scholarly journals Religion, the social brain and the mystical stance

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-62
Author(s):  
RIM Dunbar

This article explores the implications of the social brain and the endorphin-based bonding mechanism that underpins it for the evolution of religion. I argue that religion evolved as one of the behavioural mechanisms designed to facilitate community bonding when humans first evolved the larger social groups of ~150 that now characterise our species. This is not a matter of facilitating cooperation, but of engineering social cohesion – a very different problem. Analysis of the size of C19th utopian communities suggests that a religious basis both allowed larger groups to form and greatly enhanced their longevity. I suggest that religion evolved in two stages: an early immersive form with no formal structure based on trance-dancing (a form still evident in the rituals and practices of many hunter-gatherers) and a later form which had more formal structures and gave rise to our modern doctrinal religions. I argue that the modern doctrinal religions did not replace ancestral immersive religions but rather that the doctrinal component was overlaid on the ancient immersive form, thereby giving rise to the mystical stance that underlies all world religions. I suggest that it is this mystical stance that causes the constant upwelling of cults and sects within world religions.

Author(s):  
Ю.В. Ковалева

Представлен историографический анализ развития понятия большие социальные группы и историко-психологический анализ социальных феноменов , связанных с массовыми общественными явлениями в России. Сформулированы актуальные проблемы психологии больших социальных групп, к которым относятся неоднородность оснований для их выделения, недостаточная дифференцированность со сходными понятиями, неравномерность исследований в различные временные периоды и идеологическая нагруженность их разработки. Данная работа была ответом на необходимость восполнения знаний о процессах в таких группах, происходивших в различные исторические периоды развития социальной психологии, с соответствующим им уровнем научного осмысления, а также обобщением этой целостной картины на уровне современного понимания и формулировка перспективных направлений исследований. Целью исследования является установление связи между определением и основными свойствами понятия «большие социальные группы» (его синонимов, аналогов) и особенностями социальной ситуации в определенный период времени, а также реконструкция социальных процессов данного исторического этапа. Проверялась гипотеза о том, что большие социальные группы как феномены социальной жизни формировались в соответствии с историческим временем, а соответствующее им понятие и его свойства с одной стороны отвечали уровню развития гуманитарного знания, а с другой - пытались удовлетворить общественный и политический запрос в объяснении и управлении социальной ситуацией. Использовались методы историографии социальной психологии и психолого-исторической реконструкции . Первая часть статьи посвящена анализу первых двух этапов развития социальной психологии - с середины XIX до начала XX вв. и в 1920-е гг. XX в. The historiographic analysis of the development of the concept of large social groups and historical and psychological study of social phenomena associated with mass social phenomena was presented. Topical problems of the psychology of large social groups are formulated, including heterogeneity of the grounds for their isolation, insufficient differentiation with similar concepts, uneven research in various periods, and ideological loading of the history of its development. The study's main problem was the need to replenish the processes in such groups that took place in various historical periods of social psychology development as well as a synthesis of this holistic picture at the level of modern understanding and the formulation of promising areas of research. The study's purpose was to establish a connection between the definition and the basic properties of the concept of "large social groups" (and its synonyms, analogs) and the peculiarities of the social situation in a certain period, as well as the reconstruction of social processes of this historical segment. The hypothesis was tested that large social groups as phenomena of social life were formed under the past time. The concept and its properties were corresponding to them, on the one hand, compared to the level of development of humanitarian knowledge. On the other, they tried to satisfy the social and political requests to understand and manage the social situation. Methods of the historiography of the history of social psychology and psychological and historical reconstruction were used. The article's first part was devoted to the analysis of the early two stages of the development of social psychology - from the middle of the XIX to the beginning of the XX centuries and 1920 of the XX century.


Author(s):  
Alan Barnard

This chapter examines contemporary hunter-gatherer societies in Africa and elsewhere in light of the social brain and the distributed mind hypotheses. One question asked is whether African hunter-gatherers offer the best model for societies at the dawn of symbolic culture, or whether societies elsewhere offer better models. The chapter argues for the former. Theoretical concepts touched on include sharing and exchange, universal kin classification, and the relation between group size and social networks. The chapter offers reinterpretations of classic anthropological notions such as Wissler's age-area hypothesis, Durkheim's collective consciousness and Lévi-Strauss's elementary structures of kinship. Finally, the chapter outlines a theory of the co-evolution of language and kinship through three phases (signifying, syntactic and symbolic) and the subsequent breakdown of the principles of the symbolic phase across much of the globe in Neolithic times.


