Peering into the Minds of Gods

Abstract

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.

Appealing to the minds of gods: Religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies

“…As ongoing theory-building suggests (cf. Purzycki and McNamara, 2016;Bendixen and Purzycki, 2020;Purzycki and Sosis, 2011), these classes of concerns point to some important roles that gods might play in local social ecologies. Yet, an encompassing theory of gods' concerns has yet to be assessed directly alongside systematically collected, detailed, individual-level ethnographic data.…”

“…When studies have examined individual-level beliefs, they have mostly focused on moralistic gods' role in cooperation (e.g., Atkinson and Bourrat, 2011;Ge et al, 2019;Lang et al, 2019;Purzycki et al, 2016b;McNamara and Henrich, 2018;Willard et al, 2020) rather than attended to deities concerned with other matters and their ethnographic contexts. Yet, if religion can contribute to the evolution of cooperation, we should expect that variation in religious appeals, beliefs, and practices is partly attributable to variation in local threats to coordination and cooperation (Bendixen and Purzycki, 2020;Purzycki and McNamara, 2016;Purzycki and Sosis, 2022). However, despite isolated exceptions (e.g., Atran et al, 2002;McNamara et al, 2021;Purzycki, 2011Purzycki, , 2013Purzycki, , 2016Singh et al, 2021), there remains a dearth of high-resolution, directly comparable, cross-cultural data with which to examine how gods' concerns systematically vary cross-culturally.…”

“…In Section 2, we first review contemporary work on cross-cultural variation in gods' concerns. Building on this, we develop a cultural evolutionary account of that variation and outline a set of predictive criteria for what gods will evolve to care about given local socioecological features and constraints (cf., Bendixen and Purzycki, 2020). We then present methods of our data collection and summarize key results (Section 3).…”

The Cultural Evolution of Religion and Cooperation

“…Other pertinent concerns include behaviors toward nature (e.g., spoiling natural resources, excessive foraging) and toward the divine (e.g., faith, devotion, ritual performance). According to this view, the things that a particular deity will come to be associated with in a particular cultural context will reflect salient features of the local social ecology, so-called "god-problems" (Bendixen et al, nd;Bendixen and Purzycki, 2020b;Purzycki and Sosis, 2022). Some ethnographic cases help illustrate this view.…”

“…The ubiquity of moralizing gods across cultures makes sense from the perspective we laid out in this section: social life is rife with promises and pitfalls, many of which have inter-personal consequences for the local community and hence constitute potential god-problems. What makes some particular socioecological problems more likely than others to become god-problems is currently an unresolved question, although some predictions include: the cost and salience of the problem and its widespread defection; feasibility and availability of secular monitoring and sanctioning; and how disruptive defection might appear to individuals (Bendixen and Purzycki, nd;Bendixen et al, nd;Bendixen and Purzycki, 2020b). Another open question asks how, through some combination of cognitive and cultural evolutionary processes, god-problems revolve around the socioecological dilemmas and the behaviors that might mitigate them (Bendixen and Purzycki, 2020a,b;Fitouchi and Singh, 2021).…”