Learned faith: The influences of evolved cultural learning mechanisms on belief in Gods.

Abstract

Productive research programs have emerged, targeting the cultural, cognitive, and evolutionary origins of both religious belief and—more recently—religious disbelief. The current study examines the role of specific theoretically supported cultural learning strategies in the development of belief and disbelief in gods. Using a sample from the World Values Survey, we investigate the role that kin-biased transmission, conformist transmission, and credibility enhancing displays have on individuals’ beliefs in gods in 53 countries or regions worldwide. We test this relationship using a combination of signal detection analysis and multilevel modeling. The two separate analyses yield converging results, providing support for the necessary role of culture in the development of religious beliefs. This evidence supports models that place cultural learning (specifically context-biased transmission) central to the evolution of religious belief and disbelief, and suggest that revisions are necessary to popular cognitive byproduct frameworks that predict only a minimal role for culture.

The Origins of Religious Disbelief: A Dual Inheritance Approach

“…Finally, dual inheritance models highlight the cultural learning processes (Kline, 2015;Rendell et al, 2011) underpinning religious beliefs (Evans, 2001;Lane et al, 2012;Richert et al, 2017;Willard et al, 2016) and disbelief, and largely predict that context-biased social learning -especially CREDs (Henrich, 2009)would be strongly associated with degrees of religious belief (Gervais & Najle, 2015). Our dual inheritance approach predicts that CREDs would be most important, followed by other factors such as cognitive reflection, mentalizing, and perhaps existential security.…”

“…As such, we encourage similar analyses across different cultures (Willard & Cingl, 2017). Diversifying the samples that make up the empirical portfolio of evolutionary approaches to religion is especially necessary because cultural cues themselves emerged as the strongest predictor disbelief in this and related work Gervais & Najle, 2015;Maij et al, 2017;Willard & Cingl, 2017). Without diverse samples, including and especially extending well beyond nationally representative samples in the USA, researchers can only aspire to ever more precisely answer a mere outlier of an outlier of our most important scientific questions about human nature.…”

“…Distinct research trajectories have considered the preconditions for sustained belief in any given god. To currently believe in a god, one 1) must be able to mentally represent gods (Gervais, 2013;Norenzayan et al, 2012;Willard & Norenzayan, 2013), 2) must be dispositionally or situationally motivated to believe in some gods (Gray & Wegner, 2010;Kay et al, 2008), 3) must receive credible cultural cues that some gods are real (Gervais & Henrich, 2010;Gervais & Najle, 2015;Lanman, 2012;Lanman & Buhrmester, 2017), and 4) must maintain this intuitive (Bloom, 2007;Boyer, 2008;Kelemen, 2004) belief over time. Tweaks to any of these four components may instead yield disbelief in gods.…”

“…Second, apatheism describes the pattern whereby, although people are highly religiously motivated when life is insecure, unstable, and unpredictable, existential security instead predicts reduced religiosity (Inglehart & Norris, 2004;Kay et al, 2008). Third, inCREDulous atheism describes the pattern whereby a lack of credibility enhancing displays (CREDs) (Henrich, 2009) that one ought to believe in any gods is a good global predictor of atheism (Banerjee & Bloom, 2013;Gervais & Najle, 2015;Lanman, 2012). Finally, analytic atheism describes the pattern whereby people who reflectively override their intuitions tend to be less religious than those who "go with their guts" (Pennycook et al, 2012(Pennycook et al, , 2016Shenhav et al, 2012), although the magnitude and consistency of this relation is debatable .…”

Can the experimental study of religion be advanced using a Bayesian predictive framework?

“…On this account, adaptive biases can be conceived as evolved priors that have been shaped by our evolutionary past (Barrett, 2014). This way the Bayesian approach can provide a unifying framework that allows us to account for both the involvement of evolved cognitive biases (Willard & Norenzayan, 2013) as well as the role of cultural learning (Gervais & Najle, 2015) in religious beliefs and experiences. The predictive processing framework is also compatible with dual-systems accounts of religion and magical thinking (Risen, 2015), according to which religious beliefs primarily originate from an intuitive processing mode and are sustained through a process of acquiescence or "reduced error correction" (cf.…”