Cognitive ecology of religion is an integrative approach to studying how religious beliefs covary with social and natural dynamics of the environment. This is done by incorporating a cognitive ecological perspective to cross-cultural god concepts. [1] [2] Religious beliefs are thought to be a byproduct of domain-specific cognitive modules that give rise to religious cognition. [3] The cognitive biases leading to religious belief are constraints on perceptions of the environment, which is part and parcel of a cognitive ecological approach. This means that they not only shape religious beliefs, but they are determinants of how successfully cultural beliefs are transmitted.
Furthermore, cognition and behavior are inextricably linked, [4] so the consequences of cultural concepts are associated with behavioral outcomes (i.e., continued interactions with the environment). [1] For religion, behaviors often take the form of rituals and are similarly executed as a consequence of beliefs. Because the religious beliefs distributed in a population are relevant to their behavioral strategies and fine-tuned by natural selection, [5] [6] cross-cultural representations of gods and their characteristics are hypothesized to address ecologically relevant challenges. [7] In other words, religious beliefs are thought to frequently involve solutions, insofar as evolved cognitive equipment can build them, to social and natural environmental problems faced by a given population. [2]
Research in evolutionary psychology suggests that the brain is a coordinated network of domain-specific modules corresponding to various adaptations that emerged in our evolutionary history. [3] [8] [9] Most claim that a capacity for religious thoughts is not a modular adaptation itself, but an evolutionary byproduct of multiple integrated mechanisms that arose independently and are designed for different functions. These modules are co-opted to give rise to religious thinking patterns, and they include theory of mind, essential psychology and the hyperactive agency detection device. [3] Moreover, the cultural transmission of these ideas is contingent upon them being minimally counterintuitive. [10]
Theory of mind (ToM) is a capacity to attribute mental states, complete with thoughts, emotions and motivations, to other social agents. [11] This adaptation is ubiquitous in primitive forms among various social species, but the complexity of human social life for long stretches of evolutionary history has facilitated a rich understanding of others' mental experiences to match. [12] Cases of autism have been cited in support for the proposition that ToM is a distinct modular adaptation because of its distinctly narrow impact on ToM capacity. [13] ToM is thought to lend itself to an intuitive sense of mind-body dualism, where the material body is animated by a non-material self (i.e., a "soul"). [14] [15]
Folk psychology among humans is characterized by essential thinking, or a tendency to interpret objects in terms of "essences." This means that attributions of objects' underlying realities are intuitively inferred from a fuzzy set of the object's ontological features. [16] Cognitive interpretations of essence give rise to concepts of purity, simplified good and evil concepts, and intuitive senses of meaning applied to teleology. [15]
The capacity for agent detection has been an important modular adaptation for predator avoidance in humans. Some have called this mechanism a hyperactive agency detection device because of its fairly high rate of erroneous agency applications. In a potential predator situation, humans are forced to interpret an object's ontological features, infer agency or non-agency, and execute a behavioral response. Evolutionary theorists have cited the relatively low costs of incorrect agency inferences and the severe fitness costs of detection failure as a reason to suspect that a tendency to interpret naturalistic processes as agent behaviors is an adaptation. [14] [17] This creates a cognitive bias that leads humans to reason about objects and processes in agentive terms. [15] This is particularly foundational to beliefs in a god or gods. [18]
The integration of ToM, hyperactive applications of agency and essential psychology ultimately renders a cognitive tendency for humans to interact with the naturalistic processes of the world with the intentional stance. This is a perspective from which humans reason that objects and processes may be enacting behaviors intentionally, with meaningful, rational mental states of their own. [19]
Religious beliefs are successfully transmitted if they are compatible with the cognitive tools that reconstruct them upon reception. This means that they must be minimally counterintuitive, or that they violate few enough ontological features of an object or process, to make general sense while remaining memorable violations nonetheless. [10] For example, the concept of a ghost exploits existing intuitions about mind-body dualism and only violates the usual coupling of mind and body. This creates a memorable concept of a non-material person that can move through walls and have motives of its own. On the other hand, a highly counterintuitive idea about an object that violates several of its ontological features, like a jealous Frisbee, is less likely to be culturally transmitted. This is because it is cognitively demanding, not easily reconstructed by the brain and thus, not easily reasoned about and remembered. [20]
