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RELIGION’S EVOLUTIONARY LANDSCAPE:
COUNTERINTUITION, COMMITMENT,
COMPASSION, COMMUNION
Scott Atran, Ara Norenzayan
To cite this version:
Scott Atran, Ara Norenzayan. RELIGION’S EVOLUTIONARY LANDSCAPE: COUNTERINTU-
ITION, COMMITMENT, COMPASSION, COMMUNION. 2005. �ijn_00000596�
1. Introduction
In every society,
1
there are
1. Widespread counterfactual and counterintuitive be-
liefs in supernatural agents (gods, ghosts, goblins, etc.)
2. Hard-to-fake public expressions of costly material
commitments to supernatural agents, that is, offering and
sacrifice (offerings of goods, property, time, life)
3. Mastering by supernatural agents of people’s existen-
tial anxieties (death, deception, disease, catastrophe, pain,
loneliness, injustice, want, loss)
4. Ritualized, rhythmic sensory coordination of (1), (2),
and (3), that is, communion (congregation, intimate fellow-
ship, etc.)
In all societies there is an evolutionary canalization and
convergence of (1), (2), (3), and (4) that tends toward what
we shall refer to as “religion”; that is, passionate communal
displays of costly commitments to counterintuitive worlds
governed by supernatural agents. Although these facets of
religion emerge in all known cultures and animate the ma-
jority of individual human beings in the world, there are
considerable individual and cultural differences in the de-
gree of religious commitment. The question as to the ori-
gin and nature of these intriguing and important differ-
ences we leave open.
This theoretical framework drives our program of re-
search.
2
The framework is the subject of a recent book
(Atran 2002a). Here, a more comprehensive set of experi-
mental results and observations is introduced to support in-
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2004) 27, 000–000
Printed in the United States of America
© 2005 Cambridge University Press 0140-525X/04 $12.50
1
Religion’s evolutionary landscape:
Counterintuition, commitment,
compassion, communion
Scott Atran
CNRS–Institut Jean Nicod, 75007 Paris, France and Institute for Social
Research–University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248
satran@umich.edu http://www.institutnicod.org
Ara Norenzayan
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
V6T 1Z4 Canada
ara@psych.ubc.ca www.psych.ubc.ca/~ara
Abstract: Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape
that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive
processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual founda-
tions of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsy-
chology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus en-
abling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here
the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of
an “Innate Releasing Mechanism,” or “agency detector,” whose proper (naturally selected) domain encompasses animate objects rele-
vant to hominid survival – such as predators, protectors, and prey – but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens,
voices in wind, and faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and
threatens any social order. However, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through
representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious be-
liefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion.
Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims.
Keywords: agency; death anxiety; evolution; folkpsychology; Maya; memory; metarepresentation; morality; religion; supernatural
Author Bios TO COME
CD8185.Atran 001-058 3/15/05 1:11 PM Page 1
tegration within an evolutionary perspective that envisions
religion as a converging by-product of several cognitive and
emotional mechanisms that evolved for mundane adaptive
tasks (for somewhat similar, independently researched,
views of religion as an emergent by-product of numerous
domain-specific psychological mechanisms, see Boyer
2001; Kirkpatrick 1999b).
The current experiments suggestively support this long-
term research program. We hope the findings will stimulate
further tests and refinements to assess the empirical viabil-
ity of this framework. The aim of this paper is to foster sci-
entific dialogue between the fields of cultural anthropology,
cognitive, developmental and social psychology, and evolu-
tionary biology regarding a set of phenomena vital to most
human life and all societies. The present article is mainly
concerned with the first and third criteria of religion listed
above. In this introductory section, we present in general
terms the overall intellectual framework that interrelates all
four criteria, discuss some obvious objections to these gen-
eralizations, and offer some caveats.
The criterion (1) of belief in the supernatural rules out
commitment theories of religion as adequate, however in-
sightful the latter may be. Such theories underplay or dis-
regard cognitive structure and its causal role. Commitment
theories attempt to explain the apparent altruism and emo-
tional sacrifice of immediate self-interest accompanying re-
ligion in terms of long-term benefits to the individual
(Alexander 1987; Irons 1996; Nesse 1999) or group (Boehm
1999; Wilson 2002) – benefits that supposedly contribute
to genetic fitness or cultural survival. They do not account
for the cognitive peculiarity of the culturally universal be-
lief in beings who are imperceptible in principle, and who
change the world via causes that are materially and logically
inscrutable in principle. They cannot distinguish Marxism
from monotheism, or secular ideologies from religious be-
lief (Atran 2002a).
