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Religious signaling and prosociality: A review of the literature
Purpose
This study aims to analyse how cultural and religious values shape individual attitudes towards responsible consumption (RC), with a particular emphasis on contrasting Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic countries. The objective was to find out how adherence to religious beliefs could drive sustainable behaviours as a sure way to achieve sustainable development goals, among them RC and production.
Design/methodology/approach
The research classifies countries into Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic based on data derived from World Values Surveys from 1980 to 2020. To find out the effect of religious and cultural values on RC behaviours, the authors use a logistic regression model by controlling the sociodemographic variables country, denomination and town size.
Findings
The findings determined that in Abrahamic countries, high adherence to religious teachings is strongly correlated with positive RC behaviours. In most non-Abrahamic countries, however, while the strength of the effect of cultural values on RC is somewhat diminished, there is potential for a positive shift insofar as the central doctrines of the respective faiths will be adopted more actively by their adherents.
Research limitations/implications
While this study provides valuable insights into the influence of cultural and religious values on RC, it is limited by its reliance on cross-sectional data, which restricts the ability to infer causality. Future research could benefit from longitudinal studies to track changes over time or experimental designs to test causality more directly. Additionally, the study’s focus on broad religious categories may overlook the nuanced differences within each religious group, suggesting a need for more detailed subgroup analyses.
Practical implications
The practical implications of such findings lie in the fact that marketers have to design campaigns that relate to the cultural and religious ethos of their target audiences. Therefore, marketing strategies locally practised bring effectiveness in running initiatives meant to be taken for sustainable consumption practices, to develop brand loyalty and to support corporate environmental and social responsibility.
Social implications
By aligning consumption practices with religious teachings, communities can foster a collective sense of purpose and ethical responsibility. This alignment not only enhances social cohesion but also supports broader social goals such as environmental sustainability and economic moderation. Moreover, by encouraging values like thrift and stewardship, societies can mitigate the adverse effects of consumerism, such as waste and environmental degradation, thus improving the quality of life and fostering a more sustainable future.
Originality/value
This paper is going to add to the existing literature by identifying how religious teachings can be pivotal for the sustainability of modern times. Its findings provide new insight for policymakers and marketers who are seeking to encourage RC in cultures.
Costly signaling theory of religion has been proposed to explain the evolutionary adaptiveness of religion in general and, specifically, its prosocial effects, including the relative longevity of religious communes vis-à-vis their secular counterparts. This article focuses on two crucial aspects of this relationship: the features and functions of signals and the mechanism through which signaling translates into enhanced prosociality. It identifies some of the key factors of the costliness of behavior and distinguishes between religious and secular signals, arguing that only the latter serve to broadcast commitment. The role of religious signals, instead, might be to stimulate the supernatural watching (“Under His Eye”) mechanism: enhancing supernatural sanctions beliefs and providing a setting in which implicit prosocial responses are triggered. The relative absence of this mechanism in secular communities may explain their shorter life spans. A link is thus established between the costly signaling and supernatural punishment theories of religious behavior.
Around the world, people engage in practices that involve self-inflicted pain and apparently wasted resources. Researchers theorized that these practices help stabilize within-group cooperation by assorting individuals committed to collective action. While this proposition was previously studied using existing religious practices, we provide a controlled framework for an experimental investigation of various predictions derived from this theory. We recruited 372 university students in the Czech Republic who were randomly assigned into either a high-cost or low-cost condition and then chose to play a public goods game (PGG) either in a group that wastes money to signal commitment to high contributions in the game or to play in the group without such signals. We predicted that cooperators would assort in the high-cost revealed group and that, despite these costs, they would contribute more to the common pool and earn larger individual rewards over five iterations of PGG compared with the concealed group and participants in the low-cost condition. The results showed that the assortment of cooperators was more effective in the high-cost condition and translated into larger contributions of the remaining endowment to the common pool, but participants in the low-cost revealed group earned the most. We conclude that costly signals can serve as an imperfect assorting mechanism, but the size of the costs needs to be carefully balanced with potential benefits to be profitable.
Performing a dramatic act of religious devotion, creating an art exhibit, or releasing a new product are all examples of public acts that signal quality and contribute to building a reputation. Signalling theory predicts that these public displays can reliably reveal quality. However, data from ethnographic work in South India suggests that more prominent individuals gain more from reputation-building religious acts than more marginalized individuals. To understand this phenomenon, we extend signalling theory to include variation in people’s social prominence or social capital, first with an analytical model and then with an agent-based model. We consider two ways in which social prominence/capital may alter signalling: (i) it impacts observers’ priors, and (ii) it alters the signallers’ pay-offs. These two mechanisms can result in both a ‘reputational shield,’ where low quality individuals are able to ‘pass’ as high quality thanks to their greater social prominence/capital, and a ‘reputational poverty trap,’ where high quality individuals are unable to improve their standing owing to a lack of social prominence/capital. These findings bridge the signalling theory tradition prominent in behavioural ecology, anthropology and economics with the work on status hierarchies in sociology, and shed light on the complex ways in which individuals make inferences about others.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.
