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The moralization bias of gods’ minds: a cross-cultural test
Abstract
There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute moral concern—a “moralization bias”—to supernatural deities follows. Using data from 2,228 individuals in 15 different field sites, we test for the existence of such a bias. We find that people are indeed more likely than chance to indicate that local deities care about punishing theft, murder, and deceit. This effect is stable even after holding beliefs about explicitly moralistic deities constant. Additionally, we take a close look at data collected among Hadza foragers and find two of their deities to be morally interested. There is no evidence to suggest that this effect is due to direct missionary contact. We posit that the “moralization bias of gods’ minds” is part of a widespread but variable religious phenotype, and a candidate mechanism that contributes to the well-recognized association between religion and cooperation.
... These supernatural entities can also inflict punishment for moral reasons, thereby facilitating cooperation and reducing cheating in human societies. A third alternative (Purzycki et al. 2022) is the moralization bias. Humans conceptualize other humans as interested in moral behavior. ...
... Because of this, supernatural agents are perceived as also being interested in moral behavior (moralization bias). Purzycki et al. (2022) recruited participants from 15 different cultures. They concluded that the moralization bias is widespread across cultures. ...
Understanding the pervasiveness of sin is central to Christian theology. The question of why humans are so sinful given an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God presents a challenge and a puzzle. One element of this puzzle is how sinful tendencies transmit in human communities. Here, we investigate Friedrich Schleiermacher's account of sin which we characterize as a biocultural evolutionary approach. That is, we propose that Schleiermacher conceives of sin as both biologically rooted and as culturally transmitted. We look at empirical evidence to support his account and use the cultural Price equation to provide a naturalistic model of the transmission of sin. This model can help us understand how sin can be ubiquitous and unavoidable, even though it is not biologically transmitted, and even if there is no historical Fall that precipitated the tendency to sin.
... Setting aside the classical anthropological literature that emphasizes the presence of moralistic gods in traditional societies (e.g., Evans-Pritchard, 1965;Lang, 1909;Malinowski, 1936), contemporary group-level studies (Boehm, 2008;Swanson, 1960;Watts et al., 2015) show non-trivial and even high proportions of small-scale societies having moralistic supernatural punishment. Individual-level cross-cultural projects motivated by the extant target hypotheses (Bendixen et al., n.d.;Purzycki, 2011Purzycki, , 2013Purzycki et al., 2022;Singh et al., 2021) also point to the presence of moralistic supernatural punishment in traditional religions. In some reports, such beliefs are detectable even after holding constant the correlation with moralistic traditions. ...
... Across this work (Bendixen et al., 2021a;Purzycki, 2011Purzycki, , 2013Singh et al., 2021;Townsend et al., 2020), researchers find non-trivial frequencies of moralistic supernatural punishment beliefs among adherents to traditional religions in their field sites. One cross-cultural study (Purzycki et al., 2022a) finds that across 15 different field sites, individuals are more likely than not to claim their local deities care about punishing theft, murder, and deceit. This likelihood holds even after holding constant any correlation with beliefs about explicitly moralistic deities. ...
Evolutionary theories of religion frequently assume that the presence of moralizing gods is positively associated with social complexity. An influential source of evidence for this assumption is the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), which uses the moralizing high gods variable to measure the outcome of interest (the presence of moralizing gods). In this paper, we critically assess the assumption that moralizing gods are associated with complex societies. We start by discussing the high god variable’s coding criteria, which is largely defined by a theoretically irrelevant criterion: whether or not a god is a creator deity, regardless of its power or omniscience. We then show why, based on its coding criteria, the SCCS underestimates the presence of moralizing gods by systematically producing false negatives – coding moralizing gods as present because moralizing high gods are absent. We use datasets that include both moralizing gods and moralizing high gods to show that these false negatives are more frequent among lower levels of social complexity, strongly favoring a spurious positive association between social complexity and the presence of moralizing gods. We then show that this bias is likely strengthened by the ethnographic data and historical context from which the SCCS data were generated. We therefore question the widely assumed positive association between morally punitive gods and social complexity, and conclude that ethnographic evidence supports the prevalence of moralizing gods among small-scale societies.
... We were quite candid throughout our shared works about how recent the direct inquiry of what it meant to have a "moralistic god" (of any type) was; to the best of our knowledge, the first case of directly asking people if their spirits knew and cared about morality was Purzycki's work in Siberia (Purzycki, 2011(Purzycki, , 2013, but the inquiry has grown to include this (see Purzycki et al., 2022) and other projects (e.g., Singh et al., 2021;White et al., 2021;Willard et al., 2020). As such, we did not seek to explain high gods' ubiquity or role in human cooperation. ...
Believing in God and not is a human attitude in facing the ontological big reality, including his existence. Various arguments have proven the existence of God whether through ontological, cosmological, or teleological evidence in the context of philosophy and theology. This paper presents Kant's thinking which rejected all these arguments. Using Wittgenstein's method of philosophical investigation, this paper showed that for Kant, such evidence was a futile effort because human reason is limited. Kant argued that through morality, humans can find God and religion. Through morality too, Kant rejected atheism. This study can contribute to the deepening of the discussion on the existence of religion, which has always been the subject of awareness of human existence; as well as being material that can be presented in public discussions to maintain social harmonization.Abstrak. Mempercayai Tuhan dan tidak adalah sikap manusia dalam menghadapi realitas besar ontologis, termasuk keberadaan dirinya. Berbagai argumen telah berupaya untuk membuktikan keberadaan Tuhan melalui bukti ontologis, kosmologis, dan teleologis dalam konteks filsafat dan teologi. Tulisan ini menghadirkan pemikiran Kant yang menolak semua argumentasi itu. Dengan metode investigasi filosofis ala Wittgenstein, tulisan ini menunjukkan bahwa bagi Kant, pembuktian-pembuktian adanya Tuhan tersebut merupakan upaya kesia-siaan lantaran akal budi manusia itu terbatas. Kant mengetengahkan bahwa melalui moralitas, manusia bisa menemukan Tuhan dan agama. Melalui moralitas pula, Kant menolak ateisme. Kajian ini dapat memberikan kontribusi pada pendalaman diskusi tentang eksistensi agama, yang selalu menjadi bahan kesadaran eksistensi manusia; sekaligus menjadi bahan yang dapat dihadirkan pada diskusi-diskusi publik untuk menjaga harmonisasi sosial.
