Religious diversity has had profound consequences in human history, but the dynamics of how it evolves remain unclear. One unresolved question is the extent to which religious denominations accumulate gradually or are generated in rapid bursts associated with specific historical events. Anecdotal evidence tends to favour the second view, but quantitative evidence on a global scale is lacking. Phylogenetic methods that treat religious denominations as evolving lineages can help to resolve this question. Here we apply computational phylogenetic methods to a purpose-built data set documenting 291 religious denominations and their genealogical relationships to derive dated phylogenies of three families of world religions - Indo-Iranian, Islamic, and Judeo-Christian. We model the birth of new denominations along the branches of these phylogenies, test for shifts in the birth rate, and draw tentative links between the shifts we find and religious history. We find evidence for birth rate shifts in the Islamic and Judeo-Christian families, corresponding to at least three separate events that have shaped global religious diversity.

In their target article, White et al. celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), looking back on what has been done as well as into the possible futures that await this academic discipline. We are joyous to join this celebration as we consider ourselves ardent members of this discipline and wish to see the discipline flourish. Indeed, most of us academically grew up on the works of the CSR founding figures—many of whom are the authors of the present target article—and when founding our lab, we were much inspired by their call for more empirical evidence that would test the proposed theoretical models. Yet, as the inevitable law of inter-generational disagreement dictates, we see the recent developments of CESR (where the additional 'E' stands for evolution) and its near future fairly differently than White et al. In this spirit, our commentary offers several critical reflections on the target article, its scope as well as the proposed future directions for CESR.

Collective gatherings are often associated with the alignment of psychophysiological states between members of a crowd. While the process of emotional contagion has been studied extensively in dyads as well as at the population level, our understanding of its operation and dynamics as they unfold in real time in real-world group contexts remains limited. Employing a naturalistic design, we investigated emotional contagion in a public religious ritual by examining the relationship between interpersonal distance and autonomic arousal. We found that proximity in space was associated with heightened affective synchrony between participants in the context of the emotionally laden ritual (a Hindu procession) compared with an unstructured walk along the same route performed by the same group. Our findings contribute to the understanding of collective emotions and their underlying psychophysiological mechanisms, emphasizing the role of cultural practices in shaping collective emotional experiences.

Imagining the Cognitive Science of Religion: Magic Bullets, Complex Theories, Experimental Adventures, by E. Thomas Lawson. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023. Scientific Studies of Religion Inquiry and Explanation. 184 pp. $21.56. ISBN: 9781350355880

This commentary highlights the important contributions of the target book to the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion and identifies several issues and challenges that should be addressed in future work. The crucial challenges pertain to the need for more thorough theoretical modeling of what religious beliefs add to the effects of ritual behavior, the need for longitudinal studies of mundane but frequently performed individual rituals, and the need for translating the results of basic research on rituals into applied outputs. We describe those challenges in detail and suggest potential remedies and future directions.

Employing an incentivized controlled lab experiment, we investigate the effects of ovulatory shift on salient behavioral outcomes related to (i) risk preferences, (ii) rule violation, and (iii) exploratory attitude. As evolutionary psychology suggests, these outcomes may play an important role in economic decision-making and represent behavioral aspects that may systematically vary over the menstrual cycle to increase the reproductive success. Exploiting a within-subjects design, 124 naturally cycling females participated in experimental sessions during their ovulation and menstruation, the phases between which the difference in the investigated behavior should be the largest. In each session, hormonal samples for cortisol, estradiol, and testosterone were collected. The group of women was also contrasted against an auxiliary reference group composed of 47 males, who are not subject to hormonal variations of this nature. Our results reveal no systematic behavioral differences between the ovulation and menstruation phases.

People face stressors that are beyond their control and that maladaptively perpetuate anxiety. In these contexts, rituals emerge as a natural coping strategy helping decrease excessive anxiety. However, mechanisms facilitating these purported effects have rarely been studied. We hypothesized that repetitive and rigid ritual sequences help the human cognitive-behavioral system to return to low-entropy states and assuage anxiety. This study reports a pre-registered test of this hypothesis using a Czech student sample (n = 268). Participants were exposed to an anxiety induction and then randomly assigned to perform one of three actions: ritualized, control, and neutral (no-activity). We assessed the effects of this manipulation on cognitive and physiological anxiety, finding that ritualized action positively affected anxiety decrease, but this decrease was only slightly larger than in the other two conditions. Nevertheless, the between-condition differences in the reduction of physiological anxiety were well-estimated in participants more susceptible to anxiety induction.

