The Cultural Transmission Of Faith: Why innate intuitions are necessary, but insufficient, to explain religious belief

Religion

Volumn 41, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 389-410

  Gervais, Will M ^a   Willard, Aiyana K ^a   Norenzayan, Ara ^a   Henrich, Joseph ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

atheism; cognitive science of religion; cultural evolution; dual inheritance theory; religion

Indexed keywords

EID: 84859653669     PISSN: 0048721X     EISSN: 10961151     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2011.604510     Document Type: Review

References (107)

1. Astuti, R. and Harris, P. L. 2008. Understanding Mortality and the Life of the Ancestors in Rural Madagascar. Cognitive Science, 32: 713-740.
2. Atran, S. 2002. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Atran, S. and Henrich, J. 2010. The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions. Biological Theory: Integrating Development, Evolution, and Cognition, 5: 18-30.
4. Atran, S. and Norenzayan, A. 2004. Religion's Evolutionary Landscape: Counterintuition, Commitment, Compassion, Communion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27: 713-770.
5. Banerjee, R., Yuill, N., Larson, C., Easton, K., Robinson, E. and Rowley, M. 2007. Children's Differentiation between Beliefs about Matters of Fact and Matters of Opinion. Developmental Psychology, 43: 1084-1096.
6. Barrett, J. L. 2000. Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religious Belief. Trends in Cognitive Science, 4: 29-34.
7. Barrett, J. L. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
8. Barrett, J. L. 2008. Why Santa Claus Is Not a God. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8: 149-161.
9. Barrett, J. L. In press. The Relative Unnaturalness of Atheism: On Why Geertz and Markusson Are Both Right and Wrong. Religion,
10. Barrett, J. L. and Nyhof, M. A. 2001. Spreading Nonnatural Concepts: The Role of Intuitive Conceptual Structures in Memory and Transmission of Cultural Materials. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 1: 69-100.
11. Barrett, J. L. 2010. The Relative Unnaturalness of Atheism: On Why Geertz and Marküsson Are Both Right and Wrong. Religion 40, 169-172.
12. Beit-Hallahmi, B. and Argyle, M. 1997. The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief and Experience, London: Routledge.
13. Bergstrom, B., Moehlmann, B. and Boyer, P. 2006. Extending the Testimony Problem: Evaluating the Truth, Scope and Source of Cultural Information. Child Development, 77: 531-538.
14. Bering, J. M. 2006. The Folk Psychology of Souls. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29: 453-498.
15. Bering, J. M. 2011. In press. Atheism Is Only Skin Deep: Geertz and Markusson Rely Mistakenly on Sociodemographic Data as Meaningful Indicators of Underlying Cognition. Religion,
16. Bering, J. M. and Bjorklund, D. F. 2004. The Natural Emergence of Reasoning about the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity. Developmental Psychology, 40: 217-233.
17. Bering, J. M., Blasi, C. H. and Bjorklund, D. F. 2005. The Development of 'Afterlife' Beliefs in Religiously and Secularly Schooled Children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23: 587-607.
18. Berkman, M. B. and Plutzer, E. 2011. Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, but Not in the Classroom. Science, 331: 404-405.
19. Birch, S. J.A., Akmal, N. and Frampton, K. L. In press. Two-year-olds Are Vigilant of Others' Nonverbal Cues to Credibility. Developmental Science,
20. Birch, S. A. J., Vauthier, S. A., Bloom, P. 2008. Three- and four-year-olds spontaneously use others? past performance to guide their learning. Cognition, 107, 1018-1034.
21. Bloom, P. 2007. Religion Is Natural. Developmental Science, 10: 147-151.
22. Bloom, P. and Weisberg, D. S. 2007. Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science. Science, 316: 996-997.
23. Boyd, R. and Richerson, P. J. 1985. Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
24. Boyer, P. 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, New York: Basic Books.
25. Boyer, P. and Ramble, C. 2001. Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross-cultural Evidence for Recall of Counter-intuitive Representations. Cognitive Science, 25: 535-564.
