• DOI:10.1017/S0140525X14001356
Corpus ID: 54560459

The cultural evolution of prosocial religions

@article{Norenzayan2014TheCE,
  title={The cultural evolution of prosocial religions},
  author={A. Norenzayan and A. Shariff and Will M Gervais and Aiyana K. Willard and R. McNamara and E. Slingerland and J. Henrich},
  journal={Behavioral and Brain Sciences},
  year={2014},
  volume={39}
}

• A. Norenzayan, A. Shariff, +4 authors J. Henrich
• Published 2014
• Medicine, Psychology
• Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Abstract We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10–12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by… Expand

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