Manvir Singh

University of California, Davis | UCD · Department of Anthropology

Shamans, including medicine-men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession”, representing the first institu...

Researchers argue that third parties help sustain human cooperation, yet how they contribute remains unclear, especially in small-scale, politically decentralized societies. Studying justice among Mentawai horticulturalists in Indonesia, we examined evidence for punishment and mediation by third parties. Across a sample of 444 transgressions we fin...

Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands. This "nomadic-egalitarian model" suffuses the social sciences. It informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize resea...

What explains the ubiquity and cultural success of prosocial religions? Leading accounts argue that prosocial religions evolved because they help societies grow and promote group cooperation. Yet recent evidence suggests that prosocial religious beliefs are not limited to large societies and might not have strong effects on cooperation. Here, we pr...

Norms and institutions enable large-scale human cooperation by creating shared expectations and changing individuals’ incentives via monitoring or sanctioning. Like material technologies, these social technologies satisfy instrumental ends and solve difficult problems. However, the similarities and differences between the evolution of material tech...

To succeed, we posit that research cartography will require high-throughput natural description to identify unknown unknowns in a particular design space. High-throughput natural description, the systematic collection and annotation of representative corpora of real-world stimuli, faces logistical challenges, but these can be overcome by solutions...

We hypothesize that fictional stories are highly successful in human cultures partly because they activate evolved cognitive mechanisms, for instance for finding mates (e.g., in romance fiction), exploring the world (e.g., in adventure and speculative fiction), or avoiding predators (e.g., in horror fiction). In this paper, we put forward a compreh...

Despite the variability of music across cultures, some types of human songs share acoustic characteristics. For example, dance songs tend to be loud and rhythmic, and lullabies tend to be quiet and melodious. Human perceptual sensitivity to the behavioral contexts of songs, based on these musical features, suggests that basic properties of music ar...

Reports of psychedelic experiences may contain similarities and differences across cultural contexts, but most current characterizations and quantifications of psychedelic experiences come from Western medical and naturalistic settings. In this article, we begin with a brief history of the diversity of psychedelic use in non-Western settings. We th...

Fines, corporal punishments, and other procedures of punitive justice recur across small-scale societies. Although they are often assumed to enforce group norms, we here propose the relation-restoration hypothesis of punitive justice, according to which punitive procedures function to restore dyadic cooperation and curtail conflict between offender...

Despite the variability of music across cultures, some types of human songs share acoustic characteristics with one another. For example, dance songs tend to be loud and rhythmic and lullabies tend to be quiet and melodious. Human perceptual sensitivity to the behavioural contexts of songs on the basis of these acoustic features raises the possibil...

Background: Psychedelic use is anecdotally associated with belief changes, although few studies have tested these claims. Aim: Characterize a broad range of psychedelic occasioned belief changes. Survey: A survey was conducted in 2374 respondents who endorsed having had a belief changing psychedelic experience. Participants rated their agreeme...

The last three centuries have witnessed a moral and political transformation. Groups previously denied equivalent moral standing-including propertyless men, women, ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals, and slaves-became moral equals deserving of similar legal treatment. Here we argue that this process was driven by the reputational benefits...

When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations acro...

BACKGROUND: Psychedelic use is anecdotally associated with belief changes, although few studies have tested these claims.AIM: Characterize a broad range of psychedelic occasioned belief changes.SURVEY: A survey was conducted in 2,374 respondents who endorsed having had a belief changing psychedelic experience. Participants rated their agreement wit...

Fines, corporal punishments, and other forms of institutionalized punishment recur across small-scale societies. While they are often assumed to enforce group norms, we propose that these punitive procedures function to restore dyadic cooperation and curtail conflict between offender and victim following violations of reciprocal obligations. We tes...

Why do humans develop beliefs in supernatural entities that punish uncooperative behaviors? Leading hypotheses maintain that these beliefs are widespread because they facilitate cooperation, allowing their groups to outcompete others in inter-group competition. Focusing on within-group interactions, we present a model in which people strategically...

Despite the variability of music worldwide, some types of human songs share basic acoustic characteristics. For example, dance songs tend to be loud and rhythmic, whereas lullabies tend to be quiet and melodious. Prior studies with western English-speaking participants have shown that this enables listeners to infer aspects of a singer’s behaviour,...

Researchers argue that third-party involvement is critical for sustaining human cooperation, yet how third parties contribute remains unclear, especially in small-scale, politically decentralized societies. In a study of wrongdoing and punishment among the Mentawai horticulturalists of Indonesia, we test two hypotheses of third-party involvement: p...

The sympathetic plot-featuring a goal-directed protagonist who confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and wins rewards-is ubiquitous. Here, I propose that it recurs because it entertains, engaging two sets of psychological mechanisms. First, it triggers mechanisms for learning about obstacles and how to overcome them. It builds interest by confrontin...

Why do humans develop beliefs apparently well-suited to promote prosociality, such as beliefs in moralistic supernatural punishment? Leading hypotheses regard such beliefs to be group-level cultural adaptations, shaped by intergroup competition to facilitate cooperation. We present a complementary model in which cognitive mechanisms and strategic i...