26. Boyer, P. 2003. Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-products of Brain Function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, 119-124.
27. Boyer, P. and Lienard, P. 2006. Why Ritualized Behavior? Precaution Systems and Action-parsing in Developmental, Pathological and Cultural Rituals. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29: 1-56.
28. Bulbulia, J. 2008. Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction? An Adaptationist Alternative to the Cultural Maladaptationist Hypothesis. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 20: 67-107.
29. Chudek, M., S. Heller, S. Birch, J. Henrich. 2010. Prestige-biased Cultural Learning: Developmental Evidence for Selective Cultural Learning Based on Differential Bystander Attention to Models. Unpublished manuscript under review
30. Dawkins, R. 2006. The God Delusion, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
31. Dijksterhuis, A., Preston, J., Wegner, D. M. and Aarts, H. 2008. Effects of Subliminal Priming of Self and God on Self-attribution of Authorship for Events. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44: 2-9.
32. DiLalla, L. F. and Watson, M. W. 1988. Differentiation of Fantasy and Reality: Preschoolers' Reactions to Interruptions in Their Play. Developmental Psychology, 24: 286-291.
33. Donald, M. 2001. A Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, New York: Norton.
34. Edgell, P., Gerteis, J. and Hartmann, D. 2006. Atheists As "Other": Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society. American Sociological Review, 71: 211-234.
35. Evans, E. M. 2000. The Emergence of Beliefs about the Origins of Species in School-age Children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly: A Journal of Developmental Psychology, 46: 221-254.
36. Evans, E. M. 2001. Cognitive and Contextual Factors in the Emergence of Diverse Belief Systems Creationism: Versus Evolution. Cognitive Psychology, 42: 217-266.
37. Evans, E. M. What Is Creationism and How Do You Catch It?. Paper presented at the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality preconference at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. January, San Antonio, TX.
38. Foster, K. and Kokko, H. 2009. The Evolution of Superstitious and Superstition-like Behaviour. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 276: 31-37.
39. Geertz, A. W. and Markússon, G. I. 2010. Religion Is Natural, Atheism Is Not: On Why Everybody Is Both Right and Wrong. Religion, 40: 152-165.
40. Gervais, W. M. In press. Finding the Faithless: Perceived Atheist Prevalence Reduces Anti-atheist Prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
41. Gervais, W. M. and Henrich, J. 2010. The Zeus Problem: Why Representational Content Biases Cannot Explain Faith in Gods. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 10: 383-389.
42. Gervais, W.M., A. Norenzayan. 2010. Analytical Reasoning Reduces Religious Belief. Unpublished manuscript under review
43. Gervais, W.M., A. Norenzayan. In press. Like a Camera in the Sky? Thinking about God Increases Public Self-awareness and Socially Desirable responding. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
44. Gervais, W.M., A.F. Shariff, A. Norenzayan. 2010. Do You Believe in Atheists? Distrust Is Central to Anti-atheist Prejudice. Unpublished manuscript under review
45. Golomb, C. and Galasso, L. 1995. Make Believe and Reality: Explorations of the Imaginary Realm. Developmental Psychology, 31: 800-810.
46. Golumb, C. and Kuersten, R. 1996. On the Transition From Pretense Play to Reality: What Are the Rules of the Game?. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 14: 203-217.
47. Guthrie, S. G. 1993. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, New York: Oxford University Press.
48. Harris, P. L., Brown, E., Marriott, C., Whittall, S. and Harmer, S. 1991. Monsters, Ghosts and Witches: Testing the Limits of the Fantasy-reality Distinction in Young Children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9: 105-123.
49. Harris, P. L. and Gimenez, M. 2005. Children's Acceptance of Conflicting Testimony: The Case of Death. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5: 143-164.