Evolutionary theories of religion frequently assume that the presence of moralizing gods is positively associated with social complexity. An influential source of evidence for this assumption comes from researchers using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample’s moralizing high gods variable as a proxy measure of their outcome of interest (the presence of moralizing gods). In this paper, we critically assess the common assumption that moralizing gods are associated with complex societies. We first discuss the high god variable’s coding criteria, which is defined by whether or not a god is the creator or director of the universe, regardless of power or omniscience. We then show that these criteria, which are not relevant to the question about whether gods are moralistic or punitive, has led researchers to underestimate the presence of moralizing gods by systematically producing false negatives – inferring that truly present moralizing gods are absent because moralizing high gods are absent. We then use datasets that include both moralizing gods and moralizing high gods to show that researchers risk inferring false negatives more frequently among lower levels of social complexity. As we also show, this likely leads to a spurious positive association between social complexity and the presence of moralizing gods. We then briefly discuss the ethnographic data and historical biases that might have strengthened this spurious association. We therefore question the widely assumed positive association between morally punitive gods and social complexity, and conclude that ethnographic evidence supports the prevalence of moralizing gods among small-scale societies.
All populations on the planet have some belief in spiritual agents. From the perspective of the cognitive sciences of religion, gods are cultural representations (i.e., shared, socially transmitted data) that are made possible, informed, and constrained by noncultural cognitive systems. In keeping with this view, this chapter first assesses the relationship between statistically universal aspects of gods and these aspects’ corollary cognitive systems. It then addresses how environmental inputs also contribute to our conceptions of deities and points to ways in which the cognitive science of religion (CSR) can contribute to a more ecologically minded approach to understanding religious systems.
This edited volume represents a snapshot the current state cognitive science of religion with contributions from many well-established contributors to the field as well as a few newcomers. The first section broadly sets the historical and theoretical stage. Its three chapters introduce readers to the historical, theoretical, and methodological foundations of CSR. Next, rather than treating “religion” as a whole, the topical space is divided into religious concepts, actions, objects, and experiences. With these pieces in place, authors in the subsequent section consider how various components combine to form religious systems, and conditions under which religious systems change or fail. Several chapters offer comparisons between cognitive science of religion and neighboring efforts including psychology of religion, neuroscience of religion, and evolutionary studies of religion. The final section of the book introduces the growing scholarly attention concerning the philosophical, theological, and education implications of CSR’s findings and theories.
In an age of “Big Data” the study of the history and archaeology of religion faces an exponentially increasing quantity and range of data and scholarly interpretation. For the student and scholar alike, new tools that allow for efficient and accurate inquiry are a necessity. Here, the open-access and digital Database of Religious History (DRH) is presented as one such tool that addresses this need and is well suited for use in the classroom. In this article, we present the basic structure of the database along with a demonstration of its potential use. Following a thematic inquiry into questions concerning “high gods”, individual disciplinary-specific case studies examine applications to particular contexts across time and space. These case studies demonstrate the ways in which the DRH can test and disrupt ontologies through its ability to efficiently cross traditional disciplinary boundaries.
The social sciences have long recognized a relationship between religion and social ecology. Upon closer inspection, religious systems not only correspond to important features of a society’s social ecology, but also appear to directly address these features. In this article, we examine the prospect that these salient features may be framed as game theoretical dilemmas and argue that contemporary approaches that emphasize cognition and/or social learning at the expense of social ecology are inadequate in accounting for cross-cultural variation in religious expression. Using ethnographic examples, we show that religions alleviate the costs of such dilemmas in a variety of ways by: 1) fostering beliefs that motivate and sustain beneficial practices; 2) incentivizing cooperative ventures; 3) encouraging ritual performances that minimize costly conflicts and bolster territorial conventions; 4) providing institutional forums to coordinate resource distributions; and 5) maintaining important resource and species diversity.
The two-volume Cambridge History of Atheism offers an authoritative and up to date account of a subject of contemporary interest. Comprised of sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this History is comprehensive in scope. The essays are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including religious studies, philosophy, sociology, and classics. Offering a global overview of the subject, from antiquity to the present, the volumes examine the phenomenon of unbelief in the context of Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish societies. They explore atheism and the early modern Scientific Revolution, as well as the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and its continuing implications. The History also includes general survey essays on the impact of scepticism, agnosticism and atheism, as well as contemporary assessments of thinking. Providing essential information on the nature and history of atheism, The Cambridge History of Atheism will be indispensable for both scholarship and teaching, at all levels.
