Connor Wood

Analytical thinking predicts irreligiosity across paradigms and contexts. Explanations for this association have included the likelihood that analytical cognition interrupts the expression of innate cognition biases, such as teleology and anthropomorphism, that lead to religious beliefs; or that analytical thinkers are better at discriminating between unrealistic and realistic beliefs. This chapter marshals research from many subfields in cognitive and social psychology, anthropology, and sociology to advance an alternative explanation, the "social foundations hypothesis," which posits that analytical cognition is associated with both individualism and with strategic, opportunistic defection on cooperative arrangements. Honestly held religious beliefs serve as indices of heuristic cognition, which in turn telegraphs a strong likelihood that the agent will unreflectively abide by social conventions and norms. The association between holistic thinking and religiosity is thus a product of the need for predictable social coordination and cooperation in high-context social groups.

The cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion offer a standard model of religious representations, but no equivalent paradigm for investigating religiously interpreted altered states of consciousness (religious ASCs). Here, I describe a neo‐Durkheimian framework for studying religious ASCs that centralizes social predictive cognition. Within a processual model of ritual, ritual behaviors toggle between reinforcing normative social structures and downplaying them. Specifically, antistructural ritual shifts cognitive focus away from conventional affordances, collective intentionality, and social prediction, and toward physical affordances and behavioral motivations that make few references to others’ intentional states. Using synchrony and dance as paradigmatic examples of antistructural ritual that stimulate religious ASCs, I assemble literature from anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of language to offer fruitful empirical predictions and opportunities for testing based on this framework. Among the empirical predictions is that antistructural ritual may provide for cultural change in religions when religions are construed as complex adaptive systems.

Religious practices centered on controlled trance states, such as Siberian shamanism or North African zar, are ubiquitous, yet their characteristics vary. In particular, cross-cultural research finds that female-dominated spirit possession cults are common in stratified societies, whereas male-dominated shamanism predominates in structurally flatter cultures. Here, we present an agent-based model that explores factors, including social stratification and psychological dissociation, that may partially account for this pattern. We posit that, in more stratified societies, female agents suffer from higher levels of psychosocial trauma, whereas male agents are more vulnerable in flatter societies. In societies with fewer levels of formal hierarchy, males come into informal social competition more regularly than in stratified contexts. This instability leads to a cultural feedback effect in which dissociative experiences deriving from chronic psychosocial stress become canalized into a m...

Synchrony — intentional, rhythmic motor entrainment in groups — is an important topic in social psychology and the cognitive science of religion. Synchrony has been found to increase trust and prosociality, to index interpersonal attention, and to induce perceptions of similarity and group cohesion. Causal explanations suggest that synchrony induces neurocognitive self-other blurring, leading participants to process one another as identical. In light of such findings, researchers have highlighted synchrony as an important evolved tool for establishing and maintaining collective identity in human groups, particularly within ritual and religious contexts. However, many aspects of group life require coordination rather than mere prosocial cooperation. In coordinative contexts, interpersonal relations and motor sequences are often complementary rather than identical, and leadership hierarchies streamline group decisions. It is thus unclear whether synchrony would benefit or hamper group...

Few outstanding questions in the human behavioral sciences are timelier or more urgently debated than the evolutionary source of religious behaviors and beliefs. Byproduct theorists locate the origins of religion in evolved cognitive defaults and transmission biases. Others have argued that cultural evolutionary processes integrated non-adaptive cognitive byproducts into coherent networks of supernatural beliefs and ritual that encouraged in-group cooperativeness, while adaptationist models assert that the cognitive and behavioral foundations of religion have been selected for at more basic levels. Here, we survey these differing approaches, noting their respective strengths and weaknesses. We then advance a novel model that centers on the ability of language to generate alternative worlds independent of immediate empirical facts, and thus highlight the similarities between religious belief and the modes of cognition that underlie institutions in general. The institutional cognition...

I would like to thank the commentators for their useful critiques and suggestions. There is a great deal of ground to cover in a short space, so I will plunge immediately into what I consider the main issues at stake, namely: (1) whether religion is actually costly; (2) whether formal demands of costly signaling theory are met; (3) whether religion is collectivistic; (4) whether the religion– mental health relationship is genuine; (5) what is unique to religion in the present model; (6) how social support and religion are related; and (7) whether self-control is primarily effortful or automatic. I will follow these discussions with a general model of self-regulation and social signaling that demonstrates isomorphism between religious and secular signaling regimes, and conclude with suggestions for future research.