50. Harris, P. L. and Koenig, M. A. 2006. Trust in Testimony: How Children Learn about Science and Religion. Child Development, 77: 505-524.
51. Harris, P. L., Pasquini, E. S., Duke, S., Asscher, J. J. and Pons, F. 2006. Germs and Angels: The Role of Testimony in Young Children's Ontology. Developmental Science, 9: 76-96.
52. Henrich, J. 2009. The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation, and Religion: Credibility Enhancing Displays and Their Implications for Cultural Evolution. Evolution and Human Behaviour, 30: 244-260.
53. Henrich, J. and Boyd, R. 1998. The Evolution of Conformist Transmission and the Emergence of Between-group Differences. Evolution and Human Behavior, 19: 215-242.
54. Henrich, J. and Gil-White, F. 2001. The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefits of Cultural Transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22: 165-196.
55. Henrich, J. and McElreath, R. 2003. The Evolution of Cultural Evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology, 12: 123-135.
56. Heyman, G. D. 2008. Children's Critical Thinking When Learning from Others. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17: 344-347.
57. Heyman, G. D. and Legare, C. H. 2005. Children's Evaluation of Sources of Information about Traits. Developmental Psychology, 41: 636-647.
58. Jacoby, S. 2004. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, New York: Metropolitan.
59. Jaswal, V. K., Neely, L. A. 2007. Adults don't always know best: Preschoolers use past reliability over age when learning new words. Psychological Science 17, 757-758.
60. Kelemen, D. 2004. Are Children 'Intuitive Theists'?. Psychological Science, 15: 295-301.
61. Kendal, J., Giraldaeu, L. and Laland, K. 2009. The Evolution of Social Learning Rules: Payoff-biased and Frequency-dependent Biased Transmission. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 260: 210-219.
62. Koenig, M. A., F. Clément, P. L. Harris. 2004. Trust in Testimony: Children's Use of True and False Statements. Psychological Science 15, 694-698.
63. Koenig, M. A. and Harris, P. L. 2005. Preschoolers Mistrust Ignorant and Inaccurate Speakers. Child Development, 76: 1261-1277.
64. Kirkpatrick, L. 1999. Toward an Evolutionary Psychology of Religion. Journal of Personality, 67: 921-952.
65. Kosmin, B.A., A. Keysar. 2008. American Religious Identification Survey Summary Report. Trinity College, Hartford, CT. http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf.
66. Kosmin, B.A., A. Keysar, 2008. American Religious Identification Survey Summary Report. Trinity College, Hartford, CT. Retrieved June 3, 2009, from http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf.
67. Lanman, J. Towards a Cognitive Anthropology of Secularization. Paper presented at Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Denver, CO.
68. Lanman, J. Submitted. A Secular Mind: Towards a Cognitive Anthropology of Non-theism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
69. McCauley, R. N. 2000. "The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of Science". In Explanation and Cognition, Edited by: Keil, F. C. and Wilson, R. A. 61-86. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
70. McCauley, R. N., E. Cohen. 2010. Cognitive science and the naturalness of religion. Philosophy Compass 5, 779-792.
71. McCloskey, M., A. Caramazza, B. Green. 1980. Curvilinear motion in the absence of external forces: naive beliefs about the motion of objects. Science 210, 1139-1141.
72. Mead, M. 1932. The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe. Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology, 15: 1-313.
73. Morison, P. and Gardener, H. 1978. Dragons and Dinosaurs: The Child's Capacity to Differentiate Fantasy from Reality. Child Development, 49: 642-648.
74. Nisbett, R. E., Wilson, T. 1977. Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review 84, 231-259.
75. Norenzayan, A. and Gervais, W. In press. "The Cultural Evolution of Religion". In Creating Concilience: Integrating Science and the Humanities, Edited by: Slingerland, E. and Collard, M. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
76. Norenzayan, A., Atran, S., Faulkner, J. and Schaller, M. 2006. Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives. Cognitive Science, 30: 531-553.
