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PRJ0010.1177/0084672420909436Archive for the Psychology of ReligionTurner

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Archive for the Psychology of Religion

Emotional bonds: Bridging the

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https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420909436
DOI: 10.1177/0084672420909436
journals.sagepub.com/home/prj
humanistic accounts of religious
belief

Léon Turner
International Society for Science and Religion, UK

Abstract
Recent years have seen a growing willingness in the evolutionary cognitive science of religion (ECSR) to
embrace an inclusive, theoretically pluralistic approach and the emergence of a broad consensus around some
key themes that collectively constitute a central theoretical core of the field. Nevertheless, ECSR still raises
serious problems for some in the humanities. In exploring the reasons for the perception of conflict between
humanistic and cognitive evolutionary approaches to religion, I suggest that both ECSR’s default account
of the origins of religion and religion’s role in social bonding rely upon notions of culturally unmediated
universal cognitive mechanisms that preclude alternative humanistic explanations. I subsequently suggest
that the gap between humanistic approaches and the evolutionary study of religion more broadly conceived
may be narrowed by further expanding ECSR to include recent research into the brain opioid theory of
social attachment (BOTSA), which emphasises the emotional rather than cognitive basis of religion’s social
bonding functions. Finally, I outline a possible evolutionary account of the earliest forms of religious ideas
and practices, which decouples the origins of religion from the evolution of specialised cognitive machinery
and which humanists are likely to find more amenable than mainstream ECSR.

Keywords
Beliefs, cognition, groups, neuroscience, religion, ritual

Introduction
Despite the enormous amount of attention paid to the evolutionary cognitive science of religion
(ECSR) in the 30 years since the publication of Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley’s (1990)
seminal work, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture, questions remain about
what ECSR has to contribute to the more traditional approaches of the humanities and social sci-
ences – specifically, the explanation and interpretation of particular manifestations of religion,
through the study of distinctive historically and geographically contingent, sociocultural traditions,

Corresponding author:
Léon Turner, International Society for Science and Religion, Cambridge CB237PL, UK.
Email: lpt21@cantab.net
2 Archive for the Psychology of Religion 00(0)

processes and institutions (cf. Laidlaw, 2007; Levy, 2013; Slingerland, 2008a, 2008b, 2014;
Whitehouse, 2007). From the perspective of ECSR, most see a constructive mutual interaction:

On the one hand, the academic study of religion benefits by the discovery of new ways of interpreting the
origins and functions of religion. These discoveries and theories can then be coordinated with what is
already known, with all of the adjustments and negotiations that such coordination involves. On the other
hand, the scientific study of religion benefits from mutual interaction especially by appropriating hard-
won insights from the academic study of religion. (McNamara et al., 2011, p. 101)

Intertheoretical cooperation brings other benefits for ECSR. Most importantly perhaps, by demon-
strating its compatibility with humanistic approaches, it resists the common charge that it implic-
itly reduces the study of religion to the study of individual psychological structures and processes.
After all, if cognitive approaches complement rather than directly challenge humanistic approaches,
then their focus upon those aspects of religion that have a clear cognitive component (such as belief
in God, for example) is less likely to invite criticism for ignoring much of what the humanities and
social sciences understand as ‘religious’. As Cohen et al. (2008) note, ‘The cognitive science of
religion has never been about driving other inquiries out of business, but only about redressing an
imbalance in the field and seeking empirically responsible general proposals’ (p. 114).
I will suggest below that the gap between ECSR and the humanities remains wider at some
crucially significant points than many have supposed, but also that some lines of recent research
may help to narrow the gap between the humanities and the evolutionary study of religion more
widely conceived. Identifying those very specific areas where the gaps are widest helps develop a
more balanced understanding of the relationship than is evident in many discussions, where broad
brush characterisations of cognitive science of religion (CSR) sometimes unhelpfully distort our
understanding of a complex conversation that is, in many ways, both harmonious and productive.
It will also help pinpoint those areas where further theoretical development within ECSR or the
inclusion of potentially elucidating research from adjacent fields might have the most impact upon
future interdisciplinary interaction. Here, I will provide two clear examples of problematic areas
– ECSR’s account of the ultimate origins of religion as a by-product of maturationally natural cog-
nitive capacities and its attempt to explain the prosocial functions of religion via theories of super-
natural monitoring. In both cases, problems arise from ECSR’s theoretical reliance upon certain
culturally unmediated cognitive predispositions to explain key aspects of religion. There may be
other specific examples of apparent interdisciplinary conflict that could be developed along these
lines, but I hope these two are sufficient to illustrate my arguments here.
The possibility of bridging the theoretical and methodological gaps between ECSR and the
humanities, I suggest, has been greatly enhanced by the growing consensus in the field that old
arguments may be best settled through the development of a more inclusive theoretically and meth-
odologically pluralistic approach to thinking about the evolution of religion (See Sosis 2009;
Norenzayan et al. 2013; Norenzayan et al. 2016). Recognising that the concept of religion is too
nebulous, and religious phenomena too diverse, to be captured in terms of a single overarching
theory, this emerging synthesis of several discrete theories has already helped circumvent some old
and seemingly intractable internal disputes. As Sosis and Alcorta (2003) observe, ‘examining the
origins of religion, the development of religious institutions, the ecological determinants of reli-
gious behavior, and whether religion is currently adaptive constitute separate areas of inquiry
requiring different methodological tools’ (p. 264).
Driving the more inclusive narrative is a profound concern with religion’s role in promoting
social cohesion and coordinating group behaviours. Among social scientists, religion has for many
years been deemed ‘a force of integration, a unifying bond contributing to social stability and
Turner 3

control’ (Saliba, 1995, p. 119). Religion is usually perceived as a solution to the problem of how
human societies managed to balance the undisputed benefits of living in large groups with the
equally well-known difficulties. ECSR has taken up this mantra, acknowledging that at least some
kinds of religious beliefs and practices serve important functions for the individuals or groups that
they belong to. Chief among the constituents of religion that are alleged to play significant roles in
social bonding is the threat of supernatural punishment from morally concerned omniscient super-
natural beings (D. Johnson & Krüger, 2004) and rituals that signal honest commitment to a social
group (Bulbulia & Sosis, 2011). Although, here, I will focus primarily on the former, Studies of both
phenomena appeal to certain aspects of cognitive evolution in explaining how religion encourages
cooperation and controls freeriders. Below, I will argue that other non-cognitive research into the
possible social bonding functions of religion may help bolster the evolutionary study of religion and
simultaneously ease concerns among some of its most ardent critics about the reductionism they
believe to be inherent to the field.

A well-disposed social anthropologist’s problems

with the ‘cognitive science of religion’
A central concern of the debate surrounding the relationship between evolutionary cognitive scien-
tific and humanistic approaches to religion has been the question of whether cognitive science can
actually explain anything of much interest about such a complex social phenomenon. The broad
themes of the debate can be briefly illustrated through a comparison of two opposing views on the
matter, set out in two papers published over a decade ago by James Laidlaw and Edward Slingerland,
respectively. My immediate intention is briefly to explain how a key methodological principle of
ECSR seems to threaten the very concept of religion as it is typically understood in the human and
social sciences.
Slingerland (2008a), who strongly endorses the cognitive evolutionary study of religion, wants
to see a ‘vertical integration’ (p. 379) of the natural and human sciences, which both recognises the
subjective importance of the meaningfulness of first-person experience and accepts the primacy of
physically embodied cognitive processes in explaining human behaviour. As far as the study of
religion is concerned, this entails the rigorous application of the tools of cognitive science, which
he plainly supposes provide the best available explanations of the psychological processes deemed
to be at the very foundation of social phenomena of all kinds. His aim is to break the study of reli-
gion out of the ‘endless cycle of contingent discourses and representations of representations’ that
he believes characterises the dominant social constructivist epistemology of the humanities and
social sciences, and establishes ‘a picture of the human person as an integrated body–mind system
following the laws of nature’ (Slingerland, 2008a, pp. 378–379). It is a system supposed to have
been shaped by millions of years of evolution into a complex machine replete with a vast array of
functionally specific capacities, which underpin higher level cognitive processes and constrain
them to such a great extent that some of their activity is very difficult to override. Fundamental
aspects of human individual and social behaviour, then, including many aspects of religion, are
seen as the inevitable products of universal cognitive processes beyond our conscious control
being triggered by ubiquitous environmental stimuli. The experimental demonstration of the exist-
ence of the ‘natural’ evolved capacities dictating these and other behaviours is what ultimately
stands behind Slingerland’s contention that ‘We are robots designed not to believe we are robots’
(2008a, p. 394). ‘The explanation of reality that best enables us to get a grip on the world’, he
writes, ‘does not involve ghosts, souls, miracles, or original intentionality: human beings, like all
of the other entities that we know about, appear to be robots all the way down, whether we like that
4 Archive for the Psychology of Religion 00(0)