Evolutionary perspectives suggest that participation in collective rituals may serve important communicative functions by signaling practitioners' commitment to the community and its values. While previous research has examined the effects of ritual signals at the individual and collective level, there has been limited attention directed to the impact of socio-environmental factors on the quality of ritual signaling. We examined this impact in the context of the Thaipusam Kavadi, a collective ritual performed by Tamil Hindus worldwide that involves body piercings and other costly activities. We show that participants' relative position in the social hierarchy systematically affects the form of ritual signaling. Specifically, we found that low-status participants are more likely to engage in signaling modalities that require somatic and opportunity costs in the form of body piercings and cumulative effort, while high-status individuals are more likely to use financial capital, in the form of more elaborate material offerings to the deity. Moreover, signaling in each particular modality is stronger among individuals who participate in more public (but not private) rituals, corresponding to their long-term commitment to the community. In sum, our results demonstrate that social hierarchies exact unequal requirements on ritual participants, who in turn modify their signaling strategies accordingly.
The hijab is central to the lives of Muslim women across the world but little is known about the actual effects exerted by this garment on perceptions of the wearer. Indeed, while previous research has suggested that wearing the hijab may affect the physical attractiveness of women, the actual effect of wearing the hijab on perceptions of female facial attractiveness by Muslim men in a Muslim country is largely unknown. Accordingly, this study investigated the effects of the hijab on female facial attractiveness perceived by practising Muslim men living in their native Muslim country (the United Arab Emirates). Participants were presented with frontal-head images of women shown in three conditions: in the fully covered condition, heads were completely covered by the hijab except for the face; in the partially covered condition, heads were completely covered by the hijab except for the face and areas around the forehead and each side of the face and head; in the uncovered condition, heads had no covering at all. The findings revealed that faces where heads were uncovered or partially covered were rated as equally attractive, and both were rated as substantially more attractive than faces where heads were fully covered. Thus, while wearing the hijab can suppress female facial attractiveness to men, these findings suggest that not all hijab wearing has this effect, and female facial attractiveness for practising Muslim men living in their native Muslim country may not be reduced simply by wearing this garment. Indeed, from the findings we report, slight changes to the positioning of the hijab (the partially covered condition) produce perceptions of facial attractiveness that are no lower than when no hijab is worn, and this may have important implications for wearing the hijab in Muslim societies. Finally, we argue that the pattern of effects we observed is not explained by anti-Islamic feeling or cultural endogamy, and that a major contributory factor is that being fully covered by the hijab occludes external features, especially the hair and lateral parts of the head and face, which, when normally visible, provide a substantial perceptual contribution to human facial attractiveness.
Communication is central to human life, yet it leaves humans vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation. Humans have therefore evolved a suite of psychological mechanisms for the evaluation of speakers and their messages. Here, we test a key hypothesized function of these "epistemic vigilance" mechanisms: the selective remembering of links between speakers and messages that are inconsistent with preexisting beliefs. Across four experiments, participants (N = 707) read stories associated with different contexts, with each story containing concepts that violate core knowledge intuitions ("counterintuitive concepts") and ordinary concepts. Exp. 1 revealed that after a brief distractor (2 minutes) participants more accurately attributed counterintuitive concepts to their speakers than ordinary concepts. Exp. 2a-b replicated this finding and found that this attribution accuracy advantage also extended to counterintuitive versus ordinary concepts associated with other contextual details-places and dates. Exp. 3 then tested whether this attribution accuracy advantage was more stable over time for speakers than for places. After a short distractor (20-minutes), there was a counterintuitive versus ordinary concept attribution accuracy advantage for both speakers and places. However, when participants were tested again after a long delay (48-hours), this attribution accuracy advantage more than doubled for speakers but disappeared entirely for places. We discuss the implications of these findings to the set of psychological mechanisms theorized to monitor and evaluate communication to guard our database of beliefs about the world.
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 cooperativeness, religious belief, difference from normal humans and supernatural power from shamans’ adherence to special taboos. We investigated costly prohibitions on shamanic healers, known as sikerei, among the rainforest horticulturalist Mentawai people of Siberut Island. We found that shamans must observe permanent taboos on various animals, as well as prohibitions on sex and food during initiation and ceremonial healing. Using vignettes, we evaluated Mentawai participants’ inferences about taboo adherence, testing three different but not mutually exclusive hypotheses: cooperative costly signalling, credibility-enhancing displays and supernatural otherness. We found support for all three: Mentawai participants infer self-denying shamans to be (a) cooperative, (b) sincere believers in the religious rules and (c) dissimilar from normal humans and with greater supernatural powers. People's inferences about religious self-denial are multidimensional and consistent with several functional accounts.