Religious behaviors associated with culturally transmitted god concepts can be conceptualized as phenotypic strategies associated with the informational makeup of that cultural concept. [2] Successfully transmitted religious concepts typically involve minimally counterintuitive violations of the intentional stance, which serves a cognitive constraint of cultural evolution. [21] However, ecological factors also play a role in determining which religious behaviors (and their god concepts) are more likely to be replicated. [22] This means that religious rituals associated with salient representational models of gods' minds and concerns are more likely to survive when they are adaptive strategies. [14] [23]
Cross-culturally, representational models of gods' minds take an array of diverse forms, such as anthropomorphic or zoomorphic figures, abstract forces, or some combination of these. Models of gods' minds typically fall within a spectrum between two extremes: on one end there are Big Gods, and on the other there are Local Gods. [24] Big Gods are usually moralistic, punitive and omniscient, whereas Local Gods are often concerned about ritual behaviors, amoral and limited in knowledge. [15] The subject matter that gods are believed to care across cultures fall into three categories, but may involve an admixture of more than one. These categories are (1) behaviors toward other people, (2) behaviors toward the gods themselves and (3) behaviors toward nature and/or the environment. [2] While people impute these concerns to gods' minds, they often correspond to ecological challenges. [7] This correspondence establishes why religious ideas often covary with ecological problems in the social and natural world: because these ideas enact behavioral strategies that solve them. [22] [24]
Cases of large-scale cooperation in complex societies are a widely studied example of a socioecological problem that religious beliefs address. Existing models of human cooperation have included kin selection, [25] reciprocal altruism, [26] indirect reciprocity [27] [28] and competitive helping. [29] These models are robust across certain conditions likely relevant to the Pleistocene, [30] but cooperation is easily eroded in large-scale, complex societies with frequently anonymous interactions between strangers. This is because profitable defections dominate cooperative strategies due to a lack of significant threats of punishment to defectors. [31] For large-scale cooperation to succeed, a cultural coordination solution stabilized by sanction threats must exist. [23]
Religious rules addressing moral behavior are cultural coordination devices that can expand the scale of cooperative behavior by motivating prosociality. [32] The most important stipulation here is that these devices must be enforced by punishment threats for people who do not behave prosocially. Frequent instances of anonymity in large-scale societies and the costs associated with punishment undermine sanction threats, but widespread beliefs in morally punitive and omniscient gods effectively outsource the punishment costs to a pervasive social monitor. This can effectively motivate widespread prosocial behavior in large-scale, complex societies. [33]
This has been empirically supported from a few different angles. For instance, the cross-cultural prevalence of omniscient, moralistic gods (i.e., Big Gods) is positively correlated with society size and complexity. [32] Examples of sharing behaviors in experimental economic games played by large-scale societies also reveal more generous behaviors when individuals are primed with Big God concepts before the game. [34] [35] [36] These shifts toward prosociality are not replicated when similar experiments are applied to small-scale societies. [37] Another recent cross-cultural study compiled experimental economic game data from multiple large- and small-scale societies around the world, where people with various religious beliefs played with local or distant people who were often of the same religion. When distant strangers of the same religion were paired in a game, their sharing behaviors were significantly more generous if their common beliefs involved Big God concepts. The researchers of this study argue that this supports the hypothesis stating that widespread beliefs in omniscient, morally punitive Big Gods may have contributed to the expansion of prosocial behavior. [32] [38]
Concerns attributed to gods about how people behave toward the gods themselves are widespread and not easily disentangled from specific ecological conditions. The reason is intuitive; rational agents who do not care about their treatment are counterintuitive. Researchers investigating the socioecological functions of ritual behaviors in deference to gods claim that functionally, these rituals serve as costly signals of commitment to the group. [39] Costly ritual displays are particularly public and ubiquitous in small-scale societies, functioning as social devices that promote intragroup cohesion. [40] Reputations related to trustworthiness can be significantly based on adherence to ritual behavior expectations, [41] and fulfillment of these expectations are often a joint function of other behavioral strategies relevant to separate domains of gods' concerns. [22] More broadly, religious costly signals are an implicit expression of honest commitment to the rest of the group, indicating that the signaler is a dedicated part of other aspect of the group's coordinated solution strategies. [42] In small- and large-scale societies alike, these rituals often coexist with other categories of gods' concerns.
