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Ritual protocols aimed at rainmaking have been a recurrent sociocultural phenomenon across societies and throughout history. Given the fact that such protocols were likely entirely ineffective, why did they repeatedly emerge and persist, sometimes over millennia, even in populations with writing and recordkeeping? To address this puzzle, many scholars have argued that these protocols were not instrumental at all and that their practitioners were not really endeavoring to employ them to bring about rain. Here, taking advantage of the wealth of historical records available in China, we argue to the contrary: that rainmaking is best viewed as an instrumental, means-end activity and that people have always placed strong emphasis on the outcomes of such activities. To account for the persistence of rainmaking, we then present a set of cultural evolutionary explanations rooted in human psychology that can explain why people's adaptive learning processes did not result in the elimination of ineffective rainmaking methods. We suggest that a commitment to a supernatural worldview provides theoretical support for the plausibility of various rainmaking methods and that people often overestimate the efficacy of rainmaking technologies because of statistical artifacts (some methods appear effective simply by chance) and underreporting of disconfirmatory evidence (failures of rainmaking not reported or transmitted). The inclination to "do something" when a drought hits versus "do nothing" likely also plays a role and persists in the world today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persistence of nondegeneracy is a phenomenon that appears in the theory of |$\overline{\mathbb{Q}}_l$| -representations of the linear group: every irreducible submodule of the restriction to the mirabolic sub-representation of a nondegenerate irreducible representation is nondegenerate. This is not true anymore in general, if we look at the modulo |$l$| reduction of some stable lattice. As in the Clozel–Harris–Taylor generalization of global Ihara's lemma, we show that this property, called nondegeneracy persistence and related to the notion of essentially absolutely irreducible and generic representations in the work of Emerton and Helm, remains true for lattices given by the cohomology of Lubin–Tate spaces. As a global application, we give a new construction of automorphic congruences in the Ribet spirit. Résumé. La persistence de la non dégénérescence est un phénomène qui apparait dans la théorie des |$\overline{\mathbb{Q}}_l$| -représentations du groupe linéaire: toute sous-représentation irréductible de la restriction au groupe mirabolique d'une représentation irréductible non dégénérée, est non dégénérée. Ce n'est plus le cas en général pour la réduction modulo |$l$| d'un réseau stable. Comme dans la généralisation par Clozel-Harris-Taylor du lemme d'Ihara, nous montrons que cette propriété de non dégénérescence, qui est reliée à la notion de représentation essentiellement absolument générique de Emerton-Helm, reste valide pour les réseaux donnés par la cohomologie des espaces de Lubin-Tate. Nous donnons une application de nature globale en construisant des congruences automorphes dans l'esprit du travail de Ribet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commentators discussed the coherence and validity of a minimalist approach to ownership intuitions, in ways that make it possible to clarify the model, re-evaluate its cognitive underpinnings, and sketch some of its implications. This response summarizes the model; addresses issues concerning the need for a special technical lexicon when describing cognitive semantics; the psychology involved in contexts of competitive acquisition and their consequences for possession and use of rival resources; the role of cooperative expectations in creating mutually beneficial allocation of resources; the consequences of ownership psychology for social interaction and the production of social norms of property; and the relations between psychological processes and legal institutions in the domain, before proposing some final thoughts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ownership is universal and ubiquitous in human societies, yet the psychology underpinning ownership intuitions is generally not described in a coherent and computationally tractable manner. Ownership intuitions are commonly assumed to derive from culturally transmitted social norms, or from a mentally represented implicit theory. While the social norms account is entirely ad hoc , the mental theory requires prior assumptions about possession and ownership that must be explained. Here I propose such an explanation, arguing that the intuitions result from the interaction of two cognitive systems. One of these handles competitive interactions for the possession of resources observed in many species including humans. The other handles mutually beneficial cooperation between agents, as observed in communal sharing, collective action and trade. Together, these systems attend to specific cues in the environment, and produce definite intuitions such as "this is hers," "that is not mine." This computational model provides an explanation for ownership intuitions, not just in straightforward cases of property, but also in disputed ownership (squatters, indigenous rights), historical changes (abolition of slavery), as well as apparently marginal cases, such as the questions, whether people own their seats on the bus, or their places in a queue, and how people understand "cultural appropriation" and slavery. In contrast to some previous theories, the model is empirically testable and free of ad hoc stipulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Religions "in the wild" are the varied set of religious activities that occurred before the emergence of organized religions with doctrines, or that persist at the margins of those organized traditions. These religious activities mostly focus on misfortune; on how to remedy specific cases of illness, accidents, failures; and on how to prevent them. I present