The most widely cited explanation for the evolution of reliable signals is Zahavi's so‐called Handicap Principle, which proposes that signals are honest because they are costly to produce. Here we provide a critical review of the Handicap Principle and its theoretical development. We explain why this idea is erroneous, and how it nevertheless became widely accepted as the leading explanation for honest signalling. In 1975, Zahavi proposed that elaborate secondary sexual characters impose ‘handicaps’ on male survival, not due to inadvertent signalling trade‐offs, but as a mechanism that functions to demonstrate males' genetic quality to potential mates. His handicap hypothesis received many criticisms, and in response, Zahavi clarified his hypothesis and explained that it assumes that signals are wasteful as well as costly, and that they evolve because wastefulness enforces honesty. He proposed that signals evolve under ‘signal selection’, a non‐Darwinian type of selection that favours waste rather than efficiency. He maintained that the handicap hypothesis provides a general principle to explain the evolution of all types of signalling systems, i.e. the Handicap Principle. In 1977, Zahavi proposed a second hypothesis for honest signalling, which received many different labels and interpretations, although it was assumed to be another example of handicap signalling. In 1990, Grafen published models that he claimed vindicated Zahavi's Handicap Principle. His conclusions were widely accepted and the Handicap Principle subsequently became the dominant paradigm for explaining the evolution of honest signalling in the biological and social sciences. Researchers have subsequently focused on testing predications of the Handicap Principle, such as measuring the absolute costs of honest signals (and using energetic and other proximate costs as proxies for fitness), but very few have attempted to test Grafen's models. We show that Grafen's models do not support the handicap hypothesis, although they do support Zahavi's second hypothesis, which proposes that males adjust their investment into the expression of their sexual signals according to their condition and ability to bear the costs (and risks to their survival). Rather than being wasteful over‐investments, honest signals evolve in this scenario because selection favours efficient and optimal investment into signal expression and minimizes signalling costs. This idea is very different from the handicap hypothesis, but it has been widely misinterpreted and equated to the Handicap Principle. Theoretical studies have since shown that signalling costs paid at the equilibrium are neither sufficient nor necessary to maintain signal honesty, and that honesty can evolve through differential benefits, as well as differential costs. There have been increasing criticisms of the Handicap Principle, but they have focused on the limitations of Grafen's model and overlooked the fact that it is not a handicap model. This model is better understood within a Darwinian framework of adaptive signalling trade‐offs, without the added burden and confusing logic of the Handicap Principle. There is no theoretical or empirical support for the Handicap Principle and the time is long overdue to usher this idea into an ‘honorable retirement’.
Religion has often been conceptualized as a collection of beliefs, practices, and proscriptions that lift people’s thoughts and behaviors out of the metaphorical gutter of sex and selfishness toward lives full of meaning, contemplation, and community service. But religious beliefs and behaviors may serve selfish, sexual motivations in ways that are not always obvious or consciously intended. We review two lines of research illustrating nonobvious links between the mundane and the religious. First, contrary to long-held assumptions that religious upbringing causes sexually restrictive attitudes and behaviors, several large data sets now suggest a reverse causal arrow—people’s preferred mating strategies determining their attraction toward, or repulsion from, religion. Second, other recent findings suggest that distrust of nonreligious individuals is almost completely erased by knowledge that they are following a restricted monogamous lifestyle. Thus, reproductive strategies often underlie apparently sacred concerns. We close with a consideration of ways in which reproductive interests might underlie a broad range of benefits associated with religious affiliation.
Several prominent evolutionary theories contend that religion was critical to the emergence of large-scale societies and encourages cooperation in contemporary complex groups. These theories argue that religious systems provide a reliable mechanism for finding trustworthy anonymous individuals under conditions of risk. In support, studies find that people displaying cues of religious identity are more likely to be trusted by anonymous coreligionists. However, recent research has found that displays of religious commitment can increase trust across religious divides. These findings are puzzling from the perspective that religion emerges to regulate coalitions. To date, these issues have not been investigated outside of American undergraduate samples nor have studies considered how religious identities interact with other essential group-membership signals, such as ancestry, to affect intergroup trust. Here, we address these issues and compare religious identity, ancestry, and trust among and between Christians and Hindus living in Mauritius. Ninety-seven participants rated the trustworthiness of faces, and in a modified trust game distributed money among these faces, which varied according to religious and ethnic identity. In contrast to previous research, we find that markers of religious identity increase monetary investments only among in-group members and not across religious divides. Moreover, out-group religious markers on faces of in-group ancestry decrease reported trustworthiness. These findings run counter to recent studies collected in the United States and suggest that local socioecologies influence the relationships between religion and trust. We conclude with suggestions for future research and a discussion of the challenges of conducting field experiments with remote populations.
