As appeals to what gods know and care about often motivate and rationalize human behavior, understanding shared models of gods’ minds is crucial for understanding religion’s contributions to human ...sociality. If religious systems function to minimize the effects of social and ecological problems, then models of gods’ concerns should coevolve with these problems. The present work assesses this prediction using data collected in the Tyva Republic. After briefly introducing the social and ecological history of ritual cairn piety in Inner Asia, I examine explicit representational models of morality, virtue, and gods’ concerns in Tyva. I show that (a) there is very little conceptual overlap between Tyvans’ models of morality and virtue and the things about which spirits care, (b) Tyvan spirit masters are primarily concerned with ritual and breaches of resource maintenance, and (c) among the emerging, salient factors that anger spirit masters are alcohol abuse and littering, very recent social problems in the region. This report provides support for the hypothesis that representational models of gods’ minds will evolve in accordance with ever-shifting local problems and offers the first formal treatment of empirically determining what constitutes a “moralistic” deity among living people.
•Christians show higher responses to God’s knowledge of moral than nonmoral information.•Tyvans show a bias towards moralizing explicitly nonmoral Tyvan spirit-masters.•Tyvans reason about ...spirit-masters’ knowledge and concerns spatially.•Wider attributed knowledge breadth of spirit-masters predicts attributed concern for morality.
The present work is the first study to systematically compare the minds of gods by examining some of the intuitive processes that guide how people reason about them. By examining the Christian god and the spirit-masters of the Tyva Republic, it first confirms that the consensus view of the Christian god’s mind is one of omniscience with acute concern for interpersonal social behavior (i.e., moral behaviors) and that Tyvan spirit-masters are not as readily attributed with knowledge or concern of moral information. Then, it reports evidence of a moralization bias of gods’ minds; American Christians who believe that God is omniscient rate God as more knowledgeable of moral behaviors than nonmoral information. Additionally, Tyvans who do not readily report pro- or antisocial behavior among the things that spirit-masters care about will nevertheless rate spirit-masters’ knowledge and concern of moral information higher than nonmoral information. However, this knowledge is distributed spatially; the farther away from spirits’ place of governance a moral behavior takes place, the less they know and care about it. Finally, the wider the breadth of knowledge Tyvans attribute to spirit-masters, the more they attribute moral concern for behaviors that transpire beyond their jurisdiction. These results further demonstrate that there is a significant gulf between expressed beliefs and intuitive religious cognition and provides evidence for a moralization bias of gods’ minds.
Some cultural evolutionary models predict that under stressful reductions of well-being, individuals will be more attracted and fastidiously adhere to traditional systems of norms that promote ...solidarity and cooperation. As religious systems can bolster human relationships with a variety of mechanisms, the material insecurity hypothesis of religion posits that individual religiosity will increase under conditions of material insecurity. The bulk of the literature up to this point has been correlational and cross-national. Here, across 14 field sites, we examine the causal role that educational attainment and food insecurity play in religiosity. We find that years of formal education and food insecurity do not consistently contribute to individual religiosity cross-culturally. We conclude with a discussion of some theoretical and methodological implications. As a general workflow for cross-cultural causal research in the quantitative social sciences, the present work is a modest but necessary first step in reliably estimating causation in the material insecurity hypothesis of religiosity.
Denmark offers a unique context for exploring patterns of religion among the majority population. In the research of contemporary religion in Europe, many concepts have been developed in the attempt ...to capture a complex pattern of affiliation, practices, and beliefs among the majority populations in Western Europe. In a Scandinavian setting, however, one such concept, 'cultural religion', has appeared in several situations with various foci and emphases. This article analyses the use of 'cultural religion' and, more specifically, cultural Christianity through three different inquiries. We examine data from a qualitative method (focus group interviews). Building upon this study, we then analyse quantitative data from a survey, which is followed by an analysis of the concept in the public discourse. On the basis of the three case studies, we argue that, in the Danish sense of 'cultural religion', this is a term denoting national identity, shared values, emotions, and traditions. We raise the question how to use the terminology of 'cultural religion' in research on contemporary religion.
