Scars for war: evaluating alternative signaling explanations for cross-cultural variance in ritual costs

By Richard Sosis, Howard C. Kress, J. Boster. 2007

253 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Demography, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d722284ff479b0b7963230774049889199f56c2

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Citations in the corpus

Early Evidence for Brilliant Ritualized Display: Specularite Use in the Northern Cape (South Africa) between ∼500 and ∼300 Ka (2016, background): “…efforts to coordinate action through small-scale rituals that promoted shared identity and cooperation (Kuhn 2014:46, citing Sosis and Alcorta 2003; Sosis, Kress, and Boster 2007; although Sosis treats group ritual as costly signaling).3 This is considered “a response to increases in group…”
The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion: credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution (2009, background): “Such rich ethnography helps us understand the cultural evolution of the observed relationship between warfare and costly rites for males ( Sosis, Kress, & Boster, 2007 ).”
The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior (2009, background): “The fact that the “adaptive calculation” of the handicap principle really does work was able to be demonstrated in a series of studies by Sosis and his co-workers (e.g. Purzycki and Sosis this volume; Sosis and Bressler 2003; Sosis et al. 2007).”
The Evolution of Tag-Based Cooperation in Humans (2012, background): “…attenuate this threat, but such “costly signaling” is generally considered important only after the cooperative social group and the evolved social-cognitive mechanisms permitting it have already formed (e.g., as a boundary policing mechanism, or commitment signal; Sosis, Kress, and Boster 2007).”
The Evolution of Hazing: Motivational Mechanisms and the Abuse of Newcomers (2011, background): “Jones (2004) suggests that the pledges of fraternities are hazed to “prove their worth” (p. 59), and so on (e.g., Aronson and Mills, 1959; Paige and Paige, 1981; Bryshun, 1997; Boyer, 2001; Malszecki, 2004; Sosis et al., 2007).”
The cultural morphospace of ritual form ☆: Examining modes of religiosity cross-culturally (2011, background): “…of wealth) are likely to recruit lowfrequency, high-arousal rituals (e.g., hazing, painful initiation rites), both as a mechanism of bonding and perhaps as a form of costly signalling to demonstrate group commitment (Irons, 1996; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003; Sosis and Bressler, 2003; Sosis et al., 2007).”