LEVYNA contributes to new book on evolution and culture
LEVYNA researcher Radek Kundt is both editor and contributor to a new book published by Springer exploring the complex interplay between biology and culture.
New paper: How do costly religious signals remain reliable?
Religious practices can be costly in terms of time and effort, and these costs can make them useful signals of commitment to a religious community. But this creates a puzzle: if costly religious signals bring social benefits, why don’t less committed people simply imitate them and enjoy the benefits of cooperation?
In a new paper, Martin Lang, Eva Kundtová Klocová, Alexandra Ružičková, Katarína Čellarová, and Radim Chvaja examine this question across three preregistered studies with 1,341 participants. The studies included both general cooperation settings and religious contexts, including Christian participants who produced religious signals by transcribing religious texts.
The authors propose that the answer may lie in how people estimate the costs and benefits of signaling. The same signal can have different subjective value for committed and uncommitted individuals. For committed religious participants, producing a costly signal may be associated with additional social and cooperative benefits that are less valuable to people who are not similarly committed.
The findings provide evidence that these differences in cost-benefit estimation can help explain why costly signals remain reliable indicators of commitment. More broadly, they suggest that the stability of costly signaling may depend not only on what a signal objectively costs, but also on how its costs and benefits are represented by the people producing it.
Read the open-access paper in Collabra: Psychology here