idea or not’ (Slingerland, 2008a, p. 392). At the same time, however, Slingerland is clearly not
opposed to the idea that the humanities and CSR can work together for the greater good. Indeed,
he recognises a number of different, equally constructive forms such a combined approach might
take (Slingerland, 2014).
James Laidlaw (2007) has quite a different perspective. His primary aim is to contrast CSR’s
attempted explanations of religion with the interpretative approach that he believes characterises
humanistic, particularly social anthropological, approaches. To these ends, he argues that CSR
works ‘insofar as it does, by a methodological exclusion of much that we mean by religion’
(Laidlaw, 2007, p. 215). Its explanatory power is gained at the cost of the humanities’ sensitivity to
the historical contingency of particular religious traditions, which are shaped by the distinctively
human capacity to exercise ‘reason, imagination, and will’ (p. 214).
Like Slingerland, Laidlaw recognises that the debate between CSR and his preferred humanistic
approach also takes place on a more fundamental level than a simple disagreement about what
constitutes religion. Here, differences of opinion exist regarding the nature of cognition and about
the relationship between the mind and the physical and sociocultural worlds. His 2007 article
begins with a quote from Bernard Williams:

What is true is that each action is explained, in the first place, by an individual’s psychology; what is not
true is that the individual’s psychology is entirely explained by psychology. There are human sciences
other than psychology, and there is not the slightest reason to suppose that one can understand humanity
without them (Williams 1995: 86). (Laidlaw, 2007, p. 214)

At the root of his concern with CSR’s approach to religion is the decontextualisation and generali-
sation that he believes attends its attempted explanation in terms of ahistorical and atemporal
cognitive dispositions, processes and structures. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that
cognitive science can explain what it considers to be ‘religion’ because those aspects of religion
that cognitive science is unable to explain – distinctive historically contingent features of particular
religions – are deemed incidental to the very conception of religion. What are left when these
things are sidelined are the bare generic features that all religions are supposed to have in common.
And the study of the cognitive background of these things, Laidlaw suggests, adds very little to the
humanities’ attempt to understand religious traditions as traditions. For Laidlaw, after all, histori-
cally cultivated contingent traditions, institutions and practices inform and sustain religious lan-
guages, motivations and emotions to the extent that they ‘cannot be adequately described purely in
terms of cognitive mechanisms internal to individual minds’ (p. 225). Religious traditions, he con-
tinues, are ‘particularly clear and strong examples of those aspects of language, meaning, and
therefore thought and experience that are intersubjective, which is to say “not (only) in the head”’
(p. 225).
The very narrow concept of religion and the restrictive methodology of CSR are closely related
to a third major problem in Laidlaw’s (2007) opinion – CSR’s ‘commitment to regarding thought
as information processing and therefore to regarding humans (like other animals) as, in this respect,
like certain machines’ (p. 214). This is, he goes on to say, typically combined with the belief that
the cognitive mechanisms involved are ‘the outcome of natural selection’ (p. 214n). Nathaniel
Barrett (2010) has a similar target in his sights when he criticises CSR’s presumption that ‘mean-
ingful information is context-independent and that information processing functions are inherent
to structures’ (p. 598). Both Laidlaw’s observation that CSR treats individual humans as machine-
like entities and his appeal to the evolutionary origins of human cognitive architecture are here
intended to emphasise both the inescapability and ubiquity of the cognitive mechanisms concerned,
as well as his claim that they operate beyond the bounds of ‘reason, imagination and will’ (p. 215).
Turner 5

It is this attempted explanation of social phenomena in terms of the information processing per-
formed by the cognitive machinery of individual minds that he believes dramatically narrows both
the concept of religion and the range of possible causal explanations and interpretations of any
given religious phenomenon.
We should remember that Laidlaw’s discussion is not overtly hostile. He is, as he says in the title
of his paper, ‘well-disposed’ towards CSR and has no intention of ridiculing it or dismissing it out
of hand. He may be pessimistic about its prospects for integration with the humanities, which, he
believes, have totally different objectives, but this does not raise any major theoretical problems for
CSR – the disciplines do not actually have to be integrated to remain independently valid and use-
ful modes of research into religion. Nor does it mean they are incompatible. It just means that
significant mutual elucidation is unlikely because they are ultimately talking about quite different
things (Laidlaw, 2007, pp. 212–213). Laidlaw’s position is quite different both from those who
would simply deny the validity of cognitive explanations of some aspects of religion and from
those, including Slingerland, who see such explanations as crucial supplements to sociohistorical
accounts.
In his objection to CSR’s limited description of religion, and its grounding in universal psycho-
logical processes, Laidlaw appears to tread a well-worn path. Graham and Haidt (2010), for exam-
ple, arguing that the psychology of religion has a pronounced tendency to approach its subject from
the standpoint of methodological individualism, observe that ‘Religiosity is conceived as a set of
propositional beliefs (about God, the afterlife, etc.) held by some individuals, and the scientific
challenge is to figure out why those individuals hold such beliefs’ (p. 141). Geertz (2014) voices
the same frustration when he accuses CSR of inappropriately assuming ‘the causal priority of indi-
vidual mentality and that religion is about individual beliefs’ (p. 611). As a means by which psy-
chology might overcome its chequered history of individualistic explanation, Graham and Haidt
propose religion also be examined from a social functionalist perspective, suggesting that God
might be seen as analogous to ‘a maypole around which moral communities cohere’ (p. 145). The
goal of psychological study, from this perspective, should extend beyond religious beliefs to
include the explanation of how various religious social practices and doctrinally stipulated behav-
iours promote individual and communal well-being. Some early works in the field notwithstand-
ing, the notion that CSR frames religion exclusively in terms of beliefs has been largely dismissed
as inaccurate by supporters of the cognitive approach. As Schloss et al. (2010) argue in a response
to criticism along these lines by Nathaniel Barrett (2010), ‘a cursory survey of the field will reveal
that the topics under consideration extend far beyond belief in gods’ (p. 623). In the last 10 years,
the range of cognitive accounts of religion that do not focus exclusively on individual supernatural
beliefs has rapidly expanded. But Laidlaw’s worries about CSR, which run deeper than most, are
not satisfactorily addressed by these developments. As others have, he identifies a number of fea-
tures of world religions that CSR may have overlooked (Laidlaw, 2007, pp. 219–224), but he does
not suppose that the explanation of group-level or even societal-level structures and processes in
terms of individual psychological processes and structures will resolve the problem. Nor, for that
matter, will cognitive accounts of ritual performance or religion’s social bonding function. Merely
broadening the cognitive approach to include the study of things other than beliefs in supernatural
agents would be to miss Laidlaw’s point. Studying the extent to which the structure of the mind
influences such things as religious ritual performance and religious social bonding will merely
uncover further regularities. That is not uninteresting, but it will not help us understand individual
religions as historically contingent, and therefore unique, social phenomena, since historical con-
tingencies in religious belief and practice will remain resistant to explanation in terms of underly-
ing cognitive mechanics and incidental to CSR’s conceptualisation of religion.
6 Archive for the Psychology of Religion 00(0)

