were limited to participants scoring high on measures of submissiveness and authoritarianism, respectively). Leimgruber K. L., Shaw A., Santos L. R., & Olson K. R. (2012). We briefly review these alternative positions and consider what evidence would be required to adjudicate satisfactorily between the two. To circumvent these problems, we advocate a cross-culturally encompassing approach that fractionates both religion and morality while carefully distinguishing cognition from culture. morality does not necessarily depend upon religion, despite some making "an almost automatic assumption" to this effect. Bonding: Having self-transcendent, emotional experiences, typically through ritual (whether private or public, frequent or rare), that connect one to others and to a deeper reality. Baumard, Mascaro, and Chevallier (2012) found that 3- and 4-year-old children were able to take merit into account by distributing tokens according to individual contributions. Research in the cognitive science of religion has not sought to demonstrate the universality of any particular religious representations, such as various notions of ancestors, punitive deities, creator beings, or sacrifices, blessings, and rites of passage. (2013) argue that the reliable effect of surveillance cues in the dictator game is to increase the probability that dictators will donate something, rather than to increase mean donations. Economic man in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Lets take magic as an example. Similarly, successful religious and moral cultural representationsincluding notions of supernatural agents and realms, ritual practices, and various behavioral prescriptions and proscriptionsmust resonate with (fit) biologically endowed cognitive structures and preferences (or clash with them in attention-grabbing and memorable ways; see Boyer, 2001). Im going to use Christianity as my example, not because its representative of religion in general, but because theres a lot of research on Christians, and because many readers will likely be familiar with it. [16] Barbara Stoler Miller points out a further disparity between the morals of religious traditions, stating that in Hinduism, "practically, right and wrong are decided according to the categories of social rank, kinship, and stages of life. However, a recent study by Rottman, Kelemen, and Young (2014) casts doubt on this explanation. (Eds. 2. Kenward B., Karlsson M., & Persson J. Saroglou, Corneille, and Van Cappellen (2009) found that religiously primed participants encouraged by the experimenter to exact revenge on an individual who had allegedly criticized them were more vengeful than those given neutral primes. Some relationships pose the choice to compromise oneself to sustain connection or to remain true to oneself. . However, in a follow-up priming study, van Elk, Rutjens, van der Pligt, and van Harreveld (in press) found that participants religiosity moderated the effect of supernatural priming on agency detection, such that religious participants perceived more agents and responded faster to face stimuli following supernatural primes than nonreligious participants. The adaptive problem of absent third-party punishment In Hgh-Olesen H., Bertelsen P., & Tnnesvang J. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament 3. 13%). To analyze these various processes correctly, however, it is vital that we disambiguate at which levels selection acts on which traits. Berings (2002, 2006) explanation for these psychological findings hinges, in part, on what he calls the simulation constraint hypothesis (see Hodge, 2011, for a review). In contrast, Baumard and Boyer (2013a) argue incisively that the cultural prevalence of moralizing god representations does not result from the fact that such representations promote socially cohesive behaviors among human groups. Some religions (e.g., Protestantism) view thoughts as morally equivalent to actions, whereas others (e.g., Judaism) do not. Some Christians convert to Buddhism or other religions based on what they think works for their beliefs. Triggered in the absence of any visible intentional agent, however, such intuitions may be reflectively elaborated into conclusions about supernatural watchers (Baumard & Boyer, 2013b). For example, within Buddhism, the intention of the individual and the circumstances play roles in determining whether an action is right or wrong. The relationship between religion and morality has long been hotly debated. . Activating the notion of moralizing supernatural agents should encourage behaviors that advance the interests of the ingroup, whether these behaviors are nice or nasty. When priming with god concepts promotes altruism, we should expect this altruism to be parochial (confined to the ingroup) rather than indiscriminate (Hartung, 1995), and we should not be surprised if behaviors are undertaken to damage relevant out-groups (Blogowska et al., 2013; De Dreu et al., 2010). (2010). (Ed.). Socrates First, to the extent that the terms religion and morality are largely arbitrary and do not refer to coherent natural structures (as we have suggested), efforts to establish connections between religion and morality, conceived as monolithic entities, are destined to be facile or circular (or both). Monolithic problems arise when philosophical and theological trends impose