Christopher Kavanagh

The Evolution of Extreme Cooperation Via Shared Dysphoric Experiences

Willingness to lay down one’s life for a group of non-kin, well documented historically and ethnographically, represents an evolutionary puzzle. Building on research in social psychology, we develop a mathematical model showing how conditioning cooperation on previous shared experience can allow individually costly pro-group behavior to evolve. The model generates a series of predictions that we then test empirically in a range of special sample populations (including military veterans, college fraternity/sorority members, football fans, martial arts practitioners, and twins). Our empirical results show that sharing painful experiences produces “identity fusion” – a visceral sense of oneness – which in turn can motivate self-sacrifice, including willingness to fight and die for the group. Practically, our account of how shared dysphoric experiences produce identity fusion helps us better understand such pressing social issues as suicide terrorism, holy wars, sectarian violence, gang-related violence, and other forms of intergroup conflict.

Culture and Group Processes

Table of Contents Foreword: Series Editors Chapter 1. Culture and Group Processes: Defining the Intersection Marilynn B. Brewer and Masaki Yuki Part I. Culture and Basic Group Processes Chapter 2. Essentialism and Entitativity Across Cultures Nick Haslam, Elise Holland, and Minoru Karasawa Chapter 3. Intergroup Comparison and Intragroup Relationships: Group processes in the cultures of individualism and collectivism Masaki Yuki and Kosuke Takamura Chapter 4. A Knowledge-based Account of Cultural Identification: The Role of Intersubjective Representations Ching Wan and Jia Yu Chapter 5. Culture, Group Processes and Trust Letty Y-Y. Kwan and Ying-yi Hong Part II. Culture and Intragroup Processes Chapter 6. Outlier Nation: The Cultural Psychology of American Workways Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks and Eric Luis Uhlmann Chapter 7. Culture, Group Processes, and Creativity Chenchen Li, Letty Kwan, Shyhnan Liou, and Chi-Yue Chiu Chapter 8. How Does Culture Matter? A Contextual View of Intercultural Interaction in Groups Mary E. Zellner-Bruhn and Cristina B. Gibson Chapter 9. Unpacking Four Forms of Third Culture in Multicultural Teams Wendi Adair and Omar Ganai Part III. Culture and Intergroup Processes Chapter 10. Culture and Intergroup Communication Kimberly A. Noels Chapter 11. Culture, Group Entitativity and Contagion of Conflict Tiane Lee, Michele Gelfand, and Garriy Shteynberg

Relational mobility predicts social behaviors in 39 countries and is tied to historical farming and threat

Significance Biologists and social scientists have long tried to understand why some societies have more fluid and open interpersonal relationships—differences in relational mobility—and how those differences influence individual behaviors. We measure relational mobility in 39 societies and find that relationships are more stable and hard to form in east Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, while they are more fluid in the West and Latin America. Results show that relationally mobile cultures tend to have higher interpersonal trust and intimacy. Exploring potential causes, we find greater environmental threats (like disease and warfare) and sedentary farming are associated with lower relational mobility. Our society-level index of relational mobility for 39 societies is a resource for future studies. Biologists and social scientists have long tried to understand why some societies have more fluid and open interpersonal relationships and how those differences influence culture. This study measures relational mobility, a socioecological variable quantifying voluntary (high relational mobility) vs. fixed (low relational mobility) interpersonal relationships. We measure relational mobility in 39 societies and test whether it predicts social behavior. People in societies with higher relational mobility report more proactive interpersonal behaviors (e.g., self-disclosure and social support) and psychological tendencies that help them build and retain relationships (e.g., general trust, intimacy, self-esteem). Finally, we explore ecological factors that could explain relational mobility differences across societies. Relational mobility was lower in societies that practiced settled, interdependent subsistence styles, such as rice farming, and in societies that had stronger ecological and historical threats.

Too Much, Too Little, or the Wrong Kind of ‘Theory’ in the Study of Religions?