Many human groups achieve high levels of trust and cooperation, but these achievements are vulnerable to exploitation. Several theorists have suggested that when groups impose costs on their members, these costs can function to limit freeriding, and hence promote trust and cooperation. While a substantial body of experimental research has demonstrated a positive relationship between costs and cooperation in religious groups, to date, this relationship has not held for secular groups. Here we extend this line of research by comparing trust and cooperation among 11 secular groups, including four U.S. Greek fraternities that impose high costs on their members. We find that although fraternities impose greater costs on their members than social clubs, fraternities and social clubs do not significantly differ in their levels of intra-group trust. Moreover, variation in costs does not explain variation in trust among fraternities. We suggest that the lack of an evident relationship between costs and trust in our results is because secular groups, unlike religious groups, lack repeated rituals that are coupled with supernatural ideologies. We conclude by suggesting possible avenues for future research.
Acts of prosociality, such as donating to charity, are often analysed in a similar way to acts of conspicuous advertising; both involve costly signals revealing hidden qualities that increase the signaller’s prestige. However, experimental work suggests that grand gestures, even if prosocial, may damage one’s reputation for trustworthiness and cooperativeness if they are perceived as prestige enhancing: individuals may gain some types of cooperative benefits only when they perform prosocial acts in particular ways. Here, we contrast subtle, less obviously costly, interpersonal forms of prosocial behaviour with high-cost displays to a large audience, drawing on the example of food sharing in subsistence economies. This contrast highlights how highly visible prosocial displays may be effective for attracting new partners, while subtle signals may be crucial for ensuring trust and commitment with long-term partners. Subtle dyadic signals may be key to understanding the long-term maintenance of interpersonal networks that function to reduce unanticipated risks.
Religious people are more trusted than nonreligious people. Although most theorists attribute these perceptions to the beliefs of religious targets, religious individuals also differ in behavioral ways that might cue trust. We examined whether perceivers might trust religious targets more because they heuristically associate religion with slow life-history strategies. In three experiments, we found that religious targets are viewed as slow life-history strategists and that these findings are not the result of a universally positive halo effect; that the effect of target religion on trust is significantly mediated by the target’s life-history traits (i.e., perceived reproductive strategy); and that when perceivers have direct information about a target’s reproductive strategy, their ratings of trust are driven primarily by his or her reproductive strategy, rather than religion. These effects operate over and above targets’ belief in moralizing gods and offer a novel theoretical perspective on religion and trust.
We present a synthesized biological and cultural approach to religion. We discuss religion in terms of evolutionary byproducts, adaptation, cultural learning, and cultural evolution to help explain where religion originates. Specifically, we propose that religion first appeared because it is a robust byproduct of several adaptive modules, that these byproducts may in fact be adaptive or functional, and that cultural learning largely determines the details of religion and the degree of religiosity. In all we discuss religion as a product of the complex interplay of culture and biology.
How robust is the perceived association between immorality and atheism? Studies across 13 countries demonstrate that immoral behaviour is intuitively associated with atheism: people routinely assume that an immoral person is likely to be an atheist, and this effect is consistent across a wide range of societies, though with notable variation.
The relationship between religion and social behavior has been the subject of longstanding debates. Recent evolutionary models of religious morality propose that particular types of supernatural beliefs related to moralizing and punitive high gods will have observable effects on prosociality. We tested this hypothesis, comparing the effects of diverse religious beliefs, practices, and contexts among Hindus in Mauritius. We found that specific aspects of religious belief (related to moralizing gods) as well as religious practice (participation in high-intensity rituals) were significant predictors of prosocial behavior. These findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of religious prosociality and have significant implications for the evolution of morality. ARTICLE HISTORY
This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co-option of the evolved person concept. In three experiments, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate a series of statements for which core intuitions about persons and acquired Christian beliefs about God were consistent (i.e., true according to both [e.g., “God has beliefs that are true”] or false according to both [e.g., “All beliefs God has are false”]) or inconsistent (i.e., true on intuition but false theologically [e.g., “God has beliefs that are false”] or false on intuition but true theologically [e.g., “All beliefs God has are true”]). Participants were less accurate and slower to respond to inconsistent versus consistent statements, suggesting that the core intuitions both coexisted alongside and interfered with the acquired beliefs (Experiments 1 and 2). In Experiment 2 when responding under time pressure participants were disproportionately more likely to make errors on inconsistent versus consistent statements than when responding with no time pressure, suggesting that the resolution of interference requires cognitive resources the functioning of which decreases under cognitive load. In Experiment 3 a plausible alternative interpretation of these findings was ruled out by demonstrating that the response accuracy and time differences on consistent versus inconsistent statements occur for God—a supernatural religious entity—but not for a natural religious entity (a priest).
What is morality? And to what extent does it vary around the world? The theory of morality-as-cooperation argues that morality consists of a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict recurrent in human social life. By using nonzerosum game theory to identify distinct problems of cooperation and their solutions, morality-as-cooperation exhibits a theoretical precision, explanatory scope and predictive power, exceeding that of previous atheoretical accounts of morality. For example, morality-as-cooperation predicts that specific forms of cooperative behaviour – helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior ownership – will be considered morally good wherever they arise, in all cultures. We test this prediction by investigating the moral valence of these cooperative behaviours in the ethnographic records of 60 societies. We find that, as predicted, their moral valence is uniformly positive. We find also that the majority of these cooperative moral values appear in the majority of cultures, in all regions of the world. We conclude that morality-as-cooperation could at last provide the unified theory of morality that anthropology has hitherto lacked.