Laidlaw’s critique of CSR does not adequately represent the current much-developed field as a
whole, particularly as it informs the broader mainstream narratives of ECSR. The question of inter-
theoretical compatibility must be more subtly nuanced because ECSR now comprises many differ-
ent theories and claims, not all of which are likely to be equally objectionable, even to people who
broadly share Laidlaw’s views. However, I want to suggest that some actual points of conflict
between ECSR and the humanities still cannot be easily resolved.
A stronger view of the potential incompatibility of these approaches is based on the notion that
ECSR actively excludes humanistic explanations at certain critical points in its narrative, by setting
certain ideas about maturational naturalness in direct competition with the constructionist thesis
that human beings’ interactions with each other and their environments are always mediated by
distinctive social and cultural influences in several important ways. This introduces de facto con-
flict between humanists and ECSR supporters irrespective of any view about the inevitability of
interdisciplinary conflict theoretically. This is not so much a disagreement about the very concept
of ‘innateness’ or ‘naturalness’, as a disagreement about the extent to which maturationally natural
cognitive capacities can really be tied to particular proximate explanations of religion’s origins or
social functions. I will argue below that many of the theories identified by Norenzayan et al. (2016)
as central to the consensus view of ECSR lean upon certain causal naturalistic explanations of the
origins, development and differential success of religious ideas that seem to preclude alternative
humanistic accounts. It is the defence of specific instances of this sort of claim where interdiscipli-
nary conflict between ECSR and humanistic modes of explanation arises in practice. ECSR encour-
ages the idea that religions are each token forms of a generic type, which is squeezed into different
shapes by particular cultures, but which cannot be fully explained by them. At the very beginning
of this process, and at other critical junctures, certain structures and processes are implicated,
which are both universal and functionally independent of any culturally contingent factors. CSR is
happy to acknowledge this fact. As N. F. Barrett (2010) writes,

Recurrent cultural expression seems to require recurrent causes such as undergirding cognitive systems or
environmental regularities. That people tend to be religious is not adequately explained by the fact that
people are born into religious cultures. Religion doesn’t explain religion.

The origins and transmission of religious beliefs

Perhaps the most obvious source of potential conflict concerns ECSR’s account of the ultimate
origins of religion. Almost every advocate of the ECSR approach who believes the question of
religion’s origins can be answered, including Atran and Henrich (2010), Bering and Johnson (2005)
and Norenzayan (2013), traces the origins of religious beliefs to the emergence of certain proto-
religious ideas (especially concepts of supernatural agents), the appearance of which they take to
be inevitable once the proper mental ‘tool-kit’ had evolved. For Boyer (2002), this is the moment
‘when such representations could occur in people’s minds and exert enough fascination to be
painstakingly translated into material symbols’ (p. 373). Bering’s (2011) claim that ‘all but a hand-
ful of scholars in this area regard religion as an accidental by-product of our mental evolution’ (p.
6) still accurately characterises the field.
Over the last two decades, CSR has produced masses of empirical evidence regarding the spon-
taneous formation of beliefs in supernatural agents, how they are represented and processed by
individual minds after their acquisition, and those features of individual minds and religious con-
cepts that make the propagation of some concepts more likely than others (see Turner, 2014). All of
this evidence plays some part in supporting ECSR’s grandest claim – the ‘naturalness’ of religious
beliefs. According to Barrett (2007, p. 186), people are likely to invoke and believe supernatural
Turner 7

agentic explanations incorporating supernatural agents for various puzzling phenomena because
supernatural agent concepts readily generate inferences and explanations. Here, the normal func-
tioning of universal aspects of human cognitive systems in everyday human environments is pre-
sumed to be responsible for both the generation of novel supernatural agent concepts in the minds
of individual observers and the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli in terms consistent with extant
beliefs about supernatural agents.
CSR also offers an explanation of why not all supernatural agent concepts spontaneously gener-
ated by the cognitive system are equally likely to survive and subsequently spread throughout a
population. Theory in this area, which aims to explain why there is such remarkable convergence
between particular religious beliefs throughout the world, draws upon extensive psychological
research into content biases – predispositions towards forming, remembering and transmitting
mental representations with certain sorts of content. For example, extensive empirical support
exists for the idea that supernatural agent concepts, simply by virtue of their so-called ‘minimal
counterintuitiveness’ (they conform to the vast majority of intuitive beliefs about the world, but
violate a small number of them), are especially ‘attention-grabbing’ (J. L. Barrett, 2004). Neatly
summarising the whole process, Geertz and Markússon (2010) write, ‘religiosity (as belief in
supernatural agents) is an emergent property arising from the interplay of normal cognitive mecha-
nisms and the immediate natural and social environment (opaque causal processes ➜ ideas ➜
talking ➜ spread of supernatural concepts)’ (p. 156).
Many acknowledge that other elements of the dynamic, adaptive religious system (see Purzycki
et al., 2016), including certain ritualised behaviours, may predate the emergence of beliefs in and
about supernatural agents (see Alcorta & Sosis, 2005; Bellah, 2011; Peoples et al., 2016; Rossano,
2006), but the emergence of religion continues to be identified very strongly with the emergence
and transmission of particular sorts of belief. For most in the field, the appearance of religious
beliefs coincides with the end of biological evolution’s role in the emergence of religion and the
beginning of various processes driven by cultural evolution (see D. Johnson, 2015; Norenzayan,
2015). Kiper and Meier (2015) note, from this perspective, ‘it was religious belief that drastically
changed human environments: belief catalyzed ritual, ritual united communities, and united com-
munities engendered large-scale societies’ (p. 299). Not only is ECSR reasonably clear about what
constitutes the beginning of religion, then, it also clearly differentiates the non-religious or pre-
religious world from the world where religion has taken shape. Significantly, its identification of a
moment of religious creation is only possible because of its commitment to a particular concept of
religion – a concept to which Laidlaw and others object.
Not everyone agrees with this position. Alcorta and Sosis (2005), for example, in rejecting the
notion that religious beliefs are epiphenomenal by-products, argue that ‘supernatural agents of
religious belief systems not only engage, but also modify, evolved mental modules’ (p. 326). Their
modification through natural selection to meet ecological challenges, they suggest, constitutes evo-
lution. But even these notable dissenters do not disagree with the claim that evolved cognitive
adaptations, including perhaps ‘agency detection modules’, probably do give rise to ‘the human
ability to imagine a broad array of supernatural agents’ (p. 326).
ECSR may now incorporate much more than cognitive accounts of belief formation and develop-
ment, but its welcome embrace of theoretical and methodological pluralism unfortunately does
nothing to ease the humanities’ concern over particular discrete claims that appeal to notions of
universal, culturally unmediated psychological structures and processes. As far as the standard
ECSR account of the ultimate origins of religion is concerned, neither the actual generation of par-
ticular supernatural agent concepts nor many of the features those concepts acquire appear to be
influenced in any way by social or cultural processes, be they historical or contemporary. This dif-
fers starkly from the perspective of those humanists who contend that individual minds and their
8 Archive for the Psychology of Religion 00(0)

