Posted 10 March 2011 by Dominic
The new journal Religion, Brain and Behavior (RBB) hosts a debate in its inaugural issue on the role of supernatural punishment in evolutionary theories of religion.
Jeff Schloss and Michael Murray have written a “target article” in Religion, Brain & Behavior entitled: “Evolutionary Accounts of Belief in Supernatural Punishment: A Critical Review”. Scholars were invited to respond to the target article, eliciting commentary from Joseph Bulbulia (one of our project advisors), Emma Cohen, Lee Cronk (a project collaborator), Helen DeCruz, Dominic Johnson (our project leader), Ryan Nichols, Ilka Pyysiainen, and Azim Shariff.
Schloss and Murray’s argument is as follows. In recent years a wide range of adaptationist, byproduct, and memetic explanations has emerged for various recurrent features of religious belief and practice. One feature that has figured prominently in adaptationist accounts of religion is belief in the reality of moralizing, punishing supernatural agents. However, there is at present no unified theory of what fitness-relevant feature of the selective environment this cognitive predisposition is adapted to. Schloss and Murray distinguish two divergent and often conflated approaches to supernatural punishment theory, which hypothesize that the adaptive value of beliefs in supernatural punishment arise either because they increase cooperation among group members (”cooperation enhancement”), or decrease the cost of incurring (real world) punishment for norm violations (”punishment avoidance”). Schloss and Murray evaluate each of these strands of theory (including group and individual selectionist versions), using game theoretic models, experimental studies, and ethnographic data - in light of which, they argue, each proposal is plausible but with which neither is fully concordant.
The commentaries take on and debate these claims, and the conversation has greatly helped to clarify the supernatural punishment hypothesis, distinguish specific domains of application, develop more precise predictions, and identify new areas for enquiry. Schloss and Murray have sparked a serious inter-disciplinary debate on a topic of central importance to our project, and have significantly advanced its theoretical foundations and empirical implications as a result.
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Posted 31 October 2009 by Dominic
We often think of “leadership” as a uniquely human trait, conjuring up images of historical giants such as Gandhi or Churchill, as well as infamous ones like Hitler or Stalin. Current events also anchor discussions of leadership to human affairs from the war in Iraq, the election of Barack Obama, the collapse of the banks, to our everyday experience of great or bad bosses or the trials and tribulations of leading others in our workplace. Whether it is done well or badly, political, military, religious and economic leadership dramatically impacts all of our lives.
However, have you ever wondered where our propensities for leadership (and followership) came from? If we step back from our own world of human affairs, we quickly notice leadership and followership in action throughout the animal kingdom. Over the summer months, you may have seen bees following leads to productive flowers, trails of ants forming organized highways from your picnic table into the bushes, and now flocks of birds wheeling across the October skies in their seasonal migration. These are not random or chance movements and gatherings. Each is an example of adaptations for leadership and followership that are crucial to survival.
In a new paper with biologist Andrew King and psychologist Mark Van Vugt (“The Origins and Evolution of Leadership”, Current Biology, October 2009), Dominic Johnson examined aspects of leadership and followership that we share in common with other animals. Even humans, it turns out, are subject to some of the same underlying phenomena of mass movement that apply to fish and birds. But our cross-species approach also allowed us to distinguish what is unique about human leadership and followership-big brains change the game-but this difference is where an evolutionary perspective is particularly useful.
Our modern social and physical environment is of course very different to that in which we evolved. But if we understand both the “ultimate” functions of leadership and followership behavior (what is it for? who benefits? who pays the costs?), and the “proximate” psychological mechanisms that cause them, then we can identify areas of “mismatch” where our evolved mechanisms are likely to clash with evolutionarily novel stimuli (the modern world). For example, positions of leadership today are still correlated with age, sex, height, and weight—over and above differences in competence and effectiveness. Are big old male bosses really better than average? Or could this be some sort of hangover from our evolutionary past?
An evolutionary approach to leadership offers a scientific framework that offers new ways to understand, predict and improve leadership and followership—human traits that did not emerge out of thin air, but which we share with countless other species and have been shaped by natural selection for hundreds of millions of years.
The origins of leadership are importantly for our religion project, because evolutionary theorists of religion (as opposed to earlier social theorists such as by Marx) have often ignored the role of leadership (one exception is Lee Cronk’s 1994 article in Skeptic). This is, however, a critical question for understanding the Darwinian fitness benefits of religious beliefs and behaviors. What are the differences, if any, in the causes, consequences, and payoffs in religious beliefs and behaviors between followers (“the masses”) and leaders (”the elites”)? This new paper provides a useful interdisciplinary basis from which to investigate these questions from an evolutionary perspective.
See Current Biology webpage
Conference on evolutionary approaches to leadership at London Business School, 14 January 2010
Dominic Johnson’s other work on leadership: Book chapter “The Mismatch Hypothesis”, with Mark Van Vugt, Robert Kaiser and Rick O’Gorman; and his book “Overconfidence and War” (Harvard University Press, 2004)
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Jeff Schloss and Michael Murray have written a “target article” in Religion, Brain & Behavior entitled: “Evolutionary Accounts of Belief in Supernatural Punishment: A Critical Review”. Scholars were invited to respond to the target article, eliciting commentary from Joseph Bulbulia (one of our project advisors), Emma Cohen, Lee Cronk (a project collaborator), Helen DeCruz, Dominic Johnson (our project leader), Ryan Nichols, Ilka Pyysiainen, and Azim Shariff.