Belief in a personal God has been central in research and theory in the psychology of religion and spirituality. Beliefs may seem to be less important to Jews. Indeed, recent national surveys suggest that even some observant Jews report disbelief in God. Yet there are historical, philosophical, theological, and cultural reasons to suggest that Jewish beliefs about God are complex and may not be adequately measured as a yes/no survey response. Using both qualitative (in-depth interviews) and quantitative data (2 new measures of God representations), we show that Jews are quite likely to believe that God exists and that they hold diverse representations of God as a benevolent personal being, as a mystical cosmic force, and as ineffable—unknowable and incomprehensible. Jewish God representations appear to be relatively unstable and indefinite compared with the God representations of certain other religious groups. Our findings suggest that more nuanced research methods are needed in assessing religiosity, generally, and beliefs about God among Jews, specifically. Implications for the study of relational spirituality are discussed.
Immigrant women are a particularly vulnerable part of the immigrant population. In this paper we analyse negative attitudes towards immigrant women in Norway. We focus on immigrant women’s formal job qualifications, their religious background and wearing of hijab – the headscarf sometimes used by Muslim women. Using survey-embedded experiments we are able to analyse the net effects on attitudes of job qualifications, Islamic religious background and the hijab. The results show that native population frequently has more negative views of Muslim women who wear a hijab. The negative effects of a hijab do not seem to be strongly reduced if a woman wearing it has higher education. With a single exception, the results also show that Muslim background in itself (i.e. without the hijab) does not have any strong effect on attitudes of the native population towards immigrant women.
Previous work has shown that markers of Islamic identity, such as the hijab, result in more negative interpersonal judgments. In the present study, 88 Muslim men and 88 non-Muslim men rated a series of women who were depicted as wearing or not wearing a hijab for physical attractiveness, religiosity, popularity, sociability, approachability, and competence. Results showed that women wearing the hijab were rated as significantly more religious, but also less attractive, popular, sociable, approachable, and competent. Participant religion did not influence ratings, with the exception of attractiveness (non-Muslims provided higher ratings for unveiled stimuli) and approachability ratings (Muslims provided higher ratings for veiled stimuli). These results indicate the negative impact of wearing the hijab on interpersonal judgments of women and highlight the needs for interventions that challenge simplistic assumptions about markers of Islamic identity in the Western world.
We conducted 4 experiments to examine how people incorporate visual information about strangers' religious identities-religious badges-into their decisions about how much to trust them. Experiment 1 revealed that Christian and non-Christian participants were more trusting (as measured by self-report) of targets who wore a religious badge associated with Christianity (Ash Wednesday ashes) than toward targets who did not wear such a badge. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and also revealed that the effects of Ash Wednesday ashes on Christians' and non-Christians' trust extended to a behavioral measure of trust (i.e., monetary allocations in a multiplayer trust game). Experiment 3 replicated Experiments 1 and 2 with a different religious badge (a necklace with the Christian cross on it). Experiment 4 ruled out a potential confound. Consistent with a stereotype interpretation, these results suggest that U.S. students regard visual cues to people's espousal of Christian religious beliefs as signals of their trustworthiness. (PsycINFO Database Record
Anthropologists have long recognized that cultural evolution critically depends on the transmission and generation of information. However, between the selection pressures of evolution and the actual behaviour of individuals, scientists have suspected that other processes are at work. With the advent of what has come to be known as the cognitive revolution, psychologists are now exploring the evolved problem-solving and information-processing mechanisms that allow humans to absorb and generate culture. The purpose of this book is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evolutionary psychology, which supplied the necessary connection between the underlying evolutionary biology and the complex and irreducible social phenomena studied by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians.
In this Henry Myers Lecture, I summarize several decades of collaborative research on the role of ritual in group bonding and co‐operation, ranging from psychology experiments in university laboratories to field research among indigenous groups, and from surveys with armed revolutionaries to extended interviews with religious adherents. This body of work is helping to clarify the mechanisms by which social cohesion and prosocial behaviour are generated in a variety of groups, such as mothers experiencing traumatic births, football fans suffering defeat at crucial matches in Brazil and Australia, and Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia contemplating insults to Islam in faraway conflicts. These findings also shed light on changes in ritual life from the palaeolithic to the first farmers and from archaic states to the first moralizing religions. In keeping with the forward‐looking theme of the 2022 RAI conference, I consider the implications of these findings for various practical problems facing humanity today, such as how to reduce crime and to prevent violent extremism and how to foster more inclusive forms of leadership and motivate action on environmental issues.
