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The concept of wisdom has captivated scholars throughout history, yet disagreements remain over its cultural variability. Here, we investigated wisdom perception in self and others across 16 samples from eight cultural regions on five continents. Participants assessed wisdom exemplars, non-exemplar targets, and themselves on 19 socio-cognitive characteristics, rating each person's wisdom. Multilevel factor analyses unveiled two latent dimensions: Reflective Orientation and Socio-Emotional Awareness. These factors were invariant across cultures and correlated positively with each other and with explicit wisdom ratings, though ratings of some exemplars varied by culture within the socio-emotional dimension. We also found additive and interactive effects of these factors on wisdom ratings. Intriguingly, individuals perceived themselves as less reflective but more socio-emotionally aware than most wisdom exemplars. These results illuminate social perception across cultures and underscore the importance of social perception in wisdom-attribution for both self and others, with wide-ranging implications for philosophy, psychology, and cognitive sciences.

Religious hate propaganda, which is sustained communication by an authority that attempts to guide an audience towards persecuting others based on religion, is a speech crime. Yet, it is one of the least understood and most difficult speech crimes to prosecute. This is due to misunderstandings and epistemic gaps regarding how persecutory language, which would otherwise have little significance for prosocial religious adherents, becomes meaningful for a religious community. Drawing from the cognitive science of religion (CSR), this article develops and explores the hypothesis that for some religious communities, discursive attacks on others become meaningful when they center on dangerous accusations. Dangerous accusations portray the other as capable of mystical harm and, when made by cultural authorities, become socially accepted truths if repeated during rituals of veridiction. This article shows that dangerous accusations are at the heart of religious hate propaganda and exploit cognitive biases for threat perception, coalitional psychology, and costly signaling. Moreover, dangerous accusations can reinforce the social order and maintain social cohesion. Together, an analysis of speech crimes and dangerous accusations shed light on how religious hate propaganda works, how it can offer meaning to religious communities, and how it can justify persecution in certain environments.

While the central aim of decolonisation is undoing colonial legacies, a major obstacle is white nationalism. A new wave of transnational anti-globalist, Islamophobic, and white-grievance tropes have hybridised with local political ideologies of right-wing politics and authoritarian populists in Europe and the United States. Here, I review the cultural characteristics of this new wave of white nationalism by focusing on its co-option of Serbian nationalist propaganda from the Yugoslav Wars and shared receptivity to narratives among far-right political groups in former colonial powers. The portrait that emerges is one of cross-cultural variations on a common theme: maintaining white supremacy and actively countering ideological challenges to it. Critically, the new wave of white nationalism expands our anthropological understanding of white supremacy but also highlights the significance of white nationalism in obstructing justice initiatives that address the race crimes of colonialism. Less consensus has been reached, however, on how to counter white nationalist networks and transnational extremist propaganda. In addition to highlighting ways to counter white nationalist propaganda, I argue that decolonising Europe and achieving its envisioned relations of sociative peace will not be fully realised unless more is done to minimise the influence of white nationalism.

Meaning-making has been one of the primary domains of religion throughout history, and some have claimed that this is religion’s central function. Yet, the modern era has seen a proliferation of other social institutions that generate meaning for people. Here we reflect on what religious meaning-making can tell us about meaning-making in secular institutions, with a particular focus on sport. Sport as a meaning-making institution is puzzling since sports are generally considered leisure activities, not serious enough to provide meaningful structure and purpose to human lives. Nonetheless, people do derive meaning from sport and we argue that because sport shares many features with religion, it offers a unique opportunity to examine a secular meaning-making institution. We offer a theoretical framework for the study of meaning-making that derives from our conceptual approach to religion as an adaptive system. We use this approach, and other anthropological research, to delineate seven general characteristics of human meaning-making systems: collective, constructed, subjective, narrative, relational, transcendent, and growth-oriented. These features of meaning-making systems highlight why sport has been so successful at offering meaning to sport enthusiasts, both fans and athletes alike. We conclude with a brief speculative evolutionary scenario that may explain our proclivity for seeking meaning, and why secular institutions will continue to fill that role when religious worldviews are not compelling.

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 of religion could continue as quasi-independent fields, they would both benefit from theoretical and methodological integration. The systemic approach, it is suggested, offers the most promising way forward.

