Truth
Sociality and Common Identity in the Evolution of Religion
Abstract
Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.Charles Darwin
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, 2 January 2010
Evolution
Primates’ evolutionary success is because they are social, allowing problems to be solved co-operatively, and therefore more efficiently. Humans are very social primates. Any society is a tacit social contract in which individuals forego some personal freedom to benefit from the greater returns of co-operation. Without this personal sacrifice and commitment to the group, it will fail. When too many group members act in their own selfish interest, others end up paying the costs of sociality. Once they realize it, they withdraw their co-operation from the group. The selfish people in the group broke the social contract, thinking they were smart, freeloading on the backs of the rest, but they destabilized the group because the others were bound to notice, withdraw their co-operation, and split the group. The co-operative ones form a new fully co-operative group, the selfish ones cannot survive alone unless they return to group norms.
Extrapolating from cross species comparisons of neocortex size, R I M Dunbar (Ann Rev Anthropol, 2003) decided that human group sizes cannot exceed an estimated 150 individuals before groups destabilize and divide or collapse, a claim which has been disputed (R J Smith, Curr Anthropol, 2003). Whatever the precise size, it is less than the sizes of human groups that began to form in the last 10,000 years, groups that ought to have been unstable. Obviously, they were not, and so some mechanism or feature evolved which stabilized them. Some say it was religion.
We read in Wikipedia, sv “Evolutionary psychology of religion”:
There is general agreement among scientists that a propensity to engage in religious behavior evolved early in human history.
It cannot be emphasized enough that this is wrong. It suits believers to spread the idea that religion is innate in us, the product of a God implanted God Gene, or some other long term divine manipulation of us to be suitable to receive religion. Humans of the genus Homo appeared at about the start of the Pleistocene, 1.8 million years ago. In the Pleistocene environment, in the hunter gatherer lifestyle we lived before settling into agriculture, the human ancestral environment, most key traits of human evolution developed. We can see in 3D because the world really is three dimensional. We naturally fear of snakes and spiders because snakes and spiders existed in abundance in the Pleistocene forests where we evolved, they were poisonous, and often deadly. Many of our faculties are adaptations to the real world:
Natural selection would not have left us with eyes that regularly misled us.D T Campbell, Evolutionary Epistemology: A Multiparadigm Program, Eds, W Callebaut and R Pinxten, (1987)
Originally religion did not exist. It could not therefore have been adaptive. Early humans were barely distinguishable from apes, and could have had no concept of religion. If some evolutionary psychologists speak about the adaptive value of religion, then it must already have evolved or been invented!
Religion is a construct of advanced human brains, and could only have emerged late in human history, most probably in the last 10,000 years, when humans began to settle into towns and cities, and signs of religion became manifest. The Pleistocene ended about the same time. Human characteristics—social growth, cultural development, technology, language, mating, parenting, morality and ritual—had evolved in the Pleistocene period to face the challenges we faced in it, long before large social groups had become stable enough to form towns and cities. Before that, humans living in small groups must have had either cultural habits that ultimately became religion, and before that evolved traits that were the basis of those cultural practices. It is utterly misleading, though, to call these precursors of religion by the name “religion”, because these early humans were not practising any sort of religion that we would recognize, but something that served different purposes for them.
Anyone who claims “religion” evolved due to natural selection, must be wrong, because it implies that primitive prehumans were doing something recognizably ritualistic which conferred some sort of evolutionary advantage to them. A better description of the evolution of religion is that it emerged as a byproduct of other adaptive traits selected for different reproductive advantages. The aspect of human evolution that became religion is the suite of individual behaviors that evolved to allow formerly solitary animals—animals that grouped in no more than small family groups of parents, perhaps only a mother and children—to adapt to social living. Apes, to varying degrees, are distributed along that path, chimpanzees social in small bands, gorillas living in family groups and so on.
We and chimpanzees evolved in parallel, but humans then found a way of living in much larger groups, and that is the point when religion emerged as a cultural feature, and humans began to dominate the world. Nothing that requires ritual can possibly have evolved in a Darwinian sense. Ritual is a cultural practice, done with conscious purpose, quite distinct from evolution. Ritual certainly was a way of strengthening social bonds in small human groups, and became an important feature of religion as we know it, but it was a cultural adaptation, and was relatively recent, certainly within the last 200,000 years.
