The proposal of Sijilmassi et al. is an intriguing one, namely that collective myths are a cultural technology aimed at recruiting coalition partners through super-stimuli referencing collective shared experiences. Yet, the role of the psychology underlying humans' (perhaps unique) capacity to bond and create coalitions through shared experiences is remarkably absent from the authors' model, despite having important implications for the use of myths to establish large-scale social cohesiveness.
Humans' reliance on cooperation for their survival has caused them to evolve a set of social cognitive skills facilitating unique forms of communication, collaboration, and cultural learning (Tomasello, Reference Tomasello2019). One important social cognitive skill that facilitates these features of human cooperation is the capacity to create shared representations of perception, intentions, emotions, and beliefs with others (Shteynberg et al., Reference Shteynberg, Hirsh, Wolf, Bargh, Boothby, Colman and Rossignac-Milon2023), facilitating joint agency as well as the common ground necessary for abstract linguistic communication (Bratman, Reference Bratman1993; Clark & Brennan, Reference Clark, Brennan, Resnick, Levine and Teasley1991; Clark, Schreuder, & Buttrick, Reference Clark, Schreuder and Buttrick1983; Echterhoff, Higgins, & Levine, Reference Echterhoff, Higgins and Levine2009; Shteynberg et al., Reference Shteynberg, Hirsh, Wolf, Bargh, Boothby, Colman and Rossignac-Milon2023; Tomasello & Carpenter, Reference Tomasello and Carpenter2007; Tomasello & Rakoczy, Reference Tomasello and Rakoczy2003). In addition, once humans started to live in larger social groups in which large-scale cooperation could no longer be regulated through interpersonal social relationships alone, humans developed the capacity to extend shared representations beyond their interpersonal social network to their cultural group as a whole (Kern & Moll, Reference Kern and Moll2017; Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman, & Herrmann, Reference Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman and Herrmann2012; Tomasello & Rakoczy, Reference Tomasello and Rakoczy2003). These collective mental representations then paved the way for the emergence of societal norms and institutions (Tomasello, Reference Tomasello2016; Tomasello & Vaish, Reference Tomasello and Vaish2013).
Recently, it has been argued that this capacity to create shared representations during shared experiences also plays a crucial role in humans' unique social bonding activities, such as conversation, games, art, and cultural rituals (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2023). Research has shown that both adults (Dunbar et al., Reference Dunbar, Teasdale, Thompson, Budelmann, Duncan, van Emde Boas and Maguire2016; Rennung & Göritz, Reference Rennung and Göritz2015; Wolf, Launay, & Dunbar, Reference Wolf, Launay and Dunbar2015) and children (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2020b) feel closer to others after they have experienced something together. Although this phenomenon has also been found in great apes to some degree (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2019), humans seem to share experiences particularly effectively by creating mutual awareness of their experiences being shared in a way other animals do not (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2020a).
In line with Sijilmassi et al., group myths seem to function in a similar way, albeit through collective rather than interpersonal shared representations. That is, to facilitate social cohesiveness in groups that were too large to maintain social cohesion through interpersonal social activities, humans' social cognitive evolution enabled them to bond through collective, institutionalized representations of a group's past shared experiences. In this light, the group continuity aspect Sijilmassi et al. propose can be construed as a facet of a broader collective representational psychology in which not only myths, but all collective representations including institutions and norms are often experienced as transgenerational and continuous.
Previous theoretical work on these shared and collective representations has also provided explanations as to why such representations cause social bonding (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2023). Crucially, these explanations would expand the psychological model of Sijilmassi et al. in one important way: Although the authors state that humans use myths to track cues of a group's duration, frequency, and intensity of cooperative exchanges, it seems likely that myths also contain cues relating to the actual communicative and cooperative prowess of (members of) that coalition, as well as the degree to which communication and cooperation is valued within a coalition's culture.