People in a state of awe have been found to perceive their needs as small while also expressing intentions to act in a prosocial way, benefitting others at personal cost. However, these findings come largely out of the USA and have focused on intended rather than real prosocial behavior. We propose a contextual model of the awe-prosociality relationship predicated on the constructed theory of emotion, according to which emotion categories and cost-benefit analyses of possible subsequent actions differ across cultures and in line with enduring individual differences. To test the model, we conducted a laboratory study (N = 143) examining whether costly volunteering behavior is higher amid awe in the Czech Republic, a country where social psychological studies have often produced different results compared to the USA. Awe-inspiring and neutral primes were validated in pilot studies (N = 229). As is possible under the contextual model, awe-inspiring primes elicited not more, but less, prosocial behavior, with the relationship being moderated by various facets of Openness to Experience. Individuals higher in the Feelings facet of Openness were also found to be more awe-prone. A call is made for a cross-cultural investigation of the awe-behavior relationship that accounts for complex phylogenetic relationships between cultures.

While the occurrence of rituals in anxiogenic contexts has been long noted and supported by ethnographic, quantitative and experimental studies, the purported effects of ritual behaviour on anxiety reduction have rarely been examined. In the present study, we investigate the anxiolytic effects of religious practices among the Marathi Hindu community in Mauritius and test whether these effects are facilitated by the degree of ritualization present in these practices. Seventy-five participants first experienced anxiety induction through the public speaking paradigm and were subsequently asked to either perform their habitual ritual in a local temple (ritual condition) or sit and relax (control condition). The results revealed that participants in the ritual condition reported lower perceived anxiety after the ritual treatment and displayed lower physiological anxiety, which was assessed as heart-rate variability. The degree of ritualization in the ritual condition showed suggestive albeit variable effects, and thus further investigation is needed. We conclude the paper with a discussion of various mechanisms that may facilitate the observed anxiolytic effects of ritual behaviour and should be investigated in the future. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.

While accounting for the religious beliefs of about 80% of the world’s population, the five dominant global religions - Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism - are divided into hundreds of sects. What processes produced this unity amidst fragmentation over time? To date, historians have focused on describing patterns of cross-national unity and fragmentation over time within each global religion separately. However, to understand the mechanisms fostering unity across religious lines in the modern globalised world, it is necessary to identify any processes of unification common to multiple world religions. Using computational methods developed in biology, we compare world religions in terms of patterns of schism (fragmentation) over time – patterns represented as evolutionary trees (phylogenies). In Buddhism, pre-Reformation Christianity and Islam, we observe early diversity reined in by empires that sponsored the religions as ideologies of state. In Protestant Christianity and Hinduism, we observe consistent unbridled diversity of belief, attributable to the fact that sponsoring empires subscribed to ideologies that placed only loose constraints on belief content. The ideals guiding Protestant European colonial empires and various Hindu empires– modern capitalism and the caste system, respectively – have been argued to be economic. However, these ideals also had a grounding in religious ethics; specifically, in the motivation to be a trustworthy “tool of the divine will” under Protestantism, and in the motivation to maintain purity under Hinduism. In evidence of a gradual movement towards global ethical and economic unification, we observe increasing diversity of belief loosely constrained by Protestant ethics and capitalist institutions in post-19th century Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as post-17th century Judaism. Overall, our findings demonstrate how systematic approaches from natural science can combine with historical inquiry to suggest that ideological unity amidst diversity is possible under a higher order ideology combining ethical and economic principles.

It has been argued that the costs of monumental architecture and ceremonies are more than offset by their prosocial effects – effects that stem, at least in part, from the awe these entities elicit. Numerous psychological experiments have produced findings suggesting a connection between awe and prosociality. According to the popular small self model of the relationship between awe and prosociality, awe-inspiring stimuli, by virtue of their vastness, suppress the observer’s personal needs, thus encouraging prosociality. In this presenation, we begin by describing an experiment in which we monitored prosocial behaviour rather than reports about how much one would, in theory, donate to charity, only to find that this behaviour (time spent on a boring voluntary task) was less pronounced among people who had just seen a video of awe-inspiring nature. Religiosity appeared to provide a buffer against this apparent restlessness following awe. While noting the potential relevance of religiosity to how experiences of awe are interpreted, we concluded that the awe-prosociality relationship might be one that develops over longer time frames than those involved in a laboratory experiment. In the second part of the presentation, we describe an analysis of how a facet of prosociality - reported sense of connectedness to people in the local community, one's country and the world - is affected over time by interest in (and, presumably, also exposure to) impactful visual art and music. We explore this awe-prosociality relationship among groups of people differing in religiosity and socioeconomic status, with this subgroup analysis being made possible by the fact that we use data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study - a survey study following a large group of people representative of the New Zealand population over the past 7 years.

Extreme ritual practices involving pain and suffering pose significant risks such as injury, trauma, or infection. Nonetheless, they are performed by millions of people around the world and are often culturally prescribed remedies for a variety of maladies, and especially those related to mental health. What is the actual impact of these practices on health? Combining ethnographic observations and psychophysiological monitoring, we investigated outcomes of participation in one of the world's most extreme rituals, involving bodily mutilation and prolonged suffering. Performance of this physically demanding ordeal had no detrimental effects on physiological health and was associated with subjective health improvements, and these improvements were greater for those who engaged in more intense forms of participation. Moreover, individuals who experienced health problems and/or were of low socioeconomic status sought more painful levels of engagement. We suggest two potential mechanisms for these effects: a bottom-up process triggered by neurological responses to pain and a top-down process related to increased social support and self-enhancement. These mechanisms may buffer stress-induced pressures and positively affect quality of life. Our results stress the importance of traditional cultural practices for coping with adversity, especially in contexts where psychiatric or other medical interventions are not widely available.

