Attachment Theory and the Evolutionary Psychology of Religion

Abstract

More than 40 years after its inception, Bowlby's theory of infant-mother attachment remains widely accepted and highly influential across many areas and applications of psychology, including the psychology of religion. As compelling as the theory is for explaining phenomena within its natural domain, however, its explanatory scope is inherently limited: There are many aspects of religion that it cannot, and should not be expected to, explain. From the perspective of contemporary evolutionary psychology—with which Bowlby's original theory has much in common—the attachment system is one among many functionally domain-specific cognitive adaptations that populate our species' evolved psychological architecture. Evolutionary psychology offers a valuable perspective within which the attachment system can be seen properly as just one (important) piece of a much larger puzzle—of psychology in general and religion in particular—as well as a powerful and generative paradigm for identifying and fitting together the many other pieces that will be required if we are to progress toward a comprehensive psychology of religion.

Notes

¹Another emerging discipline in the scientific study of religion, dubbed by Barrett (2007) and others as cognitive science of religion, similarly adopts this assumption of a species-universal psychological architecture populated by numerous, functionally specialized mechanisms and systems. Some of these approaches are grounded explicitly in EP, but many others are not—although they may be “evolutionary” in the very different sense of cultural (vs. biological/genetic) evolution. For a discussion of the ways in which EP and cognitive science of religion models do and do not overlap, see Kirkpatrick (in press).

²The principal argument leading to the emergence of EP as a discipline distinct from these other evolutionary approaches was that a cognitive or psychological level of analysis, inserted between the evolutionary and behavioral levels of analysis, is indispensible (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Symons, 1987). The genetic recipes resulting from natural selection produce cognitive adaptations, which in turn interact with environmental inputs to produce behavior. This previously missing link is essential for understanding the many ways in which behavior itself can often be maladaptive or adaptively neutral. (For a recent discussion of this levels-of-analysis issue, see Kirkpatrick, 2009.)