Competing Forces Account for the Stability and Evolution of Religious Beliefs

ABSTRACT

Beebe and Duffy (2020) offer another addition to a growing body of theoretical and empirical work that questions the explanatory power of so-called minimal counterintuitiveness (MCI). On the basis of three memory experiments and one survey, Beebe and Duffy argue that 1) MCI concepts are at a mnemonic disadvantage relative to both concepts with moral valence as well as concepts that elicit existential anxiety; and 2) these results cannot be explained by the degree of visualizability in the test items. In this commentary, we reflect on the future of MCI theory and situate Beebe and Duffy’s study in an integrative cultural evolutionary framework. We argue that future studies in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion should not only focus on the content that makes some religious beliefs cognitively and culturally attractive but also on how different cultural evolutionary forces – including social and ecological contexts – compete and interact.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ There is some dispute over how similar, in practice and in theory, CAT is to other cultural evolutionary approaches, most notably “dual inheritance theory” (Boyd & Richerson, 1985). For instance, whether the concept of attraction in CAT can be reduced to “content bias” and/or “guided variation” in dual inheritance theory (DIT), and whether cultural transmission is best modeled as “reconstructive”/”transformative” (CAT) or “preservative” (DIT) (see e.g., Acerbi & Mesoudi, 2015; Buskell, 2019; Morin, 2016; Scott-Phillips et al., 2018; Sterelny, 2017). However, we agree with Acerbi and Mesoudi (2015) that such issues are not fundamentally insurmountable obstacles for an integration of different strains of cultural evolutionary research.

² “Evoked culture” refers to a process whereby ecological cues trigger reliably-developing cognitive apparatus tuned for such cues (e.g., Schaller, 2006) which then feed into making new conceptual associations or behavioral changes more likely. Something like “evoked culture” may conceivably impact the formation of religious beliefs and practices, although uncontroversial empirical examples of this are, to the best of our knowledge, rare.

³ The process described here is perhaps consilient with an often-overlooked aspect of CAT, namely that factors of attraction need not be cognitive. They can also be ecological (Sperber, 1996, e.g., p. 52; 82) in the sense of the distribution of energy in any given system. Hence, local ecological features can render certain cultural traits “attractive” and therefore more likely to spread in the population. Current proponents of CAT concede that this ecological aspect of CAT is currently underdeveloped (Scott-Phillips et al., 2018).