The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality:
We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality, experiments measuring religiosity and actual prosocial behavior suggest that this association emerges primarily in contexts where reputational concerns are heightened. Experimentally induced religious thoughts reduce rates of cheating and increase altruistic behavior among anonymous strangers. Experiments demonstrate an association between apparent profession of religious devotion and greater trust. Cross-cultural evidence suggests an association between the cultural presence of morally concerned deities and large group size in humans. We synthesize converging evidence from various fields for religious prosociality, address its specific boundary conditions, and point to unresolved questions and novel predictions.
Ron Bailey at Reason has an article up, Does Religion Make People Nicer?, which ruminates on the implications of the above paper. He concludes:
Shariff and Norenzayan note that while religion remains a powerful facilitator of prosociality in large groups, modern societies have devised secular replacements for Sky Big Brother, including courts, police, and other contract-enforcing institutions. Also, the modern world is headed toward a transparent society in which social monitoring will be nearly as omnipresent as that of a hunter-gatherer band. Increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies will enable anyone to assess your reputation for prosociality with a few mouse clicks. Sky Big Brother is being outsourced to the Web.
Bailey outlines the paper’s extended thesis which shows how implicit cognitive reflexes can be co-opted by the concepts promoted and formalized by institutional religions. The important point is that you don’t have to be religious to have religious instincts, in large part because religious instincts are probably emergent from normal human cognition. What we might term a religious sensibility is really nothing more than normal human intuitions in particular contexts or compounded together in a specific manner.
I suspect that many readers will be disturbed and uncomfortable with the allusion to a Transparent Society. After all most humans have an instinct for some level of privacy. The first point is that I suspect that the Transparent Society is inevitable. I remember the shock some of my friends expressed when I first Googled their parents in late 1998. Today they wouldn’t be shocked. We’ve renormalized to the expectations of our time. The emergence of Facebook is a symptom, not a driver.
Second, one does have to recall that over the past 10,000 years humans have reordered their social organization a great deal. In the distant past our species lived in small hunter-gatherer bands, and a typical individual might never have met more than a few hundred people face to face. Today the average person can easily run into a few hundred people in an hour if they’re busy going about their tasks in a public space. Though our cognitive toolkit retains the marks of its pre-mass society milieu, we’ve developed institutions, ideas and cultural norms to navigate our dense packed world. We may only be familiar with on the order of 100 people at any given time, but unlike in the past the cast of characters is often in continuous flux.
I tend to agree with those who would claim that the institutional and moralistic religions we see around us are necessarily preconditioned on the mass society. On the anonymity which the multitudes make possible. In a world where anonymity is gone will we return to our hunter-gatherer roots and “uninstall” all the optional software which we’ve had running in the background just to make do?
Note: I do not believe that a decline of institutional religion will result in the disappearance of supernatural belief.
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