Religion as an Adaption
Group Cohesion
Group Cohesion
Sosis, R.; Alcorta, C. (2003). "Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: the evolution of religious
behavior". Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (6): 264274.
McGregor, I., Inzlicht, M., Hirsh, J., & Nash, K. (2009). Neural Markers of Religious Conviction.
Psychological Science, 20(3).
Decoupled
Cognition
Theory
of Mind
Attachment
Theory
Transference
Religion as a
By-product
Inferential
Reasoning
Intensionality
HADD
Attachment Theory
Granqvist, P., & Kirkpatrick, L. A. (2008). Attachment and religious representations and
behavior. In J. Cassidy, P. R. Shaver, J. Cassidy, P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment:
Theory, research, and clinical applications (2nd ed.) (pp. 906-933). New York, NY US: Guilford
Press.
Hyperactive Agency
Detection Device
Gray, Kurt; Daniel Wegner (Feb 2010). "Blaming God for Our Pain: Human Suffering and the
Divine Mind". Personality and Social Psychology Review (Sage) 14 (1): 910.
Explaining Moral
Religions
Nicolas Baumard & Pascal Boyer
Moralising Religions
Introduction
Introduction
Universal Similarities
Buddhism
600 B.C.E
Confucianism
500 B.C.E
Taoism
200 B.C.E
For a long time, the situation used to model cooperation was similar to the
prisoners dilemma, where one cannot choose ones partner and must select
strategies to reduce the likelihood of defection.
Ignores the fact that foragers would have been able to choose their partners. A
better model is a form of biological market in which individuals use signalling
and reputation to convey that they are valuable cooperators.
Agents have to avoid excessive generosity to avoid being exploited but also
have to avoid excessive selfishness to avoid being abandoned.
This also allows for proportionality; if A does more work than B then A should
get more of the reward, if not then A will look for another partner, so it would be
in Bs interest to concede more of the reward to A.
Formal models show that when agents can select partners, evolutionary
dynamics converge towards mutually advantageous distributions.
Cultural Transmission of
Religious Morality
Moral intuitions are the same in religious and non-religious people because they
occur automatically and precede conscious moral reasoning.
Interestingly, many of these movements appeared in several places across the world
at roughly the same time (the second half of the 1 millenium BCE).
Around this period there was a sharp increase in energy capture (how much energy
is extracted from the environment) which occurred at the same time in 3 places - the
Yellow-Yangzi Rivers, the Ganga Valley and the Eastern part of the Mediterranean.
These regions reached a production level of 25,000 kcal per capita per day,
surpassing that of previous societies.
These 3 regions are precisely the places where moral religions emerged. e.g. Stoicism in the
Greek city states, Christianity in the Middle East, Buddhism in India, Confucianism in China.
This suggests that increase in the standard of living is followed by the spread of moral
religions.
Material prosperity allows people to detach themselves from material desire and there is an
evolutionary reformulation of the pyramid of needs.
People downplay the value of higher wealth and status when these needs are met and turn
their attention to other domains of evolved preferences like maximising personal wellbeing
and enjoying friendships.
Consistent with this, moralising religions recruited their first adepts among the affluent upper
classes e.g. Chinese Buddhism and Roman Christianity. They are both associated with
asceticism and self control techniques.
This new emphasis on explicit morality led to the emergence of new groups such as
Christianity and to changes in pre-existing groups like Judaism to become more ethically
focused.
By contrast, non-religious
movements (e.g. Stoicism) lack
this connection to intuition. They
engage in analytical thinking
which has been found to diminish
peoples religious commitment in
experimental settings.
Conclusion
Despite their differences,
religious and non-religious
movements owe their cultural
success to the fact that these
explicit accounts of moral
prescriptions are congruent with
universal, and much older,
evolved intuitions.