Around the world, people engage in practices that involve self-inflicted pain and apparently wasted resources. Researchers theorized that these practices help stabilize within-group cooperation by ...assorting individuals committed to collective action. While this proposition was previously studied using existing religious practices, we provide a controlled framework for an experimental investigation of various predictions derived from this theory. We recruited 372 university students in the Czech Republic who were randomly assigned into either a high-cost or low-cost condition and then chose to play a public goods game (PGG) either in a group that wastes money to signal commitment to high contributions in the game or to play in the group without such signals. We predicted that cooperators would assort in the high-cost revealed group and that, despite these costs, they would contribute more to the common pool and earn larger individual rewards over five iterations of PGG compared with the concealed group and participants in the low-cost condition. The results showed that the assortment of cooperators was more effective in the high-cost condition and translated into larger contributions of the remaining endowment to the common pool, but participants in the low-cost revealed group earned the most. We conclude that costly signals can serve as an imperfect assorting mechanism, but the size of the costs needs to be carefully balanced with potential benefits to be profitable.
Quantitative cross-cultural databases can help uncover structure and diversity across human populations. These databases have been constructed using a variety of methodologies and have been ...instrumental for building and testing theories in the social sciences. The processes and assumptions behind the construction of cross-cultural databases are not always openly discussed by creators or fully appreciated by their users. Here, we scrutinize the processes used to generate quantitative cross-cultural databases, from the point of ethnographic fieldwork to the processing of quantitative cross-cultural data. We outline challenges that arise at each stage of this process and discuss the strengths and limitations of how existing databases have handled these challenges. We suggest a host of best practices for cross-cultural database construction, and stress the importance of coding source meta-data and using this meta-data to identify and adjust for source biases. This paper explicitly discusses the processes, problems, and principles behind cross-cultural database construction, and ultimately seeks to promote rigorous cross-cultural comparative research.
Identity fusion theory has become a popular psychological explanation of costly self-sacrifice. It posits that while maintaining one’s own individual identity, a deep affinity with one’s group can ...contribute to sacrifice for that group. We test this and related hypotheses using a behavioral economic experiment designed to detect biased, self-interested favoritism among eight different populations ranging from foragers and horticulturalists to the fully market-integrated. We find that while individuals favor themselves on average, those with higher ingroup fusion sacrifice more money to other members of their ingroup who are unable to reciprocate. We also find that positive outgroup relations has a similar effect. Additionally, we assess a recently-posited interaction between ingroup and outgroup relations and show no consistent effect at the individual or sub-sample levels.
Researchers have recently proposed that "moralistic" religions-those with moral doctrines, moralistic supernatural punishment, and lower emphasis on ritual-emerged as an effect of greater wealth and ...material security. One interpretation appeals to life history theory, predicting that individuals with "slow life history" strategies will be more attracted to moralistic traditions as a means to judge those with "fast life history" strategies. As we had reservations about the validity of this application of life history theory, we tested these predictions with a data set consisting of 592 individuals from eight diverse societies. Our sample includes individuals from a wide range of traditions, including world religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity, but also local traditions rooted in beliefs in animism, ancestor worship, and worship of spirits associated with nature. We first test for the presence of associations between material security, years of formal education, and reproductive success. Consistent with popular life history predictions, we find evidence that material security and education are associated with reduced reproduction. Building on this, we then test whether or not these demographic factors predict the moral concern, punitiveness, attributed knowledge-breadth, and frequency of ritual devotions towards two deities in each society. Here, we find no reliable evidence of a relationship between number of children, material security, or formal education and the individual-level religious beliefs and behaviors. We conclude with a discussion of why life-history theory is an inadequate interpretation for the emergence of factors typifying the moralistic traditions.
Gods, games, and the socioecological landscape Purzycki, Benjamin Grant; Bendixen, Theiss; Lightner, Aaron D. ...
Current research in ecological and social psychology,
2022, 2022-00-00, 2022-01-01, Letnik:
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The social sciences have long recognized a relationship between religion and social ecology. Upon closer inspection, religious systems not only correspond to important features of a society’s social ...ecology, but also appear to directly address these features. In this article, we examine the prospect that these salient features may be framed as game theoretical dilemmas and argue that contemporary approaches that emphasize cognition and/or social learning at the expense of social ecology are inadequate in accounting for cross-cultural variation in religious expression. Using ethnographic examples, we show that religions alleviate the costs of such dilemmas in a variety of ways by: 1) fostering beliefs that motivate and sustain beneficial practices; 2) incentivizing cooperative ventures; 3) encouraging ritual performances that minimize costly conflicts and bolster territorial conventions; 4) providing institutional forums to coordinate resource distributions; and 5) maintaining important resource and species diversity.
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