2
Religiosity as Mental
Time-travel
Cognitive Adaptations for Religious
Behavior
Joseph Bulbulia1
Introduction
In this chapter, ‘religiosity’ describes belief in superhuman reality, as well
as motivations, emotions, and practices closely related to these beliefs.
I assume supernatural beings play no causal role in the explanation for
why religious agents commit and react to them. This assumption follows
from methodological naturalism. While I will not defend this stance here,
I observe that methodological naturalism is consistent with non-scientific
forms of discussing and understanding religion. It is probably consistent
with being religious—though I leave this discussion for theologians.
By ‘supernatural’ I mean non-natural beings, places, and forces—
Jehovah, Krishna, The Pure Land, Hades, Num, Zeus, Mana, Jizo, Buddha,
and innumerable others of these kind. There are problems both in viewing
religion as concerned with the ‘supernatural’ and also with the term
itself. For it is unclear whether ‘supernatural’ cuts the concepts of our
understanding at any joint. Boyer and Ramble have data suggesting that it
does—that regardless of our affiliations and traditions we reliably recognize
supernatural concepts in roughly the same way (Boyer and Ramble 2001).
1. I would like to thank Aarhus University’s Laboratories on Religion and Cognition for their
support. I’d also like to thank Laura Feldt and Rich Sosis for commenting on an earlier draft.
cognitive adaptations 45
Let’s accept the view, then, that ‘supernatural’ is a natural kind, though
surely more evidence is needed.
A significant problem in human evolutionary biology is explaining how
evolutionary processes—both cultural and genetic—could have tolerated
religious commitments. For naturalists, religious beliefs are at least partially
unfounded. Agents attribute beliefs to gods; we have assumed the gods play
no causal role in activating these beliefs. How could religious persons go
so badly wrong? More puzzling: how can they go so badly wrong without
injuring themselves, in the way schizophrenics do? For there is no evidence
that adult religious agents are cognitively impaired, globally irrational, or
immature. Unlike schizophrenics, religious agents flourish. Whatever one
thinks about the sanity of religious belief, religious persons are sane.
Moreover, we must explain why religious commitments are typically
linked to powerful norms and emotions. Why did selection tolerate the
behavioral costs that flow from religious commitments and behaviors (Atran
2002a; Sosis 2003; Bulbulia 2004a; Dennett 2006)?2
In section I, I explore a plausible model in which evolutionary processes
favor religious architecture susceptible to local religious ideas and norms,
and which link these to powerful emotional and motivational states. The
model is sometimes called the ‘costly signaling’ model for religion, but I
shall call it the ‘commitment-signaling’ model. The model makes sense of
the costs of religion as adaptations. In section II, I use evolutionary task
analysis to predict that motivational states must be disconnected from most
practical action domains (causing little harm). Here I specify a plausible
design for accomplishing these tasks, and review data supporting its presence.
In section III, I use the model to explain how religious persons
are able to experience superhuman agents while remaining otherwise
functionally engaged with distal realities—ecological and social.3
I shall
conclude that religion is a variety of mental time-travel, one that relies
on very specially contrived fictions and encapsulated self-deception over
their reality.
2. ‘Cost’ here and throughout will mean reproductive cost. The literature on commitment
signaling sometimes describes hard-to-fake signals as ‘costly’. But such signals do not always
bring reproductive costs. Faking a genuine smile is difficult for most people, yet not reproductively
costly. To denote signaling costs I use the slogan ‘hard-to-fake’. What others (including
Bulbulia 2004a) have called the ‘costly-signaling theory’ I call ‘commitment-signaling theory’.
3. Finding an ancestor spirit in a lake, or a sprit in the sky, or a deity in a configuration of paint
and clay requires extremely loose inferential standards. We would not mistake a photo of a
sexual partner for the real target, and present accordingly.
46 the be lieving primate
I. The Commitment-signaling Hypothesis
for Religiosity
I begin by reviewing the reasons to think selection tolerated, enhanced, and
elaborated religious dispositions—tendencies to form emotionally powerful
religious commitments—or their adaptive benefits.
The commitment-signaling theory holds that being religious in religious
society helped our ancestors to manage the cognitive burdens of
social living. It is uncontroversial that cooperative groups bring significant
advantages to the individuals who compose them. It is also uncontroversial
that humans have lived in cooperative groups for at least a million years,
well before the arrival of modern humans between 150–250 thousand
years ago (Boehm 1999). Human social organizations function to increase
resource extraction capacity and efficiency. Cooperating and coordinated
groups provide vigilance against predation threats. They allow agents to
organize divisions of labor and expertise, create economies of scale, and
establish networks for the distribution and defense of resources. Group
living also brings tremendous epistemic advantages. Human societies may
be arranged to store, perfect, and transmit locally useful knowledge by
divisions of intellectual labor; our capacity for social learning facilitates
this transmission with a relatively high degree of fidelity (Tomasello 1999).
No single individual need learn the collective wisdom of a tribe. Children
receive adaptive information from their parents—through an inheritance
of ideas, not merely genes—and they also receive wisdom from parental
cohort and peers. Oblique and horizontal transmission enables us to learn
about the labile local environments that situate us. Such transmission selects
for behavioral and developmental plasticity (Sterelny 2003). Much locally
adaptive knowledge is traded freely, without deception, and this too is
a kind of cooperation. Parents do not generally sabotage the beliefs of
their neighbor’s children (Sterelny 2004; Sterelny 2006). Our spectacular
capacity to transmit and improve practical knowledge has enabled humans
to support life in nearly every terrestrial circumstance. Our ability to
manage cooperative life has enabled us to survive together in scorching
deserts and on frozen seas and it has left a trail of mass extinctions in our
wake (Richerson and Boyd 2005).
The benefits accessible to individuals living in cooperative groups are
significant. But such benefits are notoriously difficult to obtain; for the
cognitive adaptations 47
benefits of social life are typically accessible only when all or most pay a
price. Frequently, defectors can benefit from the toil of others without
themselves toiling, thereby undermining cooperation. Together we can
bring down the Mammoth. If one or two defect, the beast will fall. Where
many defect, the cooperative pay the price of assaulting a large target alone.
Rational incentives often favor defection, but where many defect group
benefits vanish. So, cooperation is often available only to the degree that
it is policed. However, policing often comes at a cost, and these too bring
fresh cooperation dilemmas (Bulbulia 2004a; Dominic Johnson 2005).
In our lineage, policing is helped through a variety of psychological
mechanisms. We track past behavior and punish defection by withdrawing
cooperation, thus incentivizing exchange (Boyd and Richerson 2001). We
jealously guard our resources, even when doing so brings costs in excess of
their loss, and so deter aggression. We are emotional hagglers who refuse
to accept unfair offers, even when refusal is costly. We form strong affective
bonds. Our capacity for language enables us to establish very powerful
and precise information gradients. This capacity when combined with
tendencies to gossip enables us to spread socially relevant news (Dunbar
1998). Within a short time, the indiscretion known to one is known to all.
The perturbation of social information reduces defection by ramping up
its risks (Jolly 1966). Moreover, an inclination to accord prestige to socially
benefiting acts loads further incentive to cooperation. When an altruistic
reputation brings rewards, an agent has an incentive to acquire one.
According to the ‘social complexity hypothesis’ a key driver of human
intelligence was the emergence of large, functionally integrated social units.
As a society grows, so too do the demands imposed by social cognition.
Dunbar observes that an increase in the number of agents with whom
a focal agent interacts sharply increases the amount of socially relevant
information she must store and track for effective policing, prediction, and
effective social maintenance (Humphrey 1976; Byrne and Whiten 1988;
Humphrey 1992; Dunbar 1998; Dunbar 2005). A focal agent needs to
monitor information about each new agent introduced to a group—that
agent’s resources, behavioral tendencies, physical capacities, reliability, mate
choices preferences, expertise, social status, and other information. And,
critically, a focal agent must monitor, store, and update information about
how each new agent interacts with potentially every other agent. ‘Horizontal’
complexity of social groups rises much faster than group number.
Moreover, because the social agents also align themselves with various
48 the be lieving primate
subgroup structures—kin groups, totems, hunting groups, political and
economic hierarchies, religious units, and a number of informal alliances
and friendships—a focal agent must understand and potentially remember
how each new agent relates to each of these subgroups, and how these
subgroups relate to each other, and to the largest group unit taken as a
whole. This ‘vertical’ complexity increases as groups become more socially
differentiated. (For extended discussion see Sterelny 2007.)
