SignificanceBiologists and social scientists have long tried to understand why some societies have more fluid and open interpersonal relationships—differences in relational mobility—and how those differences influence individual behaviors. We measure relational mobility in 39 societies and find that relationships are more stable and hard to form in east Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, while they are more fluid in the West and Latin America. Results show that relationally mobile cultures tend to have higher interpersonal trust and intimacy. Exploring potential causes, we find greater environmental threats (like disease and warfare) and sedentary farming are associated with lower relational mobility. Our society-level index of relational mobility for 39 societies is a resource for future studies.

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

Across three studies, we examined the role of shared negative experiences in the formation of strong social bonds—identity fusion—previously associated with individuals' willingness to self-sacrifice for the sake of their groups. Studies 1 and 2 were correlational studies conducted on two different populations. In Study 1, we found that the extent to which Northern Irish Republicans and Unionists experienced shared negative experiences was associated with levels of identity fusion, and that this relationship was mediated by their reflection on these experiences. In Study 2, we replicated this finding among Bostonians, looking at their experiences of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings. These correlational studies provide initial evidence for the plausibility of our causal model; however, an experiment was required for a more direct test. Thus, in Study 3, we experimentally manipulated the salience of the Boston Marathon Bombings, and found that this increased state levels of identity fusion among those who experienced it negatively. Taken together, these three studies provide evidence that shared negative experience leads to identity fusion, and that this process involves personal reflection.

SummaryIn recent years, theoretical and empirical work done under the rubric of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) have led many to conclude that religion (or, at least, some aspects thereof) is “natural”. By this, it is meant that human beings are predisposed to believe in supernatural agents, and that their beliefs about these agents are constrained in various ways. The details about how and why these predispositions and cognitive constraints developed and evolved are still largely unknown, though there is enough of a theoretical consensus in CSR for philosophers to have begun reflecting on the implications of CSR for religious belief. In particular, much philosophical work has been done on the implications of CSR for theism, on both sides of the debate. On one hand, CSR might contribute to defeating particular arguments for theism, or indeed theism altogether; on the other hand, CSR might provide support for specific theological views. In this paper, we argue that the CSR is largely irrelevant for

The popular image of Japan and religion presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, large cross-cultural surveys frequently present Japan as a country of non-believers, where only 10-15% of the population self-identify as religious and the vast majority rank religion as being of little importance to their lives. Yet, any visitor to Japan is likely to be struck by the sheer number of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples that dot the landscape and the diverse array of festivals (matsuri) that are performed at these sites. In this paper, we argue that the apparent paradox is actually an illusion generated by the unwarranted ethnocentric assumption that religion everywhere must resemble the features of the Abrahamic faiths that are predominant in Western societies. To make our case we first review recurrent theoretical and definitional debates concerning religion and examine how they relate to the Japanese context. Second, we explore patterns in contemporary data from an online survey of N =1,000 Japanese that asked about religious beliefs and practices. We illustrate through the results obtained that to understand religion in Japan it is necessary to move beyond theocentric approaches and expectations that religious belief must be tied to religious identities or exclusive membership in a given tradition. To conclude, we argue that the patterns observed in Japan demonstrate that scholars who wish to explore religion cross-culturally need to take greater account of orthopraxic cultural contexts and distinguish between 'theocentric' doctrinal beliefs and broader supernatural beliefs.

Human rituals exhibit bewildering diversity, from the Mauritian Kavadi to Catholic communion. Is this diversity infinitely plastic or are there some general dimensions along which ritual features vary? We analysed two cross-cultural datasets, one drawn from the anthropological record, and another novel contemporary dataset to examine whether a consistent underlying set of latent dimensions in ritual structure and experiences were detected. First, we conducted a factor analysis on 651 rituals from 74 cultural groups, in which 102 binary variables were coded. We find a reliable set of dimensions emerged, which provide potential candidates for foundational elements of ritual form. Notably, we find that the expression of features associated with dysphoric and euphoric experiences in rituals appear to be largely orthogonal. Second, we follow-up with a pre-registered factor analysis examining contemporary ritual experiences of 779 individuals from Japan, India, and the US. We find supporting evidence that ritual experiences are clustered in relatively orthogonal euphoric, dysphoric, frequency and cognitive dimensions. Our findings suggest there are important regularities in the diversity of ritual expression and experience observed across both time and culture. We discuss the implications of these findings for cognitive theories of ritual and cultural evolution.

We present three datasets from a project about the relationship between death anxiety and religiosity. These include data from 1,838 individuals in the United States (n = 813), Brazil (n = 800), Russia (n = 800), the Philippines (n = 200), South Korea (n = 200), and Japan (n = 219). Measures were largely consistent across samples: they include measures of death anxiety, experience and exposure to death, religious belief, religious behaviour, religious experience, and demographic information. Responses have also been back-translated into English where necessary, though original untranslated data are also included.

Previous research has shown that identity fusion can motivate violent self-sacrifice when the group is threatened. In this study we conducted an ethnographic content analysis of fifteen manifestosexpressing varied levels of extremism -to examine whether fusion and other relevant variables can be reliably identified and if the predictions of the fusion-plus-threat model are supported. Our findings indicate that linguistic proxies for identity fusion combined with mediating and moderating variables such as existential threat narratives, violence-condoning group norms and dehumanizing vocabulary, can be reliably identified and are more prevalent in the documents of would-be terrorists. This method may contribute to predicting the likelihood that individuals will engage in acts of violent extremism.