Religion as a hard-to-fake sign of commitment.

By W. Irons. 2001

359 citations recorded by the source corpus.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48f6153566917fa3dcc4970407b30f343c440b85

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Citations in the corpus

Does Religion Promote Trust? The Role of Signaling, Reputation, and Punishment (2005, background): “More recently, evolutionary scholars have argued that social bonding is not an end in itself but a means to facilitate intragroup cooperation (Bulbulia 2004b; Cronk 1994; Irons 2001, 2004; Nesse 1999; Rappaport 1999; Sosis 2003; Sosis and Alcorta 2003; Steadman and Palmer 1995; Wilson 2002).”
A new Big Five: fundamental principles for an integrative science of personality. (2006, background): “The general design may also privilege a broad and varied collection of additional social tendencies, such as the tendency to develop religious beliefs and practices in culture (Irons, 2001; Kirkpatrick, 1999), that enhanced inclusive fitness for group life in the EEA.”
Do sincere apologies need to be costly? Test of a costly signaling model of apology (2009, unknown): “2000; Smith & Bliege Bird, 2000; Sosis, 2000), religious behavior (e.g., Irons, 2001; Sosis,”
Religious Beliefs as Reflective Elaborations on Intuitions: A Modified Dual-Process Model (2013, background): “Although some evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists conjecture that such beliefs may actually have adaptive advantages (Bulbulia, 2004; Irons, 2001), others see them mostly as by-products of other adaptive cognitive functions (Boyer, 1994b, 2001).”
Communication and collective action: language and the evolution of human cooperation (2010, background): “Signaling via providing collective goods has also been reported or hypothesized for several noneconomic arenas, particularly various forms of religious ritual (Boone, 1998, 2000; Irons, 2001; Sosis, 2003; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003; Sosis & Bressler, 2003; Sosis, Kress & Boster, 2007; Wilson, 2008 ).”
Does It Pay To Pray? Costly Ritual and Cooperation (2007, background): “…lines, offers an opportunity to 1 Outside of economics, evolutionary anthropologists have similarly argued that religious practices serve to signal group commitment and help overcome free-rider dilemmas that humans have encountered throughout their evolutionary history (Irons 2001, Sosis 2003).”
Whence Collective Rituals? A Cultural Selection Model of Ritualized Behavior (2006, background): “Evolutionary anthropologists have noted that expensive religious rituals in particular constitute hard-to-fake signals of commitment to statements, the only guarantee for which is other people’s commitment (Irons, 2001; Sosis, 2003; Bulbulia, 2004).”
Scars for war: evaluating alternative signaling explanations for cross-cultural variance in ritual costs (2007, background): “As Irons (2001) notes, if religious behaviors signal commitment to the group, individuals who have the most to gain from signaling their group loyalties should be the ones who exhibit the highest intensity of ritual performance.”
Hand of God, Mind of Man: Punishment and Cognition in the Evolution of Cooperation* (2006, background): “…has given rise to a number of theories arguing that religion was a key promoter of within-group cooperation during human evolution (e.g. Cronk 1994; Irons 2001; Roes and Raymond 2003; Sosis 2003; Wilson 2002), but this work remains totally absent from the literature on “strong reciprocity” and the…”
Evolutionary accounts of belief in supernatural punishment: a critical review (2011, background): “Epistemic costs are incurred in virtue of the fact that religious believers must internalize and sustain counterintuitive, counterfactual and sometimes even transparently unreasonable religious beliefs (Irons, 2001; Rappaport, 1999).”
The cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion (2004, unknown): “Irons concludes that hard-to-fake religious signally is favoured among Utilan women, who are far more religious than Utilan men, because the religious causation secures virtue (Irons 2001).”
“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies (2005, background): “2002; Panchanathan & Boyd 2004), serve as commitment devices (Hirshleifer 2001; Irons 2001; Sosis & Alcorta 2003), or function as honest signals of underlying quality (Bliege Bird & Smith 2005; Boone 1998; Gintis et al.”