation shifts to accommodate or attempt to drive out the new inhabitants. When, however, new generations encounter the changed landscape, they will experience artificial selection processes wherein they develop traits and behaviors specific to the land they encounter or seek to find another land. Once again, we could posit alternate beginnings and endings to the example in numerous directions, but the point is that the combination and accumulation of natural and artificial selection processes create the sociobiological world we all encounter every day. Having hopefully made clear the importance of natural and artificial selection processes, we now turn back to evolutionary approaches to religion. If, for example, natural events (involving weather or food sources) facilitated migration to different parts of the world or the gathering together of large groups of people, we could find the origins of religion in processes of natural selection. If, on the other hand, social events (involving war or politics) facilitated migration to different parts of the world 324

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or the gathering together of large groups of people, we could find the origins of religion in processes of artificial selection. In either case, as our previous examples suggest, we would then expect ongoing proc­esses of natural and artificial selection to influence the forms religion would take, how long it would last, and the effects of its efforts throughout the passage of time. From this perspective, the findings from existing evolutionary approaches to religion begin to make more empirical sense. Behaviors noted to promote positive results for people in a wide variety of settings, for example, may be tied to the initial artificial and/or natural selection processes that facilitated people’s development of communities and groups of like-minded others. Similarly, the sense of belonging found to be beneficial for human development could well serve as a natural selection proc­ ess generated by the initial natural and/or artificial selections that made community important. Further, the mixed results concerning beliefs would suggest belief might be an artificial selection process for people needing a reason for developing behavior and belonging necessary for their well-being. Finally, free-riding/nonconformity could be seen as an artificial selection process that generates new ideas and innovations, while religion is an artificial selection process created to keep innovation and new ideas at a manageable level. Incorporating artificial selection processes into an evolutionary model of religion removes any requirement to pretend religion is more “natural” than empirical data can verify. As a result, existing religio-evolutionary frameworks are relieved of some of their biggest problems. Religion may or may not have initially emerged from processes of natural selection, but the artificial selection proc­ esses it generates and/or benefits from maintain their relevance beyond any biological or natural needs. In fact, religious variation throughout history now becomes something to be studied from an evolutionary perspective, because these artificial mutations may explain natural and artificial selection processes in various human contexts or reveal the ways religion evolves in relation to biological, psychological, and social shifts occurring throughout the rest of the natural world.

Religion as an Ongoing Form of Natural and Artificial Selection

Having argued for the necessity of including artificial selection into models of religious evolution, we

now show how this understanding can be helpful in making sense of the emergence of religion within the context of human history. While it is not possible to empirically return to the time wherein religion emerged, for the purposes of this chapter we will use existing observations about natural and social history to suggest two potential pathways for the emergence of religion, which could facilitate an evolutionary approach to religion in various disciplines. In so doing, we seek to demonstrate how use of Darwin’s insights concerning natural and artificial selection may provide frameworks for examining many social institutions over time. Let us begin with a pathway based on natural selection. In this scenario, natural forces facilitate the initial emergence of religion. For instance, many of the world’s religions have flood myths (Witzel,  2013). While debate continues as to whether these myths have a common origin (Witzel,  2013), it is likely the case that a natural event—a flood—resulted in a natural selection proc­ess. In more concrete terms, a flood probably killed many people, leaving some who witnessed the event alive. Given limited understanding of weather, geography, climate, and other natural processes at the time, the individuals who survived such an event may have developed supernatural stories (1) to explain the natural event, (2) to explain and justify how their lives changed as a result of the event, and (3) to establish collective rules of conduct that they believed would help prevent such an event in the future. In this scenario, a driver of natural selection—in this case, a flood—leads to the development of a community; artificial selection then facilitates a system (e.g., religion) to maintain that community. While this pathway is entirely plausible based on existing data, another equally plausible pathway relies on social forces facilitating the emergence of religion. For instance, Mormonism was one of many religious groups founded in the “burned over district” of upstate New York in the early 1800s (Bowman, 2012). There was no clear natural process that led to the founding of the religion; rather it was the result of widespread social or artificial processes that happened to converge in that time and place to lead to an upsurge in religiosity. Likewise, artificial selection processes played a key role in the survival of Mormonism relative to other religions that were founded around the same time. These artificial selection processes included key social factors that resulted in a strong sense of community, like a belief in

the Book of Mormon as a new book of scripture and the return of divine revelation through prophets. The introduction of these beliefs resulted in an artificial selection process that distanced the followers of Joseph Smith Jr. from other Christians, leading to the formation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (i.e., Mormon or LDS Church). The artificial selection process has continued in the LDS Church since its founding in 1830. The introduction of polygamy led to a strong sense of community (due to outside rejection of that belief and practice). Polygamy, instituted as a result of artificial selection, resulted in a natural selection process wherein the genetics of certain men were more likely to be passed on as, at its peak, just 20 percent of Mormons participated in polygamy and leaders of the religion were more likely to participate and have more wives (Van Wagoner, 1989). When polygamy was legally outlawed and the religion capitulated by ending the practice of polygamy (both artificial selection processes), other aspects of the religion became more prominent, like its adherence to dietary restrictions that prohibit the drinking of alcohol and coffee, among other restrictions. The creation of the LDS Church has ultimately resulted in natural selection processes, as Mormon settlement in Utah changed the flora and fauna of the region with the introduction of intense agriculture and other plants, animals, and living things (Arrington,  1993). Additionally, the behavioral restrictions of the religion have resulted in sexual selection pressures (artificial selection) that result in those adhering to the behavioral restrictions having greater odds of passing on their genes (natural selection process). In short, a religion with a clearly artificial origin has resulted in natural selection proc­esses. Of course, these potential origin pathways can be debated, but in either case existing data suggest religion emerged as an adaptation in societies. Whether this emergence was due to natural or artificial selection processes is likely a false dichotomy; in most cases, religions likely relied on the combination of the two, and the transmission of religion to later generations was also likely the result of both natural and artificial mechanisms. While we may never empirically know the source of religion generally or specific religions (e.g., Hinduism), there is more than enough data to suggest it was likely a natural and artificial adaptation for living in primitive societies that either followed or facilitated the shift from roaming to domesticated social and physical spaces and lifestyles.

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Our preceding arguments and early religious history lead us to believe that, rather than natural selection processes, social mechanisms drove religious adaptations. Whether religions were integrated, annihilated, or freshly established from the roots of existing traditions at the time, the primary adaptive mechanisms involved wars (i.e., one community conquering another and supplanting existing religious traditions with their own in the process), myth integration or syncretism (i.e., taking common stories from multiple religious traditions—like a virgin birth—and defining new religions based on these stories), empire building (i.e., justifying massive rule and warfare by appealing to a specific form of supernatural belief and marginalizing or converting members of other traditions, forcefully or otherwise), or cultural domestication (i.e., welcoming new members into communities only if they adopted the beliefs and rituals of the community). Considering that none of these mechanisms arise from nature, artificial selection appears to have become the primary form of religious evolution following the initial emergence of religion itself by multiple groups or communities of people. The prominence of artificial selection both then and now, however, does not remove natural selection from the equation. Rather, as in the examples offered, artificial selection processes (for example, the formation of an empire through warfare, myth integration, and/or domestication) facilitated natural selection processes in terms of biological settings (i.e., changes in the landscape of the new empire, variation in the natural resources people could access, and breeding patterns that once established and enforced became seemingly natural in later generations) and human biology (i.e., integration of various dominant traits via established breeding patterns and rules, shifts in biological development via the roles ascribed to different types of people, and changes in biochemistry as a result of food distribution and options within given long-term societal structures). As a result, religion would have emerged via natural and/or artificial selection, continued its development via artificial selection proc­ esses that produced natural selection processes, and then further shifted via artificial selection processes facilitated by the earlier round of natural selection processes. We think of this as the “religious evolution cycle.” Given our view of the historical and physical record of our world, it would seem that this cycle could continue indefinitely until or unless natural 326

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or social events stopped the cycle. In the case of natural events, for example, one could easily note the ability of weather changes and catastrophes, extinctions of plants or animals, or evolving environments to result in changes in religions or render religions more or less likely to continue. Hypothetical examples might include the eruption of the Yellowstone super volcano, substantially increasing the odds of Mormonism coming to end given its geographical density in the Intermountain West of the United States, or a plant blight affecting marijuana could result in a change in belief and practice in Rastafarianism. In such cases, natural selection processes would influence the religious evolution cycle. In a similar fashion, social events including but not limited to warfare (e.g., The Holocaust), humanly caused famine or environmental problems, and rules regulating reproductive and resource opportunities could destroy some religions (e.g., Shakers) and advance others (e.g., Orthodox and Hasidic Jews). In these cases, artificial selection proc­esses would influence the religious evolution cycle. In either case, the cycle would shift when natural or social events influenced previous trajectories, potentially resulting in the emergence of new forms of social organization. Using existing historical records, we can easily demonstrate the cycle we have proposed in multiple cases. If we look at Mayan society, for example, we have no way to know if it was natural selection, artificial selection, or a combination of the two that initially established religion in the area, but we have multiple examples of artificial selection processes (i.e., politically and socially mandated changes to the community and later to the religion itself ) from the detailed notes Catholic clergy took upon contact. It is clear that at some point a sophisticated religious system was created and used to establish the divine right to rule Mayan society, and that this religion continued to flourish after initial contact with the Spanish. Spanish contact with the Mayans, however, represented an artificial selection process coupled with natural selection processes that rendered an end to the Mayan religious evolution cycle via warfare, disease, famine, and (often forced) conversion to Catholicism. While the initial end of Mayan religion emerged via artificial selection processes (i.e., the decision of Spanish people to invade another nation), the events that followed had natural and social consequences for the Mayan religious evolution cycle as well as the society itself. These natural

and social consequences further facilitated biological and social changes throughout the Mayan nation of the time, which ultimately facilitated the emergence of new national, political, and religious cycles of artificial and natural selection over the next few hundred years. While the Mayan religious evolution cycle provides an example of the destruction of a religion via artificial and natural selection processes, we can outline the same evolutionary cycle in relation to contemporary religious traditions. If we look to JudeoChristian-Islamic traditions, for example, we again have no way of knowing if natural, artificial, or a combination of both selection processes facilitated the initial emergence of Judaism. After this initial creation, however, we then see multiple artificial selection processes early in Judaism (i.e., the integration of multiple tribes of people, migratory patterns, and warfare captured in the Torah and Histories, most of which are later fabrications; see Finkelstein & Silberman,  2002), and later in time (i.e., contact with empires, nation states, and ­glob­al­i­za­tion to this day). Furthermore, we see the establishment of Christianity and Islam via artificial selection processes of myth integration, cultural domestication, and warfare throughout the past two millennia. Within each of these traditions and in the larger mythology they share, this cycle continues wherein Judeo-Christian-Islamic beliefs and rituals change over time in relation to biological and social transformations across the world. As these examples suggest, the integration of artificial and natural selection processes provides a useful framework for understanding religious change throughout human history. In all religions we considered, we found the same basic cycle of emergence via natural, artificial, or a combination of these selection processes followed by the primacy of artificial selection processes that facilitated natural and artificial selection processes over time. The religious evolution cycle continues, until or unless either natural, artificial, or a combination of the two processes end the religion itself. Unlike existing evolutionary frameworks, the integration of natural and artificial selection processes does not require assigning religion explanatory power, but rather grants evolution explanatory power over the development of religion over time (i.e., religions survive by developing artificial adaptations and/or responding to natural adaptations in terms of effective behavior and belonging mechanisms over time). Finally, the integration of natural and artificial

s­election processes reveals that it may not matter whether or not people actually believe in religions for these forms of social organization to persist in varied contexts, populations, and time periods (i.e., if behavior and belonging adaptations provide benefit, belief is not necessary for acquiring said benefit). We would thus suggest that incorporating Darwin’s initial insights concerning the reciprocity of artificial and natural selection processes could allow for an empirically sound socioevolutionary approach to religion in biological, psychological, sociological, and other fields.

Artificial and Natural Selection Processes in Sociological Studies of Religion

Alongside its potential usefulness in evolutionary fields, an approach integrating artificial and natural selection processes could also bolster existing social scientific approaches to religion. Whereas existing social scientific studies of religion rarely incorporate evolutionary frameworks (likely due at least partially to the issues with these frameworks noted earlier), theoretical frameworks within these traditions (especially since the 1970s) are easily incorporated into our proposed socioevolutionary approach to religion. In fact, such an incorporation would likely resolve existing gaps in these fields. To propose this incorporation, we should begin by noting that social scientific studies of religion are built on the same “traditional” social theories noted in previous sections. Specifically, these fields emerged in relation to Durkheim’s notion of sacred and profane worlds of meaning and ritual before developing exchange frameworks exploring the social and psychological costs and benefits of religious participation for various groups. Whereas existing evolutionary frameworks have rarely engaged later theory in this area, the emergence of more recent theoretical frameworks concerning secularization and religious markets imply notions of artificial and natural selection processes that could be usefully explored and integrated within our proposed framework. Incorporating exchange and functionalist propositions from the past, religious market theories posit that religion operates as a form of economy wherein religious producers create products for religious consumers based on needs and demands (Stark & Finke,  2000). In this framework, religion is a commodity that functions in relation to patterns of supply and demand, wherein religious consumers exchange their participation (and obedience) for goods

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provided by religious leaders and faith traditions. As a result, changes in religious organizations over time are explained via shifting demands and needs within the consumer base (Cragun & Lawson,  2010) and the ways religious leaders adjust to these market transformations. Although this approach has held tremendous sway in social scientific circles in recent decades, it fails to explain why religions have not changed more than they have in relation to consumer demands concerning, for example, gender, race, and sexualities (Bush, 2010). In fact, Bush’s (2010) systematic review of this theoretical approach reveals that religions often seek to avoid “keeping up” with shifting market dynamics (see also Chaves, 1997). Alongside religious market theories, recent decades have seen substantial debate surrounding secularization frameworks (see Bruce,  2013; Chaves, 1994). Put simply, secularization frameworks posit that, over time, religion loses its influence and power in society as new technologies, ways of knowing, and ideological options emerge. Secularization theorists posit that, over time, societies lose their affinity or bonds to religious values and often replace these ties with other forms of meaning and ritual. While we can clearly see empirical cases where this framework appears sound (i.e., western Europe in recent decades), other empirical cases suggest that secularization may be a nuanced proc­ess wherein some elements of religion rise and fall in terms of influence over time depending on wider societal shifts. While each of these frameworks has found mixed results empirically, both of them point our attention to the dynamics of religious change over time and reveal the role of broader social and natural forces in the form of religion or nonreligion that exists in given places and times. Whereas religious market approaches lead to positive assertions about the continued vitality of religion in society, secularization approaches suggest the opposite by noting the partial demise of religion in various contexts. What these frameworks share, however, is the recognition that religions both regularly change aspects of their structure, mythology, and rituals over the course of time (Cragun et al., 2015) and maintain elements of consistency within these same arenas during the same times (Sumerau & Cragun,  2014). Religion thus represents a social form wherein continuity and change often operate side-by-side in practice in relation to broader societal and environmental transformations. Synthesizing these frameworks with our proceeding elaboration of a socioevolutionary approach to religion may provide a fruitful avenue for social 328

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scientists. When researchers note that religions change in relation to some social transformations and natural events while remaining consistent in the face of others, for example, they are implicitly demonstrating processes of artificial selection wherein religions make decisions in relation to natural and social forces. For instance, why did the LDS Church change its policy toward blacks holding the priesthood in the 1970s while it has not changed its policy toward women holding the priesthood? Since artificial selection processes require the power to make and enforce decisions for others, this may explain why in some cases secularization assertions hold when examined in relation to concrete changes (e.g., the emergence of Reform Judaism), and in other cases religions appear to resist secular transitions (e.g., the rise of ISIS in the Middle East). Similarly, this may explain why religions sometimes appear to follow market indicators of supply and demand while ignoring or resisting these dynamics at other times. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach like that offered in secularization and market theories, focusing on artificial and natural selection processes may allow us to tease out the nuances in religious responses to change and religious changes themselves. To this end, Cragun and Nielsen (2009) offer a useful socially based framework for exploring secularization, religious markets, and religious evolution in terms of artificial and natural selection processes. Blending secularization and market insights in an examination of Mormonism, Cragun and Nielsen (2009) argue that religions exist between competing social (and we would add natural) forces, wherein they need some mainstream recognition to grow and maintain memberships and require some niche appeal to differentiate their beliefs and rituals from other religious traditions. Seeking to maintain this balance, religious traditions make nuanced decisions in order to both (1) appeal to their niche or base in terms of tradition and (2) maintain respectability in mainstream society. In so doing, religious traditions engage in artificial selection processes to remain relevant to two worlds of meaning (i.e., the niche and the mainstream) that each regularly experience their own natural and artificial selection proc­esses over the course of time. From this perspective, we can conceptualize religious evolution and change as an effort to seek and maintain market share in a given population or economy through artificial adaptations that then appear natural over time to both believers and the wider public (i.e., the creation of a sacred canopy;

see Berger,  1990). Rather than complete transformations in relation to mainstream social and biological shifts, however, religious traditions adopt partial or nuanced changes to remain relevant to their core populations while avoiding potential scorn or disagreement with the broader environment. In so doing, religious traditions secularize in limited ways deemed necessary for their continued survival while maintaining some core aspects of their existing tradition. This process of religious evolution through artificial adaptation then repeats indefinitely over time for as long as a given religious tradition maintains the balance between mainstream and niche concerns. An example examining religious evolution cycles related to homosexuality may help illustrate these artificial selection processes in practical terms (see Cragun et al.,  2015; Sumerau & Cragun,  2014; Wilcox,  2003). As late as the end of the 1800s, same-sex couples could be found holding commitment ceremonies in religious organizations in the United Sates (i.e., Boston weddings and other cultural forms). However, following the construction of homosexuality as problematic by physical scientists in the early 1900s (see Katz,  2007), religious groups shifted their own beliefs (around the 1940s officially, but earlier in some cases) to define homosexuality as problematic and sinful. In this case, we see an unproblematic aspect of social life transformed (or artificially selected) into a problem as a result of broader social forces. The following decades witnessed attempts by mainstream religious organizations to weed out and oppose homosexuality privately and publicly in line with mainstream social norms and emerging interpretations of scriptural passages based on scientific condemnation of same-sex sexual activity. As mainstream acceptance and appreciation of homosexuality in both scientific and religious organizations began to grow in the 1990s and 2000s, however, some religions shifted back to their 1800s forms and began reintegrating same-sex couples and lesbian/ gay/bisexual individuals into their organizations (i.e., adapting to the mainstream in full including once again hosting commitment ceremonies) while others maintained their opposition to homosexuality but softened their language and rhetoric to present a kinder form of damnation (i.e., adapting the mainstream partially), and still others maintained their explicitly oppositional stance to lesbian/gay/ bisexual people and communities (i.e., did not adapt). In such cases, the religions adapted to shifting societal and scientific norms again, and these

artificial selections continue at present as the place of lesbian/gay/bisexual people in society remains a subject of debate in many parts of the world. Not surprisingly, we can see similar patterns of artificial selection processes wherein religious traditions seek to balance the desires of their core members and traditions with mainstream social and environmental changes throughout history. Shifting religious notions of what the supernatural thinks about race, gender, technology, science, medicine, and many other social issues reveal ongoing evolution and change within and between religious traditions. In fact, we see similar artificial selection proc­ esses when we look at scientific notions of these same issues over the course of time and in relation to the diversity—or lack thereof—within academic settings and traditions (see Collins,  2005). In all such cases, natural and/or social events draw attention to existing beliefs and practices, which compel existing organizational forms to respond in some way. Within these responses, we witness ongoing processes of artificial selection wherein some options are favored over others as organizational forms seek to maintain mainstream legitimacy while appealing to their base. Social scientific studies of religious change (or science or any other meaning system for that matter) could thus use our proposed socioevolutionary framework to map transformations over time in relation to the interplay between natural and artificial selection processes and the ongoing pursuit of both mainstream and niche legitimacy and appeal. In fact, we may take this proposed framework to its logical conclusion by looking at the plethora of artificial adaptation processes relevant to religion in our current social and biological world. While many scholars in various fields currently seek to understand the rise of fundamentalism and the rise of nonreligious populations occurring simultaneously in our world, our socioevolutionary framework would expect these results. If, for example, religious traditions constantly shift to maintain mainstream legitimacy, then this cycle would logically lead (over time) to a point where religion was either no longer necessary or no longer recognizable to its previous forms. In such a case, what we see as religion now would either disappear as it was replaced with other types of social organization or become so watered down that it resembled other nonreligious forms more than it resembled traditional religions (i.e., the liberalization and/or secularization of religion on a broad scale). In the process, however, not all groups would follow along. As a result, some groups’

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artificial selection processes might involve forceful resistance to religious change wherein people cling to disappearing ways of organization for comfort and security (i.e., the emergence of fundamentalist religions that forsake secular conventions and mainstream expectations). The current contradiction of growing nonreligious and fundamentalist populations would thus be a logical result of artificial selection processes wherein some religious traditions shifted far enough away from traditions that other religions based purely on reclaiming these traditions would become viable enclaves for people seeking tradition in the midst of massive technological, environmental, and political change.

Conclusions

Throughout this chapter, we have elaborated some ways an empirically based integration of social and physical scientific insights could benefit both evolutionary and other approaches to religion. To this end, we outlined a socioevolutionary approach to religion that focuses on clearly recognizing explicitly religious forms of experience rather than conflating behaviors found in a variety of organizations with religion, contextualizing scientific and religious phenomena for greater clarity concerning potential mechanisms, and synthesizing existing approaches to ascertain the evolution of religion via artificial and natural selection processes. In conclusion, we suggest some ways this framework could be used across disciplines in the pursuit of a unified theoretical approach to religion and evolution in biological and social contexts, settings, environments, and other domains. Religion offers a key example wherein the combination of natural and artificial selection processes allows scholars to reclaim the entirety of Darwin’s framework in order to understand both the social and biological basis of human existence and change. As a result, scholars may explore forces of natural selection (e.g., shifting weather patterns, resource options, and individual genetic inheritance) while contextualizing these in relation to forces of artificial selection (e.g., human endeavors that influence shifting weather patterns, social distributions of resources, and socially controlled, sanctioned, or punished reproductive and health protocols and patterns). By the same token, scholars may explore forces of artificial selection (e.g., warfare, conquest, and discrimination) while contextualizing these in relation to forces of natural selection (e.g., lasting environmental effects of warfare or conquest, 330

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b­ iological repercussions of discrimination, and the ways some social systems appear natural over time). In so doing, biological and social scholars could integrate their perspectives in search of a deeper understanding of the complexity of religion, society, biology, and human history. Applying an evolutionary framework to religion also reveals dynamics wherein organizational changes (i.e., artificial selections made by humans) are predicated on locales, geographies, and biology (i.e., natural selections made over time), which are, in turn, predicated on war, language, and knowledge transformations (i.e., artificial selections made as a result of previous natural selections) that facilitate environmental and individual biological changes (i.e., natural selections made as a result of previous artificial selections). Religion, therefore, gives evolutionary social and physical scientists an avenue for exploring the cyclical patterns of artificial and natural selection that appear to lie at the heart of human existence, history, development, and future possibilities. While the integration we propose may be difficult or unsettling for social and physical scientists trained in programs and traditions that subvert one area of reality for another (i.e., physical realities over social realities or vice versa), we would echo biologists, sociologists, and health scholars who continue to find that nothing is purely physical or social. Rather, as some psychologists and many health researchers have begun to do, we argue for the integration of social and physical empiricism throughout scientific endeavors in hopes of beginning to gain full pictures of our world rather than snapshots that miss social or physical realities. To this end, we propose the integration Darwin suggested from the start in hopes of seeing an empirically based evolutionary approach to religion lead to greater understanding of the physical and social nature of human existence and evolution.