The two-volume Cambridge History of Atheism offers an authoritative and up to date account of a subject of contemporary interest. Comprised of sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this History is comprehensive in scope. The essays are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including religious studies, philosophy, sociology, and classics. Offering a global overview of the subject, from antiquity to the present, the volumes examine the phenomenon of unbelief in the context of Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish societies. They explore atheism and the early modern Scientific Revolution, as well as the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and its continuing implications. The History also includes general survey essays on the impact of scepticism, agnosticism and atheism, as well as contemporary assessments of thinking. Providing essential information on the nature and history of atheism, The Cambridge History of Atheism will be indispensable for both scholarship and teaching, at all levels.
Purpose: In this paper we examine and test alternative models for explaining the relationships between resource stress, beliefs that gods and spirits influence weather (to help or harm food supply or punish for norm violations), and customary beyond-household sharing behavior. Our model, the resource stress model, suggests that resource stress affects both sharing as well as conceptions of gods’ involvement with weather, but these supernatural beliefs play no role in explaining sharing. An alternative model, the moralizing high god model, suggests that the relationship between resource stress and sharing is at least partially mediated by religious beliefs in moralizing high gods.
Methods: We compared the models using a worldwide sample of 96 cultures from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), newly coded data on supernatural involvement with weather, and previously coded data on food and labor sharing. We conducted three types of analysis: multilevel and society-level regressions, and mediational path modeling using Monte Carlo simulations.
Results: Resource stress shows a robust effect on beliefs that high gods are associated with weather (either helping or hurting food supply), that superior gods help the food supply through weather, and that minor spirits hurt the food supply through weather. Resource stress also predicts greater belief in moralizing high gods. However, no form of high god belief that we test significantly predicts more sharing. Mediational models suggest the religious beliefs do not significantly explain why resource stress is associated with food and labor sharing.
Conclusion: Our findings generally accord with the view that resource stress changes religious belief and has a direct effect on sharing behavior unmediated by high god beliefs.
The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to such mechanisms being constrained to the religious ingroup, possibly at the expense of religious outgroups. To test these hypotheses, we administered two behavioural experiments and a set of interviews to a sample of 2228 participants from 15 diverse populations. These populations included foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, and wage labourers, practicing Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, but also forms of animism and ancestor worship. Using the Random Allocation Game (RAG) and the Dictator Game (DG) in which individuals allocated money between themselves, local and geographically distant co-religionists, and religious outgroups, we found that higher ratings of gods as monitoring and punishing predicted decreased local favouritism (RAGs) and increased resource-sharing with distant co-religionists (DGs). The effects of punishing and monitoring gods on outgroup allocations revealed between-site variability, suggesting that in the absence of intergroup hostility, moralizing gods may be implicated in cooperative behaviour toward outgroups. These results provide support for the hypothesis that beliefs in monitoring and punitive gods help expand the circle of sustainable social interaction, and open questions about the treatment of religious outgroups.
Does moral culture contribute to the evolution of cooperation? Here, we examine individuals' and communities' models of what it means to be good and bad and how they correspond to corollary behavior across a variety of socioecological contexts. Our sample includes over 600 people from eight different field sites that include foragers, horticulturalists, herders, and the fully market-reliant. We first examine the universals and particulars of explicit moral models. We then use these moral models to assess their role in the outcome of an economic experiment designed to detect systematic, dishonest rule-breaking favoritism. We show that individuals are slightly more inclined to play by the rules when their moral models include the task-relevant virtues of “honesty” and “dishonesty.” We also find that religious beliefs are better predictors of honest play than these virtues. The predictive power of these values' and beliefs' local prevalence, however, remains inconclusive. In summary, we find that religious beliefs and moral models may help promote honest behavior that may widen the breadth of human cooperation.
Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) are more prevalent in males than females. The biological basis of this difference remains unclear. It has been postulated that one of the primary causes of ASC is a partial disconnection of the frontal lobe from higher-order association areas during development (that is, a frontal ‘disconnection syndrome’). Therefore, in the current study we investigated whether frontal connectivity differs between males and females with ASC. We recruited 98 adults with a confirmed high-functioning ASC diagnosis (61 males: aged 18–41 years; 37 females: aged 18–37 years) and 115 neurotypical controls (61 males: aged 18–45 years; 54 females: aged 18–52 years). Current ASC symptoms were evaluated using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS). Diffusion tensor imaging was performed and fractional anisotropy (FA) maps were created. Mean FA values were determined for five frontal fiber bundles and two non-frontal fiber tracts. Between-group differences in mean tract FA, as well as sex-by-diagnosis interactions were assessed. Additional analyses including ADOS scores informed us on the influence of current ASC symptom severity on frontal connectivity. We found that males with ASC had higher scores of current symptom severity than females, and had significantly lower mean FA values for all but one tract compared to controls. No differences were found between females with or without ASC. Significant sex-by-diagnosis effects were limited to the frontal tracts. Taking current ASC symptom severity scores into account did not alter the findings, although the observed power for these analyses varied. We suggest these findings of frontal connectivity abnormalities in males with ASC, but not in females with ASC, have the potential to inform us on some of the sex differences reported in the behavioral phenotype of ASC.
Understanding the expansion of human sociality and cooperation beyond kith and kin remains an important evolutionary puzzle. There is likely a complex web of processes including institutions, norms, and practices that contributes to this phenomenon. Considerable evidence suggests that one such process involves certain components of religious systems that may have fostered the expansion of human cooperation in a variety of ways, including both certain forms of rituals and commitment to particular types of gods. Using an experimental economic game, our team specifically tested whether or not individually held mental models of moralistic, punishing, and knowledgeable gods curb biases in favor of the self and the local community, and increase impartiality toward geographically distant anonymous co-religionists. Our sample includes 591 participants from eight diverse societies – iTaukei (indigenous) Fijians who practice both Christianity and ancestor worship, the animist Hadza of Tanzania, Hindu Indo-Fijians, Hindu Mauritians, shamanist-Buddhist Tyvans of southern Siberia, traditional Inland and Christian Coastal Vanuatuans from Tanna, and Christian Brazilians from Pesqueiro. In this article, we present cross-cultural evidence that addresses this question and discuss the implications and limitations of our project. This volume also offers detailed, site-specific reports to provide further contextualization at the local level.
