B G Purzycki
Biographic Data
| ID | 43788 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B G Purzycki |
| GIVEN NAMES | B G |
| FAMILY NAME | Purzycki |
| SIGNATURE | PURZYCKI B G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9595-7360 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Religious Systems Evolving II: Response to Commentators
This response addresses issues raised by commentators of our book, Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics. Specifically, we address issues regarding definition, models of cognition, and how to study and understand functions of evolving cultural systems
Some of the Understudied Dimensions of Ritual
Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living by Dimitris Xygalatas offers a popularized accounting of an adaptationist view of ritual. By highlighting the author’s own work on the topic, the text itself primarily addresses questions of public rituals’ often extreme costs and its relationship to cooperation. This emphasis, though, comes at the expense of other interesting and/or downstream aspects of ritual that, in my view, deserve…
Religious systems evolving
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The answer this question is an emphatic "yes."Additional informationFundingPurzycki acknowledges support from the Aarhus University Research Foundation and a Culture in Schooling Grant [Issachar Fund grant number TIF0206]. Sosis thanks the James Barnett Endowment
Some questions on the utility of transmission biases in ethnographic research
I also thank Karl Frost, Hugh Turpin, and Connor Wood for our conversations over the past few years on some of these issues. Many thanks go to Theiss Bendixen and Aaron Lightner for their feedback on a draft of this commentary.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Here, I take "ethnography" to be: "the processes and products of research that document what people know, feel, and do in a way that…
Toward a cultural immunology of religious systems
Modeling Uncertainty around Free-list Cultural Salience Scores
The free-list method has enjoyed a remarkably productive history, yet most free-list research is limited to informal comparisons that are heavily reliant on point estimates such as item or cultural salience. Here, we demonstrate a range of methods to incorporate uncertainty into such group-level estimates. This approach involves: (1) resampling individual-level data (via bootstrapping or Bayesian regression) to create a range of hypothetical alte…
The role of costly commitment signals in assorting cooperators during intergroup conflict
A reliable assortment of committed individuals is crucial for success in intergroup conflict due to the danger of shirking. Theory predicts that reliable communication of commitment is afforded by costly signals that track cooperative intent . Across four pre-registered studies (total N = 1440, general US population), we used the public goods game where groups competed for resources to investigate whether and how costly signals function to assort…
Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges
The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation…
How much do models of human cognition matter in the study of religious systems
Appealing to the minds of gods: Religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies
How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which religious beliefs and behaviors will be associated. To evaluate these criteria, we examine the conten…
Cultural evolution of gods’ minds: Response to commentators
Lightner for constructive comments on an earlier draft.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
Material insecurity and religiosity: A causal analysis
Some cultural evolutionary models predict that under stressful reductions of well-being, individuals will be more attracted and fastidiously adhere to traditional systems of norms that promote solidarity and cooperation. As religious systems can bolster human relationships with a variety of mechanisms, the material insecurity hypothesis of religion posits that individual religiosity will increase under conditions of material insecurity. The bulk …
Moralistic supernatural punishment is probably not associated with social complexity
Evolutionary theories of religion frequently assume that the presence of moralizing gods is positively associated with social complexity. An influential source of evidence for this assumption comes from researchers using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample’s moralizing high gods variable as a proxy measure of their outcome of interest (the presence of moralizing gods). In this paper, we critically assess the common assumption that moralizing gods …
What do nonreligious nonbelievers believe in? Secular worldviews around the world
The global increase in nonreligious individuals begs for a better understanding of what nonreligious beliefs and worldviews actually entail. Rather than assuming an absence of belief or imposing a predetermined set of beliefs, this research uses an open-ended approach to investigate which secular beliefs and worldviews nonreligious nontheistic individuals in 10 countries around the world might endorse. Approximately, one thousand participants wer…
Buddhism, identity, and class: Fairness and favoritism in the Tyva Republic