We are confronted with formidable crises in the twenty-first century, ranging from massive habitat loss (see UN, 2019), to divisive political and religious ideologies (e.g., McCoy & Somer, 2019), t...

What universal features of the mind interact with specific ecologies to produce expressions of violent religious nationalism? To shed light on this question, we focus on a case study of the Yugoslav Wars, asking: How did different religious groups in the Balkans move from cooperative relationships to violent ones? We argue that the most prevalent theories invoked to answer this question fail to adequately explain the change, namely, both the rise and fall of violent religious nationalism in the Balkans. To that end, we employ a systemic framework of religious change to examine historical data and ethnographic interview excerpts from ex-fighters and survivors of the Yugoslav Wars. This framework takes religion as it is practiced by communities to be a complex adaptive system, and models how religions adapt to local socioecologies. In employing this framework, three questions are addressed: (1) What features of cognition contributed to religiously motivated mass violence; (2) Which constituents of the religious system triggered those features; and (3) What socioecological factors were those constituents responding to? We argue that popular support for religious violence—and eventually its rejection—involved a set of higher-order functions, which McNamara calls the centralized executive self. This decision-making system was decentered by religious specialists who raised social pressures; group rituals that sustained community engagement; and identity-markers that signaled group commitments. While support for violence was a response to community threats during state-level succession, the eventual rejection of violence by religious leaders and communities was due to socioecological factors, such as rising health threats and declining birth rates brought about by the wars.

Philosophers have argued that some philosophical concepts are universal, but it is increasingly clear that the question of philosophical universals is far from settled, and that far more cross-cultural research is necessary. In this chapter, we illustrate the relevance of investigating philosophical concepts and describe results from recent cross-cultural studies in experimental philosophy. We focus on the concept of knowledge and outline an ongoing project, the Geography of Philosophy Project, which empirically investigates the concepts of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom across cultures, languages, religions, and socioeconomic groups. We outline questions for future research on philosophical concepts across cultures, with an aim towards resolving questions about universals and variation in philosophical concepts.

What is the relationship between war propaganda and nationalism, and what are the effects of each on support for, or participation in, violent acts? This is an important question for international criminal law and ongoing speech crime trials, where prosecutors and judges continue to assert that there is a clear causal link between war propaganda, nationalism, and mass violence. Although most legal judgments hinge on the criminal intent of propagandists, the question of whether and to what extent propaganda and nationalism interact to cause support for violence or participation remains unanswered. Our goal here is to contribute to research on propaganda and nationalism by bridging international criminal law and the behavioral and brain sciences. We develop an experiment conducted with Serbian participants that examines the effects of propaganda as identified in the latest international speech crime trial as causing mass violence, and thereby test hypotheses of expert witness Anthony Oberschall’s theory of mass manipulation. Using principal components analysis and Bayesian regression, we examine the effects of propaganda exposure and prior levels of nationalism as well as other demographics on support for violence, ingroup empathy, and outgroup empathy. Results show that while exposure to war propaganda does not increase justifications of violence, specific types of war propaganda increase ingroup empathy and decrease outgroup empathy. Further, although nationalism by itself is not significant for justifying violence, the interaction of increased nationalism and exposure to violent media is significant for altering group empathies. The implications of these findings are discussed with respect to international criminal law and the cognitive science of nationalism.

We live in an era of populism, characterized by political polarization, inciting speech on social media, and an escalation in hate crimes. The regulatory framework for direct incitement to imminent lawless action established fifty years ago in Brandenburg is showing signs of severe strain. One of the central frailties of Brandenburg’s three-part test is the lack of guidance on how courts should evaluate the probability that an inciting speech act will cause an imminent offense. In the absence of clear direction on analyzing risk, judges often rely on outdated heuristics and misleading metaphors. This article is the first to draw on behavioral research to construct a systematic evidence-based framework for assessing the likelihood that inciting speech will result in imminent lawless action. This matrix is then applied to the fact pattern in Sines v. Kessler, a civil suit arising from the events in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

Group violence, despite much study, remains enigmatic. Its forms are numerous, its proximate causes myriad, and the interrelation of its forms and proximate causes poorly understood. We review its evolution, including preadaptations and selected propensities, and its putative environmental and psychological triggers. We then reconsider one of its forms, ethnoreligious violence, in light of recent discoveries in the behavioral and brain sciences. We find ethnoreligious violence to be characterized by identity fusion and by manipulation of religious traditions, symbols, and systems. We conclude by examining the confluence of causes and characteristics before and during Yugoslavia’s wars of disintegration.

