Why do religious cultures evolve slowly? The cultural evolution of cooperative calling and the historical study of religions

Collective representations are the result of an immense cooperation, which stretches out not only into space but into time as well; to make them, a multitude of minds have associated, united and combined their ideas and sentiments: for them, long generations have accumulated their experience and their knowledge. A special intellectual activity is therefore concentrated in them, which is infinitely richer and complexer than that of the individual. (Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, [1912] 1965: 29)The languages and folkways of ancient peoples hold little relevance for us, except in one respect: the religions of the ancient world remain our religions. Though religions change, core features of the scriptures and rituals of the world's most popular religious traditions appear to have been conserved with remarkably high fidelity. We explain slow religious change from how religion facilitates cooperation at large social scales. At the end, we clarify how historians of religion, in collaboration with psychologists and computational biologists, might test and improve explanations such as ours.This research was supported by the John F. Templeton Foundation (Testing the Functional Roles of Religion in Human Society, no. 28745), the Royal Society of New Zealand ("e Cultural Evolution of Religion, no. 11-UOA-23

Joint Action Enhances Cohesion and Positive Affect, but Suppresses Aspects of Creativity When Combined With Shared Goals

We aimed to examine the link between two types of joint action (synchrony and asynchrony) and creativity (both divergent thinking and convergent thinking) using an established experimental paradigm. A secondary aim was to replicate and extend the amplified positive effects of shared intentionality (i.e., having a shared common goal) on social and affective responses. Participants (N = 138) were randomly assigned to move in synchrony, move in asynchrony, or passively observe others moving. To induce shared goals, participants were provided with either a shared group goal of working together or an individual goal of focusing on the individual participant’s own movements. First, our results revealed that joint action in combination with group goal conditions decreases convergent thinking, but we found no support for differences in divergent thinking. This indicates that it may be the underlying shared goals combined with joint action that influences convergent thinking, and not synchronized movements. Second, we replicated synchrony’s positive effect on cohesion and positive affect. These findings are consistent with evolutionary theories of group rituals as a means for inducing solidarity, and extend previous findings by showing that joint action with shared goals may potentially induce shared patterns of thought

Church attendance and alloparenting: an analysis of fertility, social support and child development among English mothers

Many aspects of religious rituals suggest they provide adaptive benefits. Studies across societies consistently find that investments in ritual behaviour return high levels of cooperation. Another line of research finds that alloparental support to mothers increases maternal fertility and improves child outcomes. Although plausible, whether religious cooperation extends to alloparenting and/or affects child development remains unclear. Using 10 years of data collected from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), we test the predictions that church attendance is positively associated with social support and fertility (n = 8207 to n = 8209), and that social support is positively associated with fertility and child development (n = 1766 to n = 6561). Results show that: (i) relative to not attending, church attendance is positively related to a woman's social network support and aid from co-religionists, (ii) aid from co-religionists is associated with increased family size, while (iii) fertility declines with extra-religious social network support. Moreover, while extra-religious social network support decreased over time, co-religionist aid remained constant. These findings suggest that religious and secular networks differ in their longevity and have divergent influences on a woman's fertility. We find some suggestive evidence that support to mothers and aid from co-religionists is positively associated with a child's cognitive ability at later stages of development. Findings provide mixed support for the premise that ritual, such as church attendance, is part of a strategy that returns high levels of support, fertility and improved child outcomes. Identifying the diversity and scope of cooperative breeding strategies across global religions presents an intriguing new horizon in the evolutionary study of religious systems. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'

Images from a jointly-arousing collective ritual reveal affective polarization

Collective rituals are biologically ancient and culturally pervasive, yet few studies have quantified effects on participants. We assessed two plausible models from qualitative anthropology: ritual empathy predicts affective convergence among all ritual participants irrespective of ritual role; rite-of-passage predicts emotional differences, specifically that ritual initiates will express relatively negatively valence when compared with non-initiates. To evaluate model predictions, images of participants in a Spanish fire-walking ritual were extracted from video data and assessed by nine Spanish raters for arousal and valence. Consistent with rite-of-passage, we found that arousal jointly increased for all participants but that valence differed by ritual role: fire-walkers exhibited increasingly positive arousal and increasingly negative valence when compared with passengers. This result offers the first quantified evidence for rite of passage dynamics within a highly arousing collective ritual. Methodologically, we show that surprisingly simple and non-invasive data structures (rated video images) may be combined with methods from evolutionary ecology (Bayesian Generalized Linear Mixed Effects models) to clarify poorly understood dimensions of the human condition

