Causes of cultural disparity: Switches, tuners, and the cognitive science of religion

ABSTRACT

Cultural disparity – the variation across cultural traits such as knowledge, skill, and belief – is a complex phenomenon, studied by a number of researchers with an expanding empirical toolkit. While there is a growing consensus as to the processes that generate cultural variation and change, general explanatory frameworks require additional tools for identifying, organizing, and relating the complex causes that underpin the production of cultural disparity. Here I develop a case study in the cognitive science of religion and demonstrate how concepts and distinctions drawn from work on contrastive explanation and manipulationist accounts of causation provide such tools for distinguishing explanatory levels, organizing causal narratives, and accounting for cross-cultural patterns.

KEYWORDS:

• Causation
• cognitive science of religion
• cultural evolution

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Adrian Currie, Tim Lewens, Peter Woodford, the audience at the Cambridge Philosophy of Science (CamPos) group, and two anonymous referees for invaluable discussion and feedback on this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Here I assume along with a number of researchers that cultures can be individuated (see, e.g., Alesina, Devleeschauwer, Easterly, Kurlat, & Wacziarg, 2003; Fearon, 2003; Loh & Harmon, 2005; for some attempts at providing individuating criteria). Yet this supposition is contentious (Benhabib, 2002; Scheffler, 2007).

2. I note that this is not the only way of characterizing cultural diversity. In biology, the distinction between diversity and disparity marks a difference between counts of species number and sheer phenotypic variation (Maclaurin & Sterelny, 2008, p. 43). Along these lines, one might thus define cultural diversity as the number of distinct cultures in some relevant context. The use in this paper is different. Here I take diversity to count cultural trait categories. As I see it, both are legitimate construals of “diversity”. Since nothing in the current paper hangs on the particular definition of “diversity” used, I opt for the latter as it hews closer to the colloquial usage of the term.

3. For instance, religious practices which do not advert to or relate to the activities or minds of supernatural agents (Bowen, 1998), or the role of religion in metaphysical, moral, and epistemological theorizing (e.g., Durkheim, 1912/1955; Winch, 1990).

4. Perhaps the exception that proves the rule is the study of gene-culture co-evolution (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Durham, 1991; Laland, Kumm, & Feldman, 1995), which is unique in the study of cultural evolution in having well-developed causal models applied to a number of case studies (e.g., Durham, 1991; Holden & Mace, 1997).

5. Similar characterizations as to why some concepts are retained over others can be found in Boyd and Richerson (1985), Henrich and Boyd (2002), and Richerson and Boyd (2005). See Buskell (2017a, 2017b) for an account as to how the claims of Boyd and Richerson can be related to those of Sperber, Morin, Boyer, and other by-product theorists.

6. This is what researchers call the minimally-counterintuitive bias (Boyer, 1999, 2001; Barrett, 2000, 2004), where minimally counterintuitive ideas are remembered more than normal or bizarre items (Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, & Schaller, 2006). This effect is central to Boyer and Barrett’s by-product accounts, yet critics are skeptical that it can do the work required of it. The effect does not seem to be attributable to deep cognitive structures (Purzycki & Willard, 2015), nor does it seem plausible that all (or most) successful religious beliefs are best understood as minimally-counterintuitive (Sterelny, 2017).

7. The reverse trend was much weaker: while later returns to agricultural or horticultural modes of subsistence increased the likelihood of shifting back to a matrilineal system, it was not to the same extent that pastoralism increased the likelihood of patrilineal systems (Holden & Mace, 2003, 2005).

8. Indeed, they sometimes contrast the by-product approach with their “adaptationist” approach (i.e., Sosis, 2009).

9. For a review of anthropological functionalism, see Shariff et al. (2014).

10. An alternative account holds that costly rituals can be made sense of using rational choice theory, and that the downstream benefits of engaging in costly rituals may outweigh the upfront costs. This requires that individuals are able to recognize the putative costs and benefits of a range of actions and to make decisions accordingly – something that the socioecological approach need not assume. For an excellent review of the relationship between rational choice theory, costly behavior, and religion, see Pyysiäinen (2010).

11. Carl Craver describes a similar requirement when speaking about the relationship between explanatory texts and objective explanations. Objective explanations are the complex facts in the world that change over time, while explanatory texts are representations of such facts. Complete explanatory texts accurately represent the salient facts of the matter – they are complete insofar as they represent “all and only the relevant portions of the causal structure of the world” (Craver, 2007, p. 27).

12. For a similar account, see Sterelny (2003).

13. For similar claims about the relationship between theory of mind capabilities and late-signing deaf children, see Peterson, Wellman, and Liu (2005) and Peterson and Siegal (1999).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation [grant number 60501].