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  1. Group identity and the willful subversion of rationality: A reply to De Cruz and Levy.Neil Van Leeuwen - forthcoming - Mind and Language.
    De Cruz and Levy, in their commentaries on Religion as Make-Believe, present distinct questions that can be addressed by clarifying one core idea. De Cruz asks whether one can rationally assess the mental state of religious credence that I theorize. Levy asks why we should not explain the data on religious “belief” merely by positing factual beliefs with religious contents, which happen to be rationally acquired through testimony. To both, I say that having religious credences is p-irrational: a purposeful departure (...)
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  • Beyond good and bad: Reflexive imperativism, not evaluativism, explains valence.Luca Barlassina - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (4):274-284.
    Evaluativism (Carruthers 2018) and reflexive imperativism (Barlassina and Hayward 2019) agree that valence—the (un)pleasantness of experiences—is a natural kind shared across all affective states. But they disagree about what valence is. For evaluativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of representing its worldly object as good/bad; for reflexive imperativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of commanding its subject to get more/less of itself. I argue that reflexive imperativism is superior to evaluativism according to Carruthers’s own standards. He maintains that (...)
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  • Music as a coevolved system for social bonding.Patrick E. Savage, Psyche Loui, Bronwyn Tarr, Adena Schachner, Luke Glowacki, Steven Mithen & W. Tecumseh Fitch - 2021 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44:e59.
    Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, (...)
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  • How the Non-Religious View the Personality of God in Relation to Themselves.Justin E. Lane & Igor Mikloušić - 2019 - Studia Humana 8 (3):39-57.
    In this study we examined the applicability of personality measures to assessing God representations, and we explored how the overlap between personality judgments of self and God relate to strength of (dis)belief and closeness to God among atheists and agnostics. Using sample of 1,088 atheists/agnostics, we applied Goldberg’s Big Five bipolar markers as a standardized measure of personality dimensions, along with measures of identity fusion with God, belief strength, and sociosexuality, as this trait has been shown to be relevant in (...)
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  • Modelling Religious Signalling.Carl Brusse - 2019 - Dissertation, Australian National University
    The origins of human social cooperation confound simple evolutionary explanation. But from Darwin and Durkheim onward, theorists (anthropologists and sociologists especially) have posited a potential link with another curious and distinctively human social trait that cries out for explanation: religion. This dissertation explores one contemporary theory of the co-evolution of religion and human social cooperation: the signalling theory of religion, or religious signalling theory (RST). According to the signalling theory, participation in social religion (and its associated rituals and sanctions) acts (...)
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  • Recent trends in the cognitive science of religion: Neuroscience, religious experience, and the confluence of cognitive and evolutionary research.Robert N. McCauley - 2020 - Zygon 55 (1):97-124.
    Cognitive science of religion (CSR) has increased influence in religious studies, the resistance of religious protectionists notwithstanding. CSR's most provocative work stresses the role of implicit cognition in explaining religious thought and conduct. Exhibiting explanatory pluralism, CSR seeks integrative accounts across the social, psychological, and brain sciences. CSR reflects prominent trends in the cognitive sciences generally. First, CSR is giving greater attention to the new tools and findings of cognitive neuroscience. Second, CSR researchers have done carefully designed, nonlaboratory studies of (...)
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  • Exploring the Pathways Between Transformative Group Experiences and Identity Fusion.Christopher M. Kavanagh, Rohan Kapitány, Idhamsyah Eka Putra & Harvey Whitehouse - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11.
    A growing body of evidence suggests that two distinct forms of group alignment are possible: identification and fusion (the former asserts that group and personal identity are distinct, while the latter asserts group and personal identities are functionally equivalent and mutually reinforcing). Among highly fused individuals, group identity taps directly into personal agency and so any attack on the group is perceived as a personal attack and motivates a willingness to fight and possibly even die as a defensive response. As (...)