Coding culture: challenges and recommendations for comparative cultural databases

Considerable progress in explaining cultural evolutionary dynamics has been made by applying rigorous models from the natural sciences to historical and ethnographic information collected and accessed using novel digital platforms. Initial results have clarified several long-standing debates in cultural evolutionary studies, such as population origins, the role of religion in the evolution of complex societies and the factors that shape global patterns of language diversity. However, future progress requires recognition of the unique challenges posed by cultural data. To address these challenges, standards for data collection, organisation and analysis must be improved and widely adopted. Here, we describe some major challenges to progress in the construction of large comparative databases of cultural history, including recognising the critical role of theory, selecting appropriate units of analysis, data gathering and sampling strategies, winning expert buy-in, achieving reliability and reproducibility in coding, and ensuring interoperability and sustainability of the resulting databases. We conclude by proposing a set of practical guidelines to meet these challenges

Analytic atheism : A cross-culturally weak and fickle phenomenon?

Religious belief is a topic of longstanding interest to psychological science, but the psychology of religious disbelief is a relative newcomer. One prominently discussed model is analytic atheism, wherein cognitive reflection, as measured with the Cognitive Reflection Test, overrides religious intuitions and instruction. Consistent with this model, performance-based measures of cognitive reflection predict religious disbelief in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic) samples. However, the generality of analytic atheism remains unknown. Drawing on a large global sample (N = 3461) from 13 religiously, demographically, and culturally diverse societies, we find that analytic atheism as usually assessed is in fact quite fickle cross-culturally, appearing robustly only in aggregate analyses and in three individual countries. The results provide additional evidence for culture's effects on core beliefs.Peer reviewe

Spreading order: religion, cooperative niche construction, and risky coordination problems

Adaptationists explain the evolution of religion from the cooperative effects of religious commitments, but which cooperation problem does religion evolve to solve? I focus on a class of symmetrical coordination problems for which there are two pure Nash equilibriums: (1) ALL COOPERATE, which is efficient but relies on full cooperation; (2) ALL DEFECT, which is inefficient but pays regardless of what others choose. Formal and experimental studies reveal that for such risky coordination problems, only the defection equilibrium is evolutionarily stable. The following makes sense of otherwise puzzling properties of religious cognition and cultures as features of cooperative designs that evolve to stabilise such risky exchange. The model is interesting because it explains lingering puzzles in the data on religion, and better integrates evolutionary theories of religion with recent, well-motivated models of cooperative niche construction

A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported beta = 0.120). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported beta = 0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates.</p

Status Update and Interim Results from the Asymptomatic Carotid Surgery Trial-2 (ACST-2)

Objectives: ACST-2 is currently the largest trial ever conducted to compare carotid artery stenting (CAS) with carotid endarterectomy (CEA) in patients with severe asymptomatic carotid stenosis requiring revascularization. Methods: Patients are entered into ACST-2 when revascularization is felt to be clearly indicated, when CEA and CAS are both possible, but where there is substantial uncertainty as to which is most appropriate. Trial surgeons and interventionalists are expected to use their usual techniques and CE-approved devices. We report baseline characteristics and blinded combined interim results for 30-day mortality and major morbidity for 986 patients in the ongoing trial up to September 2012. Results: A total of 986 patients (687 men, 299 women), mean age 68.7 years (SD ± 8.1) were randomized equally to CEA or CAS. Most (96%) had ipsilateral stenosis of 70-99% (median 80%) with contralateral stenoses of 50-99% in 30% and contralateral occlusion in 8%. Patients were on appropriate medical treatment. For 691 patients undergoing intervention with at least 1-month follow-up and Rankin scoring at 6 months for any stroke, the overall serious cardiovascular event rate of periprocedural (within 30 days) disabling stroke, fatal myocardial infarction, and death at 30 days was 1.0%. Conclusions: Early ACST-2 results suggest contemporary carotid intervention for asymptomatic stenosis has a low risk of serious morbidity and mortality, on par with other recent trials. The trial continues to recruit, to monitor periprocedural events and all types of stroke, aiming to randomize up to 5,000 patients to determine any differential outcomes between interventions. Clinical trial: ISRCTN21144362. © 2013 European Society for Vascular Surgery. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved