Cognitive pathways to belief in karma and belief in God

Supernatural beliefs are ubiquitous around the world, and mounting evidence indicates that these beliefs partly rely on intuitive, cross-culturally recurrent cognitive processes. Specifically, past research has focused on humans’ intuitive tendency to perceive minds as part of the cognitive foundations of belief in a personified God — an agentic, morally concerned supernatural entity. However, much less is known about belief in karma – another culturally widespread but ostensibly non-agentic supernatural entity reflecting ethical causation across reincarnations. In two studies and four high-powered samples, including mostly-Christian Canadians and mostly-Hindu Indians (Study 1, N = 2006) and mostly-Christian Americans and Singaporean Buddhists (Study 2, N = 1752), we provide the first systematic empirical investigation of the cognitive intuitions underlying various forms of belief in karma. We used path analyses to (1) replicate tests of the previously documented cognitive predictors of belief in God, (2) test whether this same network of variables predicts belief in karma, and (3) examine the relative contributions of cognitive and cultural variables to both sets of beliefs. We found that cognitive tendencies toward intuitive thinking, mentalizing, dualism, and teleological thinking predicted a variety of beliefs about karma—including morally-laden, non-agentic, and agentic conceptualizations—above and beyond the variability explained by cultural learning about karma across cultures. These results provide further evidence for an independent role for both culture and cognition in supporting diverse types of supernatural beliefs in distinct cultural contexts

What is the association between religious affiliation and children’s altruism?

Decety et al. [1] examined the relationships between household religiosity and sociality in children sampled from six countries. We were keenly interested in Decety et al. [1]’s conclusions about a negative relationship between religiosity and generosity — measured with the Dictator Game — as our team has investigated related questions, often with potentially contrasting findings 2, 3, 4 and 5. We argue here that, after addressing peculiarities in their analyses, Decety et al. [1]’s data are consistent with a different interpretation

Reproductive inequality in humans and other mammals

To address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e., inequality in the number of surviving offspring) among males and smaller sex differences in reproductive skew than most other mammals, while nevertheless falling within the mammalian range. Additionally, female reproductive skew is higher in polygynous human populations than in polygynous nonhumans mammals on average. This patterning of skew can be attributed in part to the prevalence of monogamy in humans compared to the predominance of polygyny in nonhuman mammals, to the limited degree of polygyny in the human societies that practice it, and to the importance of unequally held rival resources to women’s fitness. The muted reproductive inequality observed in humans appears to be linked to several unusual characteristics of our species—including high levels of cooperation among males, high dependence on unequally held rival resources, complementarities between maternal and paternal investment, as well as social and legal institutions that enforce monogamous norms

Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochialism across 15 societies

The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to such mechanisms being constrained to the religious ingroup, possibly at the expense of religious outgroups. To test these hypotheses, we administered two behavioural experiments and a set of interviews to a sample of 2228 participants from 15 diverse populations. These populations included foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, and wage labourers, practicing Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, but also forms of animism and ancestor worship. Using the Random Allocation Game (RAG) and the Dictator Game (DG) in which individuals allocated money between themselves, local and geographically distant co-religionists, and religious outgroups, we found that higher ratings of gods as monitoring and punishing predicted decreased local favouritism (RAGs) and increased resource-sharing with distant co-religionists (DGs). The effects of punishing and monitoring gods on outgroup allocations revealed between-site variability, suggesting that in the absence of intergroup hostility, moralizing gods may be implicated in cooperative behaviour toward outgroups. These results provide support for the hypothesis that beliefs in monitoring and punitive gods help expand the circle of sustainable social interaction, and open questions about the treatment of religious outgroups

