Fundamental social motives and the varieties of religious experience

Abstract

Evolutionary theorists have explained universals in religion, but no integrative theory exists to explain why multiple aspects of religion vary within and between individuals and groups. We propose how four dimensions of religions – beliefs about nonhuman agents, religious rituals, community structures, and moral concerns and values – may change in response to the fundamental social goals of self-protection, disease avoidance, coalition formation, status seeking, mating and mate retention, and kin care. We review empirical research and provide testable hypotheses, and finally discuss implications of this theoretical framework for the study of evolution and religion.

Keywords:

• community
• evolution
• morality
• motivation
• nonhuman agents
• religion
• ritual

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Douglas Kenrick, Peter Killeen, Sarah Harrison, and the CARMA Lab for comments on this manuscript.

Notes

1. We often observe a Western, Protestant bias in the psychology of religion. To reduce this bias, we have included examples in the following sections that have been drawn from multiple religions. Importantly, our anecdotal examples have not been systematically culled from every religion, nor do they constitute evidence for our hypotheses. We merely wish to provide exemplars of the outcomes that we predict, and we invite research that may support or contradict our theory.