Before around 12,000 years ago, group sizes remained small—limited by the destructive effect of selfishness (R Axelrod, The evolution of cooperation, 1984). A social group was restricted to genetically related individuals, bound by kin selection (W D Hamilton, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1964), and a few acceptable neighbors, bound by reciprocal altruism (R L Trivers, Quarterly Review of Biology, 1971). Social cohesion in small groups depended on social approval, those who were not approved being cast out—expelled, exiled. Group members therefore had a strong motive to want to avoid the disdain of other group members, and therefore to avoid doing something antisocial, because ultimately it meant a possible lonely death. Natural selection therefore favoured socially inclined people, those who were unselfish—were naturally empathetic, sharing and caring to others in the group. Fear for reputation and guilty feelings were selected because they ultimately maximized adaptation by fitting people for social living. Generosity was a sign of commitment to others, and therefore to the group.
Cultural evolution, driven by intergroup competition for scarce resources and habitats as human population rose and squandered them, favored large groups supported by technological improvements, but personal selfishness is much easier in large groups (H Gintis, S Bowles, R Boyd, E Fehr, Evol Hum Behav, 2003). The cultural encouragement of belief in a moral omniscient god, placing a fear of retribution into people’s mind even when they were not being observed by people that knew them, reduced selfish behavior, thereby strengthening society even when it had gone beyond the optimum size for self monitoring and punishment.
These studies suggest belief in a watching omniscient and omnipresent God helped the group size to expand with the formation of the first towns and cities from about 10,000 years ago. Fear for reputation by being known as a freeloader by God, the group epitomized as an omniscient spirit, kept most people social even when they need not be. The idea of the God, a supernatural embodiment of the social group, being able to see what anyone was doing, even when no one known was present, inhibited social deviance.
The Myth of Common Ancestry
The earliest society, perhaps even before we became human, was formed when families remained in touch as adults, then bonded together as a clan, led by a matriarch. Kinship, possession of common genes, held them together because the small groups of animals turned out to be reproductively fitter than the ones who remained solitary. Clan sociality was a more successful evolutionary strategy than solitary hunting and foraging for some animals. What, though, had changed to make animals that formerly became vicious towards each other, beyond a certain age, live together amicably?
Previously, the offspring of a mother, while young, remained amicably together in the litter supervized by the mother. While very young, they were too weak to do any harm to their siblings, unless one was a runt who was always pushed aside and eventually died of malnutrition. The others enjoyed rough and tumble together in play, without any fear of injury. But what motivated the young animals to play? Why waste valuable energy playing? It let them exercise their muscles, and hone their senses and skills without danger—play was an adaptive trait, improved fitness, and so was selected.
Even so, what made them play in the first place? It was that some of them enjoyed it, and they enjoyed it because it gave them a buzz—by some mutation, play caused certain chemicals to enter the brain giving a euphoric feeling. They were natural drugs like endorphins and dopamine, perhaps usually associated with the hunt, or sex. Animals with the mutation felt enjoyment in play, and got stronger and more skilful from playing than their brothers and sisters who did not have the mutation. Over time, the mutation was selected, and play became the norm for animals that were able to survive and reproduce. It all happened long ago, because play is intrinsic even to unsophisticated mammals. Social animals took it farther. They extended play into adulthood, enjoying the company of their siblings when others rejected it, remaining solitary.
Among the primates, some enjoyed their brothers’ and sisters’ company so much they too took to social living, and found it gave them more security and better reproductive success. Humans were among them, but they took it further still. First they formed clans like other social animals, then the clans came together for marriage, ultimately merging for mutual protection as the growing population and declining resources led to intertribal competition. Clans each had a matriarch, and had adopted a badge or symbol from something in their environment they wanted to be associated with—their totem, usually, but not always, an animal. In some mythical way, the totem and the human clan were associated—perhaps the totem was the mythical twin of a founding matriarch—and represented the clan’s power.
The clan origins of many historical nations like the Greeks and the Romans can be traced in their history, but by then patriarchy had replaced matriarchy, leaving relics only in some ancient customs, so the ancestor of the founding tribes was often male rather than female. The ancestor was the father of the clan. The tribe was obviously more diffuse than the clan. Everyone in a tribe were not kin, for tribes accepted strangers from other tribes, and even whole clans, to join in their confederation. The ancestor of any tribe could therefore not possibly have been the real ancestor of a mixture of people. He, or sometimes still, she, had to be mythical. The myth of common ancestry was an early myth meant to justify actions taken by the tribe as social glue—religion! Ancestor worship was the social glue applied in practise.
Clans that successfully united under the worship of some mythical common ancestor or totem were stronger than those that failed in competition for scarce resources including land. The weaker clans and tribes lost out, either having to join the united tribe, or to disperse to marginal land, or to be destroyed. When they chose to merge with the dominant tribe, they had to give up their traditional ancestor and badge, and accept a new one. They had to accept the ancestor myth of the dominant tribe, and the culture and ritual behavior that it required—its religion.
