(credit: flickr user: gags9999)
The level of altruism that humans display is an anomaly in the animal world. Most species don’t interact peacefully with strangers every day or build large, stable societies that rely on cooperative behavior between unrelated individuals. Although there are animals that show altruistic behavior toward their relatives or breeding partners, we still don’t know how humans managed to develop the extreme level of cooperation between strangers needed to build and maintain our societies.
A paper in Nature hints that religion may be one of the keys to understanding this cooperation. The paper's authors suggest that, as people started to believe in gods who see everything and punish wrongdoing, they may have had more motivation to behave nicely toward strangers. They also suggest that beliefs in more powerful gods might widen the circle of cooperation: the more all-knowing your deity, the farther away people can be from you and still benefit from your cooperation.
To test this idea, the authors studied nearly 600 people with a wide range of beliefs from countries around the world. The beliefs included predominant world religions such as Christianity and Hinduism but also local traditions like ancestor worship, animism, and belief in supernatural entities like saints or ghosts. After answering detailed questions about what they believed, participants played a game to assess how they would act toward other people.
Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment