Richard Sosis

Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion:

The costly signaling theory of religion posits that religious rituals and taboos can promote intragroup cooperation, which is argued to be the primary adaptive benefit of religion. To test this theory, the authors collected historical data on the constraints and ritual requirements that eighty-three 19th-century U.S. communes imposed on their members. All communes must solve the collective action problem of cooperative labor to survive; thus, they are an ideal population to assess the impact of ritual and taboo on intragroup cooperation. The authors evaluated whether communes that imposed costlier requirements survived longer than less demanding communes and whether costly requirements and religiosity interact to promote cooperation. The results support aspects of the costly signaling theory of religion and reveal new avenues for its development. The authors discuss some of the shortcomings of the theory and explore ways to expand the theory that incorporate additional features of ritual and religious belief.

Ritual, emotion, and sacred symbols

This paper considers religion in relation to four recurrent traits: belief systems incorporating supernatural agents and counterintuitive concepts, communal ritual, separation of the sacred and the profane, and adolescence as a preferred developmental period for religious transmission. These co-occurring traits are viewed as an adaptive complex that offers clues to the evolution of religion from its nonhuman ritual roots. We consider the critical element differentiating religious from non-human ritual to be the conditioned association of emotion and abstract symbols. We propose neurophysiological mechanisms underlying such associations and argue that the brain plasticity of human adolescence constitutes an “experience expectant” developmental period for ritual conditioning of sacred symbols. We suggest that such symbols evolved to solve an ecological problem by extending communication and coordination of social relations across time and space.

Why aren’t we all hutterites?

In this paper I explore the psychology of ritual performance and present a simple graphical model that clarifies several issues in William Irons’s theory of religion as a “hard-to-fake” sign of commitment. Irons posits that religious behaviors or rituals serve as costly signals of an individual’s commitment to a religious group. Increased commitment among members of a religious group may facilitate intra-group cooperation, which is argued to be the primary adaptive benefit of religion. Here I propose a proximate explanation for how individuals are able to pay the short-term costs of ritual performance to achieve the long-term fitness benefits offered by religious groups. The model addresses three significant problems raised by Irons’s theory. First, the model explains why potential free-riders do not join religious groups even when there are significant net benefits that members of religious groups can achieve. Second, the model clarifies how costly a ritual must be to achieve stability and prevent potential free-riders from joining the religious group. Third, the model suggests why religious groups may require adherents to perform private rituals that are not observed by others. Several hypotheses generated from the model are also discussed.

Religion and Intragroup Cooperation: Preliminary Results of a Comparative Analysis of Utopian Communities

Several authors have argued that religious beliefs are a way of communicating commitment and loyalty to other group members. The advantage of commitment signals is that they can promote intragroup cooperation by overcoming the free-rider problems that plague most cooperative pursuits. In this article, the author tests this idea using a database on 19th century utopian communes. The economic success and survival of utopian communes is dependent upon solving the collective-action problem of cooperative labor. If religious beliefs foster commitment and loyalty among individuals who share those beliefs, communes formed out of religious conviction should survive longer than communes motivated by secular ideologies such as socialism. Preliminary results from survivorship analysis support this hypothesis; religious communes are more likely than secular communes to survive at every stage of their life course. These results are discussed with reference to a modern communal movement, the Israeli kibbutz.

Costly signaling and torch fishing on Ifaluk atoll.

In this paper I evaluate the merit of costly signaling theory (CST) as a paradigm for understanding why men of Ifaluk atoll torch fish. I argue that torch fishing is a handicap that signals mens productivity. Consistent with CST, torch fishing is observed by the predicted audience (women), energetically costly to perform, and a reliable indicator of the frequency a man fishes during the trade wind season. Contrary to expectations of who should benefit from torch fishing and consequently participate, torch fishers are not primarily young and unmarried. Torch fishers, however, are predominately from the matriline that owns the canoe on which they fish, suggesting that torch fishing also signals the productivity of a matriline. Although these results support the possibility that torch fishing is a handicap, no data are presented which demonstrate that torch fishers achieve any gains from sending the costly signal. This shortcoming and other directions for future research on Ifaluk foraging decisions are discussed.

