Prosocial Debating

Posted 10 November 2009 by Dominic

A guest blog by Richard Sosis

Although I have studied religion for the past decade, until this past weekend I had never attended an annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. This year the meeting was held in Montreal (November 7-10). The annual AAR meetings are the granddaddy of religious studies meetings with thousands of attendees and presenters so it is no surprise that I’ve avoided them; I tend to limit my conferences to those with total attendance under Dunbar’s number (that is, 150).  While the AAR is dominated by scholars in the humanities, primarily Religious Studies, several years ago a small group interested in the Cognitive Science of Religion emerged.  If I’m not mistaken this is the second year that the Cognitive Science of Religion section has sponsored multiple sessions.  This year there were five sessions, including two research forums that showcased brilliant talks by Joseph Bulbulia (Victoria University) and Jon Lanman (Oxford University), among others. Ted Slingerland (University of British Columbia), a true guiding light in bridging the sciences and humanities, invited me to speak at a session entitled “The Evolution of Religion: Adaptation or Byproduct?” Lee Kirkpatrick (College of William and Mary) and Ara Norenzayan (University of British Columbia) were invited and agreed to speak. The adaptationists were in need of a staunch defender. How could I refuse?

It turns out that the deck was slightly stacked in favor of the adaptationists as Joseph Bulbulia served as the respondent and moderator. He opened the session dryly: “It’s an adaptation.” Having solved that debate I thought we might all be packing up to put our minds to other weighty matters, but in fact the show went on and Joseph masterfully outlined the major issues in the debate. Before the session, the speakers had agreed that for the AAR audience a detailed discussion of the adaptationist-byproduct debate made little sense. It would be more productive to highlight how the alternative evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior that we each represented - evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, and dual inheritance theory – complemented each other and offered a comprehensive evolutionary analysis of religion.  As someone commented, “Rather than a raucous fight, it was now going to be a love fest.”  And so it was. Following Joseph’s introductory remarks, Lee offered a brief but clear overview of evolutionary psychology and how one would examine the underlying psychological mechanisms that produce religious beliefs and behaviors.  Lee then summarized his pioneering work on attachment theory and explained why psychologists tend to view religion as a byproduct of psychological mechanisms that were designed for other purposes. I followed Lee’s engaging talk with an overview of how evolutionary anthropologists – or at least this one – study religion. I emphasized our focus on behavioral phenotypes and environmental context and how we seek to understand what benefits religion offers that could overcome the costs of religious practices. Ara concluded the session with an inspiring synthesis of the psychological and behavioral approaches, focusing on cultural evolutionary models of religion. He discussed his elegant study with Azim Shariff (University of British Columbia), which found that religious primes increased prosociality in a dictator game. The speakers fielded a half hour of diverse questions following the talks, many which were insightful and many which highlighted our ignorance about religion. But hopefully that was the point. For the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion to succeed it has to engage religious studies scholars and the exchange of ideas and information must be mutual. Evolutionary scholars are indeed lacking a deep understanding of religion (Bulbulia and Jeffrey Schloss (Westmont College) are two exceptions) but nonetheless we can offer powerful methodological tools and a compelling theoretical lens to study religion. Hopefully this session offered benefits for everyone involved.

Speaking of benefits and prosociality, I must add one of my personal highlights of the conference. On Saturday evening the five of us involved in the session and Jon Lanman spent considerable time debating appropriate tipping practices in Canada. As any healthy evolutionists would do, we considered Robert Frank’s classic tipping dilemma, straining our memories to reconstruct why we should bother tipping in a city none of us planned to return to in the foreseeable future (wonderful though Montreal is, of course). We pondered what the gods thought of our discussion and looked for tipping boxes with eyes but found none.  After the others walked to their hotels, I walked to the Metro station, wondering why I was the only one who searched for a hotel too late to find one in walking distance to the conference. Lacking a grad student who could work the ticket machine for me, I helplessly tossed coins into the money slot hoping that a ticket would magically appear. It did, but not from the thieving machine. A fellow conference attendee, who apparently was also slow in making hotel reservations, handed me a Metro ticket and refused payment for it.  A mysterious angel? Or had listening to talks on religion all day served as a sufficient prime to produce this savior? After receiving such generosity I was just thankful that even without the gaze of supernatural eyes or a sufficient evolutionary rationale, we had left an appropriate tip.

For further information on the adaptationist-byproduct debate, see Richard Sosis’s new article “The Adaptationist-Byproduct Debate on the Evolution of Religion: Five Misunderstandings of the Adaptationist Program” in the latest issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Adaptation, Meetings, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.