Jeffrey Schloss: Westmont College Department of Biology

A prominent evolutionary account of “religious cognition” is that it emerged as a byproduct of agency detection mechanisms biased toward false positives, which were exapted as cultural innovations of moralizing gods helped stabilize cooperation by controlling defection in large-scale interactions. Although there is some empirical evidence for this account, along with the concomitant claim that religious rituals function as costly signals of commitment, if the cost of such rituals is less than their benefit, they need not function as honest signals of ascent. This talk will examine the proposal that some kinds of religious rituals associated with autonomically mediated behaviors such as blushing, shivering, fainting, and ecstatic speech, may function as hard-to-fake, though not costly, signals that both convey and promote cooperative intent. I will describe results from experiments in which human subjects engaged in a variety of religious and non-religious group activities – including Pentecostal worship – followed by participation in a series of decision tasks in standard economic games. Indices of trust, trustworthiness, generosity, and conditional responsiveness varied significantly between treatments. Measures of prosociality were correlated with the effect of group activity on plasma oxytocin. I will discuss the implications and limitations of these findings for evolutionary accounts of religion and for our understanding of ritualized group behaviors as facilitators of cooperation.