John H Shaver
Biographic Data
| ID | 90570 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John H Shaver |
| GIVEN NAMES | John H |
| FAMILY NAME | Shaver |
| SIGNATURE | SHAVER J H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Otago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9522-4765 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Maternal religiosity and social support to mothers: Helpers’ Religious Identity Matters
Data and statistical script: The statistical script associated with this study is made public https://osf.io/6mpbe/. However, since the data we use in this study are part of larger project and will be made public in a future, we cannot currently share the raw dataset. Therefore, we provide access to the processed dataset prepared for analyses. Reader may go through the full script or skip the data curation part directly to load prepared dataset a…
Uncoordinated, contradictory, yet cumulatively effective: How Four Critiques of the Humanities Study of Religion Inflict Collateral Damage on the Scientific Study of Religion
Religious parents receive more alloparental aid in rural Bangladesh
Researchers have long speculated about the evolutionary benefits of religiosity. One explanation for the evolution of religious ritual is that rituals signal commitment to co-religionists. As a major domain of prosocial behaviour, alloparental care – or care directed at children by non-parents – is a plausible benefit of religious signalling. The religious alloparenting hypothesis posits that parents who signal religious commitment receive greate…
Religion’s Hilbert problems, ten years later: Progress, pitfalls, and new horizons
Self‐treatment with psychedelic substances for health and wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand: An exploratory descriptive study
This study draws attention to, and provides a description of, a previously unmapped and emerging self‐medication phenomenon occurring in Aotearoa New Zealand where psychedelic substances are being used in the absence of clinical supervision to address a wide range of health and wellbeing issues, partly in response to unmet mental health needs. We interviewed 34 individuals who had self‐administered psychedelics with the intention of improving the…
Nuclearization of maternal support networks in the UK and the US during the Covid-19 pandemic: Impact on women's financial and emotional wellbeing
The social isolation resulting from governments' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic likely limited support available to mothers. Evidence suggests tasks like childcare and domestic work fell disproportionately on mothers during the pandemic, with consequences for their wellbeing. We explore how the pandemic affected emotional and practical support available to mothers between March and August 2020 and whether changes in support are associated wit…
Religious women receive more allomaternal support from non-partner kin in two low-fertility countries
Cost structures and socioecological conditions impact the fitness outcomes of human alloparental care in agent-based model simulations
Religious Involvement Is Associated With Higher Fertility and Lower Maternal Investment, but More Alloparental Support Among Gambian Mothers
OBJECTIVES: Human childrearing is cooperative, with women often able to achieve relatively high fertility through help from many individuals. Previous work has documented tremendous socioecological variation in who supports women in childrearing, but less is known about the intracultural correlates of variation in allomaternal support. In the highly religious, high-fertility setting of The Gambia, we studied whether religious mothers have more ch…
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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…
Introducing a special issue on phase two of the Evolution of Religion and Morality project
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Kiwi Diwali: A longitudinal investigation of perceived social connection following a civic religious ritual
Religious rituals are ubiquitous. Recent research indicates they can powerfully affect social connection, increasing collective sentiments and behaviors. However, the extent to which these effects depend on religious commitment remains unclear. Here, we use longitudinal data to investigate this question in a natural ritual setting by comparing the responses of religiously committed Hindus and non-Hindus immediately after a public Diwali celebrati…
A changing of the guard
Fertility and faith: Insights from human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and life history theory
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by John Templeton Foundation [Grant number grant ID 61426]
Disentangling the relationships between religion and fertility
In this issue of Religion, Brain & Behavior, scholars from multiple disciplines offer comments on Jenkins ' Fertility and Faith (Jenkins, 2020).The debate, and Jenkins' response to the commentaries, contribute to moving scholarship forward in an often-neglected area in the scientific study of religion.The book tackles an extensive literature, synthesizing work on several topics: drivers of secularization, drivers of fertility decline, the relatio…
Faith and fertility in evolutionary perspective
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…
Food storage facilitates professional religious specialization in hunter–gatherer societies
Professional religious specialists centralised religious authority in early human societies and represented some of the earliest instances of formalised social leadership. These individuals played a central role in the emergence of organised religion and transitions to more stratified human societies. Evolutionary theories highlight a range of environmental, economic and social factors that are potentially causally related to the emergence of pro…
The impact of market integration on arranged marriages in Matlab, Bangladesh