It has been argued that shared (and collective) representations cause social bonding not only because it allows individuals to assess potential partners' willingness to cooperate (with shared social activities as costly signals for cooperative intentions), but that shared social activities also provide a testing ground to evaluate potential partners' social cognitive capabilities relevant to cooperation and communication (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2023). As the skills necessary for creating shared representations in social bonding activities are identical to those facilitating collaboration and effective communication in joint problem solving, it stands to reason that those who do so more effectively during social bonding activities will also be more effective collaborators in other situations requiring collaboration. This, in turn, makes these individuals more desirable cooperative partners.
Importantly, the same rationale can be applied to myths as collective representations within human coalitions. It seems plausible that humans evaluate coalitions' sharing of myths amongst themselves and toward new recruits to infer how desirable that coalition is in terms of their social communicative and collaborative prowess. For example, if there are narrative inconsistencies between coalition members, potential new recruits might infer that communication within that coalition is less effective, which might also cause problems during collaborative activities. Conversely, high consistency across coalition members in the telling of a myth rich in details (i.e., more sources of potential narrative variability) can be interpreted as a sign of strong collective communication within a group, making membership of that coalition more desirable. This applies especially to myths pertaining to events in the distant past, as successful sharing of those myths signals that communicative and cooperative capacities have been valued by this coalition for multiple generations, suggesting that this alliance has been culturally nurturing communication and cooperation throughout this time. This implies that the most successful myths are myths that are rich in content while being simultaneously easily and consistently reproducible by coalition members, for example, by tapping into salient and culturally relevant episodic events, such as conflicts with other coalitions or individual achievements of individuals that benefitted the coalition.
In other words, psychological models explaining why collective myths are particularly effective at creating large-scale cohesion (and why some types of myths are selected for while others are not) should not solely focus on individuals' capacity to infer the degree of fitness interdependence of a coalition based on how often and intensely they collaborate, but should also incorporate a psychological mechanism for recognizing a coalition's cooperative and communicative prowess based on how detailed these myths are, and how consistently they are communicated, and have been over time.
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The proposal of Sijilmassi et al. is an intriguing one, namely that collective myths are a cultural technology aimed at recruiting coalition partners through super-stimuli referencing collective shared experiences. Yet, the role of the psychology underlying humans' (perhaps unique) capacity to bond and create coalitions through shared experiences is remarkably absent from the authors' model, despite having important implications for the use of myths to establish large-scale social cohesiveness.
Humans' reliance on cooperation for their survival has caused them to evolve a set of social cognitive skills facilitating unique forms of communication, collaboration, and cultural learning (Tomasello, Reference Tomasello2019). One important social cognitive skill that facilitates these features of human cooperation is the capacity to create shared representations of perception, intentions, emotions, and beliefs with others (Shteynberg et al., Reference Shteynberg, Hirsh, Wolf, Bargh, Boothby, Colman and Rossignac-Milon2023), facilitating joint agency as well as the common ground necessary for abstract linguistic communication (Bratman, Reference Bratman1993; Clark & Brennan, Reference Clark, Brennan, Resnick, Levine and Teasley1991; Clark, Schreuder, & Buttrick, Reference Clark, Schreuder and Buttrick1983; Echterhoff, Higgins, & Levine, Reference Echterhoff, Higgins and Levine2009; Shteynberg et al., Reference Shteynberg, Hirsh, Wolf, Bargh, Boothby, Colman and Rossignac-Milon2023; Tomasello & Carpenter, Reference Tomasello and Carpenter2007; Tomasello & Rakoczy, Reference Tomasello and Rakoczy2003). In addition, once humans started to live in larger social groups in which large-scale cooperation could no longer be regulated through interpersonal social relationships alone, humans developed the capacity to extend shared representations beyond their interpersonal social network to their cultural group as a whole (Kern & Moll, Reference Kern and Moll2017; Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman, & Herrmann, Reference Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman and Herrmann2012; Tomasello & Rakoczy, Reference Tomasello and Rakoczy2003). These collective mental representations then paved the way for the emergence of societal norms and institutions (Tomasello, Reference Tomasello2016; Tomasello & Vaish, Reference Tomasello and Vaish2013).