References

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CH A PTE R

21

The Evolution and Exploitation of Transcendence

Gregory Gorelik

Abstract This chapter discusses the transcendent experience, which is defined as an ego-dissolving encounter with something greater than one’s self. The transcendent experience is cross-cultural and panhistorical. This chapter presents a model describing the evolution and function of various evolved modes of transcendence, such as group-directed transcendence, theory of mind (ToM) transcendence, aesthetic transcendence, and epistemic transcendence. It then discusses the susceptibility of these modes of transcendence to costly exploitation by selfish individuals. The ensuing sections discuss the relationship between transcendence and human development across the lifespan, and concludes with some thoughts on the epistemic and ethical utility of transcendence. Key Words: transcendence, evolution, spirituality, mysticism, exploitation, religion

The transcendent experience is often associated with the subsumption of the individual self in an allencompassing reality. The boundary between the self and the outside world is broken and a more expansive perspective diffuses throughout all aspects of one’s experience. All the while, the self fizzles out and one experiences a deep connection with and love for other beings. Such experiences are also accompanied by the revelation of some heretofore hidden, inexpressible truth, often communicated by a higher intelligence or all-pervading sentience. Although the previous statements may sound like wishy-washy, New Age trope, the scientific study of mystical states lends credence to at least some of these experiences. More than 30% of Americans and Brits, including 25% of atheists and agnostics, report having at least one transcendent experience (Levin & Steele, 2005). Likewise, research on patients with epilepsy and on Buddhist monks midmeditation highlights the role of the brain in the production of mystical and transcendent states (Davidson & Lutz, 2008; Waxman & Geschwind, 1975). Of course, we need not refer to neuroscience to know that physiological processes are responsible

for the induction of transcendence—and all other psychological states, for that matter. Drugs and sleep deprivation, for instance, can trigger illuminative out-of-body experiences and hallucinatory visions (Babkoff, Sing, Thorne, Genser, & Hegge, 1989; Wilkins, Girard, & Cheyne, 2011). Two points, in particular, are elucidated by such phenomena. The first is that a naturalistic explanation is fully compatible with the spiritual dimension of life. The fact that mystical states can be linked to the firing of electrical impulses and to the action of neurotransmitters on neural receptors demonstrates the inseparability of the transcendent state from material reality. At the very least, we can say that certain aspects of the transcendent experience can be explained in naturalistic terms. Of course, as William James cautioned, even if the brain and human physiology are responsible for religious experiences, the positive and meaningful effects of such states should not be discounted (James, 2004/1902, pp. 15–34). Indeed, romantic love can just as easily be traced to such physiological processes as the release of dopamine and oxytocin and the immunohistocompatibility of lovers (Liu & 333

Wang, 2003; Wedekind, Seebeck, Bettens, & Paepke, 1995), yet love is made no less real or meaningful thereby. The second point that is illustrated by the linkage of transcendent experiences with brain states is that these experiences are the products of evolution. Even if such experiences are aberrations of normal psychological functioning, there have to be normally functioning neural structures in place that such states are aberrations of—structures with a long history of evolution by natural and sexual selection. This point highlights one of the basic tenets of evolutionary biology: Phenotypic traits need not have been ancestrally adaptive in an evolutionary sense (in that they always contributed to successful survival and reproduction), but may consist of ancestrally nonadaptive byproducts of adaptations. There could be much within the transcendent experience that is associated with such byproducts, including the belief in gods and disembodied spirits. Nevertheless, as discussed in what follows, some transcendent experiences may indeed have survival and reproductive value. A less-acknowledged possibility is that the capacity for transcendent experiences in some is often parasitized by other individuals who seek to selfishly exploit it. Such exploitation, I  argue, was ancestrally adaptive for those who might benefit from others’ delusions and selfdestructive devotion to religious causes.

Definitions

When discussing matters of religion or tran­scend­ ence, ambiguity and obfuscation are typical pitfalls. Whether religious or secular, many people have a  pet idea of what religion is about. Even in arguments over what the words “religion” and ­ ­“tran­scend­ence” mean, there is no clear consensus. Some understand religion to be about communal ceremonies and feelings of belongingness. Others see it as indistinguishable from specific beliefs and dogmas about the supernatural. Similarly, “tran­ scend­ence” can refer to a feeling of connectedness with one’s environment and the beings inhabiting it, to one or another New Age belief about spiritual com­ mun­ ion, or to meditation- or drug-induced mental travel to other dimensions and realities. Words like “spiritual” and “mystical” often motivate similar disagreements. Though every word has strengths and weakness, some words and definitions are better suited to my purposes in this chapter than others. By “religion,” I mean the union of specific cultural ideas and beliefs about the supernatural world with certain 334

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universal human emotions and cognitive systems that are hospitable to such ideas and beliefs. Although tran­ scend­ ent experiences are included among some of the most potent emotions and cognitive systems that motivate religion, without specific rituals and beliefs associated with the supernatural, religions they do not make. I transition between the words “transcendent,” “spiritual,” and “mystical,” all of which I use to refer to the same basic human experience, which is a state of high emotional and cognitive arousal following acquaintance with something perceived to be greater than one’s self. This experience coincides with a corresponding dissolution of one’s sense of “self ” that users of psychedelics refer to as “ego death” (Leary, Metzner, & Albpert, 2000/1964). I prefer the word “tran­scend­ ent” to describe such experiences because of its reference to feelings of human interconnectedness and the perceived dissolving of boundaries between individuals and their environments. Such boundarydissolving properties of the transcendent experience are, however, not always enacted for egalitarian or compassionate purposes. Indeed, as I discuss, the tran­scend­ent state in some is often taken advantage of by others for the purpose of exploitation. As such, I argue that both the transcendent experience itself and its activation and misuse by manipulators are naturally selected adaptations.

The Evolutionary and Cognitive Underpinnings of Transcendence

The capacity for transcendent states is universal and possesses many common features across societies. Sub-Saharan, Siberian, and Mesoamerican tribal cultures have been described by historians, anthropologists, and journalists as often revolving around shamans, who—with the aid of drumming, dancing, and drugs—induce a hypnotic mindset through which group members can commune with departed ancestors, spirits, and gods (Atran, 2002, p. 124; Pinchbeck, 2002; Waida, 1983). An illustrative example comes from the shamans of the Amazon who induce hallucinogenic states via ayahuasca, a concoction made of various rainforest plants, with the active ingredient being dimethyltryptamine, a potent hallucinogenic (Rivier & Lindgren, 1972). Ayahuasca is known to stimulate visions of spiritual realms beyond ordinary reality— visions that assist shamans and ritual participants in healing the sick or in finding meaning or answers to specific questions. Similar shamanic practices surrounding the iboga bark in western Africa have been documented (Pinchbeck, 2002). Accounts of

transcendence-inducing communal rituals in the Western and Eastern traditions—from the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece, to the ecstasies of Sufi mystics, swirling dervishes, and Buddhist monks—likewise hint at the universality of the psychology of tran­scend­ence. The transcendent experience is associated with the activation of either one or all of the following evolved cognitive states: group-directed affection (often involving feelings of love and friendship), the perceived presence of incorporeal minds and supernatural agents, a feeling of awe following an encounter with something beautiful and grand, or an epistemic state that is associated with the revelation of some hidden reality or deeper truth. These evolved cognitive systems might help to explain both the manifestation of the transcendent experience and its exploitation by others. Although preliminary, the following model may be useful in capturing some of the necessary features of ­transcendence—features that make it vulnerable to usurpation by exploiters.

Group-Directed Transcendence

Group-directed transcendent experiences rely on cognitive and emotional systems whose simultaneous activation by the various features of a communal ritual uniquely defines a type of transcendent experience. The social nature of the communal setting and the often-reported feelings of empathy and dissolving boundaries between oneself and one’s fellow tribe-members or coworshipers serve the proposed function of consolidating coalitional ties among group members—a function that is aided by cognitive states associated with love, friendship, and camaraderie (for review, see Atran, 2002, pp.  149–173; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003). The social nature of religious cognition is likewise observable at the level of the brain, as suggested by Kapogiannis et al.’s (2009) finding of a correspondence between certain types of religiosity and the cortical thickness of brain areas implicated in social cognition. Some evolutionary theorists propose that such evoked social bonding benefits groups over individuals (Wilson, 2002), whereas others contend that the benefit is to individuals and their genes (Cronk, 1994). Assuming that one’s participation in such rituals has the effect of garnering support and cooperation from one’s fellow group members, the psychological capacity for taking part in and signaling one’s commitment to others during such rituals can benefit individuals, their genes, and, as a byproduct, their groups.

Regardless of whether the reproductive benefits of transcendent rituals are enjoyed by individuals or groups, the theory of costly signaling can explain the level of emotional investment that is expected from participants (Atran, 2002, pp. 127–140; Zahavi, 1975). According to costly signaling theory, organisms are under selection pressure to honestly communicate their ability and willingness to apportion benefits to other organisms. Assuming that ancestral humans were less likely to cooperate with potential cheaters (i.e., those who would accept the benefits of group membership without paying the costs), it would be to an individual’s advantage to send an honest signal of cooperativeness in order to attract other cooperators. Such signals might include generous gestures such as gift giving, as exemplified by the chiefs of some Northwestern Native American tribes who would throw “potlatches,”— that is, grand feasts during which the leftovers were often destroyed as a costly signal of a chief ’s bountiful resources (Barnett, 1938). More pertinent to this chapter, an individual might signal his cooperative and group-oriented qualities by exhibiting a costly emotional response that is hard to fake by would-be cheaters. Life history milestones such as puberty-related coming-ofage ceremonies and the cementing of pair-bonding with communal wedding rituals often rely on participants’ abilities to exhibit hard-to-fake emotional responses appropriate for the occasion (i.e., a solemn and mature commitment to one’s role as an adult within one’s community and an unmistakable show of sexual and emotional fidelity to one’s future spouse, respectively). Evolutionary psychologists have also proposed that grief exhibited by friends and family of the deceased functions to communicate a mourner’s value as a potential social partner to onlookers (Winegard, Reynolds, Baumeister, Winegard, & Maner, 2014). Indeed, in addition to its effect on recruiting future allies, such emotional costs may simply function as an emotional debt paid by the aggrieved to the deceased—a necessary payment whose initial promise functioned as a costly signal of commitment to the now-deceased while he or she was still alive. Such costly emotional signaling was probably more frequent in ancestral tribal societies that engaged in communal rituals in order to control everything from the weather to success in intertribal warfare. Even in the secular, urban environments of today, adherents of some religious traditions (e.g., Pentecostal Christians, Hassidic Jews) continue to come together for energy- and emotion-consuming communal prayers and feasts.

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Rituals are especially potent in unifying group members via behavioral synchrony and shared emotional resonance. Anthropologists have documented the universality of tribal practices such as drumming, chanting, and dancing during religious rituals—practices that are often enacted within the group for cohesion-building purposes (Atran, 2002, pp. 171–172; for a separate discussion of music as an  activator of transcendence, see “Aesthetic Transcendence” in the present chapter). Drumming, chanting, and dancing all produce rhythm-based behavioral synchrony among participants, an evolved capacity whose proposed selected function is the building and strengthening of social ties (Lakin, Jefferis, Cheng, & Chartrand, 2003). Indeed, mother-child synchrony is associated with a host of positive personal and social outcomes in childhood and adolescence (Criss, Shaw, & Ingoldsby, 2003; Feldman, 2007; Feldman &  Greenbaum, 1997; Feldman, Greenbaum, & Yirmiya, 1999). Lending support to its proposed evolutionary role in enacting adaptive social interactions, adults often mimic attractive opposite-sex confederates—that is, men mimic physically attractive women, whereas women mimic high-status men (van Straaten, Engels, Finkenauer, & Holland, 2008). Is such mimicry successful in furthering adaptive social interactions? Indeed, mimicry is an effective cohesion-building tool, as highlighted by participants’ greater liking for confederates who mimicked their body movements (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999) Due to questions about the academic integrity of Gueguen’s research, I would like to pull this citation from the text.). In a subsequent section, I discuss how the human propensity to mimic and be mimicked by others is vulnerable to hijacking by manipulators during the transcendent state.

Theory of Mind and Transcendence

As powerful as the commitment-oriented emotions are, Pentecostal revivals replete with snake-handling and echolalia—and even solitary experiences of supernatural entities—activate an additional evolved cognitive system. In his discussion of the nature of beliefs, David Hume (1978/1739) proposed that ideas become beliefs via, among other influences, the passions and the emotions. Specifically, an idea becomes “lively” (i.e., gains “belief ” status) if it is given force by direct experience, the imagination, or the passions. Hume specifically mentions religion’s ability to stir up passions such as fear and terror, writing, “in matters of religion men take a pleasure in being terrify’d” (p. 115). That men take pleasure 336

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in being “terrify’d” is even highlighted by quite secular activities such as reading Stephen King novels and watching horror films. The activation of fear during moments of transcendence is discussed in anthropological literature on coming-of-age rituals, wherein the juvenile or adolescent must withstand some torturous trial or vision quest in order to become an adult member of the tribe. One Amazonian tribe stipulates that, to become warriors, coming-of-age boys must endure the wearing of a glove made of vegetation and studded with viciously biting “bullet ants” as part of a communal milestone-marking ceremony (Botelho & Weigel, 2011). Often, such ceremony-induced emotional states are wedded to specific religious beliefs and dogmas about the supernatural world and its inhabitants, which, in accordance with Hume, are reified into truth-status. Bullet ants aside, fear is often elicited solely by the specific content of a religious or cultural tradition’s message. Often, the content will include reference to supernatural entities with their own minds, intentions, judgments, and powers of influence. An evolved system variously referred to as the “agency detector,” the “intentional stance,” and the “theory of mind” (ToM) is evoked during the processing of such supernatural content (Baron-Cohen, 2005; Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Dennett, 1987). All of these describe mechanisms whose evolved function is the ready attribution of animacy to unknown sounds, sights, and sensations. It is thought that by erring on the side of assuming that a rustling in the bushes, a shadowy movement in the grass, or an unexpected tingling on one’s skin is, in fact, a predator, human ancestors ensured their own survival and reproduction (Haselton & Buss, 2000). Such sounds and sights were usually benign, but in case they were not, the immediate triggering of the fight-or-flight response would have saved an early human from an early grave. Albeit possessing the same properties as other mechanisms whose function is the detection of animate beings, ToM specifically refers to the attribution of human psychological properties to other entities. It is likely that, in addition to predators such as poisonous snakes and spiders and the big cats of the savanna, ancestral humans often had to contend with other humans for resources and mates, and that such conflicts were often deadly. Thus, some of our ancestors’ most dangerous predators, and most potent allies, were other humans whose intentions had to be intuited in order to predict whether these other humans’ behavior posed a

threat or an opportunity for cooperation. The human propensity to anthropomorphize (i.e., to readily attribute emotions and thoughts to nonhuman entities such as dogs, cats, clouds, and gods) may stem from this easily activated ToM. When a god’s or spirit’s characteristics are predatory (characteristics perhaps associated with a demonic god or spirit), the contemplative reacts with fear and terror—correlates of the fight-or-flight response. It is also possible that, in addition to being predatorlike, deities and demons might come to resemble prey, an attribute captured by Nietzsche in The Gay Science, wherein the madman proclaims “God is dead  .  .  .  And we have killed him” (Nietzsche, 1974/1887, p. 181). Assuming that gods enforce social cohesion (see the ensuing discussion), perhaps such culturally expressed down-regulations of predator-deities into preyed-on deities reflect societies that are no longer dependent on supernatural forces for cooperation and mutual action. Note that predators and prey are not the only stimuli that activate agency attribution mechanisms such as ToM. As we mature, our social world gradually expands from the immediate circle of our parents to include other adult caregivers, siblings, friends, and lovers. In Totem and Taboo, Freud (1919) posited that the human belief in God is associated with the image of the “primal father,” a figure eliciting both feelings of childhood attachment and the Oedipal fear of being castrated. Although there is no evidence of any primal father template or its attendant fear of castration, Freud’s conflation of deities with parental figures gains traction from studies by Kirkpatrick on the relationship between the attachment system and beliefs in the supernatural (Kirkpatrick, 2005). According to Kirkpatrick, the attachment system—a naturally selected system whose function is the formation of  life-sustaining bonds between offspring and caregivers—is activated by beliefs in supernatural agents and incorporeal entities. Granqvist and Kirkpatrick (2004) present evidence that children’s attachment styles toward parents—whether secure or insecure—are carried over to their relationships with culturally inherited figures such as gods. As discussed by Wright (2009) and Norenzayan and colleagues (2016), the invention of agriculture led to a gradual, if uneven, rise of ever-more powerful and all-knowing deities who were especially concerned with human moral conduct—a process that finally culminated in monotheism. The increased production and storage of harvests demanded a population-wide system of morality that promoted

cooperation, labor division, and the reduction of stealing and free-riding. The cultural invention of gods and goddesses with parental qualities can help to sustain such a moral system. Parental deities are compelling and memorable because they induce the same fear, guilt, and love that a parent would induce, in addition to counterintuitive properties such as omnipotence, omnipresence, and om­nis­ cience (for a summary of research on the durability of minimally counterintuitive beliefs, see Atran, 2002, pp. 100–107). The punishing and rewarding properties of such supernatural agents are what helped to sustain cooperation within growing ancestral populations of genetically unrelated individuals who, in turn, acquired the status of fictive kin. Especially in the Christian tradition (wherein kinship terms are used to describe one’s relationship with the divine, as in “God the Father” in relation to His “children,” who are all “brethren”), tran­scend­ ent states typified by filial piety are quite common. Sosis and Bressler’s (2003) study of 19th-century American communes supports the view that, when wedded to costly religious rituals, supernatural beings maintain group cooperation and longevity. In light of Kirkpatrick’s own research (Kirkpatrick & Shaver, 1992), and the preponderance of various fertility gods and goddesses across different times and places, it is possible that human attachments to lovers and spouses might likewise function as templates for beliefs in deities with sexual and erotic properties. This is attested to by the Tantric discipline in Hinduism, which advocates the cultivation of union with the divine godhead, or “Brahman,” via sexual intercourse. Note that Tantric sexual practices involve more than just lustful effervescence; rather, they are marked by an infusion of emotions associated with romantic love in addition to sexuality. As described by Borchert (1994), Tantric practices encourage lovers to view one another as “keys to each other’s welfare, for each is a god in the other. Each loves the other within themselves” (p. 90). Tantric practices and some Western accounts of  transcendence, such as the orgasmic ecstasy of Teresa of Avila (1904, pp. 256–257), suggest that transcendence may occur alongside the activation of oxytocin-mediated psychological circuits whose evolutionary function is the cementing of romantic commitment to mates. Such mechanisms enabled our male and female ancestors to cement their unions to one another in order to ensure mutual investment in the resultant offspring. Further evidence for the activation of these mechanisms during moments of transcendence comes from late medieval

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and early modern accounts of sexualized unions with Christ (as well as an assortment of angelic and demonic figures) experienced by Catholic nuns in the thralls of orgasmic ecstasy (Sluhovsky, 2002). Such instances of religion-inspired sexual hysteria spread across Europe in a pandemic fashion, as convent after convent was exposed to rumors of these spectacles. It is possible that the advent of erotic expressions of love for the divine gave those who took on vows of celibacy the plausible deniability necessary to express their earthly needs and desires in religiously sanctioned ways. Because most of these religious enthusiasts were women, their expressions of erotic attachments to Christ probably included romantic sentiment in addition to carnal desire (reflecting ancestral women’s greater obligatory investment in offspring and the ensuing evolution of preferences for long-term over short-term mates; Trivers, 1972).

Aesthetic Transcendence

Alongside the fear and love activated by predatory, parental, and amorous gods, the transcendent experience often evokes rewarding emotions such as awe, wonder, hope, and bliss in the face of something grand and unknown. Mystics such as Teresa of Avila would often experience alternating periods of despair followed by ecstasy and well-being (Atran, 2002, p. 189; see also James, 2004/1902, pp. 66–70, 168–169). The Christian canon likewise refers to the more beatific states of transcendence as being in “God’s grace.” Such states are often associated with both aesthetic transcendence and epistemic tran­ scend­ence (the latter type of transcendence is discussed in the following section). The transcendent experience of beauty is ultimately rooted in the experience of pleasure—and for good reason. Evolutionarily, pleasurable feelings are associated with survival and reproduction, whereas painful feelings are associated with harm and death. Despite people finding beauty in horror and pain, aesthetic sensations are usually associated with pleasure (Indeed, part of the aesthetic experience of horror and pain may be the relief one experiences once such terror subsides after the movie credits roll or the horror novel is laid on the nightstand). In general, people find landscapes beautiful if they resemble the savannas of our hominin ancestors—that is, open spaces with adequate tree cover, footpaths for navigation, and the presence of animals and vegetation for foraging (Dutton, 2003). Likewise, faces that exhibit symmetry, averageness, and smoothness of skin—signals of genetic health and parasite resistance—are judged to be more 338

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beautiful than faces that do not exhibit these features (Apicella, Little, & Marlowe, 2007; Fink, Grammer, & Thornhill, 2001; Gangestad, Thornhill, & Yeo, 1994). We also find stories told by engaging orators to be aesthetically pleasing because such stories relayed evolutionarily relevant information to our ancestors—namely, how to successfully hunt down a gazelle or avoid being outwitted by a rival (Pinker, 1997, pp. 541–543). The pleasure associated with such sources of beauty draws us to environments and organisms that would have promoted ancestral survival and reproduction. When an individual looks at an attractive face or a vibrant sunset, for example, his or her dopamine-mediated pleasure circuits are activated (though to a lesser extent than they would be by more direct pleasurable experiences associated with, say, sex or heroin). Thus, the pleasure associated with beauty functions to direct individuals to aspects of their environments that were ancestrally associated with various reproductive benefits, be they healthy and fertile mates, hospitable landscapes, or life-saving information relayed as poetry or oratory. In addition to landscapes, beautiful faces, and engaging stories (e.g., the picturesque setting of houses of worship, the beauty of religious figures in sculptures and paintings, and the appeal of biblical tales and life-affirming sermons), the transcendent experience of beauty is inspired by something that is grand and mysterious—something that invites further exploration. The human propensity to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of even some inhospitable environments (e.g., the open ocean, deserts, glaciers, or the surface of Mars) suggests that aesthetic pleasure inspires curiosity and exploration—aspects of the human experience that have been historically associated with the discovery of new lands, untapped resources, and, in the intellectual sphere, heretofore unknown or unacknowledged scientific paradigms and findings. Evolutionarily, such beauty is associated with the pleasure of exploring an object or environment that may possess opportunities for survival and reproduction—for example, a new tool that may yield more resources or an unexplored glade that may be teeming with nutritive plants and animals. No doubt, being open to new experiences is often dangerous, if not deadly; contacting other tribes in order to acquire their unique tool-making skills or traversing a strange path potentially teeming with predators are decisions that our ancestors could not afford to make regularly. This is why, in addition to being compelled by the awe-inspiring beauty of forbidden landscapes, humans are sometimes i­ nhibited

by emotions such as fear. Grand and i­mposing gothic cathedrals may call forth such aesthetic experiences by simultaneously activating the sense of mystery and opportunity alongside fear of the unknown. The aesthetic pleasure of such fear may lie in the relief one feels when the pleasure-inducing aspects of the aesthetic experience take over (e.g., the safety and orderliness of divine protection, the opportunity of heretofore unexplored spiritual realms).

Music

The unique power of music to elicit transcendence in individuals and groups deserves special attention. Some scholars claim that music is nothing but an evolutionary byproduct or “cheesecake” of the mind—that is, it is pleasurable simply because it exploits the normally adaptive pleasure circuits associated with language and other auditory faculties (Pinker, 1997, pp. 534–535). Others believe that music production and appreciation are sexually selected evolutionary adaptations (Miller, 2000). Still others contend that because music has the universal effect of inducing pleasure and bringing people together via this shared pleasure, its main function is in uniting group members in mutually benefiting alliances (Huron, 2001). As with most complex and multifaceted human phenomena, music may consist of a combination of various adaptive and nonadaptive features. Rhythm is the most basic component of music, and its importance to humans may be a product of a long evolutionary history alongside rhythmical sounds and sensations associated with breathing, walking, and the beating of the heart. Moving to the same rhythm also elicits emotional closeness between listeners (Launay, Dean, & Bailes, 2014), suggesting an adaptive role of rhythmical timekeeping in establishing mutually cooperative bonds between group members. Furthermore, the production and perception of music stimulates many of the same brain areas that are involved in the production and perception of speech (Levitin & Menon, 2003). This may be the reason why music has such an emotionally stirring effect on people. That is, when you strip away the vocabulary, grammar, and semantics of verbal communication but leave (and exaggerate) the nonverbal syntax and intonations of speech (i.e., the time-based structure of patterned sound, the alternating rise and fall of verbal pitch), what is left is the emotion-inducing melodic core that lies at the heart of human conversation. Musicians skillfully exploit this core whenever they construct melodies whose differentially embedded patterns evoke emo-

tional intonations associated with various speech sounds, be it the sounds of happiness, sadness, anger, sexual and romantic interest, or—if there are such sounds—the sounds of transcendence.

