Ara Norenzayan, Azim F. Shariff, Will M. Gervais, Aiyana K. Willard, Rita A. McNamara, Edward Slingerland and Joseph Henrich
Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core.
It has been hypothesized that one way that prosocial religions maintain social cohesion in expanding groups is by legitimizing authority, inequality, and hierarchical relations.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/cultural-evolution-of-prosocial-religions/01B053B0294890F8CFACFB808FE2A0EF#
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The spread of normative monogamy may provide an illustrative case of self-interest being curtailed by metaphysically rooted norms.
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In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape and murder
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Although some of these gods are pleased with rituals or sacrifices offered to them, they play a small or no part in the elaborate cooperative lives of foraging societies, and they rarely concern themselves with norm violations, including how community members treat each other or strangers. However, as the size and complexity of societies increase, more powerful, interventionist, and moralizing gods begin to appear.
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one way that prosocial religions maintain social cohesion in expanding groups is by legitimizing authority, inequality, and hierarchical relations
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rituals that are characterized by shared, synchronous arousal, a phenomenon Durkheim (1915) termed collective effervescence. [ENERGY]
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human minds are reliably equipped with a set of social instincts related to kinship, reciprocity, status, and reputation. In addition, these social instincts are bundled together with tribal instincts for life in groups based on a social identity cued by shared customs, taboos, languages, and practices
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In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape and murder
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Cultural evolution, driven by intergroup competition (including warfare), over historical time favored those amalgams of beliefs, norms, and rituals (belief–ritual complexes) that most effectively increased internal solidarity, elevated in-group cooperation in expanding groups, and promoted success in outcompeting or absorbing rival groups.
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Sosis compared the group longevity of nineteenth century American religious and secular communes.
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religious communes were found to outlast secular ones by an average factor of four
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analysis of 83 of these religious and secular communes (Sosis & Bressler 2003) found that religious communes imposed more than twice as many restrictions (including food taboos and fasts, and constraints on material possessions, marriage, sex, and communication with the outside world), and the number of restrictions predicted religious commune longevity
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it is hard to find overwhelmingly secular societies today that are reproducing above replacement levels, despite strong government incentives in welfare state countries such as France and Germany. Religious positions on women’s rights, contraception, sexual orientation, and abortion can be seen in this same light. What are called “family values” in the United States can be best understood as a set of values conducive to producing larger families.
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It appears that God and government are both culturally and psychologically interchangeable. Experimentally induced reminders of secular moral authority had as much effect on generous behavior in an economic game as reminders of God
Abstract
We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history:
(1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously,
(2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10–12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing.
We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups.
This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term, cultural evolutionary process. This framework:
(1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and by-product approaches to the origins of religion,
(2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and
(3) generates novel predictions.
Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate.
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