Current research suggests that commitment to moralistic, omniscient, and punitive gods may contribute to the evolution of cooperation. As they may curb antisocial behaviors that incur costly social repercussions, supernatural punishment may help stabilize reciprocal relationships among peers. One recent elaboration of this hypothesis posits that commitment to such gods may boost prosociality to the point that it expands cooperation beyond one’s f…
A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being
The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N=10,535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-…
Coding, causality, and statistical craft: The emergence and evolutionary drivers of moralistic supernatural punishment remain unresolved
Cultural religion: Patterns of contemporary majority religion in Denmark
Denmark offers a unique context for exploring patterns of religion among the majority population. In the research of contemporary religion in Europe, many concepts have been developed in the attempt to capture a complex pattern of affiliation, practices, and beliefs among the majority populations in Western Europe. In a Scandinavian setting, however, one such concept, ‘cultural religion’, has appeared in several situations with various foci and e…
Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures
Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses t…
Gods: Cognition, Culture, and Ecology
All populations on the planet have some belief in spiritual agents. From the perspective of the cognitive sciences of religion, gods are cultural representations (i.e., shared, socially transmitted data) that are made possible, informed, and constrained by noncultural cognitive systems. In keeping with this view, this chapter first assesses the relationship between statistically universal aspects of gods and these aspects’ corollary cognitive sys…
Soul Mates? Conflicts and Complementarities in the Evolutionary and Cognitive Sciences of Religion
This chapter aims to (a) provide a brief overview of the three primary approaches to the evolutionary study of religion (evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, and dual-inheritance theory), (b) examine how the evolutionary and cognitive sciences of religion differ, and (c) explore areas of potential integration between these two scientific fields of inquiry. The chapter concludes that although the evolutionary and cognitive sciences o…
Some Vision Impairments in the Cognitive Science of Religion
In this review, we discuss three vision impairments in the cognitive science of religious beliefs. We first assess the CSR’s improvements upon previous generations’ “mindblindness.” We also address “contextblindness,” the CSR’s relative lack of focus on the extant environment’s role in the formation and retention of religious beliefs. Finally, we address the problem of the CSR’s “ecoblindness,” that is, ignoring how beliefs are aligned with the d…
Material insecurity predicts greater commitment to moralistic and less commitment to local deities: A cross-cultural investigation
The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community sizes with diverse religious traditions including animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, we con…
The moralization bias of gods’ minds: A cross-cultural test
There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute…
Guiding the evolution of the evolutionary sciences of religion: A discussion
Ritual Behavior and Trust in the Tyva Republic
Many anthropologists of Inner Asia have examined the use of ritual cairns that pepper the landscape of the region. These cairns are devoted to a variety of spirits and are typically placed on territorial borders. Cairn rites devoted to these spirits can be both collective and individualized affairs, and some anthropologists have suggested that collective cairn rites may facilitate a stronger sense of in-group solidarity, which, in turn, must be p…
War increases religiosity
The Evolution of Gods' Minds in the Tyva Republic
As appeals to what gods know and care about often motivate and rationalize human behavior, understanding shared models of gods' minds is crucial for understanding religion's contributions to human sociality. If religious systems function to minimize the effects of social and ecological problems, then models of gods' concerns should coevolve with these problems. The present work assesses this prediction using data collected in the Tyva Republic. A…
Spirit Masters, Ritual Cairns, and the Adaptive Religious System in Tyva
Tyvan conceptions of spirit masters, their attributed domains of knowledge, and their places of devotion show signs of an adaptive function. Drawing from current research in the cognitive and evolutionary ecological studies of religion, I analyze interview data collected in the Tyva Republic during the summer of 2009 and construct an interpretation for why the ritual stone cairn (ovaa) tradition evolved and persists in Central Asia. As spirit mas…
Buddha as a God: An Empirical Assessment
For at least a century, scholars have argued about whether or not Buddha is considered a god. We treat this question empirically by conducting two ethnographic studies among residents of the Tyva Republic, one of the Buddhist republics in the Russian Federation. Using a mixed methods approach to interrogate the question, this report concludes that Buddha is, in fact, popularly represented as a punitive and moralistic supernatural agent in the rep…
The religiosity gender gap in 14 diverse societies
Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this "gender gap" may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation into the prevalence of, and explanations for, the religiosity gender gap in 2,002 individuals from 14 d…