A theme common to many of the essays is that of identifying the unique contribution that religion (specifially, supernatural thinking) adds to human social life. We argue that the contribution may have been efficiency. Supernatural thinking may have made cooperation easier to implement in human social groups. We explore this possiiblity in two areas: partner choice and parenting.
As large-scale collaborative, cross-cultural ethnographic research becomes easier and easier to realize, certain ethnographic methods and analyses should be correspondingly more available, inviting, and accommodating. We have therefore created AnthroTools, a package for the free, open-source language R, with a variety of tools and functions suitable for both multi-factor free-list analysis and Bayesian cultural consensus modeling. Free-list data elicitation is a simple technique for ethnographic research. However, especially for cross-cultural free-list data, background preparation is considerable and often requires specific software. In addition, although current cultural consensus analysis tools offer very sophisticated analyses, they also either require specialized software or have computationally taxing methods. AnthroTools expedites these techniques, rapidly performs diagnostics, and prepares data for further analysis. In this article, we briefly discuss what this package offers cross-cultural researchers and provide basic examples of some of its functions.
Given the antiquity of African forager genetic lineages tracing to source populations older than the movement of modern humans outside Africa, and given significant cultural continuity and resilience, what are the prospects of reconstructing archaic structures of early modern human cosmology?
As appeals to what gods know and care about often motivate and rationalize human behavior, understanding shared models of gods’ minds is crucial for understanding religion’s contributions to human sociality. If religious systems function to minimize the effects of social and ecological problems, then models of gods’ concerns should coevolve with these problems. The present work assesses this prediction using data collected in the Tyva Republic. After briefly introducing the social and ecological history of ritual cairn piety in Inner Asia, I examine explicit representational models of morality, virtue, and gods’ concerns in Tyva. I show that (a) there is very little conceptual overlap between Tyvans’ models of morality and virtue and the things about which spirits care, (b) Tyvan spirit masters are primarily concerned with ritual and breaches of resource maintenance, and (c) among the emerging, salient factors that anger spirit masters are alcohol abuse and littering, very recent social problems in the region. This report provides support for the hypothesis that representational models of gods’ minds will evolve in accordance with ever-shifting local problems and offers the first formal treatment of empirically determining what constitutes a “moralistic” deity among living people.
Since the origins of agriculture, the scale of human cooperation and societal complexity has dramatically expanded. This fact challenges standard evolutionary explanations of prosociality because well-studied mechanisms of cooperation based on genetic relatedness, reciprocity and partner choice falter as people increasingly engage in fleeting transactions with genetically unrelated strangers in large anonymous groups. To explain this rapid expansion of prosociality, researchers have proposed several mechanisms. Here we focus on one key hypothesis: cognitive representations of gods as increasingly knowledgeable and punitive, and who sanction violators of interpersonal social norms, foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation, trust and fairness towards co-religionist strangers. We tested this hypothesis using extensive ethnographic interviews and two behavioural games designed to measure impartial rule-following among people (n = 591, observations = 35,400) from eight diverse communities from around the world: (1) inland Tanna, Vanuatu; (2) coastal Tanna, Vanuatu; (3) Yasawa, Fiji; (4) Lovu, Fiji; (5) Pesqueiro, Brazil; (6) Pointe aux Piments, Mauritius; (7) the Tyva Republic (Siberia), Russia; and (8) Hadzaland, Tanzania. Participants reported adherence to a wide array of world religious traditions including Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as notably diverse local traditions, including animism and ancestor worship. Holding a range of relevant variables constant, the higher participants rated their moralistic gods as punitive and knowledgeable about human thoughts and actions, the more coins they allocated to geographically distant co-religionist strangers relative to both themselves and local co-religionists. Our results support the hypothesis that beliefs in moralistic, punitive and knowing gods increase impartial behaviour towards distant co-religionists, and therefore can contribute to the expansion of prosociality.
Laboratory and field studies have demonstrated that exposure to cues of intentional agents in the form of eyes can increase prosocial behavior. However, previous research mostly used 2-dimensional depictions as experimental stimuli. Thus far no study has examined the influence of the spatial properties of agency cues on this prosocial effect. To investigate the role of dimensionality of agency cues on fairness, 345 participants engaged in a decision-making task in a naturalistic setting. The experimental treatment included a 3-dimensional pseudo-realistic model of a human head and a 2-dimensional picture of the same object. The control stimuli consisted of a real plant and its 2-D image. Our results partly support the findings of previous studies that cues of intentional agents increase prosocial behavior. However, this effect was only found for the 3-D cues, suggesting that dimensionality is a critical variable in triggering these effects in a real-world settings. Our research sheds light on a hitherto unexplored aspect of the effects of environmental cues and their morphological properties on decision-making.