environmental perceptions are in part the products of historically and geographically contingent
sociocultural processes. For ECSR, the development of maturationally natural cognitive resources
does not depend upon the particular ordering of social relations that characterise particular societies,
particular rules governing the exchange of property or the division of labour, particular attitudes
towards deceased ancestors, or any of the other particular things humanists and social scientists
might have in mind when they speak about ‘society’ and ‘culture’. As far as humanists like Laidlaw
are concerned, it is a mistake to believe that concepts of gods and spirits are all simply idiosyncratic
forms of the same basic type of cognitive error. From this perspective, neither CSR’s understanding
of universal environmental stimuli nor the notion that the archetypal origins of particular religious
beliefs might lie in the culturally unmediated perceptions of individual minds is acceptable.
Importantly for our current concerns, the denial of even a marginal role for particular forms of cul-
ture in explaining the ultimate origins of some particular concepts of gods also denies the possibility
of an alternative, compatible, sociohistorical explanation. This suggests that in some places, at least,
ECSR will struggle to peacefully co-exist with humanistic approaches to the study of religion.
Although CSR theorists all admit the environment plays a central role in the formation of super-
natural agent concepts, the role of cultural traditions or social structures or processes in some aspects
of the production of religion is sometimes flatly denied. As Atran (2002), J. L. Barrett (2004) and
Geertz and Markússon (2010) all explain, the stimulus for the production of supernatural agent
concepts may be totally culturally untextured, and since its relevant features are universal, it has a
curiously atemporal character (cf. N. F. Barrett, 2010). Since the stimulus itself cannot be located in
a particular historical narrative, there is no sense that particular preceding events that are detached
from universal maturational processes play an important role in the individual’s initial interpretation
of the environment in terms of supernatural agency. Particular supernatural agent concepts might be
ideally suited to the filling of particular explanatory gaps in the immediate environment – a need to
explain the rustle in the bushes or the marks on the ground that look a bit like footprints, for example
– but this does not mean that the environment determines the resultant supernatural concept in any
meaningful way. Desert dwellers are unlikely to conjure up forest spirits (see Schloss et al., 2010),
not because they draw upon a complex, culturally developed understanding of deserts in order to
populate the sand dunes with appropriate spirits, but because a physical environment from which
trees are absent means that trees cannot provide the necessary stimulus for the generation of super-
natural agent concepts. Even if the production of particular kinds of agent concepts depends upon
particular environmental stimuli, the rules for the production of those concepts are functional adap-
tations of the individual cognitive system. ECSR does not necessarily deny the significance of cul-
tural influences upon the interpretation of the environment. But such a meaning-rich, complex,
socially structured environment is simply not required for the genesis of proto-religious beliefs,
either in the minds of contemporary individuals or in their distant evolutionary ancestors.
From the perspective of the humanities, this claim fails to recognise the sociohistorical con-
struction of both individual minds and their particular understandings of their environments.
Intertheoretical conflict does not arise simply because ECSR generally favours a concept of mind
that is naturally furnished with a particular set of cognitive tools, but specifically because of how
that concept is integrated into a causal naturalistic explanation of the ultimate origins of religious
belief. Those evolutionary accounts that identify the origins of beliefs in gods in the conceptual
by-products of the cognitive system offer precisely this kind of causal explanation – the supernatu-
ral agent concepts, which eventually become particular concepts of gods, begin life as the cultur-
ally unmediated responses to raw environmental stimuli to which the humanities object so strongly.
As far as the humanities are concerned, similar difficulties must afflict certain aspects of
ECSR’s account of the transmission of religious ideas and, consequently, its account of concep-
tual convergence in the world’s religions. Here, as already explained, the concept of minimal
Turner 9

counterintuitiveness plays a crucially important role, determining which ideas are most ‘atten-
tion-grabbing’ and therefore more likely to be successfully spread throughout a population. But
particular cultural traditions have no role to play in determining which ideas are minimally coun-
terintuitive. That is determined entirely by internal, maturationally natural cognitive processes. To
be deemed minimally counterintuitive, a concept needs to only include some unexpected feature
– ‘By departing systematically, but mildly, from established cognitive rules we use to understand
and organize information in our environment, they achieve greater memorability’ (Gervais et al.,
2011, p. 394). As Barrett (2007) observes, ‘whether or not a concept is counterintuitive in this
technical sense is largely or entirely independent of cultural context’ (p. 188). In other words,
culturally unmediated cognitive biases are responsible for the filtering out of most possible sorts
of supernatural concept, leaving only the ones that are easily transmitted. This helps explain, it is
hypothesised, why extant religions exhibit such striking similarities with one another – other pos-
sible religious forms can never really take off because they are not constituted by the kind of ideas
that the cognitive system is most hospitable towards.
Since the cognitive system’s filtering capacity is entirely independent of cultural context, the
possibility of a meaningful compatible account of the recurrence of certain features of religious
beliefs in terms of sociohistorically contingent factors appears explicitly to be ruled out. CSR’s
accounts of cognitive constraints upon religious transmission will not necessarily conflict with all
sociohistorical explanations of the differential success of particular concepts of gods or spirits. But
a causal explanation of the ubiquity of certain aspects of religious beliefs, constructed exclusively
in terms of maturationally natural cognitive tendencies or dispositions, leaves little room for alter-
native sociohistorical explanations. At worst, it simply denies both their relevance and their valid-
ity. From the perspective of ECSR, had the whole of human cultural history been completely
different, all extant religious beliefs, whatever specific form they took, would still share a common
set of features. Once more, then, intertheoretical incompatibility between CSR, the humanities and
the social sciences arises from the former’s preference for causal naturalistic explanations of cer-
tain features or aspects of religion, rather than from any particular model of cognition, the narrow-
ness of its concept of religion or any particular claims about maturational naturalness.
To be absolutely clear, the possibility that ECSR’s account of the origins of religion is unac-
ceptable to the humanities does not mean that humanists must treat the entire field with equal
suspicion. Much of this work is unproblematic. For example, research into how people process
information about supernatural and non-supernatural agents, why particular concepts flourish or
the evolutionary drivers of the cognitive faculties involved in religious cognition seem unlikely to
cause any friction. These are notions that may only be of limited interest to some humanists and
social scientists, but it raises few, if any, challenges for them. They might perhaps argue about
whether religion can be properly described purely in such narrow psychological terms, but that is
not really what ECSR is trying to achieve in its account of supernatural agent representation, which
is simply an explanation of why supernatural agents often (if not quite always) exhibit certain
shared characteristics. Humanists might also argue that the particular historical forms of gods or
spirits cannot be explained by the identification of any number of cognitive predispositions. But,
again, that is not what ECSR’s many and varied discussions of supernatural agency are trying to
achieve. It does not deny that sociocultural reality plays as important a role in the shaping of indi-
vidual cognition as cognition plays in the shaping of particular beliefs and practices. CSR has
always been clear on this matter. Regardless of its intentions, however, my point here has been that,
in practice, ECSR does squeeze out humanistic accounts at certain critically important points in its
description of religion’s historical emergence and development.
10 Archive for the Psychology of Religion 00(0)

ECSR and prosociality

Away from questions about the origins and transmission of religious beliefs, other aspects of
ECSR’s central narrative appear equally vulnerable to the same sort of humanistic critique.
Although research into the naturalness of supernatural agent concepts dominated the early days of
ECSR, the larger goal of understanding the resilience and ubiquity of religious belief and behav-
iours rapidly set cognitive science to work in explaining religion’s role in social bonding and the
evolution of the sort of prosocial behaviour that is necessary if people are to live together in large
groups. Despite minor differences of opinion in this area, theorists share very similar ideas about
exactly what needs to be explained, and although a range of different explanations of how religion
fulfils its social bonding functions have been proposed, there is clear theoretical convergence upon
a few central themes. Arguably, the most important of these is constituted by research into theories
of supernatural monitoring (or surveillance), and at the heart of this research, I will suggest, is a
claim about the supposed naturalness of fear of supernatural punishment that humanists such as
Laidlaw will find difficult to embrace.
A primary goal of ECSR has been to understand how religion contributes to group stability and
solidarity primarily through (a) the encouragement and reinforcement of cooperative behaviour
and (b) the effective control of freeriders. Following earlier work in human and non-human evo-
lutionary studies of social bonding, most of the recent evolutionary studies of religion are focused
on explaining these two things. If individuals do not cooperate with one another, either because
they are incentivised to act selfishly or they are unable to trust other members of the group, and/
or if a significant number of individuals are able to reap the benefits of group-living without pay-
ing the associated costs, the kind of coordinated action that gives groups such significant survival
advantages is impossible. Consequently, religion’s perceived value to historical and contempo-
rary communities is often quantified according to the extent to which it helps them achieve these
goals (see Shariff et al. 2009). Nobody is suggesting that religion is the only sociocultural devel-
opment to have played a pivotal role in galvanising social solidarity – there is plenty of evidence
of people living in groups before the advent of recognisably religious beliefs or practices, and
plenty more regarding the importance to sociality of, for example, the establishment of political
systems, social hierarchies and institutions – but it may be among the most important (see, for
example, Watts et al. 2015).
At the heart of Norenzayan et al.’s (2016) theoretical synthesis is the suggestion that religion
effectively promotes prosocial behaviour through its provision of supernatural entities that con-
stantly monitor the behaviour (and sometimes the private mental states) of individuals and punish
those that break the rules, whatever those rules are deemed to be by particular communities. The
increased cooperation among individuals that results from this pervasive fear controls social devi-
ance and improves cooperation between individuals, thereby enhancing social stability and pros-
perity relative to other communities. This concern with supernatural monitoring has taken two
main forms – the Supernatural Punishment Hypothesis (SPH; a term coined by D. Johnson &
Krüger, 2004 and subsequently developed by D. Johnson & Bering, 2006, and Bering, 2011) and
the Big Gods theory (pioneered by Norenzayan, 2013).
Although important differences still exist between the most popular accounts of supernatural
monitoring (see Purzycki 2013; Norenzayan et al., 2016; Schloss & Murray, 2011), all are primar-
ily concerned with the significance of belief in supernatural punishment and how those beliefs
impact cooperative behaviour. As far as the Big Gods hypothesis is concerned, Norenzayan et al.
(2016) are clear that particular beliefs in Moralising High Gods are the products of cultural group
selectionary pressures in the face of ever-expanding population sizes. As such beliefs became more
common, they suggest, religion became more closely associated with morality, and perceived
Turner 11

