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  • Lausten replied to the topic Evolution of Religion in the forum Religion and Secularism 5 years, 3 months ago

    You’d need to his book(s) or at least a few studies, but he’s a summary of Scott Atran’s work.

    Evolved elements of cognition that favour religion include the inherent susceptibility of religious beliefs to modularised (innate, universal, domain-specific) conceptual processing systems. Cross-cultural experiments in developmental and cognitive psychology point to a universal “theory of mind”, or folkpsychology, that favours survival and recurrence of notions of a spiritual soul and the supernatural within and across minds and societies. Historical conditions for religion concern the problem of forming large-scale groups of genetic strangers able to compete with other predatory human groups. A quantitative cross-cultural analysis of 186 societies found that the larger the group, the more likely it culturally sanctioned deities who are directly concerned about human morality. Such moral concern also translates into greater propensity for conflict and warfare with other groups, although experiments in western societies show that activation of God concepts leads to reduced cheating and greater generosity between anonymous strangers.