We argue that limiting the theory of extreme self-sacrifice to two determinants, namely, identity fusion and group threats, results in logical and conceptual difficulties. To strengthen Whitehouse's theory, we encourage a more holistic approach. In particular, we suggest that the theory include exogenous sociopolitical factors and constituents of the religious system as additional predictors of extreme self-sacrifice.

In this chapter, we provide a philosophical and anthropological analysis of strong reciprocity. We begin our analysis by outlining the logical argument for strong reciprocity in detail, drawing attention to its most questionable premises. We then address the most critical issue facing strong reciprocity: the lack of ethnographic evidence for strongly reciprocal behavior in the real world, outside of economic games. We conclude that (1) despite some weak premises, the foundational argument for strong reciprocity is logically sound, and (2) while it is very unlikely that strong reciprocity is an artifact entirely limited to experimental settings, it is difficult to detect the behavior in nonexperimental contexts. Lastly, we suggest that while the impulses of strong reciprocity can motivate justice and fairness, one of the reasons that strong reciprocity is difficult to detect in real-world contexts is that cultural forces influence and often limit the manifestation of strong reciprocity impulses.

Once in a great while, an intellectual comes along and provides a story that makes sense of the “big” questions within a discipline. We are fortunate enough that Norenzayan (2013) has done just tha...

This chapter reviews the cultural evolution of religious terrorism since the late nineteenth century and explores how terrorists have effectively exploited religious systems to pursue their political goals. Religious systems are adaptive complexes that efficiently respond to rapidly changing socioenvironmental conditions and successfully motivate prosocial and sacrificial behavior by engaging evolved psychological capacities. Ongoing religious terrorism differs from previous waves of terror by manipulating religious systems in order to frame political conflicts, organize combatants, and render collective violence as sacred. By taking an evolutionary perspective of religious terrorism, scholars can begin to shed light on the ultimate and proximate mechanisms of collective violence and the manner in which religion contributes to contemporary terrorist activity.

Group violence, despite much study, remains enigmatic. Its forms are numerous, its proximate causes myriad, and the interrelation of its forms and proximate causes poorly understood. We review its evolution, including preadaptations and selected propensities, and its putative environmental and psychological triggers. We then reconsider one of its forms, ethnoreligious violence, in light of recent discoveries in the behavioral and brain sciences. We find ethnoreligious violence to be characterized by identity fusion and by manipulation of religious traditions, symbols, and systems. We conclude by examining the confluence of causes and characteristics before and during Yugoslavia's wars of disintegration.

Abstract Do human rights have religious foundations? Among philosophers and theologians, the question tends to invite two standard replies. Some accept the boundary between the secular and the religious, and say that the universal protection of freedoms, possessions, and duties associated with human rights extend beyond any religious system. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the moral standards within human rights are inherently religious. In this paper I propose a third position. By taking the perspective of relative universalism, I draw a distinction between the conceptualization and implementation of human rights. The former is a historical process that is arguably bereft of religion, while the latter is a dynamic process that often embraces it. This distinction motivates my central thesis: although religion is absent from the normative and historical foundations of human rights, the realization of human rights in some regions of the world today often requires it.

In light of the many recent criticisms of Henry Shue's philosophy, this article provides a defense of Shue's philosophical argument for basic rights. The author demonstrates that the latest criticisms made by Thomas Pogge, Michael Payne, and Andrew Cohen misconstrue Shue's position, and therefore fail to overturn the soundness of Shue's argument. Against those who contend that basic rights demand too much, both logically and morally, the author argues that basic rights serve as the minimal threshold for human dignity and the foundation for all other rights. Consequentially, the overall moral landscape is skewed if basic rights are absent.

Although religions, as Smaldino demonstrates, provide informative examples of culturally evolved group-level traits, they are more accurately analyzed as complex adaptive systems than as norm-enforcing institutions. An adaptive systems approach to religion not only avoids various shortcomings of institutional approaches, but also offers additional explanatory advantages regarding the cultural evolution of group-level traits that emerge from religion.