The criterion (2) of costly commitment rules out cogni-
tive theories of religion as inadequate, however insightful
they may be. Cognitive theories attempt to explain religious
belief and practice as cultural manipulations of ordinary
psychological processes of categorization, reasoning, and
remembering (Andresen 2000; Atran & Sperber 1991; Bar-
rett 2000; Boyer 1994; Lawson & McCauley 1990; Pyysiäi-
nen & Anttonen 2002). They do not account for the emo-
tional involvement that leads people to sacrifice to others
what is dear to themselves, including labor, limb, and life.
Such theories are often short on motive and are unable to
distinguish Mickey Mouse from Moses, cartoon fantasy
from religious belief (Atran 1998, p. 602; cf. Boyer 2000;
Norenzayan & Atran 2004). They fail to tell us why, in gen-
eral, the greater the sacrifice – as in Abraham offering up
his beloved son – the more others trust in one’s religious
commitment (Kierkegaard 1843/1955).
We extend the idea (first suggested by Sperber 1975b)
that religious thought and behavior can be explained as me-
diated by ordinary mental mechanisms, which can be sci-
entifically studied regardless of whether religions are true
or not true in a metaphysical sense. In this “mentalist” tra-
dition, the focus so far has been on cognition and culture;
that is, on how religious ideas are mentally constructed,
transmitted across minds, and acquired developmentally.
To be sure, there have been recent attempts by cognitive
scientists studying religion to consider the role of emotion,
and growing realization that religion cannot have a purely
cognitive explanation that fails to take into account the so-
cial dilemmas motivating religious beliefs and practices
(McCauley & Lawson 2002; Pyysiännen 2001; Whitehouse
2000). But there is still little analytic or empirical integra-
tion of (1) and (3).
Religions invoke supernatural agents (Horton 1967; Ty-
lor 1871/1958) to deal with (3) emotionally eruptive exis-
tential anxieties (Malinowski 1922/1961), such as death and
deception (Becker 1973; Feuerbach 1843/1972; Freud
1913/1990).
3
All religions, it appears, have “awe-inspiring,
extraordinary manifestations of reality” (Lowie 1924,
p. xvi). They generally have malevolent and predatory
deities as well as more benevolent and protective ones. Su-
pernatural agent concepts trigger our naturally selected
agency-detection system, which is trip-wired to respond to
fragmentary information, inciting perception of figures
lurking in shadows and emotions of dread or awe (Guthrie
1993; cf. Hume 1757/1956). Granted, nondeistic “theolo-
gies,” such as Buddhism and Taoism, doctrinally eschew
personifying the supernatural or animating nature with su-
pernatural causes. Nevertheless, common folk who espouse
these faiths routinely entertain belief in an array of gods and
spirits that behave counterintuitively in ways that are in-
scrutable to factual or logical reasoning.
4
Even Buddhist
monks ritually ward off malevolent deities by invoking
benevolent ones, and they perceive altered states of nature
as awesome.
5
Conceptions of the supernatural invariably involve the in-
terruption or violation of universal cognitive principles that
govern ordinary human perception and understanding of
the everyday world. Consequently, religious beliefs and ex-
periences cannot be reliably validated (or disconfirmed as
false) through consistent logical deduction or consistent em-
pirical induction. Validation occurs only by (4) collectively
satisfying the emotions that motivate religion in the first
place. Through a “collective effervescence” (Durkheim
1912/1995), communal rituals rhythmically coordinate
emotional validation of, and commitment to, moral truths in
worlds governed by supernatural agents. Rituals involve
sequential, socially interactive movement and gesture,
and formulaic utterances that synchronize affective states
among group members in displays of cooperative commit-
ment. Through the sensory pageantry of movement, sound,
smell, touch, and sight, religious rituals affectively coordi-
nate actors’ minds and bodies into convergent expressions of
public sentiment (Turner 1969) – a sort of N-person bond-
ing that communicates moral consensus as sacred, tran-
scending all reason and doubt (Rappaport 1999). Sensory
pageantry also ensures the persistence and transmission of
the religious beliefs and practices it infuses.
