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Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission
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When group membership gets personal: a theory of identity fusion.
TLDR
Possible causes of identity fusion--ranging from relatively distal, evolutionary, and cultural influences to more proximal, contextual influences--are discussed and possible effects on pro-group actions are mediated by perceptions of arousal and invulnerability.
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Happy to help? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of performing acts of kindness on the well-being of the actor
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Inside the Cult: Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea
For the past thirty years, adherents of a millenarian cult in Papua New Guinea, known as the Pomio Kivung, have been awaiting the establishment of a period of supernatural bliss, heralded by the…
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Intergroup Conflict
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Brothers in arms: Libyan revolutionaries bond like family
TLDR
Stark evidence of extraordinarily tight, familial-like bonds among those who put themselves directly in harm’s way (i.e., frontline combatants) are found, helping illuminate the social bonds that seem to motivate combatants to risk their lives for the group during wartime.
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The evolution of extreme cooperation via shared dysphoric experiences
TLDR
A mathematical model shows how conditioning cooperation on previous shared experience can allow individually costly pro-group behavior to evolve, and empirical results show that sharing painful experiences produces “identity fusion” – a visceral sense of oneness – which in turn can motivate self-sacrifice, including willingness to fight and die for the group.
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Dying for the group: Towards a general theory of extreme self-sacrifice
  • H. Whitehouse
  • Political Science
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences
  • 7 February 2018
TLDR
This paper attempts to integrate many of these factors into a single overarching theory based on several decades of collaborative research with a range of special populations, from tribes in Papua New Guinea to Libyan insurgents and from Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia to Brazilian football hooligans.
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Modes of religiosity: towards a cognitive explanation of the sociopolitical dynamics of religion
In this article is summarized the theory of "modes of religiosity", the doctrinal mode and the imagistic mode. It seeks to contribute to a growing body of research, by explaining, in terms of…
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Memorable Religions: Transmission, Codification and Change in Divergent Melanesian Contexts
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