Cognitive ecology of religion

Cognitive ecology of religion is an integrative approach to studying how religious beliefs covary with social and natural dynamics of the environment. This is done by incorporating cognitive phenomena in context to cross-cultural god concepts . Cognitive ecology itself is a perspective drawing from aspects of ecological psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary ecology and anthropology. Notions of domain-specific modules in the brain are also important to this approach, particularly in understanding the components of religious cognition . The cognitive biases that render religious beliefs are constraints on perceptions of the environment. This means that they not only shape religious beliefs, but they dictate the success of culturally transmitted beliefs. Because culturally transmitted concepts can often inform ecological decision-making behaviors, group-level trends in cognition (i.e., culturally salient beliefs) are hypothesized to address ecologically relevant challenges . For religion, these trending ideas among groups are cultural representations of gods and their characteristics .

Cognitive ecology

Cognitive ecology explores the interactive relationship between organism-environment interactions and its impact on cognitive phenomena . Human cognition in this framework is multimodal and viewed similarly to enactivist perspectives on cognitive processing. For cultural concepts, this emphasizes cognitive distribution across an ecosystem, which is predicated on models of the extended mind thesis. Religious beliefs in particular are cognitive interpretations of ecological dynamics that emerge from existing modules, which are culturally transmitted and evolve thereafter .

Theoretical basis and history

The multi-faceted nature of cognitive ecology is a consequence of its interdisciplinary history. Paradigm shifts from behaviorist orientations of psychology to cognition, or the “cognitive revolution,” , gave rise to a subfield known as ecological psychology. This approach distanced itself from mainstream cognitivism by working to break down the mind-environment dichotomy that persists in psychological theory . One particularly influential progenitor of this work was ecological psychologist James Gibson, whose legacy is marked by his ideas on ecological and social affordances. These are the opportunistic features of environmental objects that can be exploited for human use, and are thus are particularly perceptible (e.g., a knob affords twisting, an agreeable social cue affords a warm reaction) . Gibson argued further that organisms cannot be disentangled from their environments, and that their cognitive constraints were consequences of a limited set of environmental invariants which shaped them over evolutionary time .

Another foreshadowed element of cognitive ecological theory comes from anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who considered the notion of informational feedback loops between mind and environment, particularly their role in generating meaning and awareness of one’s surroundings. In an essay, he speculates on how an observer might best delineate the “self” of a blind man. In his treatment, he questions how one may arbitrarily choose to carve out the man’s informational processing loop at his brain or his hands or his walking stick without offering an incomplete view of his cognitive process . This discussion of concept remains influential in modern cognitive ecological considerations of the densely interconnected elements of ecology that play relevant roles in cognition .

An enactive perspective of cognition is fundamental to a cognitive ecological view . Rather than passive interpretations of internally represented information, cognition is an active process involving the transformation of information into meaningful relationships between the organism itself and its environment . For humans, a perceived environment is constructed insofar as cognitive constraints will allow. In other words, they “enact a world” by building perspectives out of ecological information with evolved cognitive equipment .

Distributed cognition

Cognitive ecology borrows ideas from views of extended cognition, as articulated by Chalmers and Clark (1998). They argue that humans cognitively utilize elements of their environment to aid the cognitive process, further entangling the mind-environment relationship under this framework. They illustrate their claim with a hypothetical example of two people who achieve the same navigational success through a museum by different means; a person with Alzheimer’s may use a notebook with written directions, while another may use her memory. The primary difference between the two is that the former outsourced his memory to an external representation, whereas the latter relied on an internal representation of information about the museum. An extension of this concept they consider is socially extended cognition, a similar outsourcing of cognitive representations into other peoples’ minds . These ideas elaborate a cognitive interpretation of broader anthropological notions which maintain that humans are a species entangled in elements of culture .

Distributed cognition is an important model of the extended mind thesis for cognitive ecological theory put forth by Edwin Hutchins . This conceptualizes human groups as active networks with cognitive properties of their own, much like neural networks themselves yield emergent cognitive properties. For a social group, cognitive properties are disseminated into an individual’s surrounding network . The cognitive properties of a group, Hutchins notes, is completely distinct from a given those of an individual . Distributed cognition is fundamentally contingent on and emergent from trending ideas among a collection of brains and artefacts .

This is conceptually similar to models of collective cognition in other social animal groups, which use agent based models to understanding insect swarming, fish schooling, bird flocking and baboon pack behaviors . Collective cognition in social animal groups is useful because in can amplify its overall responsiveness to detecting ecological cues , and for humans, the computational power of a group can be more effective than that of even its best individuals . Is idea is echoed by anthropologists noting the “collective intentionality” of cultural institutions among groups .