These four conditions do not constitute the necessary
and sufficient features of “religion.” Rather, they comprise
a stipulative (working) framework that delimits a causally
interconnected set of pancultural phenomena, which is the
object of our study. One may choose to call phenomena that
fall under this set of conditions “religion” or not; however,
for our purposes the joint satisfaction of all four conditions
is what we mean by the term religion. Nevertheless, we of-
fer this working framework as an adequate conceptualiza-
tion that roughly corresponds to what most scholars con-
sider religion. This framework is concerned with the
pancultural foundations of religion; accordingly, our con-
ceptualization is broad in scope. Surely, religions are man-
ifested in culturally diverse ways and are shaped by local
Atran & Norenzayan: Religion’s evolutionary landscape
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cultural contexts. Elsewhere, scholars have examined how
the distinctive paths that religions take shape psychological
tendencies (e.g., Weber 1946; Shweder et al. 1997). Our
framework is not incompatible with these approaches. In-
deed, it offers candidates for the psychological building
blocks of religion, which then are culturally exploited in dis-
tinct but converging paths.
More critical are the many ethnographic reports which
interpret that some people or some societies make no hard
and fast distinction between (1), the natural and supernat-
ural, or between (2), costly sacrifice and the social redistri-
bution of material or social rewards; or that (3) religions are
as anxiety-activating as they are anxiety-assuaging, or that
(4) they are sometimes devoid of emotional ritual. In addi-
tion, (5) there is considerable psychological and sociologi-
cal evidence for the health and well-being benefits of reli-
gion, which suggests that religion may be adaptive and not
simply a by-product of evolutionary adaptations for other
things. We address each of these objections next.
1.1. The natural versus the supernatural
We base our argument regarding the cognitive basis of re-
ligion on a growing number of converging cross-cultural ex-
periments on “domain-specific cognition” emanating from
developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and an-
thropology. Such experiments indicate that virtually all (non
brain-damaged) human minds are endowed with core cog-
nitive faculties for understanding the everyday world of
readily perceptible substances and events (for overviews,
see Hirschfeld & Gelman 1994; Pinker 1997; Sperber et al.
1995). The core faculties are activated by stimuli that fall
into a few intuitive knowledge domains, including: folkme-
chanics (object boundaries and movements), folkbiology
(biological species configurations and relationships), and
folkpsychology (interactive agents and goal-directed be-
havior). Sometimes operation of the structural principles
that govern the ordinary and “automatic” cognitive con-
struction of these core domains are pointedly interrupted
or violated, as in poetry and religion. In these instances,
counterintuitions result that form the basis for construction
of special sorts of counterfactual worlds, including the su-
pernatural; for example, a world that includes self-pro-
pelled, perceiving, or thinking mineral substances (e.g.,
Maya sastun, crystal ball; Arab tilsam [talisman]) or beings
that can pass through solid objects (angels, ghosts, ancestral
spirits) (cf. Atran & Sperber 1991; Boyer 1994).
These core faculties generate many of the universal cog-
nitions that allow cross-cultural communication and make
anthropology possible at all. For example, even neonates as-
sume that a naturally occurring rigid body cannot occupy
the same space as another (unlike shadows), or follow dis-
continuous trajectories when moving through space (unlike
fires), or change direction under its own self-propelling ini-
tiative (unlike animals), or causally effect the behavior of
another object without physical contact (unlike people)
(Spelke et al. 1995). When experimental conditions simu-
late violation of these universal assumptions, as in a magic
trick, neonates show marked surprise (longer gaze, intense
thumb sucking, etc.). Children initially expect shadows to
behave like ordinary objects, and even adults remain un-
certain as to how shadows move. This uncertainty often
evokes the supernatural.
All known societies appear to partition local biodiversity
into mutually exclusive species-like groupings (Atran 1990;
Berlin 1992; Darwin 1859; Diamond 1966), and to initially
identify nonhuman organisms according to these groupings
rather than as individuals (unlike the immediate local iden-
tification of individual human faces and behaviors; Atran
1998; cf. Hirschfeld 1996). Individualized pets and taxo-
nomic anomalies, such as monsters, become socially rele-
vant and evocative because they are purposely divorced
from the default state of “automatic” human cognition
about the limited varieties of the readily perceptible world,
that is, “intuitive ontology” (Atran 1989; Boyer 1997; cf.
Sperber 1975b). This commonsense ontology is arguably
generated by task-specific “habits of mind,” which evolved
selectively to deal with ancestrally recurrent “habits of the
world” that were especially relevant to hominid (and in
some cases, pre-hominid) survival, that is, inanimate sub-
stances, organic species, and persons.