The complexity of social life drives the evolution of enhanced storage
and tracking skills, and predictive abilities. To accommodate a
Machiavellian mind, our chimp-like ancestors required a massive memory
upgrade. And they became increasingly skilled theorists of mind,
understanding how the motivational and epistemic states of their cohort
were linked, and how these vary with circumstance for specific agents.
Social complexity further selected for enhanced linguistic competence—
perhaps also facilitated by enhanced memory and agent-tracking skills—as
agents needed to convey and interpret increasingly precise and substantial
social and ecological information. And, with these upgrades, a still further
elaboration of social complexity was made possible, thus creating new
and more intricate cognitive demands on increasingly social agents. Over
time, cognitive and social complexities were mutually elaborated (Boyd and
Richerson 1985).
Religiosity as an adaptation that reduces the cognitive load
of cooperative social life
As the informational demands on agents rise, so too do the advantages
of technologies equipping agents to reduce the computational complexity
of social living. Cooperation is policed by Machiavellian minds, but it is
also policed by a variety of cognitive mechanisms and cultural innovations
that diminish the cognitive load of strategic socializing. As Chris Boehm
has emphasized, a significant factor in the explanation for the success of
forager groups lies in their power to specify and propagate egalitarian norms
(Boehm 1999). Norms regulate exchange by standardizing expectations,
thereby reducing Machiavellian complexity. We know the pig’s hindquarter
goes to the killing hunter’s family, the back and chest is divided among
the hunting party, the entrails go to the spear maker, and so forth. And
as Richerson and Boyd have emphasized, violations of norms are often
immediately and cheaply punishable, and so norms appear to be selfpolicing
(Boyd and Richerson 2001; see also Fehr and Fischbacher 2004).
cognitive adaptations 49
Sterleny uses the rather vivid example of drunkenly groping a superior’s
mate at a Christmas party, a norm whose violation brings immediate
disutility (Sterelny 2007).
We are also a symbolic species who mark social worlds in a variety of
ways relevant to action and exchange, and this marking also reduces a
weighty cognitive load. For, given a marking convention, we are better
able to understand social affiliations, and so better able to predict future
behaviors. That skinhead with the swastika tattoo on his forehead has precommitted
himself to the fate of his neo-Nazi cohort. His prospects are
truly dim if they fail. His fate and those of his group converge, substantially
diminishing his cooperation dilemma. With symbolic labeling, intricate
computational problems are reduced to perceptual and emotional problems
we are well equipped to solve. With norms and symbolic conventions,
it appears we do not need to evolve minds capable of running massively
intricate social chess programs. Thus, through the convergence of
norms and symbolic marking, computationally intractable problems are
tamed. Boehm and others find it no accident that the first evidence of
symbolic marking coincides with the rapid expansion of the hominid
lineage into formally inhospitable domains (Boehm 1999; Mithen 1999).
Through a tremendous reduction in cognitive demands afforded by normative
and symbolic life, it appears human society grew its feet, and
ran.
But commitment-signaling theorists believe normative and symbolic
marking give only part of the story for the human transition to the
ultrasocial niche. Let us consider why.
The commitment-signaling theory of religion
Norms and symbolic marking foster reliable exchange by cheaply punishing
defection. But, in a Machiavellian world this effect can only be temporary.
For extrinsically motivating social conventions select for more effective Machiavellian
agents. Instead of drunkenly groping a superior’s spouse at the party we
take the adultery underground. Defectors may use the cover of night and
other screens and props effectively to deceive. The gossip gradient may be
polluted with mistaken or exaggerated information (Geertz 2009; Geertz
2007). Defectors may contrive various schemes and technologies to assist
in swindling their norm-following cohort: shell games, card hustles, snake
oils are common in every culture. Thieves often strike and honor private
deals at the expense of group welfare. Cabals and juntas form. Not every
50 the be lieving primate
action can be policed by a norm. And to the degree that defection remains
difficult to detect, there will be incentive to dodge and exploit the rules.
Furthermore, we are prone to ‘matching law’ fallacies. Our preference
for immediate reward over future reward is (approximately) inversely
proportional to the timing of the reward (Frank 1988). We often select
immediate pleasure at the expense of future pain. Were we to experience a
hangover before imbibing, few would drink to excess. We do not always act
as we know we should. So, at the time, even risky norm-violating behavior
may seem worth it. Moreover, where defection stakes are high, and the
threat of discovery is low, defection in even well policed societies may pay.
Norms commit agents to cooperation through extrinsic benefits and
costs. But they do not pre-commit agents. And for this reason they do
not secure commitment where an agent perceives an interest to defect.
Norms do not reliably reduce Machiavellian complexity unless they are
intrinsically motivating. The standard solution to social evolution does not
solve its problem.
It seems religion may rescue norms. For religion appears to afford cheap
policing. Even if an actual return favors defection, a perceived supernatural
return (now or soon) or a strong emotional desire to please a normsupporting
supernatural agent will be capable of inducing cooperation.
When individuals face cooperation dilemmas, it is not the actual pay-off
schedule that predicts cooperation. What matters is their preference schedule.
If the distortion brings more advantage than accuracy then selection
will favor distortion in our understanding and feelings relative to a reward
matrix. And if a god or ancestor or karmic power is believed to reward
cooperation or punish defection then defection may be rationally disfavored
(Bering 2004; Dominic Johnson 2005). Where a religious agent acts out
of self-interest, or a sense of duty, or love for a god, social transgressions
become less desirable. It may be very easy to access the boss’s spouse, but
if you have reason to believe that a castrating god or your dead mother
is watching the tactic may seem ill advised (for a ‘spandrelist’ account of
‘full access strategic agents’ see Boyer 2001). Moreover, the idea that gods
and other supernatural powers are agents to whom we owe duties and
obligations can motivate exchange when the idea becomes genuinely and
commonly believed. For, given the rest of human psychology, we feel those
obligations without calculating conditional strategies and natural outcomes.
For religionists, honoring social commitments will seem desirable. Or so it
may seem.
cognitive adaptations 51
Unfortunately religious policing is unevolvable. Supernatural illusions
cannot police exchange. For such a tendency to supernatural policing
cannot become common when the illusion-trait is rare. Against defectors,
religionists will only get cheated. And even where religion is common
religious persons remain exploitable by defectors impersonating religionists:
in time, defecting wolves dressed as cooperative sheep keep company only
with other wolves in theological drag (see, e.g., Irons 1996). Religious
cooperators face a recognition constraint (Bulbulia 2005; Bulbulia 2006). Critically,
religiously motivated cooperation is evolvable only if co-religionists
can find each other, while at the same time spotting religious impostors.
Religious emotions as pre-commitment signals
The commitment-signaling theory of religion suggests we can solve this
problem. At the core of the theory is the idea that solving the recognition
constraint relies on the deployment and interpretation of signals that reliably
and perceptibly distinguish genuinely religious agents from defecting frauds.
If religious cooperators are able to produce a characteristic signature that
identifies them as different from religious impostors, religiously motivated
moralities become possible. Yet, what could function as such a signal?
What can religious agents do that would-be defecting agents impersonating
religious agents cannot?
Commitment theory suggests many candidate signals. Participation in
religious practices frequently brings costs that only the religiously committed
will accept (Irons 1996; Irons 2001; Sosis 2003; Sosis and Alcorta
2003; Sosis 2004; Bulbulia 2004a). Some of these costs are very striking
indeed, for ritual agents immolate themselves in dramatic and dangerous
ways (Atran 2002a; Bulbulia 2004b). Many costs are less vivid, and come
through resource expenditure and forsaken opportunities. For cost outlays
themselves give information about the nature and degree of commitment.
If Hajji is willing to swing on a flesh hook for his god, there can be little
doubt he is committed. The core prediction of ritual-signaling theory is
that if an agent produces evidence of commitment to a god, that agent is
committed to a group (for empirical evidence supporting ritual-signaling
theory see Sosis 2000; Sosis and Bressler 2003; Bulbulia 2007).4
4. Sosis and his colleagues have built an impressive empirical case for looking at rituals as amplifiers
of cooperation signals. But I (and they) want to emphasize that commitment signaling may not
be the primary function of ritual action. To the extent that rituals permanently mark us, they
52 the be lieving primate
There are other signals religious agents may send that defectors will
not easily match. Theological knowledge is a hard-to-fake signal of group
affiliation; it identifies past resource investments and developmental histories.
