Psychological study: Punishing gods enhance social coherence.

[DetlefK]

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature16980.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nature16980.pdf

Abstract:
Here we focus on one key hypothesis: cognitive representations of gods as increasingly knowledgeable and punitive, and who sanction violators of interpersonal social norms, foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation, trust and fairness towards co-religionist strangers.

...

Holding a range of relevant variables constant, the higher participants rated their moralistic gods as punitive and knowledgeable about human thoughts and actions, the more coins they allocated to geographically distant co-religionist strangers relative to both themselves and local co-religionists. Our results support the hypothesis that beliefs in moralistic, punitive and knowing gods increase impartial behaviour towards distant co-religionists, and therefore can contribute to the expansion of prosociality.



Text:
To account for the emergence of these patterns, some evolutionary approaches to religion have theorized that cultural evolution may have harnessed and exploited aspects of our evolved psychology, such as mentalizing abilities, dualistic tendencies and sensitivity to norm compliance, to gradually assemble configurations of supernatural beliefs that promote greater cooperation and trust within expanding groups, leading to greater success in intergroup competition. Of course, given that cultural evolution can produce self-reinforcing stable patterns of beliefs and practices, these supernatural agent concepts may also have been individually favoured within groups due to mechanisms related to signalling, reputation and punishment.

...

At the societal level, several lines of converging evidence are consistent with this hypothesis. For example, after controlling for key correlates, analyses of cross-cultural data sets show that larger and more politically complex societies tend to have more supernatural punishment and moralistic deities...





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For a long time, it's been my opinion that belief and religion aren't phenomena unto themselves but side-effects of evolutionary adaptions to life in societies.

My hypothesis is that the psychological tendency to "believe" stems from an advantageous neurological evolutionary trait: People who believe learn faster, and thus are more likely to survive, than people who doubt and test.
Populations solely consisting of believers would stagnate. And populations solely consisting of doubters would be socially unstable and have a high mortality-rate. It takes both: Doubters for abstract progress and believers for tangible day-to-day business. That's why neither of these fundamentally different conditions has been able to fully take over evolutionarily.
It gets interesting when you change the parameters of survival that determine evolution: In an environment where technological progress becomes irrelevant, the "stability" of believers would give them an evolutionary advantage. In an environment where experiments are no longer real-life risks to you and your society, the faster rate of technological progress of doubters would give them an evolutionary advantage. (For example: You have a new idea how to tend a crop-field. Can you afford to divert the necessary time and manpower into developing this idea? Or would diverting this time and manpower from food-production put you and your society at risk?)

And now this paper shows that religion increases social stability within societies with one mutually shared religion.

[rug]

1. So do criminal statutes.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

2. I erm... doubt... your hypothesis.

People who just 'believe' are going to do more stupid things and get themselves killed sooner. Drinking things they shouldn't, kissing snakes, doing a hundred and one things that are dangerous because they 'believe', while the doubter holds back and survives by watching their mistakes. The early bird may get the worm, but the late worm isn't a snack for the early bird, the early worm is.

[DetlefK]

4. Suppose, you are a cave-man trying to hunt a wild boar.

Will you craft your spear just like the elders tell and show you?
Or do you feel fancy and come up with a new design for a spear?

Scenario 1:
The spear-design of your ancestors has been tested in hundreds of trials and has proven track-record of success. It won't let you down.

Scenario 2:
Your fancy spear will kill the boar more efficiently, equally efficiently or less efficiently than an ordinary spear.
If it's more efficient, good. Your spear-design will become the new standard that future elders will teach to future generations.
If it's equally efficient, good.
If it's less efficient, bad: You are now standing in front of a wild boar in "rip-out-guts-with-my-tusks" mode.



When a believer gets taught something, he accepts that.
"Don't go there."
"Take your vitamins."
"Don't eat yellow snow."

When a doubter gets taught something, he won't accept that.
"Hey, the legends say "there be dragons". We should totally find out what's going on there."
"Our parents are just making a fuzz. I have never seen somebody get biten by a snake. How venomous could they possibly be?"
"Hey, everybody! Watch this! Our parents told us not to do that but it will be hilarious when I go swimming in that frozen lake!"

[Kalidurga]

3. People who believe learn faster, and thus are more likely to survive, than people who doubt and test

Belief is almost the exact opposite of learning.

[DetlefK]

5. What's the taste of yellow snow?

No, seriously.
If you don't believe your parents that eating yellow snow is bad, you are obligated to find out whether it is bad. Did you ever try to find out? Or did you just accept that piece of knowledge unquestioningly?



And what about literature? All those stories that formed your character, your decisions, your morals... Did you adapt the morals of the stories or did you set out to test those scenarios?

[Kalidurga]

6. Oh my

That really doesn't change the reality of what I said. Belief is the nearly the exact opposite of learning. No, I didn't learn what yellow snow tastes like. But, that doesn't make it a learning experience to not test it for myself. It's still the opposite. I accept that yellow snow tastes bad.

[DetlefK]

7. Maybe your definition of "learning" is narrower than mine.

Not every incorporation of knowledge is preceded by deriving that knowledge via trial&error.
Sometimes you incorporate knowledge that was derived BY SOMEBODY ELSE via trial&error.

[Kalidurga]

8. I am happy to see you finally agree with me.

Somebody else had to learn via trial and error and not just listen to what someone said to them and take it on faith.