Recently, it has been argued that this capacity to create shared representations during shared experiences also plays a crucial role in humans' unique social bonding activities, such as conversation, games, art, and cultural rituals (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2023). Research has shown that both adults (Dunbar et al., Reference Dunbar, Teasdale, Thompson, Budelmann, Duncan, van Emde Boas and Maguire2016; Rennung & Göritz, Reference Rennung and Göritz2015; Wolf, Launay, & Dunbar, Reference Wolf, Launay and Dunbar2015) and children (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2020b) feel closer to others after they have experienced something together. Although this phenomenon has also been found in great apes to some degree (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2019), humans seem to share experiences particularly effectively by creating mutual awareness of their experiences being shared in a way other animals do not (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2020a).
In line with Sijilmassi et al., group myths seem to function in a similar way, albeit through collective rather than interpersonal shared representations. That is, to facilitate social cohesiveness in groups that were too large to maintain social cohesion through interpersonal social activities, humans' social cognitive evolution enabled them to bond through collective, institutionalized representations of a group's past shared experiences. In this light, the group continuity aspect Sijilmassi et al. propose can be construed as a facet of a broader collective representational psychology in which not only myths, but all collective representations including institutions and norms are often experienced as transgenerational and continuous.
Previous theoretical work on these shared and collective representations has also provided explanations as to why such representations cause social bonding (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2023). Crucially, these explanations would expand the psychological model of Sijilmassi et al. in one important way: Although the authors state that humans use myths to track cues of a group's duration, frequency, and intensity of cooperative exchanges, it seems likely that myths also contain cues relating to the actual communicative and cooperative prowess of (members of) that coalition, as well as the degree to which communication and cooperation is valued within a coalition's culture.
It has been argued that shared (and collective) representations cause social bonding not only because it allows individuals to assess potential partners' willingness to cooperate (with shared social activities as costly signals for cooperative intentions), but that shared social activities also provide a testing ground to evaluate potential partners' social cognitive capabilities relevant to cooperation and communication (Wolf & Tomasello, Reference Wolf and Tomasello2023). As the skills necessary for creating shared representations in social bonding activities are identical to those facilitating collaboration and effective communication in joint problem solving, it stands to reason that those who do so more effectively during social bonding activities will also be more effective collaborators in other situations requiring collaboration. This, in turn, makes these individuals more desirable cooperative partners.
Importantly, the same rationale can be applied to myths as collective representations within human coalitions. It seems plausible that humans evaluate coalitions' sharing of myths amongst themselves and toward new recruits to infer how desirable that coalition is in terms of their social communicative and collaborative prowess. For example, if there are narrative inconsistencies between coalition members, potential new recruits might infer that communication within that coalition is less effective, which might also cause problems during collaborative activities. Conversely, high consistency across coalition members in the telling of a myth rich in details (i.e., more sources of potential narrative variability) can be interpreted as a sign of strong collective communication within a group, making membership of that coalition more desirable. This applies especially to myths pertaining to events in the distant past, as successful sharing of those myths signals that communicative and cooperative capacities have been valued by this coalition for multiple generations, suggesting that this alliance has been culturally nurturing communication and cooperation throughout this time. This implies that the most successful myths are myths that are rich in content while being simultaneously easily and consistently reproducible by coalition members, for example, by tapping into salient and culturally relevant episodic events, such as conflicts with other coalitions or individual achievements of individuals that benefitted the coalition.
In other words, psychological models explaining why collective myths are particularly effective at creating large-scale cohesion (and why some types of myths are selected for while others are not) should not solely focus on individuals' capacity to infer the degree of fitness interdependence of a coalition based on how often and intensely they collaborate, but should also incorporate a psychological mechanism for recognizing a coalition's cooperative and communicative prowess based on how detailed these myths are, and how consistently they are communicated, and have been over time.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interest
None.