Building Quantitative Cross-Cultural Databases From Ethnographic Records: Promise, Problems and Principles
Quantitative cross-cultural databases can help uncover structure and diversity across human populations. These databases have been constructed using a variety of methodologies and have been instrumental for building and testing theories in the social sciences. The processes and assumptions behind the construction of cross-cultural databases are not always openly discussed by creators or fully appreciated by their users. Here, we scrutinize the pr…
Cultural religion: Patterns of contemporary majority religion in Denmark
Denmark offers a unique context for exploring patterns of religion among the majority population. In the research of contemporary religion in Europe, many concepts have been developed in the attempt to capture a complex pattern of affiliation, practices, and beliefs among the majority populations in Western Europe. In a Scandinavian setting, however, one such concept, ‘cultural religion’, has appeared in several situations with various foci and e…
Cognitive Architecture, Humor and Counterintuitiveness: Retention and Recall of MCIs
The recent surge of interest in the cognitive science of religion has resulted in a number of studies regarding the memorability of minimally counterintuitive ideas (MCIs). The present model incorporates ontological templates and their respective inferences, as well as delineates between two major types of violations: schema- and template-level violations. As humor is also defined by its counter-intutiveness at the schema level, this study was de…
Material insecurity and religiosity: A causal analysis
Some cultural evolutionary models predict that under stressful reductions of well-being, individuals will be more attracted and fastidiously adhere to traditional systems of norms that promote solidarity and cooperation. As religious systems can bolster human relationships with a variety of mechanisms, the material insecurity hypothesis of religion posits that individual religiosity will increase under conditions of material insecurity. The bulk …
Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures
Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses t…
Breaches of Trust Change the Content and Structure of Religious Appeals
Considerable work suggests that social and environmental pressures can influence religious commitment, the content of beliefs, and features of ritual. Some ecologically minded theories of religion posit that crosscultural variation in beliefs and practices can be partly explained by their utility in addressing persistent threats to cooperation and coordination. However, little experimental work has assessed whether or not socioecological pressure…
Cognitive Architecture, Humor and Counterintuitiveness: Retention and Recall of MCIs
The recent surge of interest in the cognitive science of religion has resulted in a number of studies regarding the memorability of minimally counterintuitive ideas (MCIs). The present model incorporates ontological templates and their respective inferences, as well as delineates between two major types of violations: schema- and template-level violations. As humor is also defined by its counter-intutiveness at the schema level, this study was de…
Spirit Masters, Ritual Cairns, and the Adaptive Religious System in Tyva
Tyvan conceptions of spirit masters, their attributed domains of knowledge, and their places of devotion show signs of an adaptive function. Drawing from current research in the cognitive and evolutionary ecological studies of religion, I analyze interview data collected in the Tyva Republic during the summer of 2009 and construct an interpretation for why the ritual stone cairn (ovaa) tradition evolved and persists in Central Asia. As spirit mas…
Tyvan cher eezi and the socioecological constraints of supernatural agents' minds
The specific concerns attributed to supernatural agents vary considerably across populations. Evidence from evolutionary psychology suggests that commitment to supernatural agents facilitates prosocial behavior, and ecological studies have shown that costly rites can increase trust and cooperation. While there has been little systematic treatment of what the gods will know and care about, the contents of supernatural agents' minds seem to rest on…
Humor as Violation and Deprecation: A Cognitive Anthropological Account
Over the past few centuries, scholars have expressed a number of models of humor which are divergent, but potentially complementary. Specifically, the Incongruity Hypothesis posits that humor is our confrontation with a stimulus that is surprising or inconsistent with the way we normally view the world. The Hermetic Hypothesis maintains that the incongruity of humorous statements or events exploits shared cultural (i.e., schematic) knowledge. The…
Barnard, Alan: Social Anthropology and Human Origins
Anthropos , Seite 233 - 234
Ritual Behavior and Trust in the Tyva Republic
Many anthropologists of Inner Asia have examined the use of ritual cairns that pepper the landscape of the region. These cairns are devoted to a variety of spirits and are typically placed on territorial borders. Cairn rites devoted to these spirits can be both collective and individualized affairs, and some anthropologists have suggested that collective cairn rites may facilitate a stronger sense of in-group solidarity, which, in turn, must be p…
Religions as cultural solutions to social living.
