Research on religious behavior has stressed its character as a cognitive complex
that evolved during the Pleistocene to incentivize prosocial behavior and serves
roughly similar population management roles regardless of social context. To
explore this idea, we reconstructed religious institutional structure for three pre-
Columbian societies using a key feature or religious organization: the basal
congregation size—a critical axis of population management and for the creation
of shared communal identities. Results show that in places where populations
could fission to avoid intra-community conflict, religious institutions show no real
evidence of internal community management. In locations where large towns
meant more internal conflict, religious institutions mapped themselves over the
extended family, creating small congregations that provided the mid-level
organizational tiers necessary to support larger communities. Finally, for
populations organized into regional polities, religious institutions used large ritual
assemblies and conspicuous paraphernalia to invoke our Pleistocene cognitive
predispositions for altruistic and cooperative behavior towards close-kin, but redirected
them towards the large, non-kin religious community. This variation
highlights the malleable and reactive nature of religious institutions, which
interact quite differently with their constituent members or their cognitive
predispositions depending on the social needs they look to resolve.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Centro de Investigaciones Antropológicas (CIAN)UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ciencias Sociales::Facultad de Ciencias Sociales::Escuela de Antropologí