Epistemic Transcendence

A key feature of some ecstatic and transcendent experiences is the attribution of truth value to them. Such experiences of illumination and enlightenment are in a different epistemic category—at least for those who experience such states—than everyday encounters with beautiful people and objects. The beauty of such experiences is wedded to the certainty that some fundamental truth or revelation was glimpsed, and such experiences are often followed by a change in the seer’s perspective on life and the nature of reality (see James’s [2004/1902] discussion of the “practical fruits” of religious experiences, pp. 230–286). It is likely that humans possess an evolved psychological system devoted to truth-seeking. Although there are arguments that support the existence of evolved self-deceptive mechanisms (von Hippel & Trivers, 2011) and the withholding of accurate information by some psychological systems from others (Kurzban, 2010), an accurate accounting of the world is often necessary for successful survival and reproduction. This entails that, given enough exposure to contrary information, humans are capable of changing their minds and adopting beliefs that they previously opposed or were not exposed to (see Vallacher & Wegner, 2012, p. 344, on “catastrophic shifts” in social cognition). The volatile physical and social environments of our ancestors likely selected for learning mechanisms capable of recognizing and overcoming past mistakes and creating associations that were more reflective of reality. Neurocognitive research points to a specific brain mechanism that may be responsible for such tracking of one’s own and of others’ mistakes: the anterior cingulate cortex. When an individual makes a mistake on a cognitive task (e.g., he or she reads the word “blue” rather than correctly naming the color of its ink, which is red), the anterior cingulate cortex is activated (Pardo, Pardo, Janer, & Raichle, 1990). Its activation ensures that such mistakes are minimized in the future, and indeed, tasks that are associated with conflicting responses trigger the anterior cingulate cortex in anticipation of the possibility of making a mistake (Carter et al., 1998). The complement to such errorfinding processes is a system that ensures that accurate knowledge structures are built via associa-

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tive learning mechanisms. Such a creative process is necessary if humans are to perfect the skills and develop the knowledge base necessary for completing long-term tasks quickly and efficiently. Although the development of such knowledge structures is an everyday occurrence, remembering where one misplaced one’s keys or learning something new about the tax code is unlikely to lead to any major overhauls in one’s cognitive universe. The formation of pervasive truth-carrying knowledge structures associated with the transcendent experience relies on additional factors. One such factor is the unification of disparate perceptions, memories, beliefs, and motivational systems via the recognition of some common pattern among them. Transcendent experiences associated with such representational overhauls are a reflection of the moment-to-moment change from one semantic paradigm or perspective to another. Indeed, the transcendent experience is often described as an event during which an individual uncovers something heretofore hidden, or makes connections among heretofore unrelated aspects of one’s personal or intellectual life. The occurrence of such experiences also highlights the commonalities between the supernaturalism-steeped illuminative experiences of mystics and the moments of inspiration associated with artistic and scientific breakthroughs. As documented by neuroscientists and psychologists, integration of neural and cognitive function occurs at all levels of cognition, from the local (e.g., the integration of various systems devoted to the unitive experience of vision) to the global (e.g., the integration of visual with auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory systems, and the psychological integration of various personality characteristics, self-concepts, and schemas) (Lewkowicz & Ghazanfar, 2009; Vallacher, 2009; Varela, Lachaux, Rodriguez, & Martinerie, 2001). Indeed, adaptive behavior would not be possible if some type of psychological integration did not exist. The act of reproduction, for example, requires functional integration of visual, auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic, tactile, and other sensory, cognitive, and affective systems. Although all such processes of informational synthesis speak to their adaptive design, knowledge structures are not always reflective of the true state of the world. Even from an evolutionary perspective, the acquisition of survival-unrelated knowledge, such as a Bible verse or a Shakespearean sonnet, may be adaptive if it merely leads to an in340

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crease in attractiveness to members of the opposite sex. Furthermore, although the human capacity to acquire, analyze, and sometimes synthesize disparate types of information is very much a product of selection, the continuously changing content that is processed by these knowledge-acquisition mechanisms may be divorced from concerns about survival, reproduction, and truth. To summarize, what some refer to as the “gnostic” or “noetic” aspects of the transcendent experience are, what I believe, instances of cognitive synthesis; that is, heretofore dissociated knowledge structures become associated and a new perspective develops. Physiologically, such neuronal associations probably form via synaptic strengthening. Likewise, the experience of synthesis that such associations produce can be induced by the ingestion of various psychotropic substances. Müller and Schumann (2011) even proposed that the harvesting and use of psychotropic plants by humans is an example of coevolved mutualism, and that one of the benefits of such coevolution is the formation of new knowledge structures from preexisting ones. If the new knowledge structures aid the individual in survival or reproduction, the drug-ingesting behavior gets naturally selected. Although it is intriguing to consider that the benefits of mind alteration for early humans may have led to our coevolutionary dependence on various psychotropic organisms, such experiences as just described also occur during normal states of consciousness. The rewarding aspects of knowledge acquisition, in particular, ensure that humans are continuously motivated via dopamine—a neurotransmitter likewise associated with synaptic strengthening—to seek out new knowledge or to reassess existing knowledge structures. When new knowledge is acquired, or a common pattern is detected among unrelated memories, ideas, or experiences, the motivating and rewarding aspects of dopamine ensure that we continue to engage in such knowledge acquisition and processing in the future. In the environments of our ancestors, such cognitive development within one’s lifetime perhaps aided our ancestors in building tools, controlling fires, and domesticating plants and animals. No doubt, humans have unique genetic and cultural inheritances that we do not share with our cousins, the chimpanzees. But reaping the fruit of such genetic and cultural gifts requires both development and learning within a lifetime. Even if agriculture is mostly a product of cultural imitation, there had to have been a moment (or many moments) now and

in our evolutionary past when the cognitive connection between the concept of seeds and their ability to give rise to edible plants was made. I am not suggesting that the creation of rewarding knowledge is alone responsible for the ecstasies of certain transcendent states, but the gaining of some deeper insight is a recurring theme in descriptions of transcendent states and peak experiences. Most likely, the more immersive forms of tran­ scend­ence—what Aldous Huxley, echoing Eckhart’s use of “intellect,” refers to as “immediate intuition” (1970/1945, p. 133)—involve the activation of ToM processes in the temporal cortex and is felt as a reception of some divine truth or a glimpse of some hidden realm controlled by a hyperintelligent mind. However, the immersive aspects of such experiences need not rely only on the activation of various cognitive systems. For example, the selective deactivation of the default mode network—a brain structure that is implicated in one’s sense of self, or one’s identification as a separate and unique being—has been observed in fMRI scans of psilocybin-ingesting participants (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012). Incidentally, peak performance experiences referred to as “flow” states (Csikszentmihalyi & Nakamura, 2002), and the often-reported “ego death” experienced by meditators and psychotropic users, all involve the loss of self-consciousness and the dissolution of one’s sense of separateness from one’s environment and its inhabitants. When individuals who are in such states of self-dissolution also experience the creation of knowledge or the linkage of heretofore unconnected knowledge structures, the experience becomes immersive and enlightening. More work is needed in tracking the nature of transcendent states. As suggested by the previous discussion on the various psychological mechanisms that may be activated during transcendent experiences, there is probably no such thing as the exemplar case of transcendence. Some transcendent experiences may be activated by the social sphere and its attendant affiliative emotions that ensure commitment to the in-group. Others may be under the influence of culture-specific supernatural beliefs and the fear- and love-inducing properties of gods and spirits. Still others may be anchored in the immersive aspects of beauty and knowledge synthesis, and the ecstasies they unleash. More likely than not, many instances of transcendence involve the activation of a combination of psychological mechanisms, and the unique and personal nature of tran­scend­ ence may reflect this unique pattern of activation that varies within an individual’s lifetime and

from  one individual to another. Added to this is the very real possibility that there are several more tran­scend­ence-inducing psychological mechanisms that have yet to be uncovered. I only discussed the aforementioned mechanisms because they easily lend themselves to an analysis of how they may be exploited by ill-intentioned others—one of the main themes of the current chapter. No doubt, I have left out many known and still unknown psychological mechanisms responsible for the tran­ scend­ent state. It is my intention that, in the future, scholars and scientists formulate a more complete taxonomy of transcendence and the complex interactions among all transcendence-inducing psychological mechanisms. Perhaps the formulation of such a taxonomy might itself be a product of the transcendent acquisition and synthesis of knowledge by scholars and scientists from across the disciplinary spectrum.

The Induction and Subversion of Transcendence

Although the communal nature of transcendent ­experiences—and their attendant shows of costly emotional commitment to the in-group—probably serves the adaptive function of cementing coalitional ties to one’s fellow group members, the experience’s activation of ToM and the cognitive circuits associated with aesthetic appreciation and knowledge formation may be alternatively explicable as byproducts of psychological mechanisms designed by natural selection for other purposes. It is certainly plausible—especially after the appearance of densely populated sedentary communities following the rise of agriculture during the Neolithic— that fear of all-powerful moralizing deities may have been individually adaptive if it induced cooperation among genetically unrelated group members (Norenzayan et al., 2016; Wright, 2009). However, the activation of an individual’s ToM during ­tran­scend­ent states need not serve any reproductive function for the individual in question, and may simply be a byproduct of the human propensity to attribute mental properties to ambiguous stimuli— a propensity that has, on average, aided our ancestors in safely navigating their environments. Likewise, the appreciation of beauty may be evoked by breathtaking cathedrals, ceremonial regalia, and religion-inspired compositions, paintings, and sculptures for either adaptive or nonadaptive ends. As I elaborate in this section, such propensities may be taken advantage of by those who would elicit commitment-inducing emotions, ToM, aesthetic

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pleasure, or epistemic transcendence in others in order to benefit themselves. In such instances, an evolved psychological system may be taken advantage of by manipulators (I use “manipulators,” “exploiters,” and “cheaters” interchangeably to refer to those who parasitize others’ transcendent states), and its exploitation by them may very well become a naturally selected exploitative strategy—even if the victim’s transcendent state is a nonadaptive byproduct of psychological adaptations. As a result, we might expect the existence of certain psychological and cultural products that have been honed across generations for their effectiveness at manipulating others via the induction of transcendent states. Following the previous discussion of some of the  mechanisms that are activated during the ­tran­scend­ent state, I now enumerate the plausible ways that these mechanisms may be exploited by manipulators. First note that, albeit grounded in research, I include some speculations that might open up avenues for further theoretical and empirical exploration. Also note that I will primarily focus on exploitation—that is, parasitic forms of tran­scend­ ence induction in others. It is plausible that there are instances of individuals activating the tran­scend­ ent state in one another as a way of enacting mutually benefiting reciprocal interactions. My focus on the exploitative aspects of transcendence induction is intended to contrast with its benign depictions in popular culture—for example, in New Age literature and pop-science. Among scholars, historians, and mystics from both Eastern and Western traditions, there is an acknowledgment that tran­scend­ ent states can be horrifying and even disastrous. What St. John of the Cross referred to as “the dark night of the soul,” often described as a bleak and meaningless void left in the wake of transcendent and mystical states, is only now being given scientific consideration (Rocha, 2014). Note, however, that somber and even depressive states can be adapt­ ive for the individuals experiencing them, as research on depression’s energy-conserving and socialreassessment functions suggests (Keller & Nesse, 2006). Conversely, being under the spell of someone maleficent does not necessarily have to be horrifying to be reproductively costly; indeed, one would expect exploiters to have evolved the ability to elicit seemingly positive affective states in others as a disarming maneuver. Some religious mythologies actually highlight the possibility of spiritual deception and exploitation. During his meditative retirement under the 342

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Bodhi tree, the Buddha was said to have been tempted away from enlightenment by the demon Māra and his three daughters: Tanhā (Craving), Arati (Boredom), and Ragā (Lechery) (Guruge, 1997). Likewise, during Christ’s 40-day and 40night fast in the desert (note that fasting, among other bodily mortifications, may bring forth hallucinatory visions and other transcendent experiences), Satan tempted Christ with the prospect of relieving his hunger, manifesting his (i.e., Christ’s) power, and obtaining power over every kingdom in the world—all of which Christ refused (Luke 4:1–13; Matthew 4:1–11). More likely than not, these stories are fictional, but the fact that various strains of mainstream Buddhism and Christianity acknowledge that even the founders of their respective religions may have been exposed to illusory spiritual experiences points to the ever-present danger of being deceived or exploited during one’s personal journey of transcendence. Dawkins’ concept of the “extended phenotype” (Dawkins, 1982) captures the relevant biological features of the exploitation of transcendent states (for an earlier description of religious exploitation as extended phenotypic manipulation, see Cronk, 1994).1 The extended phenotype refers to all of the adaptive effects that an organism exhibits outside of its physical body. For example, a virus that manipulates its host to engage in bouts of sneezing and coughing while around other potential hosts is using the host as an extended phenotype of itself. More specifically, some of the virus’s genes—namely, the genes that contributed to the coughing and sneezing of hosts—were selected across generations because they helped to build widely dispersed extended phenotypic webs of virulence that enabled the replication of those very genes. Like viral genes, some human genes may have been selected because they contributed to our ancestors’ development of extended phenotypic uses of environments and the beings inhabiting them—whether mutualistically or parasitically. I posit that many human experiences are mediated by extended phenotypic phenomena between humans and other humans, including transcendent experiences.

1  Although Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman’s (2003) concept of “niche construction” has been proposed as an alternative to the extended phenotype, in that it better captures the feedback of environmental manipulation on the subsequent evolution of organisms (Wells, 2015), its conceptual broadness will limit my ability to hone in on the specific tools and strategies that manipulators use in exploiting others.

Exploitation of Group-Directed Transcendence

Individuals may unwittingly enact group-benefiting behaviors spurred on by the transcendent experience if they are manipulated into doing so by fake commitment signals from cheaters. One such exploitative strategy involves the brandishing of supernormal stimuli—that is, stimuli that exaggerate the evolved features of normally subdued communicative signals (Dawkins & Krebs, 1979). For example, the cuckoo—a bird that parasitizes parents from other species—exaggerates the red mouth and unique soliciting vocalization of the young of its foster parents in order to acquire provisioning. Similarly, shamans and preachers may enact repetitive and elaborate rituals and emotions whose purpose is to alter the behavior of ritual participants and congregants. Although such costly signals may function as honest expressions of in-group commitment rather than exploitative supernormal stimuli, given the historic and current preponderance of religious manipulation, it is necessary to discuss the possibility that costly commitment signals are sometimes repurposed for deception and exploitation. Although a costly signal’s main function is to send an honest signal of one’s status or intention (if it were not costly, cheaters would be able to easily fake high status or cooperative intentions), the evolutionarily recent emergence of religious rituals and emotions suggests that their costs may not yet be great enough to deter cheaters from enacting the rituals and emotions in question. Indeed, the continuously improving ability of cheaters to mimic costly signals is what is responsible for the evolution of even costlier honest signals, suggesting that the evolution of unforgeable religious signals is still (and perhaps always will be) a work in progress. Emotions often trigger behaviors, just as behaviors trigger emotions. For example, liking someone predisposes an individual to act in a friendly manner toward the liked person—for example, laughing at the person’s jokes, mimicking the person’s body movements and mannerisms, and so forth. Conversely, when one’s behavior is being mimicked, one unconsciously begins to like and feel an emotional closeness to the mimicking person (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). As discussed, mimicry and behavioral synchrony are evolved mechanisms whose selected purpose is to enable smooth social interaction and to communicate one’s affiliative intentions toward others. The ready activation of this set of mechanisms in social situations is more or less an

automatic response. Therefore, it should not be so reproductively costly to mimic others in order to get them to like you and to confer benefits on you— even if you do not intend to benefit them in turn. In effect, what one is doing when one mimics another for one’s own selfish benefit is entraining the manipulated person’s behavior to be an extension of one’s own behavior—that is, mimicry is used to employ others as extended phenotypes. The lack of any personal boundaries between oneself and others, and the alignment of one’s own interests with the interests of the group—commonly reported experiences of group-enacted tran­ scend­ ence—perhaps describe the psychological experience of being someone else’s extended phenotype. As discussed, mimicry and behavioral synchrony are ubiquitous in both tribal ceremonies and modern religious services. Hunter-gatherers often dance and chant in unison during communal gatherings. The beating of the drums and the rhythmicity of the chanting set the pace for the congruous motions of all involved. Often under the tempo set by the shaman, participants jump in unison, land in unison, and vocalize in unison— behaviors that, no doubt, arouse a unifying feeling among the participating tribe-members. Likewise, Orthodox Jewish services are marked by both improvised and ritualized swaying and bowing, and Muslim services are highly ritualized and ordered with respect to the exact timing of prostrations. All such examples of patterned synchrony suggest that, even if leaders and ritual participants have differing reproductive interests, their mutual suspicions may subside as they mirror one another’s actions and emotions. Exploitative shamans—figures who are already venerated within the community—can enhance the tribe’s commitments to the shaman’s own selfish interests by simply engaging the tribe in synchronous dancing and chanting. Such exploitation can have devastating consequences for the tribe if the ceremony encourages an attack on a neighboring tribe when such an attack is less than optimal for the tribe, but beneficial for the shaman (e.g., if it enables him to monopolize the tribe’s women when the men go off to war). As proposed by MacNeill (2004), one of the main evolved functions of the religious experience is the arousal of a bellicose feeling and a propensity to sacrifice for the in-group during battle. Although MacNeill’s account of tran­ scend­ence may be a bit too limited in scope, soldiers have indeed been known to lose themselves in the heat of war, often experiencing something akin to

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spiritual transcendence.2 One is no longer a separate entity but part of a larger body that includes one’s fellow brothers-in-arms for whom one is ready to sacrifice one’s life. The effect of synchrony on the subsumption of the self into the larger military unit is likewise manifest in military drills and processions. What makes this form of exploitation so insidious is that simple, low-level synchronous movements can bring about transcendent states that are then used to inspire deadly intergroup aggression or self-righteous vengeance against purported transgressors within the group. Other forms of emotional exploitation of ingroup feelings include dishonest expressions of love, camaraderie, and displays of commitments that are never fulfilled. Sacred rituals that are purportedly enacted by religious “healers” in the service of healing the sick may exploit family members’ vulnerable position and the trust that the family members already have in the healer. Promises of financial rewards and debt relief in exchange for donations to the church exhibit similar parasitism, a common abuse in today’s world of celebrity preachers and televangelists. In such cases, the manipulator is evoking a victim’s desire to either be disease- or debt-free in addition to the victim’s unabating affection for the manipulator, often aided by communal tran­ scend­ent states. Whereas the benefits to exploitative hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist shamans was access to food and mates, today’s religious scammers enjoy private jets and tax-free church accounts.

Exploitation of Theory of Mind

Just as affectionate and unifying feelings directed toward the in-group are often activated alongside a person’s desire to be healthy and financially secure, in-group feelings of commitment can be made more 2  Haidt (2012) quotes two extended passages by William McNeill (different from Allen MacNeill, cited in text), a World War II veteran, that are illustrative of such transcendent experiences during warfare. The first reads thus: “Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.” McNeill quotes another veteran: “Many veterans who are honest with themselves will admit, I believe, that the experience of communal effort in battle . . . has been the high point of their lives. . . . Their ‘I’ passes insensibly into a ‘we,’ ‘my’ becomes ‘our,’ and individual fate loses its central importance. . . . I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. . . . I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life” (pp. 221–222).

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potent if they are motivated by punishing and rewarding supernatural agents. The belief in om­nis­ cient and omnipotent deities can either activate approach or avoidance systems and their attendant emotions—for example, hope when believers are promised earthly or heavenly rewards for following a god’s directives, and fear of hellfire and other celestial punishments for transgressions. In either scenario, beliefs in supernatural agents are evoked by individuals or social groups in order to guide the behavior of others who accept such beliefs. Collective beliefs in nonexistent supernatural agents may be benign or even beneficial if they help individuals and group members to solidify longterm reciprocal coalitions via both the threat of punishment and the promise of reward. However, when victims’ communal emotions are simultaneously activated alongside their fears and desires, supernatural threats and incentives can be especially potent in transforming these victims into the extended phenotypes of manipulators. The fact that supernatural beings are unfalsifiable (see Sosis & Alcorta, 2003, on how unfalsifiable postulates are more “stable referents” for groups than falsifiable postulates) ensures that their ability to motivate— and exploit—human behavior remains unquestioned. Although being motivated by the intentions of supernatural agents does not necessarily depend on experiencing transcendent states, the felt presence of supernatural minds during moments of transcendence gives these supernatural minds staying power in the minds of individuals undergoing transcendence. That religious rules and dogmas are used to control social behavior and individual thought is hard to deny. Just focusing on the three main monotheistic religions of today, each includes a cannon filled with specific injunctions and rules of conduct, including mores for cleanliness, sexual behavior, religious rites, and injunctions to believe specific narratives about the world and its relationship with the supernatural. According to Cosmides and Tooby’s (1992) definition of a “cheater” as someone who receives benefits without paying the stipulated costs, individuals who use the threat of divine punishment or the incentive of divine reward to accrue benefits from others without themselves following the divine injunctions are glaring examples of such cheaters. Although research is lacking on which supernatural characteristics cheaters are more likely to invoke when manipulating others, the previously mentioned characteristics associated with predatory, parental, and amorous gods suggest a

few that may be of interest. For example, the capacity for predators and parents to inspire fear of either death or parental punishment might be more useful to manipulators who want to deter victims from engaging in certain behaviors. Conversely, the capacity for parents and lovers to confer benefits might be invoked by manipulators when used to entice victims toward behaviors that benefit manipulators at a cost to victims. The role of parental deities as tools of manipulation is especially relevant in contexts of sudden religious conversion—an empirical indicator of a tran­ scend­ ent experience. In their meta-analysis, Granqvist and Kirkpatrick (2004) found that individuals with insecure attachments to parents were much more likely to experience sudden religious conversions. Given the ubiquity of stress, anxiety, and emotional vulnerability prior to the onset of an intense religious or mystical experience (often experienced by adolescents and individuals on the margins of society; for a review, see Atran, 2002, pp. 166–169), it is plausible that manipulators specifically exploit such vulnerability by presenting victims with a surrogate supernatural parent within the context of an emotionally charged transcendent experience. Specific mention should be given to the exploitation of long-term romantic commitment mechanisms in religious adherents. According to research by Weeden and Kurzban (2013), religion’s primary role in the modern world is to cement monogamous individuals into communities centered on the reinforcement of monogamous reproductive strategies. Being an upstanding member of such a religious community is presumably associated with the benefits of ensuring that one’s long-term mate does not stray, that one’s coreligionists do not try to seduce one’s mate, and that one honors one’s own monogamous commitments. These monogamous practices—and the benefits accrued from them—are enforced by the threat of public censure, divine punishment for sexual misbehaviors, and communal and supernatural rewards for sexual restraint. The attribution of characteristics associated with romantic lovers to divine figures may likewise aid in ensuring that one’s love for the divine carries over to one’s monogamous partner—for example, the love of Christ is manifest in one’s love for their spouse. It is still unknown what role, if any, religious ceremonies and transcendent states have in enforcing monogamous practices, or any other sexual mores for that matter. Nevertheless, it is possible that the most fundamentalist religious circles—namely, ones

wherein costly signals of commitment and moralizing gods feature prominently—are also the ones with the lowest rates of sexual infidelity and promiscuity. Though not finding denominational differences, Burdette and colleages (2007) did find that individuals whose religious affiliation was strong reported lower rates of marital infidelity than individuals whose religious affiliation was weak. Once again, if an individual endorses a belief in monogamyimposing deities without practicing monogamy him- or herself, the individual, in effect, becomes a cheater who exploits others’ behaviors for his or her own reproductive benefit. For example, a manipulator prevents others from sleeping with his or her spouse, but has no qualms about sleeping with others’ spouses. In such a scenario, the imposition of monogamy on others via the invocation of punishing and rewarding deities leads to the manipulation of others’ sexual behavior for one’s own benefit.