What testable evidence there is indicates that, sometime
after age three and except for severe autistics, most any per-
son understands that most any other person can entertain
perceptions, beliefs, and desires different from one’s own,
and that these different mental states differentially cause
people’s behaviors (Avis & Harris 1991; Baron-Cohen 1995;
Knight et al. 2004; Wimmer & Perner 1983). Granted,
there is experimental evidence for cultural variations in
causal attribution of social behavior to personality traits ver-
sus social situations (Choi et al. 1999), and there are anec-
dotal interpretations of cultural behaviors indicating an in-
ability to distinguish between true and false beliefs, or
reality from desire (cf. Lévy-Bruhl 1923/1966; Lillard
1998). But contrary to the anecdotal evidence, experimen-
tal evidence suggests that children growing up in very dif-
ferent cultures soon develop similar understanding of core
aspects of human behavior as a function of beliefs and de-
sires (Avis & Harris 1991; Flavell et al. 1983). Furthermore,
there is no generally accepted body of evidence indicating
that our simian cousins can simultaneously keep in mind
the thoughts of others, or, equivalently, entertain multiple
possible and different worlds from which to select an ap-
propriate course of action (Premack & Woodruff 1978;
Hauser 2000; cf. Hare et al. 2001 for intriguing experiments
suggesting rudimentary perspective taking in chimps).
Without the ability to entertain multiple possible worlds,
belief in the supernatural is inconceivable.
Within the emerging work on domain specificity there
are controversies and doubts, as in any young and dynamic
science. But the findings sketched above are widely repli-
cated. Admittedly, there are alternative approaches to un-
derstanding cognition, such as connectionism, artificial in-
telligence, and phenomenology. Using any of these other
approaches to model religion would no doubt present a dif-
ferent picture than the one we offer. We leave it to others
to work the alternatives.
1.2. Costly sacrifice versus redistribution
One evolutionary problem with religion is explaining how
and why biologically unrelated individuals come to sacrifice
their own immediate material interests to form genetically
incoherent relationships under an imagined permanent and
immaterial authority. Altruism occurs when an organism’s
behavior diminishes its own fitness and enhances the fitness
of some other organism or organisms. Fitness is a measure
of an organism’s reproductive success. The sacrifice of an
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organism for its relatives – a mother for her children, a
brother for his siblings, an ant for its colony, a bee for its
hive – lowers an organism’s individual fitness (also called
“classical” or “Darwinian” fitness) because it compromises
the individual’s ability to bear and raise offspring. Never-
theless, such kin altruism may also enhance the individual’s
“inclusive fitness” by allowing surviving relatives to pass on
many of the individual’s genes to future generations
(Hamilton 1964). But what motivates the sort of non-kin co-
operation characteristic of human religious commitment?
Unlike other primate groups, hominid groups grew to
sizes (Dunbar 1996) that could not function exclusively on
the basis of kin selection (commitment falls off precipi-
tously as genetic distance increases between individuals) or
direct reciprocity (ability to directly monitor trustworthi-
ness in reciprocation decreases rapidly as the number of
transactions multiply). Larger groups of individuals out
compete smaller groups in love and war (Axelrod 1984). A
plausible hypothesis, then, is that the mechanisms for suc-
cessful promotion of indirect reciprocity – including both
religious and nonreligious behaviors – were naturally se-
lected in response to the environmental problem-context of
spiraling social rivalry among fellow conspecifics, or “run-
away social competition” (Alexander 1989). As “fictive kin”
(Nesse 1999), members of religious groups perform and
profit from many tasks that they could not do alone, one by
one, or only with family. Thus, “Among the Hebrews and
Phoenicians...the worshipper is called brother (that is,
kinsman or sister of the god)” (Robertson Smith 1891/1972,
p. 44, note 2). “Brotherhood” is also the common term ap-
plied today among the Christian faithful and to the frater-
nity (ikhwan) of Islam.
Indirect reciprocity occurs when individual X knows that
individual Y cooperates with others, and this knowledge fa-
vors X cooperating with Y. Consider a population whose in-
dividuals have the option to cooperate or not. Suppose in-
dividual X randomly meets individual Y. If Y has a
reputation for cooperation, and if X cooperates with Y, then
X’s reputation likely increases. If X does not cooperate with
Y, then X’s reputation likely decreases (see Nowak & Sig-
mund 1998 for various simulations). The basic idea is to
help those who are known to help others. Reputation for re-
ligious belief is almost always reckoned as sincere social
commitment, and such reputation is invariably linked to
costly and hard-to-fake expressions of material sacrifice or
concern that goes beyond any apparent self-interest.
