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Chapter 10 - Cultural Evolutionary Psychology of Belief

from Evolutionary Psychology of Beliefs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2022

By
Theiss Bendixen  and
Benjamin Grant Purzycki
Edited by
Julien Musolino ,
Joseph Sommer  and
Pernille Hemmer
Julien Musolino
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Joseph Sommer
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Pernille Hemmer
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
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Summary

In this chapter, we consider a cultural evolutionary psychological framework for understanding the origin, maintenance and diffusion of beliefs, and illustrate the utility of such a framework with two case studies – religious belief systems and conspiracy theory beliefs. A cultural evolutionary psychology of belief considers four broad sets of interacting factors: the content of a belief, a belief’s fit with individual conditions, the social dynamics surrounding a belief, and the socioecological conditions that promote or suppress a belief. A cultural evolutionary psychology of belief overcomes the limitations to what we call standard evolutionary psychology, a school of thought that emphasizes the activation of innate cognitive modules for understanding the generation and spread of beliefs. With this chapter, then, we aim to show how social and cognitive science researchers can approach the study of beliefs from an evolutionary perspective without committing to the controversial assumptions of standard evolutionary psychology.

Keywords

evolutionary psychologycultural evolutionevolutionary social sciencereligious beliefconspiracy theory belief
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cognitive Science of Belief
A Multidisciplinary Approach
 , pp. 209 - 230
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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