Discerning devotion: Testing the signaling theory of religion

Abstract

Religious rituals often entail significant investments of time, energy, and money, and can risk bodily harm. Instead of being evolutionarily inexplicable, such costly religious acts have been argued to be honest signals of commitment to the beliefs and values of the community, helping individuals establish good reputations and foster trusting, cooperative relationships. Most tests of this hypothesis have evaluated whether religious signalers are more prosocial; here I investigate whether signal receivers actually perceive religious signalers as such. I do this with data collected over 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two villages in South India, where Hindu and Christian residents engage in di↵erent modes of religious practice, including dramatic acts of firewalking and spirit possession as well as the more subtle but consistent act of worshipping at a church or temple each week. Each mode of religious practice is found to be informative of a distinct set of reputational qualities. Broadly speaking, in the long term, individuals who invest more in the religious life of the village are not only seen as more devout, but also as having a suite of prosocial, other-focused traits. In the short term, individuals who perform greater and costlier acts in the annual Hindu festival show a slight increase in the percent of villagers recognizing them as physically strong and hardworking. These results suggest that people are attending to the full suite of religious acts carried out by their peers, using these signals to discern multiple aspects of their character and intentions.

Content, cost, and context: A framework for understanding human signaling systems

“…Any given putative signal may contain one or more aspects of signal content, and this may be especially true for human signals. While the male sedge warbler's song is indicative of what we term here embodied capital (healthy males have more complex songs), the act of attending a puja (Hindu worship) by Tamil devotees may demonstrate their material capital through the commitment of time and offerings, as well as their character (Figure ).…”

“…This means that benefits to the sender—and eventually the overall cost–benefit ratio—should be assessed empirically. This could entail observing senders before and after signaling events, for example, measuring reputational change . Third, the absence of cost is also an empirical challenge: when costs are meted out to deceptive signalers, the costs may be empirically invisible when most or all signalers are honest.…”

“…prosociality, 10,11 commitments, [12][13][14] and social status, 15,16 with one signal potentially conveying information about multiple attributes simultaneously. In this work, signaling theory has largely been used to explain three broad types of behavior: (a) the pursuit of risky resources, especially when the resources are widely shared 5,6,9,[17][18][19] (Box 2B); (b) contribution to a public good, as with blood donation [20][21][22] (Box 2C); and (c) religious behaviors that entail sizable investments of time, money, and energy in the name of the divine 12,14,[23][24][25][26][27][28] (Box 2A). Empirical investigations have suggested that signals result in improved status and reputational standing, 25 leading to increased social support and wellbeing, 11,14,19,21,22,27 and ultimately reproductive success.…”

Costly signaling and the handicap principle in hunter‐gatherer research: A critical review

“…It is further notable that many Hadza view nonreciprocators negatively . Finally, the recent literature on social capital, relational wealth and social network centrality may provide some good evidence for the benefits of a positive reputation for pro‐sociality.…”

“…This condition may be demonstrated via experimental manipulation, as has been neatly done with widowbirds, Euplectes spp.. 71,72 Correlational data may also be sufficient to demonstrate this condition, as is often seen in the anthropological literature. [73][74][75] Experimental manipulation may allow researchers to conclude more confidently that a signal affects the behavior of a recipient than does correlational research, although experimental research is less often possible due to the difficulties, ethical and practical, of manipulating the intensity of signals. Showing that traits affect the behavior of recipients does not,…”