From Conflict to COVID: How Shared Experiences Shape Our World and How They Could Improve It

The human capacity for cooperation is at the root of many of the most impressive accomplishments of our species—from the evolution of language and tool use to the construction of pyramids and space stations. Although some forms of cooperation are motivated by self-interest or fear of punishment, the forms of cooperation that are most likely to succeed in the face of personal costs stem from love of the group. In this article, I consider one of the most intense forms of ingroup love known to psychology—identity fusion—resulting from shared suffering, from the battlefield and football pitch to the hospital ward and prison camp. Though often harnessed in ways that fuel intergroup conflict and violent extremism, fusion can just as easily be channeled into peaceful and consensual forms of prosocial action, for example, to tackle climate change, reduce crime, prevent intergroup conflict, or respond to pandemics. Understanding and applying the insights generated by research on fusion can help policy makers foster more effective forms of cooperation for the public good

Religion and morality

The relationship between religion and morality has long been hotly debated. Does religion make us more moral? Is it necessary for morality? Do moral inclinations emerge independently of religious intuitions? These debates, which nowadays rumble on in scientific journals as well as in public life, have frequently been marred by a series of conceptual confusions and limitations. Many scientific investigations have failed to decompose “religion” and “morality” into theoretically grounded elements; have adopted parochial conceptions of key concepts—in particular, sanitized conceptions of “prosocial” behavior; and have neglected to consider the complex interplay between cognition and culture. We argue that to make progress, the categories “religion” and “morality” must be fractionated into a set of biologically and psychologically cogent traits, revealing the cognitive foundations that shape and constrain relevant cultural variants. We adopt this fractionating strategy, setting out an encompassing evolutionary framework within which to situate and evaluate relevant evidence. Our goals are twofold: to produce a detailed picture of the current state of the field, and to provide a road map for future research on the relationship between religion and morality

Afterword: Ritual, Emotion and Power

Harvey Whitehouse, Pieter Francois, ‘Afterword: Ritual, Emotion and Power’, in Merridee Bailey, Katie Barclay, eds., Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200-1920: Family, State and Church, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), ISBN 978-3-319-44184-9, eISBN 978-3-319-44185-6.Peer reviewe

The Role of Ritual in the Evolution of Social Complexity: Five Predictions and a Drum Roll

Copyright © 2015, The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ EnquiriesPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

What Motivates Barrier-Crossing Leadership?

From large-scale wars, natural disasters, and pandemics to community-level religious and ethnic conflicts, many leaders wield power during crises by championing their group’s goals against those of rivals. But there is also a rarer breed of leader—barrier-crossers who pursue group interests by recognizing rivals’ interests and working with them to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Though such leaders have played vital roles in resolving conflicts, little is known about their extraordinary motivation. Here we report survey results contrasting barrier-crossing with barrier-bound leaders from seven communities. In line with new theories from group psychology and anthropology, we found that barrier-crossers uniquely reported intense, family-like bonds to both ingroups and outgroups. Further evidence suggests that these outgroup bonds result from past, personally transformative experiences shared with outgroup members

Testing for a unit root against ESTAR stationarity

In this paper we examine the local power of unit root tests against globally stationary exponential smooth transition autoregressive [ESTAR] alternatives under two sources of uncertainty: the degree of nonlinearity in the ESTAR model, and the presence of a linear deterministic trend. First, we show that the Kapetanios, Shin and Snell (2003, Journal of Econometrics 112, 359.379) [KSS] test for nonlinear stationarity has local asymptotic power gains over standard Dickey-Fuller [DF] tests for certain degrees of nonlinearity in the ESTAR model, but that for other degrees of nonlinearity, the linear DF test has superior power. Second, we derive limiting distributions of demeaned, and demeaned and detrended KSS and DF tests under a local ESTAR alternative when a local trend is present in the DGP. We show that the power of the demeaned tests outperforms that of the detrended tests when no trend is present in the DGP, but deteriorates as the magnitude of the trend increases. We propose a union of rejections testing procedure that combines all four individual tests and show that this captures most of the power available from the individual tests across different degrees of nonlinearity and trend magnitudes. We also show that incorporating a trend detection procedure into this union testing strategy can result in higher power when a large trend is present in the DGP

Band of mothers: Childbirth as a female bonding experience

Does the experience of childbirth create social bonds among first-time mothers? Previous research suggests that sharing emotionally intense or painful experiences with others leads to “identity fusion,” a visceral feeling of oneness with a group that predicts strong forms of prosocial action and self-sacrifice for other group members. This study compared identity fusion with other mothers during pregnancy versus after childbirth in a sample of 164 U.S. women. Eighty-nine mothers in our sample were pregnant with their firstborn, and 75 mothers had given birth to their firstborn up to 6 months prior to the time of data collection. Results demonstrated that identity fusion with other mothers was higher for postpartum mothers than for antenatal mothers. As predicted, among postpartum mothers, those who thought that their childbirth was more painful than a typical childbirth experience reported greater identity fusion with mothers who reported having had a very difficult birth. Postpartum mothers’ ruminative thought about the birth mediated the association between level of dysphoria and identity fusion, and identity fusion moderated the association between postpartum mothers’ ruminative and reflective thought about the birth and their posttraumatic growth in complex ways. These findings provide evidence that perceived sharedness of the childbirth experience and thoughts about the birth are important to the process of identity fusion with other mothers, and highlight the importance of post-event processing for psychological health

Preverbal infants expect agents exhibiting counterintuitive capacities to gain access to contested resources

Claims to supernatural power have been used as a basis for authority in a wide range of societies, but little is known about developmental origins of the link between supernatural power and worldly authority. Here, we show that 12- to 16-month-old infants expect agents exhibiting counterintuitive capacities to win out in a two-way standoff over a contested resource. Infants watched two agents gain a reward using either physically intuitive or physically counterintuitive methods, the latter involving simple forms of levitation or teleportation. Infants looked longer, indicating surprise, when the physically intuitive agent subsequently outcompeted a physically counterintuitive agent in securing a reward. Control experiments indicated that infants’ expectations were not simply motived by the efficiency of agents in pursuing their goals, but specifically the deployment of counterintuitive capacities. This suggests that the link between supernatural power and worldly authority has early origins in development

Does loving a group mean hating its rivals? Exploring the relationship between ingroup cohesion and outgroup hostility among soccer fans

Why does group loyalty sometimes take the form of cooperation or peaceful competition with rival groups and, at other times, violent outgroup hostility? We approached this question using online surveys and an experimental manipulation with British soccer fans. Identity fusion (a visceral sense of “oneness” with the group) is known to motivate strong forms of pro-group action, both peaceful and violent. We identified three crucial factors that influence fused supporters’ intergroup behaviours: age, gender, and exposure to out-group threat. Intergroup behaviours included ingroup altruism (e.g., giving one’s time, or emotional/financial support), barrier-crossing altruism (altruistic acts toward rival fan groups), and outgroup hostility (e.g., insulting, spitting at, or physically attacking). Overall, fused fans were more hostile towards outgroups than were weakly fused fans, but they prioritised ingroup altruism over outgroup hostility, and were most likely to report high levels of barrier-crossing altruism. Older fused fans desired future outgroup hostility only under high threat conditions. A clearer understanding of the factors that modulate these different behaviours is a crucial first step in devising more effective ways of reducing intergroup hostility and, crucially, of channelling extreme forms of group alignment into peaceful forms of prosocial action