Polly Wiessner: University of Utah Department of Anthropology

Indoctrinability, the capacity to be inculcated with values or doctrines and to accept them uncritically, poses an evolutionary puzzle because it can lead individuals to voluntarily sacrificing immediate individual interest for a belief, cause, or group. I will briefly explore the cognitive capacities underlying indoctrinability. Then I will propose that strong social selection for indoctrinability was an outcome of parent-offspring conflict in arranging marriage and in building cooperative cohorts. That is, elders used their control over the marriage market, as well as their network and information advantages, to persuade youths to uncritically accept cultural beliefs that would to align the goals of youth with their own. I will illustrate these ideas in a case study among the Enga of PNG by: (1) outlining the different agendas of elders and youth in different periods over 250 years of Enga history and (2) showing how elders manipulated indoctrination through ritual and other means to instill norms, values and beliefs that guided peace and war in pre-contact generations and even today when youths have the advantage of wielding high-powered weapons.