The myth of a common identity under a common god who also zealously watched over the proper observance of the identity is an important feature of human socialization beyond the primitive limit of around 150 people—the Dunbar number. In primitive times the tribe provided security to its members in return for everyone agreeing to tribal norms of reciprocity. Freeriding was antisocial and dangerous because it threatened mutual trust and reliability. Members of the smaller original groups constituting human society treated disloyalty and selfishness by expulsion.
People rejected by the community had to live a solitary existence, if they could, or join an alien group, if it would admit them. Successful groups would admit strangers but they had to accept the tribal identity, which meant worshiping the tribal father god, and accepting tribal culture and morality. In social units bigger than a tribe, the punishment remained, but policing selfish and antisocial acts got harder. The invention of an omniscient common ancestor, to whom ritual obeisance had to be given, helped to control freeloading by magnifying fear and guilt. That was the cultural purpose of religion. And with settlement from the hunter gatherer phase to agriculture, tribes eventually grew bigger still, forming city states surrounded by fields and hamlets.
Big Society and Religion
City states seem to have been an essential phase of the growth of civilization, and they were only able to exist by the power of religion to arouse feelings of guilt and fear in citizens tempted to free ride. The size of human groups continued to grow as the population ballooned with the new managed resources of agriculture. But the tension remained between the selfishness of the deeply ingrained tendency to be solitary, and the necessity of society for survival. Freeloaders were increasingly able in larger societies to escape the attention of people who knew them and could apply social sanctions, as they had once done—sanctions like exclusion, or now exile, from the city.
It was the myth of common origin with its ritual paraphernalia of worship of the omniscient god that put psychological pressure on people to conform to social norms of sharing and caring. Each city had a symbol of its traditions at its heart consisting of a fortress for defence, and a temple for the worship of its totem or ancestor god—its citadel. People coming to the city seeking citizenship had to accept its common identity, the god of the fathers of its citizens—the ancestral god or father, sometimes mother. The truth, then, of the kinship myth is not a literal truth but a practical truth—the truth of its usefulness in uniting disparate people into a single political body under the joint worship of a common god. So identity based on kinship is a myth and always was until we get back to the primitive clan as the largest human group.
The United States of America is an illustration of the myth of common origins, for these myths still prevail. Nations speak of the fatherland and some speak of the motherland, implying an ancestral father or mother. Americans sing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” complete with the line “Land where my fathers died, Land of the Pilgrim pride”, but few US citizens are descended from the Pilgrim Fathers. Most are descended from much later immigrants. The pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey, tested Americans about this, finding they ignored the facts in favor of the sentiments of the song!
Unity was the purpose of religion. The myth of common identity was a psychological force through the notion of the tribe or city being guarded under the watchful eye of an omniscient lord, zealous to find sinful behavior—behavior that would compromise social unity. Guilt and humanity’s instinctive morality gave people a sense of moral duty to conform, and fear that the embodiment of the tribe or city, in the person of its god, could see everything one did upheld most people’s sense of social responsibility. For those who did not conform, the kings of the cities or its elders introduced laws with punishments, for banishment or exile was getting less feasible, especially for people with skills the city needed.
The Greek city states never merged into a nation, but they did all accept a common ancestry from Hellen, whose three sons, Aeolus, Dorus, and Xuthus, gave rise to the four Greek peoples, the Aeolians, the Dorians, the Achaeans and the Ionians, the latter two descending from Xuthus. The Greeks had gone along the path to a nationhood that failed to come because neither Athens nor Sparta ever were able to assert their dominance, and the war between them was partially fomented and financed by Persia, seeking to divide and rule, or at least avoid a dangerous enemy uniting in the west. The outcome was that Athens and Sparta squandered their best sons and exhausted themselves through warfare. Alexander of Macedon did unite the Greeks and Persia suffered, but Alexander’s empire split into several parts, and Greece was easy prey to the growth of Rome.
Rome was united from the clans or gentes, which merged into tribes called curia, and about thirty of them merged to set up the city of Rome. The name of the people who started the city was “patricians” meaning “men of the fathers”. They became the ruling elite of Rome, the richest families, and the others, whom they ruled, were called plebeians, but they accepted the myth, which became the myth of Romulus and Remus, and the god identified with Romulus, Quirinus (Mars).
Modern Empirical Studies
Students of history can follow all of this so far, but only in the last few decades have a range of scientists looked into it for its implications, and to test or confirm these historical hypotheses. There are implications for sciences from biology and the theory of evolution, through economics and sociology to anthropology. Scientists have questioned the older idea that humans are uniquely emotional, that they have a unique theory of mind allowing them to deceive and trust, that we are in competition as the capitalist system requires, that the qualities that contribute to religion and sociality cannot be measured, and so on. It has led to a remarkable surge in ingenious psychological and sociological experiments to tease out the factors, but much more needs to be done.