Cultural evolution requires the social transmission of information. For this reason, scholars have emphasized social learning when explaining how and why culture evolves. Yet cultural evolution results from many mechanisms operating in concert. Here, we argue that the emphasis on social learning has distracted scholars from appreciating both the fu...

Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands composed mostly of kin. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challe...

Principled behavior seems to defy evolutionary logic. Principled people consistently abide by their principles, ignore tradeoffs or compromises, and pursue the principles for transcendental reasons, such as that they are "right", decreed by God, or part of an eternal debt to the emperor. Here, we explain principled behavior as a combination of what...

Cognitive and evolutionary research has overwhelmingly focused on the powerful deities of large-scale societies, yet little work has examined the smaller gods of animist traditions. Here, in a study of the Mentawai water spirit Sikameinan (Siberut Island, Indonesia), we address three questions: (1) Are smaller gods believed to enforce cooperation,...

Why is culture the way it is? Here I argue that a major force shaping culture is what I call subjective (cultural) selection, or the selective retention of cultural variants that people subjectively perceive as satisfying their goals. I show that people evaluate behaviors and beliefs according to how useful they are, especially for achieving goals....

This letter is in reply to Hattori & Tomonaga (2020), who report that seven captive chimpanzees moved in response to piano sounds, more so than in silence. On this basis, they argue, "some biological foundation for dancing existed in the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees ~6 million years ago". Music's universality suggests it has deep phylo...

Religious leaders refrain from sex and food across human societies. Researchers argue that this avoidance influences people's perceptions of leaders’ underlying traits, but few, if any, quantitative data exist testing these claims. Here we show that shamans in a small-scale society observe costly prohibitions and that observers infer cooperativenes...

Across taxa, the forms of vocal signals are shaped by their functions. In humans, a salient context of vocal signaling is infant care, as human infants are altricial. Humans often produce "parent-ese", speech and song for infants that differ acoustically from ordinary speech and song, in fashions that are thought to support parent-infant communicat...

Cross-cultural analysis of song It is unclear whether there are universal patterns to music across cultures. Mehr et al. examined ethnographic data and observed music in every society sampled (see the Perspective by Fitch and Popescu). For songs specifically, three dimensions characterize more than 25% of the performances studied: formality of the...

Cognitive and evolutionary research has overwhelmingly focused on the powerful deities of large-scale societies, yet little work has examined the smaller gods of animist traditions. Here, in a study of the Mentawai water spirit Sikameinan (Siberut Island, Indonesia), we address three questions: (1) Are smaller gods believed to enforce cooperation,...

Religious leaders refrain from sex and food across human societies. Researchers argue that this self-denial promotes perceptions of credibility, invoking such associations in explanations of shamanism and prosocial religion, but few, if any, quantitative data exist testing these claims. Here we show that shamans in a small-scale society observe cos...

For over a century, scholars have compared stories and proposed universal narrative patterns. Despite their diversity, nearly all of these projects converged on a common structure: the sympathetic plot. The sympathetic plot describes how a goal-directed protagonist confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and wins rewards. Stories with these features f...

We built corpora of ethnographic text and audio recordings from many human societies and analyzed them with tools of quantitative social science, to explore universals and variability in music. We find that music appears in every society measured; that variation in musical behavior is best explained by three dimensions capturing the formality, exci...

In nearly every documented society, people believe that some misfortunes are attributable to malicious group mates employing magic or supernatural powers. Here I report cross-cultural patterns in these beliefs and propose a theory to explain them. Using the newly-created Survey of Mystical Harm, I show that several conceptions of evil, mystical pra...

The commentators endorse the conceptual and ethnographic synthesis presented in the target article, suggest extensions and elaborations of the theory, and generalize its logic to explain apparently similar specializations. They also demand clarity about psychological mechanisms, argue against conclusions drawn about empirical phenomena, and propose...

Humans use music for a variety of social functions: we sing to accompany dance, to soothe babies, to heal illness, to communicate love, and so on. Across animal taxa, vocalization forms are shaped by their functions, including in humans. Here, we show that vocal music exhibits recurrent, distinct, and cross-culturally robust form-function relations...

Rules regulating social behavior raise challenging questions about cultural evolution in part because they frequently confer group-level benefits. Current multilevel selection theories contend that between-group processes interact with within-group processes to produce norms and institutions, but within-group processes have remained underspecified,...

We agree that institutions and rules are crucial for explaining human sociality but we question the claim of there not being "alternatives to CGS [that] can easily account for the institutionalized cooperation that characterizes human societies" (target article sect. 7). Hypothesizing that self-interested individuals coercively and collaboratively...

Leadership is widespread across the animal kingdom. In self-organizing groups, such as fish schools, theoretical models predict that effective leaders need to balance goal-oriented motion, such as toward a known resource, with their tendency to be social. Increasing goal orientation is predicted to increase decision speed and accuracy, but it is al...

Several decades of research in humans, other vertebrates, and social insects have offered fascinating insights into the dynamics of punishment (and its subset, policing), but authors have only rarely addressed whether there are fundamental joint principles underlying the maintenance of these behaviors. Here we present a punisher/bystander approach...