Success in marriage markets has lasting impacts on women's wellbeing. By arranging marriages, parents exert financial and social powers to influence spouse characteristics and ensure optimal marriages. While arranging marriages is a major focus of parental investment, marriage decisions are also a source of conflict between parents and daughters in which parents often have more power. The process of market integration may alter parental investmen…
Social inequality and signaling in a costly ritual
Evolutionary perspectives suggest that participation in collective rituals may serve important communicative functions by signaling practitioners' commitment to the community and its values. While previous research has examined the effects of ritual signals at the individual and collective level, there has been limited attention directed to the impact of socio-environmental factors on the quality of ritual signaling. We examined this impact in th…
Causal inference in regression: Advice to authors
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Mother's Partnership Status and Allomothering Networks in the United Kingdom and United States
In high-income, low-fertility (HILF) settings, the mother's partner is a key provider of childcare. However, it is not clear how mothers without partners draw on other sources of support to raise children. This paper reports the findings from a survey of 1532 women in the United Kingdom and the United States, in which women described who provided childcare for a focal child and how frequently they did so. We use multivariate Bayesian regression m…
Effects of Extreme Ritual Practices on Psychophysiological Well-Being
Extreme ritual practices involving pain and suffering pose significant risks such as injury, trauma, or infection. Nonetheless, they are performed by millions of people around the world and are often culturally prescribed remedies for a variety of maladies, and especially those related to mental health. What is the actual impact of these practices on health? Combining ethnographic observations and psychophysiological monitoring, we investigated o…
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…
How Does Male Ritual Behavior Vary Across the Lifespan: An Examination of Fijian Kava Ceremonies
The impact of market integration on arranged marriages in Matlab, Bangladesh
Success in marriage markets has lasting impacts on women's wellbeing. By arranging marriages, parents exert financial and social powers to influence spouse characteristics and ensure optimal marriages. While arranging marriages is a major focus of parental investment, marriage decisions are also a source of conflict between parents and daughters in which parents often have more power. The process of market integration may alter parental investmen…
Mother's Partnership Status and Allomothering Networks in the United Kingdom and United States
In high-income, low-fertility (HILF) settings, the mother's partner is a key provider of childcare. However, it is not clear how mothers without partners draw on other sources of support to raise children. This paper reports the findings from a survey of 1532 women in the United Kingdom and the United States, in which women described who provided childcare for a focal child and how frequently they did so. We use multivariate Bayesian regression m…
Costs do not Explain Trust among Secular Groups
Many human groups achieve high levels of trust and cooperation, but these achievements are vulnerable to exploitation. Several theorists have suggested that when groups impose costs on their members, these costs can function to limit freeriding, and hence promote trust and cooperation. While a substantial body of experimental research has demonstrated a positive relationship between costs and cooperation in religious groups, to date, this relatio…
Food storage facilitates professional religious specialization in hunter–gatherer societies
Professional religious specialists centralised religious authority in early human societies and represented some of the earliest instances of formalised social leadership. These individuals played a central role in the emergence of organised religion and transitions to more stratified human societies. Evolutionary theories highlight a range of environmental, economic and social factors that are potentially causally related to the emergence of pro…
Only children in the 21st century: Personality differences between adults with and without siblings are very, very small
Extended Computer Use in Compiling a Flanders-Amidon Interaction Analysis Matrix
How Does Male Ritual Behavior Vary Across the Lifespan: An Examination of Fijian Kava Ceremonies
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…
The evolution of stratification in Fijian ritual participation
Social scientists have long sought to explain the complex relationships between religion and social inequality. Building from a recent theoretical model, I predict that social hierarchies influence the cultural evolution of ritual systems and explain substantial intracultural variation in ritual behavior. The present work investigates these predictions using historical data and an analysis of observational and ethnographic interview data collecte…
Christian religious badges instill trust in Christian and non-Christian perceivers
Can honest signaling theory clarify religion’s role in the evolution of social inequality
Vivid coloration, pungent odors, strident alarms, and crippling stings have co-evolved in many lineages as mechanisms that conspicuously identify menacing creatures. Biologists call this mode of communication aposematic signaling, from the Greek apo “away” and sema “sign.” Despite the prevalence of aposematic signaling across a broad range of biological taxa, its scope and role in human cultural evolution remains unclear. Evidence from a large da…
Why and how do religious individuals, and some religious groups, achieve higher relative fertility