Existing theories of population-level learning dynamics seem to articulate the mechanisms by which cognition is distributed within a cultural group. In particular, cultural models of evolution make parellel claims that individual learning is required for tracking environmental dynamics , and this information is transmitted by social learning . For Hutchins, this theoretical similarity is not a coincidence. After suggesting the phrase “cognitive ecosystems” to describe distributed cognitive networks and their relationships with ecological dynamics, he defines culture as a “shorthand way of referring to a complex cognitive ecosystem" .

Applications to religion

Cognition and behavior are inextricably linked , so the consequences of cultural concepts are typically associated with behavioral outcomes (i.e., continued interactions with the environment) . For religious beliefs, behaviors (often in the form of religious rituals) are similarly executed as a result. These behavioral strategies are fine-tuned by natural selection , so researchers of cross-cultural variance of religious beliefs often hypothesize that religious beliefs may correspond to adaptive ecological functions .  

Religious cognition

Research in evolutionary psychology often suggests that the brain is a coordinated network of domain-specific modules that correspond to various adaptations throughout our evolutionary history . Most claim that a capacity for religious ideas is not a modular adaptation itself, but an evolutionary byproduct of multiple integrated mechanisms that emerged independently and are designed for different functions. These modules are co-opted to give rise to religious patterns of thought, and include theory of mind, essential psychology and the hyperactive agency detection device . Moreover, the cultural transmission of these ideas is contingent upon them being minimally counterintuitive .

Theory of mind

Theory of mind (ToM) is a capacity to attribute mental states, complete with thoughts, emotions and motivations, to other social agents . This adaptation is ubiquitous in primitive forms among various social species, but the complexity of human social life for long stretches of evolutionary history has facilitated a rich understanding of others’ mental experiences to match . Cases of autism have been cited in support for the proposition that ToM is a distinct modular adaptation because of its distinctly narrow impact on ToM capacities . ToM is thought to lend itself to an intuitive sense of mind-body dualism, where the material body is animated by a non-material self (i.e., a "soul") .

Essentialism

Folk psychology in humans is characterized by essential thinking, or a tendency to interpret objects in terms of “essences.” This means that attributions of objects’ underlying realities are intuitively inferred from a fuzzy set of the object’s ontological features. Cognitive interpretations of essence give rise to concepts of purity, simplified good and evil concepts, and intuitive senses of meaning applied to teleology.

Hyperactive agency detection device

The capacity for agent detection has been an important modular adaptation for predator avoidance in humans. Some have called this mechanism a hyperactive agency detection device because of its fairly high rate of erroneous applications of agency. These researchers have noted that relatively low costs of incorrectly agency inference agency based form on a potential predator’s ontological features (compared to the severe costs of detection failure) suggests that a readiness to interpret mundane processes to agent behaviors is an adaptation. This creates a cognitive bias that leads humans to reason about objects and processes in agentive terms. This tendency is particularly foundational to beliefs in a god or gods.

Minimally counterintuitive beliefs

The integration of ToM, hyperactive applications of agency and essential psychology ultimately renders a cognitive tendency for humans to interact with the naturalistic processes of the world with the intentional stance. This is a perspective from which humans reason that objects and processes may be enacting behaviors intentionally, with meaningful, rational mental states of their own.

Religious beliefs are successfully transmitted if they are compatible with cognitive tools that are reconstructing them upon reception. This means that they must be minimally counterintuitive, or that they violate few enough ontological features of an object or process to make general sense while remaining memorable violations nonetheless. For example, the concept of a ghost exploits existing intuitions about mind-body dualism and only violates the usual coupling of mind and body. This creates a memorable concept of a non-material person that can move through walls and have motives of its own. On the other hand, a highly counterintuitive idea about an object that violates several of its ontological features, like a jealous Frisbee, is less likely to be culturally transmitted. This is because it is cognitively demanding, not easily reconstructed by the brain and thus, not easily remembered.

Religious behaviors associated with culturally transmitted god concepts can be conceptualized as phenotypic strategies resulting from culturally transmitted god beliefs. Successfully transmitted religious concepts typically involve minimally counterintuitive violations of the intentional stance, which serves a cognitive constraint of cultural evolution. However, ecological factors also play a role in determining which religious behaviors (and their god concepts) are more likely to be replicated. This means that religious rituals associated with salient representational models of gods' minds and concerns are more likely to survive when they are adaptive strategies.

Ecology of god concepts

Cross-culturally, representational models of gods’ minds take an array of diverse forms, such as anthropomorphic or zoomorphic figures, abstract forces, or some combination of these. Models of gods’ minds typically fall within a spectrum between two extremes: on one end there are Big Gods, and on the other there are Local Gods. Big Gods are usually moralistic, punitive and omniscient, whereas Local Gods are often concerned about ritual behaviors, amoral and limited in knowledge. The subject matter that gods are believed to care across cultures fall into three categories, but may involve an admixture of more than one. These categories are (1) behaviors toward other people, (2) behaviors toward the gods themselves and (3) behaviors toward nature and/or the environment. While people impute these concerns to gods’ minds, they often correspond to ecological challenges. This correspondence establishes why religious ideas often covary with ecological problems in the social and natural world: because these ideas enact behavioral strategies that solve them.