Trust can transform conflicting interests into cooperation. But how can individuals know when to trust others? Here, I develop the theory that reputation building may signal cooperative intent, or "trustworthiness." I model a simple representation of this theory in which individuals 1) optionally invest in a reputation by performing costly helpful behavior ("signaling"); 2) optionally use others' reputations when choosing a partner; and 3) optionally cooperate with that partner. In evolutionary simulations, high levels of reputation building, of choosing partners based on reputation, and of cooperation within partnerships emerged. Costly helping behavior evolved into an honest signal of trustworthiness when it was adaptive for cooperators, relative to defectors, to invest in the long-term benefits of a reputation for helping. I show using game theory that this occurs when cooperators gain larger marginal benefits from investing in signaling than do defectors. This happens without the usual costly signaling assumption that individuals are of two "types," which differ in quality. Signaling of trustworthiness may help explain phenomena such as philanthropy, pro-sociality, collective action, punishment , and advertising in humans and may be particularly applicable to courtship in other animals.
We show that altruism can evolve as a signaling device designed to solve commitment problems in interactions with outside options. In a simple evolutionary game-theoretic model, uncertainty about agents' incentives to stay in a relationship can cause the relationship to collapse, because of a vicious circle where being skeptical about one's partner's commitment makes one even more likely to leave the relationship. When agents have the possibility to send costly gifts to each other, analytical modeling and agent-based simulations show that gift-giving can evolve as a credible signal of commitment, which decreases the likelihood of relationship dissolution. Interestingly, different conventions can determine the meaning of the signal conveyed by the gift. Exactly two kinds of conventions are evolutionarily stable: according to the first convention, an agent who sends a gift signals that he intends to stay in the relationship if and only if he also receives a gift; according to the second convention, a gift signals unconditional commitment.
The signaling theory of religion has many claimed virtues, but these are not necessarily all realizable at the same time. Modeling choices involve trade-offs, and the available options here have not traditionally been well understood. This paper offers an overview of signaling theory relevant to the signaling theory of religion, arguing for a narrow, “core” reading of it. I outline a broad taxonomy of the choices on offer for signaling models, and examples of how previous and potential approaches to modeling religious signaling meet or fail to meet the initial promise of the theory. A pluralist approach to religious signaling seems possible, but this would require a high level of detail and specificity with respect to both formal models and target systems.
Previous research has shown that participation in the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca can lead to both more positive outgroup attitudes and increased commitment to Muslim identity. We describe a survey of pilgrims (N = 1176) carried out at Mecca, during the Hajj, which tested explanations for these experiences of self‐change at the time of their occurrence. In line with contact theory, perceived cooperation among pilgrims indirectly predicted more positive outgroup attitudes (as well as enhanced Muslim identification), via identification with the crowd. In line with social identity and identity congruence explanations, positive emotional experience and the perception that the crowd embodied the Muslim value of unity predicted self‐change variables through identification with the crowd. The finding that participation in an all‐Muslim gathering increases positive views of other groups (including non‐Muslims) through identification with the crowd offers an alternative perspective to suggestions that such gatherings might encourage intolerance. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Humans frequently perform extravagant and seemingly costly behaviors, such as widely sharing hunted resources, erecting conspicuous monumental structures, and performing dramatic acts of religious devotion. Evolutionary anthropologists and archeologists have used signaling theory to explain the function of such displays, drawing inspiration from behavioral ecology, economics, and the social sciences. While signaling theory is broadly aimed at explaining honest communication, it has come to be strongly associated with the handicap principle, which proposes that such costly extravagance is in fact an adaptation for signal reliability. Most empirical studies of signaling theory have focused on obviously costly acts, and consequently anthropologists have likely overlooked a wide range of signals that also promote reliable communication. Here, we build on recent developments in signaling theory and animal communication, developing an updated framework that highlights the diversity of signal contents, costs, contexts, and reliability mechanisms present within human signaling systems. By broadening the perspective of signaling theory in human systems, we strive to identify promising areas for further empirical and theoretical work.
Based on ethnographies of two Evangelical Christian contexts in the U.S., this article investigates how Evangelicals’ expectation that prayer be sincere – i.e., an honest reflection of the praying subject's true thoughts, feelings, and desires – enabled prayer to do particular kinds of cultural work for Evangelicals at the same time it created a series of troubling dilemmas surrounding the practice itself. Through this empirical analysis, we develop the more general theoretical concept of normative frames to draw broader sociological attention to how groups’ normative expectations regarding how cultural tools should (and should not) work interact with and influence the pragmatics of culture in action. We discuss how future sociological scholarship on the possibilities and problems of culture in action can benefit from further study of the complex and sometimes paradoxical interplay between cultural tools and their normative frames.