Scholars have debated naturalistic theories of religion for thousands of years, but only recently have scientists begun to test predictions empirically. Existing databases contain few variables on religion, and are subject to Galton's Problem because they do not sufficiently account for the non-independence of cultures or systematically differentiate the traditional states of cultures from their contemporary states. Here we present Pulotu: the first quantitative cross-cultural database purpose-built to test evolutionary hypotheses of supernatural beliefs and practices. The Pulotu database documents the remarkable diversity of the Austronesian family of cultures, which originated in Taiwan, spread west to Madagascar and east to Easter Island-a region covering over half the world's longitude. The focus of Austronesian beliefs range from localised ancestral spirits to powerful creator gods. A wide range of practices also exist, such as headhunting, elaborate tattooing, and the construction of impressive monuments. Pulotu is freely available, currently contains 116 cultures, and has 80 variables describing supernatural beliefs and practices, as well as social and physical environments. One major advantage of Pulotu is that it has separate sections on the traditional states of cultures, the post-contact history of cultures, and the contemporary states of cultures. A second major advantage is that cultures are linked to a language-based family tree, enabling the use phylogenetic methods, which can be used to address Galton's Problem by accounting for common ancestry, to infer deep prehistory, and to model patterns of trait evolution over time. We illustrate the power of phylogenetic methods by performing an ancestral state reconstruction on the Pulotu variable "headhunting", finding evidence that headhunting was practiced in proto-Austronesian culture. Quantitative cross-cultural databases explicitly linking cultures to a phylogeny have the potential to revolutionise the field of comparative religious studies in the same way that genetic databases have revolutionised the field of evolutionary biology.
This article concerns Hadza cosmology examined through objects, rituals and the Hadza concept of epeme. A brief background to the Hadza and the fieldwork that informs this study is followed by a close analysis of three key objects that are central to the argument presented. The objects are intimately linked to women and to aspects of the social and cosmological identity of the individual makers. one object is a materialisation of the woman’s name and it leads to an examination by interview of naming practices more generally. Naming a child gives it a spirit and places the child in a strong family matrix, and since it receives two names the child has two spirits and two families. Calling a person’s name is thus calling out to one of the spirits within the person. This practice of calling a name occurs during the epeme night dance ritual. Dancers call a name of a relative and turn into the spirit-beings of the named. In this ritual we find that dancers when calling names of women do so through the mediating power objects. The article concludes by considering death, the dead body and the role of the objects in death. The approach taken is not intended to be holistic, but rather a presentation of ethnographic research indicating the potential and need for further examination of the power and role of objects in Hadza society.
This article concerns Hadza cosmology examined through objects, rituals and the Hadza concept of epeme. A brief background to the Hadza and the fieldwork that informs this study is followed by a close analysis of three key objects that are central to the argument presented. The objects are intimately linked to women and to aspects of the social and cosmological identity of the individual makers. one object is a materialisation of the woman’s name and it leads to an examination by interview of naming practices more generally. Naming a child gives it a spirit and places the child in a strong family matrix, and since it receives two names the child has two spirits and two families. Calling a person’s name is thus calling out to one of the spirits within the person. This practice of calling a name occurs during the epeme night dance ritual. Dancers call a name of a relative and turn into the spirit-beings of the named. In this ritual we find that dancers when calling names of women do so through the mediating power objects. The article concludes by considering death, the dead body and the role of the objects in death. The approach taken is not intended to be holistic, but rather a presentation of ethnographic research indicating the potential and need for further examination of the power and role of objects in Hadza society.
Relative to the large amount of behavioural ecology literature, little has
been documented on Hadza ritual activity. Nor has it been placed in context of myth
and narrative. This is a serious lack given the agreement of both social anthropology
(Durkheim, Turner, Rappaport) and more recent evolutionary approaches, eg Sosis and
Bulbulia, on the central importance of ritual as the medium for establishing symbols
and showing commitment to the group. This paper examines the relationship of the
two gender rituals, the more regular monthly epeme, and the less frequently performed
female initiation, maitoko. Both sexes are participants in each ritual, but epeme is
governed by male-held ‘secrets’, while maitoko is governed by female ones. Drawing
on a case study where the two rituals ran concurrently, one by night, one by day, I will
link them as counterparts in a gender contest. The key myth on origins of epeme – a
male ‘secret’ – is also the source for dramatic ritual enactment by women and girls in
maitoko. While epeme rules of respect underpin Hadza ritual and economic life, the
importance of maitoko for women’s solidarity is indicated by its greater costliness. The
relationship of these contesting but counterpart rituals fits a model of a ‘pendulum of
power’ swinging between men and women (cf. Lewis, Finnegan), implying that hunter-gatherer
gender relations should be considered as dynamic.
doi: 10.1080/2153599X.2015.1024915
Supernatural belief presents an explanatory challenge to evolutionary theorists-it is both costly and prevalent. One influential functional explanation claims that the imagined threat of supernatural punishment can suppress selfishness and enhance cooperation. Specifically, morally concerned supreme deities or 'moralizing high gods' have been argued to reduce free-riding in large social groups, enabling believers to build the kind of complex societies that define modern humanity. Previous cross-cultural studies claiming to support the MHG hypothesis rely on correlational analyses only and do not correct for the statistical non-independence of sampled cultures. Here we use a Bayesian phylogenetic approach with a sample of 96 Austronesian cultures to test the MHG hypothesis as well as an alternative supernatural punishment hypothesis that allows punishment by a broad range of moralizing agents. We find evidence that broad supernatural punishment drives political complexity, whereas MHGs follow political complexity. We suggest that the concept of MHGs diffused as part of a suite of traits arising from cultural exchange between complex societies. Our results show the power of phylogenetic methods to address long-standing debates about the origins and functions of religion in human society.