For theological knowledge is hard to learn. Indeed, theology may
serve few utilities apart from its signaling capacity, for religious agents do
not appear to employ it to reflect about their gods (Barrett 1996; Barrett
1998; Barrett 2004). Moreover, permanent symbolic markers—those that
come both through ‘assent’ and ‘dissent’ communities—may pre-commit
individuals through permanent marking, as the swastika example illustrates.
Where individuals lack permanent signals they will often import various
contrivances to signal their affiliation—headpieces, unusual clothing,
scarves, masks, and headdresses, various charms and emblems, specific and
unconventional configurations of body hair. They may adopt a special
gait or stride. These paraphernalia and habits signal commitment through
conventional meanings that many defectors would be reluctant to accept;
especially where such affiliations are public and exclusive (extensive display
disrupts the join–defect–leave strategy). True believers may shed much
information as a by-product of their normal activity, for religious commitments
impinge on life outside of symbolic contexts. Paying attention
to what religionists do when they are distressed may give clues about their
convictions. An athlete who thanks and praises a god on national television
gives a somewhat difficult-to-fake signal of commitment, and this kind of
example, so familiar in public life, may reflect a deeper disposition to shed
hard-to-fake evidence of group identity and commitment in non-religious
contexts.
So there are many signals potentially relevant to solving the recognition
constraint. Here, I wish to focus on emotional signaling, for emotions
illustrate the most basic and ancient reliable signaling technology, one that
has long been a legacy of primate flesh.5
Moreover, our ancestral signaling
system helps to explain the cognitive binding of religious beliefs and powerful
motivation states. Let us consider emotional signaling generally, before
considering how religious emotions give evidence of commitments to
powerfully pre-commit us to acting in pro-social ways. For, if group competition is fierce, our
prospects for survival may well coincide with the success of our tribe, as the parable of the
tattooed Nazi suggests. And there may be other crucial non-signaling functions (see discussion
below).
5. Primates signal emotion through cries and facial expressions, and through postures and ritual
gestures (Griffiths 1997b). See also Zahavi and Zahavi 1997.
cognitive adaptations 53
norm-supporting superhuman agents. There are three significant properties
of emotions that collectively work to make emotions reliable as signals
of cooperative (or defective) intent (Frank 1988; Zahavi and Zahavi 1997;
Frank 2001).
First, emotions are linked to motivations. To feel lonely suggests a
motivation to seek company. To feel fear suggests a motivation to escape.
Of course, we do not always act on our emotions. But, where an emotion
is present, there is at least a prima facie motivation to act or respond (or to
inhibit response) in a certain way. Notice that evidence of motivation gives
clues about future behavior. This connection between display, motivation,
and signal enables emotions to function prophetically. A strong emotion—
say, fear at being dragged to the fire—will accurately predict activation of a
characteristic response pattern. Facial expressions of basic emotions—fear,
joy, anger, sadness, shock, disgust, and others—are human universals. They
are unlearned and universally understood (Darwin [1872] (1965); Ekman
1994). No one needs to explain the haunted expression of terror in the
torture victim’s eyes.
Second, emotions manifest themselves in ways that are hard to fake.
Emotionally salient fear is not difficult to detect. And, though other emotions
may be masked, for most of us they are difficult to obscure for long,
and some cannot be manipulated. A blush expresses self-consciousness, and
the response may be very difficult to control. The muscular orchestration
of a smile is both complex and produced outside of the neo-cortex, in
regions of the brain dedicated to emotional processing (Ramachandran
and Blakeslee 1998). Most of us have a hard time producing a genuine
smile for the camera. The face is not the only emotional projector. Our
voice too gives evidence. Speakers find fear and anger difficult to suppress.
Profuse sweating suggests high autonomic arousal. Posture and gait also
give emotional clues. Someone advancing rapidly with his chin forward
probably means business. In short, though our emotions may be damped
down, emotional states are very often credibly paired with motivations that
are signaled through clear perceptual cues. Audiences are able to use these
clear cues to discern emotional signatures, and so are better outfitted to
predict behavior.
Third, audiences scrutinize emotional displays. The data here are less
decisive for we are not perfect at detecting liars (see, e.g., Ekman 1975).
Nevertheless, Frank’s studies indicate that experimental subjects in even
artificial, data-impoverished settings do far better than random prediction
54 the be lieving primate
(1988). Considering emotions in the wild, Frank argues that our interpretive
and discriminatory capacities will give even better results, as the
information presented to them is more substantial, differentiated, and
informed by other channels of information (the gossip gradient, accolades,
emblems of success, reputations, and others). Moreover, most of us find
it difficult to suppress and control emotion for long. In the evolutionary
arms race between signaling and detection systems, our capacities to discern
emotional signals as reliable indicators of motivational states endow
emotions with a fragile prophetic power. In scanning an emotional display
we are better able to anticipate how an agent will behave, and so to adjust
our plans. But deceptive agents will always have incentive to mimic these
signals and, for this reason, biologically wired signaling technologies must
be configured to remove them as much as possible from deceptive control
(including self-deceptive control). For discussion of how ritual helps to
combat evolutionary arms races in signaling technology, see Sosis 2003;
Bulbulia 2004a. If Frank is right, our emotional responses are relatively
reliable and transparent because they evolved to pre-commit agents to
cooperation. To a rough approximation, emotional displays function as
signals potentially relevant to social interaction.
The literature on emotional signaling bears on an important feature of
religious commitment. It helps us to understand how intrinsically motivating
norms would have been supported over hominid evolution through
emotional displays relative to supernatural beings. We begin to understand
how religion supports norms by looking to the evolutionary problems our
immediate ancestors had to solve before acquiring rich normative morality.
Without a doubt, our emotional signaling system evolved much earlier
than did our capacities for normative and symbolic living. While our
nearest primate relatives have nothing remotely approaching normative and
symbolic society, they nevertheless register emotional displays in response
to other primates (and natural agents) as Darwin long ago observed ([1872]
(1965); see also Griffiths 1997b; Sterelny and Griffiths 1999).6
Our capacity
for managing intricate social worlds emerged in a lineage already equipped
with the cognitive wares to express pre-commitments through hard-to-fake
emotional display.
Notice that this commitment-signaling system provides a powerful
pre-adaptation for norm-supported society. Agent–emotion signaling bridges
6. Not always other primates. A chimpanzee will recoil violently from a snake, etc.
cognitive adaptations 55
an evolutionary trench that primates must cross before beginning the ascent of
norm-building fitness peaks. For, once norms were associated with normsupporting
agents, normative commitments could have been marked by an
agent–emotion display system whose complex and coordinated efficiency
already had been honed by millions of years of evolutionary organization.
That link would have been forged not because supernatural agents are
intrinsically norm supporting (we shall see in section III how the gods
behave appallingly). Roughly, the opposite was true. The link was forged
because emotions evolved in our primate ancestors as a mechanism of
response to agents. Thus, for an intrinsic signaling system to evolve from its
primate predecessors, the representational inputs feeding that system would
have benefited greatly by describing agent-like beings. And those agents are
optimally effective only if they are all knowing, emotionally and morally
compelling, potentially everywhere, and eternal. They are optimized, that
is, when they are imagined as supernatural parents, ancestors, and masters.
For the system to be stable, belief in those agents would have benefited
through regular emotionally charged encounters, that is, through religious
experience. (In section III we shall see how cognition manages this trick.)
Conviction → Norm-supporting Agents → Emotional Signal →
Predicts Cooperative Intent
The connection of emotions to beliefs in norm-supporting gods would
have unleashed tremendous advantages to individuals facing significant
cooperation dilemmas. For, again, norms remain imperfectly reliable when
they are not supported through intrinsic commitment. In an increasingly
Machiavellian social world the recognition constraint threatens extensive,
reliable exchange. By registering emotions relative to norm-supporting
gods we were able to express pre-commitments to a god-supporting
social group.7
Moreover, where such agents form the targets of emotional
concern—when we love or respect the gods—then violating their laws will
not only seem unwise but also shameful.8
And these pre-commitments will
7. Emotions may be centered on various natural objects—the props and prompts of religious
culture, priests and priestesses, striking natural objects like mountains, or the sun and moon,
and others. While my interest here is on explaining supernatural commitments relative to
supernatural agents, a full treatment requires understanding the enchantment of nature. A full
treatment would link supernatural agents to the larger class of ‘sacred agents’.
