The effects of control and uncertainty on children's supernatural beliefs

textMost people believe that the world is orderly and predictable, and one mechanism by which this belief is maintained is a sense of personal control, or the belief that one can predict and steer outcomes. Research indicates that when adults perceive a threat to their personal control, they will compensate for this threat by seeking other sources of control. However, it is unclear whether children also feel threatened by a lack of personal control or whether they seek similar sources of compensatory control as adults. The proposed studies investigated the process of compensatory control in children. A novel game primed children to feel either high personal control or low personal control in order to evaluate the extent to which children seek compensatory control via 1) the detection of visual patterns in random noise, 2) endorsement of superstitious explanations for events, and 3) explicit belief in supernatural sources of control. Children also completed a questionnaire designed to measure their intolerance of uncertainty. It was predicted that both the manipulation of control and individual differences in children’s willingness to tolerate uncertainty would affect compensatory control seeking behaviors. Results indicated that manipulation of personal control did not affect children’s pattern detection; however, the manipulation did affect children’s endorsement of karma-like explanations, such that children in the low-control condition were significantly more likely to endorse such explanations compared to children in the high-control condition. Regarding individual differences, results indicated a positive relationship between children’s intolerance of uncertainty and their explicit belief in God. These results are interpreted with regard to existing research with adults, and the implications for situational and dispositional motivations for control are discussed.Psycholog

The Common-Core/Diversity Dilemma: Revisions of Humean thought, New Empirical Research, and the Limits of Rational Religious Belief

This paper is the product of an interdisciplinary, interreligious dialogue aiming to outline some of the possibilities and rational limits of supernatural religious belief, in the light of a critique of David Hume’s familiar sceptical arguments -- including a rejection of his famous Maxim on miracles -- combined with a range of striking recent empirical research. The Humean nexus leads us to the formulation of a new ”Common-Core/Diversity Dilemma’, which suggests that the contradictions between different religious belief systems, in conjunction with new understandings of the cognitive forces that shape their common features, persuasively challenge the rationality of most kinds of supernatural belief. In support of this conclusion, we survey empirical research concerning intercessory prayer, religious experience, near-death experience, and various cognitive biases. But we then go on to consider evidence that supernaturalism -- even when rationally unwarranted -- has significant beneficial individual and social effects, despite others that are far less desirable. This prompts the formulation of a ”Normal/Objective Dilemma’, identifying important trade-offs to be found in the choice between our humanly evolved ”normal’ outlook on the world, and one that is more rational and ”objective’. Can we retain the pragmatic benefits of supernatural belief while avoiding irrationality and intergroup conflict? It may well seem that rationality is incompatible with any wilful sacrifice of objectivity. But in a situation of uncertainty, an attractive compromise may be available by moving from the competing factions and mutual contradictions of ”first-order’ supernaturalism to a more abstract and tolerant ”second-order’ view, which itself can be given some distinctive intellectual support through the increasingly popular Fine Tuning Argument. We end by proposing a ”Maxim of the Moon’ to express the undogmatic spirit of this second-order religiosity, providing a cautionary metaphor to counter the pervasive bias endemic to the human condition, and offering a more cooperation- and humility-enhancing understanding of religious diversity in a tense and precarious globalised age

The influence of goal demotion on children’s reproduction of ritual behavior

Abstract: Rituals are a ubiquitous feature of human behavior, yet we know little about the cognitive mechanisms that enable children to recognize them and respond accordingly. In this study, 3 to 6 year old children living in Bushman communities in South Africa were shown a sequence of causally irrelevant actions that differed in the extent to which goal demotion was a feature. The children consistently replicated the causally irrelevant actions but when such actions were also fully goal demoted they were reproduced at significantly higher rates. These findings highlight how causal opacity and goal demotion work in tandem to demarcate actions as being ritualistic, and specifically, how goal demotion uniquely influences the reproduction of ritualistic actions