© 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
Cross-cultural beliefs about gods’ concerns point to local socioecological challenges. Such appeals to gods’ concerns provide insights for understanding religious cognition specifically and the evolution of religious systems more generally. Here, we review case studies to this effect, and introduce the “god-problem problem”: to the extent that gods are concerned with local socioecological problems, which criteria does a problem need to satisfy in order to become an object of supernatural attention? We offer some preliminary solutions to this puzzle, which leads to a related, but often-overlooked, question: granted that features of religions may culturally evolve to adaptively fit to and resolve aspects of the local socioecological environment, what are the psychological processes through which this adaptation could occur? We wager that in order to answer the question satisfactorily, contemporary evolutionary approaches need to work together. Psychologically, the socioecological environment provides the initial impetus for a belief or practice by increasing the cognitive salience of a corresponding local problem and its costs. This increased receptivity makes such ideas and corollary behaviors easier to learn and transmit along the routes posited by dual-inheritance theorists. Behaviors feed back to beliefs and can offset the costs of social life in a variety of ways. As such, examining how cognition, social learning, behavior, and ecological pressures inform each other is especially crucial for understanding the persistence, diffusion, and evolution of religious ideas and practices.
It is a classical anthropological paradox that symbols of rebirth and fertility are frequently found in funerary rituals throughout the world. The original essays collected here re-examine this phenomenon through insights from China, India, New Guinea, Latin America, and Africa. The contributors, each a specialist in one of these areas, have worked in close collaboration to produce a genuinely innovative theoretical approach to the study of the symbolism surrounding death, an outline of which is provided in an important introduction by the editors. The major concern of the volume is the way in which funerary rituals dramatically transform the image of life as a dialectic flux involving exchange and transaction, marriage and procreation, into an image of a still, transcendental order in which oppositions such as those between self and other, wife-giver and wife-taker, Brahmin and untouchable, birth and therefore death have been abolished. This transformation often involves a general devaluation of biology, and, particularly, of sexuality, which is contrasted with a more spiritual and controlled source of life. The role of women, who are frequently associated with biological processes, mourning and death pollution, is often predominant in funerary rituals, and in examining this book makes a further contribution to the understanding of the symbolism of gender. The death rituals and the symbolism of rebirth are also analysed in the context of the political processes of the different societies considered, and it is argued that social order and political organisation may be legitimated through an exploitation of the emotions and biology.
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, especially compared to bigger gods in larger-scale societies? (2) Do beliefs in these deities encourage people to engage in behavior that would otherwise be perceived as costly? and (3) Does ritual reinforce beliefs in these deities? Drawing on interview responses, data from healing ceremonies, and ethnographic observation, we show that Sikameinan is believed to punish people who violate meat-sharing norms and that people ‘attacked’ by Sikameinan pay shamans to conduct healing rituals. The public nature of rituals, involving prestigious individuals apologizing to Sikameinan for the patient's stinginess, reinforce onlookers' beliefs about Sikameinan. The most widely shared beliefs about Sikameinan are represented in rituals while beliefs not represented vary considerably, indicating that ritual may be potent for cultural transmission. These results suggest that moralizing supernatural punishers may be more common than suspected and that the trend in the cultural evolution of religion has been an expansion of deities' scope, powers, and monitoring abilities.
Whether those who believe in God are more prosocial has been a long debated topic. Here we shed new light on this question by examining giving in incentivized Dictator Games where no mention of religion was made, played online with anonymous strangers. Study 1 (N = 15,827) found a significant correlation between belief and giving, r = .122 (robust to demographics). Study 2 (N = 2334) included the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) to examine whether this relationship could be explained by intuitive cognitive style driving both belief and prosociality. Study 2 replicated the correlation between belief and giving, r = .106, and found CRT to be negatively correlated with both belief, r = −.229, and giving, r = −.174. Critically, the relationship between belief and giving was reduced by 34% when controlling for CRT; and also adding basic demographics rendered the relationship non-significant. Our results suggest that—at least in this task and population—believers do show greater prosociality, but more due to intuitive cognitive style than belief per se.
Widespread cooperation is a defining feature of human societies from hunter-gatherer bands to nation states [1, 2], but explaining its evolution remains a challenge. Although positive assortment of cooperators is recognized as a basic requirement for the evolution of cooperation, the mechanisms governing assortment are debated. Moreover, the social structure of modern hunter-gatherers, characterized by high mobility, residential mixing, and low genetic relatedness [3], undermines assortment and adds to the puzzle of how cooperation evolved. Here, we analyze four years of data (2010, 2013, 2014, 2016) tracking residence and levels of cooperation elicited from a public goods game in Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Data were collected from 56 camps, comprising 383 unique individuals, 137 of whom we have data for two or more years. Despite significant residential mixing, we observe a robust pattern of assortment that is necessary for cooperation to evolve; in every year, Hadza camps exhibit high between-camp and low within-camp variation in cooperation. We find little evidence that cooperative behavior within individuals is stable over time or that similarity in cooperation between dyads predicts their future cohabitation. Both sets of findings are inconsistent with models that assume stable cooperative and selfish types, including partner choice models. Consistent with social norms, culture, and reciprocity theories, the strongest predictor of an individual's level of cooperation is the mean cooperation of their current campmates. These findings underscore the adaptive nature of human cooperation-particularly its responsiveness to social contexts-as a feature that is important in generating the assortment necessary for cooperation to evolve.