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  • (1 other version)‘I get high with a little help from my friends’ - how raves can invoke identity fusion and lasting co-operation via transformative experiences.Martha Newson, Ragini Khurana, Freya Cazorla & Valerie van Mulukom - forthcoming - Frontiers in Psychology.
    Psychoactive drugs have been central to many human group rituals throughout modern human evolution. Despite such experiences often being inherently social, bonding and associated prosocial behaviors have rarely been empirically tested as an outcome. Here we investigate a novel measure of the mechanisms that generate altered states of consciousness during group rituals, the 4Ds: dance, drums, sleep deprivation, and drugs. We conducted a retrospective online survey examining experiences at a highly ritualized cultural phenomenon where drug use is relatively uninhibited- raves (...)
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  • (1 other version)Moral rigidity as a proximate facilitator of group cohesion and combativeness.Antoine Marie - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42:e130.
    De Dreu and Gross's description of the proximate mechanisms conditioning success in intergroup conflict omits humans' deontological morality. Drawing on research on sacralization and moral objectivism, I show how “moral rigidity” may have evolved through partner selection mechanisms to foster coalitions’ cohesion and combativeness in intergroup conflict.
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  • Tradition and invention: The bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution.Robert Jagiello, Cecilia Heyes & Harvey Whitehouse - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e249.
    Cultural evolution depends on both innovation (the creation of new cultural variants by accident or design) and high-fidelity transmission (which preserves our accumulated knowledge and allows the storage of normative conventions). What is required is an overarching theory encompassing both dimensions, specifying the psychological motivations and mechanisms involved. The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution proposes that the co-existence of innovative change and stable tradition results from our ability to adopt different motivational stances flexibly during social learning and transmission. (...)
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  • Bifocal stance theory: An effort to broaden, extend, and clarify.Robert Jagiello, Cecilia Heyes & Harvey Whitehouse - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e275.
    The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution has prompted a wide-ranging discussion with broadly three aims: to apply the theory to novel contexts; to extend the conceptual framework; to offer critical feedback on various aspects of the theory. We first discuss BST's relevance to the diverse range of topics which emerged from the commentaries, followed by a consideration of how our framework can be supplemented by and compared to other theories. Lastly, the criticisms that were raised by a subset (...)
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  • How do we know who may replace each other in triadic conflict roles?Lotte Thomsen - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45.
    Group representations need not reduce to triadic conflict roles, although we infer group membership from them. A conceptual primitive of as one solidary, bounded unity or clique may motivate and facilitate reasoning about cooperative group interactions in context with and without intergroup conflict and may also be necessary for representing which agents would replace one another in a triadic conflict.
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  • Cognitive Inflexibility Predicts Extremist Attitudes.Leor Zmigrod, Peter Jason Rentfrow & Trevor W. Robbins - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10:424519.
    Research into the roots of ideological extremism has traditionally focused on the social, economic, and demographic factors that make people vulnerable to adopting hostile attitudes toward outgroups. However, there is insufficient empirical work on individual differences in implicit cognition and information processing styles that amplify an individual’s susceptibility to endorsing violence to protect an ideological cause or group. Here we present original evidence that objectively assessed cognitive inflexibility predicts extremist attitudes, including a willingness to harm others, and sacrifice one’s life (...)
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  • Identity fusion, outgroup relations, and sacrifice: A cross-cultural test.Benjamin Grant Purzycki & Martin Lang - 2019 - Cognition 186 (C):1-6.
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  • Toward a computational theory of social groups: A finite set of cognitive primitives for representing any and all social groups in the context of conflict.David Pietraszewski - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:1-62.
    We don't yet have adequate theories of what the human mind is representing when it represents a social group. Worse still, many people think we do. This mistaken belief is a consequence of the state of play: Until now, researchers have relied on their own intuitions to link up the concept social group on the one hand and the results of particular studies or models on the other. While necessary, this reliance on intuition has been purchased at a considerable cost. (...)
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