a general model to account for the cross-cultural recurrence of these particular themes. The model is based on (independently established) features of human psychology—namely, (a) epistemic vigilance, the set of systems whereby we evaluate the quality of information and of sources of information, and (b) threat-detection psychology, the set of evolved systems geared at detecting potential danger in the environment. Given these two sets of systems, the dynamics of communication will favor particular types of messages about misfortune. This makes it possible to predict recurrent features of religious systems, such as the focus on nonphysical agents, the focus on particular cases rather than general aspects of misfortune, and the emergence of specialists. The model could illuminate not just why such representations are culturally successful, but also why people are motivated to formulate them in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In nearly every documented society, people believe that some misfortunes are caused by malicious group mates using magic or supernatural powers. Here I report cross-cultural patterns in these beliefs and propose a theory to explain them. Using the newly created Mystical Harm Survey, I show that several conceptions of malicious mystical practitioners, including sorcerers (who use learned spells), possessors of the evil eye (who transmit injury through their stares and words), and witches (who possess superpowers, pose existential threats, and engage in morally abhorrent acts), recur around the world. I argue that these beliefs develop from three cultural selective processes: a selection for intuitive magic, a selection for plausible explanations of impactful misfortune, and a selection for demonizing myths that justify mistreatment. Separately, these selective schemes produce traditions as diverse as shamanism, conspiracy theories, and campaigns against heretics—but around the world, they jointly give rise to the odious and feared witch. I use the tripartite theory to explain the forms of beliefs in mystical harm and outline 10 predictions for how shifting conditions should affect those conceptions. Societally corrosive beliefs can persist when they are intuitively appealing or they serve some believers' agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ritual is not a proper scientific object, as the term is used to denote disparate forms of behaviour, on the basis of a faint family resemblance. Indeed, a variety of distinct cognitive mechanisms are engaged, in various combinations, in the diverse interactions called 'rituals' -- and each of these mechanisms deserves study, in terms of its evolutionary underpinnings and cultural consequences. We identify four such mechanisms that each appear in some 'rituals', namely (i) the normative scripting of actions; (ii) the use of interactions to signal coalitional identity, affiliation, cohesiveness; (iii) magical claims based on intuitive expectations of contagion; and (iv) ritualized behaviour based on a specific handling of the flow of behaviour. We describe the cognitive and evolutionary background to each of these potential components of 'rituals', and their effects on cultural transmission. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divination is found in most human societies, but there is little systematic research to explain (1) why it is persuasive or (2) why divination is required for important collective decisions in many small-scale societies. Common features of human communication and cooperation may help address both questions. A highly recurrent feature of divination is "ostensive detachment," a demonstration that the diviners are not the authors of the statements they utter. As a consequence, people spontaneously interpret divination as less likely than other statements to be influenced by anyone's intentions or interests. This is enough to give divination an epistemic advantage compared with other sources of information, answering question 1. This advantage is all the more important in situations where a diagnosis will create differential costs and benefits, for example, determining who is responsible for someone's misfortune in a small-scale community. Divinatory statements provide a version of the situation that most participants are motivated to agree with, as it provides a focal point for efficient coordination at a minimal cost for almost all participants, which would answer question 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on social transmission suggests that people preferentially transmit information about threats and social interactions. Such biases might be driven by the arousal that is experienced as part of the emotional response triggered by information about threats or social relationships. The current studies tested whether preferences for transmitting threat-relevant information are consistent with a functional motive to recruit social support. USA residents were recruited for six online studies. Studies 1a and 1B showed that participants more often chose to transmit positive, lowarousal vignettes (rather than negative, high-arousal vignettes involving threats and social interactions). Studies 2A and 2B showed higher intentions to transmit emotional vignettes (triggering disgust, fear, anger, or sadness) to friends (rather than to strangers or disliked acquaintances). Study 4 showed a preference for transmitting stories that participants had modified and were therefore novel and unique. Studies 2A and 3 (but not Studies 2B and 4) suggest that motivations for seeking social support might influence transmission preferences. Overall, the findings are not easily accounted for by any of the major theories of social transmission. We discuss limitations of the current studies and directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Folk-sociology is a set of intuitive assumptions that organize our spontaneous theories about society, including the notion that social groups are agent-like. Pietraszewski's model may explain this folk-sociological assumption in an elegant way. However, large-scale group dynamics include features