Supernatural punishment beliefs as cognitively compelling tools of social control

Fitouchi, Léo; Singh, Manvir

doi:10.31234/osf.io/vejac

“…The third view is that some supernatural belief systems are doctrinal, and many invoke moralizing gods (Lang et al, 2019;Bendixen et al, 2021a). That is, a distinct pathway for supernatural beliefs to flourish among societies might involve appeals to moralizing gods who, especially in the long term, serve a community of believers by helping negotiate and resolve common resource management and other cooperative problems (Purzycki and McNamara, 2016;Bendixen and Purzycki, 2020;Fitouchi and Singh, 2021;Bendixen et al, 2021b;Lightner and Purzycki, nd;Stucky and Gardner, 2022). Our arguments do not eliminate the need for a religion concept because they are silent on systems that involve these more collective elements.…”

Section: Concluding Remarks Caveats and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 84%

All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Religious: Supernatural Explanations as Abstract and Useful Falsehoods about Complex Realities

Lightner

¹

,

Hagen

²

2022

Hum Nat

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Many cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion argue that supernatural explanations are byproducts of our cognitive adaptations. An influential argument states that our supernatural explanations result from a tendency to generate anthropomorphic explanations, and that this tendency is a byproduct of an error management strategy because agents tend to be associated with especially high fitness costs. We propose instead that anthropomorphic and other supernatural explanations result as features of a broader toolkit of well-designed cognitive adaptations, which are designed for explaining the abstract and causal structure of complex, unobservable, and uncertain phenomena that have substantial impacts on fitness. Specifically, we argue that (1) mental representations about the abstract vs. the supernatural are largely overlapping, if not identical, and (2) when the data-generating processes for scarce and ambiguous observations are complex and opaque, a naive observer can improve a bias-variance tradeoff by starting with a simple, underspecified explanation that Western observers readily interpret as "supernatural." We then argue that (3) in many cases, knowledge specialists across cultures offer pragmatic services that involve apparently supernatural explanations, and their clients are frequently willing to pay them in a market for useful and effective services. We propose that at least some ethnographic descriptions of religion might actually reflect ordinary and adaptive responses to novel problems such as illnesses and natural disasters, where knowledge specialists possess and apply the best available explanations about phenomena that would otherwise be completely mysterious and unpredictable.

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“…The third view is that some supernatural belief systems are doctrinal, and many invoke moralizing gods (Lang et al, 2019;Bendixen et al, 2021a). That is, a distinct pathway for supernatural beliefs to flourish among societies might involve appeals to moralizing gods who, especially in the long term, serve a community of believers by helping negotiate and resolve common resource management and other cooperative problems (Purzycki and McNamara, 2016;Bendixen and Purzycki, 2020;Fitouchi and Singh, 2021;Bendixen et al, 2021b;Lightner and Purzycki, nd;Stucky and Gardner, 2022). Our arguments do not eliminate the need for a religion concept because they are silent on systems that involve these more collective elements.…”

Section: Concluding Remarks Caveats and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 88%

All models are wrong, and some are religious: Supernatural explanations as abstract and useful falsehoods about complex realities

Lightner¹,

Hagen²

2022

Preprint

0

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Many cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion argue that supernatural explanations are byproducts of our cognitive adaptations. An influential argument states that our supernatural explanations result from a tendency to generate anthropomorphic explanations, and that this tendency is a byproduct of an error management strategy because agents tend to be associated with especially high fitness costs. We propose instead that anthropomorphic and other supernatural explanations result as features of a broader toolkit of well-designed cognitive adaptations, which are designed for explaining the abstract and causal structure of complex, unobservable, and uncertain phenomena that have substantial impacts on fitness. Specifically, we argue that (1) mental representations about the abstract vs. the supernatural are largely overlapping, if not identical, and (2) when the data-generating processes for scarce and ambiguous observations are complex and opaque, a naive observer can improve a bias-variance tradeoff by starting with a simple, underspecified explanation that Western observers readily interpret as "supernatural." We then argue that (3) in many cases, knowledge specialists across cultures offer pragmatic services that involve apparently supernatural explanations, and their clients are frequently willing to pay them in a market for useful and effective services. We propose that at least some ethnographic descriptions of religion might actually reflect ordinary and adaptive responses to novel problems such as illnesses and natural disasters, where knowledge specialists possess and apply the best available explanations about phenomena that would otherwise be completely mysterious and unpredictable.

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“…For example, Ostrom (1990) famously reviewed how people in many small-scale communities deliberately developed, often through years of trial-and-error, institutional rules they perceived as efficient in limiting free-riding. Researchers similarly argue that beliefs in punitive gods develop because people's folk-psychology perceives these beliefs-potentially wrongly-as likely to motivate others to cooperate (Fitouchi & Singh, 2022).…”

Section: The Cultural Evolution Of Puritanism As a Behavioral Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral disciplining: The cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality

Fitouchi

¹

,

André²,

Baumard³

2022

Self Cite

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Why do many human societies morally condemn apparently victimless and pleasurable behaviors, such as lust, gluttony, drinking, drugs, gambling, or even music and dance? Why do they morally praise temperance, chastity, sobriety, decency, and piety? While this puritanical morality often appears as an exception to the cooperative function of moral cognition, we propose that it stems, like other moral concerns, from moral judgements targeting cooperative challenges. Specifically, we propose that it consists of preemptive moralizations of behaviors perceived as risk factors for uncooperative self-control failures, impeding people's ability to resist the short-term temptations naturally conflicting with cooperative motivations.

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Supernatural punishment beliefs as cognitively compelling tools of social control

Cited by 8 publications

References 28 publications

All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Religious: Supernatural Explanations as Abstract and Useful Falsehoods about Complex Realities

All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Religious: Supernatural Explanations as Abstract and Useful Falsehoods about Complex Realities

All models are wrong, and some are religious: Supernatural explanations as abstract and useful falsehoods about complex realities

Moral disciplining: The cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality

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