Religiosity is to a moderate extent heritable, prompting scholars like D S Wilson and R D Alexander to think it is an evolutionary adaptation, a genetically inherited trait that increases fitness. But not all inheritable traits are adaptations. Some persist in a population as byproducts of adaptive traits without increasing fitness. P Boyer, L Kirkpatrick, S Atran, S J Mithen, and S Guthrie all think religion is an evolutionary byproduct produced by various brain mechanisms that are themselves adaptive. These were preserved in evolution because they solved particular (nonreligious) problems faced by our ancestors. Byproduct theories of religion explain the full spectrum of religious manifestations, without invoking any function for which they were selected.
Moreover, traits adaptive in one context can become maladaptive in a new context, so even if religion were once an evolutionary adaptation, it might now be maladaptive. It might once have been helpful to human evolution, but now, in the context of large human groups, it has become maladaptive, causing strife when once it created trust.
Empathy and compassion are accepted as social bonding emotions which people have because they are human beings. Indeed, they seem to exist in mammalian species generally. As they are common to everyone who is not defective in some way, they ought to play a role in religion, at least some of the time (D Keltner, J Haidt, Emotions: Current Issues and Future Directions, Eds T Mayne, G A Bonanno, 2001). So far, though, it has not been directly demonstrated. In recent years, moral psychology has received a lot of scientific attention (J Haidt, Science, 2007), and although most of the studies reviewed here concern behavioral outcomes, the relation between religious sociality and moral intuitions and reasoning needs more study.
The religious texts of the main religions encourage sociality in their adherents. Ara Norenzayan and Azim F Shariff, in an informative review in Science, note that religions encourage followers to be unconditionally social, even though religious people theoretically should be—certainly if there is really an almighty and beneficent God, as western religions say, but also if morality is an evolutionary adaptation within us—and empirically are found to be socially discriminating anyway (C D Batson, P Schoenrade and W L Ventis, Religion and the Individual, 1993). Although anecdotes documenting religion’s social and antisocial effects abound, the empirical literature has produced mixed results regarding religion’s role in social behavior.
Norenzayan and Shariff appeal for more direct research on the possible role of social motivations, such as empathy and compassion, in religious sociality, and the extent to which religion is implicated in human co-operation. Progress on these issues requires collaboration among historians, archaeologists, social scientists, and evolutionary biologists. They propose this framework:
- religious devotion to omniscient, morally vigilant god should be reflected in greater personal concern for social reputation
- religious situations in societies devoted to an omniscient morally alert god—religious ritual performance or being in religious surroundings—should remind people of the all seeing god, and promote social behavior. By inducing religious thoughts in experimental subjects sociality should increase even in anonymous situations, providing that the morally concerned gods can be brought to mind when social decisions are being made
- genuine religious behavior and devotion in these societies should bring about greater co-operation and trust, and it suggests perhaps that religious groups would be better able to cope with internal and external threats to group survival
- finally, large societies with established co-operative norms are expected generally to espouse belief in omniscient morally concerned gods, actively observing human behavior.
What then was the evolutionary origin of the omniscient superbeing called God? Justin L Barrett in Why Would Anyone Believe in God? suggests that we evolved a sensitive mental system to detect danger. It works by keeping us hyper alert to the danger of predation, thereby ensuring we are more likely to see a danger than be eaten. Its effect is to make us fear predation from the least signal, and is the reason why we imagine monsters, ghosts and demons. Though there are none, we fear there are, because they are predators stylized in our imagination, and so we stay fearful and alert.
So, religion is the byproduct of our fear of being eaten causing a cognitive sensitivity to sounds and signs in our immediate space that might have indicated the presence of animals with fearsome teeth or claws. We are sensitive to cracking twigs, rustling leaves, imagine something is creeping up behind us and so on. Our senses are probably no more sensitive than those of a mouse, which also is a timorous beastie, but we have more imagination so we imagine fearsome things.
It magnified the sense we got of agency once we started to get an intuitive theory of the mind of other people, and with it the notion of soul, psyche or personality. Intuitive psychology or the theory of mind—“theory” here being used more in its popular sense of educated guesswork, rather than its scientific sense—is an intuition that other people in our society behave like us because we assume they think like us. We do not know what they are thinking or feeling, but we assume they will think and feel much as we would in similar circumstances, and so we can have a fair expectation of how they will react. Our theory of mind does not require us to understand its principles. We do not need to know how it works, but just to feel intuitively that it does, and have our theory confirmed in practise from its success in letting us guess someone’s behavior.
