War, Religion, and Evolution Focus Group
Hosted by Azim Shariff and Holly Arrow, Institute for Cognitive and Decision Sciences
FOCUS/RATIONALE/VISION
Religion and war have both played a profound role in driving human history and, despite repeated predictions of their demise, continue to exert powerful influences across the world. Evolutionarily informed perspectives of group processes can help us understand the power and persistence of religion and war, as well as the ways the two interact. We hope that this focus group will attract faculty members and graduate students in anthropology, evolutionary biology, history, political science, psychology, religious studies, sociology, and other fields who are interested in discussing these fundamentally cross-disciplinary topics and sharing ideas and work in progress.
We envision a mixture of presentations on work in progress and sessions in which we discuss articles suggested by focus group members. The nature of that mixture will depend on the collective desires of those attending the focus group. We hope the focus group will serve both as a rewarding intellectual community and as a seedbed for new collaborations among researchers studying these topics from different perspectives.
MEETING SCHEDULE
We meet every two weeks on Thursday evening. Please email Holly at harrow@uoregon.edu for information about the next meeting and to get added to the mailing list for the group.
A little about the organizers:
Holly Arrow’s research focuses on the evolution of social capacities that help men and women cope with the challenges to survival and reproductive success posed by war.
Azim Shariff’s research explores the evolutionary origins of and psychological mechanisms underlying moral behavior, with a special focus on the positive and negative social consequences of religions and related cultural systems.
Please direct any questions to Holly at harrow@uoregon.edu or Azim at shariff@uoregon.edu
Papers
Shariff, A.F., Norenzayan, A. & Henrich, J. (2009).
The birth of high Gods: How the cultural evolution of supernatural policing influenced the emergence of complex cooperative human societies, paving the way for civilization. Pdf
In M. Schaller, A. Norenzayan, S.J. Heine, T. Yamagisi, & T. Kameda (Eds.), Evolution, culture, and the human mind,
(pp. 119-136). Psychology Press.
Norenzayan, A. & Shariff, A.F. (2008).
The origin and evolution of religious prosociality. Pdf
Science, 322, 58-62.
Arrow, H., Smirnov, O., Orbell, J. & Kennett, D. (2007).
The selective consequences of war: A formal model. Pdf
In L. Thompson & K. Behfar (Eds.), Conflict in organizational teams: New directions in theory and practice (pp. 113-142). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Smirnov, O., Arrow, H., Kennett, D., & Orbell, J. (2007).
Ancestral war and the evolutionary origins of ‘heroism.’ Pdf
Journal of Politics, 69 (4), 927-940.
Arrow, H., & Burns, K. L. (2004).
Self-organizing culture: How norms emerge in small groups. Pdf
In M. Schaller & C. Crandall (Eds.), The psychological foundations of culture (pp. 171-199). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Crosson, S. B., Orbell, J., & Arrow, H. (2004).
“Social poker”: A laboratory test of predictions from club theory. Pdf
Rationality and Society, 16(2), 225-248.
Arrow, H., & Crosson, S. B. (2003).
Musical chairs: Membership dynamics in self-organized group formation. Pdf
Small Group Research, 5, 523-556.