The ecology of religious beliefs

Although ecological forces are known to shape the expression of sociality across a broad range of biological taxa, their role in shaping human behavior is currently disputed. Both comparative and experimental evidence indicate that beliefs in moralizing high gods promote cooperation among humans, a behavioral attribute known to correlate with environmental harshness in nonhuman animals. Here we combine fine-grained bioclimatic data with the latest statistical tools from ecology and the social sciences to evaluate the potential effects of environmental forces, language history, and culture on the global distribution of belief in moralizing high gods (n = 583 societies). After simultaneously accounting for potential nonindependence among societies because of shared ancestry and cultural diffusion, we find that these beliefs are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological duress. In addition, we find that these beliefs are more likely in politically complex societies that recognize rights to movable property. Overall, our multimodel inference approach predicts the global distribution of beliefs in moralizing high gods with an accuracy of 91%, and estimates the relative importance of different potential mechanisms by which this spatial pattern may have arisen. The emerging picture is neither one of pure cultural transmission nor of simple ecological determinism, but rather a complex mixture of social, cultural, and environmental influences. Our methods and findings provide a blueprint for how the increasing wealth of ecological, linguistic, and historical data can be leveraged to understand the forces that have shaped the behavior of our own species

Practicing Safe Sects

In Practicing Safe Sects F. LeRon Shults provides scientific and philosophical resources for having “the talk” about religious reproduction: where do gods come from – and what are the costs of bearing them in our culturally pluralistic, ecologically fragile environment?; Readership: All interested in the promotion of peaceful and healthy societies, and anyone concerned with the role of religion in fostering superstition and segregation

Children's distinct drive to reproduce costly rituals

This study was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant to MN and AW (DP140101410).Costly rituals are ubiquitous and adaptive. Yet, little is known about how children develop to acquire them. The current study examined children's imitation of costly rituals. Ninety‐three 4–6 year olds (47 girls, 45% Oceanians, tested in 2022) were shown how to place tokens into a tube to earn stickers, using either a ritualistic or non‐ritualistic costly action sequence. Children shown the ritualistic actions imitated faithfully at the expense of gaining stickers; conversely, those shown the non‐ritualistic actions ignored them and obtained maximum reward. This highlights how preschool children are adept at and motivated to learn rituals, despite significant material cost. This study provides insights into the early development of cultural learning and the adaptive value of rituals in group cognition.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Ritual increases children's preferences for in-group members

textThis study examined the impact of ritual on children's in-group affiliation (N = 71, 4-11-year-old children). A novel social group paradigm was used in an afterschool program setting to test the influence of a ritual versus a control task on three key outcomes--affiliation with in-group members, expectations for inclusion by in-group members, and selective group fusion with in-group members. Results from converging measures support the hypothesis that the experience of participating in a ritual increases in-group preference to a greater degree than group activity alone. The results provide insight into the early-developing preference for in-group members and are consistent with the proposal that rituals facilitate in-group cohesion.Psycholog

Practicing Safe Sects

In Practicing Safe Sects F. LeRon Shults provides scientific and philosophical resources for having “the talk” about religious reproduction: where do gods come from – and what are the costs of bearing them in our culturally pluralistic, ecologically fragile environment?; Readership: All interested in the promotion of peaceful and healthy societies, and anyone concerned with the role of religion in fostering superstition and segregation

The perpetuation of ritualistic actions as revealed by young children's transmission of normative behavior

Children will comprehensively copy others' actions despite manifest perceptual cues to their causal ineffectiveness. In experiment 1 we demonstrate that children will overimitate in this way even when the arbitrary actions copied are used as part of a process to achieve an outcome for someone else. We subsequently show in experiment 2 that children will omit arbitrary actions, but only if the actions are to achieve a clear, functional goal for a naïve adult. These findings highlight how readily children adopt what appear to be conventional behaviors, even when faced with a clear demonstration of their negligible functional value. We show how a child's strong, early-emerging propensity for overimitation reveals a sensitivity for ritualistic behavior