supernatural punishments became ‘increasingly focused on violations of group beneficial norms’

(Norenzayan et al., 2016, p. 7). D. Johnson (2015), who believes the broader scope of the SPH
gives it a significant theoretical advantage over the Big Gods theory (p. 296), does not disagree, but
focuses to a greater extent upon the origins of belief in supernatural monitoring, arguing that natu-
ral selection ‘may have favoured epigenetic predispositions receptive to religious norms of behav-
iour that promoted cooperation’ (D. Johnson & Krüger, 2004, p. 169).
Both acknowledge that fear of supernatural punishment exploits a range of universal cognitive
mechanisms, even if they agree that cultural forces are responsible for the shaping of particular
beliefs about the capacities and activities of particular gods or spirits and about the moral order in
general. D. Johnson and Bering (2006) note, ‘supernatural punishment can only be an effective
deterrent insofar as individuals are capable of reasoning that negative life events are caused by
supernatural agents who have explicit reasons for bringing about such events’ (p. 225). The answer
to the question of why people ultimately come to hold such beliefs about supernatural agents, how-
ever, is not rooted in cultural tradition: ‘We appear to have an inherent cognitive tendency to search
for reason and intentionality in life events, and to attribute positive and negative outcomes to
supernatural agency’ (p. 225). Despite their focus on cultural group selection, Norenzayan et al.
(2016) offer a broadly similar sort of argument, suggesting that certain cognitive ‘tendencies’
(which are clearly not supposed to be culturally acquired) have been ‘drafted by cultural evolution
in more recent millennia to underpin particular supernatural beliefs, such as an afterlife contingent
on proper behavior in this life’ (p. 4).
As with research into the origins and transmission of supernatural agent concepts, research on
the role played by fear of supernatural monitoring in the promotion of social cooperation is inex-
tricably tied to the evolution of the cognitive system. Fear of supernatural punishment is not itself
presumed to be strictly innate, inasmuch as people are not born with an innate predisposition
towards being afraid of supernatural agents, but it does constitute a more or less inevitable cogni-
tive and behavioural product of certain universal cognitive mechanisms functioning independently
of historically contingent sociocultural currents and traditions in response to universal environ-
mental triggers. Maturationally natural cognitive attributes explain not just the origins of concepts
of gods and spirits, but why those concepts seem to have so much in common all over the world
and throughout history.
At the same time, ECSR is supposed to help explain why other religious forms, specifically
those that do not incorporate morally concerned, vengeful supernatural agents, are relatively
uncommon. It is because societies where fear of supernatural punishment is ubiquitous will be
more cooperative and therefore more successful than societies where it is absent. Those societies
where supernatural monitoring never really got going, if such societies ever existed, have been
outcompeted by the societies we see in the world today. Arguing that ancient hominids would have
accrued fitness advantages for selfish behavioural strategies that ceased to be effective once the
evolution of the cognitive system (specifically the ‘intentionality system’) permitted more efficient
social monitoring within a group, later hominids would have benefited from a predisposition for
resisting selfish urges, thereby preempting the possibility of serious punishment for defection from
social norms. Fearing supernatural punishment, they argue, may have given some individuals a
selective edge in this regard: ‘God-fearing people may, therefore, have had a selective advantage
over non-believers because the latter’s more indiscriminately selfish behaviour carried a higher
risk of real-world vengeance by the community’ (D. Johnson & Bering, 2006, p. 226).
Once again, then, it is presumed that certain natural cognitive constraints can explain the prolif-
eration, if not the particular form, of certain sorts of religious beliefs and the convergence of belief
systems over time. The prevalence of morally concerned deities (whether big or relatively small)
is not to be explained only via the detailed analysis of historically and geographically contingent
12 Archive for the Psychology of Religion 00(0)

sociocultural processes, but also through culturally unmediated cognitive predispositions towards
attributing ‘positive and negative outcomes to supernatural agency’ (D. Johnson & Bering, 2006,
p. 225). Effectively, universal cognitive predispositions again appear to take on a filtering role,
preventing those beliefs that do not inspire fear of supernatural punishment from entering wide-
spread circulation. The religious beliefs we actually see in the world today exhibit certain recurrent
features because they are essential to their historical survival, features that are themselves explained
by cognitive predispositions that are functionally independent from sociocultural institutions,
structures and processes. Whereas it might be possible for individuals to consciously develop other
sorts of beliefs, they never actually become religious beliefs, in the sense of being widely distrib-
uted, because they confer no selective advantages upon the population.
This is still not to say that such accounts will necessarily conflict with sociohistorical explana-
tions of why one particular religion incorporating a particular concept of god succeeded, while
another incorporating a different concept of god failed. But a causal explanation of the pancultural
convergence of religious beliefs in terms of maturationally natural and universal cognitive struc-
tures and processes raises insurmountable problems for humanistic approaches where the useful-
ness and perhaps the validity of their explanations are denied. Once more, this does not mean that
the whole of ECSR, including much of the research on supernatural punishment, is incompatible
with alternative humanistic approaches emphasising the social construction of all aspects of reli-
gion. The majority of what ECSR has to say will be utterly uncontroversial for the humanities and
social sciences. There is no systemic theoretical incompatibility. My aim has been only to identify
some of those particular critical junctures in the consensus ECSR narrative where interdisciplinary
conflict seems unavoidable in the absence of further theoretical development. As with theories of
the emergence and transmission of supernatural agent concepts, intertheoretical incompatibility
between ECSR and the humanities arises from ECSR’s preference for causal naturalistic explana-
tions of certain phenomena, not its model of mind, the narrowness of its concept of religion or its
general ideas about maturational naturalness.