In response to the recent publication of Theory In a Time of Excess this article offers an outsider perspective on the theoretical issues raised and why they are ultimately unlikely to be resolved. The article argues that there is a widespread problematic tendency to equate theory with a specific category of critical theory that tautologically restricts the theoretical boundaries of the study of religion field and neglects the contributions of more empirically inclined theorists. In a similar manner, essentialising narratives about the Cognitive Science of Religion that portray the field as unified and monolithic are highlighted and the validity of such critiques is questioned.

Positive experiences of high arousal martial arts rituals are linked to identity fusion bonds and costly progroup actions.

Abstract A cross‐sectional study was conducted with 605 practitioners of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) to test the hypothesis that high arousal rituals promote social cohesion, primarily through identity fusion. BJJ promotion rituals are rare, highly emotional ritual events that often feature gruelling belt‐whipping gauntlets. We used the variation in such experiences to examine whether more gruelling rituals were associated with identity fusion and pro‐group behaviour. We found no differences between those who had undergone belt‐whipping and those who had not and no evidence of a correlation between pain and social cohesion. However, across the full sample we found that positive, but not negative, affective experiences of promotional rituals were associated with identity fusion and that this mediated pro‐group action. These findings provide new evidence concerning the social functions of collective rituals and highlight the importance of addressing the potentially diverging subjective experiences of painful rituals.

The event cognition “hammer” and the “nails” of experience

Taves and Asprem’s article presents an admirable effort to promote consilience among researchers of religion, advocating a potential shared research platform that is focused on events and event cognition. While I am in broad agreement with their conciliatory goals and the call for cognitively informed research on religion to return to focus on religious experience, I have some reservations about the broader applications of the research framework they advocate. Before discussing my reservations, I want to state clearly that I strongly agree with the usefulness of applying an event cognition approach when investigating unambiguous religious events, such as a specific festival or an ecstatic trance episode. For more ambiguous cases, such as events that endure for extended periods of time, the framework seems less directly applicable, but it still has the potential to provide insights. In both cases an event cognition framework places prominence on the processes that are constantly generating and updating our cognitive working models of events, and this is an effective means of emphasizing the multifaceted, subjective, and malleable nature of experiences. This in turn reminds researchers to consider the impact of previous experiences, expectations, and post-event reflection/elaboration and not to make the fundamental error of confusing pooled subjective responses as representing an accurate account of objective reality. These are factors that are widely recognized as important by all researchers of religion, cognitive and otherwise, but they are also often ignored in practice. Taves and Asprem also rightly highlight the importance of developing a robust terminology and a shared theoretical framework for addressing religious experiences, to enable more effective collaborations across disciplines and the building of a cumulative body of research. Similar suggestions have been made recently in regards to the theoretical framework and terminology relating to religious representations (Purzycki & Willard, 2015). Both calls, if heeded, will help to increase rigor in the field. However, I would like to raise three core criticisms that I hope will help to move things forward. The first is that, in seeking to illustrate the utility of event cognition as a unified framework, the authors utilize a (popular) definition so broad that it essentially enables all experience to be recast as “events.” My past week can be conceived of as “a segment of time [i.e., seven days] at a given location [i.e., Sapporo, Japan], that is perceived by an observer [i.e., me] to have a beginning and an end”; so can a birthday party, so can a trip to the bathroom, and so can a two-year tour of duty in Iraq. Indeed, as Taves and Asprem state in the target article, if we apply this definition, “experiences are events.” The concern here is that reframing experiences as events may obscure more than it illuminates. Is an autobiographical, narratively constructed life event best examined by categorizing it in the same group as a mundane daily event, such as riding an elevator that generates a procedural schema? I remain unconvinced. Especially when we have alternative established frameworks and existing terminology that draws important distinctions between these experiences, such as that utilized in the memory research literature. The event cognition approach does make use of this terminology but as the proposed alternative typology of events indicates, the distinctions are not prioritized.

On the necessity of “minimal” methodological standards and religious “butterfly” collecting

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