The Adaptationist-Byproduct Debate on the Evolution of Religion: Five Misunderstandings of the Adaptationist Program

The primary debate among scholars who study the evolution of religion concerns whether religion is an adaptation or a byproduct. The dominant position in the field is that religious beliefs and behaviors are byproducts of cognitive processes and behaviors that evolved for other purposes. A smaller group of scholars maintain that religion is an adaptation for extending human cooperation and coordination. Here I survey five critiques of the adapationist position and offer responses to these critiques. Much of the debate can be resolved by clearly defining important but ambiguous terms in the debate, such as religion, adaptation, adaptive, and trait, as well as clarifying several misunderstandings of evolutionary processes. I argue that adaptationist analyses must focus on the functional effects of the religious system, the coalescence of independent parts that constitute the fabric of religion.

Signalling theory and the evolution of religious cooperation

How does religion motivate cooperation? How do the factors (genetic and cultural) that cause these motivations variously evolve, and why are they conserved? Cooperative-signalling theories of religion answer these questions by generalising from well-supported principles and research in the life sciences. Cooperative-signalling theories are interesting because they explain existing puzzles in the data about religions, and lead to testable hypotheses. This article discusses how signalling theory has been applied to explain the evolution and conservation of religiously motivated cooperation at small and large social scales, and reviews evidence relevant to evaluating these applications.

IDEOLOGY, RELIGION, AND THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION: FIELD EXPERIMENTS ON ISRAELI KIBBUTZIM

Despite the putative importance of ideological commitments in the evolution of large-scale cooperation among unrelated individuals, evolutionary researchers have yet to examine empirically the relationship between ideology and cooperation. We conduct an experimental game on Israeli kibbutz members to evaluate whether: (1) differences in ideological commitment can explain variation in cooperation within and across kibbutzim; and (2) whether certain types of ideologies are better at promoting cooperation than others. We use the cooperative behavior of Israeli city residents as a baseline and show that members of collectivized kibbutzim are more cooperative than city residents, while members of kibbutzim that have abandoned socialist ideology (privatized kibbutzim) are no more cooperative than city residents. Our results further indicate that among collectivized kibbutzim, members of religious kibbutzim are more cooperative than their secular counterparts. Religious males who engage in thrice-daily communal prayer display the highest levels of cooperation of any subpopulation in our sample. We discuss how the performance of sanctified rituals serves to internalize religious ideological commitment, thus enhancing the ability of religious ideology to motivate cooperative behavior.

Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel

Significance It is a popular assumption that certain perceptions—for example, that highly feminine women are attractive, or that masculine men are aggressive—reflect evolutionary processes operating within ancestral human populations. However, observations of these perceptions have mostly come from modern, urban populations. This study presents data on cross-cultural perceptions of facial masculinity and femininity. In contrast to expectations, we find that in less developed environments, typical “Western” perceptions are attenuated or even reversed, suggesting that Western perceptions may be relatively novel. We speculate that novel environments, which expose individuals to large numbers of unfamiliar faces, may provide novel opportunities—and motives—to discern subtle relationships between facial appearance and other traits. A large literature proposes that preferences for exaggerated sex typicality in human faces (masculinity/femininity) reflect a long evolutionary history of sexual and social selection. This proposal implies that dimorphism was important to judgments of attractiveness and personality in ancestral environments. It is difficult to evaluate, however, because most available data come from large-scale, industrialized, urban populations. Here, we report the results for 12 populations with very diverse levels of economic development. Surprisingly, preferences for exaggerated sex-specific traits are only found in the novel, highly developed environments. Similarly, perceptions that masculine males look aggressive increase strongly with development and, specifically, urbanization. These data challenge the hypothesis that facial dimorphism was an important ancestral signal of heritable mate value. One possibility is that highly developed environments provide novel opportunities to discern relationships between facial traits and behavior by exposing individuals to large numbers of unfamiliar faces, revealing patterns too subtle to detect with smaller samples.

The Religious System as Adaptive: Cognitive Flexibility, Public Displays, and Acceptance

Religion is often conceived as a conservative social force that sustains traditional cultural beliefs and behaviors. Religion, however, also exhibits predictable socioecological variation and facilitates adaptive response patterns in the diverse environments that humans inhabit. Here we examine how the religious system, which is composed of a number of interacting components, generates adaptive response patterns. We argue that the religious system accomplishes this by: (1) employing highly flexible cognitive mechanisms, (2) evoking emotional responses that provide reliable information concerning individual physical and psychological states, (3) supporting specialists who introduce religious ideas that endorse and sustain the social order, and (4) encouraging collective acceptance of these ideas with public displays, typically in the form of rituals, badges, and taboos. These interacting components of the religious system ultimately promote prosocial behavior under diverse conditions.