Endorphins, religious ritual and social bonding

The possibility that ECSR, as it currently stands, presents certain problems for humanists does not
mean that the evolutionary study of religion as a whole must automatically be seen as similarly
problematic. Not all evolutionary accounts of religion’s origins and social bonding functions make
such strong naturalistic causal claims. Alongside what might be considered ECSR’s core explana-
tions of religion’s role in encouraging prosocial behaviour is a less well-developed literature
grounded in a relatively small number of studies exploring the remarkable positive effects that
synchronised group performances of physically demanding actions have been shown to have on
prosociality and social bonding (e.g. Fischer et al., 2013; Lang et al., 2017; Wiltermuth & Heath,
2009). In the remainder of this article, my aim is to explain how recent research into the psychop-
harmacological basis of social bonding provides a compelling explanation of the mechanisms
behind these phenomena. An alternative evolutionary account of religion grounded in this research
is compatible with many of the premises of ECSR, and yet not as vulnerable to the humanistic
critique of ECSR set out above. Consequently, I will suggest, an endorphins-centred approach to
religion and social bonding has the potential to help bridge the gap between ECSR and more tradi-
tional humanistic accounts of religion.
Central to understanding the psychopharmacological mechanism underlying religion’s social
bonding function is the Brain Opioid Theory of Social Attachment (BOTSA) (Dunbar & Shultz,
2010; Machin & Dunbar, 2011). According to a BOTSA-based approach to sociality, feelings of
bondedness arise naturally as the products of psychopharmacological responses to certain sorts of
Turner 13

action. Non-human primate studies reveal physical touching to be the most important means by
which endorphins-based social bonding is accomplished (Keverne et al., 1989; Lehmann et al.
2007; Machin & Dunbar, 2011; Merker 2000), but human beings can precipitate endorphin produc-
tion in all sorts of different ways (Kulcsar et al. 1987; Dunbar, 2014; Dunbar & Shultz, 2010;
Machin & Dunbar, 2011). These include, but are not restricted to, the synchronised production of
rhythmic music, laughter, singing, dancing and chanting (see Dezeache and Dunbar 2012; Tarr
et al., 2014, 2016; Weinstein et al., 2016). In fact, a wide range of physically exertive activities
stimulate the endorphin system much more effectively when they are performed in synchrony than
when they are performed in isolation or asynchronously (see Cohen et al., 2014; Hove & Risen,
2009; Lakens & Stel, 2011; Páez et al., 2015; Pearce et al., 2015; Reddish et al., 2014; Tarr et al.,
2015; Weinstein et al., 2016).
The potential relevance of this body of research to the evolutionary study of religion seems
plain. It suggests that ritual itself can help explain the social bonding functions of religion without
appealing to the notion of culturally unmediated cognitive predispositions to explain pancultural
religious regularities. From this perspective, religious rituals develop out of truly ancient behav-
iours evolved for the purpose of bonding small groups together in an extremely time-efficient
manner. That rituals do frequently play this role is not an entirely new idea, of course, but under-
standing this function of ritual in terms of the effects of elevated endorphin production has only
quite recently begun to take hold (see Dunbar, 2013; Lang et al., 2017). Early pioneering work by
Henry (1982), Jilek (1982), Kane (1982) and Prince (1982) all acknowledge the link between ritual
trance dancing (and often also singing or chanting accompanied by intensive rhythmic drumming
or other musical instruments) and the stimulation of the endorphin system, but their focus is mostly
upon altered states of consciousness and the increased ability to withstand pain and fatigue, which,
they argue, accompany the production of endorphins, rather than the effects of endorphins them-
selves upon social bonding, or their potential role in the cultural evolution of religion. Frecska and
Kulcsar (1989) also described the role of endorphins in trance dancing and the induction of altered
states of consciousness. In community healing rituals, as a result of what they call ‘the opioid way
of social bonding’, they suggest ritual performance scaffolds a complex social dynamic that has a
profound effect upon group identity. Winkelman (2002a, 2002b, 2002c) also describes how the
endorphin system is stimulated through energetic movement and accompanying rhythmic music,
singing and chanting in Shamanic healing rituals, grounding the evolution of these behaviours
squarely in natural selection processes via a discussion of non-human primate behaviour. Like
Frecska and Kulscar, Winkelman recognises that trance dancing both stimulates the endorphin
system and promotes social cohesion, but is focused more upon the cognitive dimension of social
cohesion than the emotional dimension that is Dunbar’s (2013) primary concern.
BOTSA’s explicit concern with the emotional basis of social bonding does not represent a
totally unique direction in the field of the evolution of religion, either. But where the emotional
content of particular rituals or the notion of emotional arousal does appear in the ECSR literature,
it is usually only loosely connected to discussions of the underlying mechanisms of social bonding.
For Whitehouse (2002, 2004), imagistic and doctrinal modes of religion are distinguished partly by
a difference in emotional content related to the memorability and cohesion of religious behaviours
and experiences. For Xygalatas (2008) and others, on the other hand, emotional arousal often
accompanies the painful rituals that are best equipped to act as costly signals of commitment to the
group. Emotion is also supposed to play an essential role in the memorability of religious beliefs
and behaviours (see Atran, 2002; J. L. Barrett, 2004), in the effective transmission of beliefs (see
Lawson & McCauley, 1990) and in the reinforcement and validation of beliefs (see Atran, 2002).
In each of these cases, the emotional content of a belief or practice is considered salient to religious
14 Archive for the Psychology of Religion 00(0)

cognition in some sense, but discussion of the emotional basis of the evolution of sociality itself is
much less common.
In stark contrast, BOTSA makes the establishment of emotional bonds central to the evolution
of human (and primate) sociality. Sociality is here conceived as a two-step process (see also Dunbar
& Shultz, 2017), the first of which is the facilitation of group-living as a defence against predation
and invasion. Cooperation on everyday tasks involving complex cognitive activity, when systems
to control numbers of freeriders can develop, comes second. The role of the endogenous opioid
system (EOS) in this process is simply to establish commitment to the group irrespective of the
individual costs associated with the stresses of group-living. It involves the establishment of trust
through the development of emotional forms of attachment and can happen on a large scale when
a group sings, dances or plays music together. Endorphin-stimulating, coordinated religious rituals
not only increase trust (and perhaps, thereby, facilitate cooperative behaviour) between large num-
bers of people simultaneously, they also increase interpersonal warmth (Depue & Morrone-
Strupinsky, 2005) and relieve ‘social pain’ (Eisenberger, 2015), reducing social friction and
defusing arguments. In short, they make people more tolerant towards one another. Hence, it is the
emotional level which, Dunbar (2013) supposes, is the level at which religious ritual bonds people
together. Here, trust is the basis of commitment to the others of the group. It is the foundation rather
than the end result of coordinated cooperative behaviour (also see Sutcliffe et al. 2012). It is seen
as an involuntary consequence of psychopharmacological processes triggered by participation in
communal ritual, not as the product of complex cognitive accounting processes. That is not to say
that both methods of establishing trust may not be important to group bonding processes, but the
significant differences between an endorphins-centred approach to social bonding and that epito-
mised by ECSR reinforce the notion that there is more to understanding group bonding than the
study of prosocial behaviour in economic games can, on its own, reveal.
This approach does not, however, deny the significance of any of the processes that form the
core of contemporary ECSR. As we have already noted, there is no real reason to choose between
them since the psychopharmacological and cognitive mechanisms underlying social bonding
appear to act in parallel (see Dunbar, 2010, 2012; Dunbar & Shultz, 2010). According to this view,
research into brain opioids and sociality significantly deepens rather than radically transforms
understanding of how religious rituals establish intra-group trust.
From a BOTSA-centred perspective, religion’s role in social bonding is tied to cognitive evolu-
tion in a much looser sense than in ECSR. Such remarkable behavioural developments as synchro-
nised singing and dancing are clearly underpinned by crucial cognitive evolutionary developments
(especially the capacities for theory of mind and higher order mentalising) in the absence of which
complex coordinated action among the members of a group is much more difficult, and perhaps
impossible (see Brüne & Brüne-Cohrs, 2006; Dunbar, 2008, 2014; Paal & Bereczkei, 2007). But
according to the BOTSA-centred approach, the social bonding functions of religion are rooted first
and foremost in the capacity of rituals to stimulate the endorphin system rather than in the uncon-
scious operation of discrete cognitive tools under the constraints of maturationally natural cogni-
tive predispositions shaped by natural selection deep in human prehistory. This decoupling of
religion’s social bonding functions from specifically cognitive capacities and processes also effec-
tively drives a wedge between the evolution of religion and the evolution of the cognitive system.
Here, cognitive evolution is not entirely unrelated to the evolution of religion, nor does it exert the
same sort of influence upon the formation and development of religious beliefs and behaviours as
is supposed by advocates of the consensus ECSR approach.
If social bonding is achieved primarily through the emotional bonds established by the perfor-
mance of religious ritual rather than, for example, through a maturationally natural tendency to
ascribe particular characteristics to supernatural agent concepts that lead inevitably to the
Turner 15