2013 ◽  
Vol 280 (1765) ◽  
pp. 20131151 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Dávid-Barrett ◽  
R. I. M. Dunbar

Sociality is primarily a coordination problem. However, the social (or communication) complexity hypothesis suggests that the kinds of information that can be acquired and processed may limit the size and/or complexity of social groups that a species can maintain. We use an agent-based model to test the hypothesis that the complexity of information processed influences the computational demands involved. We show that successive increases in the kinds of information processed allow organisms to break through the glass ceilings that otherwise limit the size of social groups: larger groups can only be achieved at the cost of more sophisticated kinds of information processing that are disadvantageous when optimal group size is small. These results simultaneously support both the social brain and the social complexity hypotheses.


Author(s):  
Nikolas Rose ◽  
Joelle M. Abi-Rached

This chapter looks at the social brain hypothesis. The term social brain has come to stand for the argument that the human brain, and indeed that of some other animals, is specialized for a collective form of life. One part of this argument is evolutionary: that the size and complexity of the brains of primates, including humans, are related to the size and complexity of their characteristic social groups. However, the social brain hypothesis is more than a general account of the role of brain size: for in this thesis, the capacities for sociality are neurally located in a specific set of brain regions shaped by evolution, notably the amygdala, orbital frontal cortex, and temporal cortex—regions that have the function of facilitating an understanding of what one might call the “mental life” of others.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (118) ◽  
pp. 20160044 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Harré ◽  
Mikhail Prokopenko

The cognitive ability to form social links that can bind individuals together into large cooperative groups for safety and resource sharing was a key development in human evolutionary and social history. The ‘social brain hypothesis’ argues that the size of these social groups is based on a neurologically constrained capacity for maintaining long-term stable relationships. No model to date has been able to combine a specific socio-cognitive mechanism with the discrete scale invariance observed in ethnographic studies. We show that these properties result in nested layers of self-organizing Erdős–Rényi networks formed by each individual's ability to maintain only a small number of social links. Each set of links plays a specific role in the formation of different social groups. The scale invariance in our model is distinct from previous ‘scale-free networks’ studied using much larger social groups; here, the scale invariance is in the relationship between group sizes, rather than in the link degree distribution. We also compare our model with a dominance-based hierarchy and conclude that humans were probably egalitarian in hunter–gatherer-like societies, maintaining an average maximum of four or five social links connecting all members in a largest social network of around 132 people.


2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (S2) ◽  
pp. 1821-1821
Author(s):  
R. Abed ◽  
M. Abbas

A reformulation of the Social Brain Theory of schizophrenia is proposed that contends that schizophrenia is a novel human phenomenon that arose following the establishment of large permanent human settlements and the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer way of life. It is contended that the blurring of the demarcation between ingroup and outgroup membership and living in close proximity to strangers is a stressor that leads to perturbation in the development of the social brain in vulnerable individuals leading to the syndrome of schizophrenia. Contrary to previous authors who have considered schizophrenia to be an inherently human condition that has existed throughout human history we suggest that schizophrenia is a relatively recent phenomenon and that the vulnerability to it remained hidden amongst hunter-gatherers. Hence, we contend that schizophrenia is the result of a mismatch between the post-Neolithic human social environment and the design of the social brain. The importance of the distinction between ingroup and outgroup membershipin human evolutionary history lies at the heart of inter-group conflict, violence and xenophobia. This formulation explains a range of epidemiological findings on schizophrenia related to the risk of migration and urbanisation. The present hypothesis can therefore, account for a range of disparate findings regarding schizophrenia that have thus far defied explanation by other extant theories. However, as this formulation claims to have identified the ultimate causation of schizophrenia the hypothesis does not specify the proximate mechanisms that lead to it. We conclude with a number of testable and refutable predictions.


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