H L Mencken said the chief occupation of humanity, the most common of all follies, is to believe passionately in what is palpably not true. How can irrational beliefs evolve? When you attribute intent to other people, it is easy to imagining other things can act with intent too, and then to imagine invisible intent, a spirit! Our emerging theory of mind and the intentions of other people also extended to inanimate objects, and the rustling of leaves in the wind, the movement of shadows and the sun, and so on. All were imagined to have a mind and a purpose like our own. Predators intended to eat us, giving us a sense that equates to evil, and then rocks that fell on us, thorns that scratched us, roots that tripped us, were all doing it intentionally, out of malice. Thus we were led to the notion of nature spirits, totems, souls, and ultimately angels and God, because they were considered a special kind of person.
Barrett says belief in God compares with belief in other minds, other people, but neurological imaging shows that interpretation of other people’s minds uses different parts of the brain from the parts one uses when simply thinking one’s own thoughts, and attempting to think what God wills uses these latter parts, not the parts active when thinking of other people’s thoughts. Believers believe because God knows they think just like Him, and they do not want to lose His favor.
Perhaps there really is a personal, attentive, invisible, miracle producing, reward giving, retributive deity, and we have a God module to commune with him. As a scientist, I like to interpret claims as testable hypotheses, and this certainly is one. It predicts, for example, that miracles should be observable, that success in life should be proportional to virtue, and that suffering should be proportional to sin.Steven Pinker
The common sense of normal living shows these hypotheses are not confirmed. It seems scarcely necessary to devise tests to check them, yet people continue to find excuses for it being true, even though most of experience shows it is not. Moreover, though most Americans believe the bible is God’s word, it is far from being a moral book, rather proving that most Christians haven’t read it.
Religions have given us stonings, witch burnings, crusades, inquisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombers, gay bashers, abortion clinic gunmen, and mothers who drown their sons so they can happily be united in heaven.Steven Pinker
Why do believers accept what priests and shamans offer? Well, in primitive society these men were considered experts, and it makes good sense for survival to defer to experts. It is more true today, when we put our faith in surgeons, airline pilots, and even politicians. These days we think our faith in our experts is rational—although politics casts as much doubt on it as religion. Division of labour in human social groups was an invention that led to great improvement in discovery and economics, but also led to classes, the beginning of the breakdown of society. The bulk of a tribe deferred to the expertise of the chief and the shaman, who were therefore in a position to recommend, then dictate, actions to the rest. The sheep were separated from the shepherds. Religion provided a relatively easy living for the shepherds, but what was the benefit to the sheep? In the excessively large societies that were forming, they felt uneasy and insecure. With society failing in its caring and sharing functions, people wanted assurance of health, love and success, and religion seemed to offer supernaturally what society was increasingly failing to offer. God, souls and spirits via the new religions offered comfort.
An Omniscient Watcher God
Anyway, people who believe devoutly in morally alert omniscient gods ought to be more self conscious about their moral reputation, and be more inclined to be helpful and social. Surveys confirm it, pious Christians who pray often and attend church give more to charity, and do voluntary social work more often than those who are less religious (S V Monsma, Interdiscipl J Res Relat, (2007); A Brooks, Who Really Cares? The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, 2006), and controlling for other possible causes like income, political opinion, married or single, education, age, and gender, does not account for the effect. Brooks promotes these findings as evidence that religious people are more sociable than the nonreligious. What has not adequately been tested is how far this charity extends. It seems to be directed mostly at people within a particular congregation, or church interest, but there is little sign that it applies, as Christ intended it to, to people the congregation do not particularly care for.
Moreover, these surveys are mostly methodically unsound, because they are self reported—they depend on people honestly reporting their religious commitment, and the amounts they give to charities—but psychologists know these are flawed methods, people tending to give themselves moral toffee whether deliberately or unwittingly. So self reports of socially desirable behaviors, such as charitability, may not be accurate, reflecting the desire to create a good impression or even self deception (D E Trimble, Educ Psychol Meas, 1997). If people are religious for a subconscious desire to maintain their reputation before God, then their motivation might incline them to unwitting self deception—their desire to meet their own expectations. Indeed, psychological tests show that people react in this way.
Thirty years ago, religiosity positively correlated with unwitting projection of an exaggerated positive image in tests (J Darley and C D Batson, J Pers Soc Psychol, 1973). This association raises questions about the validity of self report measures of social behavior. Researchers failed, in several behavioral studies, to find any reliable association between religiosity and sociality. In a “Good Samaritan” experiment, J Darley and C D Batson staged an anonymous situation modeled after the biblical parable—a man was lying on a sidewalk appearing to be in need of assistance. Participants varying in religiousness were led past the victim—actually a research confederate. Offers of help showed no relation with the helper’s religiosity.
If religiosity is related to social behavior, is it that religion makes you more social or that being more social makes you religious? Or is some third variable, such as guilt or empathy, causing both social and religious behavior. Only rarely have controlled experiments addressed this limitation by experimentally inducing thoughts of supernatural agents to examine them as a causal factor of social behavior.