that seem to escape agent-like descriptions. Therefore, one may want to find out whether the "event-grammar" proposed here can account for these features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about potential danger is a central component of many rumors, urban legends, ritual prescriptions, religious prohibitions and witchcraft crazes. We investigate a potential factor in the cultural success of such material, namely that a source of threat-related information may be intuitively judged as more competent than a source that does not convey such information. In five studies, we asked participants to judge which of two sources of information, only one of which conveyed threat-related information, was more knowledgeable. Results suggest that mention of potential danger makes a source appear more competent than others, that the effect is not due to a general negativity bias, and that it concerns competence rather than a more generally positive evaluation of the source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association between threat perception and motor execution, mediated by evolved precaution systems, often results in ritual-like behavior, including many idiosyncratic acts that seem irrelevant to the task at hand. This study tested the hypothesis that threat-detection during performance of a risky motor task would result in idiosyncratic activity that is not necessary for task completion. We asked biology students to follow a particular set of instructions in mixing three solutions labeled "bio-hazardous" and then repeat this operation with "non-hazardous" substances (or vice versa). We observed a longer duration of the overall performance, a greater repertoire of acts, longer maximal act duration, and longer mean duration of acts in the "risky" task when it was performed before the "non-risky" task. Some, but not all, of these differences were eliminated when a "non-risky" task preceded the "risky" one. The increased performance of idiosyncratic unnecessary activity is in accordance with the working hypothesis of the present study: ritualized idiosyncratic activities are performed in response to a real or illusionary threat, as a means to alleviate anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this comment, we respond to comments raised by Eastwood (2012) in response to our article on the role of evolutionary psychology in understanding institutions (Boyer and Petersen, 2012). We discuss how evolutionary psychological models account for cultural variation and change in institutions, how sociological institutionalism and evolutionary models can inform each other, how evolutionary psychological models illuminate the role of power in institutional design and the possibility of a ‘general theory’ of institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Motor behaviours typically include acts that may seem irrelevant for the goal of the task. These unnecessary idiosyncratic acts are excessively manifested in certain activities, such as sports or compulsive rituals. Using the shared performance (commonness) of acts as a proxy for their relevance to the current task, we analysed motor behaviour in daily tasks, sport-related tasks, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) tasks. For each task, these motor behaviours comprised common acts that were performed by all the individuals, and idiosyncratic acts that were performed by only some individuals. In all three tasks there was a temporal section that included all the common acts (termed 'body'). This body section was preceded by a sequence of idiosyncratic acts that we termed 'head', and was followed by another sequence of idiosyncratic acts that we termed 'tail'. While both head and tail sections were relatively short in the daily tasks, the head was relatively long and the tail largely absent in sport-related tasks, which have a definite end and high stakes. In contrast, OCD behaviour had a relatively long tail. In light of these results, we suggest that the head is a preparatory phase and the tail a confirmatory phase. The head may be viewed as a warm-up phase for the pragmatic section of the task ('body'), and the tail as a cool-down phase. Finally, we suggest that rituals may be viewed as a descendant of pragmatic activities, which differentially feature a greater terminal phase of idiosyncratic acts in OCD, and an extended initial phase of idiosyncratic acts in sport rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard measures of generalized trust in others are often taken to provide reliable indicators of economic attitudes in different countries. Here we compared three highly distinct groups, in Kenya, China and the US, in terms of more specific attitudes, [a] people's willingness to invest in the future, [b] their willingness to invest in others, and [c] their trust in institutions. Results suggest that these measures capture deep differences in economic attitudes that are not detected by standard measures of generalized trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deficits in episodic memory are associated with deficits in the ability to imagine future experiences (i.e., mental time travel). We show that K.C., a person with episodic amnesia and an inability to imagine future experiences, nonetheless systematically discounts the value of future rewards, and his discounting is within the range of controls in terms of both rate and consistency. Because K.C. is neither able to imagine personal uses for the rewards nor provide a rationale for selecting larger future rewards over smaller current rewards, this study demonstrates a dissociation between imagining and making decisions involving the future. Thus, although those capable of mental time travel may use it in making decisions about future rewards, these results demonstrate that it is not required for such decisions. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most standard social science accounts only offer limited explanations of institutional design, i.e. why institutions have common features observed in many different human groups. Here we suggest that these features are best explained as the outcome of evolved human cognition, in such domains as mating, moral judgment and social exchange. As empirical illustrations, we show how this evolved psychology makes marriage systems, legal norms and commons management systems intuitively obvious and compelling, thereby ensuring their occurrence and cultural stability. We extend this to propose under what conditions institutions can become ‘natural’, compelling and legitimate, and outline probable paths for institutional change given human cognitive dispositions. Explaining institutions in terms of these exogenous factors also suggests that a general theory of institutions as such is neither necessary nor in fact possible. What are required are domain-specific accounts of institutional design in different domains of evolved cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do people detect mental dysfunction? What is the influence of cultural models of dysfunction on this detection process? The detection process as such is not usually researched as it falls between the domains of cross-cultural psychiatry (focusing on the dysfunction itself) and anthropological ethno-psychiatry (focusing on cultural models of sanity and madness). I provide a general model for this 'missing link' between behavior and cultural models, grounded in empirical evidence for intuitive psychology. Normal adult minds entertain specific intuitive expectations about mental function and behavior, and by implication they infer that specific kinds of behavior are the result of underlying dysfunction. This suggests that there is a 'catalogue' of possible behaviors that trigger that intuition, hence a limited catalogue of possible symptoms that feed into culturally specific folk-understandings of mental disorder. It also suggests that some mental dysfunctions, as they do not clearly violate principles of intuitive psychology, are 'invisible' to folk-understandings. This perspective allows us to understand the cultural stability and spread of particular views of madness. It also suggests why certain types of mental disorder are invisible to folk-understandings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Boyer [Monodromy of perverse sheaves on vanishing cycles on some Shimura varieties, Invent. Math. 177 (2009), 239-280 (in French)], a sheaf version of the monodromy-weight conjecture for some unitary Shimura varieties was proved by giving explicitly the monodromy filtration of the complex of vanishing cycles in terms of local systems introduced in Harris and Taylor [The geometry and cohomology of some simple Shimura varieties (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001)]. The main result of this paper is the cohomological version of the monodromy-weight conjecture for these Shimura varieties, which we prove by means of an explicit description of the groups of cohomology in terms of automorphic representations and the local Langlands correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work in biology, cognitive psychology, and archaeology has renewed evolutionary perspectives on the role of natural selection in the emergence and recurrent forms of religious thought and behavior, i.e., mental representations of supernatural agents, as well as artifacts, ritual practices, moral systems, ethnic markers, and specific experiences associated with these representations. One perspective, inspired from behavioral ecology, attempts to measure the fitness effects of religious practices. Another set of models, representative of evolutionary psychology, explain religious thought and behavior as the output of cognitive systems (e.g., animacy detection, social cognition, precautionary reasoning) that are not exclusive to the religious domain. In both perspectives, the question remains open, whether religious thought and behavior constitute an adaptation or a by-product of adaptive cognitive function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ritualized behavior is a specific way of organizing the flow of action, characterized by stereotypy, rigidity in performance, a feeling of compulsion, and specific themes, in particular the potential danger from contamination, predation, and social hazard. We proposed elsewhere a neurocognitive model of ritualized behavior in human development and pathology, as based on the activation of a specific hazard-precaution system specialized in the detection of and response to potential threats. We show how certain features of collective rituals—by conveying information about potential danger and presenting appropriate reaction as a sequence of rigidly described precautionary measures—probably activate this neurocognitive system. This makes some collective ritual sequences highly attention-demanding and intuitively compelling and contributes to their transmission from place to place or generation to generation. The recurrence of ritualized behavior as a central feature of collective ceremonies may be explained as a consequence of this bias in selective transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In reply to commentary on our target article, we supply further evidence and hypotheses in the description of ritualized behaviors in humans. Reactions to indirect fitness threats probably activate specialized precaution systems rather than a unified form of danger-avoidance or causal reasoning. Impairment of precaution systems may be present in pathologies other than obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), autism in particular. Ritualized behavior is attention-grabbing enough to be culturally transmitted whether or not it is associated with group identity, cohesion, or with any other social aspect of collective ceremonies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ritualized behavior, intuitively recognizable by its stereotypy, rigidity, repetition, and apparent lack of rational motivation, is found in a variety of life conditions, customs, and everyday practices: in cultural rituals, whether religious or non-religious; in many children's complicated routines; in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD); in normal adults around