SACRIFICE: Scarring Rituals, Fierce Intergroup Conflict, and Extreme Prosociality
From Maya blood-letting to group beating and penile subincision performed on the initiates of the Ilahita Arapesh, fresh recruits of tightly-knit groups are often required to undergo strenuous ordeals to earn their membership. Furthermore, various religious movements such as the Branch Davidians or Aum Shinrikyo required their members to sacrifice all material property and assume celibacy. From an evolutionary perspective, these activities are puzzling: why would anyone be willing to voluntarily undergo these dangerous ordeals and/or pay costs such as sacrificing resources and even reproduction to join a group?
Consider a second evolutionary puzzle. Groups with extreme rituals and other costly requirements have often created tight-knit, highly cooperative social units. Members of these communities are willing to sacrifice time and resources to produce public goods for other community members, as observed in the social services of organizations such as Hamas, the Taliban, or communes such as the Order of the Solar Temple and the Peoples Temple. The cooperativeness of these communities may even reach the point of individual self-sacrifice on behalf of the group, manifested in combat-related sacrifices to save comrades or launch terrorist attacks with premeditated decisions to die during the attack. Assuming the gene-centered view of evolution, why would anyone be willing to sacrifice their own genes to propagate the unrelated genes of his or her fellow members?
Connecting these two puzzles, I argue that A) rituals help to create cooperative communities through imposing costs on their members (thereby eliminating free-riders); and B) these members are willing to defend and promote public goods produced by their communities through sacrifices made on behalf of other members during intergroup warfare. Without systematic laboratory and field studies investigating these outstanding hypotheses, the potential role of cultural practices in promoting the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the group remains dubious, hampering our understanding of real-world phenomena such as the willingness to die for a fellow soldier in combat or forfeit one’s life during a terror attack. Therefore, answering these questions is paramount for the recognition of mechanisms that may lead to increased parochial prosociality as well as potential radicalization.
SACRIFICE was a two-year project (2020-2021) funded by the Czech Ministry of Education.