Extremni ritualy zahrnujici bolestive tělesne mutilace, zůstavaji kvůli nedostatku ocividných fitness benefitů při vysokem riziku zraněni, traumatu ci infekce evolucni hadankou. Jednim z navrhovaných skrytých benefitů by mohl paradoxně být pozitivni dlouhodobý dopad na zdravi. Reportujeme výsledky srovnani fyziologických měřeni a subjektivnich hodnoceni kvality života před a po tamilskem hinduistickem ritualu Kavadi mezi ucastniky a kontrolni skupinou z terenniho experimentu na Mauriciu.

Emoce užasu sehrava v naboženskem proživani významnou roli, avsak užas a psychologicke mechanizmy s nim spojeny zůstavaji neobjasněne. Předevsim se jedna o vztah mezi emoci užasu a prosocialnim chovanim clověka. Předpoklada se, že emoce užasu vede k pocitu jedincovy nicotnosti a nedůležitosti, který je tak nasledně ochoten obětovat vlastni cas a prostředky pro druhe. Naproti tomu stoji předpoklad, že emoce užasu je spojena s kulturnim kontextem a s clověka přesahujicimi nadpřirozenými moralizujicimi aktery. Tato asociace by pak vedla k intenzivnějsimu proživani emoce užasu a k jejimu větsimu dopadu na prosocialni chovani u naboženských jedinců. Cilem přispěvku je představeni experimentalni studie, ktera testuje tyto dva modely.

Several prominent evolutionary theories contend that religion was critical to the emergence of large-scale societies and encourages cooperation in contemporary complex groups. These theories argue that religious systems provide a reliable mechanism for finding trustworthy anonymous individuals under conditions of risk. In support, studies find that people displaying cues of religious identity are more likely to be trusted by anonymous coreligionists. However, recent research has found that displays of religious commitment can increase trust across religious divides. These findings are puzzling from the perspective that religion emerges to regulate coalitions. To date, these issues have not been investigated outside of American undergraduate samples nor have studies considered how religious identities interact with other essential group-membership signals, such as ancestry, to affect intergroup trust. Here, we address these issues and compare religious identity, ancestry, and trust among and between Christians and Hindus living in Mauritius. Ninety-seven participants rated the trustworthiness of faces, and in a modified trust game distributed money among these faces, which varied according to religious and ethnic identity. In contrast to previous research, we find that markers of religious identity increase monetary investments only among in-group members and not across religious divides. Moreover, out-group religious markers on faces of in-group ancestry decrease reported trustworthiness. These findings run counter to recent studies collected in the United States and suggest that local socioecologies influence the relationships between religion and trust. We conclude with suggestions for future research and a discussion of the challenges of conducting field experiments with remote populations.

Religious rituals have long puzzled scientists since they consume a lot of energy, time, and resources. What is it about rituals that explains their prevalence? Are there any fitness benefits to ritual participation? Sexual selection may explain the evolution of religious behaviours. Males and females face different reproductive challenges associated with mate-evaluation, which results in sex differences in religious behaviours. These differences are manifested in reputation signals among men (public religious displays) and fidelity signals among women (private religious displays). Our experiment uses visual stimuli to examine the effect of religious cue intensity on perceived mate attractiveness.

One of the features of religions that can be universally observed is the costliness of devotion, which gets manifested in ritual participation. Rituals require investments of such currencies as time, energy, or money, yet lack any straightforward causal mechanism that would translate these investments into desired ends. What then explains the prevalence of these behaviors in religious contexts and beyond? How can devotees benefit from investing their resources into rituals? Sexual selection may offer a possible answer to this long-standing puzzle. Scientists have observed differences in religious behaviours between males and females, responding to mate-evaluation by the opposite sex. Men tend to signal reputation through public religious displays and women tend to signal fidelity through private religious displays. These signals mirror the diverse reproductive challenges of both sexes. associated with. Our experiment manipulates religious ritual intensity in a visual stimuli to examine its effects on mate attractiveness assessments.

In agreement with ‘the material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences and informed by psychological studies of priming, the authors argue that human action can be deeply influenced by objects and other features of the environment coordinated by ritual practices. They suggest that the moods and behaviors catalyzed by an effective ritual result from a ‘mangle’ of human and material agencies. But this mangle is not the result of an accidental fusion of disparate elements; rather, they consider it a complex adaptive system in which the organic and inorganic interact in such a way that each component provides some of the necessary conditions for the others’ activities. In line with this, there is a need to identify the reciprocally causal relationships among people, places, plants, animals, stones, relics, icons and idols that constitute ritual, an approach they call ‘ritual ecology’.