development of fear of supernatural punishment, then it is difficult to see how we might give a
causal naturalistic evolutionary explanation for any features of religious beliefs or behaviours that
obviates the need for, or even precludes the possibility of, further explication in terms of histori-
cally contingent social factors. From a BOTSA-centred perspective, neither the endorphin system
nor ubiquitous endorphin-stimulating, evolutionarily adaptive behaviours – singing, dancing,
rhythmic music production and chanting, for example – play the causal explanatory roles played
by cognitive capacities in ECSR. Both the endorphin system and many of the behaviours that trig-
ger it so effectively may predate religion by a very long time, but could not be said to lead inevi-
tably to religion in the way that ECSR supposes the evolution of certain cognitive capacities leads
inevitably to the production of supernatural agent concepts. It does not tie the very existence of
religion to natural capacities of any sort. BOTSA helps to explain how religion fulfils its social
bonding functions, but these functions are totally unrelated to either the formation of religious
belief systems or, crucially, to the actual contents of those systems. A BOTSA-centred approach
provides an elegant evolutionary account of why religion, whenever and wherever it emerges,
might exploit pre-existing bonding mechanisms with ruthless efficiency by incorporating certain
sorts of ritualised synchronous behaviours. But religious rituals are still just rituals that have
acquired a religious significance, not the products of the endorphin system.

Endorphins, trance states and the emergence of proto-religious

ideas
Although a BOTSA-centred account of religion and social bonding is primarily concerned with
explaining how religion facilitates sociality, and does not itself make any particular claims about
the ultimate origins of religion, this does not mean that we must completely abandon the idea that
evolutionary theory can help explain the earliest religious forms of religion. To the contrary, it
remains compatible with many possible such accounts. Dunbar himself describes one particular
account of the potential origins of some proto-religious ideas, which will not feel entirely unfamil-
iar to anthropologists of religion and which humanists such as Laidlaw are unlikely to object to.
For Dunbar and others, including Winkelman (2002a, 2002b, 2002c) and Rossano (2006, 2008),
research into endorphins and social bonding constitutes a sufficiently solid platform upon which to
construct an alternative account of the origins of some proto-religious concepts and the gradual
historical transformation of proto-religious rituals into recognisably religious rituals.
On the basis of studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers, Dunbar (2013; this issue) suggests
that the very earliest religious practices developed from earlier evolutionary adaptive rituals that
facilitated social bonding. The notion that ritual is much older than religious belief in a position has
many sympathisers in the history of anthropology, from Emile Durkheim to Merlin Donald (1991).
In Bellah’s (2011, p. 135) words, ‘Ritual clearly precedes myth’, even if it is also commonly
acknowledged that ‘ritual as we know it is deeply embedded in myth, and is usually unintelligible
without it’ (Bellah, 2010, p. 136). Early religions that incorporated such adaptive rituals, Dunbar
suggests, are likely to have involved the induction of trance states through energetic dancing and
chanting, where people encountered spirits of ancestors, totemic animals and good and bad beings
of various non-earthly kinds. These rituals acquired a quasi-religious character as they were spon-
taneously interpreted by their performers (also see Rock & Krippner, 2011). The earliest quasi-
religious narratives developed directly out of ritual experiences and prepared the ground for the
further development of more complex systems of religious rituals and beliefs that came into play
during the Neolithic (Dunbar, 2013).
Given the obvious difficulties with obtaining reliable information about the structure and content
of ancient rituals, any theory of how specifically religious rituals emerged from everyday
16 Archive for the Psychology of Religion 00(0)

pre-religious group behaviours necessarily involves a degree of speculation. As Peoples et al. (2016)
acknowledge, although it is very likely that ‘archaic hominids [like the Neanderthals] would have
exhibited ritualistic behaviour in some form’, it is also true that ‘evidence for nascent religiosity
remains difficult to infer from the archaeological record’ (p. 263). Dunbar’s tentative account is,
however, very much in line with studies of contemporary shamanic-like religious practices where
trance states are linked directly to both endorphin production and altered states of consciousness,
although the final crucial step of linking endorphin production to social bonding through ritual per-
formance is rarely taken (see Frecska & Kulcsar, 1989; Jilek, 1982; Rossano, 2006, 2007; Winkelman,
2002a, 2002b, 2002c, 2011). It must be noted, however, that support for the idea that shamanic ritu-
als coincide with the emergence of the earliest religious beliefs is not unequivocal (see Peoples
et al., 2016), and there can, after all, be no concrete archaeological evidence connecting the earliest
religious rituals and beliefs directly to trance dancing and altered states of consciousness, even if
reports of trance dances performed by modern hunter-gatherer societies sharing certain common
characteristics including ‘“magical flight” or “soul journey,” that are similar to contemporary reports
of “out-of-body experiences,” “astral projection,” and other reports of traveling to a spirit world’
(Rock & Krippner, 2011, p. 62) are quite common. With that qualification in mind, however, it is
perhaps also worth drawing attention to the fact that the possibility of concrete archaeological evi-
dence causally linking the earliest religious beliefs directly to the evolution of particular cognitive
capacities is similarly fanciful. Both Dunbar’s account of the evolution of the physiological, cogni-
tive and behavioural capacities necessary for the emergence of religion in the manner he describes
and the mainstream ECSR account of the cognitive evolution underpinning religion are equally well
supported by extant archaeological evidence (see Atran, 2002; Dunbar, 2013, 2014, 2017;
Norenzayan, 2013). For Dunbar, of course, who emphasises the roles of both emotional and cogni-
tive mechanisms underlying social bonding, this is only to be expected.
Clearly, this account of the origins of proto-religious beliefs and rituals differs markedly from
the standard ECSR account. While it is perfectly compatible with the notion that some religious
ideas, including beliefs in gods or supernatural beings and concepts of supernatural punishment,
only became possible once human beings had evolved the appropriate cognitive machinery, it dif-
fers starkly from those accounts based on CSR in several ways. It does not, for example, link reli-
gion’s capacity for social bonding to the emergence of supernatural agent concepts. Nor does it
presume that the earliest religious ideas were necessarily a ‘cultural by-product of a suite of psy-
chological tendencies evolved in the Pleistocene for other purposes, such as detecting and inferring
the content of other minds and sensitivity to one’s prosocial reputation in the group’ (Norenzayan
& Shariff, 2008, p. 58). Some ‘religious content’ may begin this way, but, according to the BOTSA-
centred approach, not necessarily all.
But are the obvious differences with ECSR relevant as far as countering Laidlaw’s and others’
critiques of CSR are concerned? And does this account to do anything to help bridge the gap with
the humanities and social sciences? Certainly, the BOTSA-centred account does not preclude the
possibility that the particular religious (or proto-religious) ideas and concepts that emerge from
trance states are as much the products of historically, culturally and geographically contingent
concerns and traditions as they are the product of anything inherent to the individual cognitive
system or universal environmental features. Trance states may be caused by the over-stimulation
of the endorphin system through vigorous physical activity, but that does not mean the endorphin
system or the cognitive system might be considered causes of, or constraints upon, any particular
religious concepts that might emerge. Religious beliefs are not limited in shape or form, or other-
wise carefully filtered according to predetermined credibility criteria by the maturationally natural
cognitive system. Nor do maturationally natural (which is also to say culturally independent)
capacities have the final say on which beliefs will succeed or fail. Rock and Krippner (2011) may
Turner 17