8. Given the matching law, supernatural rewards must be paid in either the immediate or near
future, or be enormously substantial to work. But intrinsically felt emotions alter preference
schedules without a need for extra reward.
56 the be lieving primate
then be decoded by perceptional systems already evolved for the task of
defector detection, thereby bypassing the computational intractability of a
Machiavellian world. A substantial barrier to social living was crossed.
Is there any evidence for this evolutionary conjecture? The theory predicts
that emotional responses to norm-supporting gods will be difficult to
fake absent actual belief in such gods. And it predicts that morally motivating
gods will never be merely represented: they will also be feared, adored,
ingratiated, respected, loved, and honored. Perhaps unsurprisingly there is
little experimental data on the role of emotional signaling in the literature
on religion. Indeed, without the commitment-signaling hypothesis, it is
unclear why anyone would look for it. More data are needed here. Intuitively
it would seem difficult for most of us to manage emotions of religious
piety towards superhuman agents that strike one as preposterous, under the
hard scrutiny of religious observers. The relevant emotions are difficult to
prompt and even harder to sustain. Moreover, the emotional dimension
of religiosity is commonplace to anthropologists and historians of religion.
And it is a repeated theme in religious theologies from Augustine through
Edwards, Schleiermacher, Otto, and their contemporary followers. Finally,
the commitment-signaling model of the emotions is well supported in the
ordinary exchange contexts (Frank 2001). So, it appears safe to back the
emotional-signaling horse in religious contexts.
At present, the commitment-signaling theory of religious emotions,
then, takes the form of an inference to the best explanation. It explains
the otherwise puzzling fact that religious agents inhabit emotion-drenched
supernatural worlds. It explains the link between belief in false reality and
strong motivational social commitment, and so explains the integration of
religious belief with emotion to produce powerfully motivating conviction.
I want to stress again, however, that the emotional dimension of
religious signaling gives only part of the story. Emotions do more than
signal commitment. Emotions motivate the search for specific kinds of
information relevant to development and success. For example, aesthetic
emotions may direct the search strategies of religious agents, indicating
what sort of super-human information to seek out. An intense interest
in gossip, for example, better enables us to understand our social context
(see Tooby and Cosmides 2001 for an account of ‘aesthetic’ emotions and
their importance to developmental contexts).
Moreover, a more detailed explanation of religious emotion would
require submersion in the details of the highly structured religious contexts
cognitive adaptations 57
that prompt, cultivate, revise, edit, assess, and amplify religious emotions.
Cultural variation will organize different emotion-regulation systems in
different contexts. The spasmodic ejaculations that are expected in an
evangelical church will appear out of place in a dour Presbyterian service.
Moreover, religious emotions are not stable absent any religious context,
and without continued exposure to religious practice, religiosity as a whole
degrades (Francis and Kay 1995). So, religious commitment substantially
relies on locally configured religious practice for enduring epistemic support.
Finally, without platforms for broadcasting commitment signals we
would have no means for detecting them in the social collectives; for
we cannot scan the religiosity of our peers without public, collective
expressions of religious commitment.9
In short, there is far more to the
explanatory story than has been suggested here. Nevertheless, I hope to
have made a credible case for investigating religious emotions as strategic
adaptations for social exchange.
II. Religious Decoupling
Having sketched an evolutionary account for the integration of supernatural
commitment to powerful emotional and motivational states I now
consider how the systems that mediate that connection disengage religiosity
from non-social practical domains. For, when religious conviction seeps
into practical domains, an otherwise adaptive trait becomes damaging. Religious
agents face an encapsulation constraint (see Bulbulia 2006 for discussion)
Consider our capacity for decoupled representation (or ‘metarepresentation’).
Organisms do not merely respond to their immediate circumstances
with stereotyped behaviors. Instead, their perceptual representations of
distal reality are ‘decoupled’ from automated response strategies. Perceptual
9. For religious signaling to function it clearly needs to be projected through cultural technology.
In a tribe of 150 cooperators laced with defectors, a focal agent cannot move from shelter to
shelter inducing and then evaluating the religiosity of each of her cohort. An organism whose
life dissolves into an everlasting series of produced and observed religious seizures is not viable.
Moreover, the computational demands imposed by constant emotional signaling remain too
high. Each individually observed religious signal would need to be filed, retained, and updated
as social dramas unfold. There is no substantial reduction of a cognitive load here. In place
of everlasting emotional scrutiny, however, we have social practices that at one time routinely
display the religiosity of a collective. Moreover, such amplification technologies allow for other
credible signals of religious motivation apart from emotional display, and these too provide a
means for securing reliable exchange.
58 the be lieving primate
information may be stored and accessed for future purposes, perhaps
presently unknown. Perceptual information may also prompt a range of
behaviors. And, for any single behavior, a range of signals may activate initiation
(Sterelny 2003). Other organisms decouple thought from behavior.
A cat monitoring prey may attempt reconnaissance before pouncing. But,
in the hominid lineage, this capacity operates with truly astounding richness
and intricacy. We do not merely register distal affairs, we reflectively
consider the extent to which our representations are true. We form moral
and epistemic attitudes to our thoughts. We remember the source of certain
information—as self or other (and who)—and modify our commitments in
light of new information. We mark representations with time tags as well—
locating events within the space–time matrix of personal autobiography. We
recall and re-experience these representations with vivid emotional detail.
And we update autobiographical knowledge with the receipt of new and
relevant information. ‘Jane wanted John the moment she discovered his
unseemly defect.’ Robust decoupling capacity enables us to manipulate and
mark our thoughts for a range of purposes, many of which we cannot
determine in advance. Such capacity brings massive, portable behavioral
flexibility (see especially Cosmides and Tooby 2000).
In developing my story about religious decoupling I wish to consider
the special advantages we obtain through counterfactual metarepresentation
(and the simulation systems that inform it.) Through counterfactuals we are
able to manipulate specific representations for special consideration offline.
(1) ‘What would happen if the door to the aircraft cabin just now opened
at 12,000 meters?’
(1) can receive a reliable though non-actual answer. In contemplating this
scenario, an agent may access epistemic databases and utilize simulationbased
inference machinery to bear on the task. She may produce and
compare various scenarios, according a degree of probability to each.
The relevant information processing may be very complicated indeed.
For example, an agent’s knowledge may change in light of how she
imagines the counterfactual cases, and this change, in turn, may inform
further deliberation. Stable panhuman resources such as folk physics may be
invoked—in the present case, the law of gravity acting on the trajectories
of falling bodies. Novel knowledge may give advice: Second World War
bombardiers improved their accuracy by retraining their folk intuitions
(McCloskey 1983). A ‘phonological loop’ and ‘visual sketch pad’ may be
cognitive adaptations 59
deployed (Cosmides and Tooby 2000). We rehearse ideas and hatch plans
in quasi-perceptual formats.
It is significant that through counterfactual inference, agents are frequently
able to produce reliable answers to non-actual but possible scenarios.
They do so without incurring the substantial risks and costs of live experimentation.
In understanding and predicting their world, counterfactualenabled
agents are liberated from the deliverances of actual fortune. And
they may devise plans appropriate to their novel, local circumstances. How
may this happen?
In the first instance, counterfactual reasoning involves separating and
marking a set of propositions for consideration as ‘imagined but not actual’.
To dignify ignorance with a name, let us call the scope operator that binds
this set the IMAGINE WHAT IF operator. (I will suppose conditional
counterfactuals give a THEN WOULD scope operator in inferences acting
on arguments bound by the WHAT IF operator):
(1∗
) IMAGINE WHAT IF [(The door to the aircraft cabin just now
opened) THEN WOULD (I fall to my death, bringing others with
me)]
Though understood as not literally true, the contents bound by the counterfactual
operator are allowed to migrate freely, as if they were true. We can
produce a range of potential outcomes and assess their conditional probability
through this invented knowledge (a form of individual learning).
Propositions within the scope of the operator are treated differently than
they would be were they admitted without the operator. Critically this
isolation of information within a domain prevents false information from
damaging our inferential capacity in unrelated domains. The information
encoded in the hypothetical (1∗
) would produce schizophrenic terror were
it represented or read in the unmarked form as:
(1∗∗
) The door to the aircraft cabin just now opened at 12,000 meters.