Exploitation of Aesthetic Transcendence

As discussed by Austin (1980), the religious experience and the aesthetic experience have much in common; both trigger similar types of knowledge, both promote a similar process of self-unification and integration, and both motivate moral behavior (though unspecified by Austin, such behavior may be related to in-group cooperation). These similarities between the religious experience and the aesthetic experience involve some of the same cognitive processes discussed in this chapter. Austin believes that, at bottom, the religious experience and the aesthetic experience are the same, though outfitted with different cultural accoutrements—presumably doctrine and group-commitment in the case of the former, and traditions of creative expression in the case of the latter. Indeed, from church choirs to the Christianity-inspired paintings of Dali, there is often no clear division between the clergyman’s transcendence and the artist’s. What was left unspecified in Austin’s account was the distinction between the origin of the transcendent state in the producer of art and in the consumer. It is here that I include manipulative religious individuals alongside artists. Specifically, the transcendent experience of the shaman or priest, like the transcendent experience of the painter or composer, gives form to either a sermon or some public act of devotion, which, in turn, arouses the transcendent state in the parishioner. So, in the case of both religious and artistic transcendence, the transcendent state in the producer of the religious expression or artwork is

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communicated to the consumer of the religious or artistic message via the medium of the message itself. In addition to activating the same pleasure circuits activated by evolutionarily relevant stimuli such as livable landscapes, fertile mates, and life-saving information, art’s appeal lies in what it communicates about the artist. According to sexual selection theory (Darwin, 2006/1871), what evolves is not just what benefits survival (natural selection), but also what benefits reproduction (sexual selection). Specifically, individuals who are especially good at creating complex and aesthetically pleasing signals may be communicating their high intelligence, deft hand-eye coordination, and successful control of resources—traits that would benefit the offspring of whoever chose them as mates. In this way, creativity and artistry are considered “sexy” and are thereby multiplied in a population across evolutionary time. The sway of a  charismatic preacher’s sermon is much the same; both the preacher and the artist rely on their transcendence-inspired productions in order to manipulate the reactions and behavior of those who admire the productions. In the case of sexually selected capacities for tran­ scend­ ence, the observer’s focus is on the mate-worthiness of the creator of the religious or aesthetic production (the very individual with whom such tran­scend­ence is shared) rather than just the creation itself. It is a topic for future study whether—and to what extent—successful preachers and artists rely on the aesthetic induction of tran­ scend­ence in order to garner fertile mates, devoted flocks, and dedicated followers. Part of what makes someone an exceptional exploiter of other individuals and groups is the ability to make others passionately acquiesce to manipulation. For this task, several avenues are at the manipulator’s disposal. Religious and political ceremonies that involve drugs, passionate oratory, music, dancing, and other modes of transcendence elicitation may function as venues for social integration and (sometimes) exploitation. Hitler, for example, perfected his theatrical gestures by practicing them while listening to recordings of his own speeches (Newton, 2014), suggesting an explicit awareness of the manipulative power of body language and aesthetically pleasing oratory. The use of music and visual propaganda by totalitarian regimes and despots suggests that aesthetic transcendence is useful in politics, not just art and religion. Most of the time, music listening is innocuous, and possibly even physically, psychologically, and socially beneficial. However, it is not hard to find examples of 346

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when music can function as a manipulative ploy that exploits individuals and crowds. The most obvious example entails the use of music during military parades and processions. At such gatherings, music is known to arouse feelings of jingoistic fervor and emotional commitment to one’s country and its armed forces. Some of the most despotic regimes are notorious for having the most celebrated military processions (e.g., Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, and today’s North Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran). As the orchestra plays the bombastic sounds of a military march, missiles and artillery are proudly displayed in front of the gawking eyes of entranced citizens (as well as ally and enemy nations) who are inspired and frightened by such a show of military might. Calling this type of music use “exploitative” may be a misnomer, assuming that civilians and military officers are often supporting their own interests by supporting the military interests of their nations. Music may be exploitative, however, when its production is intended to elicit a costly emotional response in listeners, as would occur when populaces are manipulated into supporting doomed and self-destructive military campaigns by the propagandistic sounds of national anthems and jingoistic war songs. In this way, religious and nationalistic feeling (often the most lethal in combination) may be musically elicited by religious and political leaders whose aim is the extended phenotypic use of crowds and populations. The use of music in religious settings is effective in inspiring collective bouts of devotion and tran­ scend­ent personal experiences, often interpreted in supernatural terms. However, we do not have to go to a religious service for firsthand knowledge of the emotionally stirring effects of music; instances of collective deindividuation and violent mob-behavior at musical events, such as the breakdown of social order at the Woodstock festival in 1999 (Wyman, 1999), highlight the manipulative effects of music on behavior in more secular contexts. That music is emotionally poignant and yet nonverbal may explain its cross-cultural appeal and communicative value. Alas, this nonverbal structure of music may be associated with various social costs, in that it is much more difficult to scrutinize a message that is nonverbal than one which relies on words. The rhythms, harmonies, and melodies produced by instrumental musicians, for instance, are rarely (if ever) assessed for their truth value (if there is such a thing), while the stump speeches and debate responses of politicians are analyzed and reanalyzed by political pundits on 24-hour news networks.

Music is not the only tool that religions employ to avoid suspicions of illegitimacy on the part of congregants. Another tool entails the use of human language—though not the kind that is understood by congregants. Examples of this phenomenon include Orthodox Jewish services, which are rife with ancient Hebrew praying and chanting (often quite rhythmical and melodic), the Catholic Mass, which partly attains its mystical aura from the recital of ancient Latin passages (passages whose translation was expressly forbidden by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages), and the recitation of the Koran in Arabic (a language that many Muslims in Pakistan have no knowledge of ). It is difficult to scrutinize millennia-old passages written in languages that no one understands save for religious leaders—and often, they do not understand them themselves. Though a religious message may be false, it may be given a fair amount of gravity and reverberation by its impenetrable linguistic character. Over time, its cultural influence is enhanced as generation supplants generation and augments the manipulative effectiveness of the intonations of ancient religious scriptures—an instance of cumulative cultural evolution (see Caldwell & Millen, 2008) of manipulative knowledge.

Exploitation of Epistemic Transcendence

Aesthetic appeal may not be sufficient for a manipulator to circumvent the skepticism of would-be extended phenotypes. Better if a manipulator uses both aesthetic and epistemic states to manipulate a victim. However shaky on empirical grounds, the elegance and symmetry of Buddhist concepts such as reincarnation and dependent origination provide aesthetically pleasing—and transcendence-inducing—states of knowledge. As previously discussed, humans are equipped with specialized cognitive mechanisms whose naturally selected function is the acquisition of knowledge relevant to survival and reproduction. Many times, such knowledge is self-generated, as when individuals figure things out on their own. Other times, knowledge is proffered by supposed experts, be they experts in practical or in spiritual matters. The benefits to the receiver of the spiritual message sent out by the sender may come in the form of in-group-directed affection, which may be useful in generating mutual cooperation. There are, however, cases of religious authorities who have issued transcendence-inducing knowledge at a cost to receivers of that knowledge. Similar to the aforementioned warmongering shaman who takes advantage of the tribe’s women

while the men are away at battle, it is possible that religious authorities in 20th-century Japan (e.g., Kitarō Nishida and D.  T.  Suzuki, among others) evoked transcendent states in Japanese troops with various intellectual influences associated with Zen Buddhism (see Sharf, 1993). This is not to say that these authorities were consciously malevolent or manipulative, but their effect on the martial mindset of the Japanese was quite tangible. The epistemic effect of Zen thought (discussed in this section) was greatly aided by the activation of emotional commitments to the Japanese nation and subordination to its emperor. When wedded to Zen self-negation, the kin-directed traditions of Shinto and the communal traditions of Buddhism helped to motivate individuals’ willingness to sacrifice themselves for nation and emperor during war. Especially for the more educated students who were enlisted in the World War II effort, the influence of Zen intellectual propaganda was a key component in the creation of a psychological mindset aimed at complete self-negation (Harding, 2014). Albeit proving to be a useless wartime strategy, such self-negation was perhaps instrumental in motivating many of the suicidal kamikaze pilots. In order to elucidate the manipulative use of knowledge in eliciting and exploiting the tran­scend­ ent states of victims, we must first understand the signals manipulators are sending that are picked up by the learning mechanisms of victims. Second, we must track the neurocognitive progress of such input stimuli through the victims’ minds. Finally, we must account for the behavioral output on the part of victims—output that harms victims but benefits manipulators. Albeit speculative, I believe that something like the ensuing account of the exploitation of transcendence by Zen teaching may explain the effect of epistemic transcendence on self-sacrifice during war. First, let us begin by examining one aspect of the mid-20th-century Zen message: “absolute nothingness” (Harding, 2014; Sharf, 1993).3 As with Buddhism more generally, the negation of the self is considered a necessary precondition for the attainment of Nirvana. Indeed, much of Buddhist meditative practice is centered on the cultivation of self3  Note that critics have questioned the link between traditional Zen teachings and the more Western, militaristic, and colonial face of Zen following the Meiji Restoration of the late 19th century (Sharf, 1993). However, as with the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, Zen’s newfound nationalism and militarism became central to its identity in wartime Japan, making it difficult to distinguish “true” from “false” Zen.

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lessness and the realization of one’s true “Buddha nature.” Zen kōans (i.e., short, traditional stories and aphorisms whose vocalization is thought to bring about realization or enlightenment) were perhaps instrumental in fostering such selflessness. Two of the most famous kōans, for example, ask “What was your original face before father and mother were born?” and “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” (Hori, 2004). Though meaningless and unanswerable, the intent of the kōans is for the practitioner to realize the true nature of the self— specifically, that there is no “self ” to begin with. The seeming absurdity of both questions perhaps points one to the realization that there is no such thing as an original face or the sound of one hand clapping. Rather, in place of an “original face,” there are only historical contingencies that precede, co-occur with, and follow one’s mortal sojourn in this life. Likewise, one’s existence is impossible but for the in­ter­de­ pend­ ent factors that create it—namely, the two hands necessary to create the clapping sound. Although these interpretations are admittedly speculative, the traditional goal of kōan recitation is apparently to make the subject indistinguishable from the object—more specifically, the distinction between the practitioner who is uttering the kōan and the kōan itself should fall away. Esoteric interpretations of Zen practices aside, it is hard to deny the pervasive pattern of selfnegation—be it in Zen Buddhism or suicidal jihadism—across religious traditions. This brings us to the second stage of understanding the effects of such selflessness-inducing messages: their neurocognitive journey in the minds of receivers. In order for selflessness to occur, there has to be some anatomical and physiological network in the brain that is associated with the concept of “self.” Neuroscientists have inadvertently stumbled onto such a network by tracking subjects’ brains between experimental tasks—that is, when subjects were not doing anything. This network was termed the “default mode network” (DMN)—“default” because it appeared to be the baseline state to which subjects’ brains usually reverted (Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, & Schacter, 2008). Further studies revealed that the DMN is activated whenever subjects are reflecting on themselves and when their minds are “wandering.” A study on the effects of psilocybin (the active molecule in psychedelic mushrooms) on participants’ brains revealed that the more immersive—and, presumably, more selfless—aspects of the drug state were associated with decreased activation of the DMN (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012). 348

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The DMN is present in other primates, from macaques to chimpanzees, and appears to also activate primates’ social-cognition areas (Mars et al., 2012). This suggests that one’s ability to create a selfimage is dependent on one’s relationship to one’s fellow group-members (see Meltzoff & Decety, 2003, on imitation’s role in children’s apprehension of others’ minds prior to their own). Indeed, evolutionarily, a social primate’s ability to monitor whether others are friends or enemies, reciprocators or moochers, depends on these others’ relationship to the self—that is, are they friends with me? Do they owe me anything? The enhanced capacity for humans to monitor their relationships with others over long tracks of time may explain the emergence of the “narrative self,” or a self that weaves together all of one’s episodic memories in a sequential pattern, and imagines future memories that might be incorporated into the same pattern (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). Evolutionarily, such narration enables humans to pursue personal long-term goals, work toward imagined outcomes that are desired, and avoid imagined outcomes that are not desired. The final stage of our analysis concerns the effect of selflessness-producing epistemic messages on receivers’ behavior. When the DMN, and whatever other structures associated with the narrative self, are selectively deactivated during a transcendent state, the individual loses sight of his or her own personal goals, concerns, and distinctions, and the only thing that exists is the present moment. It is at such a time that the individual becomes vulnerable to other internal and external influences, be they helpful or harmful. Although it is possible that the selective deactivation of the DMN may be physically and psychologically beneficial (as is suggested by research on meditation’s ability to improve concentration; Davidson & Lutz, 2008), the loss of self may come at a cost. If one such cost is falling prey to the manipulative signals of religious and political authorities, then the inculcation of selflessness may be a powerful means by which said authorities ensure a steady supply of extended phenotypes with which to procure resources and fight wars. Activating psychological mechanisms devoted to in-group commitment or commitment to one’s leaders while deactivating the DMN may explain how some religious messages compel individuals to engage in violent self-sacrifice on behalf of some group- or leaderbenefiting cause. Again, I should note that it is often difficult to distinguish whether the individual undergoing transcendence is harmed, benefited, or unaffected

by the transcendent experience. Likewise, the individuals sending such transcendence-inducing messages (e.g., either in the form of an intellectual exercise such as a kōan or chanted passages from the Koran) may not necessarily be reproductively benefited by such signaling. Using the Dalai Lama as nothing more than a hypothetical example, according to a 2012 Telegraph article, an 18-year-old Tibetan monk immolated himself to death in commemoration of the 53rd year since the Chinese government ousted the Dalai Lama from Tibet (Staff, 2012). Beijing’s claim that the Dalai Lama condones such suicidal statements may be borne out by the Dalai Lama’s own reaction: according to The Telegraph, “The Dalai Lama has said he does not encourage the protests, but he has praised the courage of those who engage in self-immolation and has attributed the protests to what he calls China’s ‘cultural genocide’ in Tibet.” Ignoring the Dalai Lama’s doublespeak of not “encouraging” and yet praising the “courage” of self-immolating monks, the Dalai Lama’s statement might motivate future bouts of self-immolation by rewarding such behaviors with in-group recognition and spiritual advancement. Exploitative or otherwise, the self-sacrifice of monks on behalf of the loss of a historical homeland does not necessarily garner reproductive benefits for the Dalai Lama, given the Dalai Lama’s celibacy (discounting, of course, any reproductive benefits to his family members or any nonreproductive political benefits, such as a free Tibet). Mixed- and subtle-messaging from religious and political leaders is not just a modern-day phenomenon. Historically, manipulators were not always explicit in their manipulative messaging in order to exploit others. For example, although there was plenty of old and new anti-Semitic propaganda that the Nazis used to arouse the ire of the German people toward the Jews, the German people were already nurtured within a culture shadowed by antiSemitic stereotypes and hostilities—some stemming from the Christian tradition, others from the “blood and soil” ethnonationalism of the previous century (Pinker, 2011, pp. 186–188). As such, Hitler and the Nazi propaganda machine relied on the latent prejudices and beliefs of the German public to consolidate their genocidal plans for the Jews of Europe. Of course, not all Germans acquiesced to such murderous reaches, but many did. Similarly, religious exploiters rely on the already-present knowledge structures in victims in order to hijack victims’ minds. Cult leaders such as David Koresh and Warren Jeffs, for example, relied on the existing

religious knowledge of their coreligionists (SeventhDay Adventism and Mormonism, respectively) to further their physically and sexually abusive agendas. Likewise, manipulators may direct subtle hints at victims in order to synthesize victims’ alreadyexisting epistemic structures into unified wholes of manipulative power. For example, the various Eastern methods of nullifying the “self ” may goad victims’ minds into following the paths of previously inculcated—albeit disparate—cognitive structures into a unified self-oblivion. At a more personal level, Shakespeare’s Othello demonstrates how manipulators can fan the flames of evolved, uncontrollable emotions and motivations (in this case, male sexual jealousy—an evolved defense against the prospect of caring for another man’s child) with only slight provocations or suggestions. Thus, Iago, motivated by ambition and envy, arouses Othello’s suspicions that his wife, Desdemona, is having an affair. “Work on, My medicine, work. Thus credulous fools are caught” (Othello, Act 4, Scene 1), mutters Iago, while Othello languishes in an epileptic fit of jealousy and suspicion following Iago’s seemingly reluctant admission of Desdemona’s adultery (again, recall research on the co-occurrence of epilepsy with tran­ scend­ence; Waxman & Geschwind, 1975). All such examples highlight the fact that victims are not blank slates waiting to be “brainwashed” by manipulators. Instead, to varying extents, manipulators rely on victims’ own nervous systems to finish the job of the initial manipulative message.

Transcendence and Development

The previous discussion of the mechanisms of tran­ scend­ence may imply that these mechanisms are either fully functional early in development or that they are equally likely to be activated during the entirety of a person’s lifespan. Both of these suppositions are questionable. In an evolutionary reworking of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Kenrick and Griskevicius (2013) amended Maslow’s famous developmental pyramid to more accurately reflect the emergence of adaptations that satisfy the biological needs of the individual. Whereas Maslow’s pyramid reaches its apex at “self-actualization” (i.e., the development of creativity, spontaneity, and moral sense), Kenrick and Griskevicius’s peaks at “kin care,” one of the final tasks that humans engage in to make sure that their genes outlive them. Leading up to kin care are the evolved needs for selfprotection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, and mate retention, in order of

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developmental emergence. Although all of these “subselves” often co-occur with one another, individuals have to wait for either shorter or longer stretches of time before each comes to the fore, and some subselves may never manifest at all. So, for example, although our need for self-protection develops fairly early (e.g., even infants are wary of strangers; Sroufe, 1977), it is not until we have children of our own that our “kin care” subself emerges. The emergence of each of the subselves is de­ pend­ent on the vagaries of an individual’s predisposition and the timing of their exposure to specific problems of survival and reproduction. It is likely that the different mechanisms of transcendence track this and vary across individuals in the timing of their emergence. Note also that, although tran­ scend­ent experiences are prevalent even in industrialized nations, the majority of people simply do not experience such states of consciousness. This fact does not dismiss the adaptive nature of these states, however, just as the fact that there are two sexes does not negate the evolved value of either males or females—some adaptations are only found in some individuals because others make use of different means by which to get their genes into the ensuing generation. Using Kenrick and Griskevicius’s developmental framework, we can predict that certain types of transcendent experiences are more likely than others at each life stage. Early childhood, for example, will likely be the stage at which supernatural experiences take precedence. Regardless of whether such experiences are “transcendent,” Kelemen (2004) suggests that children are, in fact, naturally predisposed to theism. This is not to say that children are born believing in Yahweh, Christ, or Allah; rather, their automatic attribution of mental properties to inanimate objects and occurrences (e.g., thoughtful clouds, happy trees, etc.) may either be a necessary byproduct of a developing ToM, or an adaptation that either helped our ancestors to avoid predators or endear themselves to caregivers during childhood (Bjorklund, Blasi, & Periss, 2010). It is also likely that, given children’s reliance on parents as their primary caregivers early on in life, the need for self-protection—the first developmental stage along Kenrick and Grikevicius’s evolved developmental trajectory—may coincide with the attribution of parental properties to incorporeal entities such as gods and spirits. Such attributions may reflect the adaptive importance of children’s moral development and the reliance on supernatural threats and incentives for the formation and reten350

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tion of affiliative ties to others—Kenrick and Griskevicius’s third developmental stage. This stage is activated throughout the lifespan, from preschool to old age. It is during this stage that another type of transcendent experience occurs—one whose evolved function is the formation of coalitional ties to other individuals. This is usually accomplished by costly material and emotional signals, as previously discussed. Although children have reported quite intense spiritual and mystical states, such friendship and group-solidifying emotions occur mostly in adolescence and young adulthood (see Atran, 2002, pp. 166–169). In societies that interpret such group-directed transcendent states in supernatural terms, they are often undergirded by the attribution of mental states to incorporeal beings—beings who can both enforce in-group cooperation and function as the intermediaries between individuals of the same coalition. Sometimes, group-directed transcendence may be coincidental with an individual’s experience of sexual attraction or falling in love—states coinciding with the coming of Kenrick and Griskevicius’s mate acquisition, mate-retention, and kin care subselves. It is this type of tran­scend­ ent experience that has inspired the pervasive linkage between the religious and the romantic—from Song of Songs to the poetry of Rūmī. Likewise, the group-oriented tran­ scend­ ent state may coincide with epistemic states that contribute to the immersive aspects of the experience—for example, the aforementioned ep­i­ste­mic dissolution of the “self ” in favor of a higher, group-directed cause among Zen-inspired Kamikaze pilots. Assuming that creativity and intellectual production are, in part, sexually selected skills (Miller, 1999), we can expect aesthetic and epistemic tran­ scend­ence to be more prevalent among individuals in the prime of their reproductive years (though it should not be restricted to them). These are individuals who can capitalize on this type of tran­scend­ence if it helps them to produce creative artworks or intellectual and practical discoveries—signals that communicate their reproductive value. As Kenrick and Griskevicius (2013, p. 44) write, “We do not deny that human beings are motivated to be creative and artistic. But a desire to self-actualize is not detached from our social goals.” Thus, Maslow’s ultimate stage of healthy maturation—punctuated by the prevalence of transcendent states that Maslow referred to as “peak experiences” (Maslow, 1964)—may be salvaged as an important proximate means toward the evolved ends of survival and reproduction.

The developmental journey of the organism should be no surprise to devotees of transcendent experiences. The spiritual or transcendent life is often described as a “journey” or “path.” Indeed, the mythical tale of Gautama’s (i.e., the Buddha’s) coming to enlightenment is a developmental tale consisting of stages along which Gautama is gradually made aware of old age, disease, and death—a journey whose ultimate lesson is impermanence, to which the remedy is following the “middle way” (a compromise between attachment to the world and its negation). Indeed, the developmental timeline may itself function as the instigator of transcendent states. The process of psychological development is a dynamic one that is marked by the gradual emergence of evolved psychological states, or modules, and this emergence depends on the complex web of interactions between the genetic and nongenetic environment. Likewise, modules interact with other modules across the lifespan, sometimes vying for control, other times awaiting their turn to get activated either during specific life stages (e.g., puberty) or when facing specific problems of survival or reproduction (e.g., finding friends and mates). The appearance of latent modules—that is, complex psychological structures that emerge across the lifespan in the form of new motivations, emotions, and cognitions—may itself be associated with an immersive transcendent state at any point during the lifespan. It is still a question as to whether such development-induced transcendent states are coopted by natural selection to aid in survival and reproduction or whether they are the nonadaptive byproducts of ontogeny.

The Liberation of Transcendence from Exploitation

At worst, transcendent experiences manifest an illusory view of reality that is then exploited by manipulators. Yet, for such a hard-to-define experience, its pervasiveness in our species compels us to acknowledge both its pitfalls and its utility. There are two questions that must be answered when considering transcendent experiences: (1) how much do they reflect reality, and (2) what are their ethical implications? The vulnerability of the transcendent experience to exploitation suggests that its truth-value is bleak. How can we ever arrive at an honest account of reality via transcendence if we so easily fall prey to selfish manipulators who activate our in-group-directed emotions and beliefs in nonexistent supernatural agents, or are so easily influenced by exploitative

beauty and illusory knowledge? Even where there are no manipulators, the evolutionary origin of transcendence does not ensure its accuracy as a model of reality—much as our visual and auditory systems sometimes misrepresent our world, as highlighted by our vulnerability to visual and auditory illusions. Nevertheless, given that even sober states of reality can be illusory, something must be said in favor of the transcendent state and its ontological connotations. After all, however flawed our visual and auditory systems, they enable us to more-or-less successfully navigate our world. Similarly, as flawed and vulnerable to exploitation as our multiple modes of transcendence are, we should not write off their epistemic utility so quickly. The skeptic will demur that evidence, logic, and reason are the most trustworthy means of acquiring the truth. But is this always true? In their article on the evolutionary advantage of reason, Mercier and Sperber (2011) advanced the hypothesis that reason evolved because it enabled our argumentative ancestors to successfully convince others of some point of view or course of action, and to thereby advance their (i.e., the arguers’) prestige—and, hence, reproductive success. If someone can use seemingly coherent arguments, then that person should be believed. The advantage to the recipient of such reasoned messages is the presumed validity of the messages—that is, on average, individuals who employed reasoned argument were more likely to communicate useful, if not truthful, information. The selective advantage of reason, however, came with a cost to those who would be duped by it into following a seemingly intelligent—albeit manipulative— sophist. Thus, far from being instances of flawed reasoning, phenomena such as the hindsight bias and the confirmation bias are reason’s main features. If so, then the concept of “truth” seems to be in question. Is “truth” completely reliant on evidence, logic, and reason, or is it something that is beyond one or another conceptual explanation? There is something to be said for occasionally shutting off all of the distractions that bombard the individual in modern society. From the automatic siphoning of one’s attention to radio and satellite signals, to the everyday commitments to one’s family, friends, and society at-large, our environments are overflowing with manipulative influences. By engaging in meditation or some other transcendence-inducing practice, perhaps individuals can avoid being swayed by toothpaste advertisements and political propaganda (note Davidson & Lutz’s [2008] discussion of meditation’s efficacy in

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promoting attention and reducing distraction). As recounted by Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy (1970/1945; pp. 125–146), mystics from a variety of religious traditions and historical epochs were skeptical of the power of language and reason to communicate certain truths that can only be revealed by a direct encounter with what Buddhists call “tathātā,” or “suchness.” Despite the seemingly antiscientific suggestion that reason should not be trusted, perhaps the main lesson in such sentiments is that there are forms of knowledge that exist beyond reason-derived knowledge. Indeed, the lessons of evolutionary biology suggest that human language is a specific type of animal signal whose possible advantage in deceiving others was naturally selected in the socially dense environments of our ancestors (though this is more likely a secondary function of language; Goody, 1997). Likewise, assuming that the ability to reason was selected because it enabled our ancestors to win arguments, the utility of transcendent experiences may be their capacity to dissolve illusory arguments, words, and appearances. Such a dissolving effect may, in turn, prepare the mind for the acceptance of better, more truthful forms of knowledge, be it in the form of nonexploitative arguments or experiences of “suchness.” The individual-centered experience of ep­i­ste­ mic transcendence could be isolated from the manipulative influence of gurus and religious dogmas; in addition to its adaptive utility in creating knowledge relevant to survival and reproduction, perhaps it can help us to drill down to some deeper truth hidden beneath the veneer of the evolution-imposed limitations of our normal sensory experience. The revelations derived from such transcendent states should not be viewed as substitutes for evidence and reason, but as forms of knowledge that complement reason by clearing the fallacious residue surrounding it and supplement it by revealing states of consciousness beyond the humdrum of everyday experience. As for the ethical implications of transcendence, the previously discussed anthropological and ethnographic record suggests that transcendent states trigger empathic identification with one’s fellow tribemembers and promote in-group cohesion via emotional and material commitments. The problem, however, is that, historically, such transcendent states were limited to only inspiring fellow-feeling directed at one’s in-group. This is especially highlighted by the use of transcendence to inspire martial cohesion and the readiness to sacrifice oneself 352

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for one’s brothers-in-arms and in-group at-large during times of warfare (MacNeill, 2004). As such, we should be cautious whenever political or religious leaders evoke transcendence to inspire social cohesion. Nevertheless, if group-directed tran­scend­ ence can be evoked in a global society wherein members view all of humanity—and perhaps all sentient beings—as part of their in-group, tran­ scend­ence might be salvaged as an invaluable tool for creating and maintaining peace and well-being.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Michael Saenger of Southwestern University for directing me to Iago’s manipulation of Othello in Shakespeare’s classic.

