Manvir Singh
Biographic Data
| ID | 3693694 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Manvir Singh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Manvir |
| FAMILY NAME | Singh |
| SIGNATURE | SINGH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6026-947X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Why I Use the Term ‘Shamanism’ and So Should You
I am grateful to Bubandt, Fonneland, Remme, and Wright for their thoughtful and often generous engagement with my book (Singh 2025). In service of clarification and rigorous debate, this response f...
Supernatural beliefs encode knowledge about malaria but inhibit uptake of biomedical interventions among Siberut Mentawai
To what extent do supernatural beliefs encode medical and ecological knowledge? Here, we investigate the similarity between biomedical understandings of malaria and the spirit illness kisei (contact with spirits) through interviews with Mentawai individuals in southern Siberut, Indonesia ( n = 90). We find that kisei is the most culturally salient explanation for general fever and, contrary to some other mystically caused illnesses (e.g., moralis…
The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, A Global Corpus of Vocal Music
A comprehensive cognitive science requires broad sampling of human behavior to justify general inferences about the mind. For example, the field of psycholinguistics relies on a rich history of comparative study, with many available resources that systematically document many languages. Surprisingly, despite a longstanding interest in questions of universality and diversity, the psychology of music has few such resources. Here, we report the Expa…
Strategy and experience required: Social learning cannot explain the varieties of supernatural belief
The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories
Why is there so much diversity in fictional plots? Why are some fictional stories more popular in certain countries or during specific historical periods? In this paper, we propose an evolutionary psychological framework to address these questions. Fictional stories trigger a range of evolved psychological mechanisms—such as finding mates (romance fiction), exploring the world (adventure fiction), or avoiding threats (horror fiction). While these…
Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing
Why do humans believe in moralizing gods? Leading accounts argue that these beliefs evolved because they help societies grow and promote group cooperation. Yet recent evidence suggests that beliefs in moralizing gods are not limited to large societies and might not have strong effects on cooperation. Here, we propose that prosocial religions, including beliefs in moralizing gods, develop because individuals shape supernatural beliefs to achieve t…
Punitive justice serves to restore reciprocal cooperation in three small-scale societies
Acute Subjective Effects of Psychedelics within and Beyond Weird Contexts
Reports of psychedelic experiences may contain similarities and differences across cultural contexts, but most current characterizations and quantifications of psychedelic experiences come from Western medical and naturalistic settings. In this article, we begin with a brief history of the diversity of psychedelic use in non-Western settings. We then compare and contrast accounts of psychedelic experiences within and beyond Western, educated, ind…
Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model
Subjective selection and the evolution of complex culture
Why is culture the way it is? Here I argue that a major force shaping culture is subjective (cultural) selection , or the selective retention of cultural variants that people subjectively perceive as satisfying their goals. I show that people evaluate behaviors and beliefs according to how useful they are, especially for achieving goals. As they adopt and pass on those variants that seem best, they iteratively craft culture into increasingly effe…
Evidence for third-party mediation but not punishment in Mentawai justice
Researchers argue that third parties help sustain human cooperation, yet how they contribute remains unclear, especially in small-scale, politically decentralized societies. Studying justice among Mentawai horticulturalists in Indonesia, we examined evidence for punishment and mediation by third parties. Across a sample of 444 transgressions, we find no evidence of direct third-party punishment. Most victims and aggrieved parties demanded payment…
Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures
Cognitive and Evolutionary Foundations of Superstition and Paranoia: A Reply to Planer and Sterelny
The Sympathetic Plot, Its Psychological Origins, and Implications for the Evolution of Fiction
The sympathetic plot—featuring a goal-directed protagonist who confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and wins rewards—is ubiquitous. Here, I propose that it recurs because it entertains, engaging two sets of psychological mechanisms. First, it triggers mechanisms for learning about obstacles and how to overcome them. It builds interest by confronting a protagonist with a problem and induces satisfaction when the problem is solved. Second, it evoke…