Moreover, counterfactual decoupling combines with other metarepresentational
capacities, for we are able to do more than mark propositions for
special consideration as ‘not literally true’. We are able to form emotional
attitudes to hypothetical propositions and accord them a degree of certainty.
The source of a representation—say, as ‘self’ rather than as ‘other’—can be
identified and pinned to its representational contents. Robust combinatorial
inflection enables us to generate richly structured representational outputs:
60 the be lieving primate
(1∗∗∗
) SELF // NOW // IMAGINE WHAT IF [(the door to the cabin
just now open . . . ) VERY LIKELY // THEN WOULD (I fall to
my death, bringing others with me)
→ inference: WOULD BE // UNDESIRABLE (I fall to my
death . . . )
→ inference: mark antecedent of the conditional UNDESIRABLE
The rich inflectional character of thought also helps us to produce strikingly
precise strategies. With it, we travel through time to fictional futures,
running experiments to improve our own.
2. PLAN (Do not open the door)
Massive decoupling enables us to plan in ways unavailable to the literalminded.
We consider alternatives and limn future possibilities. We scheme,
trading immediate discomfort for future return: ‘If I endure the tooth
drilling, the chronic pain will dissipate.’ As with any creature, the shadow of
the future falls on us. Yet, through ‘remembering a future’—in Cosmides
and Tooby’s apt phrase—we can alter which shadows fall. We anticipate
destiny and so are not enslaved by it.
The power of non-literal thinking also emerges in the analysis of fiction.
For the present purposes, consider fiction as extended counterfactual
cognition deploying a matrix of representations explicitly understood to
be not literally true. It is interesting, and puzzling, that we should desire
to contemplate such representations (Tooby and Cosmides 2001), for the
extensive contemplation of fiction imposes opportunity and other resource
costs, and it dwells in falsehoods. There is no possible future in which
we will face the Minotaur, the Little Mermaid, or Vader’s Death Star.
Moreover, in fiction, non-literal thinking is none the less represented in
quasi-literal format (Brock 2002). We know the Shining is only fictional,
but nevertheless we fear for the boy as he flees to the snowy maze. We
know Godzilla has never afflicted Japan—indeed we know the 100-meter
dragon cannot be physically realized—yet hope the Japanese army will deter
it. Moreover, though we fear the fictional Godzilla, we do not run from
the theater as we would from a real 100-meter dragon. And, even as we
hope for its success, we may not even know if Japan has an army.
There has been lively debate over the utility and evolutionary history
of fictional capacities (Crews, Gottschall, et al. 2005). Some see purposes,
e.g. Carroll 2004. Others see fiction as ‘mental cheesecake’, attractive but
cognitive adaptations 61
not functionally so (Pinker 1997: 525). But it cannot be doubted that
a substantial information management system needs to be in place to
prevent the cognition of fiction from becoming maladaptive. For fiction
to work we require something roughly approximating the following metarepresentational
design:
IMAGINE + [Fiction]
We define ‘IMAGINE’ as the ordinary counterfactual decoupler that marks
a collection of non-actual representations for hypothetical and conditional
consideration. We identify the argument of this operator (the bounded
non-actual collection) with the notation [Fiction]. To prevent fiction from
harming us, the IMAGINE operator must keep fictional information from
spilling into practical inferential domains. It erects cognitive firebreaks
between the representations it binds and practically relevant ontological
commitments. It marks the contents within its scope as ‘not literally true’.
We judge that
(3) Scarlet O’Hara is beautiful
but also that
(3∗
) Scarlet O’Hara does not exist.
Paradox is resolved when we note that (3) falls within the scope of a fiction.
(3) should be read as
(3∗∗
) IMAGINE [(Gone with the Wind) → LICENSE fictional inference:
(Scarlet O’Hara is beautiful)]
→ practical inference: NOT TRUE (Scarlet O’Hara exists)
The IMAGINE scope operator guides the interpretation and motivational
integration of fiction cognition.10
It enables us to understand both that
fictions are invented and that genuine inferential relations hold for their
contents. If fiction is adaptive the systems that export fictional information
to practical problem solving domains do so without the contents of fiction
ever being believed.11
10. Advocates of the ‘fiction as adaptation’ idea observe that the knowledge and emotion
released through fictional contemplation allow for a more rapid accumulation of locally
adaptive knowledge than is possible were we restricted to learning from the vagaries of actual
experience. See esp. Tooby and Cosmides 2001.
11. The marking of fiction as only quasi-true allows for inferences within the boundaries of a
fictional marking to flow freely. This leads to some peculiar effects. We can ask whether
62 the be lieving primate
I have avoided the ‘fiction as adaptation’ debate. But, in section I, I
urged that religiosity manifests the complex and coordinated structure of
an adaptation for cooperative exchange. Its function is not to help us learn
about social complexity but rather to reduce it. It does so by making social
relations more reliably predictable. Thus, the task requirements further
constrain the cognitive organization of religious commitment, and structure
the metarepresentational systems that manage them.
I have discussed the distinctive functions of highly motivating religious
commitment. The most parsimonious supposition—in evolutionary
and cognitive terms—is to suppose that the capacities that enable us to
produce decoupled religious representation resemble the capacities that
underwrite counterfactual and fictional thinking (see Atran 2002a and
Pyysiäinen 2003a for similar but non-adaptationist analyses). For, the functional
tasks in many respects resemble each other. Religious cognition contemplates
fictional realities in ways that drive domain-specific motivations
and responses. Information held within the scope of the religiosity operator
must not migrate into many practical domains of interaction. Religiosity,
like counterfactual and fictional reasoning, faces a significant encapsulation
constraint. Functional religious decoupling, however, differs from fiction
counterfactual decoupling.12
These differences stem from the functions of
religiosity as a pre-commitment and signaling device.
The most important and obvious difference is that religious conviction is
not self-consciously represented as fiction. It is self-consciously represented
as true. We begin with the simplest conjecture:
®
IMAGINE + [Fiction]
where ®
IMAGINE is a special counterfactual scope operator. Like the
naked IMAGINE operator we assume that the religious decoupler binds
a fiction so that it is read by the motivation and behavior systems as
not actual. This prediction follows from the encapsulation constraint. An
Holmes is brighter than Watson and form an opinion, though this fact is never directly stated
within Conan Doyle’s work. But we cannot sensibly ask the color of Watson’s eyes or the
number of wives he has had. For nothing in the propositions given in Doyle’s books allows
inferences to these conclusions. We tolerate inferences (and perhaps debates) over the first
case, whereas the second meets a blank stare of incredulity. There is a fact of the matter about
how many wives Jeppe Jensen (an actual person) has had. But there is no such fact for Watson.
Fictional characters are in this respect ontologically gappy.
12. I am not committing to an ‘out of fiction’ conjecture for the origins of religiosity. Rather, I
merely note that both capacities share very similar structural features, for both are powerfully
constrained by the demands of encapsulation.
cognitive adaptations 63
evolutionary task analysis predicts that ®
IMAGINE is read by most psychological
systems in ways similar to the IMAGINE scope operator. The
simplest hypothesis is that religious representations are read by the systems
that regulate practical involvement with the world similarly to the way
they read fictional marked representations. Metarepresentational binding
allows religious information to be fenced off from harming a religious
agent.
(4) ®
IMAGINE [Zugroo is Lord Creator]
→ practical inference: NOT TRUE [Zugroo is Lord Creator]
Yet, given the functional constraints on adaptive religiosity, we assume that
in the workspace where representational contents are consciously accessed and
manipulated religion is represented as ‘true’, or even as ‘certainly true’.
For the strength of a pre-commitment signal hinges on the emotionally detectible
certainty of a religious belief. Hence, self-consciousness is constrained to read
®
IMAGINE counterfactuals as it would read factual representations. We
can say that religiosity operates under a self-deception constraint. Here I use
‘self deception’ in Trivers’ sense of a biasing and distorting of information
flow to produce adaptive outcomes (Trivers 1991). We must consciously
believe and we must also unconsciously not believe that religious representations
are true. Needless to say, this division of a religious mind imposes strict
demands on the metarepresentational system that controls and isolates
religious fictions.