In an unlikely sounding trial (J M Bering, K McLeod, and T K Shackelford, Human Nature, 2005), randomly selected university students cheated less on a rigged computer spatial reasoning task when they had been incidentally told that the ghost of a dead student had been seen in the test laboratory. The same author (J M Bering, Behav Brain Sci, 2006) describes how children were told not to look inside a box, and were then left alone with it. Some were also told a supernatural “Princess Alice” would be watching, and were less likely to look than others not so warned. In another study, casually reminding people of God lowered rates of cheating (B Randolph-Seng, M E Nielsen, Int J Psychol Rel, 2007). Without the hint of belief, religiosity had no relationship with cheating.
These studies suggest that explicit thoughts of supernatural agents curb cheating behavior. But Haley and Fessler (K J Haley and D M T Fessler, Evol Hum Behav, 2005) found that even stylized eyespots on a computer background increased the amount of money offered in an economic game, and an image of a pair of eyes increased money contributions to an honesty box used to collect money for drinks in a university lounge (M Bateson, D Nettle, G Roberts, Biol Lett, 2006). So, religiously produced social behavior could have promoted co-operation in large groups—in the masses that came with city, nation and empire wide political groups—because reputation and reciprocity became insufficiently universal to influence individuals in such large communities—they just did not know most of the people they came into contact with well enough.
Group Reputation and Guilt
Social behavior need not be driven by empathy for others, even in the same religious community, but by egoistic motives, such as a desire for admiration or to avoid disdain for failing to live up to one’s religious self image. Most of the evidence suggests that religious sociality is used for maintaining a favorable reputation within the group. Conventional religiosity is associated with sociality when the subject’s reputation is at stake. Participants were given the option of volunteering to raise money for a sick child who could not pay their medical bills (C D Batson et al, J Pers Soc Psychol, 1989). In one case, volunteers were told they would be called upon, but in the other, they were told they were unlikely to be called upon, so could feel or seem helpful at no cost, being unlikely to be called. Religiosity correlated with volunteering only in the latter case. Many studies have corroborated that religiosity predicts social behavior primarily when the social act could promote a positive image for the participant, either in his or her own eyes or in the eyes of observers (C D Batson, P Schoenrade, W L Ventis, Religion and the Individual, 1993).
Security within the group depends on reputation, those with good reputations being highly regarded by others in the group, and those with bad reputations risking the ultimate ire of the group, and expulsion from it. People have a personal concern for their reputation within the group because of the potentially disastrous consequences of a bad one. Moreover, the fear of getting a bad reputation preys on the individual’s mind as guilt. Guilt reminds people that their reputation, and therefore their group membership is at stake—and in primitive societies their life.
Human sensitivity to social reputation, noted by E Fehr and U Fischbacher (Nature, 2003), is a psychological mechanism, originally unrelated to religion, that evolved to facilitate strong reciprocal co-operative bonds within groups. Selfish people could be accused, punished or excluded from the group (H Gintis, S Bowles, R Boyd, E Fehr, (Evol Hum Behav, 2003) and J Henrich, et al, Science, 2006). The threat of punishment, but particularly exclusion, motivated group members to conform to group behavioral norms. In early human groups, anonymity was virtually impossible, and reducing anonymity in experimental economic games (E Hoffman, K McCabe, V L Smith, Am Econ Rev, 1996) enforces social behavior, as does the visible presence of images of human eyes.
Sociological surveys find that religious people subjectively report more willingness to care for others than do nonreligious people, but, when religiosity and actual social behavior are measured more objectively in experiments, the correlation arises mostly when subjects are concerned with their reputation. The more devoted people were more helpful because they were seeking praise or avoiding guilt, rather than a wanting to benefit other people. But benefiting other people is benefiting the group, so praise is received when the group benefits, and guilt induced when people are aware that they are not benefiting the group. Praise and guilt are the consequences of social behavior, and psychological or evolved mechanisms for preserving it.
W Irons (Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, Ed R Nesse, 2001) argues that certain religious beliefs and behaviors are evolutionary adaptations for group living in large communities that have maximized genetic fitness. However, these accounts have difficulty explaining the differential cultural distribution and cultural change over time of religious beliefs and behaviors.
Cultural group selection (CGS), based on precise mathematical models, takes as its starting point that religious beliefs are cultural byproducts of evolved psychology, but that reputation, though important, does not explain the strong sociality of religious behavior. R Boyd, P Richerson (2002), and N S Henrich and J Henrich, Why Humans co-operate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation have shown, CGS can overcome the problems of genetic group selection, and show competition among social groups may favor the spread of cultural beliefs and costly practices, such as religious sociality by enhancing fitness.