Toward a science of science fiction: Applying quantitative methods to genre individuation
What is a genre? What distinguishes a genre like science fiction from other genres? We convert texts to data and answer these questions by demonstrating a new method of quantitative literary analysis. We state and test directional hypotheses about contents of texts across the science fiction, mystery, and fantasy genres using psychometrically validated word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We also recruit the work of traditi…
Religion
Religions are complex systems that can adapt to diverse environments because of the dynamic relationship of their internal parts. The most fundamental of these parts includes supernatural beliefs, rituals, and myths. The social scientific study of religion focuses on these parts and builds on previous generations of research to provide distal explanations for religion as a dynamic phenomenon. In recent years, interest in the social science of rel…
Ecology, consensus, and variation: Issues with time and persistence in religious systems
Johnson, Li, and Cohen's (JLC) article exhibits the kind of broad but precise synthesis that is very much needed in the literature. By incorporating psychological motivations, explicit representati
Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality
Using economic games, the authors examine the role of religion in the persistence of human cooperation; individuals who claim that their gods are moralizing, punitive and knowledgeable about human affairs are more likely to play fairly towards geographically distant co-religionists. How has cooperation persisted in human societies that are increasingly large and complex, where simple relatedness is not necessarily sufficient? These authors examin…
MCI theory: A critical discussion
In this paper, we critically review MCI theory and the evidence supporting it. MCI theory typically posits that religious concepts violate what we call deep inferences, intuitions stemming from our evolved cognitive architecture rather than shallow inferences that are specific and flexible informational units also used for inference-making. We point to serious problems facing the approach, and propose a few corrective measures, avenues for furthe…
Accounting for variation and stability in religious cognition
We are genuinely appreciative of the commentators for their input. While the majority of them admitted that there are serious problems with the theory, there are still some disagreements as to whet
The Evolution of Gods' Minds in the Tyva Republic
As appeals to what gods know and care about often motivate and rationalize human behavior, understanding shared models of gods' minds is crucial for understanding religion's contributions to human sociality. If religious systems function to minimize the effects of social and ecological problems, then models of gods' concerns should coevolve with these problems. The present work assesses this prediction using data collected in the Tyva Republic. A…
AnthroTools: An R Package for Cross-Cultural Ethnographic Data Analysis
As large-scale collaborative, cross-cultural ethnographic research becomes easier and easier to realize, certain ethnographic methods and analyses should be correspondingly more available, inviting, and accommodating. We have therefore created AnthroTools, a package for the free, open-source language R, with a variety of tools and functions suitable for both multi-factor free-list analysis and Bayesian cultural consensus modeling. Free-list data …
Some Comments on the Alleged Innateness of Religion
This response assesses the claim that Barrett views religious beliefs as non-cultural entities that stem from “innate” cognitive systems “meant for” a “singular idea of God.” By briefly reviewing the literature and Barrett’s actual position—that people are especially sensitive to learning religious beliefs by virtue of cognitive systems that function in domains more mundane than religion—I conclude that the target article misrepresents Barrett’s …
The cognitive and cultural foundations of moral behavior
Religiosity and resource allocation in Marajó, Brazil
Current research suggests that certain features of religion can harness our sociality in important ways, curbing selfish behavior and/or boosting prosocial behavior. If this is the case, embodied symbols of religious devotion should induce these effects. To test the claim that religious symbolism has an effect on sociality, we conducted the Random Allocation Game with a symbolic prime in Pesqueiro, on the island of Marajó, Brazil, among Christian…
The evolution of religion and morality: A synthesis of ethnographic and experimental evidence from eight societies
Understanding the expansion of human sociality and cooperation beyond kith and kin remains an important evolutionary puzzle. There is likely a complex web of processes including institutions, norms, and practices that contributes to this phenomenon. Considerable evidence suggests that one such process involves certain components of religious systems that may have fostered the expansion of human cooperation in a variety of ways, including both cer…
The evolution of religious diversity
Sterelny suggests that economic shifts toward reciprocity-based cooperation and increased human spatial and temporal dispersal during the Pleistocene promoted the recruitment of pre-existing social
Buddha as a God: An Empirical Assessment
For at least a century, scholars have argued about whether or not Buddha is considered a god. We treat this question empirically by conducting two ethnographic studies among residents of the Tyva Republic, one of the Buddhist republics in the Russian Federation. Using a mixed methods approach to interrogate the question, this report concludes that Buddha is, in fact, popularly represented as a punitive and moralistic supernatural agent in the rep…
War increases religiosity
Peering into the Minds of Gods: What Cross-Cultural Variation in Gods’ Concerns Can Tell Us about the Evolution of Religion
Cross-cultural beliefs about gods’ concerns point to local socioecological challenges. Such appeals to gods’ concerns provide insights for understanding religious cognition specifically and the evolution of religious systems more generally. Here, we review case studies to this effect, and introduce the “god-problem problem”: to the extent that gods are concerned with local socioecological problems, which criteria does a problem need to satisfy in…
Minds of gods and human cognitive constraints: Socio-ecological context shapes belief
What believers say about gods’ thoughts, concerns, and dispositions reflects both the minds of believers and the societies in which they live. A review of the psychology of religion literature reveals a paradox: individuals benefit from belief in divine benevolence, while groups benefit from belief in divine punishment. We propose that a resolution to this paradox lies in the combination of cognitive systems and culturally-transmitted social norm…
Institutions, natural selection(s), and religion
Turner, Maryanski, Petersen, and Geertz’s (2017) The Emergence and Evolution of Religion (EER, henceforth) is a welcome addition to the growing canon of evolutionary approaches to religion. In my v
Psychology (39 works) · Sociology (39 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (31 works) · Epistemology (28 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Social Psychology (24 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (23 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (22 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (19 works) · Cognition (16 works)