We investigate how religious beliefs in an omnipotent, omniscient God vs. locally concerned, more limited gods impact prosocial behavior at varying degrees of social distance. We recruit participants from traditional villages on Yasawa Island, Fiji. Yasawan religion includes belief in both universalistic Christian teachings and local deified ancestor spirits (Kalou-vu). Yasawans’ contrasting reliance on local, kin-based social networks and anonymous economic market exchange provides an interesting test case for how religious beliefs interact with wider social structures. We use an experimental priming procedure to test whether reminders of Christian vs. traditional imagery, as compared to neutral, influence local or self-favoritism in the random allocation game (RAG). We find that traditional imagery caused increased local – but not self – favoritism. Priming effects depended upon perceived resource uncertainty: participants primed with Christian imagery were most likely to allocate to distant co-religionists when they were least worried about resources. However, more uncertainty predicted higher local RAG allocations, further suggesting the importance of local social networks for managing such uncertainty. We further find additional support for previous findings that prosocial effects of punitive supernatural agent beliefs depend upon uncertainty. These findings further emphasize the interplay between contents of cultural forms like religious belief and socioecological context.
Our species’ biological success is unsurpassed – an achievement largely accredited to our remarkable capacity to cooperate. Large-scale cooperation, however, remains a puzzle. Recent work suggests that belief in the existence of omnipresent and omnipotent moralistic deities may have contributed to the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in large-scale societies. This study examines the relationship between religiosity and cooperation in the Hadza, one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer populations in the world. Hadza were surveyed about their religious beliefs and participated in two incentivized economic games, designed to measure rule-bending in favor of one’s campmates (game 1) and self (game 2) at the expense of Hadza living in other camps. Consistent with previous ethnographic descriptions, the Hadza engage in few religious practices and lack a strong belief in the existence of powerful and moralizing deities. The Hadza also show very high levels of rule-bending. There is, however, little evidence that belief in moralistic deities is associated with decreased rule-bending within the Hadza. Instead, the findings suggest that rule-bending for one’s campmates increases as the proportion of kin in one’s camp increases. Also, Hadza living in a geographic region close to markets and increased tourism exhibit greater rule-bending in favor of self compared to more isolated Hadza. The high levels of rule-bending and low levels of religiosity observed in the Hadza are discussed in light of the strong norms of sharing and egalitarianism that characterize their lives.
In recent years, scientists based in a variety of disciplines have attempted to explain the evolutionary origins of religious belief and practice1, 2, 3. Although they have focused on different aspects of the religious system, they consistently highlight the strong association between religiosity and prosocial behaviour (acts that benefit others). This association has been central to the argument that religious prosociality played an important role in the sociocultural florescence of our species4, 5, 6, 7. But empirical work evaluating the link between religion and prosociality has been somewhat mixed8, 9, 10, 11. Here, I use detailed, ethnographically informed data chronicling the religious practice and social support networks of the residents of two villages in South India to evaluate whether those who evince greater religiosity are more likely to undertake acts that benefit others. Exponential random graph models reveal that individuals who worship regularly and carry out greater and costlier public religious acts are more likely to provide others with support of all types. Those individuals are themselves better able to call on support, having a greater likelihood of reciprocal relationships. These results suggest that religious practice is taken as a signal of trustworthiness, generosity and prosociality, leading village residents to establish supportive, often reciprocal relationships with such individuals.
Several papers have reported that artificial surveillance cues, such as images of watching eyes, cause anonymous participants to behave as if they are actually under surveillance, thus increasing moral behavior. In a series of four experiments, we found no evidence that artificial surveillance cues impact reported moral judgment, self-rated possession of positive traits, or religiosity. Two small meta-analyses, both comprising six experiments investigating the effect of artificial surveillance cues on moral judgment, provided mixed conclusions. One meta-analysis produced a mean effect size not significantly different from zero and the other produced a mean effect size on the edge of significance. On the whole, artificial surveillance cues have inconsistent effects, or possibly no effect, on moral outcomes.
and Keywords 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.
Religious rituals often entail significant investments of time, energy, and money, and can risk bodily harm. Instead of being evolutionarily inexplicable, such costly religious acts have been argued to be honest signals of commitment to the beliefs and values of the community, helping individuals establish good reputations and foster trusting, cooperative relationships. Most tests of this hypothesis have evaluated whether religious signalers are more prosocial; here I investigate whether signal receivers actually perceive religious signalers as such. I do this with data collected over 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two villages in South India, where Hindu and Christian residents engage in different modes of religious practice, including dramatic acts of firewalking and spirit possession as well as the more subtle but consistent act of worshipping at a church or temple each week. Each mode of religious practice is found to be informative of a distinct set of reputational qualities. Broadly speaking, in the long term, individuals who invest more in the religious life of the village are not only seen as more devout, but also as having a suite of prosocial, other-focused traits. In the short term, individuals who perform greater and costlier acts in the annual Hindu festival show a slight increase in the percent of villagers recognizing them as physically strong and hardworking. These results suggest that people are attending to the full suite of religious acts carried out by their peers, using these signals to discern multiple aspects of their character and intentions.
Many studies have seemingly demonstrated that anonymous individuals who are shown artificial cues of being watched behave as if they are being watched by real people. However, several studies have failed to replicate this surveillance cue effect. In light of these mixed results, we conducted two meta-analyses investigating the effect of artificial observation cues on generosity. Overall, our meta-analyses found no evidence to support the claim that artificial surveillance cues increase generosity, either by increasing how generous individuals are, or by increasing the probability that individuals will show any generosity at all. Therefore, surveillance cue effects should be interpreted cautiously.