P Boyer, Religion Explained (2001), and Atran and Norenzayan proposed that religion is a cultural by product of psychological tendencies evolved in the Pleistocene period for other purposes, such as detecting and inferring the content of other minds and sensitivity to one’s social reputation in the group. Inasmuch as the requirements of religion and the primary purpose of the psychological mechanisms were the same, religion helped promote co-operation in large groups in the last 10,000 years.
Larger social groups in humans also relate with the culture of societies which embrace belief in morally concerned gods. Theorists think belief in omniscient and omnipresent supernatural beings has aided the development of large scale human societies. The imagined presence of such agents, along with emotional ritual and costly commitment to the social group they govern, may have been the major development that allowed genetically unrelated individuals to interact in co-operative ways.
Participating in religious services or rituals reminds people of the religious duty of sociality to which they have committed themselves, but such reminders can be subtly induced in experiments as well. Such religious reminders curtail cheating and increase fairer behavior among subjects under test, even when they do not know each other. When people live in a culture in which they believe they are being watched by a morally concerned god, they are concerned for their reputation with the god, even when they are not being observed by anyone able to report it back to their peers in society. Plainly, God is a surrogate for the whole of the group, for society. Their concern to do the right thing comes from society, their peers, not from anything supernatural, but they transfer the omniscience of small societies to God when societies get large, and one’s peers cannot see everything anyone does. It explains why a religious situation is more important than anyone’s religious disposition in predicting social behavior.
The tendency to detect agency in nature supports the pervasive belief in spirits as supernatural agents (S Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds, 1993) able to transcend physical, biological, and psychological human limitations. Details vary according to culture. In many societies, supernatural agents are not concerned with human morality, but in others, like the God of Abrahamic religions, they use their supernatural powers to observe and, sometimes, to punish or reward human social morality. So, when they help ingroup co-operation, they spread culturally. Either ingroup selection by reputation sensitivity to social shunning and ultimately expulsion of deviants, in the byproduct account, or exgroup selection by the more coherent group succeeding in inter group competition, by the CGS account, could have led to selection of the acquired habits—both!
If stylized eyespots can increase generosity, then a convinced belief in a supernatural watcher could produce similar effects. Ara Norenzayan, et al, argue that religion’s effect on social behavior depends on reputational sensitivity. The belief in supernaturally omniscient gods has the same effect on believers as images of eyes have on most human subjects (D Johnson, J Bering, Evol Psychol, 2006). The growth of supernatural monitoring by sincere belief in imagined omniscient gods has the advantage in larger—civil, national and imperial—groups that people cannot be always observed, as they generally were in a clan or tribal situation, so the psychological monitor of the omniscient god became more attractive to ruling elites.
Trust
Religious belief, particularly belief in morally concerned gods. may enhance within group interpersonal trust, reinforcing intragroup sociality and promoting larger co-operative communities which otherwise might be unstable. In fact, the distribution of morally concerned gods and group size in 186 societies in the Standard Cross Cultural Sample, confirmed that the larger the group size, the more likely the group approved of gods concerned with human morality (F L Roes and M Raymond, Evol Hum Behav, 2003). Most religious people worship moralizing gods. Of course, the direction of causation remains unclear. Large groups, with greater resources available to rulers, might cultivate belief in moral gods to facilitate the job of ruling so many people. Moralizing gods are also more likely in societies with high water scarcity (J Snarey, J Sci Study Relig, 1996), the sort of societies that gave rise to our modern western religions. Moralizing gods are more prevalent in societies of more selfish people or when people realize that selfishness is detrimental to social stability.
A few laboratory studies confirm an association between religion and trusting behavior. Trust is effectively an investment in someone in expectation of a future return. It can be explored in a laboratory game (J Berg, J Dickhaut, K McCabe, Games Econ Behav, 1995) in which subjects are randomly assigned to be a proposer or a responder. The proposer decides how much money to send to the responder. The rules multiply the sum by a factor. Then the responder decides how much money to return to the proposer. The proposer stands to gain most by transferring more money to the responder, but only when the responder can be trusted to reciprocate.
H W Tan and C Vogel (J Econ Psychol) used this game to get at the differences in outcome depending on the proposer’s and responder’s religious persuasions, and how it affected the outcome when it was known to the otherwise anonymous partner in the game. Proposers sent more money to responders thought to be religious, and particularly by religious proposers. Religious responders also reciprocated the proposer’s offer more than less religious responders. Plainly it remains true that religion elicits more trust whether by religious or by nonreligious people. Still, though, the effect of the degree of commitment by costly religious behaviour is not tested in terms of trust or co-operation, nor that members of religious groups with more costly requirements are more trusting and more to be trusted than others.