Small gods, rituals, and cooperation: The Mentawai water spirit Sikameinan
Magic, Explanations, and Evil: The Origins and Design of Witches and Sorcerers
National audience
Why do religious leaders observe costly prohibitions? Examining taboos on Mentawai shamans
Universality and diversity in human song
Cross-cultural analysis of song It is unclear whether there are universal patterns to music across cultures. Mehr et al. examined ethnographic data and observed music in every society sampled (see the Perspective by Fitch and Popescu). For songs specifically, three dimensions characterize more than 25% of the performances studied: formality of the performance, arousal level, and religiosity. There is more variation in musical behavior within soci…
The cultural evolution of shamanism
Shamans, including medicine men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex. In this article, I propose a cultural evolutionary …
Universality and diversity in human song
What is universal about music across human societies, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies and a discography of audio recordings of the music itself. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music appears in every society observed; that variation in musical behavior is well-characterized by three dimensions, which capture the formality, arousal, and religiosi…
Magic, explanations, and evil: On the origins and design of witches and sorcerers
In nearly every documented society, people believe that some misfortunes are attributable to malicious group mates employing magic or supernatural powers. Here I report cross-cultural patterns in these beliefs and propose a theory to explain them. Using the newly-created Survey of Mystical Harm, I show that several conceptions of evil, mystical practitioners recur around the world, including sorcerers (who use learned spells), possessors of the e…
Self-Interest and the Design of Rules
Self-Interest and the Design of Rules
Magic, Explanations, and Evil: The Origins and Design of Witches and Sorcerers
National audience
Why do religious leaders observe costly prohibitions? Examining taboos on Mentawai shamans
Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures
Evidence for third-party mediation but not punishment in Mentawai justice
Researchers argue that third parties help sustain human cooperation, yet how they contribute remains unclear, especially in small-scale, politically decentralized societies. Studying justice among Mentawai horticulturalists in Indonesia, we examined evidence for punishment and mediation by third parties. Across a sample of 444 transgressions, we find no evidence of direct third-party punishment. Most victims and aggrieved parties demanded payment…
Magic, explanations, and evil: On the origins and design of witches and sorcerers
In nearly every documented society, people believe that some misfortunes are attributable to malicious group mates employing magic or supernatural powers. Here I report cross-cultural patterns in these beliefs and propose a theory to explain them. Using the newly-created Survey of Mystical Harm, I show that several conceptions of evil, mystical practitioners recur around the world, including sorcerers (who use learned spells), possessors of the e…
Self-Interest and the Design of Rules
The cultural evolution of shamanism
Shamans, including medicine men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex. In this article, I propose a cultural evolutionary …
Universality and diversity in human song
What is universal about music across human societies, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies and a discography of audio recordings of the music itself. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music appears in every society observed; that variation in musical behavior is well-characterized by three dimensions, which capture the formality, arousal, and religiosi…
Magic, explanations, and evil: On the origins and design of witches and sorcerers
In nearly every documented society, people believe that some misfortunes are attributable to malicious group mates employing magic or supernatural powers. Here I report cross-cultural patterns in these beliefs and propose a theory to explain them. Using the newly-created Survey of Mystical Harm, I show that several conceptions of evil, mystical practitioners recur around the world, including sorcerers (who use learned spells), possessors of the e…
Universality and diversity in human song
Cross-cultural analysis of song It is unclear whether there are universal patterns to music across cultures. Mehr et al. examined ethnographic data and observed music in every society sampled (see the Perspective by Fitch and Popescu). For songs specifically, three dimensions characterize more than 25% of the performances studied: formality of the performance, arousal level, and religiosity. There is more variation in musical behavior within soci…
Why do religious leaders observe costly prohibitions? Examining taboos on Mentawai shamans
The Sympathetic Plot, Its Psychological Origins, and Implications for the Evolution of Fiction
