The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions

Atran, Scott; Henrich, Joseph

doi:10.1162/biot_a_00018

Cited by 344 publications

(274 citation statements)

References 92 publications

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“…Previous research has identified both functional and dysfunctional consequences of group rituals (e.g., Atran & Henrich, 2010;Blake, 2014;Collins, 2004;Durkheim, 1912;Irons, 1996;Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008;Rossano, 2012). In contrast, we focus on the possible intrapsychic benefits of rituals for individuals, predicting that rituals can reduce anxiety for individuals about to face a performance task.…”

Section: Rituals Anxiety and Performancementioning

confidence: 98%

RETRACTED: Don’t stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety

Brooks

Schroeder

Risen

et al. 2016

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

121

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a b s t r a c tFrom public speaking to first dates, people frequently experience performance anxiety. And when experienced immediately before or during performance, anxiety harms performance. Across a series of experiments, we explore the efficacy of a common strategy that people employ to cope with performance-induced anxiety: rituals. We define a ritual as a predefined sequence of symbolic actions often characterized by formality and repetition that lacks direct instrumental purpose. Using different instantiations of rituals and measures of anxiety (both physiological and self-report), we find that enacting rituals improves performance in public and private performance domains by decreasing anxiety. Belief that a specific series of behaviors constitute a ritual is a critical ingredient to reduce anxiety and improve performance: engaging in behaviors described as a ''ritual" improved performance more than engaging in the same behaviors described as ''random behaviors."

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Section: Rituals Anxiety and Performancementioning

confidence: 98%

RETRACTED: Don’t stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety

Brooks

Schroeder

Risen

et al. 2016

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

121

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confidence: 99%

“…Over time, these deities spread culturally and came to dominate the modern world religions like Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Such traditions eventually came to account for a large proportion of the world's population 6,7,13,14 (see Supplementary Information section S1). Here we directly test one specific hypothesis: conceptions of moralistic and punitive gods that know people's thoughts and behaviours promote impartiality towards distant co-religionists, and as a result contribute to the expansion of sociality.…”

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confidence: 99%

Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality

Purzycki

Apicella

Atkinson

et al. 2016

Nature

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275

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Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality Benjamin Grant Purzycki 1 , Coren Apicella 2 , Quentin D. Atkinson 3,4 , Emma Cohen 5,6 , Rita Anne Mcnamara 7 , Aiyana K. Willard 8 , Dimitris Xygalatas 9,10,11 , Ara norenzayan 7 & Joseph henrich 7,12,13 Since the origins of agriculture, the scale of human cooperation and societal complexity has dramatically expanded 1,2 . This fact challenges standard evolutionary explanations of prosociality because well-studied mechanisms of cooperation based on genetic relatedness, reciprocity and partner choice falter as people increasingly engage in fleeting transactions with genetically unrelated strangers in large anonymous groups. To explain this rapid expansion of prosociality, researchers have proposed several mechanisms 3,4 . Here we focus on one key hypothesis: cognitive representations of gods as increasingly knowledgeable and punitive, and who sanction violators of interpersonal social norms, foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation, trust and fairness towards co-religionist strangers 5-8 . We tested this hypothesis using extensive ethnographic interviews and two behavioural games designed to measure impartial rule-following among people (n = 591, observations = 35,400) from eight diverse communities from around the world: (1) inland Tanna, Vanuatu; (2) coastal Tanna, Vanuatu; (3) Yasawa, Fiji; (4) Lovu, Fiji; (5) Pesqueiro, Brazil; (6) Pointe aux Piments, Mauritius; (7) the Tyva Republic (Siberia), Russia; and (8) Hadzaland, Tanzania. Participants reported adherence to a wide array of world religious traditions including Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as notably diverse local traditions, including animism and ancestor worship. Holding a range of relevant variables constant, the higher participants rated their moralistic gods as punitive and knowledgeable about human thoughts and actions, the more coins they allocated to geographically distant co-religionist strangers relative to both themselves and local co-religionists. Our results support the hypothesis that beliefs in moralistic, punitive and knowing gods increase impartial behaviour towards distant co-religionists, and therefore can contribute to the expansion of prosociality.Among the other factors 2-4,7 that influence the emergence of human ultrasociality and complex societies, the diffusion of explicit beliefs in increasingly moralistic, punitive and knowledgeable gods may have played a crucial role 6,7 . People may trust in, cooperate with and interact fairly within wider social circles, partly because they believe that knowing gods will punish them if they do not. Additionally, through increased frequency and consistency in belief and behaviour sets, commitments to the same gods coordinate people's expectations about social interactions [5][6][7][8][9] . Moreover, the social radius within which people are willing to engage in behaviours that benefit others at a cost to themselves may enlarge as gods' powers to monitor and punish increase 10 . To account f...

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“…Indeed, many scholars have suggested that rituals are ubiquitous because they are central to the functioning of large-scale cooperative groups, forming the basis of contemporary society (Atran & Henrich, 2010;Durkeim, 1915;Irons, 1996;Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008;Rossano, 2012;. The idea of ritual regulating a person's ability to connect with others has long-standing tradition in anthropology.…”

Section: Social Regulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The psychology of rituals: An integrative review and process-based framework

Hobson¹,

Schroeder²,

Risen³

et al. 2017

Preprint

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Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, the current paper provides an organizing framework to understand recent empirical work from social psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. Our framework focuses on three primary regulatory functions of rituals: regulation of (1) emotions, (2) performance goal states, and (3) social connection. We examine the possible mechanisms underlying each function by considering the bottom-up processes that emerge from the physical features of rituals and top-down processes that emerge from the psychological meaning of rituals. Our framework, by appreciating the value of psychological theory, generates novel predictions and enriches our understanding of ritual and human behavior more broadly.

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The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions

Cited by 344 publications

References 92 publications

RETRACTED: Don’t stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety

RETRACTED: Don’t stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety

Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality

The psychology of rituals: An integrative review and process-based framework

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