Across the contemporary world, religious individuals tend to exhibit higher relative fertility than their secular counterparts, while religions vary substantially in mean fertility levels. Across all biological taxa, organisms sacrifice quantity for quality of offspring. If all things were equal, then, religious individuals would be expected to produce lower-quality offspring and religions with high fertility levels would be expected to be lower-…
Costly Signaling in Human Culture
Evolutionary anthropologists and archaeologists have applied costly signaling theory (CST) to explain many of the apparently wasteful and ostensibly maladaptive behaviors evident across human cultures. CST suggests that costly behaviors can enable reliable communication between individuals with partially conflicting interests. To date, researchers have fruitfully applied CST to a wide range of human behaviors
Religion, Evolution, and the Basis of Institutions: The Institutional Cognition Model of Religion
Few outstanding questions in the human behavioral sciences are timelier or more urgently debated than the evolutionary source of religious behaviors and beliefs. Byproduct theorists locate the origins of religion in evolved cognitive defaults and transmission biases. Others have argued that cultural evolutionary processes integrated non-adaptive cognitive byproducts into coherent networks of supernatural beliefs and ritual that encouraged in-grou…
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
Costs do not Explain Trust among Secular Groups
Many human groups achieve high levels of trust and cooperation, but these achievements are vulnerable to exploitation. Several theorists have suggested that when groups impose costs on their members, these costs can function to limit freeriding, and hence promote trust and cooperation. While a substantial body of experimental research has demonstrated a positive relationship between costs and cooperation in religious groups, to date, this relatio…
Alloparenting and religious fertility: A test of the religious alloparenting hypothesis
Only children in the 21st century: Personality differences between adults with and without siblings are very, very small
Effects of Extreme Ritual Practices on Psychophysiological Well-Being
Extreme ritual practices involving pain and suffering pose significant risks such as injury, trauma, or infection. Nonetheless, they are performed by millions of people around the world and are often culturally prescribed remedies for a variety of maladies, and especially those related to mental health. What is the actual impact of these practices on health? Combining ethnographic observations and psychophysiological monitoring, we investigated o…
Religious change is driven primarily by individual-level Darwinian processes
About thirty years ago, a flurry scientific activity began when a group of chemists reported that they could fuse hydrogen atoms without producing heat (see Gaulin & McBurney, 2001). This report, h
Special Issue Introduction: Religious Diversity and the Cognitive Science of Religion
Special Issue Introduction
Social inequality and signaling in a costly ritual
Evolutionary perspectives suggest that participation in collective rituals may serve important communicative functions by signaling practitioners' commitment to the community and its values. While previous research has examined the effects of ritual signals at the individual and collective level, there has been limited attention directed to the impact of socio-environmental factors on the quality of ritual signaling. We examined this impact in th…
Causal inference in regression: Advice to authors
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Mother's Partnership Status and Allomothering Networks in the United Kingdom and United States
In high-income, low-fertility (HILF) settings, the mother's partner is a key provider of childcare. However, it is not clear how mothers without partners draw on other sources of support to raise children. This paper reports the findings from a survey of 1532 women in the United Kingdom and the United States, in which women described who provided childcare for a focal child and how frequently they did so. We use multivariate Bayesian regression m…
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…
Introducing a special issue on phase two of the Evolution of Religion and Morality project
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Kiwi Diwali: A longitudinal investigation of perceived social connection following a civic religious ritual
Religious rituals are ubiquitous. Recent research indicates they can powerfully affect social connection, increasing collective sentiments and behaviors. However, the extent to which these effects depend on religious commitment remains unclear. Here, we use longitudinal data to investigate this question in a natural ritual setting by comparing the responses of religiously committed Hindus and non-Hindus immediately after a public Diwali celebrati…
A changing of the guard
Fertility and faith: Insights from human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and life history theory
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by John Templeton Foundation [Grant number grant ID 61426]
Disentangling the relationships between religion and fertility
In this issue of Religion, Brain & Behavior, scholars from multiple disciplines offer comments on Jenkins ' Fertility and Faith (Jenkins, 2020).The debate, and Jenkins' response to the commentaries, contribute to moving scholarship forward in an often-neglected area in the scientific study of religion.The book tackles an extensive literature, synthesizing work on several topics: drivers of secularization, drivers of fertility decline, the relatio…
Psychology (26 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (13 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (12 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (12 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Biology (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Demography (9 works)