The sympathetic plot—featuring a goal-directed protagonist who confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and wins rewards—is ubiquitous. Here, I propose that it recurs because it entertains, engaging two sets of psychological mechanisms. First, it triggers mechanisms for learning about obstacles and how to overcome them. It builds interest by confronting a protagonist with a problem and induces satisfaction when the problem is solved. Second, it evoke…
Small gods, rituals, and cooperation: The Mentawai water spirit Sikameinan
Magic, Explanations, and Evil: The Origins and Design of Witches and Sorcerers
National audience
Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model
Subjective selection and the evolution of complex culture
Why is culture the way it is? Here I argue that a major force shaping culture is subjective (cultural) selection , or the selective retention of cultural variants that people subjectively perceive as satisfying their goals. I show that people evaluate behaviors and beliefs according to how useful they are, especially for achieving goals. As they adopt and pass on those variants that seem best, they iteratively craft culture into increasingly effe…
Evidence for third-party mediation but not punishment in Mentawai justice
Researchers argue that third parties help sustain human cooperation, yet how they contribute remains unclear, especially in small-scale, politically decentralized societies. Studying justice among Mentawai horticulturalists in Indonesia, we examined evidence for punishment and mediation by third parties. Across a sample of 444 transgressions, we find no evidence of direct third-party punishment. Most victims and aggrieved parties demanded payment…
Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures
Cognitive and Evolutionary Foundations of Superstition and Paranoia: A Reply to Planer and Sterelny
Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing
Why do humans believe in moralizing gods? Leading accounts argue that these beliefs evolved because they help societies grow and promote group cooperation. Yet recent evidence suggests that beliefs in moralizing gods are not limited to large societies and might not have strong effects on cooperation. Here, we propose that prosocial religions, including beliefs in moralizing gods, develop because individuals shape supernatural beliefs to achieve t…
Punitive justice serves to restore reciprocal cooperation in three small-scale societies
Acute Subjective Effects of Psychedelics within and Beyond Weird Contexts
Reports of psychedelic experiences may contain similarities and differences across cultural contexts, but most current characterizations and quantifications of psychedelic experiences come from Western medical and naturalistic settings. In this article, we begin with a brief history of the diversity of psychedelic use in non-Western settings. We then compare and contrast accounts of psychedelic experiences within and beyond Western, educated, ind…
The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories
Why is there so much diversity in fictional plots? Why are some fictional stories more popular in certain countries or during specific historical periods? In this paper, we propose an evolutionary psychological framework to address these questions. Fictional stories trigger a range of evolved psychological mechanisms—such as finding mates (romance fiction), exploring the world (adventure fiction), or avoiding threats (horror fiction). While these…
The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, A Global Corpus of Vocal Music
A comprehensive cognitive science requires broad sampling of human behavior to justify general inferences about the mind. For example, the field of psycholinguistics relies on a rich history of comparative study, with many available resources that systematically document many languages. Surprisingly, despite a longstanding interest in questions of universality and diversity, the psychology of music has few such resources. Here, we report the Expa…
Strategy and experience required: Social learning cannot explain the varieties of supernatural belief
Why I Use the Term ‘Shamanism’ and So Should You
I am grateful to Bubandt, Fonneland, Remme, and Wright for their thoughtful and often generous engagement with my book (Singh 2025). In service of clarification and rigorous debate, this response f...
Supernatural beliefs encode knowledge about malaria but inhibit uptake of biomedical interventions among Siberut Mentawai
To what extent do supernatural beliefs encode medical and ecological knowledge? Here, we investigate the similarity between biomedical understandings of malaria and the spirit illness kisei (contact with spirits) through interviews with Mentawai individuals in southern Siberut, Indonesia ( n = 90). We find that kisei is the most culturally salient explanation for general fever and, contrary to some other mystically caused illnesses (e.g., moralis…
Psychology (15 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (14 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · History (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works)