Montserrat Soler: University of California, Santa Barbara

In the last ten years, there has been a surge of work dedicated to the study of religion from the point of view of evolutionary studies and cognitive science. These accounts of religion are divided into two main areas: one views religious concepts as by-products of other cognitive capacities, while the other argues that belief and ritual are adaptations that promote intra-group cooperation. A novel way to integrate these approaches is to think of religion as a dynamic system where signalers (religious authorities) and receivers (religious followers) are engaged in a continual interaction of exploitative and cooperative strategies. Here, I will present this idea in three sections. First, I will describe how investigating the costs and benefits of religious authority and the receiver psychology of religious followers can help us understand why people believe and how those beliefs are transformed into directives for both cooperative and maladaptive behavior. Second, I will present results from an agent-based simulation model that explores the success and failure of individual signaling strategies in different conditions. In the model, different religious systems may function as risk-pooling enterprises in variable environments where leaders and followers alternate honest and dishonest signaling to compete for available resources. Finally, data from an African diasporic religion will be presented to explore the relationship between religious leadership, status and intra-group cooperation and to indicate directions for future research.