Although calculations of economic or political utility of-
ten influence religious practices (Stark 2000), to conclude
that that’s all there is to religious commitment and sacrifice
is unwarranted. In religious offerings, there is usually a
nonrecuperable cost involved both in the selection of the
item offered and in the ceremony itself. Thus, for the Nuer
of Sudan, substituting a highly valued item (cow) by one
that is less valued (fowl or vegetable) is allowable only to a
point, after which “a religious accounting might reveal that
the spirits and ghosts were expecting a long overdue proper
sacrifice, because accounts were out of balance, so to speak”
(Evans-Pritchard 1940, p. 26). Religious sacrifice usually
costs something for the persons on whose behalf the offer-
ing is made. That is why “sacrifice of wild animals which can
be regarded as the free gift of nature is rarely allowable or
efficient” (Robertson Smith 1894, p. 466). In many cases,
the first or best products of one’s livelihood goes to the gods,
as with the first fruits of the Hebrews or the most perfect
maize kernels of the Maya. Most, if not all, societies spec-
ify obligatory circumstances under which religious sacrifice
must be performed, regardless of economic considerations.
Reviewing the anthropological literature, Raymond Firth
(1963, p. 16) surmises, “In all such cases the regular reli-
gious need to establish communication with god or with the
spirit world... would seem to be pressing and primary. ‘Af-
ford it or not.’”
In sum, religious sacrifice generally runs counter to cal-
culations of immediate utility, such that future promises are
not discounted in favor of present rewards. In some cases,
sacrifice is extreme. Although such cases tend to be rare,
they are often held by society as religiously ideal: for exam-
ple, sacrificing one’s own life or nearest kin. Researchers
sometimes take such cases as prima facie evidence of “true”
(nonkin) social altruism (Kuper 1996; Rappaport 1999) or
group selection, wherein individual fitness decreases so
that overall group fitness can increase (relative to the over-
all fitness of other, competing groups) (Sober & Wilson
1998; Wilson 2002). But this may be an illusion.
A telling example is contemporary suicide terrorism
(Atran 2003a). Through indoctrination of recruits into rel-
atively small and closeted cells – emotionally tight-knit
“brotherhoods” – terror organizations create a “family” of
cell mates who are just as willing to sacrifice for one another
as a mother for her children. Consider the “Oath to Jihad”
taken by recruits to Harkat al-Ansar, a Pakistan-based ally
of Al-Qaida, which affirms that by their sacrifice, they will
help secure the future of their “family” of fictive kin: “Each
[martyr] has a special place – among them are brothers, just
as there are sons and those even more dear.” These cultur-
ally contrived cell loyalties mimic and (at least temporarily)
override genetically based fidelities to family kin while se-
curing belief in sacrifice to a larger group cause. The mech-
anism of manipulation resembles the one used by our own
army to train soldiers in small groups of committed buddies
who acquire willingness to sacrifice for one another, and,
derivatively, for glory and country (motherland, father-
land). In the case of religiously inspired suicide terrorism,
these sentiments are purposely manipulated by organiza-
tional leaders, recruiters, and trainers to the advantage of
the manipulating elites rather than the individual (much as
the fast-food or soft-drink industries manipulate innate de-
sires for naturally scarce commodities like fatty foods and
sugar to ends that reduce personal fitness but benefit the
manipulating institution). No “group selection” is involved,
only cognitive and emotional manipulation of some indi-
viduals by others.
1.3. Relieving versus provoking anxieties
Often the naturally eruptive anxieties that bring on the su-
pernatural are artificially (purposely) excited, then as-
suaged (Durkheim 1912/1995). It might seem, then, that
the problem of religion’s ability to neutralize suffering is
akin to the wag about the salesman who throws dirt on the
rug in order to demonstrate the vacuum cleaner’s ability to
remove it. Consider initiation rituals that involve “rites of
terror” (Whitehouse 1996), as among Native American
Cheyenne and Arapaho (Lowie 1924), Walbiri (Meggitt
1965) and other aboriginals of the Central Australian
Desert (Spencer & Gillen 1904), Mountain Ok Baktaman
(Barth 1975) and Ilahita Arapesh of Highland Papua New
Guinea (Tuzin 1982), and Candombolé Nagô sects of
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