To a religious agent the scope operator will give something like the
following permission to autobiographical consciousness:
(4∗
) ®
IMAGINE [Zugroo is Lord Creator]
→ practical inference: NOT TRUE [Zugroo is Lord Creator]
→ workspace inference: CERTAINLY TRUE [Zugroo is Lord
Creator]
Whether we are able to claim that agents believe in gods rather than
‘believe in believing’ has recently been subject to lively dispute (Palmer
and Steadman 2004; Dennett 2006), for there is no obvious referent to that
to which religious agents express commitment. But if the commitment
signaling theory is in the right ballpark, there can be little doubt that
religious agents consciously believe that what they are representing is true.
For, such a conviction is required to produce the hard-to-fake emotional
commitment to a norm-supporting god. Indeed, for the system to remain
64 the be lieving primate
functional, we must believe with emotional zeal (Dennett is correct to note
that religious agents ‘believe in believing’ but wrong in thinking that the
‘religious memes’ explanation sufficiently explains why (2006)). A nontrivial
prediction of commitment signaling theory, then, is that persons
will genuinely believe that they believe, even if this belief is inferentially
unbounded. They will, for example, pass polygraph tests and galvanic skin
response measures for lying.
Let us examine the interplay between self-conscious belief and encapsulation
more fully. In a karma-bound world an agent expresses intrinsic precommitment
by expressing moralistic emotional beliefs in karmic powers.
Yet, consider an agent who truly believes in karma (that what goes around
comes around). In a karmic world there is no point in punishing our
enemies, for they shall get theirs anyway (as the karmic wheel turns).
But karma doesn’t exist. An organism that fails to punish its enemies will
have lots of delighted enemies, and it will also be short for this world.
Consider the thought that there is a perfect life of bliss after this one
where all the faithful will go. A natural inference from this thought is:
‘Give up caring very deeply about what happens in this life.’ Yet, not
caring about the hard labor of living is a bad idea for survival. Like a
contradiction, almost anything follows from unconstrained supernatural
commitment. And that makes any dispositions to it very dangerous indeed.
So, religious commitments must be surrounded by cognitive firewalls
similar to those that prevent our counterfactual and fictional musings
from collapsing into a split-minded failure to distinguish actual from nonactual
representations. The theory predicts that while religious persons
express religious beliefs such persons will act in many ways as if they
do not believe—for example, they will punish their enemies and fear
death.
Furthermore, commitment-signaling theory predicts that religious fictions
will be expressed with a moral valence. This further constrains its
outputs. ®
IMAGINE fictions must be visible both to consciousness and
to the systems that control moral normative emotions, motivations, and
responses. While the outputs of religious belief must be fenced off from
practical domains, they must be highly salient in cooperation domains.
For religiosity to function adaptively those outputs must be integrated to
normative exchange domains. Thus, religiosity not only faces an encapsulation
constraint it also faces an integration constraint (Bulbulia 2006; Bulbulia
2007).
cognitive adaptations 65
(4∗∗
) ®
IMAGINE [Zugroo is Lord Creator]
→ practical inference: NOT TRUE [Zugroo is Lord Creator]
→ workspace inference: CERTAINLY TRUE [Zugroo is Lord
Creator]
→ emotional response: Zugroo is real display
→ morally normative inference: Follow Zugroo’s norms (including
norms of sacrifice).
The integration constraint predicts that agents will come to believe that the
rules and social orientations that religious fictions describe and motivate are
intrinsically good and right. Hence religious fictions will be cast to prevent
or minimize challenges to the moral authority of religious fictions. It is
worth observing that in all religious cultures, to challenge norm-supporting
inferences from religious fictions typically results in harsh and immediate
social punishment. Religious narratives are norm supporting, but they are
also norm supported. Religious morality thus scours the fictions that support
it. This moral casting can produce very strange interpretive strategies.
Very often religious characters will be seen through a moralizing lens that
we do not apply to fictional characters. Consider this story.
There is a very rich man named Mr Z who wants you to worship him. He
lives in a nearby town though no one has seen him. Those who worship Mr
Z are given a million dollars. No one has ever seen this, but trust me it is true.
Mr Z repeatedly breaks the legs and burns those who do not worship him. If
you love Mr Z, he will give you a million dollars. If you do not love him, Mr
Z will savage you.13
Some Ignorant Shepherd
It makes sense to ask whether this story licenses the inference ‘Mr Z is a
good man’ or the inference ‘Mr Z is deserving of praise and worship he
demands.’ More basically, it makes sense to ask why Mr Z would make
such outrageous demands, and why he would care to be worshiped. But
often it does not make sense for believers to ask these questions of deities
who behave in similar ways. (Indeed far more horrendous ways, as in the
Book of Job.) For the religious story is interpreted in such a way that God’s
command must be good. Moreover, for most believers it does not make
sense to question a deity’s practical judgment. It would be strange to ask
of the Judeo-Christian fiction why God sent his all-important messages of
13. This story is adapted from <http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank>.
66 the be lieving primate
salvation to uneducated shepherds, at a time when there were no printing
presses or mass media. The question is obvious, but does not come up.
Similarly, it makes no sense to ask why, if God is invisible but omnipotent,
God did not write his name on the moon or in the stars.14
Moreover,
religiously inflected accounts of religious history are not typically revised in
light of new knowledge, and resist placement into a wider context. We may
doubt the veracity of ‘the Legend of Mr Z’ transcribed by Some Ignorant
Shepherd. But, to refer to Christianity as invented by scientifically ignorant
pastoral peoples in the ancient Near East may well offend solemn Christian
believers.
Notice I do not claim that the gods of religious fictions will always be
interpreted as good and righteous.
(5) → Moral normative inference: Follow Zugroo’s norms
is compatible with but not equivalent to
(5∗
) → Morally normative inference: Follow Zugroo’s norms because
Zugroo is morally perfect.
The inference (5∗
) is not the only one capable of supporting a norm. There
may be a variety of reasons agents supply for why they follow Zugroo’s
demands—for example, terror of crossing a cosmic tyrant. Moreover, the
morally normative inference may well be basic, given the integration
constraint religious norms likely deliver for every believing agent, absent
the need for supplementary reasons.
The data suggest that few religious fictions support norms through
reliance on representations of perfectly moral gods. Indeed, in vastly many
traditions, the gods are explicitly represented in morally questionable ways.
Human morality and the gods’ morality are sharply distinguished. To
repeat, this property of religious fictions is striking when compared with
ordinary fictions. Even very powerful fictional characters (Mr Z) are held
morally accountable by our standards. Ordinarily we apply to fictional
characters standards we would apply to ourselves.
The religious fictions of ancient Greece ably illustrate this pattern: Greek
gods are explicitly represented as ruthless, capricious, and cruel. Similarly,
14. Children do sometimes ask this question, for which they are generally dissuaded if not
harshly punished. It appears they do not know whether to group a narrative bundle with
an IMAGING THAT scope operator or an IMAGINE THAT®
scope operator, perhaps
because their religiosity system remains immature. This is very interesting and deserves close
consideration in the developmental psychology of religion.
cognitive adaptations 67
the Hindu god Kali is represented as arbitrary and vicious, yet nevertheless
remains the object of mass veneration. Nevertheless, in both ancient Greek
and Hindu societies very strong morally normative inferences run from
religious mythologies to pro-social (and sacrificial) behavior. These facts
comport well with commitment-signaling theory, which predicts an active
integration of religious commitment to cooperative domains. For religion
to enhance solidarity, religious commitments must promote distinctive
motivational and behavioral states. While religiosity is insulated from (nonsocial)
practical behavior, it must be reliably integrated to social behavior.
Otherwise, religiosity will be rejected, not targeted and amplified by evolutionary
selection pressures (see Bulbulia 2004a).15
To draw the threads of this section together, the commitment-signaling
model predicts that religious persons will emotionally believe in gods, and
moralistically believe in believing, for believing in a norm-supporting god
signals a commitment to each other. The ®
IMAGINE operator therefore
defines a moral expectation about the fiction it bundles, in intricate and
often bizarre ways. The convention of interpreting stories to have normsupporting
consequences frequently distorts and biases the interpretation of
religious fictions. Explicit ‘why do we celebrate nailing day?’ questions will
be discouraged or punished.