the idea that morality began within a religious framework, and therefore this necessarily follows that if for example, religion were to disappear morality would as well, which is totally speculative based upon conjecture rather than truth. The other in me: Interpersonal multisensory stimulation changes the mental representation of the self, Perception of human face does not induce cooperation in darkness, Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science, Priming God-related concepts increases anxiety and task persistence, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. This observation leads to a second: atheists and agnostics do not behave less morally than religious Preston J. L., Ritter R. S., & Hernandez J. I. It could be that moral cultural representations amplify or constrain the activation of religious intuitions. For the purposes of fractionating morality, we import what we regard as the dominant model in contemporary moral psychology: moral foundations theory (MFT; Graham & Haidt, 2010; Graham et al., 2013; Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; Haidt, 2012; Haidt & Graham, 2007, 2009; Haidt & Joseph, 2004, 2007). Received 2012 May 15; Revised 2014 Aug 30; Accepted 2014 Oct 21. For example, Wiltermuth and Heath (2009) found that participants who engaged in synchronic behaviors (e.g., walking in step, synchronous singing and moving) contributed more to the public good in subsequent group economic measures than control participants. The irony is that behaviors that are literally prosocial insofar as they further the interests of a particular social group (e.g., prosocial aggression: Sears, 1961; altruistic punishment: Fehr & Gchter, 2002, and Shinada, Yamagishi, & Ohmura, 2004; cf. Contextualize your plight against worse realities. Tinbergen, 1963).4 Evolutionary theorists standardly categorize the causal and developmental whys as forms of proximate explanation, and the functional and phylogenetic whys as forms of ultimate explanation (see Mayr, 1961). Do the latter studies undermine the hypothesis of Norenzayan and colleagues? Finally, university students (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009), and even actively publishing physical scientists (Kelemen, Rottman, & Seston, 2013), demonstrate increased acceptance of teleological explanations of natural phenomena when their information-processing resources are limited. Although this usage reflects both popular parlance and a venerable social scientific tradition (Batson & Powell, 2003), we view it as highly confusing. Our aim in what follows will be to sort out some of the conceptual confusions and to provide a clear evolutionary framework within which to situate and evaluate relevant evidence. In posing these particular questions, we do not mean to suggest that the direction of causality must always run from religion to morality. In our view, this is because debates about religion and morality are marred by a set of interrelated conceptual lacunae and confusions. Great attention is paid to the noises of ancestors entering the temple (e.g., the creaking of the door), tampering with the food (e.g., the clattering of dishes), and the visible signs of eating (e.g., morsels of food apparently removed by invisible hands). The mainstream Kivung exhibits all the fractionated elements of our intuitive religious repertoire: hyperactive agency detection, ToM, teleofunctional reasoning, the ritual stance, and group psychology. Comment on Galen (2012). [10] is great! (2014). Ara Norenzayan and colleagues (e.g., Norenzayan, 2013, 2014; Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008; Norenzayan, Shariff, & Gervais, 2009; Shariff, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2009) have argued that the cultural innovation of notions of such gods over the last 12 millennia has been an important factor in the human transition from small-scale, kin-based groups to large-scale societies. Lets take a few examples: Is homosexuality an immoral abomination? An eye-like painting enhances the expectation of a good reputation. If, on the other hand, such primes stimulate kindness, then participants may be less likely to engage in such punishment. It has been argued that rituals provided a signal of good character (trustworthiness and willingness to cooperate) in the absence of specific information about other peoples personal histories (Bulbulia et al., 2013). Yet by meticulously conforming to arbitrary social conventions, human groups bind themselves together into cooperative units facilitating cooperation on a scale that is very rare in nature. B. Hence, to repeatedly utter the banal canard that morality is outside the purview of science is astonishingly false. And it is in these small-scale huntergatherer societies that explicit doctrines about moralizing, punitive supernatural agents are conspicuously absent (Baumard & Boyer, 2013a; Boehm, 2008; Boyer, 2001). At the same time, however, participants tended to reason that higher level cognitive functions, such as memories, emotions, and beliefs, would continue to function normally, such responses being coded as continuity judgments (E. Cohen & Barrett, 2008). In the case of the magic above, there is a moral behaviour advocated by the Bible that gets rejected by most people. In a public goods game, players privately choose how much of an