Resource management and the prevention of material insecurity are more commonly associated with gods' concerns among small-scale societies. [43] [44] While other aspects of religious belief often address social interactions, problems of resource acquisition and security extend from attributed gods' concerns about peoples' interactions with their natural environment. [2] An example of this effect has been alluded to by anthropologist Marvin Harris, who wrote about the economic reasons that Hindu beliefs, holding cows as sacred and forbidden from slaughter, were adaptive. According to Harris, the long-standing and stable benefits derived from many Hindu peoples' use of cows for labor and sources of fuel and fertilizer seemed to outweigh the costs of not eating them. [45] Another ethnographic example of an adaptive use of animal resources was described by Roy Rappaport in 1984, who considered the reasons for ritual pig sacrifice in Papua New Guinea during times of intergroup conflict. These pigs were consuming local peoples' resources and creating resource insecurities that put a strain on the local groups, escalating the intergroup competition for resources and fueling their conflict. Thus, the ritualistic sacrifices alleviated the strain on local resources and mitigated the hostilities between groups. [46] Furthermore, human behavioral ecology researchers have more recently studied burning practices among the Australian Martu people and the consequential increases in local biodiversity. These authors, in an ethnographic discussion of the Martu people, note that these burning practices stem from religious beliefs that their practices allow the world to continue existing as they know it. [47]
Another ethnographic example of religious beliefs facilitating resource management comes from the Tyva people, a pastoralist population in southern Siberia. They associate ritual structures called cairns with local spirit masters (cher eezi). These structures demarcate local territories in which spirit masters reside, and the expectation to stop and give prayer offerings out of respect to cher eezi is embedded in peoples' beliefs about them. The cher eezi are believed to be amoral and care mostly about activity within their sacred territories, such as hunting and overexploiting resources that belong to them. [41] [44] More recently, Tyva people have begun facing new challenges associated with urbanization (e.g., pollution, alcohol abuse), and the cher eezi have been more frequently believed to be concerned about these same problems. [22]
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection or non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.
Morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper (right) and those that are improper (wrong). Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal. Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness" or "rightness".
Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.
Psychology of religion consists of the application of psychological methods and interpretive frameworks to the diverse contents of religious traditions as well as to both religious and irreligious individuals. The various methods and frameworks can be summarized according to the classic distinction between the natural-scientific and human-scientific approaches. The first cluster amounts to objective, quantitative, and preferably experimental procedures for testing hypotheses about causal connections among the objects of one's study. In contrast, the human-scientific approach accesses the human world of experience using qualitative, phenomenological, and interpretive methods. This approach aims to discern meaningful, rather than causal, connections among the phenomena one seeks to understand.
Ritualization refers to the process by which a sequence of non-communicating actions or an event is invested with cultural, social or religious significance. This definition emphasizes the transformation of everyday actions into rituals that carry deeper meaning within a cultural or religious context. Rituals are symbolic, repetitive, and often prescribed activities that hold religious or cultural significance for a certain group of people. They serve various purposes: promoting social solidarity by expressing shared values, facilitating the transmission of cultural knowledge and regulating emotions.
Pascal Robert Boyer is an American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist of French origin, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge, with Jack Goody, working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. Boyer is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Cognitive archaeology is a theoretical perspective in archaeology that focuses on the ancient mind. It is divided into two main groups: evolutionary cognitive archaeology (ECA), which seeks to understand human cognitive evolution from the material record, and ideational cognitive archaeology (ICA), which focuses on the symbolic structures discernable in or inferable from past material culture.
The study of religiosity and intelligence explores the link between religiosity and intelligence or educational level. Religiosity and intelligence are both complex topics that include diverse variables, and the interactions among those variables are not always well understood. For instance, intelligence is often defined differently by different researchers; also, all scores from intelligence tests are only estimates of intelligence, because one cannot achieve concrete measurements of intelligence due to the concept’s abstract nature. Religiosity is also complex, in that it involves wide variations of interactions of religious beliefs, practices, behaviors, and affiliations, across a diverse array of cultures.
Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of evolution by natural selection, to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.
The concept of the evolution of morality refers to the emergence of human moral behavior over the course of human evolution. Morality can be defined as a system of ideas about right and wrong conduct. In everyday life, morality is typically associated with human behavior rather than animal behavior. The emerging fields of evolutionary biology, and in particular evolutionary psychology, have argued that, despite the complexity of human social behaviors, the precursors of human morality can be traced to the behaviors of many other social animals. Sociobiological explanations of human behavior remain controversial. Social scientists have traditionally viewed morality as a construct, and thus as culturally relative, although others such as Sam Harris argue that there is an objective science of morality.
Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought, theory, and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.
Harvey Whitehouse is chair of social anthropology and professorial fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford.