Decisions to trust help form the basis of relationships and society yet little is known about their neurophysiology. We told participants they were playing a coin toss game with a trustworthy and an untrustworthy person and measured their neural activity with EEG as they decided whether to trust those fictitious interaction partners. Target people ostensibly correctly reported the outcome of a coin toss on 66% of trials. Behaviorally, participants probability matched and chose to trust the reported coin flips from each profile equally by the end of 100 trials. Electrophysiologically, there were reliable differences in the pattern of oscillatory activity in the alpha band (8-13Hz) over parietal electrode sites 1-3 s prior to their trust decisions. Specifically, for trustworthy profiles, there was greater alpha suppression for trust decisions vs. distrust decisions. Conversely, for untrustworthy profiles there was greater alpha suppression for distrust decisions vs. trust decisions. This differential activity (trust minus distrust) also predicted the number of trust decisions made. Our results indicate that the intentions to trust people form very early in the processing stream and manifest as alpha suppression over parietal cortex.
Mounting evidence supports long-standing claims that religions can extend cooperative networks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 . However, religious prosociality may have a strongly parochial component 5 . Moreover, aspects of religion may promote or exacerbate conflict with those outside a given religious group, promoting regional violence 10 , intergroup conflict 11 and tacit prejudice against non-believers 12 ,13 . Anti-atheist prejudice—a growing concern in increasingly secular societies 14 —affects employment, elections, family life and broader social inclusion 12 ,13 . Preliminary work in the United States suggests that anti-atheist prejudice stems, in part, from deeply rooted intuitions about religion’s putatively necessary role in morality. However, the cross-cultural prevalence and magnitude—as well as intracultural demographic stability—of such intuitions, as manifested in intuitive associations of immorality with atheists, remain unclear. Here, we quantify moral distrust of atheists by applying well-tested measures in a large global sample (N = 3,256; 13 diverse countries). Consistent with cultural evolutionary theories of religion and morality, people in most—but not all— of these countries viewed extreme moral violations as representative of atheists. Notably, anti-atheist prejudice was even evident among atheist participants around the world. The results contrast with recent polls that do not find self-reported moral prejudice against atheists in highly secular countries 15 , and imply that the recent rise in secularism in Western countries has not overwritten intuitive anti-atheist prejudice. Entrenched moral suspicion of atheists suggests that religion’s powerful influence on moral judgements persists, even among non-believers in secular societies.
The coexistence of Christian and traditional “Kastom” beliefs on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu provides an especially interesting environment in which to investigate the association between religion and cooperation. Here I use an experimental economic game together with ethnographic and survey data to compare religious beliefs and practices and their association with cooperative behavior across two communities – one predominantly Christian and one predominantly Kastom. Results show some evidence of bias in favor of the self in the Kastom but not the Christian village, although the overall allocations are not significantly different between villages. Allocations to self or own village were generally lower for those who professed belief in a more omniscient and rewarding supernatural agent and for those who engaged in ritual acts of devotion more frequently, although the relationship with ritual devotion and local garden spirit beliefs varied across sites. These findings highlight intriguing differences between the two sites and provide some support for the hypothesis that elements of religion may function to facilitate the expansion of cooperation to co-religionists beyond the local community.
Neo-Pentecostalism is notable for its emphasis on “prosperity theology,” the belief that economic prosperity is available to the faithful. Members give monetary offerings in exchange for later blessings of financial prosperity. Despite the faith's rapid growth worldwide, the influence of prosperity theology on believers’ lives is still being understood. This mixed-method study examines Brazilian neo-Pentecostal rituals through the dual paradigms of religious signaling and cognitive dissonance theory. Signaling theory posits that costly behaviors, such as giving significant sums of money, are honest signs of an individual's intent toward group cooperation. Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that individuals will justify the costly signals required by overvaluing membership in the group. The integration of these two approaches provides a comprehensive model for costly ritual participation by addressing both social and individual motivating factors. This study furthers our understanding of neo-Pentecostalism by examining how prosperity theology rituals influence behaviors, cognitions, and the psychological well-being. Neopentecostalismo é notável por sua ênfase na “teologia da prosperidade,” a crença de que a prosperidade econômica está disponível para os fiéis. Os membros dão ofertas monetárias em troca de bênçãos financeiras. Este estudo de método misto examina os rituais neopentecostais através de dois paradigmas: sinalização custosa e dissonância cognitiva. A teoria da sinalização custosa postula que os comportamentos caros, tais como dar somas significativas de dinheiro, são sinais honestos de intenções para a cooperação e participação dentro do grupo. A teoria da dissonância cognitiva sugere que as pessoas vão justificar os sinais caros exigidos pela supervalorização no grupo. A integração dessas duas abordagens oferece um modelo mais abrangente para a participação nos rituais, abordando ambos os fatores sociais e individuais de motivação. Este estudo possibilita a compreensão do evangelho da prosperidade, examinando como seu ritual influencia comportamentos, cognições e o bem-estar psicológico dos neopentecostais brasileiros.
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.
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.