Strictness
Attitudinal surveys show that religious people are thought to be more trustworthy and more co-operative (L R Iannaccone, J Polit Econ, 1992). Religious groups imposing more costly requirements, like Mormons and strictly orthodox Jews, have members who are more committed, and show higher levels of church or synagogue attendance and monetary contributions to their religious communities, despite lower average income levels, than less strict ones. However, these findings do not demonstrate that strictness predicts community survival and growth.
Among religious and secular communes founded in nineteenth century America, the religious ones lasted longer than secular ones motivated by such as socialism (R Sosis and C Alcorta, Evol Anthropol, 2003). The religious communes imposed more than twice as many costly requirements, like food taboos, fasts, constraints on material possessions, marriage, sex, and communication with the outside world, than secular ones, and, for religious communes, the number of costly requirements predicted longevity, though it did not for secular communes. Once the costly requirements were statistically controlled, religious ideology did not predict commune longevity, showing that it was the greater commitment of their members in terms of accepting costly restrictions that kept the group together.
Sosis and Ruffle (2004) examined levels of generosity in an experimental co-operative pool game in religious and secular kibbutzim in Israel. In an economic game, two members of a kibbutz, unaware of who the other was, were given an unknown amount of money, from which they, each at the same time, had to decide how much money to keep. If the sum chosen was less than the total given, they could keep it. If it was more than the sum given, both had nothing. More co-operation was found in the religious ones, and the highest levels were among religious men who engaged in daily communal prayer. Players from religious kibbutzim asked for less than those in secular kibutzim, and religious men who prayed communally took the least money. Religious Israelis were mutually more social than the irreligious ones.
Of course, those in the religious kibbutz were surrounded by reminders of their religion and God, religious prayer and attendance being a daily part of life. Furthermore, they knew they were playing with another member of the same kibbutz even though they did not know who, so they knew their sociality was with someone else in the same religious ingroup. Jews are uncommonly dedicated to their own religion and community, but are not uncommonly devoted to strangers. Finally, there is a doubt about cause and effect—the sociality of regular, communal prayer might be encouraging sociality, rather than religious feeling.
Would unconscious reminders of God work as well in promoting generosity towards others? It did relative to a control (A F Shariff, A Norenzayan, Psychol Sci, 2007). Unconscious thoughts of God did make subjects more generous towards anonymous strangers, but so too did reminding a secular group of secular moral authority! The reason might be that religious people are conscious of their reputation with God, and believe it will matter at some time. Concern for reputation is a component in the evolution of cooperative behavior in that selfishness noted by other members results in exclusion from the group. But why would reminders of God work for the secular group? Perhaps the unconscious suggestions or signs simply make people more aware of their innate moral duty to others. Another reason for religious people might be their religion is associated mentally with charitable giving. Why though are God concepts mentally associated with charity in the first place other than through an innate and evolved morality?
In these tests, no effect of religiosity was noticed unless the unconscious reminder was made or was clearly present at the moment of decision making. It agrees with the observation that belief in God or religious devotion self reported did not reliably predict generous behavior in anonymous interactions between people.
Other Factors
Religions help sociality in large groups, but efficient secular social organization, such as universal education countering superstition, and practical institutions to enforce the law—law courts, police, and civil actions to enforce contracts—have reduced the need for and conviction behind the upholding of morals by religion. Nowadays, nonreligious people are as likely to report donating to charity as religious ones (R Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, 2000). Supporting this conclusion, experimentally induced reminders of secular moral authority had as much effect on generous behavior in an economic game as reminders of God, and there are many examples of modern, large, co-operative, and not very religious nations, like many in Europe, in which citizens trust each other and co-operate successfully (B Herrmann, C Thöni, S Gächter, Science, 2008).
Even so, social observation and experiment is fraught with conflicting factors, so any one should be interpreted with caution, but different disciplines and procedures seem slowly to be converging on to consistent results. More research is needed to address the costliness of religious and nonreligious rituals, and few studies have attempted to quantify these costs in relation to social behavior. The finding that religiosity evokes greater trust underscores the need for more experimental and theoretical research, including mathematical modeling, to establish the specific conditions under which costly religious commitment could evolve as a stable individual strategy and whether these models need to take into account intergroup competition.
Finally, religious sociality is not extended indiscriminately. The dark side of within group co-operation is between group competition and conflict (J-K Choi, S Bowles, Science, 2007). The same mechanisms involved in ingroup altruism may also facilitate outgroup antagonism. In the modern world of eligious cultural conflict, this is subjject to wide and often not substantiated debate. Scientific attention is needed to examine precisely how individuals and groups determine who are the beneficiaries of religious sociality, and who its victims.