Over the past decade, the various strands of the scientific study of religion have converged on a number of methodological assumptions, including Pascal Boyer’s concept of the hyperactive agency detection device (HADD) and the model of the modular brain that informs evolutionary psychology. According to Sebastian Schüler, the field as it now stands is thus primarily concerned with the question of why humans believe in supernatural agents, and its answers depend on descriptions of cognitive processes. In Religion, Kognition, Evolution, Schüler provides an overview of what he terms this ‘‘cognitive science of religion,’’ leveling pointed but constructive criticisms of the field’s operating assumptions and presenting his alternative view of religion as primarily a social, embodied phenomenon. The book’s arguments hinge on the contrast between models of cognition that describe mental activity as information processing and those that see it as a holistic social phenomenon rooted in the somatic experience. The former is, according to Schüler, characterized by a ‘‘conceptual individualism’’ that reflects Darwinistic evolutionary models and is informed by Cartesian dualistic assumptions that separate mental from somatic experiences (p. 49; all translations from the German are by the reviewer). The latter attributes genuine ontological status to higher-order or emergent levels of human social organization and thus prioritizes interpersonal, somatically rooted interactions. Schüler, a religious studies scholar, argues for the social model. Schüler begins the introduction with a description of a Pentecostal church service featuring glossolalia. Using this example of ritual exuberance as a starting point, he then sets forth his major questions: is religion evolutionarily adaptive? Why do all religions feature rituals? What effects do rituals have on their partakers? Already in the introduction Schüler tips his hand, bemoaning the fact that ‘‘the social-collective aspects (of ritual behavior) . . . often receive but little to no attention in the cognitive scientific theories of religion’’ (p. 17). The qualm does not seem unreasonable, given its narrative context: how could cognitive theories of religion define religion exclusively as belief in supernatural agents therefore taking as their conceptual locus the individual brain and still have anything to offer for describing or explaining ecstatic, collective religious experiences? The remainder of the book is divided into three parts. The first, consisting of chapters 2, 3, and 4, tackles what Schüler calls the ‘‘cognitive shift’’ in psychological and social research and its implications for religious studies (p. 33). The second, comprising chapters 5 and 6, outlines the current cognitive scientific theories of Religion, Brain & Behavior Vol. 2, No. 2, June 2012, 177 179

Singh deploys cultural evolution to explain recurrent features of shamanistic trance forms, but fails to substantively address important distinctions between these forms. Possession trance (vs. trance without possession) is disproportionately female-dominated and found in complex societies. The effects of cultural conditions on shamanism thus extend beyond its presence or absence and are vital for modeling its professionalization and spread.

Both Mehr et al.'s credible signaling hypothesis and Savage et al.'s music and social bonding hypothesis emphasize the role of multilevel social structures in the evolution of music. Although empirical evidence preferentially supports the social bonding hypothesis, rhythmic music may enable bonding in a way uniquely fitted to the normative and language-based character of multilevel human societies.

Religion is positively correlated with subjective well-being across a variety of contexts, but convincing causal models are lacking. Some researchers have suggested that religion may boost self-control, and thus well-being, by requiring effortful rituals. This article proposes that costly signaling theory provides a vital explanatory tool for understanding these relationships. Signaling theories posit that religious adherents signal their commitment to religious collectives through difficult or anhedonic activities and rituals, creating a cost barrier for entry which protects religious communities against free riders. Because costly signaling behaviors require the inhibition of prepotent responses and intentional exposure to aversive stimuli, committed adherents build self-control over time. Subjective well-being is thus modeled as a longitudinal product of subjective investment in a religious social collective and the self-regulation abilities that emerge from signaling that investment. This emphasis on a feedback cycle driven by social signaling represents a novel contribution to investigations of religion and well-being. New longitudinal research in social investment theory and self-control lends the model conceptual credibility.

Religion is positively correlated with subjective well-being across a variety of contexts, but convincing causal models are lacking. Some researchers have suggested that religion may boost self-control, and thus well-being, by requiring effortful rituals. This article proposes that costly signaling theory provides a vital explanatory tool for understanding these relationships. Signaling theories posit that religious adherents signal their commitment to religious collectives through difficult or anhedonic activities and rituals, creating a cost barrier for entry which protects religious communities against free riders. Because costly signaling behaviors require the inhibition of prepotent responses and intentional exposure to aversive stimuli, committed adherents build self-control over time. Subjective well-being is thus modeled as a longitudinal product of subjective investment in a religious social collective and the self-regulation abilities that emerge from signaling that investment. This emphasis on a feedback cycle driven by social signaling represents a novel contribution to investigations of religion and well-being. New longitudinal research in social investment theory and self-control lends the model conceptual credibility.

The cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion offer a standard model of religious representations, but no equivalent paradigm for investigating religiously interpreted altered states of consciousness (religious ASCs). Here, I describe a neo‐Durkheimian framework for studying religious ASCs that centralizes social predictive cognition. Within a processual model of ritual, ritual behaviors toggle between reinforcing normative social structures and downplaying them. Specifically, antistructural ritual shifts cognitive focus away from conventional affordances, collective intentionality, and social prediction, and toward physical affordances and behavioral motivations that make few references to others’ intentional states. Using synchrony and dance as paradigmatic examples of antistructural ritual that stimulate religious ASCs, I assemble literature from anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of language to offer fruitful empirical predictions and opportunities for testing based on this framework. Among the empirical predictions is that antistructural ritual may provide for cultural change in religions when religions are construed as complex adaptive systems.

Few outstanding questions in the human behavioral sciences are timelier or more urgently debated than the evolutionary source of religious behaviors and beliefs. Byproduct theorists locate the origins of religion in evolved cognitive defaults and transmission biases. Others have argued that cultural evolutionary processes integrated non-adaptive cognitive byproducts into coherent networks of supernatural beliefs and ritual that encouraged in-group cooperativeness, while adaptationist models assert that the cognitive and behavioral foundations of religion have been selected for at more basic levels. Here, we survey these differing approaches, noting their respective strengths and weaknesses. We then advance a novel model that centers on the ability of language to generate alternative worlds independent of immediate empirical facts, and thus highlight the similarities between religious belief and the modes of cognition that underlie institutions in general. The institutional cognition model of religion accounts for some of the shortcomings of extant approaches and draws attention to the human ability to create non-empirical worlds; that is, worlds that are imaginary. Both religious beliefs and institutional facts—such as jurisdictional borders—are non-empirical assertions, yet they are socially accepted as truths and reified through ritual and behavior. One type of non-empirical, linguistically generated belief—supernatural agent belief—is particularly effective for stabilizing systems of arbitrary norms by rooting them in deontic rather than utilitarian reasoning. The evolutionary roots and continued persistence of religion are thus functions of the capacity for humans to generate cognitive alternatives to empirical reality, and the need to stably coordinate those alternative conceptions.

I would like to thank the commentators for their useful critiques and suggestions. There is a great deal of ground to cover in a short space, so I will plunge immediately into what I consider the main issues at stake, namely: (1) whether religion is actually costly; (2) whether formal demands of costly signaling theory are met; (3) whether religion is collectivistic; (4) whether the religion– mental health relationship is genuine; (5) what is unique to religion in the present model; (6) how social support and religion are related; and (7) whether self-control is primarily effortful or automatic. I will follow these discussions with a general model of self-regulation and social signaling that demonstrates isomorphism between religious and secular signaling regimes, and conclude with suggestions for future research.

Religion is positively correlated with subjective well-being across a variety of contexts, but convincing causal models are lacking. Some researchers have suggested that religion may boost self-control, and thus well-being, by requiring effortful rituals. This article proposes that costly signaling theory provides a vital explanatory tool for understanding these relationships. Signaling theories posit that religious adherents signal their commitment to religious collectives through difficult or anhedonic activities and rituals, creating a cost barrier for entry which protects religious communities against free riders. Because costly signaling behaviors require the inhibition of prepotent responses and intentional exposure to aversive stimuli, committed adherents build self-control over time. Subjective well-being is thus modeled as a longitudinal product of subjective investment in a religious social collective and the self-regulation abilities that emerge from signaling that investment. This emphasis on a feedback cycle driven by social signaling represents a novel contribution to investigations of religion and well-being. New longitudinal research in social investment theory and self-control lends the model conceptual credibility.

Why are cosmopolitans so anxious? The world is a unmanageably complex. Fortunately, ritual is a fantastically useful tool for encoding and compressing raw data and “tagging” it with handy priority labels – and thus for streamlining the overwhelming deluge of information the universe hurls at us each day. By crisply highlighting certain features against the maddening background of life, by bundling up swathes of reality into densely meaningful intuition packets, ritual transforms the flat landscape of raw propositional data into a topography in which there are peaks and valleys of value or priority. Partaking in a ritual culture, then, we are freed from grappling directly with the overwhelming flow of daily information – especially social information. However, secular society encourages the explicit, decoded analysis of data. This more analytical processing cannot easily encode information with “high-priority” or “low-priority” tags, since such tags can only be meaningfully affixed to condensed symbols, not to raw fine-grained data. Inhabitants of intuition-averse cosmopolitan cultures thus risk chronic decision paralysis due to the inability to assign actionable gradations of value to different classes of data. Faced with an overwhelming tide of explicit, valueless facts, we confront far more decision points than we can reasonably handle. Of course we’re anxious!