Memory and Belief in the Transmission of Counterintuitive Content

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York. Cognitive scientists have increasingly turned to cultural transmission to explain the widespread nature of religion. One key hypothesis focuses on memory, proposing that that minimally counterintuitive (MCI) content facilitates the transmission of supernatural beliefs. We propose two caveats to this hypothesis. (1) Memory effects decrease as MCI concepts become commonly used, and (2) people do not believe counterintuitive content readily; therefore additional mechanisms are required to get from memory to belief. In experiments 1–3 (n = 283), we examined the relationship between MCI, belief, and memory. We found that increased tendencies to anthropomorphize predicted poorer memory for anthropomorphic-MCI content. MCI content was found less believable than intuitive content, suggesting different mechanisms are required to explain belief. In experiment 4 (n = 70), we examined the non-content-based cultural learning mechanism of credibility-enhancing displays (CREDs) and found that it increased participants’ belief in MCI content, suggesting this type of learning can better explain the transmission of belief

Weighing Outcome vs. Intent Across Societies: How cultural models of mind shape moral reasoning

Mental state reasoning has been theorized as a core feature of how we navigate our social worlds, and as especially vital to moral reasoning. Judgments of moral wrong-doing and punish worthiness often hinge upon evaluations of the perpetrator’s mental states. In two studies, we examine how differences in cultural conceptions about how one should think about others’ minds influence the relative importance of intent vs. outcome in moral judgments. We recruit participation from three societies, differing in emphasis on mental state reasoning: Indigenous iTaukei Fijians from Yasawa Island (Yasawans) who normatively avoid mental state inference in favor of focus on relationships and consequences of actions; Indo-Fijians who normatively emphasize relationships but do not avoid mental state inference; and North Americans who emphasize individual autonomy and interpreting others’ behaviors as the direct result of mental states. In study 1, Yasawan participants placed more emphasis on outcome than Indo-Fijians or North Americans by judging accidents more harshly than failed attempts. Study 2 tested whether underlying differences in the salience of mental states drives study 1 effects by inducing Yasawan and North American participants to think about thoughts vs. actions before making moral judgments. When induced to think about thoughts, Yasawan participants shifted to judge failed attempts more harshly than accidents. Results suggest that culturally-transmitted concepts about how to interpret the social world shape patterns of moral judgments, possibly via mental state inference

The basis of belief : the cognitive and cultural foundations of supernatural belief

In this dissertation I explore the relative roles of cognition and culture play as the foundations of religious and supernatural belief. On the cognitive side, theories of religion have postulated several cognitive biases that predispose human minds towards supernatural belief. However, to this date, very little empirical evidence exists to show how these hypotheses preform in predicting actual religious beliefs. I explore these biases and how they interrelate to support supernatural beliefs using individual difference measures across several large samples from Canada, the US, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. On the cultural side, I look at how different theories of secularization and the CREDs theory of cultural learning support supernatural belief and religious practice. I compare these effects of culture to the effects of cognition and find that cognitive biases support supernatural belief generally, but these effects are stronger for paranormal beliefs than religious ones and are almost non-existence for religious practice. Religious belief and practice are largely supported by social and cultural factors. Finally, I compare religious and non-religious participants to spiritual but not religious (SBNR) participants to further break down the differences between religious and non-religious supernatural beliefs and religious practice. I find that the SBNR are more like the religious than the non-religious but can still be identified as a unique group in terms of cognition and culture.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat

Universal cognitive biases as the basis for supernatural beliefs : evidence and critiques

What explains the ubiquity of religions across time and space, and why do these supernatural belief systems seem to have so much in common? Many cognitive scientists of religion have proposed that cross-cultural patterns in religious belief are, at least in part, the indirect result of reliably developing and otherwise adaptive features of the human mind. These ‘cognitive bias’ theories propose that religion is a by-product of universal mental architecture. Similar beliefs recur in unrelated cultural and historical contexts because of biases in how we perceive and interpret the word, and how we remember concepts. This chapter reviews the evidence, merits, and limitations of such theories. In so doing, the chapter addresses the most influential of the cognitive bias theories: the proposed relationships between various religious beliefs and Theory of Mind, anthropomorphism, dualism, teleological reasoning, and minimally counterintuitive concepts. Both the strengths and shortcomings of these theories in explaining religious belief are addressed and the chapter suggests future directions