It has been argued that children who possess an advanced theory of mind (ToM) are more likely to act prosocially, yet the empirical findings are mixed. To address this issue definitively, a meta-analytic integration of all prior literature that met appropriate inclusion criteria was conducted. In total, 76 studies including 6,432 children between 2 and 12 years of age contributed to these analyses. Collapsed across all studies, a significant association emerged (r = .19), indicating that children with higher ToM scores also received higher scores on concurrent measures of prosocial behavior. The magnitude of this effect was similar across ToM assessments requiring identification of others' cognitions versus emotions, and it existed irrespective of whether the ToM measure imposed demands on false belief reasoning or not. The association with ToM was also evident for different subtypes of prosocial behavior (helping, cooperating, comforting). ToM had a similar effect for boys and girls, but was slightly stronger in children aged 6 years or older, relative to their younger peers. Taken together, these findings provide the strongest evidence to date that being able to explicitly consider what other people are thinking and feeling is related to children's tendencies to act prosocially, although the magnitude of the association is relatively weak. (PsycINFO Database Record
Theorists have argued that religious beliefs emerged as a consequence of the human propensity to attribute mental states. However, little empirical work has explored the relationship between individual variability in theory of mind (ToM) and religious beliefs. We investigated the connection between empathy, emotional intelligence, systemizing, ToM, and religiosity in two college student samples. Empathy was correlated with aspects of religiosity but did not uniquely predict religiosity. Emotional intelligence was positively related to religiosity, whereas ToM was either unrelated or negatively related to religiosity. We argue that the basic ability to reason about self and other, including self-awareness (emotional intelligence) and empathy, rather than accuracy in mentalizing (ToM), predicts religiosity. However, despite these intriguing patterns, our measures of sociocognitive abilities explained little variance in our religiosity measures. Future research should explore other samples including those absent of empathy and ToM, and should explore capacities such as agency detection.
Religion and Morality are not Isomorphic or Commensurable The Durkheimian Stream: Obligation, Commitment, and Ritual Performance The Weberian Stream: Practice and Religious Values A Brief Ethnographic Invitation Conclusion Acknowledgments References
In The Hadza, Frank Marlowe provides a quantitative ethnography of one of the last remaining societies of hunter-gatherers in the world. The Hadza, who inhabit an area of East Africa near the Serengeti and Olduvai Gorge, have long drawn the attention of anthropologists and archaeologists for maintaining a foraging lifestyle in a region that is key to understanding human origins. Marlowe ably applies his years of research with the Hadza to cover the traditional topics in ethnography-subsistence, material culture, religion, and social structure. But the book's unique contribution is to introduce readers to the more contemporary field of behavioral ecology, which attempts to understand human behavior from an evolutionary perspective. To that end, The Hadza also articulates the necessary background for readers whose exposure to human evolutionary theory is minimal.
People’s large-scale cooperation with genetically unrelated people is widely assumed to lie beyond the scope of standard evolutionary mechanisms like kin selection and reciprocal altruism and to require mechanisms specific to human sociality. The emergence of the idea of being monitored by supernatural agents who can punish social norm violations has been proposed as one solution to this problem. In parallel, secular authorities can have similar functions with that of religious authority based on supernatural agents in today’s secularized world. However, it is not clear whether it is the idea of religious or secular authority in general or the punishing aspects of both institutions in particular that leads to increased cooperation and prosociality. Study 1 showed that people reported more prosocial intentions after being implicitly primed with punishing religious and secular authorities (versus non-punishing ones or a neutral one) in a scrambled sentence task. Study 2 showed that explicitly priming the punishing aspects of God (versus the non-punishing aspects or a neutral prime) led to an increase in the level of prosocial intentions. The findings support the supernatural punishment hypothesis and suggest a similar mechanism for the influence of secular authority on prosociality. More generally, the findings are consistent with views that punishment, whether real or imagined, played an important role in the evolution of large-scale cooperation in the human species.
How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today--even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods"--the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths--spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other. Once human minds could conceive of supernatural beings, Norenzayan argues, the stage was set for rapid cultural and historical changes that eventually led to large societies with Big Gods--powerful, omniscient, interventionist deities concerned with regulating the moral behavior of humans. How? As the saying goes, "watched people are nice people." It follows that people play nice when they think Big Gods are watching them, even when no one else is. Yet at the same time that sincere faith in Big Gods unleashed unprecedented cooperation within ever-expanding groups, it also introduced a new source of potential conflict between competing groups. In some parts of the world, such as northern Europe, secular institutions have precipitated religion's decline by usurping its community-building functions. These societies with atheist majorities--some of the most cooperative, peaceful, and prosperous in the world--climbed religion's ladder, and then kicked it away. So while Big Gods answers fundamental questions about the origins and spread of world religions, it also helps us understand another, more recent social transition--the rise of cooperative societies without belief in gods.
Mentalizing, or theory of mind, has been argued to be critical for supporting religious beliefs and practices involving supernatural agents. As individuals with autism spectrum conditions have been found to have deficits in mentalizing, this raises the question as to how they may conceive of gods and behave in relation to gods. To examine this, we compared high functioning individuals with autism (HFA) to typically developing individuals across seven key aspects of religious cognition and behaviour: (1) strength of belief; (2) anthropomorphism of god concepts; (3) felt closeness towards the god; (4) prayer habits; (5) attraction to prayer; (6) efficacy of prayer; and (7) a sense of agency whilst praying. A battery of mentalizing tasks was administered to measure mentalizing ability, along with the Autism-Spectrum Quotient. As expected, typically developing subjects performed better than HFA subjects in the advanced mentalizing task. However, no statistically significant differences were found with first order and second order false belief tasks. In contrast to our predictions and previous research on the religiosity of HFA, we found very little differences between the groups in their religious cognition and behaviour. Moreover, the relationship between mentalizing ability and most of our measures of religious cognition and behaviour was weak and negative. Our data suggest that HFA's deficits in mentalizing appear to have only minimal impact on the way they interact and think about gods. We end the paper by re-evaluating the role mentalizing may have in religious cognition and behaviour.