77. Norenzayan, A., Shariff, A. F. and Gervais, W. M. 2010. The Evolution of Religious Misbelief. Behavior and Brain Sciences, 32: 531-532.
78. Norris, P. and Inglehart, R. 2004. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
79. Nosek, B. A. 2007. Explicit-Implicit Relations. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16: 65-69.
80. Pasquini, E. S., Corriveau, K., Koenig, M. and Harris, P. L. 2007. Preschoolers Monitor the Relative Accuracy of Informants. Developmental Psychology, 43: 1216-1226.
81. Pichon, I., Boccato, G. and Saroglou, V. 2007. Nonconscious Influences of Religion on Prosociality: A Priming Study. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37: 1032-1045.
82. Pyysiäinen, I. 2001. How Religion Works, Boston, MA, Leiden, NL: Brill.
83. Pyysiäinen, I. and Antonnen, V. 2002. Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion, Edited by: Pyysiäinen, I. and Antonnen, V. New York: Continuum.
84. Pyysiäinen, I., Hauser, M. 2010. The Origins of Religion: Evolved Adaptation or By-product? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, 104-109.
85. Randolph-Seng, B. and Nielsen, M. E. 2007. Honesty: One Effect of Primed Religious Representations. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 17: 303-15.
86. Richerson, P. J. and Boyd, R. 2005. Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
87. Sabbagh, M. A. and Baldwin, D. A. 2001. Learning Words from Knowledgeable Versus Ignorant Speakers: Links Between Preschoolers' Theory of Mind and Semantic Development. Child Development, 72: 1054-1070.
88. Samuels, A. and Taylor, M. 1994. Children's Ability to Distinguish Fantasy Events from Real-life Events. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 12: 417-427.
89. Schaller, M., Norenzayan, A., Heine, S. J., Yamagishi, T. and Kameda, T. 2010. Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind, London: Psychology Press.
90. Shariff, A. F. and Norenzayan, A. 2007. God Is Watching You: God Concepts Increase Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game. Psychological Science, 18: 803-809.
91. Sharon, T. and Wooley, J. D. 2004. Do Monsters Dream? Young Children's Understanding of the Fantasy/reality Distinction. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 22: 293-310.
92. Skolnik, D. and Bloom, P. 2006. What Does Batman Think about SpongeBob? Children's Understanding of the Fantasy/fantasy Distinction. Cognition, 101: B9-B18.
93. Slingerland, E. 2008. What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
94. Sosis, R. and Alcorta, C. 2003. Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology, 12: 264-274.
95. Spelke, E. S. and Kinzler, K. D. 2007. Core Knowledge. Developmental Science, 10: 89-96.
96. Sperber, D. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach, Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
97. Sperber, D., Clement, F., Heintz, O. M., Mercier, H., Origgi, G. and Wilson, D. 2010. Epistemic Vigilance. Mind and Language, 25: 359-393.
98. Statistics Canada. 2003. 2001 Census: Analysis Series. Religions in Canada, by Canada, Statistics. Ottawa.http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/Products/Analytic/companion/rel/pdf/96F0030XIE2001015.pdf
99. Taylor, M. 1999. Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them, New York: Oxford University Press.
100. Tomasello, M. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
101. Wade, N. 2009. The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, New York: Penguin Press.
102. Whiten, A. 2005. The Second Inheritance System of Chimpanzees and Humans. Nature, 437: 52-55.
103. Willard, A., A. Norenzayan, W.M. Gervais, J. Henrich. 2010. Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts are Unbelievable. Unpublished raw data, Vancouver, Canada
104. Wilson, D. S. 2003. Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
105. Woolley, J. D. and Wellman, H. M. 1990. Young Children's Understanding of Realities, Nonrealities, and Appearances. Child Development, 61: 946-961.
106. Zuckerman, P. 2007. "Atheism: Contemporary Numbers and Patterns". In The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Edited by: Martin, M. 47-65. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
107. Zuckerman, P. 2008. Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment, New York: New York University Press.