endowment to donate to a public pot. Paulhus D. (1991). Our concern is with descriptive rather than prescriptive ethnocentrism. (2013). And Ginges et al. In view of these various considerations, one could posit not one but two distinct dimensions of supernatural belief here: (a) supernatural agency, and (b) supernatural justice. (Eds. One obstacle to a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between religion and morality is the tendency of researchers to privilege their own cultural perspective on what counts as a moral concern. Opposing such ethnocentrism is not the same as advocating cultural or moral relativism: We need take no stand here on whether absolute moral standards exist, or whether it is appropriate for citizens of one society to judge the moral standards of another. MFT is an avowedly pluralistic theory of morality. ), Human characteristics: Evolutionary perspectives on human mind and kind. In contrast to these studies, Raihani and Bshary (2012) found that dictators donated less money in the presence of eye images. Impulsive choice and altruistic punishment are correlated and increase in tandem with serotonin depletion. Bottom line: Morality exists outside of religion. To the extent that rituals represent or promote moral behaviors (see earlier), therefore, gods that care about rituals care about morality, directly or indirectly. and Van Pachterbeke et al. As conditions permitted an escalation of the scale and complexity of human societies, cultural evolutionary processes may have further tuned the elements of ritual, promoting social cohesion. When god sanctions killing: Effect of scriptural violence on aggression. With the evolution of social complexity, religious rituals become more routinized, dysphoric rituals become less widespread, doctrine and narrative becomes more standardized, beliefs become more universalistic, religion becomes more hierarchical, offices more professionalized, sacred texts help to codify and legitimate emergent orthodoxies, and religious guilds increasingly monopolize resources (Whitehouse, 2000, 2004). [21] In Christian traditions, certain acts are viewed in more absolute terms, such as abortion or divorce. The error of God: Error management theory, religion, and the evolution of cooperation In Levin S. A. We note in this connection that common components of ritual performance may facilitate parochially altruistic behaviors, including aggression (e.g., Wiltermuth, 2012, has recently shown that participants who acted in synchrony with a confederate were more likely to comply with the confederates request to administer a blast of noise to other participants than were control participants). Whereas hands are biologically evolved features of human anatomy, gloves are culturally evolved artifacts that must follow the contours of the hand at least to some extent in order to be wearable. (2009). A religion's adherents assume themselves to be moral by default, and so they never bother to question themselves. And if you ask them about what their religion tells them about whats right and wrong, it will likely line up with their own ideas of right and wrong. Relationship between religious views and morals, Relationship between religion and morality, Laura R. Saslow, Robb Willer, Matthew Feinberg, Paul K. Piff, Katharine Clark, Dacher Keltner and Sarina R. Saturn, Gary F. Jensen (2006) Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University, "Supernaturalizing Social Life: Religion and the Evolution of Human Cooperation", 'The Buddhist perspective of lay morality', "Whence religion? [45] Phil Zuckerman notes that Denmark and Sweden, "which are probably the least religious countries in the world, and possibly in the history of the world," enjoy "among the lowest violent crime rates in the world [and] the lowest levels of corruption in the world. But what of the intuitions themselves? Bateson, Nettle, and colleagues have found similar effects using an image of a pair of eyes on a notice in naturalistic settings. Bernard Williams argued that, "Either one's motives for following the moral word of God are moral motives, or they are not. Research conducted with nonschooled Romani adults, who are unfamiliar with scientific accounts of evolutionary origins, arguably demonstrates the persistence of teleological intuitions into adulthood (Casler & Kelemen, 2008). But for several thousand years, during which the so-called ethical religions evolved, much of the worlds population has lived in relatively complex societies in which interactions with strangers were common and parasitic free riders could evade punishment by wearing the cloak of anonymity. Many contemporary investigations employ parochial conceptions of religion and morality, fail to decompose these categories into theoretically grounded elements, and/or neglect to consider the complex interplay between cognition and culture. (Eds. Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice, In a different voice: Psychological theory and womens development. But such structures may, in turn, be subjectgiven sufficient time scalesto genetic modification under the selection pressures imposed by culturally evolved practices and preferences. It would not, however, address the deeper question of why they do so. A reanalysis by these authors of Raihani and Bsharys (2012) data confirmed the former effect.