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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 manifest 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-flow. 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.

This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history. It thus constitutes a welcome contribution to a gradually emerging approach to social science based on E. O. Wilson’s concept of ‘consilience’ . Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens spans a wide range of topics, from an examination of ritual behaviour, integrating neuro-science, ethology and anthropology to explain why humans engage in ritual actions (both cultural and individual), to the motivation of conflicts between groups. As such, the collection gives readers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the applications of an evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences. This volume will be a useful resource for scholars and students in the social sciences (particularly psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and the political sciences), as well as a general readership interested in the social sciences.

Introductory Note Relations between different ethnicities are often fraught with conflict, from mild suspicion to avoidance, discrimination or violent inter-group conflict. In many places, inter-group conflict has consequences for people’s well-being, including their health. But why is that the case? In this article, Rengin Firat, Florian van Leeuwen and I tried to propose a general model of inter-group conflict that would explain these well-documented and sometimes paradoxical public health ...

Introductory Note Why do people perform rituals? Over the world and however far we can go in the past, human groups seem to engage in what we would recognize as, well, ‘rituals’ of some kind or other, even though we may be very unclear about what that term is supposed to convey. Pierre Liénard nudged me to join forces and re-open that question, which used to be central in classical anthropology, together with the additional query, what is the connection (if any) between the collective ceremon...

The domain of ‘folk-economics’ consists in explicit beliefs about the economy held by laypeople, untrained in economics, about such topics as, for example, the causes of the wealth of nations, the benefits or drawbacks of markets and international trade, the effects of regulation, the origins of inequality, the connection between work and wages, the economic consequences of immigration, or the possible causes of unemployment. These beliefs are crucial in forming people’s political beliefs and in shaping their reception of different policies. Yet, they often conflict with elementary principles of economic theory and are often described as the consequences of ignorance, irrationality, or specific biases. As we will argue, these past perspectives fail to predict the particular contents of popular folk-economic beliefs and, as a result, there is no systematic study of the cognitive factors involved in their emergence and cultural success. Here we propose that the cultural success of particular beliefs about the economy is predictable if we consider the influence of specialized, largely automatic inference systems that evolved as adaptations to ancestral human small-scale sociality. These systems, for which there is independent evidence, include free-rider detection, fairness-based partner choice, ownership intuitions, coalitional psychology, and more. Information about modern mass-market conditions activates these specific inference systems, resulting in particular intuitions, for example, that impersonal transactions are dangerous or that international trade is a zero-sum game. These intuitions in turn make specific policy proposals more likely than others to become intuitively compelling, and, as a consequence, exert a crucial influence on political choices.

Why is it that the majority of cultural anthropology is no longer relevant? The debates within this specific field are generally absent from wider academic conversations, its scholars no longer rank amongst the most renowned and significant intellectuals of their day, and its contribution to non-academic discourse is basically nonexistent. This third aspect is even more alarming, given that the actual subject matter of cultural anthropology situates it at the core of pressing social issues. A...

Introductory Note People have views about the economy, about such things as unemployment, trade, taxation, etc. Where do these opinions come from? Explaining that would certainly count as an example of ‘useful’ anthropology or political science, considering that most political programs are based on some particular vision of the way a modern economy works, and how it could be made better. Michael Petersen and I were interested in explaining how people acquire these representations of the econo...

Introductory Note One of the most enduring and most damaging assumptions in the social sciences is the belief that it makes sense to talk about nature and culture, or to part the ‘innate’ from the ‘acquired’ in describing human behavior. Almost as misguided is the recommendation that we should describe behavior as some combination or mixture of these elements—an insipid counsel for moderation that only results in a stubborn incuriosity about what is being ‘mixed’ and how (Pinker, 2002). Again...

Contacts between people from different groups engage a variety of human competencies and motivations, from high-level representations of social categories to visceral responses when confronted with strangers, from cognitive appraisal of conflict to a desire to exclude or even attack ‘others.’ There is a correspondingly diverse set of fields and subfields in psychology and the social sciences focusing on such specific topics as racial prejudice, ingroup bias, ethnic identity, xenophobia, and n...

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.

The essays gathered in this volume were all intended as contributions to what I would like to call a useful and scientific anthropology, two words that may seem a tad presumptuous and require an explanation. First, the useful part. The essays address specific questions such as the following: Why do some social institutions seem ‘natural’ to many people across different cultures? How do people form their views of the economy? Why do human beings engage in ritual behaviors, either pathological ...

Introductory Note This essay starts with the question of why the discipline of cultural anthropology is marginal in public debates, when it should and might be central. (I provide data that may seem dated, but the trends described here have if anything become stronger.) The diagnosis is that this is a self-inflicted wound—and perhaps more interestingly, I try to describe how some kinds of social science do contribute to public discourse. But this is not intended as a series of recommendations...

How is mental dysfunction detected? How do cultural models of mental disorder affect this process of detection? Attempts to answer these questions have not often been made in the research, as they fall between two domains: that of cross-cultural psychiatry (which looks at the dysfunction itself) and anthropological ethno-psychiatry (which looks at cultural models of sanity and insanity). In this paper, I set out a model to illustrate this ‘missing link’ between behavior and cultural models, founded on experiential evidence for intuitive psychology. Typical adult minds contain certain intuitive expectations about mental function and behavior, and these are used to perceive certain sorts of dysfunctional behavior. It appears that there is a ‘catalogue’ of potential behaviors that activate this intuition, and therefore the symptoms that are present in culturally specific folk-understandings of mental dysfunction are also restricted. It is also suggested that certain mental dysfunctions are ‘invisible’ to folk-understandings due to their lack of obvious breaches of principles of intuitive psychology. This standpoint helps us to comprehend the cultural stability and spread of certain views of mental disorder.

Introductory Note Who do we see as mad, and why? How do people decide that some person (possibly themselves) suffers from a mental disorder? History and anthropology tell us that in all human societies, people readily identify some forms of behavior as evidence for some dysfunction. In modern societies, we delegate final decisions about such matters to medical specialists. But that is of course a recent phenomenon (Porter, 2004). And, even in places with psychiatric experts, an individual mus...