Large-scale cooperation

Cases of large-scale cooperation in complex societies are a widely studied example of a socioecological problem that religious beliefs address. Existing models of human cooperation have included kin selection, reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity and competitive helping. These models are robust across certain conditions likely relevant to the Pleistocene, but cooperation is easily eroded in large-scale, complex societies with frequently anonymous interactions between strangers. This is because profitable defections dominate cooperative strategies due to a lack of significant threats of punishment to defectors. For large-scale cooperation to succeed, a cultural coordination solution enforced by sanction threats must exist.

Religious rules addressing moral behavior are cultural coordination devices that can expand the scale of cooperative behavior by mandating prosocial behavior. The most important proviso, however, is that these devices must be enforced by threats of punishment for people who do not behave prosocially. Frequent instances of anonymity in large-scale societies and the costs associated with punishment undermine sanction threats, but widespread beliefs in morally punitive and omniscient gods effectively outsource the punishment costs to a pervasive social monitor. This can motivate widespread prosocial behavior in large-scale, complex societies.

This has been empirically supported from a few different angles. For instance, the cross-cultural prevalence of omniscient, moralistic gods (i.e., Big Gods) is positively correlated with society size and complexity. Examples of sharing behaviors in experimental economic games played by large-scale societies also reveal more generous behaviors when individuals are primed with Big God concepts before the game. These shifts toward prosociality are not replicated when these experiments are applied to small-scale societies. Moreover, a recent cross-cultural study compiled experimental economic game data from multiple large- and small-scale societies around the world, where people with various religious beliefs played with local or distant people who were often of the same religion. When distant strangers of the same religion were paired in a game, their sharing behaviors were significantly more generous if their common beliefs involved Big God concepts. The researchers of this study argue that this supports the hypothesis stating that widespread beliefs in omniscient, morally punitive Big Gods may have contributed to the expansion of prosocial behavior.

Costly signaling

Concerns attributed to gods about how people behave toward the gods themselves are widespread and not easily disentangled from specific ecological conditions. The reason is intuitive; rational agents who do not care about their treatment are counterintuitive. Researchers investigating the socioecological functions of ritual behaviors in deference to gods claim that functionally, these rituals serve as costly signals of commitment to the group. Costly ritual displays are particularly public and ubiquitous in small-scale societies, functioning as social devices that promote intragroup cohesion. Reputations related to trustworthiness can be significantly based on adherence to ritual behavior expectations, and fulfillment of these expectations are often a joint function of other behavioral strategies relevant to separate domains of gods' concerns. More broadly, religious costly signals are an implicit expression of honest commitment to the rest of the group, indicating that the signaler is a dedicated part of other aspect of the group's coordinated solution strategies. In small- and large-scale societies alike, these rituals often coexist with other categories of gods' concerns.

Resource management

Resource management and the prevention of material insecurity are more commonly associated with gods' concerns among small-scale societies. While other aspects of religious belief often address social interactions, problems of resource acquisition and security extend from attributed gods' concerns about peoples' interactions with their natural environment. An example of this effect has been alluded to by anthropologist Marvin Harris, who wrote in 1982 about the economic reasons that Hindu beliefs, holding cows as sacred and forbidden from slaughter, were adaptive. According to Harris, the benefits derived from many Hindu peoples' use of cows for labor and sources of fuel and fertilizer seemed to outweigh the costs of not eating them. Another ethnographic example of an adaptive use of animal resources was described by Roy Rappaport in 1984, who considered the reasons for ritual pig sacrifice in Papua New Guinea during times of intergroup conflict. These pigs were consuming local peoples' resource and creating resource depressions that put strain on the peoples and fueled intergroup competition for resources. Thus, the ritualistic sacrifices alleviated the strain on local resources and mitigated the hostilities between groups. Moreover, human behavioral ecology researchers have more recently studied burning practices among the Australian Martu people and the consequence increases in local biodiversity. These authors, in an ethnographic discussion of the Martu people, note that these burning practices stem from religious beliefs that their practices allow the world to continue existing as they know it.

An ethnographic example of religious beliefs managing resources comes from the Tyvan people, a pastoralist population in southern Siberia. They associate ritual structures called cairns with local spirit masters (cher eezi). These structures demarcate local territories in which spirit masters reside, and the expectation to stop and give prayer offerings out of respect to cher eezi is embedded in beliefs about them. The cher eezi are believed to be amoral and care mostly about activity within their sacred territories, such as hunting and overexploiting resources that belong to them. More recently, Tyvan people have begun facing new challenges associated with urbanization (e.g., pollution, alcohol abuse), and the cher eezi have been more frequently believed to be concerned about these same problems.