certain stages of the life-cycle, birthing in particular. Combining evidence from evolutionary anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroimaging, we propose an explanation of ritualized behavior in terms of an evolved Precaution System geared to the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness. This system, distinct from fear-systems geared to respond to man~fest danger, includes a repertoire of clues for potential danger as well as a repertoire of species-typical precautions. In OCD pathology, this system does not supply a negative feedback to the appraisal of potential threats, resulting in doubts about the proper performance of precautions, and repetition of action. Also, anxiety levels focus the attention on low-level gestural units of behavior rather than on the goal-related higher-level units normally used in parsing the action-How. Normally automatized actions are submitted to cognitive control. This "swamps" working memory, an effect of which is a temporary relief from intrusions but also their long-term strengthening. Normal activation of this Precaution System explains intrusions and ritual behaviors in normal adults. Gradual calibration of the system occurs through childhood rituals. Cultural mimicry of this system's normal input makes cultural rituals attention-grabbing and compelling. A number of empirical predictions follow from this synthetic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's learning—in the domains of science and religion specifically, but in many other cultural domains as well—relies extensively on testimony and other forms of culturally transmitted information. The cognitive processes that enable such learning must also administrate the evaluation, qualification, and storage of that information, while guarding against the dangers of false or misleading input. Currently, the development of these appraisal processes is not clearly understood. Recent work, reviewed here, has begun to address three important dimensions of the problem: how children and adults evaluate truth in communication, how they gauge the inferential potential of information, and how they encode and evaluate its source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposes a modification of a model by Paulo Sousa regarding the decline of kinship studies in anthropology. Awareness of scientists and academics of the dynamics of authority transmission; Importance of authority transmission; Modes of transmission; Features of erudition.

Investigates whether ghost concepts are either intuitive, endemic or innate. Aspects of religious dead concepts as counter-intuitive; Attempts made to explicate the endemic and cultural claims with regard to ghost-concepts; Examination of the development of ghost-notions in the brain.

Presents a study which reported the results of free-recall experiments conducted in France, Gabon and Nepal, to test predictions of a cognitive model of religious concepts. Questions concerning studies of memory effects on cultural material; Experiment contrasting standard situation with breaches of intuitive domain-level expectations; Religious notions that imply a particular treatment of information associated with domain-concepts.

ABSTRACT Cognitive developmental evidence is sometimes conscripted to support "naturalized epistemology" arguments to the effect that a general epistemic stance leads children to build theory-like accounts of underlying properties of kinds. A review of the evidence suggests that what prompts conceptual acquisition is not a general epistemic stance but a series of category-specific intuitive principles that constitute an evolved "natural metaphysics". This consists in a system of categories and category-specific inferential processes founded on definite biases in prototype formation. Evidence for this system provides a better understanding of the limited "plasticity" of ontological commitments as well as a computationally plausible account of theft initial state, avoiding ambiguities about innateness. This may provide a starting point for a "naturalized epistemology" that takes into account evolved properties of human conceptual structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culturally successful religious concepts are the outcome of selective processes that make some concepts more likely than others to be easily acquired, stored and transmitted. Among the constructs of human imagination, some connect to intuitive ontological principles in such a way that they constitute a small catalogue of culturally successful supernatural concepts. Experimental and anthropological evidence confirm the salience and transmission potential of this catalogue. Among these supernatural concepts, cognitive capacities for social interaction introduce a further selection. As a result, some concepts of supernatural agents are connected to morality, group identity, ritual and emotion. These typical 'religious' supernatural agents are tacitly presumed to have access to information that is crucial to social interaction, an assumption that boosts their spread in human groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an evaluation of how evolutionary psychology can contribute to the description and explanation of cultural material as a continuation of other research frameworks that connected genetic inheritance and cultural evolution. Evolutionary psychology provides a proximate explanation of cultural transmission in that it is based on a description of the cognitive mechanisms involved in acquisition of cultural representations. To illustrate this point, the author uses the example of religious concepts. A better understanding of cultural acquisition processes will probably require new descriptive models for anthropological data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses issues pertaining to the evolutionary interpretations of psychology. Contribution of evolutionary psychology to classical issues in psychology, anthropology and sociology; Discussion on the potential and limits of a Darwinian framework; Key conceptual problems involved in research about gene-culture interaction.