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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 Religio

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Author Info

  • Scott Atran

    () (IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod - CNRS : UMR8129 - Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris - ENS Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS))

  • Joseph Henrich

    (Dept of Economics & Dept of Psychology - University of British Columbia)

Abstract

Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors—as an evolutionary by-product—the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in rituals and devotions involving costly displays exploits various aspects of our evolved psychology to deepen people's commitment to both supernatural agents and religious communities. Third, competition among societies and organizations with different faith-based beliefs and practices has increasingly connected religion with both within-group prosociality and between-group enmity. This connection has strengthened dramatically in recent millennia, as part of the evolution of complex societies, and is important to understanding cooperation and conflict in today's world.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by HAL in its series Post-Print with number ijn_00505193.

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Date of creation: 2010
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Publication status: Published, Biological Theory, 2010, 5, 18-30
Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:ijn_00505193

Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00505193/en/
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Web page: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/

Related research

Keywords: by-product hypothesis; credibility enhancing displays; cultural 40 transmission; cooperation; group competition; high gods; min;

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Cited by:
  1. Hammad Sheikh & Jeremy Ginges & Alin Coman & Scott Atran, 2012. "Religion, group threat and sacred values," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 7(2), pages 110-118, March.

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