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22 CH A PTE R

Challenges to an Evolutionary Perspective on Religion

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi

Abstract The evolutionary perspective on religion proposes that religious ideation is natural and plausible because of innate mechanisms, the product of evolution, that lead humans to imagine reality through egocentric, anthropocentric, animistic, or teleological processes and to interpret events through intentionality and design. If these mechanisms operate in all human brains, the level of religiosity in individual and social lives is likely to remain stable and uniform, regardless of time and place. Challenges to this perspective include that the expression of religious ideation is contingent on numerous conditions, contexts, and circumstances. Manifest individual differences in religiosity, and instability in collective religiosity, lead to consideration of the gap between “deep structure” and “phenotypic” manifestations. The most serious test of this perspective is the recent appearance of secularization, which entails a massive reduction in the resources devoted to religion. The chapter analyzes the challenges and provides an integration of historical and psychological data. Key Words: religiosity, deep structure, phenotype, history, secularization

Introduction

Scholars advancing an evolutionary perspective on religion regard it as foundational to a general theory of religion and religiosity and to the academic study of religion (Kirkpatrick, 2011). One class of such theories proposes that religious ideation is natural and intuitively plausible because of innate mechanisms that lead us to imagine reality through egocentric, anthropocentric, animistic, or teleological processes and to interpret events through intentionality and design. Being historically recent, an evolutionary perspective needs to document that its novelty is tied to explanatory power in order to find its rightful place in academia. Naturally, it encounters numerous challenges from established research traditions and alternative conceptual schemes. This chapter surveys some of them.

The Validation Challenge

Validating the basic theoretical framework means correlating the potency of cognitive mechanisms with 356

religiosity. If these cognitive mechanisms are indeed the building blocks of religious beliefs, then there should be positive correlations between individual differences in their salience—tied to neural variability— and individual religiosity. This process of validation forms the meeting ground of a new evolutionary perspective and the “old” psychology of religion, a tradition (together with work in other academic fields) that has given us a large body of findings about religious believers and the correlates of religiosity. Recent work has correlated the salience of infrastructure mechanisms with indicators of religiosity and individual traits. Willard and Norenzayan (2013) measured religiosity, “paranormal” beliefs, and life-purpose beliefs (e.g. “Things in my life happen for a reason”) together with mentalizing, dualism, teleological thinking, and anthropomorphism in two North American samples (ns = 492 and 920). They found clear connections among basic cognitive mechanisms and supernatural beliefs. Their main conclusion was that dualism was

central to the formation of supernatural beliefs, with other mechanisms playing a secondary role: Dualism is, theoretically, a necessary condition to believe in any disembodied supernatural being. . . . This includes gods, ghosts, spirits, and the soul. The more people see minds and bodies as separate, the more likely they are to think about and believe in these types of beings. (Willard & Norenzayan, 2013, p. 388)

Whereas Willard and Norenzayan state that individual differences in dualism are more important than those in other cognitive mechanisms, Lindeman, Svedholm-Häkkinen, and Lipsanen (2015) suggest that ontological confusion is more important than cognitive mechanisms. Banerjee and Bloom (2014) reported that teleology played a more important role in accounting for religious beliefs. Agency detection has also been found to be related to religiosity (Riekki, Lindeman, & Raij, 2014; van Elk, Rutjens, van der Pligt, & van Harreveld, 2014). If mentalizing is crucial to religious thinking, then individuals with problems in theory of mind (TOM), such as those with autism spectrum disorders, will be expected to demonstrate lower religiosity. This indeed has been found in samples of individuals with autism in Canada and the United States (Norenzayan, Gervais, & Trzesniewski, 2012). Individuals with Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, are less likely to see design or purpose behind events in their lives, which may undermine intuitive support for supernatural agent concepts (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004). Not to be neglected is the question of conceptual consensus in an evolutionary approach. The cognitive-evolutionary psychology of religion assumes the centrality of five mechanisms, namely, animism, anthropomorphism, TOM, dualism, and teleology, as well as the related agency-detection system (Beit-Hallahmi, 2015). Still, it has been argued that vitalism beliefs (tied to beliefs in free will) or ontological confusion may be useful additions to this consensus (Cashmore, 2010; Lindeman & Saher, 2007; Lindeman et al., 2015).

The Variance Challenge

Rigorously validating the basic theoretical consensus leads us immediately to the reality of individual differences in religiosity (surface, “phenotypic” form), in cognitive mechanisms (“deep structure”), and in other individual traits. Despite the

automaticity and naturalness of cognitive shortcuts, observable expression of religious ideation is not automatic; it is contingent on numerous conditions, contexts, and circumstances. Beyond the challenge of individual differences, historical transformations in the form of new religions and the instability of group religiosity force us to consider the gap between “deep structure” and “phenotypic” manifestations. Predicting individual or collective investment in religious activity can be done only by considering presumed internal propensities and the interaction with environmental factors. It seems that psychological theories of religion, not just evolutionary ones, start by implicitly or explicitly assuming a constant “human nature” in the form of stable psychological and neurological endowment, or universal early experiences making religion inevitable or likely (Beit-Hallahmi, 1989, 1996, 2010). The cognitive approach to religion focuses on what all humans share—cognitive mechanisms generating religion—and pays limited  attention to variance in religiosity. These fundamental notions of psychic unity, uni­form­ ity, and universality reflect both humanistic tradition and evolutionary theory. These general explanations predict the uni­form­ ity and stability of religion, because they all assume stable human capacities, drives, needs, and psychological mechanisms, but they need to account for individual and group differences in religiosity, as well as for major historical transformations. Given the presumed universality and uniform action of the psychological mechanisms involved in the making of religion, the question of variance in religiosity is compelling. Despite the common mechanisms that create the naturalness of religious ideas, humanity in general—as well as particular human populations—has displayed a great deal of variation when the actual investment of resources in religion is observed. If we all possess the same brain architecture, how is it that individual humans differ in the way it is translated into action? Even in the same individual, discontinuity over a lifetime can be observed, and today’s atheist may even become tomorrow’s convert. Basic cognitive mechanisms interact with internal traits and situational factors to create the observed heterogeneity in individual and group religiosity. Developing comprehensive explanations requires an integration of the findings that connect religiosity to specific traits and situations. These connections are the constraints on the ways

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in which evolved cognitive shortcuts may lead to actions. Observations of religious movements and intense religious experiences have shown that the religiosity of a significant minority among believers may be qualitatively and quantitatively different. William James proposed a distinction between the once-born “healthy minded” and the twice-born “sick souls” (James, 1961/1902). The former were optimistic and well adjusted; the latter depressed, ridden by guilt, and in a permanent crisis. These individuals may change dramatically and experience elation and zest as the result of conversion. Then they sometimes become leaders and models for others. Beit-Hallahmi (1989) described two distinctive styles of religiosity, denoted by the terms of art versus identity: One is the low-involvement religion, the religion of identity, learned within the family of origin and having little emotional significance; and the other is the high-involvement religion, often the religion of converts, who learned it outside their family of origin and invest much emotional energy in it. (p. 100)

Research shows that many nominal believers simply do not know much about the religious tradition they nominally embrace, nor do they report much in the way of emotional experiences (BeitHallahmi, 2015). The majority of believers just follow, rather than lead or create new beliefs; it is the variation in the behavior of this vast majority that needs explaining, just like those among the intense minority.

First Step at a Comprehensive Theory: Two Primary Predictors of Religiosity Situational Determinants: Social Learning

Social learning and social identity can account for most religious involvement, because all concrete aspects of religion and religiosity are socially learned. Commitment to specific beliefs is tied to identity, which creates a degree of uniformity within the group. The most common way individuals become committed to a particular religion is by being born into it, and that is how most believers have acquired the identity they so often proudly proclaim. Individual religious identity is, in the vast majority of cases, totally predictable in terms of culture and intergenerational continuity. A believer’s specific persuasion is actually determined at the moment of birth and formed as a specific identity, not related to 358

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conviction or choice. A majority of the world’s religious believers have followed parental and communal teachings in acquiring the belief system they hold (Beit-Hallahmi, 2015). Gary Becker put the matter within the framework of culture (1996, p. 16): “Individuals . . . cannot alter their ethnicity, race or family history, and only with difficulty can they change their country or religion. Because of the difficulty of changing culture and its low depreciation rate, culture is largely a ‘given’ to individuals throughout their lifetimes.” As another social scientist has observed, “the content of individuals’ religious beliefs correlates very strongly with the beliefs of their communities . . . the fact of belief does not correlate with the content of belief but does correlate with . . . the believers’ social context” (Hardin, 1997, p. 260). Believers, young and old, are constantly socialized and resocialized through rituals, sermons, prayers, and festivals. Repeated rituals in the form of holidays and festivals celebrate miracles and triumphs and strengthen the faith, and so religion “persists on the basis of a constant rehearsal of its complicated dramas, woven as they are into the whole rhythm of social and cultural life” (Geertz, 1966, p. 177). Religious activity in any given individual reflects not only individual traits but also the success of local socialization systems. Other contextual factors in addition to cultural learning, such as sex, generation, personality traits, and social dynamics, determine the way beliefs are acquired and expressed (Gervais & Henrich, 2010).

Biological Determinants: Men, Women, and Religiosity

How to explain the most important predictor of religiosity: being female? The greater religiosity of women, demonstrated in consistent research findings over the past 100 years, is often ignored. Most research on religion is in reality research about women, who are actively supporting, maintaining, and sometimes keeping alive religious establishments, institutions, and organizations worldwide (Beit-Hallahmi, 1989,  2015; Beit-Hallahmi & Argyle, 1997). The findings are clearly not tied to Christianity or Western culture. Sullins (2006) reported that being female was significantly correlated with self-reported religiosity among Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, and Buddhists. Inglehart and Norris (2003) reported on religiosity in 74 nations (including eight Moslemmajority nations, India, China, and Brazil). Women

were more religious than men in all of them. The differences were largest in postindustrial nations and smallest in agrarian ones. Data on levels of religiosity for men and women in 49 Western and eight nonWestern cultures (Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, India, Albania, Azerbaijan, and Turkey) show that, in every case, women are more likely to describe themselves as religious compared with men, with ratios ranging from 1.05 in Brazil to 1.69 in Estonia. In the largest data pool anywhere in the world, women in the United States have been found to score significantly higher than men on all measures of religiosity used in public opinion polls (BeitHallahmi, 2015). Sex differences appear already among children, adolescents, and young adults. Religiosity rises with age, but older women are significantly more religious than older men. Women are more likely to be involved with divination (horoscopes, astrology, fortune-telling, and tarot), as well as with “alternative medicine.” Women are eager customers for practices that promise direct contacts with the world of the spirits or claim to operate with help from invisible powers and energies. They are much more likely to believe in ghosts, “psychic healing,” reincarnation, “telepathy,” and fortune-telling, and this has been confirmed in numerous cultures (Beit-Hallahmi, 2015). Most of the customers for “alternative medicine” have been female (Singh & Edzard, 2008). Bader (2003) noted that those claiming to have been abducted by UFOs or being ritual abuse survivors are 63% and 100% female, respectively. The typical “New Age” customer is a middleaged woman (Driskell & Lyon, 2011; Heelas & Woodhead, 2005). Streiker (1991, p. 50) stated that the “New Age . . . is largely of, by, and for women.” Research on spirituality, just like research on “New Age,” shows that women make up the majority of followers. Mencken, Bader, and Kim (2009, p. 77) suggested that “Spirituality may be perceived as a form of femininity.” Heelas and Woodhead (2005) stated that 80% of those involved as either practitioners or clients in what they call self-spiritualities, are female.

This difference between men and women had never been predicted by any general theories of religion. It often seems counterintuitive because religious organizations, institutions, and traditions are developed and controlled by men, often described as supporting the subordination of women. When we observe what religious doctrines everywhere say about women, the content and nature of male fantasies is clear and uniform. Women are the target of taboo and derision in most traditions, described as evil and impure (Piven, 2003). If the world of religious figures and ideas was created by men, reflecting their wishes, why are women so willing to adopt this masculine universe and commit themselves to it? Attempts to create an alternative female pantheon (“Goddess religions”) have clearly failed. Women’s religiosity is tied to basic cognitive mechanisms. Willard and Norenzayan (2013) meas­ ured mentalizing, dualism, teleological thinking, and anthropomorphism, together with religious and parareligious beliefs, in 1,412 individuals in North America. Table  22.1 reports their findings on the differences between men and women. As expected, women scored higher on religiosity, but also on each of the four cognitive mechanisms that are hypothesized to produce it. Female superiority on these scores is related to a greater openness to “official” religiosity, parareligious beliefs, and life’s-purpose beliefs, which are all related. King, Wood, and Mines (1990) found males scoring higher on critical thinking tests, and a survey of British secondary school students (n = 2,159) found that, at all ages, females were less skeptical than males (Preece & Baxter, 2000). It has often been suggested “that women’s behavior is more often directed by sensitivity and intuition” (Hollinger & Smith, 2002, p. 242), and, in terms of the dichotomy between intuitive and analytic style, it is clear that men think more analytically and less intuitively than women (Lieberman, 2000; Pacini & Epstein, 1999). Women’s less analytical thinking, compared with men’s, partially explains their readiness to embrace occult beliefs (Aarnio & Lindeman, 2005).

Table 22.1.  Male and Female Mean Differences, Adult Sample

Male Female

Anthro

Teleology

Dualism

Mentalizing

Paranorm

Purpose

Religiosity

3.14 3.48

4.70 5.00

3.68 3.90

19.09 23.67

2.63 3.18

4.58 5.27

4.61 5.31

Note: All differences are significant at the .001 level. Source: Willard and Norenzayan (2013, p. 386).

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The greater empathy of women acts to reduce critical thinking, and female neurohormones lead to the suppression of negative judgments, as shown by Bartels & Zeki (2004). The biological substratum behind sex differences in religiosity is reflected in many findings. Weisenbach et al. (2014) suggested that emotion processing in females and males takes place through different neural pathways. There are substantial sex differences in the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of emotionally influenced memory (Cahill, Uncapher, Kilpatrick, Alkire, & Turner, 2004), affective imagery (Bradley, Codispoti, Sabatinelli, & Lang, 2001), and sadness (Schneider, Habel, Kessler, Salloum, & Posse, 2000). Differences in the processing of social and emotional stimuli, tied to physiological differences in neurohormones, are at the root of differences in bonding and social interaction. Bartels and Zeki (2004) found that both romantic and maternal love activate many of the same specific regions of the brain and lead to a suppression of neural activity associated with the critical assessment of other people and negative emotions or judgments. The brain regions activated are the same ones that respond to brain-produced oxytocin and vasopressin. These neurohormones have been shown in animals to be both sufficient and necessary to induce both mother–infant bonding and male–female bonding. Human attachment mechanisms apparently overcome social distance by deactivating networks used for critical social assessment and negative emotions. This is more pronounced in females, shown in their greater empathy and readiness for attachment. The male brain secretes less oxytocin and less of the calming neurotransmitter serotonin than the female brain. Hormones such as testosterone and vasopressin set the male brain up to seek competitive, hierarchical groups in a constant quest to prove selfworth and identity.

The Challenge of High-Intensity Religiosity

Most religious behavior is rather undramatic, but the natural tendency of observers and researchers is to look at the minority of individuals demonstrating costly involvements. The literature on religious experiences or mysticism refers, on the one hand, to reportedly spontaneous, personal experiences leading to written or oral testimony and related religious commitment (“mystical experiences”), and, on the other hand, to findings from mass surveys that ask respondents about private experiences. Religious experiences or mystical states are by definition private 360

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events, like dreams. Laubach (2004, p. 242) described them as “perceptions of psychic intrusions into the stream of consciousness that are interpreted by the actor as not originating within the self ’s normal information channels.” It is clear that the particular content of private religious experience is totally determined by cultural learning and tradition. Muslims will not report apparitions of the Holy Virgin. Religious visions reported by individuals, possession experiences, glossolalia (speaking in what sounds like an unknown language), snake handling, and conversions engage the observer’s curiosity and challenge researchers. Often such rare experiences are reported by those living a totally religious life. Wellknown mystics throughout history felt compelled to report them publicly, even though they were said to be indescribable and unutterable (Belzen & Geels, 2003). Individual experiences reported by religious devotees or leaders become part of religious histories and traditions, and sometimes led to the formation of new movements. While such experiences are reported as spontaneous, a psychological interpretation will regard them as being the product of combined brain processes and social learning. Saver and Rabin (1997) diagnosed several wellknown mystics and religious leaders. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), a prominent mining engineer, started having visions of angels, heaven, and hell at age 55. These visions were contained in his many books, and the movement he inspired is known as the New Church, signified by the New Jerusalem in the Revelation. Saver and Rabin (1997) described him as a probable epileptic, in addition to suffering from mania and schizophrenia. Ann Lee (1736–1784), the founder of the Shakers, and Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844), the founder of Mormonism, were also described as possible epileptics. The personality dimension of schizotypy consists of a tendency to hallucinate and have other anomalous perceptual or cognitive experiences, but also enables those who have it to be creative in art or literature and to be religious (Claridge, 1985). Jackson (1997) found a positive correlation between schizotypy and reported religious experiences. The schizotypy items with the strongest correlations were “Do things sometimes feel as though they were not real?” (.43), “Do you believe in telepathy?” (.40), and “Do you believe that dreams can come true?”(.30). Confirming earlier findings, Hood and Chen (2013) reported that the Hood (1975) Mysticism Scale (M Scale) correlated with schizotypy scores and with beliefs in “extrasensory perception.”

Conversion

Conversion, a rare phenomenon occurring in the small minority of believers, seems like a mysterious, sudden, and powerful transfer of loyalty and attachment, which runs counter to the way most humans acquire a religious identity. It is intuitively assumed that it results from a set of unusual traits, together with special circumstances. Under the heading of conversion we encounter two seemingly separate kinds of identity change. In the first, a nominal (often minimal) affiliation with a religious tradition becomes an intensified, redefined commitment. This is the “born again” variety, where a nominal Presbyterian, Baptist, Jew, or Muslim proclaims a new commitment and changes his or her life accordingly. In the second, an individual rejects his former religious affiliation in favor of a new one, and thus a Baptist may become a Jew, or vice versa. External changes in identities and labels go together with internal and private changes. What characterizes the convert is the high level of displayed commitment, emotion, and activity tied to the religious transformation. Many identity changes can be explained by looking at macrosocial factors arising from history and microsocial ones arising from proximate social networks. Such conversions may be significant historically and socially, but not psychologically. They stem from situational factors and obvious secondary gains, or opportunism, in the absence of any real ego-involvement. Switching or “circumstantial” conversion may occur with migration, geographic mobility, or for other reasons that are far from religious. Many millions of individuals have changed religious affiliation because of such happy occasions as marriage, or while under duress and oppression. Millions of Dalit (“Untouchables”) in India have converted to Islam, Christianity, or Buddhism, trying to shake off the Hindu caste system (without much success). The majority of believers, those who display intergenerational continuity but low ego-involvement, demonstrate the effects of “simple” social learning. Looking at the minority that displays a radical discontinuity, we assume that personality dynamics and early experiences, which determine attachment to— or alienation from—family and community, are at work. Normal social learning is automatic and without awareness or conscious processing. Conversions, often described as spontaneous, like religious experiences, result from another form of social learning. Without exposure to beliefs there are no dramatic apparitions, and conversions to Islam never occur in

a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Identity discontinuity also appears when a person becomes less religious than her parents (i.e., apostasy, defection). This phenomenon seems much less dramatic, and has attracted much less scholarly attention. Apostasy, or individual secularization, is perceived as calling for fewer explanations.

The Challenge of Extending Validation

The first stage of validating the cognitive infrastructure assumptions by correlating cognitive mechanisms with measurable “phenotypic” religiosity (Banerjee & Bloom, 2014; Norenzayan et al., 2012; Willard & Norenzayan, 2013) needs to be followed by examining the connections between these mechanisms and many other measurable factors that have been discussed in the literature. Some of these are reviewed in what follows.

Propensities and Traits Individual Predispositions: Biology

Behind individual differences in religiosity, as well as the total absence of religiosity in atheists, there must lie a biological substratum (Saler & Ziegler, 2006). Research has investigated two biological aspects of individual differences: genetics and brain mechanisms. Numerous studies have reported genetic influences on religiosity (Koenig, McGue, Krueger, & Bouchard, 2005). Significant heritability coefficients for general views about the value of religion have been reported (Bradshaw & Ellison, 2008; Olson, Vernon, & Harris, 2001). Self-transcendence (ST) is a measure of religiosity and support for occultism. Urgesi et al. (2010) found that damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions induced an increase in ST. Borg, Andree, Soderstrom, and Farde (2003) found that the number of serotonin receptors correlated negatively with scores for self-transcendence—higher scores on self-transcendence were associated with fewer receptors. Nilsson et al. (2007) reported that genes connected to serotonin are associated with religiosity. Parkinson’s disease, related to lower dopamine production, is associated with lower religiosity (Butler, McNamara, & Durso, 2010). Asp, Ramchandran, and Tranel (2012) hypothesized that patients with prefrontal cortex damage would have a “doubt deficit,” which would be expressed through higher authoritarianism and fundamentalism. Ten patients with bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), 10 patients with damage to other brain areas, and 16 medical control patients were compared on authoritarianism,

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fundamentalism, and specific religious beliefs. The vmPFC patients scored significantly higher than both other groups on authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism. Devinsky and Lai (2008) proposed that the two levels of religiosity—normative beliefs and ecstatic religious experience—may be localized in the frontal and temporal regions of the right brain hemisphere. While events in the temporal lobe may evoke subjective religious experiences, changes in frontal lobe functions may contribute to permanently increased religious interests in the individual.

Intuitive Versus Analytic Style

Intuitive thinking style is positively related to religiosity (Pennycook, Cheyne, Seli, Koehler, & Fugelsang, 2012; Shenhav, Rand, & Greene, 2012). “An analytic cognitive style denotes a propensity to set aside highly salient intuitions when engaging in problem solving” (Pennycook et al., 2012, p. 335). An analytic style predicted lower religious and occultist beliefs (Pennycook et al., 2012). Gervais and Norenzayan (2012) also found that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics. Shenhav et al. (2012) suggested a causal link between intuitive thinking and a belief in God. Aarnio and Lindeman (2005) found that intuitive thinking was positively connected with occult beliefs. Furthermore, Burris and Petrican (2011) presented evidence showing that atheists, compared with religious individuals, process emotions differently. Atheists’ experiences appeared to be less vivid and less emotionally evocative relative to those of religious individuals, which may be related to a hyperanalytical style.

Intelligence

Overall, the correlation between IQ and religiosity has been found to be negative, but low. Sherkat (2010) examined the impact of religious affiliation, religious participation, and beliefs in the inerrancy of the Bible on verbal ability, and found that both inerrantist beliefs and affiliations with sectarianstyle groups have substantial negative effects on verbal ability. Zuckerman, Silberman, and Hall (2013) performed the most comprehensive metaanalysis of 63 studies, which showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity with a mean r of –.24. Three possible explanations were proposed: Higher intelligence may be negatively correlated with conformity; higher intelligence may be tied to an analytical thinking style (see the previous section, “Intuitive Versus Analytical 362

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Style”); or higher intelligence helps in coping and may make religious compensations unnecessary. Several studies have followed up children with outstanding (top 1%) IQ scores or with exceptional mathematical abilities (Ferriman, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009). Starting in 1922, Terman and his colleagues studied 1,528 gifted youth with a mean IQ of 151, who were followed as long as they lived. Almost one-tenth of the 856 males became academic researchers (77), more than a tenth (85) earned law degrees, and 48 earned medical degrees. Their religiosity was investigated repeatedly. At midlife, in 1941, 45% of the group was unaffiliated with any religion (as compared with 6% in the general population). Sixty-two percent of the men and 57% of the women claimed “little religious inclination” (Terman & Oden, 1959). This notable level of secularity was consistent throughout life (Holahan & Sears, 1995).