III. Religious Experience and Confabulation
I finally consider an application of the religious scope operator hypothesis
to the domain of religious experience. Religiosity involves the active interpretation
of reality as god-infested. While the gods are passively represented
through shared religious stories and through public testimony, many religious
agents report that the gods are personally encountered (James 1902).
I suggest that religious conviction is best explained as a kind of confabulation.
We know that individuals have poor access to the true causes of
their judgments, emotions, and behaviors. In a classic experiment Nisbett
and Wilson (1977) showed that when faced with an arbitrary decision
15. While religious fictions support norms by allowing for emotional pre-commitment signaling,
I do not think that religious fictions are necessary for supporting such norms. The fact that
Asperger’s patients can learn and strongly commit to religious norms without understanding
other minds suggests that the relevant domains are to some degree dissociated. See Atran
2002a: 193. In Asperger’s we find normative bracing without psychological content.
68 the be lieving primate
between identical objects (nylon stockings), agents nevertheless invented
reasons for their choice, defending these reasons even after being informed
the objects were identical.16
Dennett suggests that confabulatory practices
are extremely common, for concocting ad hoc stories is a fundamental
part of interpreting who we are. In expressing our personal pasts we invent
reasons and fill missing gaps, supplying a coherence and control to our
autobiographical selves that we do not actually possess. Hirstein observes
that the response ‘I don’t know?’ is a complicated cognitive feat, one that
involves the active suppression of conjectural thoughts that flood knowledge
and response systems. The breakdown of these systems in a range
of cognitive disorders suggests that critical cognitive stopgaps mediate the
relationship between how we imagine ourselves to be and how we finally
acknowledge ourselves to be. Hirstein notes that the effect of confabulatory
response is particularly strong when agents are asked to respond to questions
for which they ought to have answers. When asked by a romantic partner,
‘why do you love me?’, agents will typically supply some explanation—
‘your eyes’, ‘your kindness’, ‘your sympathy’—when in fact they may not
understand or have access to their reasons. It would be inappropriate in such
instances to reply ‘Honestly, I don’t know why I love you’ (Hirstein 2005:
chap. 1). Thus, given well-documented confabulatory response effects, it
would be astonishing if believers were unable to supply reasons for their
strong religious conviction; it would be astonishing if they were to reply
‘I don’t know why I have strong religious conviction’, all the more so
where there are strong social expectations that they ought to know. Such
expectations pervade many religious contexts.
While the reasons religious agents give for their belief may be sheer confabulation,
it is nevertheless interesting that religious agents often describe
some of their experiences as of supernatural beings. That is, the experience
of some religious agents seems to be confabulatory in the present tense.
Religious persons describe how they encounter religious beings in the
course of their lives—typically, though not always, in the course of private
and public religious practices (James 1902). Here I want to understand
whether the minimalist-scope syntactic architecture I sketched in section II
sheds any light on how such characterizations are organized. ‘Spandrel’ theories
suggest that religiosity endures through the transmission of arresting
16. When given a set of choices, most people tend to pick the rightmost object. While only those
with psychological training have access to this reason, nearly everyone will supply a reason.
cognitive adaptations 69
or otherwise compelling concepts (e.g., Boyer 2001; Atran 2002a). Here,
the claim is that religious information comes second hand, by a kind of
conceptual transfer. But I have urged that the minimum unit of transfer
is not the concept, but a scope-restricted fiction that embeds religious
concepts (see also Feldt 2009). Agents acquire the religious fictions of their
cohort in the context of social learning. But it seems they also acquire
religious information through powerful emotional experience, in groups,
but also alone by a kind of individual learning.17
We have assumed that the
gods play no explanatory role in agents’ experiences. Thus, it is perplexing
how religious agents are able to describe some of their experiences as caused
by supernatural beings.
Given the scope-syntactic model presented above, the simplest explanation
is that religious experience is ordinary counterfactual simulation in
which the relevant simulations are marked and bounded by the ®
IMAGINE
scope operator. That is, religious simulations are internally generated religious
fictions. Such representation can undoubtedly produce powerful affect. For
a capacity to imagine religious agents as CERTAINLY TRUE makes it
possible to engage with supernatural agents as more than abstract concepts.
Through religious experience, agents are able to commune with supernatural
beings. The simplest explanation for this experience is that religious
agents produce counterfactual representations of sacred realities, which
they consciously interpreted and store ‘as true’ (the self-deception constraint).
These representations are formatted so that they do not split-mindedly
influence practical action (the encapsulation constraint) outside of normative
social exchange (the integration constraint).
The model sketched above also gives an initial answer for why religious
agents produce religious experience. Given an absolute poverty of
experience, it is difficult to understand how religious commitments to
superhuman agents could be long sustained. Yet, religious experience gives
emotionally powerful episodic support to religious commitment. For in
most instances the best reason for believing in something is having directly
experienced it. Thus, on the scope-syntactic model advanced here, we
can view religious experience as a kind of adaptive confabulation. It is adaptive
because it produces emotionally powerful evidence for religious precommitment
and signaling. It is confabulation because religious evidence
flows from a heavily structured biasing and distorting of information.
17. Individual learning, of course, may be developmentally scaffolded by social learning.
70 the be lieving primate
Let us explore this hypothesis. Moving from an imagined possibility
to an unlicensed belief is extremely common. Such occurs every time
one slips from a belief that x might be the case (‘the tyrant might be
holding weapons of mass destruction’; ‘the chairman might be trying to
thwart my progress’; ‘she might love me’) to an affirmation that x is true
[thus, → infer: CERTAINLY (Invade!); thus, → PLAN (Hit the chairman
with a chair); thus, → MEMORY (She struck me from love)]. Such
confusion manifests itself in peculiar clinical situations. Patients significantly
and obviously impaired by stroke sometimes truthfully deny their condition
(anosognosia) or concoct and believe with rigid certainty wildly implausible
stories for why they cannot do what is asked of them (as in Korsakoff’s
syndrome). Capgras disorders also lead afflicted agents to express convictions
in vastly unwarranted claims. Such agents regularly invent fabulous
stories in which loved ones are claimed to be impostors who have killed
and are now impersonating their loved ones, or are alien clones. Here
again the stories are so remote as to seem expressed in jest or as lies. But
the afflicted agents are dead serious, sometimes to the point of attacking
those they take to be doppelgangers (for discussion see Hirstein 2005:
124–34).
Exploring this model further, observe that in practical domains the
systems that internally generate counterfactual representations will mark
and bind counterfactual ruminations with ‘the self’ as their source. (The
contents are marked and bounded as ‘only imaginary’ and ‘invented by
me’.) When I imagine Judgment Day, I register and record the simulation
as mine. But ®
IMAGINE marking of internally generated counterfactual
simulation allows for the authority of religious counterfactuals to lie outside
the religious agent. Here ‘Judgment Day’ is experienced as uniquely real,
and endowed with moral importance. Given this authority, it would be
unsurprising if religious imagination were frequently registered with the
source tag ‘supernatural other’ and mistaken for an objective, external
encounter.
There is much evidence suggesting that religious experience is registered
as supernatural-other generated (James 1902; Taves 1999). The ethnographic
and historical literature is also animated with examples of powerful
and vividly represented supernatural experiences (e.g., Richard Katz 1984).
On the model proposed here, we find that religious experience stems from
an adaptive marking error. It is a kind of powerfully motivating, moralistic
confabulation.
cognitive adaptations 71
Notice that the religious decoupling of imagination makes it possible
to have religious experience without visual or auditory hallucinations. The
model predicts that when a believer generates a simulation of Judgment Day
the argument (bundled representation set) produced is approximately similar
to that of a disbeliever. But, different scope operators bind the believer’s
argument by very different rules, according them very different permissions
than do the scope operators inflecting a non-believer’s argument. For
the believer, these representations are read as ‘CERTAINLY TRUE’. And
this gives imagination an experiential quality without a requirement for
ordinary sensory experience.
Moreover, the model predicts that internally generated religious fictions
will be marked and accessed by episodic memory as morally relevant experience.
For the capacity for experiential storage enables religious simulation
to generate norm-supporting motivational power. Religious experience
not only obeys the integration constraint; it also supports integration by
generating supernatural evidence. But, because religious scope operators
restrict ‘as true’ interpretations of religious experience to the confines of
moral emotion and motivation (cooperative pre-commitments) religious
experiences, though false, will not typically harm religious agents. Indeed,
if the model proposed here is correct, these experiences benefit religious
agents over the long haul. They do not, for example, produce behavior
characteristic of schizophrenia, because religious scope operations encapsulate
their content.