Vegetarianism is perhaps the most important contribution Buddhism has made to Chinese cuisine.1 Today, Buddhist monks and nuns in China are expected to maintain a vegetarian diet, and as far one can tell, in general they take the prohibition seriously, abstaining from all forms of meat, fish, and eggs. There is more flexibility for the Buddhist laity in China. They are not required to be lifelong vegetarians and, while many are, some choose to keep to a semi-vegetarian diet, or adopt a vegetarian diet for a limited period of time. From at least the thirteenth century, the demands of a vegetarian Buddhist community have spawned vegetarian restaurants in Chinese cities and inspired the creation of a distinctive vegetarian cuisine, complete with various sorts of imitation meats as well as strict avoidance of alcohol, garlic, and onions—all linked to the avoidance of meat in Buddhist vegetarianism. Vegetarianism has in recent decades become a focus of attention among lay Chinese Buddhists, and the number of Buddhist vegetarian restaurants both in China and abroad has grown steadily, supported by a sizeable industry that manufactures vegetarian products. Buddhist vegetarianism has exerted influence on other religious movements in China as well, encouraging millions of Chinese to adopt a vegetarian diet on the basis of religious beliefs. For the moment, Buddhism is closely associated with vegetarianism in China and is an important part of Buddhist identity—monks, nuns, and to a lesser extent the laity daily affirm their beliefs and distinguish themselves from others by their diet.
Does participation in mass religious rituals promote intergroup conflict or does it promote intergroup tolerance? We assess these claims by examining the effects of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca (the hajj) on sociopolitical views of Muslims in Russia’s North Caucasus. Participant observation during the hajj and a quasi-experimental focus group study of pilgrims and non-pilgrims produced paradoxical findings. While the hajj strengthened their ingroup pride as Muslims, the pilgrims came through as more outgroup-tolerant and prosocial than the non-pilgrims. We develop a synthetic theoretical solution: in high-identity-value, high-diversity common group settings social recategorisation and social capital become transitive – that is, inclusive views and social capital effects within an ingroup extend to outgroups. This means that intergroup conflict could be reduced by not only maximising contact across conflicting groups, but also by bringing together as many subgroups as possible within each conflicting group in settings where their common identity is positively affirmed in a non-discriminatory fashion.
This book is intended for an educated general readership and for use in college courses. It is also intended to be a supplement to other texts in introductory courses in various religious traditions, because the issues raised by its essays play pivotal roles in many cultures. Moreover, the chapters in this book are intended to introduce students to the role of celibacy, or a lack of it, in various religious traditions, and the contributors present the rationale for its observance (or not) within the context of each tradition.
The historical Buddha insisted on celibacy for monks and nuns because suffering was caused by ignorant craving and because sexual relations encouraged attachment to the world. Both functioned as obstacles to mental concentration. Monastic rules helped one to comprehend the reason for the essential role of celibacy in the quest for liberation. Buddhist practice became more complex with later developments, such as Tibetan Buddhism, which witnessed some schools insisting on celibacy, while others allowed sexual intercourse within a ritualistic context for advanced practitioners, and other schools approved a married clergy.
This book is intended for an educated general readership and for use in college courses. It is also intended to be a supplement to other texts in introductory courses in various religious traditions, because the issues raised by its essays play pivotal roles in many cultures. Moreover, the chapters in this book are intended to introduce students to the role of celibacy, or a lack of it, in various religious traditions, and the contributors present the rationale for its observance (or not) within the context of each tradition.
In this paper I explore the psychology of ritual performance and present a simple graphical model that clarifies several issues in William Irons's theory of religion as a "hard-to-fake" sign of commitment. Irons posits that religious behaviors or rituals serve as costly signals of an individual's commitment to a religious group. Increased commitment among members of a religious group may facilitate intra-group cooperation, which is argued to be the primary adaptive benefit of religion. Here I propose a proximate explanation for how individuals are able to pay the short-term costs of ritual performance to achieve the long-term fitness benefits offered by religious groups. The model addresses three significant problems raised by Irons's theory. First, the model explains why potential free-riders do not join religious groups even when there are significant net benefits that members of religious groups can achieve. Second, the model clarifies how costly a ritual must be to achieve stability and prevent potential free-riders from joining the religious group. Third, the model suggests why religious groups may require adherents to perform private rituals that are not observed by others. Several hypotheses generated from the model are also discussed.
Trust is a critical aspect of social interaction. One might predict that individuals trust religious out-groups less than religious in-groups, and that costly signals performed by members of religious in-groups increase trust while costly signals performed by members of religious out-groups decrease trust. We examined how Christian participants perceived the trustworthiness of Muslim and Christian individuals who did or did not engage in religious costly signaling. Religious costly signaling, operationalized as giving to religious charities (Experiments 1 and 2) or adhering to religious dietary restrictions (Experiment 3), increased self-reported trust, regardless of target religious affiliation. Furthermore, when estimating the likelihood that trustworthy versus untrustworthy targets engaged in costly signaling, participants made systematic judgments that showed that costly signaling is associated with trust for both Muslim and Christian targets (Experiment 4). These results are novel in their suggestion that costly signals of religious commitment can increase trust both within and, crucially, across religious-group lines.
© The Author(s) 2015.