Intellectualism

Beyond intelligence, some individuals are marked by intellectualism: a total commitment to scholarship and a high level of analytical, nonintuitive thinking. They are likely to spend their lives at research universities. Surveys of religiosity among academics in the United States have consistently showed a huge gap separating them from the general population (Ecklund & Park, 2009; Gross & Simmons, 2009). This was already clear early in the 20th century, when surveys found a majority of nonbelievers among academics (Leuba, 1916). Ecklund and Scheitle (2007) surveyed 1,646 academics in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, economics, political science, and psychology at 21 elite universities in the United States. They were significantly less religious than the general population, leading to the thought that they came from another culture, or constituted one. Almost 52% identified themselves as having no current religious affiliation, compared with only 14% of the general population. There were 33.5% atheists and 30.2% agnostics (for a total of 63.7% nontheists), while in the general population of the United States, atheists made up less than 1%, as did agnostics (Kosmin & Keysar, 2009). While 14% of the US population called themselves “evangelical” or “fundamentalist,” less than 2% of academics did. Fifteen percent identified as Jewish, compared with 2% in the general population. Sectarian Protestants and Catholics are underrepresented among academics (Ecklund & Scheitle, 2007; Gross & Simmons, 2009).

A sample of 1,100 Indian scientists from 130 universities and research institutes were asked about their religiosity in 2007–2008 (Keysar & Kosmin, 2008). To the question “What do you believe about God?,” 12% were atheists and 13% agnostic, 26% believed in a personal God without doubts, 15% believed with doubts, and 30% did not believe in a personal God but did believe in a higher power. The results showed a higher level of religiosity compared with academics in the United States, but a degree of secularity significantly higher than that of the Indian general population. According to Norris and Inglehart (2004) there may be no more than 5% atheists in the Indian population.

Personality and Religiosity Attachment

Attachment theory assumes that ways of dealing with attachment, separation, and loss in in adults stem directly from mental models of oneself and others developed during infancy and childhood. Research on adults has shown that individual differences in attachment styles are related to individual differences in religiosity. Attachment to parents predicts adolescent and adult religiosity, with securely attached adults exhibiting more stable religiosity (Granqvist, 2002; Granqvist & Hagekull, 2000). Individuals with insecure attachment display a religiosity marked by relatively sudden changes (Kirkpatrick, 1998). Granqvist and Kirkpatrick (2004) found that individuals who described their mothers as cold and distant were more likely to have had religious conversions. Furthermore, Granqvist and Hagekull (2001) found that, in a Swedish sample, an insecure childhood attachment to mother was strongly related to holding positive beliefs about astrology, the occult, “parapsychology,” and UFOs.

Big Five Dimensions

The Big Five model of personality uses the five dimensions of Openness, Conscientiousness, ­ Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Studies on the Big Five correlates of religiosity concluded that the traits of Agreeableness (warm and kind) and Conscientiousness (responsible and goal driven) were correlated with religiosity, though the correlations were low (Lodi-Smith & Roberts, 2007; Saroglou, 2010). Galen and Kloet (2011) argued that the one personality dimension distinguishing religious church members from secular individuals is Openness (i.e.,  intellectual, unconventional). Openness was

negatively related to orthodoxy (Duriez, Soenens, & Beyers, 2004), and apostates had higher scores on Openness (Streib, Hood, Keller, Csoff, & Silver, 2010). So, there is much agreement on low Openness being associated with religiosity, while disagreement remains in regard to the other Big Five traits.

Situational Determinants of Religiosity Situational Uncertainty

Supernatural beliefs are used in coping with what appear like random misfortunes such as business failures, unemployment, illness, and accidents. Reliance on supernaturalism in such cases is related to the degree of possible human control (Ashforth, 1998; Harnischfeger, 2006; Stewart & Strathern, 2004). Hanson and Xiang (2013) found that Christian denominations with stricter religious doctrines attracted more converts in countries where risks of natural disaster or disease outbreak were greater and where government provision of health services was more limited. Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, and Hamedani (2013) found that victims of horrific natural disasters are likely to think about them in religious terms when their experiences were indeed unpredictable and uncontrollable. Sibley and Bulbulia (2012) assessed religiosity in a representative sample of the inhabitants of Christchurch, New Zealand, before and after a major earthquake killed 185 people on February 22, 2011. Those affected became more religious compared with the general population, but this did not improve their subjective well-being. Religion helps satisfy the need for order, explanation, and prediction by providing a sense of illusory control (Kay, Gaucher, McGregor, & Nash, 2010). The idea that religious beliefs serve to block threats to one’s sense of certainty, stability, and security has been proposed and tested in several experiments (Burling, 1993; Hogg, Adelman, & Blagg, 2010; Li, Cohen, Weeden, & Kenrick, 2010). Van den Bos, Van Ameijde, and Van Gorp (2006) showed that uncertainty led participants to be more protective of their beliefs and religious identity. Laurin, Kay, and Moscovitch (2008) found that a threat to beliefs in personal control led to a stronger belief in a controlling God. Kay, Shepherd, Blatz, Chua, & Galinsky (2010) proposed that religion helps to maintain the belief in an orderly world and found that feeling a loss of control is tied to belief in God or “spiritual forces.” They also reported that when the stability of external control structures (e.g., government) is threatened, religious belief increases.

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Kay, Moscovitch, and Laurin (2010) found that exposing individuals to random or uncertain occurrences increased religious conviction. Rutjens, van der Pligt, and van Harreveld (2010) showed how a desire for certainty pushes individuals toward holding religious beliefs. McGregor, Nash, and Prentice (2010) placed participants in anxiety-provoking or  neutral situations, which included asking whether they would give their lives for their faith. The anxiety-inducing condition caused participants to become more religiously committed. Experimental manipulations of loneliness resulted in greater belief in supernatural agents, such as ghosts, God, or the devil (Epley, Akalis, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2008), and manipulations of social exclusion fostered greater religious belief in both Western and non-Western respondents (Aydin, Fischer, & Frey, 2010). Individuals without a current love relationship were found to be more religiously active (Granqvist & Hagekull, 2000, 2003). There is related evidence that the need to belong does push individuals in the direction of greater religiosity (Gebauer & Maio, 2012). These results suggest that religious beliefs may help people shore up threats to their sense of social connectedness and may serve this buffering role for low-status individuals. Inzlicht, McGregor, Hirsh, and Nash (2009) found reduced reactivity in the anterior cingulate cortex (a system involved in anxiety and selfregulation) among participants with stronger religious beliefs. They concluded that religious beliefs defend against anxiety and minimize the subjective experience of failure.

Terror Management Theory

Terror management theory (TMT) proposes that the awareness of death is humanity’s main cultural problem, and suggests that it is managed through cultural beliefs that offer transcendence via nonreligious (scientific or artistic contributions, raising children) and/or religious (promises of afterlife bliss) ways. When confronted with death reminders, individuals will defend cultural traditions (Greenberg, Solomon, & Arndt, 2008; Dechesne et al., 2003), including religious beliefs and identities (Greenberg, Simon, Porteus, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1995). Vail, Arndt, and Abdollahi (2012) found that death reminders had no effect on atheists, but among Christians it raised religiosity and enhanced denial of the “competitor” deities Allah and Buddha. Among Muslims, they raised religiosity and enhanced denial of Jesus and Buddha. 364

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The Challenge of Cultural and Historical Variations in Religiosity

Defenders of religion have claimed that all humans shared an innate sensus divinitatis, leading them to some form of religious faith. Maitzen (2006) asked why the visible manifestations of this innate capacity is so easily affected by national and cultural boundaries. Thus, the demographics of theism are an argument against theistic claims, but the demographics of religiosity across time and space are a challenge to secular theories as well. The reality of cultural and historical differences in religiosity demonstrates the numerous (and unpredictable) ways of cultural evolution, as we observe interminable ascents and demises, formations and deformations. The most common explanations for heightened religiosity offered by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, or psychologists refer to deprivation, frustration, suffering, crisis, vulnerability, and insecurity. They may refer to objective, material conditions, or subjective, psychological factors. The literature also uses terms like “estrangement,” “isolation,” “marginality,” “alienation,” or “anomie” to describe the context of religious yearnings. Deprivation and distress explanations predict that with less frustration and anxiety, religiosity would decrease for both individuals and groups. Davis (1948) stated, “the existence of goals beyond this world serves to compensate people for frustrations they inevitably experience in striving to reach socially acquired and socially valuable ends” (p. 532). Glock, Ringer, and Babbie (1967) stated that being female, unmarried, old, with little income, and with little education are all forms of deprivation that would lead to greater religious involvement. In the United States, individuals who report praying often and claim that it brings results are likely to be women, fundamentalists, African Americans, those with less education and income, the widowed, and the elderly (Baker, 2008; Pargament, 1997). Norris and Inglehart (2004) described “the absence of human security as critical for religiosity” (p. 14). Cross-national differences in religiosity are then explained by economic modernization, which reduces any need for religious reassurance (Inglehart & Baker, 2000; Norris & Inglehart, 2004). The prediction that suffering and poverty would lead to higher levels of religiosity has been put to the test by analyzing cross-national data. McCleary and Barro (2006) found that economic development leads to lower levels of individual religiosity. Data from 114 countries showed that lower rates of employment in agriculture, together with growing income security

and equality, led to a decline in religiosity (Barber, 2013). Ritual attendance rates are higher in nations suffering economic inequalities without offering a safety net (Gill & Lundsgaarde, 2004; Norris & Inglehart, 2004). Solt, Habel, and Grant (2011) found that economic inequality had a strong positive effect on the religiosity of all members of a society regardless of income. Greater inequality yields higher religiosity by increasing the extent to which wealthy people support religion and shape the attitudes and beliefs of those with fewer means. A survey in 40 nations found that inequality increases religious service attendance as well as support for the involvement of religious organizations and leaders in politics, and weakens support for secularization, especially among the poor (Karakoç & Baskan, 2012). A high level of religiosity in a developed nation (the bestknown case is the United States) may be related to a high level of economic inequality and the absence of a welfare safety net (Höllinger, Haller, & ValleHöllinger, 2007; Verweij, Ester, & Nauta, 1997). The scholarly literature offers hundreds of case studies that demonstrate the connection between deprivation and the appearance of new religious movements (NRMs) (Beit-Hallahmi, 1992,  2015; Beit-Hallahmi & Argyle, 1997). Among the historical movements described as religions of crisis—or of protest and resistance—are Voodoo, modern Pentecostalism, the Rastafarians, the Bwiti in West Africa, the Great Awakenings in the United States, Cargo Cults, and Ghost Dances. Individual readiness to join NRMs has been interpreted as a response to crisis situations and individual alienation, alleviated by a promise of salvation. Wilson (1967, p. 31) stated that NRMs emerge because of “disturbance of normal social relations, for instance in the circumstances of industrialization and urbanization . . . Insecurity, differential status anxiety, cultural neglect.”

Secularization

The observations and generalizations presented here are being made within the historical context of secularization, a process in which both society and individuals move away from the dominance of religious institutions and religious ideation. Secularization, gradual and relative, is the quantitative decline in the allocation of material and psychological resources to supernaturalism. It does not mean that religious ideas disappear—only that less energy is invested in them. This decrease in investment can be observed even among those who consciously and

explicitly proclaim support for supernaturalism. It should be recalled that the academic study of religion, in all its forms, is possible only because of secularization. Secularization is a significant transformation in human history. Large-scale economic and political upheavals led to the loss of political power once invested in religious institutions, now marginalized or neutralized. This coincided with the decline of monarchy and feudalism and the rise of secular nation-states and then transnational corporation. In traditional societies, religious ideas are pervasive, affecting all and everything: The point is that before these transformations every aspect of life had involved religious associations. Everywhere people looked they were reminded of another dimension in life. There was not yet a secular world to escape to, as there is today, where one can effectively forget about anything beyond what we take to be ordinary reality. (Sommerville, 2002, p. 367)

The great change in everyday discourse—and this change is indeed revolutionary—is the possibility of looking at religion from the outside, which used to be not just impossible, but inconceivable. This is what the process involves: The rise of individualism and egalitarianism, the growth of religious diversity, the separation of human rights from religious rectitude, the displacement of supernatural remedies by scientific-based technological solutions, and the growth of a positive view of human power and potential . . . have been accompanied . . . by such fundamental changes in the nature and place of religion as privatization and de facto relativism, which in turn have been accompanied by a marked decline in religious activities, religious institutions, and religious beliefs. (Bruce, 2012, pp. 533–534)

The idea of banishing religion from politics, a dramatic historical change, is at present a dominant point of view globally. Some nations still have an official state religion, most of them with Muslim majorities, but even Muslim-majority countries such as Albania, Azerbaijan, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Turkey, and Tajikistan do have a formal separation of state and religion. Other nations with formal separation include the United States, India, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Brazil, Spain, Norway, Sweden, and France. The Enlightenment has led to a new, totally secular, public discourse about morality focusing on

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rights, equality, and human welfare and regarding impulse control as an individual problem. This language of rights, which today seems natural and familiar, has been created in a secular context by secular individuals. Modernity defines itself as committed to the values of free inquiry, the centrality of the individual, and to basic individual freedoms. According to Triandis (1973), modernity does the following: [It] puts a greater emphasis on the nuclear family (as opposed to the extended family), on egalitarian relationships between the sexes; on status based on achievement . . . (as opposed to status based on birth . . . or other ascriptive characteristics); and on greater concern with individualism (rather than with doing what is prescribed by authority figures or by social groups). (p. 165)

This has been happening globally, with the status of religion as an institution radically changing in most of the world. It is in Europe, North America, and English-speaking settler colonies such Australia and New Zealand that we can observe striking changes, but we can also find them in India, China, Korea, and Japan. The exception is the Islamic world, where secularization is minimal or non­ex­ist­ ent. Recent historical changes include the rise of violent Islamic movements aimed at reestablishing medieval institutions and norms. These may be viewed as a response to globalization, but it is important to recall that the Islamic world has never been secularized and is still close to the Middle Ages in culture and politics. This explains the shocking— by Enlightenment standards—displays of intolerance and barbarism. In terms of conscious processing, secularization means that religious ideation loses its previously automatic plausibility for a critical mass of individuals. This transforms the context in which permanent mechanisms operate to create religiosity. Over the course of the 20th century, the estimated number of nonbelievers skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900 to 918 million in 2000, or from 0.2% of world population in 1900 to 15.3% in 2000 (Barrett, Kurian, & Johnson, 2001). Campbell (2013/1971) described what he called “irreligion” as an attitude of rejection or indifference, which is quite remarkable, psychologically speaking. Atheism, the conscious rejection of all supernaturalism, is the highlight of secularization, and “The widespread occurrence of at least some forms of atheism presents an interesting challenge for any evolutionary explanation of religion” (Norenzayan et al., 2016, p. 18). 366

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At the most descriptive level, and beyond any dispute, secularization means a striking increase in the variance of measured religiosity and a growing heterogeneity in organizations, as the uniformity that used to characterize a religious society disappears. In Islamic countries, this uniformity is still found, but when secularization begins, this is dramatically reduced. Thus, the most religious country in Europe, Poland, had an atheist president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, between 1995 and 2005 (and Italy has had three atheists in the presidency since 1964). In Europe, some changes are especially striking not only against the background of the last millennium, but even the past century. Since the end of World War II, the decline of religiosity in Europe has been accelerating. In 1945, 100% of Germans had a religious affiliation, equally divided between Roman Catholics and Protestants. In the 21st century, more than 30% of Germans are unaffiliated (Wohlrab-Sahr, 2009). Voas (2009) found that every European generation is less religious than the one before. Many of the phenomena discussed here, such as change in religious identity or NRMs, are possible only in a secularized culture. Individuals are free to make choices only in a world where religion has lost its authority and its power: “persons are seen to be free to choose not only which religion will be theirs but also whether to choose any at all” (Hammond, 1991, p. 517). The desacralization of culture means that religious symbols, language, and references are abandoned, or used without reference to their original meaning. Greenfield (2013) examined word frequencies in approximately 1,160,000 English books published between 1800 and 2000. The importance of obedience and religion has decreased, as reflected in the declining use of words such as “obedience,” “authority,” “belong,” and “pray.” Another survey found that in the 1500s and 1600s words such as “baptized,” “hymns,” “God,” “Christ,” and “Pope” were among the most common, together with the expressions “baptized in the name of ” or “God forbid it should be.” By the 1800s, the above words and phrases were being used less and less often (Petersen, Tenenbaum, Havlin, Stanley, & Perc, 2012). These findings reflect a profound transformation of consciousness. Western folklore used to be filled with witches, spirits, and trolls, but over the past couple of centuries it has become naturalized (Simpson, 1981). A  similar transformation has taken place in the

content of psychotic delusions. Klaf and Hamilton (1961) reported that in Britain the religious content in schizophrenic ideation went down over a century from 65% around 1850 to 23% around 1950. In more traditional populations, religious ideation in schizophrenia is still common (Ndetei & Vadher, 1985). Natural disasters used to play a major role in religious discourse, but the discussion of catastrophes as evidence of cosmic justice has become rare (Kelly, 2005). Secularization means that humans no longer interpret misfortune as caused by gods or ancestors, angry at human sins, and cope with natural disasters and disease without tying them to any imaginary moral calculus. Misfortunes, disasters, disease, suffering, and death are explained in natural and naturalist terms (Chester, 2005; Steinberg, 2000). The idea that human fortune and misfortune are the result of random, impersonal events is totally counterintuitive, as humans naturally find meaning in imaginary sequences of design, intention, purpose, reward, and punishment. It seems obvious, and consistent with experimental findings (Kay Gaucher et al., 2010), that resorting to religious explanations will persist as uncontrollable events (or events that appear beyond control) continue to occur around us. Nevertheless, for many humans, what seemed uncontrollable 300 years ago (epidemics, illnesses, earthquakes, storms) seems more manageable, if not preventable. Explanations of secularization refer to situational  changes, especially lowered deprivation. Urbanization and industrialization are psychologically tied to an increase in self-confidence, with relatively more control over nature and circumstances (Norris & Inglehart, 2004). Nonbelief emerges as a viable personal choice as existential security rises in modern industrialized societies (Norris & Inglehart, 2004). It is easy to become an atheist when you enjoy economic prosperity and security (Diener, Tay, & Myers, 2011). If deprivation really accounts for higher religiosity, then the persistence of supernaturalism must be related to various forms of continuing deprivation and frustration. Harrington (1983) stated that capitalism was responsible for secularization, as the family, religion, and community are undermined by the market and by the ideology of utilitarian individualism. Kinship ties are weakened by urbanization (tied to social heterogeneity) and industrialization. The family has changed from a unit of production, consumption, and socialization to a unit of consumption and socialization.

McCleary and Barro (2006) stated that secularization is part of modernization (Inglehart & Baker, 2000) and acknowledged their debt to the economic determinism proposed by Karl Marx, who argued that economic structure determines the superstructure of social consciousness, including religion. Using data collected between 1985 and 2005 from 68 nations, they found that religiosity, meas­ ured through belief in heaven, belief in hell, belief in afterlife, belief in God in some form, and selfdefinition as a religious person, as well as ritual attendance, declined with economic development and urbanization. Moreover, they argued that this indicated causation rather than just correlation. Social dislocations have also contributed to the decline of religiosity in specific cultures (Bruce & Glendinning, 2010). Globalization means that cross-cultural communication is pervasive, but spreading particular ideas, especially religious ones, may encounter resistance, and acceptance is far from automatic. Reactions to conversion attempts are determined by local history. Western missionaries are resented in India, but some Westerners have been open to Hindu and Buddhist imports, as established Western traditions were losing their plausibility. Globally, religious mobility has become easier. Fluctuations in public religiosity because of government policy have been observed for hundreds of years. In such cases, religiosity is not autonomous of conscious decisions by political leaders, with significant results. Secularization worldwide, since the Middle Ages, has often been the result of violent political struggles. There have been cases where secularization has been directed from above rather forcefully, involving coercion and violence, together with indoctrination. Since 1900, this has happened in such places as the communist-ruled Albania, Bulgaria, East Germany, Russia (Froese, 2004), Turkey, China, and Mexico. These cases are of some theoretical interest because they may be regarded as large-scale experiments, which the evolutionary approach may judge as destined to fail. There seems to have been an assumption of (or hope for) an automatic resurgence of religiosity in postcommunist countries. This has not been borne out by events. Surveys have shown that East Germany (52.1% atheists), the Czech Republic (39.9%), Latvia (18.3%), Hungary (15.3%), and Slovenia (13.2%) are among the most secular in Europe, compared with France (23.3%) and Sweden (19.3%) (Smith, 2012). There is evidence showing that regime-guided secularization has been quite

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successful in East Germany and Albania and less successful in Turkey (Hann, 2000). The case of East Germany, regarded as a massive secularization experiment, has attracted much attention, because it has remained among the most irreligious territories in the world long after the end of the communist regime (Froese & Pfaff, 2005; Wohlrab-Shar, 2011). Regimes’ actions do not follow just one direction. In the postcommunist nations since the 1990s, in Iran after 1979, and in Afghanistan under the Taliban (1996–2001), desecularization campaigns have been carried out with various degrees of coercion and intensity (Karpov, 2010). In Russia since the 1990s, secular political elites have carried out a desecularization policy. The results, according to one observer, are as follows: Ritualistic reaction of belonging without believing accompanied by a relatively small proportion of more genuine conversions. Over 80 percent of Russians describe themselves as Orthodox, including one-half of the non-believers, but proportions of those who combine consistent Orthodox beliefs with regular church attendance measure in single digits. (Karpov, 2010, p. 260)

The Persistence of Religion

Evolutionary explanations for the origins of religion predict the persistence of religion, because they assume invariant psychological mechanisms that propel humans toward religion and religiosity. If indeed there is a neurophysiological basis for all religious behaviors, as we assume, then we should not expect any decline in their prevalence. Secularization obviously challenges theories that assume the forces pushing humans to create and support religious ideas are constant and eternally present. What are the lessons of historical fluctuations induced from above? Findings about secularization and desecularization campaigns show that public expressions of religiosity may be easily changed, but religious thinking—growing out of the cognitive infrastructure—may be harder to affect. While the evidence for global secularization presented so far is significant, supernatural beliefs and practices survive. Even in the secularized West, new forms of supernatural commitment are evident. Religion “becomes privatized, which means that every individual . . . might create his own cocktail of Christian devotion, Buddhism, and belief in astrology” (Tschannen, 1991, p. 401). Gellner (1974, p. 193) argued that despite the sweeping economic and social changes brought about by moderniza368

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tion, “serious cognition need not pervade all aspects of daily life . . . the insulation of various spheres of life . . . makes it easier to permit any degree of fantasy in those aspects of life which are distinct from the serious business of knowledge.” This makes possible the coexistence of astrology and astrophysics, both flourishing in the same culture. In addition to the survival of traditional practices and beliefs, new forms of individualized religiosity have become known under the labels of “New Age” and spirituality. Both offer personalized supernaturalism. The “New Age” phenomenon reflects both secularization and the persistence of supernaturalism, because it combines supernatural thinking with privatization and low investment, in most cases, but through this process, supernaturalism survives. A comprehensive definition of “New Age” refers to “non-traditional medicine, psychics, fortune tellers, horoscopes, Ouija boards, UFOs, ghosts, astrology, and mysterious animals, such as Bigfoot” (Driskell & Lyon, 2011, p. 389). It does not take the place of old religion in terms of the investment of resources, and does not neutralize nonreligiosity (Houtman & Mascini, 2002), because individualization is a component of the predominant secularization process. Since 1750, the world has seen the rise of thousands of new religions, as an age of massive secularization (and religious freedom) has also been an age of religious creativity, but the membership of these new religions has been limited, and their social significance limited. New religious movements are quite small, and most barely survive. Movements that once seemed on the verge of becoming global powers are now remembered only by historians. Moral Rearmament (the “Oxford Movement”), the best-known NRM of the 1930s in Britain and the United States, is today almost forgotten (Sack, 2009). The Jesus Movement of the 1970s in the United States, with its hundreds of communes all over the country, has similarly disappeared from memory (Shires, 2007). Adolescence and the move into young adulthood and a return to the mainstream is more of a factor than has often been realized. When enthusiastic members get older, commitment wanes in favor of more conventional pursuits. The NRMs reflect the persistence of religion, but involve small numbers of individuals as compared with “New Age” and “Spirituality.” The reality of secularization, together with the persistence of religion, hints at a multiplicity of factors that determine the centrality (or marginality) of religious thinking (Botero et al., 2014). A multicausal

framework is the preferred path. An evolutionary approach leads to the suggestion that secularization is psychologically unnatural because it seems to involve nonintuitive thinking overcoming permanent brain architecture, which dictates particular cognitive biases. No one will suggest that historical changes occurred because of modified brain architecture, so how are innate mechanisms neutralized or overridden and where do nonintuitive strategies come from? It has been claimed that individuals on the autism spectrum, like those with Asperger’s, are less likely to express religious ideas, and that intellectualism, discussed previously, is also related to autism (Caldwel-Harris, Murphy, Velazquez, McNamara, 2011). It is possible that for various evolutionary reasons such individuals, naturally committed to nonintuitive, nonanimistic thinking, are more common in human populations today. Still, this does not explain instances of pervasive secularization. Is real secularization possible? The cognitive infrastructure is still in place, and regardless of historical changes, the default mode is there, and it is of animistic-intuitive thinking. We can assume that humans will always think animistically, teleologically, and anthropomorphically in some situations, despite the institutional decline of religion. But at the same time, religious ideas will become marginal. This means that in addition to the psychological mechanisms pulling humans forcefully toward religion, opposing forces are at work. When it comes to high involvement religiosity, the situation is clear. Fewer people are ready to devote their lives to religion in the ranks of the clergy. Those who still believe in the tenets of supernaturalism but do not participate in public worship obviously invest less (time, money, and mental energy) than those who believe and worship.