The evolutionary psychology of religion is the study of religious belief using evolutionary psychology principles. It is one approach to the psychology of religion. As with all other organs and organ functions, the brain's functional structure is argued to have a genetic basis, and is therefore subject to the effects of natural selection and evolution. Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand cognitive processes, religion in this case, by understanding the survival and reproductive functions they might serve.
Prosocial behavior, or intent to benefit others, is a social behavior that "benefit[s] other people or society as a whole", "such as helping, sharing, donating, co-operating, and volunteering". Obeying the rules and conforming to socially accepted behaviors are also regarded as prosocial behaviors. These actions may be motivated by empathy and by concern about the welfare and rights of others, as well as for egoistic or practical concerns, such as one's social status or reputation, hope for direct or indirect reciprocity, or adherence to one's perceived system of fairness. It may also be motivated by altruism, though the existence of pure altruism is somewhat disputed, and some have argued that this falls into philosophical rather than psychological realm of debate. Evidence suggests that pro sociality is central to the well-being of social groups across a range of scales, including schools. Prosocial behavior in the classroom can have a significant impact on a student's motivation for learning and contributions to the classroom and larger community. In the workplace, prosocial behaviour can have a significant impact on team psychological safety, as well as positive indirect effects on employee's helping behaviors and task performance. Empathy is a strong motive in eliciting prosocial behavior, and has deep evolutionary roots.
The evolutionary origin of religion and religious behavior is a field of study related to evolutionary psychology, the origin of language and mythology, and cross-cultural comparison of the anthropology of religion. Some subjects of interest include Neolithic religion, evidence for spirituality or cultic behavior in the Upper Paleolithic, and similarities in great ape behavior.
Joseph Henrich is an American professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Before arriving at Harvard, Henrich was a professor of psychology and economics at the University of British Columbia. He is interested in the question of how humans evolved from "being a relatively unremarkable primate a few million years ago to the most successful species on the globe", and how culture shaped our species' genetic evolution.
Culture and social cognition is the relationship between human culture and human cognitive capabilities. Cultural cognitive evolution proposes that humans’ unique cognitive capacities are not solely due to biological inheritance, but are in fact due in large part to cultural transmission and evolution. Modern humans and great apes are separated evolutionarily by about six million years. Proponents of cultural evolution argue that this would not have been enough time for humans to develop the advanced cognitive capabilities required to create tools, language, and build societies through biological evolution. Biological evolution could not have individually produced each of these cognitive capabilities within that period of time. Instead, humans must have evolved the capacity to learn through cultural transmission. This provides a more plausible explanation that would fit within the given time frame. Instead of having to biologically account for each cognitive mechanism that distinguishes modern humans from previous relatives, one would only have to account for one significant biological adaptation for cultural learning. According to this view, the ability to learn through cultural transmission is what distinguishes humans from other primates. Cultural learning allows humans to build on existing knowledge and make collective advancements, also known as the “ratchet effect”. The ratchet effect simply refers to the way in which humans continuously add on to existing knowledge through modifications and improvements. This unique ability distinguishes humans from related primates, who do not seem to build collaborative knowledge over time. Instead, primates seem to build individual knowledge, in which the expertise of one animal is not built on by others, and does not progress across time.
Evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations. Considerable work, though, has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture. Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught. As opposed to a domain-general cultural acquisition program, where an individual passively receives culturally-transmitted material from the group, Tooby and Cosmides (1989), among others, argue that: "the psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect.".
Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena within social and natural contexts. It is an integrative perspective drawing from aspects of ecological psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary ecology and anthropology. Notions of domain-specific modules in the brain and the cognitive biases they create are central to understanding the enacted nature of cognition within a cognitive ecological framework. This means that cognitive mechanisms not only shape the characteristics of thought, but they dictate the success of culturally transmitted ideas. Because culturally transmitted concepts can often inform ecological decision-making behaviors, group-level trends in cognition are hypothesized to address ecologically relevant challenges.
Joseph A. Bulbulia is a Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Science at Victoria University of Wellington (2020-present). He was the Maclaurin Goodfellow Chair in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts at University of Auckland (2018-2020). He previously served as a Professor in the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Bulbulia is regarded as one of the founders of the contemporary evolutionary religious studies. He is a past president of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and is currently co-editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior. Bulbulia is one of four on the Senior Management Team of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a 20-year longitudinal study tracking over 15,000 New Zealanders each year. He is an associate investigator for Pulotu, a database of 116 Pacific cultures purpose-built to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of religion. In 2016 Bulbulia won a Research Excellence Award at Victoria University.