note that trance states appear to exhibit certain recurrent features, including spirit guides and other
non-earthly entities, but they do not go so far as to ground this observation in any innate psycho-
logical processes. In short, whereas we might say with some confidence that certain behaviours
have evolved to exploit the endorphin system’s social bonding functions, and this system might be
strongly implicated in the production of proto-religious ideas in human prehistory, that is quite dif-
ferent to the claim that the earliest religious ideas can be considered the by-products of culturally
unmediated cognitive structures and processes. The humanities will find little to object to here.
The BOTSA-centred approach is likely to be treated sympathetically by humanists for other
reasons, too. Perhaps most importantly, it is ambiguous regarding the question of what really con-
stitutes the origins of religion. Since there is assumed to be a continuity between early human (and
even primate) social bonding behaviours and modern explicitly religious rituals, and since the
social bonding functions of religious rituals are rooted in their capacity to establish and maintain
emotional forms of attachment between members of a group, there is never a discernible moment
where one might say that religion has officially begun and no discernible moment where religion
begins to play a radically new role in social bonding. In fact, this approach is not even committed
to any particular concept or definition of religion, since the mechanisms it describes are by no
means exclusive to religion in the way that concepts of gods or supernatural monitoring are exclu-
sive to, and therefore sometimes taken to be definitive of, religion. Rather, a BOTSA-centred
approach to religion and sociality, by explaining the evolutionary functions of certain endorphin-
stimulating activities, provides a credible account of the behavioural resources underlying proto-
religious ritual performance for the purpose of bonding of small communities. Here, the question
of the origins of religion is really a question about the origins of a particular sort of communal
practice, which clearly do not come into the world fully formed, not a question about the emer-
gence of individual beliefs (also see Geertz, 2014) or what Peoples et al. (2016) refer to as ‘traits
of religion’ (p. 274). Shamanic practices of the sort Dunbar focuses upon merely represent the
earliest example of religion performing the functions that it is known to perform in every single
society, from ancient hunter-gatherer groups to the modern day. This is certainly not to say that the
question of where religious beliefs in gods and spirits come from is no longer of interest, but the
decoupling of the evolution of religion’s social bonding functions from cognitive evolution, spe-
cifically, makes the question of the origins of belief less central to the major aims of an evolution-
ary account of religion, including the explanation of religion’s recurrent features and the differential
success of some religions over others. Indeed, we might even see the emotional bonding processes
enabled by synchronous energetic proto-religious rituals as the very things that enable the histori-
cal development of complex religious belief systems by holding a given community together in
such a way that particular traditions and beliefs are able to coalesce from individual trance experi-
ences and spread among the group (also see Marshall 2002).

Conclusion
I have argued that the peaceful co-existence of ECSR with humanistic and social scientific accounts
of religion depends upon the former, leaving space for the latter in their respective explanations of
various aspects of religion. In practice, this does not always occur. As far as the origins of beliefs
in gods are concerned, ECSR theorists commonly embrace causal naturalistic explanations which
seem to preclude alternative explanations in terms of distinctive historically contingent social and
cultural features of the particular societies in which individuals develop. Similarly, ECSR’s attempt
to explain the cross-cultural conceptual convergence and social bonding functions of the world’s
religions in such a way that crucial features of religious beliefs and behaviours are determined by
18 Archive for the Psychology of Religion 00(0)

evolved, maturationally natural and culturally unmediated cognitive capacities leaves no space for
sociohistorical accounts to play a complementary role.
However, the evolutionary study of religion is currently characterised by a newfound willing-
ness to embrace a broad variety of theory in explaining issues that are too complex and diverse for
any single account to capture. I have proposed that the evolutionary study of religion can be bol-
stered by research into the role of the EOS in social bonding, as described by BOTSA. This
approach, I have suggested, has the capacity to extend and deepen current thinking about the role
of ritual in religion’s social bonding functions while remaining compatible with other major themes
in the field. This analysis is firmly in the spirit of those broad integrative approaches, epitomised
by Norenzayan and colleagues, which have come to dominate the current theoretical landscape.
The aim has not been to discredit ECSR, nor to argue for the inherent superiority of one evolution-
ary approach to religion over another, but to emphasise the importance of a crucial psychopharma-
cological bonding mechanism in understanding religion’s evolutionary history.
As far as bridging the gap between the contemporary evolutionary study of religion and more
traditional humanistic approaches is concerned, BOTSA’s chief virtue is its dissociation of reli-
gion’s social bonding functions from belief in gods, a mechanistic view of cognition and presump-
tions about natural cognitive processes and predispositions, which appear to close the door on
complementary humanistic modes of explanation. From this perspective, neither religious beliefs
nor religious rituals need to necessarily be understood as the products of culturally unmediated,
maturationally natural cognitive capacities selected over the course of evolutionary history for
their ability to promote prosocial behaviour and effectively control freerider numbers in human
societies. The BOTSA-centred approach does not preclude the possibility that such capacities play
a role in establishing religion’s social bonding functions, but the provision of a parallel mechanism
concerned with emotional forms of attachment resulting from the stimulation of the endorphin
system suggests that such cognitive capacities might not play the primary role in social bonding as
advocates of ECSR have tended to assume. This approach separates the issues of sociality and
prosociality, arguing that group bonding is a two-step process that begins with the formation of
emotional ties. Focusing on the formation of emotional attachment as the primary mode of social
bonding obviates the need for a causal naturalistic explanation of religion’s bonding function
grounded in the origins of beliefs in gods, spirits or other supernatural agents. At the same time, the
BOTSA-centred approach provides a novel explanation of why rituals so frequently exhibit certain
structural features, including synchronised movement, singing, chanting and the production of
rhythmic music (and, in some cases, emotionally arousing stories). It certainly explains the preva-
lence of these ritual features more parsimoniously than any other established account of the evolu-
tion of religion. However, this does not entail the conclusion either that all rituals will include these
features or that religions will necessarily incorporate rituals that maximise the efficient production
of endorphins. BOTSA does not comprehensively explain why rituals take the forms they do. It
merely explains the evolutionary origins of a behavioural resource for social bonding that religion
seems likely to have exploited.
A BOTSA-centred approach to the evolution of religion such as Dunbar’s similarly obviates the
need for an evolutionary account of the origins of religion grounded in universal, culturally unme-
diated cognitive capacities and leaves the door ajar for humanistic modes of analysis to comple-
ment evolutionary explanations of the emergence and significance of religious ideas. Again, this is
a consequence of decoupling the evolution of religion from the evolution of the cognitive system
by grounding its social bonding functions in particular features of religious ritual rather than reli-
gious beliefs. According to the account outlined above, the establishment of religious beliefs may
even be seen as a product of social bonding processes rather than a cause. We must acknowledge,
however, that considerable work still needs to be done in verifying this account. Although it
Turner 19

receives considerable support from many quarters, particularly the research into social bonding
and the endorphin system, as well as contemporary research into shamanism and shamanic-like
religion, crucial issues concerning the role played by the specifically religious content of social
bonding rituals are still to be addressed. For example, whether the nature and type of a communi-
ty’s beliefs, particularly beliefs in transcendent deities and/or beliefs about supernatural punish-
ment or reward, have an impact upon the efficiency of religious ritual bonding or whether
specifically religious rituals typically exhibit certain performance-related features that enhance the
effects of the endorphin system remains an open question.
So, the answer to the question of whether the approach outlined here helps bridge the gap
between the evolutionary study of religion and the humanistic study of religion is unequivocally
affirmative. Happily, it achieves this goal without setting itself in conflict with the consensus view
of the evolution of religion as represented by the current state of ECSR. Laidlaw and others may
still complain that the study of religion’s role in social bonding in terms of psychopharmacological
mechanisms as opposed to the cognitive mechanisms of ECSR remains largely uninteresting to the
humanities, but it would seem, at least, to provide them with a less problematic evolutionary expla-
nation. The key to this harmonious state is not the outright rejection of ECSR’s ideas about the role
of maturationally natural cognitive capacities in the evolution of religion, but rather the provision
of viable alternative explanations of religion that do not substitute causal naturalistic and universal
explanations of religious belief and behaviour for humanistic interpretations of particular religious
traditions in terms of historically contingent phenomena.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publica-
tion of this article: The research for this article was undertaken as part of a larger project, ‘Religion and the
Social Brain’, funded by a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust, awarded to ISSR (TRT0153).

ORCID iD
Léon Turner https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7586-1161

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