Conclusion: The Integration Challenge

What an evolutionary approach offers the academic study of religion is a division between a cognitive infrastructure of unconscious processes and the superstructure of conscious discourse, creating thousands of particular religions, as well as religiosity, collective or individual. Most discussions of religion, both academic and popular, deal with local and particular cases of the superstructure, often interpreting them as the result of universal processes (Beit-Hallahmi, 1996, 2010). Does the cognitive infrastructure explain specific beliefs and rituals? Additional psychological processes, as well as historical developments, are involved.

The primacy of sociocultural influences and historical context is clear in the formation of local traditions. In concrete religious belief systems, we encounter structures of beliefs and practices which have evolved over millennia, but the basic mechanisms make the evolved narratives and rituals so seductive. An evolutionary perspective has won much attention and acclaim, but to gain further integration into the academic study of religion, a continuing extended validation research program is needed. The relationship between infrastructure and superstructure must be elucidated within various religious contexts, together with the connections between cognitive mechanisms, individual traits, and situational factors. The possibility of using cognitive shortcuts as measures of religiosity may be pursued, together with experimentation involving both infrastructure and superstructure processes.

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INDEX

Note: Tables and figures are indicated by an italic “t” and “f ”, respectively, following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

A

accusation in a mirror phenomenon  269–70 adaptation  20–4, 80–1, 94, 175, 230–1. See also in-group adaptation accounts of religion  7–13, 80, 247–8 in adolescence  100–1 anxieties and  12–13 commitment and  10–12 in cooperating social groups  136 cooperation benefits of  21 costly signaling hypothesis  10–12 cultural evolution and  8 in ecological revolution  149 evolution by natural selection and  2 evolution under genetic and cultural kinship 141 handicap principle  12 language as  80 religion as  21–2, 121–2, 247–8 in religious system  274 sexual selection and  12 adaptationist theory  52–3 adaptive value, of parochial altruism  267 adolescence adaptation in  100–1 animals and  101 emotionally influenced behavior during 100 males and  100–1 music and  108 physical growth in  100 religion and health  110–11 religiously inspired terrorism and  99–100 secular systems and  112–13 social communication of  103–4 adolescent brain development  101–3 dopaminergic reward system  100, 102–3 experience-expectant brain  103 limbic system and emotions  102 prefrontal and temporal cortices  102–3 adolescent health, religion and  110–11 advantageous, in evolution  175 aesthetic transcendence  338–9, 345–7 affiliation strength, GSS measure of  220 afterlife and immortality beliefs  76–7, 79

agency cognitive process interpretation of  4 hypersensitivity to  4, 121 of mind, in children  72 agency detection  81 development of  70–1 error management in  71 false positives and  71 supernatural beliefs and  71–2 TOM development and  72 agents. See also supernatural agents human-like 5–6 objects distinction from  71 TOM and nonhuman  72–3 altered or ecstatic states of consciousness 83–5 animals and  85 in shamanism  84–5 altruism  119, 247. See also parochial altruism group-level selection, selfishness and 248 indirect 119 kin  119, 121 kinship and  137 reciprocal 119 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), on religiosity  213–14 amorality, of gods  35 amygydala 102 analytic thinking style, religious disbelief and 164 ancestor-cults 37–8 ancestors concept of God and  147 as gods  57 religious beliefs health benefits of  155 supernatural agents similarities  147 worship 146–7 ancestor spirits  179–80 Fijian concerns  237–8, 238t animals adolescence and  101 altered states of consciousness and  85 animism among  60–1 costly signals and rituals of  89 HADD and  84 imagination in  85 music and  107–8 ritualized behaviors of  86

synchronized movements of  87, 92 TOM and  84 animism 49 among animals  60–1 as anthropomorphism  60 morality separation from  146 religious behavior and  146 antecedents, in anthropomorphism theory 56 anthropomorphic gods  62–3 anthropomorphism animism as  60 in art  49–50, 57 cognitive neuroscience and  61–2 cognitive strategy of  48–9, 56 in daily life  49–50, 57–8 description of  49 as evolutionary byproduct  58–60 Freud on  50 Horton on  50–1 human condition and  51 humanlike mind in  49, 57 Hume on  50, 58, 63 illusion and  49 inanimate objects and  57 Nietzsche on  51, 63 projection and  57 propositions on  58–60 Spinoza on  50, 63 of supernatural agents  20 Tylor on  50 anthropomorphism theory antecedents in  56 anthropomorphic gods in  62–3 general propositions for  56 objections to  62–3 religion as cognition in  55–6 anxieties 12–14 aposematic signaling  239–40 in central Andes  240 in Egypt  240 in Indus Valley  232–3 in Mesoamerica  241 in Mesopotamia  240 in North China Plains  233 in other regions  241 in Yoruba Territories of Southwestern Nigeria 240 ARIS. See American Religious Identification Survey

375

art anthropomorphism in  49–50, 57 cave  90–1, 93 artificial selection  322, 330 Darwin and  323 religion and  324–7 religion sociological studies and  327–30 atheism  159, 293. See also religious disbelief all gods and  19, 25–6, 28–30 mind-blind 194 moral distrust of  253–4 trust and  117 attendance  182, 190, 219 parental  184–5, 184t, 185t, 188 Australia aboriginal people  146, 179–80 Axial Age  40–2, 42f, 127–8 conflicting goals post-  44–5 doctrines  40, 45 economic development in  41 future-oriented approach to  42 intuitive expectations in  40–1 life-history approach to  41–2 morality in  35 personal discipline and moderation in 41 salvation and antimaterialism  44–5 upper class and  41

B

beads burial use of  89 in rituals  89–90 sites 89–90 behavior. See religious behavior behavioral ecology  135–6, 234 of hunter-gatherers  140–1 behavioral immune system (BIS) cross-cultural evidence between religiosity and  209–10 disease threat and  200 disgust as component of  201 infectious disease  200 mating practices and  206–8 parental investment and  206 pregnancy and  208 prejudice and  205f religiosity and sex differences in  206–8 beliefs. See also religious beliefs about afterlife  77 causality and expressed  190–1 communal support for  159 in context-based learning biases  26–7 defined 299 group threat and questioning of  160–1 in supernatural agents  3 biblical fundamentalism fourth-wave terrorists and rise of  277 GSS on  220 Big Gods cultural group-selection based theory of  158, 167–8, 194, 237

376 index

EA on  299–300 morality and cooperation from  249 religious beliefs, cooperation and  298 SCCS on  299–301 supernatural punishment by  249 binding foundations, in moral foundations theory  258 biological roles  175 birth control  256, 291 BIS. See behavioral immune system blatant aposematic signaling  239–40 Bloom, Paul  75 brain adolescent development of  101–3 amygydala in  102 evolutionary analysis of  2, 85–6 hypothalamus in  102 insula in  103 music impact on  107 neurons, synapses, and neural networks in 101 patterns of development in  101–2 prefrontal cortex in  102–3 temporal cortex in  102–3 burials 92–3 beads used at  89 Neanderthals and  92 byproduct  3, 80–1 accounts of religion  3–7, 80–1 anthropomorphism as evolutionary  58–60 coevolution, intuitive process and  159–60 cognition and  20 DPT and  157–60 early religion approaches  20–3 evolution by natural selection  2 HADD and  3–6, 158 infer causation  158 reinforcement learning and  10 religions as  20–1, 121–2, 247–8 ritualized behaviors, superstitions and 6–7 Rube Goldberg device and  81 statistical relationships and  158 supernatural agents beliefs and  3 supernatural punishment and  304–5, 311 TOM 157–8

C

causality  14, 226 complex, multidirectional  189–91, 189f expressed beliefs and  190–1 hypersensitivity to  6 between lifestyles and religious involvement  183, 189–90 moral and religious differences  183 cave art  90 in Rhino Cave  90–1 shamanism and  91, 93

caves fire use in  87–8 rituals and  90–1 celibacy 257 Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication (CSCC)  275–6 central Andes, aposematic signaling in 240 ceremonies, kingdoms and city-states focus on  39 charismatic signaling theory anonymous cooperation and  231 cooperation and uncertainty suppression 235–41 etiquette violations punishment by gods 238 group gods and  239 group punishment for individual transgressions 239 overview of  230–1 religious ecologies and automated cooperative responses  237 religious niche construction and cooperation 236–7 risky cooperation and cheating  235–6 social inequality and cooperation stratification 239 syncretism 237 cheater detection module  120, 123 cheating  231–5, 302, 344–5 cooperation evolution and  241 evolutionary problems of  233–4 hard-to-fake signals and  233–4 morality and  120, 123 risky cooperation and  235–6 child abuse  290–1 children agency detection and supernatural agents beliefs  71–2 agency detection development  70–1 agency of mind in  72 habituation-dishabituation of  70 imagination of  85 intuitive theism of  109 invisible friends of  73, 76 looking-time methods for  70–1 preferential looking of  70 TOM and  84 Christianity in-group bias in  129–31 parochiality and converts to  255 purity references in  199 religious moral traditions and  129–31 church parental inheritance influence on  182 reproductive strategies and  183 tangible services benefits  188 CIUS. See Crime in the United States civilian attacks, in terrorism  271 cleansing rituals  199, 201 coalitional aggression  266–7, 277 intergroup conflict from  268 religious terrorism and  266

coevolution, of religious belief and intuitive cognitive style belief questioning as group threat  160–1 byproducts and intuitive process  159–60 cognitive style  163–4 deliberation and religious questioning  161–2 on DPT  159 group threat response  161 individual-level selection in  159–65 intuitive belief growth  160 IQ and  162–3 NFC measure  163 predictions in  166–7 religion scaling-up  165 selection pressure against deliberation  164–5 theory summary  165, 168 cognition 2. See also religious mind anthropomorphism theory on religion as 55–6 byproduct and  20 domain of reality in  35 dual-process 58 religious disbelief and  26 transcendence and  334–41 cognitive dissonance  10 cognitively unnatural beliefs  79 cognitive neuroscience anthropomorphism and  61–2 personhood and  61 prayer and  61–2 cognitive reflection task (CRT)  163–4 cognitive science of religion (CSR) theory 53 cognitive strategy of anthropomorphism  48–9, 56 effects of  49 cognitive style  163–4, 166 paranormal belief and  163 religiosity studies on  163–4 religious individuals and  167 cognitive theory of religion  48 collective violence  268–9 community leaders influence on  270 moral disengagement and  269 religious terrorism as  266 collectivism, conservatism and  205 commandments, fertility and divine  256–7 commitment  14, 18 adaptation and  10–12 costly signals of  123 emotions and  11–12 empathy and  128 religious rituals and  10, 126–7 to sacred values  259 in small-scale societies  38 commonality, of gods  19, 27 communal nature, of transcendence  341–2

communal support, for belief  159 community leaders, collective violence influenced by  270 condemnation, morality and  192 conflict 255. See also intergroup conflict kinship, cooperation and  138, 143 prosocial behavior and  255 conformist cultural transmission  23–5 conscience, morality and  192 conservatism 209–10 collectivism and  205 disease avoidance and  204 disgust sensitivity and  205 out-group members and  208 prejudice and  204, 205f contamination BIS and disease threat from  200 human contact and  203 out-group members and  203, 205–6, 208 content-based learning biases  23 memory and transmission-based  25 mental representation and  25–6 context-based learning biases  23, 25 belief in  26–7 religious disbelief and  26–7 cooperation  241–2, 302. See also religious beliefs, cooperation and adaptation benefits from  21 charismatic signaling and anonymous 231 cheating and risky  235–6 environment and  21 evolution of  136–40, 241 in hunter-gatherers  136 intragroup 111–12 intuition support of  165 kinship, conflict and  138, 143 kinship and  137–40 from manipulation or repression  136–7 mismatch hypothesis of  21–2 mutualism in  136 niche construction and risky  236–7 partners discriminating information and 232–3 religiosity and  185–6 religious behavior benefits from  22 religious behaviors index of motivations in 234–5 in religious communities  234 religious ecologies and automated, nonreflective 237 in religious system  274 social inequality correlation with large-scale 239 theories of  194–5 WVS on  186 cosmic justice  40 costly behaviors index quality  233–4 costly signaling theory  234 adaptation and  10–12 religion cooperation and cheating suppression 231–5

costly signals animals and rituals of  89 of commitment  123 cooperative benefits  111–12 religion as  111–12 religious beliefs social benefits and 156–7 rituals as  88–93, 112 social communication and  111 transcendence and  335, 343 of violent and painful initiations  112 counterintuitive beliefs  109 intuitive beliefs compared to  78 in religious system  275–6 religious system and  275 counterintuitiveness theory  57–8, 62 CPS. See Current Population Survey credibility enhancing displays (CREDs) theory  24, 157, 167–8 Crime in the United States (CIUS), UCR of 221–2 criminality 250–1 unmarried males and  257 Cross, Ian  107 cross-cultural evidence of afterlife and intuitive dualism  77 between BIS and religiosity  209–10 on children intuitive theism  109 for kinship  149–50 for TOM  73–4 CRT. See cognitive reflection task CSCC. See Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication CSR. See cognitive science of religion cults ancestor- 37–8 imagination and  35 local, religions elimination of  42–5 religious organizations from  35 cultural constructions music connections in  106–7 rites of passage and  106 sacred symbols as  106 cultural epidemiology theory  53 cultural evolution  8, 23–5 disgust and  204 four waves of  272–3 GGS and  248 of group-interest morality  246–50 group selection in  24–5 learned traits in  25 multilevel selection in  24–5 religious belief and  25–7 of terrorism  270–3 cultural group hypothesis, of supernatural punishment 307 cultural group selection, supernatural agents and  249 cultural group-selection based theory, of Big Gods  158, 167–8, 194, 237 cultural group selections ingroup cohesion and  249 parochial prosocial behavior and  254

index

377

cultural kinship  138f, 139 adaptations evolution under  141 concept of God and  147 inclusive fitness maximization in  142 cultural learning  18–19, 29 cultural sharing, in religion moral function 122 cultural transmission conformist 23–5 CREDs theory and  24 differential success in  23 kin-biased  23, 26 naïve learners in  23 success-biased  24, 26 variation in  23 Current Population Survey (CPS), in secure society theory study  222

D

daily life, anthropomorphism in  49–50, 57–8 Darwin, Charles  174, 318, 330 artificial selection and  323 on emotions  200 on evolutionary foundation  323–4 on parochial altruism  267 deep structure  357 default mode network (DMN)  348 deliberation religion differences in  166 religious questioning and  161–2, 166–7 selection pressure against  164–5 deliberative thinking  161–3 development, transcendence and  349–51 developmental psychology, of child religious beliefs  70 adaptation and byproduct  80–1 intuitive dualism  75–7 MCI theory and  77–9 naturalness and  79–80 supernatural agents detection  70–2 teleological reasoning  74–5 TOM and  72 disease avoidance  199, 209 conservatism and  204 pathogen and sexual disgust domains  202 religiosity influenced by  186–7, 209 disease threat BIS and  200 infectious 200 in-group members and  203 out-group members and  203 social behavior and  203 disgust 200–1 as BIS component  201 conservatism and sensitivity of  205 cultural evolution and  204 domains of  202 error management theory and  200–1 moral 202 obsessive-compulsive disorder and 208–9

378 index

as personality trait  200–1 prejudice and  204 purity and  201–3 religiosity correlations with  202t Tantra religion and  199 DMN. See default mode network doctrines  35, 178–9 Axial Age similarities of  40, 45 of kingdoms and city-states  39 religious representations and  35 small-scale societies absence of moral 38 theological correctness in  43 dogma  166, 175–8, 344–5 Dolni Vestonice, fire at hearths of  88, 93 domain of reality cognitive domain of  35 intuitive expectations about  35 violations of  35 Donahue, Michael  110–11 dopaminergic reward system, in adolescent brain development  100, 102–3 double-byproduct fear of supernatural punishment 306 DPT. See dual-process theory dual-process cognition  58 dual-process theory (DPT)  159 byproduct and  157–60 deliberation and religious questioning 161–2 functionalist position  154–7 intuitive belief increase  160 Dunbar, Robin  103 Durkheim, Émile  135, 155–6, 297 religion defined by  199 on sacred and profane worlds  327

E

EA. See Ethnographic Atlas ecological revolution, kinship and  148–50 adaptation in  149 leadership component of  148 monotheism and  148–9 repression and  148 economic development, in Axial Age  41 economic inequality, religiosity and  218 ecstatic states of consciousness. See altered or ecstatic states of consciousness Egypt, aposematic signaling in  240 embedded tradition, uncertain novelty to 176 emotions adolescence and behavior influenced by 100 commitment and  11–12 Darwin on  200 limbic system and  102 music enhancement of  107 from religious beliefs  12 religious thought and traits of  142 rites of passage and  108 transcendence and exploitation of  343 empathy  121, 142

commitment and  128 High Gods and  127 religious behaviors and  127 enemies 179–80 of environment  179 in warfare  179 environment 175 cooperation and  21 as enemy  179 epistemic transcendence  339–41, 351–2 exploitation of  347–9 error management in agency detection  71 disgust and  200–1 Ethnographic Atlas (EA), on Big Gods and High Gods  299–300 etiquette violations, gods punishment of 238 Euhemerus’s proposal, on gods  57 evolution 92–3 advantageous 175 brain 85–6 components of  24–5 costly rituals and Neanderthal challenge 93 differential success in  23 of morality and religion  118 of religious moral traditions  128 religious representations  45 ritual experience intensification  92–3 social rituals  92 supernatural and group ritual activity 93 variation in  23 evolutionary biology, transcendence and 334 evolutionary foundations  191–5 Darwin on  323–4 human motives and  191–2 morality and social functions  192 for religion  231, 316, 320–3 self-explanations and social narratives 193–4 sexual and reproductive strategies  192–3 of transcendence  334–41 evolutionary perspective, on religion overview of  356–8 validation challenge  356–7 variance challenge  357–8 evolutionary psychology  14, 320–1 religion perspective by  2–3, 214 secure society theory and  226–7 on violence  282–5, 293–4 evolutionary theory  194–5. See also minimal counterintuitiveness theory in-group adaptation and  120 on terrorism  265–70, 277 evolution by natural selection  14, 18 adaptations and  2 byproducts and  2 evolved psychological mechanisms  2

experience-expectant period adolescent brain and  103 rituals impact during  110 sacred symbols creation and  109 exploitation of aesthetic transcendence  345–7 of epistemic transcendence  347–9 of group-directed transcendence  343–4 of TOM  344–5 of transcendence  335 transcendence liberation from  351–2 extended phenotype  342–3, 362 extrinsic religious orientation  203–4

F

faith future of  29–30 rapid secularization  29–30 reproductive advantages and  29–30 false-belief test, for TOM  72 false positives, agency detection and  71 family model of religion  51 family-resemblance approach  55 family values  256–8 fertility 256 monogamy  257, 345 females males violence against  285 violence perpetrated by  293 fertility 256 birth control and  256, 291 celibacy and  257 divine commandments about  256–7 religious beliefs encouragement of  256 as sacred value  250 Fijian religion  237–8, 238t filicide 290–1 fire caves and use of  87–8 Dolni Vestonice hearths and  88, 93 Neanderthal sites use of  88 in Rhino Cave  90–1 rituals and  87–8, 93 flexibility, of supernatural agents  145 Flynn Effect, IQ and  162 formality, in rituals  104–5 fourth-wave terrorists  273–4, 277 biblical fundamentalism rise and  277 four waves, of cultural evolution  272–3 free-riding  8, 10 Freud, Sigmund  50 on religion  117, 337 function, of terrorism  271 functionalist position  154–7, 168, 231. See also adaptationist theory on religious beliefs health benefits  154–5 on religious beliefs social benefits  154–7 in religious system  274 future-oriented approach, to Axial Age 42

G

Galton’s problem  301 gene-culture coevolution  19–20, 29 general intelligence factor (g factor)  162 General Social Survey (GSS), on religiosity  184, 186 religiosity measures for  219 in secure society theory study  219–21, 227 genetic group selection (GGS), cultural evolution and  248 genetic kinship  137, 138f, 139, 141 genital mutilation  288–9 g factor. See general intelligence factor GGS. See genetic group selection ghosts  8–9, 49, 76 Global Terrorism Index  277 God, concept of  147–8 ancestors and  147 cultural kinship and  147 prosocial behavior and punishing  251 God, origin of ancestor worship and  146–7 Australian aboriginal dreamtime ethos 146 totemism 146 gods as amoral  35 ancestors as  57 anthropomorphic 62–3 atheism and  19, 25–6, 28–9 commonality  19, 27 disembodiment of  49 etiquette violations punishment  238 Euhemerus’s proposal on  57 group, charismatic signaling theory and 239 group fates and punishment by  239 human prototype of  49 invisibility of  49, 62 kingdoms and city-states on powerful, nonlocal 39 as moral beings  122–3 morality interest of  40, 125, 127–8 moral relevance of  125–6 popularity of  19, 29 religion-morality nexus and  124–6 of small scale hunter-gatherer societies  125, 127 small subset of  19, 27–8 ubiquity of  19, 27 worship of small subset  19, 28 Golden Rule  40–1 group-directed transcendence  335–6, 350, 352 exploitation of  343–4 rituals and  336 Tantric practice and  337–8 group fates, gods punishment of  239 group-interest morality, cultural evolution of 246–50

group-level selection  156, 167–8 altruism and selfishness  248 in cultural evolution  24–5 group threat belief questioning as  160–1 religious disbelief and  167 response to  155 in small-scale societies  160–1 GSS. See General Social Survey

H

habituation-dishabituation, of children 70 HADD. See hyperactive agent-detection device Hamilton, William on inclusive fitness  137 on kin selection  118–19, 137 handicap principle, adaptation and  12 hard-to-fake signals  233–5 healing practices, in small-scale societies  37–8 health benefits, of religious beliefs  154–5 ancestors and  155 hypnosis and  155 on mental health  154 mortality and  154 motivated meaning-making  155 Herto skulls  91, 93 high-commitment, high-fertility strategies  188, 193, 195 High Gods  127–8 EA on  299–300 empathy and  127 morality and  124–5 religious beliefs, cooperation and  298 SCCS on  299–301 high-intensity religiosity  360–1 HIV prognosis, religious beliefs and  154 honor-killing 289–90 religious texts on  289–90 Horton, R.  50–1 human cognition. See cognition human cognitive ecology  141–3 human condition, anthropomorphism and 51 human contact, contamination and  203 human history religious beliefs in  34–5 religious doctrines and  35 religious representations in  35 on supernatural beings  35 human-like agents  5–6 humanlike mind, in anthropomorphism  49, 57 human rituals  105–6 religious ritual  105–6 sacred symbols  106 signals and secular  105 humans embodiments of  57 religion uniqueness to  18

index

379

Hume, David  336 on anthropomorphism  50, 58, 63 on religion evolution  118 on teleology  56 humor, disgust and  202 hunter-gatherers behavioral ecology of  140–1 cooperation of  136 inclusive fitness of  139 religion-morality nexus and gods of  125, 127 hyperactive agent-detection device (HADD) animals and  84 byproduct and  3–6, 158 supernatural agents and  3–4, 121, 305 theory 55 hypersensitivity to agency  4, 121 to causation  6 hypnosis 155 hypothalamus, in brain  102

I

illusion, anthropomorphism and  49 imagination  35, 142 in animals  85 of children  85 situational model of  85 immortality beliefs. See afterlife implicit monitoring hypothesis, of supernatural punishment  306 inanimate objects, anthropomorphism and 57 inclusive fitness  137, 139, 142 index signals  156–7 indirect altruism  119 indirect reciprocity, of morality  141–2, 233 individualizing foundations, in moral foundations theory  258 individual-level selection  164 Indus Valley, aposematic signaling in 232–3 infectious disease threat  200 infer causation  158 information theory  54 in-group adaptation, of morality  120 in Christianity  129–31 in Judaism  129 in-group members disease threat and  203 parochial altruism toward  267–8 parochiality toward  254 religious individuals intuition and  167 initiations, costly signals of violent and painful 112 insula, in brain  103 intelligence quotient (IQ) Flynn Effect and  162 religious beliefs and  162–3 intergroup conflict  268 from coalitional aggression  268

