The cultural evolution of prosocial religions

Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Volumn 39, Issue , 2014, Pages 1-19

  Norenzayan, Ara ^a   Shariff, Azim F ^b   Gervais, Will M ^c   Willard, Aiyana K ^d   McNamara, Rita A ^a   Slingerland, Edward ^a   Henrich, Joseph ^a,e  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY   (United States)

^d UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

^e HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

belief; cooperation; culture; evolution; prosociality; religion; ritual

Indexed keywords

ATTENTION; COMPETITION; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; FERTILITY; HUMAN; PREDICTION; RELIGION; SYNTHESIS; HUMAN RELATION; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; RITUAL;

CULTURAL EVOLUTION; HUMANS; INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS; RELIGION; RELIGION AND PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR;

EID: 84933569233     PISSN: 0140525X     EISSN: 14691825     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X14001356     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. We consider 12,000 years a convenient starting point for when the first human groups in the Middle East began to scale up (cf. Diamond 1997a).
2. Richerson et al. (2001) show why demographic growth cannot account for this expansion.
3. Puzzle, arguing that our "hunter-gatherer psychology" (e.g., kin and reciprocity psychology) in the absence of any cultural evolution simply "misfires" to create a ready path to large-scale cooperation (Burnham & Johnson 2005; Dawkins 2006).
4. The limitations of this argument have been discussed elsewhere (Chudek et al. 2013).
5. In this category we include aspects of epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010).
6. Other scholars have considered such behaviors in the context of signaling models (Bulbulia 2008; Frank 1988; Schloss 2007; Slingerland 2014).
7. Also see Marlowe (2010) for similar observations of Hadza foragers, and for recent quantitative evidence among Tyvan pastoralists in Siberia, see Purzycki (2011) and Purzycki (2013).
8. Schneider, personal communication. Coffin Text spell 1130; see discussion in Enmarch (2008), and compare with Assmann (2001) and Lazaridis (2008).
9. The related Mickey Mouse Problem asks why people do not worship the minimally counterintuitive agents in cartoons, myths, and folk tales (Atran & Norenzayan 2004; cf. Barrett 2008).
10. Baumard and Boyer (2013) propose to explain prosocial religions as cultural reflections of evolved moral intuitions, such as proportionality and fairness, and argue against the idea that some religions spread by having prosocial effects.
11. Cultural group selection provides a mechanism by which these more group-beneficial signaling equilibria can spread, and at the same time permits us to account for the immense diversity of signaling systems across human societies and their change over historical time (Henrich 2009).
12. Norenzayan and Gervais (2013) and Norenzayan (2013). See also similar arguments concerning different forms of disbelief and the importance of cultural and linguistic environment to religious disbelief (Banerjee & Bloom 2013; Bulbulia 2012; Geertz & Markusson 2010; Lanman 2012; McCauley 2011).