The literature on sensory deprivation and religious experience provides
a fertile ground on which to explore this model. From the late 1950s to the
1970s researchers conducted experiments on participants whose sensory
inputs were significantly reduced, often through immersion in warm dark
saline baths placed in soundproof rooms. Participants in such conditions
frequently described altered states of consciousness and imagery, which
they almost universally interpreted positively (Lilly 1977; Lilly 1956; Suedfeld
1975). But they did not interpret such experiences as ‘hallucinations’
(Suedfeld and Vernon 1964). They did not literally see and hear as they
would in ordinary experience.
In an experiment examining reports of religious imagery in sensory
deprivation tanks, Hood and Morris compared the responses of intrinsic
and extrinsic religious participants in a double-blind procedure. Intrinsic
participants value religion for its own sake (they are cooperators, in my
terminology). Extrinsic persons value religion for their worldly/practical
72 the be lieving primate
benefits such as access to mates or as a means to impress high-status
community members (defectors). (As Maynard Smith 1982 noticed long
ago, most cooperating populations are stably composed of a mixed group of
cooperators and defectors!) Half the participants were instructed to imagine
religious figures, situations, and settings, whereas the other half were
asked to imagine cartoon figures, situations, and settings. The researchers
theorized that the intrinsic religious persons would produce more religious
images because for them such images are more ‘relevant’. Analysis
revealed that indeed intrinsically religious persons reported more cued
religious imagery than did their extrinsic counterparts. But, strikingly,
the intrinsic religious persons produced more spontaneously religious
images in the cartoon control setting than extrinsic persons produced in
the religious setting! Intrinsic agents were finding religion even where
they were primed to find only cartoons (Hood and Morris 1981). Interestingly,
Hood and Morris did not observe this effect in response to
ambiguous drawings, suggesting that the effect was limited to experiential
simulations.
The finding suggests that the systems that control simulation in intrinsically
religious persons may be strongly primed to read ambiguous experience
with something like the ®
IMAGINE scope operator. Critically, there
is an important developmental story relevant to this marking disposition,
for mere exposure to religious fictions is insufficient to produce the relevant
effect. Nevertheless, once acquired, intrinsic religiosity initiates an
experiential search protocol for religion.18
I do not suggest that these data fully vindicate the experience-asreligiously-inflected-imagination
hypothesis. But they produce intriguing
evidence for it. And a negative result (religious experience as hallucination)
would undermine the hypothesis. Moreover, sensory deprivation
experiments illustrate how a well-motivated theory of religious experience
enables us to place already known facts into a wider explanatory frame.
This is important because we are not only interested in fragments of a
puzzle about religiosity but also in whether those fragments form part of a
larger complex and functionally integrated composition.
We can hazard several more predictions. If religious experience is ordinary
counterfactual simulation bound by a religious scope operator, then
18. I think this research program also casts some doubt on the proposition that repetitive and
sensory impoverished rituals lack sensory pageantry—a key dogma of contemporary cognitive
ritual theory. But I will leave this point unexamined for now.
cognitive adaptations 73
religious persons will represent the characters of religious experience as they
do fictional characters. That is, they will describe and remember religious
experiences as something akin to ‘true fiction’. In the simplest case, those
who have religious experiences will be unable to tell you whether God has
thick eyebrows or walks with a limp. They will not be able to say whether
the God they converse with in prayer speaks with a heavy foreign accent.
Gods here are ontologically gappy, like ordinary fictional characters. Such
questions, of course, can be asked after encounters with ordinary agents.
Having met him, I can tell you whether Sosis walks with a limp. This, of
course, does not rule out that more robust confabulatory simulation may
occur. A schizophrenic religionist can really tell you whether God’s eyes
are blue because she has seen them. But, even in very robust experiential
simulation—for example, that cultivated by meditation, trances, psychedelic
drugs, or simply very specifically manipulated sensory contexts—
the model predicts that for non-clinical common-or-garden religionists,
such extreme experiences, nevertheless, will be restricted by religious scope
operators to prevent inferential damage. Religious persons will say and
believe mad things, but they will generally not act as if they are mentally
impaired.
Conclusion
I began with a review of the commitment-signaling hypothesis for religiosity.
I suggested that this hypothesis is important because it postulates
psychological and cultural mechanisms for supernatural cognition that
differ somewhat from many popular cognitive approaches. In particular,
it postulates emotionally salient commitments to superhuman agents capable
of motivating moral exchange. The signaling hypothesis explains the
otherwise puzzling link between religious cognition, moral cognition, and
emotional display. Supernatural commitments help to predict cooperative
exchange by endowing norms with strongly enhanced motivational support.
They enable the conversion of extrinsically motivated normative
commitment to intrinsically motivated pre-commitment. Yet, I have urged
that religious pre-commitment is only evolvable if religious agents are able
to solve the recognition constraint. To find each other, such agents must
be capable of producing and decoding signals whose production is easy
for religious persons but difficult for religious impostors. I urged that the
74 the be lieving primate
barriers to religious cooperation are surmountable. The affective dimension
of religious cognition—visible signs of love, devotion, piety, or fear for the
gods—provides signals of cooperative commitment that help to resolve the
demands of recognition. Religious emotions, on this view, are not noise
created by otherwise functional mental architecture, they are adaptations for
rewarding trade. I suggested that many of the costs surrounding religious
practice, then, may be fruitfully explored as scaffolding for cooperative
exchange.
In the second section, I used the commitment-signaling theory sketched
in section I to sketch a metarepresentational design for processing religious
information. I observed that our capacities to commit to a moralizing
supernatural reality appear to be minimal modifications of our capacities
to represent counterfactuals and fictions. A strong encapsulation constraint
on the functionality of religion suggests that—like counterfactual and
fictional thought—cognitive firewalls stand between religious information
and most practical motivation/action domains. Religiosity, I suggested,
exhibits something approximating the functional elaboration of fictional
decoupling, for, in religion, emotionally salient false beliefs are nevertheless
massively insulated from most practical action domains. But the similarity
stops there. A self-deception constraint suggests that, unlike ordinary fictions,
religious fictions will nevertheless be represented as true. For if religious
agents are to manage emotional and other signals of belief in non-actual
moralizing agents they must really believe in them. An integration constraint
suggests that religious scope-operators will support normative inferences
linking religious commitment with moral pre-commitment. For if religious
beliefs are to support normative pre-commitments, that informational
channel must be opened and maintained. I noted that the integration
constraint leads to moralistic inferences from religious fictions that are
strikingly different from those we would ordinarily derive from stories
explicitly represented as fictional. For example, morally appalling gods
appear praiseworthy.
In the final section, I applied the structured scope operator developed
in section II to the domain of religious experience, urging that
religious experience is best explained as the religious confabulation of
ordinary imagination—mental time-travel mistaken (though restrictedly)
as true. I urged that anomalies in the data on sensory deprivation and
religious imagery are best explained by the confabulatory model of religious
experience.
cognitive adaptations 75
Much of the preceding argument has been offered as an inference-tothe-best-explanation.
I have sketched a model that explains why religiosity
is common, emotionally powerful, believed as true, and connected to
cooperative exchange. The model also explains why non-actual superhuman
agents are experienced, and how this experience is prevented from
damaging those who produce it. And, finally, the model showed how these
three explanations are linked by commitment-signaling theory.
This chapter presents a guardedly optimistic view about the ability of
biological theory to shed light on some very basic and pervasive structural
features of religious cognition. This adaptationist picture of religion
presented here does not gaze at religion through straws. It is a broad
picture, and some may reject it as imprecise. But such rejection would
be too hasty. For, in my view, we desperately need plausible alternatives to
the ‘spandrelist’ conceptions of religion that have dominated the cognitive
study of religion over the past fifteen years. For a similar criticism see
Bering 2004. I have sought to develop a model that makes it apparent
why emotional religiosity is no accident, and why otherwise rational and
functional persons experience supernatural realities and stake their lives on
these experiences. Only after it becomes credible to view religiosity as
richly adapted for human flourishing can we begin to assemble the sundry,
disparate fragments of empirical data on religion into a more coherent
picture. I have advertised a way to begin putting the puzzle together, one
that strikes me as fruitful.
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