380 index

cultural evolutionary stages of  268 environment and  268 security dilemmas in  268 worldviews justification of  268 intragroup cooperation religion and  111–12 in rituals  112 intrinsic religious orientation  203–4 intuitive beliefs. See also counterintuitive beliefs counterintuitive beliefs compared to  78 intuitive cognition  159–60. See also coevolution, of religious belief and intuitive cognitive style cooperation and  165 style  163, 167–8 intuitive dualism  75–7 afterlife and immortality beliefs  76–7, 79 Bloom on  75 cross-cultural evidence of  77 on identity and brain relationship  76 intuitive expectations in Axial Age  40–1 of domain of reality  35 intuitive psychology  36–7 intuitive theism, of children  109 invisibility counterintuitiveness theory and  62 of gods  49, 62 invisible friends, of children  73, 76 IQ. See intelligence quotient Islam purity references in  199 religious moral traditions and  129

J

Jainism 231 James, William  84–5 Judaism in-group bias in  129 purity references in  199 religious moral traditions and  129

K

kin altruism  119, 121 kin-biased cultural transmission  23 beliefs and  26 kingdoms and city-states  39–40 ceremonies general issues focus  39 doctrine of  39 licensed practitioners in  39 moral doctrine specificity and  40 participation coercive enforcement  39–40 political authority close connections  39 powerful, nonlocal gods promotion by 39 standardized services  39 kin selection  247 Hamilton on  118–19, 137 kinship. See also cultural kinship; ecological revolution, kinship and altruism cooperation in  137

background of  135 conflict and cooperation in  138, 143 cooperation in  137–40 cross-cultural tests for  149–50 genetic  137, 138f, 139, 141 lineal 138f manipulation cooperation  137 mutualism cooperation  137 religiosity and  149–50 religious roles of  141t rituals and  147 universal religious  138f variation in  137–40 Krapina  91, 93

L

language 142 as adaptation  80 maturational naturalness and  69–70 leadership ecological revolution and  148 moral disengagement and community 270 learned traits, in cultural evolution  25 life-history approach, to Axial Age  41–2 lifestyle interest, moral and religious differences causality  183 limbic system, emotions and  102 lineal kinship  138f longevity, religion and  111 Longitudinal Survey. See National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 looking-time methods  70–1 low-commitment, low-fertility strategies  188, 193

M

The Madman (Nietzsche)  117 males adolescent 100–1 criminality and unmarried  257 violence against other men  284–5 violence against women  285 manipulation, cooperation from  136–7 manipulators, of transcendence  341–2 marriage criminality of unmarried males  257 sacred value of  257 masturbation 291 mating practices, BIS and  206–8 maturational naturalness  69–70 MCI. See minimal counterintuitiveness theory meaning-making, religious beliefs and motivated 155 meditation 110 memes 176 religious beliefs as  13–14 religious diversity and  14 mental health, religious beliefs and  154 mental representation, content biases and 25–6 Mesoamerica, aposematic signaling in  241

Mesopotamia, aposematic signaling in  240 meta-ethics, religious and nonreligious morality differences  258–9 Middle Stone Age (MSA), red ochre in  89 mind-blind atheism  194 mind-body dualism  54, 59–60 minds, anthropomorphism and  49, 57 minimal counterintuitiveness (MCI) theory  53–5, 62, 77–9, 158 mismatch hypothesis  21–2 moderation, in Axial Age  41 monistic materialism  58 monogamy  257, 345 monotheism  148–9, 293 moral behavior, religious brood and  143–4 moral codes  128 moral cognition  123, 128–31 moral differences causality between religious differences and 183 religiosity and  183, 189 moral disengagement  269–70 collective violence and  269 community leaders and  270 war propaganda and  270 moral disgust  202 moral doctrines kingdoms and city-states absence of specific 40 small-scale societies absence of  38 moral foundation, religious and nonreligious morality differences 258 moral foundations theory binding foundations in  258 individualizing foundations in  258 moral function, of religion  117–18 cultural sharing in  122 gods as moral beings  122–3 moral cognition and  123 moral intuitions and  122–4 standard model  121–4 strategic social function and  192 studies on  123–4 moral intuitions  122–4 morality. See also empathy altruism 119 animism separation from  146 in Axial Age  35 cheater detection module  120, 123 cheating and  120, 123 cognitive framework for religious moral traditions 128–31 conscience and condemnation  192 cultural evolution of group-interest  246–50 evolution and biological basis of  118 evolution of  119–21 gods interest in  40, 125, 127–8 Hamilton on kin selection and  119 High Gods and  124–5 indirect reciprocity of  141–2, 233

as in-group adaptation  120, 129–31 overview of  246–7 psychological structures for  120 religion encouragement of group-interest 247 religion-morality nexus  124–8, 246 self-interest subsuming to group-interest in 246–7 social behavior regulation and  247 soul and  41 morality, religious and nonreligious  258–9 meta-ethics differences  258–9 moral foundation differences  258 morality defined  247 moral reasoning  40–1 moral relevance, of gods  125–6 mortality, religious beliefs and  154 MSA. See Middle Stone Age multidirectional causality  189–91, 189f multilevel selection, in cultural evolution 24–5 music 107 adolescence and  108 animals and  107–8 brain impacted by  107 Cross on  107 cultural constructions and connections in 106–7 emotions enhancement by  107 Native American Sun Dance rites  108 rites of passage and  106–8 transcendence and  339, 346 mutualism, in cooperation  136 kinship and  137 Prisoner’s Dilemma game  136 mysticism 360

N

naïve learners  23–4 National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health  110–11 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 (Longitudinal Survey)  184–5, 188 National Study of Youth and Religion, 2003 110–11 Native American Sun Dance rites  108 naturalness 81 cognitively unnatural beliefs and  79 general religious beliefs for  79 of religion  79–80 natural selection  174, 322–3, 330 religion and  324–7 religion sociological studies and  327–30 Neanderthals burials and  92 costly rituals and  93 fire use of  88 Krapina and  91 rituals of  94 need for cognition (NFC) measure  163

neural networks, in brain  101 ritual impact on  105 neurons, in brain  101 neurophysiological effects of religious ritual  110, 113 of transcendence  333–4 NFC. See need for cognition niche construction, risky cooperation and 236–7 Nietzsche, F.  51, 63, 117 nonhuman agents, TOM and  72–3 nonreligious domains  35 North China Plains, aposematic signaling in 233

O

objects agents distinction from  71 children on supernatural agents distinguished from  71 obsessive-compulsive disorder  208–9 omniscient supernatural agents  109 ontogenetic development, of religious concepts 109 out-group members conservatism and  208 contamination and  203, 205–6, 208 prejudice toward  203, 209, 254–5

P

paranormal belief, cognitive style and  163 parasite stress  204–6, 206f theory 204–5 parental attendance  184–5, 184t, 185t, 188 parental deities  345 parental inheritance, church participation influenced by  182 parental investment  283–4 BIS functioning and  206 sex differences in  257 parenting, religious texts on  290–1 parochial altruism  267–8 adaptive value of  267 Darwin on  267 terrorism and  268 parochiality Christian converts and  255 cultural group selection and  254 prejudice and  254 toward in-group members  254 participation, kingdoms and city-states coercive 39–40 partner-directed violence  286–8 religious texts on  287 Pascal’s Wager  48–9, 297, 302–4 personal discipline, in Axial Age  41 personality, religiosity and  363 attachment theory  363 Big Five model of  363 personality features disgust as trait of  200–1 religiosity influenced by  186 personhood 61

index

381

phenotype  141–2, 357 extended  342–3, 362 physical space, sacred value of  276–7 pigs 176–8 favored 177 feared 176–7 political authority kingdoms and city-states close connection to  39 small-scale societies loose connection 38 Polybius, on religious beliefs  302 popularity, of gods  19, 29 Popular Religiosity versus Secularism Scale (PRVSS) 217 post-axial religions conflicting goals within  44–5 rituals 44 postmortem processing  91–2 Herto skulls  91, 93 Krapina  91, 93 practitioners individual, small-scale socieities  38 licensed, in kingdoms and city-states  39 prayer cognitive neuroscience and  61–2 GSS on frequency of  219 preferential looking, of children  70 prefrontal cortex, of brain  102–3 pregnancy, BIS and  208 prejudice BIS and  205f disgust and  204 institutional and devotional religion aspects 254 parochiality and  254 religion and  203–4 toward out-group members  203, 209, 254–5 Prisoner’s Dilemma game  136 projection 57 promiscuous sexual behavior  193 prosocial behavior  250 conflict and  255 criminality and  250–1 punishing God impact on  251 punitive religion impact on  251 religious situations and beliefs increase in 251–2 rituals support of  252–3 self-enhancement and  251 self-reports of  251 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey on  250 prosociality 250–6 conflict 255 parochiality and prejudice  254 prosocial behavior  250 supernatural punishment  308–9 trust 253 prototype human, of gods  49 of religion  51

382 index

proximate, ultimate compared to  174–5 PRVSS. See Popular Religiosity versus Secularism Scale psychological death  76–7 psychological structures, for morality  120 psychological warfare, of terrorism  271 psychology, of sacred values  255 psychopathology obsessive-compulsive disorder  208–9 religious obsessions and  208–9 punishment. See supernatural punishment purity cleansing rituals for  199, 201 disgust and  201–3 physical and moral  201 rituals 198–9 value system and  202

Q

quality signals  104

R

Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred  135, 146–7 reciprocal altruism  119 red ochre  93 in MSA  89 in rituals  89, 112 reinforcement learning  6–7, 10 religion. See also specific religion as adaptation  21–2, 121–2, 247–8 adaptation accounts of  7–13, 80, 247–8 adolescent health and  110–11 analysis of  2 anthropomorphism theory on cognition and 55–6 artificial selection and  324–30 as byproduct  20–1, 121–2, 247–8 byproduct accounts of  3–7, 247–8 as complexes  3 components of  2, 14 contemporary theories of  51–7 as costly signal  111–12 defined  1–2, 175–6, 199, 316–18, 334 disease richness and  207f evolutionary foundation for  316, 320–3 evolutionary sequence in  175 evolution in  318–20 Freud on  117, 337 historical process for  118 humans uniqueness of  18 intragroup cooperation and  111–12 local cults elimination  42–5 longevity and  111 moral function of  117–18, 121–4 natural selection and  324–7 origins of  153 persistence of  368–9 prejudice and  199

prosocial behavior and punitive  251 prototype of  51 scaling-up of  165 in small-scale societies  40 as survival kit  180–1 religion-morality nexus  124–8 ancient roots of  124–5 existentially relevant gods  124–6 religiosity age, cohort and gender influence on 186 attachment theory  363 biological determinants of  358–60 biology individual predisposition  361–3 cooperation influence on  185–6 correlates of  184 cultural and historical variations in 364–9 degree of  213–14 disease avoidance influence on  186–7, 209 disgust correlations with  202t economic inequality and  218 GSS on  184, 186 high-intensity 360–1 individual differences in  187 intellectualism 362 intelligence 362 intuitive versus analytic style  362 kinship and  149–50 lifestyle differences causality and  183, 189–90 Longitudinal Survey on  184–5 moral differences and  183, 189 parental attendance influence on  184–5, 184t, 185t, 188 personality and  363 personality features influence on  186 psychology understanding of  1 sex differences in  206–8, 358–60, 359t situational determinants of social learning  358, 363–4 society benefit from  216–17 society type and  216t trust relationship with  253 validation challenge  361–4 variability in  214 well-being and  217–18 religiosity measures, of GSS  219 affiliation strength  220 biblical fundamentalism  220 prayer frequency  219 religious attendance  219 religious behavior  234 animism and  146 Australian aboriginal dreamtime ethos 146 cooperation benefit of  22 empathy and  127 hard-to-fake signals and  235 origins and early evolution of  143–9

origins of Gods and  145–7 religious brood  143–4 supernatural and mind synergism  145 supernatural powers  144–5 religious beliefs  19–20, 69. See also religious disbelief cultural evolution and  25–7 emotions from  12 evolutionary history and  83 fertility encouragement  256 handicap principle and  12 health benefits of  154–5 in human history  34–5 intuitive cognition and  160 IQ and  162–3 MCI concepts on  78 as memes  13–14 mortality and  154 naturalness and general  79 Polybius on  302 social benefits  154–7 violence influenced by  282–3 religious beliefs, cooperation and adaptationist hypotheses  305–7, 311 Big Gods  298 byproduct hypotheses  304–5 cognitive causal mechanisms on  307–10 crudest hypothesis on  302–4 ethnography on  300–2 evolutionary account of  298 evolutionary hypotheses on  297–8, 303t evolutionary mechanisms of  302–7 future research on  310–11 High God and  298 Swanson on  300 terminology on  298–300 WVS on  301 religious brood  143–4 kinship conflict and cooperation in 143 moral behavior and  143–4 social learning in  143 religious change, social theories on  315–16 religious communities cooperation in  234 religious questioning and  166–7 religious disbelief analytic thinking style and  164 cognition and  26–7 group threat and  167 religious diversity  1 memes and  14 religious doubt, NFC and  163 religious ecologies, automated, nonreflective cooperation and  237 religious individuals cognitive style and  167 in-group members intuition and  167 religious involvement, causality between lifestyles and  183, 189–90

religiously motivated violence, sexual selection and  286–92 religious mind altered or ecstatic states of consciousness 83–5 evolution of  85–8 HADD and  83–4 imagination 83–5 ritual and emergence of  86 TOM and  83–4 religious moral traditions Christianity and  129–31 cognitive framework for  128–31 evolution of  128 Islam and  129 Judaism and  129 moral codes and  128 religious obsessions, psychopathology and 208–9 religious organizations, from cults  35 religious questioning deliberation and  161–2, 166–7 DPT and  161–2 positive and negative  162 religious communities and  166–7 scientific community and  162 religious representations evolution and  45 nonreligious domains and  35 religious doctrines and  35 of supernatural beings  35 varieties of  36f religious system  274–7 adaptation in  274 combatants organization  276 conflict and  275–6 counterintuitive beliefs in  275–6 functionalist position in  274 rites of passage  275 rituals in  274, 276 sacred and profane world in  274–7 religious terrorism  277 coalitional aggression and  266 as collective violence  266 religious texts on honor-killing  289–90 on parenting  290–1 on partner-directed violence  287 on terrorism  292 violence justification by  294 on war  291–2 religious thought cognitive and emotional traits of  142 origins and early evolution of  143–9 supernatural thinking and morality in 142 repression cooperation from  136–7 ecological revolution and  148 reproductive advantages, faith and  29–30 reproductive religiosity model  187

reproductive strategies  183, 192–3 revenge accusation in a mirror phenomenon  269–70 collective predisposition for  269 cycles of  268 reverse-engineering 230–1 Rhino Cave cave art in  90–1 fire in  90–1 ritualized behavior at  93 risk factors, for terrorism  271–2 rites of passage  106–10 chanting, music and dances  106–8 costly rituals in  112 creation of sacred  109–10 emotion, sacred pain and  108 neurophysiological effects of religious ritual 110 ontogenetic development of religious concepts 109 religious system and  275 separation phase in  106 ultimate sacred postulates  108–9 ritualized behaviors  6–7, 14, 83 of animals  86 reinforcement learning and  10 religion-morality nexus and  126–7 at Rhino Cave  93 rituals  94, 104–5, 160. See also human rituals animals costly signals and  89 beads 89–90 caves and  90–1 cleansing  199, 201 commitment and  10, 126–7 as costly signals  88–93, 112 experience-expectant period impacted by 110 fire and  87–8, 93 formality in  104–5 group-directed transcendence and  336 human 105–6 intragroup cooperation in  112 kinship and  147 of Neanderthals  94 neuroendocrine function and  105 neurophysiological effects of  110, 113 prosocial behavior supported by  252–3 red ochre  89, 112 in religious system  274, 276 religious system and  275 sacred ancestors and  179 sacred values and  249–50 secular 105 significance of  160 social bonding from  88 structure of  104–5 symbolic elements in  112 synchronized movement and  86–7 in tribal religions  40 Rube Goldberg device  81

index

383

S

sacred ancestors, rituals and  179 sacred and profane worlds Durkheim on  327 in religious system  276–7 sacred pain  108 sacred symbols  106 creation of  109–10 as cultural constructions  106 emotionally charged  106 experience-expectant period for creation of 109 as social construct  106 sacred values  249 commitment to  259 fertility as  250 marriage and  257 of physical space  276–7 psychology of  255 rituals and  249–50 SCCS. See Standard Cross-Cultural Sample scientific community, religious questioning and  162 second-order representation  76 secularization  213, 328, 365–8 theory of  214 secular rituals signals and  105 social groups and  105 secular systems, adolescence and  112–13 secure society theory  214–15 Cultural Traditions Axiom  214–15 evidence support of  215–18 Security Axiom of  214–15 societies categorization and  215 time series analysis support for  215 WVS on  215 secure society theory study  218 conclusion on  226–8 control variables in  221 CPS use in  222 data sets and variable selection in  218–22 future directions and  228 GSS on  219–21, 227 limitations of  227–8 religiosity component in  220 societal insecurity measurement  221 time series data set use in  222 UCR use in  221–2 secure society theory study results  222–6 on religiosity and societal insecurity perceptions  222–4, 226 on societal insecurity at individual and regional level  224–6 societal insecurity future religiosity prediction 225–6 security dilemmas, in intergroup conflict 268 selection pressures against deliberation  164–5 individual-level selection  164

384 index

self-awareness 142 self-enhancement, prosocial behavior and 251 self-inhibition 165 selfishness, altruism and  248 self-reports, of prosocial behavior  251 separation phase, in rites of passage  106 sex differences in BIS functioning  206–8 in parental investment  257 sexual disgust  202 sexual selection adaptation and  12 birth control  256, 291 child abuse and filicide  290–1 genital mutilation  288–9 honor-killing 289–90 partner-directed violence  286–8 religious motivated violence and  286–92 theory 283 war and terrorism  291–2 sexual strategies  183 shamanism  37–8, 84–5, 93, 334–5, 343–4 cave art and  91, 93 signals. See also aposematic signaling; charismatic signaling theory; costly signals hard-to-fake 233–5 index 156–7 quality 104 secular rituals and  105 site myths  180 situational model, of imagination  85 situational uncertainty  363 small-scale societies ancestor-cults 37–8 commitment in  38 doctrine absence in  37–8 group threats in  160–1 healing practices in  37–8 hunter-gatherer gods  125, 127 individual practitioners  38 moral doctrine absence in  38 political authority loose connections  38 problems addressed in  38 religion in  40 small gods in  249 supernatural agents and  37–9 unified services absence in  38 small subset, of gods  19, 27–8 worship of  19, 28 social behavior  36–7, 142 disease threat and  203 morality and regulation of  247 rituals and social bonding  88 social benefits, of religious beliefs  154–7 costly signals and  156–7 CREDs theory  157 group-level selection  156 index signals and  156–7

morality and  192 social cohesion  155–6 social solidarity theories  154–6 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, on prosocial behavior  250 social communication in adolescence  103–4 costly signals and  111 Dunbar on  103 social conservatism. See conservatism social construct of race  318–19 sacred symbols as  106 of sexual selection  319 social groups adaptation in cooperating  136 secular ritual and  105 social inequality, large-scale cooperation correlation with  239 social interaction, uncertainty and  233 sociality, parasite stress and regional differences in  204–6 social learning  142–3 religiosity and  358 social narratives, self-explanations as  193–4 social selection mechanisms  122 social solidarity theories  154–6 social theory  318–19, 322 societal insecurity future religiosity prediction  225–6 at individual and regional level  224–6 perceptions of  222–4, 226, 228 secure society theory study measurement of  221 society religiosity benefit to  216–17 religiosity by type of  216t secure society theory categorization of 215 socioevolutionary theory  315–17, 320, 322, 327–8 sociosexuality 192 soul 41 Spencer, Herbert  231 Spinoza, B. de  50, 63 SSS. See Successful Societies Scale Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), on Big Gods and High Gods  299–301 standardized services, of kingdoms and city-states 39 statistical relationships  158 strategic uncertainty, signaling theory for explanation of  233 strategies disease avoidance  199 high-commitment, high-fertility  188, 193, 195 low-commitment, low-fertility  188, 193 stratification 239

success-biased cultural transmission  24, 26 Successful Societies Scale (SSS)  217 supernatural agents  2, 299–300 ancestors similarities to  147 anthropomorphism of  20 assumptions for  43 beliefs in  3 children on objects distinguished from 71 cultural group selection and  249 detection of  70–2 engaging 144 flexibility of  145 God, Gods, sacred ancestors  178 HADD and  3–4, 121, 305 humanlike traits of  145 omniscient 109 public expressions of  2 ritualized coordination of  2 small-scale societies and  37–9 surprising contexts task and  73 TOM and  72–4, 121–2, 305 supernatural authority  144 supernatural beings human history on  35 religious representations of  35 ultimate sacred postulates and belief in 109 supernatural concepts  35–7, 51–2 domain of reality violations  35 types of  35–6 supernatural imagination  42f, 43, 45 supernatural powers  144–5 supernatural authority  144 supernatural punishment  302–4 adaptationist hypotheses for  305–7, 311 by Big Gods  249 byproduct hypotheses for  304–5, 311 cultural group hypothesis of  307 defined 299–300 future research on  310–11 hypothesis of double-byproduct fear of 306 implicit monitoring hypothesis  306 prosociality 308–9 superstitions  6–7, 44, 176 surprising contents task  73 survival kit  178–80 enemies 179–80 environment in  181 religion as  180–1 value system  178–9 survival value  175 Swanson, Guy  300 synapses, in brain  101 synaptogensis 101 synchronized movement  92 of animals  87, 92 rituals and  86–7 syncretism 237

T

taboos 177–8 Tantric practices  199 transcendence and  337–8 teleological reasoning  74–5, 81, 158 purpose-based explanations  74–5 teleology  56, 59 temporal cortex, of brain  102–3 Teresa of Avila  337–8 terrorism. See also religious terrorism adolescence and religiously inspired  99–100 civilian attacks in  271 conditions for  269 cultural evolution of  270–3 evolutionary theory on  265–70, 277 fourth-wave terrorists  273–4, 277 function of  271 overview of  265–6 parochial altruism and  268 psychological warfare of  271 religious texts on  292 risk factors for  271–2 sexual selection and  291–2 terror management theory (TMT)  364 theological correctness  43 theory. See also specific theory adaptationist 52–3 Big Gods  158, 167–8, 194, 237 of cooperation  194–5 cultural epidemiology  53 family model of religion  51 family-resemblance approach  55 religion contemporary  51–7 theory of mind (TOM)  72, 81, 142, 157–8, 357 animals and  84 cross-cultural evidence  73–4 development 74–5 exploitation of  344–5 false belief test for  72 invisible friends and  73 nonhuman agents and  72–3 second-order representation  76 supernatural agents and  72–4, 121–2, 305 surprising contents task  73 transcendence and  336–8 time series analysis data set, in secure society theory study 222 for secure society theory support 215 TMT. See terror management theory TOM. See theory of mind totemism 146 transcendence aesthetic  338–9, 345–7 communal nature of  341–2 costly signals and  335, 343 defined 334 development and  349–51 emotions and exploitation of  343

epistemic  339–41, 347–9, 351–2 evolutionary and cognitive background of 334–41 evolutionary biology and  334 exploitation liberation  351–2 exploitation of  335 group-directed  335–6, 350 induction and subversion of  341–9 manipulators of  341–2 music and  339, 346 neurophysiological effects of  333–4 TOM and  336–8 traveling myths  180 tribal religion  37 rituals in  40 trust 253 atheism and  117 atheism and moral distrust  253–4 religiosity relationship with  253 Tylor, E. B.  50, 297

U

ubiquity, of gods  19, 27 UCR. See Uniform Crime Reports ultimate, proximate compared to  174–5 ultimate sacred postulates  108–10 uncertain novelty, to embedded tradition 176 unconscious intent  176 unified services, small-scale societies absence of  38 Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), in secure society theory study  221–2 universal religious kinship  138f upper class, Axial Age and  41

V

validation challenge on religion evolutionary perspective 356–7 on religiosity  361–4 value system  178–9. See also family values; sacred values purity and  202 variance challenge, on religion evolutionary perspective  357–8 variation cultural and historical, in religiosity 364–9 in cultural transmission  23 in evolution  23 in kinship  137–40 vigilance 310–11 violence. See also collective violence; religious texts evolutionary psychology on  282–5, 293–4 females perpetration of  293 future directions on  292–3 males against other men  284–5 males against women  285

index

385

violence (Continued) partner-directed 286–8 religious beliefs influence on  282–3 sexual selection and religiously motivated 286–92

W

war propaganda 270 religious texts on  291–2 sexual selection and  291–2

386 index

warfare enemies in  179 terrorism psychological  271 wishful thinking theory  52, 57–8 worlds, sacred and profane  276–7, 327 World Values Survey (WVS) on cooperation  186 on religious beliefs and cooperation  301 secure society theory and  215 worldviews, intergroup conflict justified by 268

worship ancestors 146–7 of gods small subset  19, 28 WVS. See World Values Survey

Y

Yoruba Territories of Southwestern Nigeria, aposematic signaling in  240

Z

Zen practices  347–8