TY - JOUR
T1 - Supernatural agents and prosociality in historical China:
T2 - micro-modeling the cultural evolution of gods and morality in textual corpora
AU - Nichols, Ryan
AU - Slingerland, Edward
AU - Nielbo, Kristoffer Laigaard
AU - Kirby, Peter
AU - Logan, Carson
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - A major source of attention paid to high gods in the fields of cultural evolution and cognitive science is the social effects of belief in high gods. Belief in high gods is both hypothesized to catalyze a cognitive punishment-avoidance mechanism at the level of individual minds, and a group cultural evolutionary mechanism that amplifies in-group cooperation. Recent research into non-Western contexts not only indicates a multiplicity of supernatural influences on the individual-level and group-level mechanisms but raises questions about theoretical presuppositions about how a supernatural agent is classified as a high god or as something else. Our exploratory study operationalizes the question “Does historical China have high gods?” through the assessment of semantic associations between each of several supernatural agent categories (alleged high gods, low gods, ancestors, sage kings, and emperors) and each of several social functional content categories (punishment, reward, morality, monitoring, and religion). Analyzing collocations in a corpus of 5.7 m Chinese characters, representing all of the most influential historical Chinese-language texts, our preliminary results suggest social functions of supernatural agents in historical China were widely distributed across many species of supernatural agent thereby complicating a claim that high gods constitute a special category in relation to these social functions.
AB - A major source of attention paid to high gods in the fields of cultural evolution and cognitive science is the social effects of belief in high gods. Belief in high gods is both hypothesized to catalyze a cognitive punishment-avoidance mechanism at the level of individual minds, and a group cultural evolutionary mechanism that amplifies in-group cooperation. Recent research into non-Western contexts not only indicates a multiplicity of supernatural influences on the individual-level and group-level mechanisms but raises questions about theoretical presuppositions about how a supernatural agent is classified as a high god or as something else. Our exploratory study operationalizes the question “Does historical China have high gods?” through the assessment of semantic associations between each of several supernatural agent categories (alleged high gods, low gods, ancestors, sage kings, and emperors) and each of several social functional content categories (punishment, reward, morality, monitoring, and religion). Analyzing collocations in a corpus of 5.7 m Chinese characters, representing all of the most influential historical Chinese-language texts, our preliminary results suggest social functions of supernatural agents in historical China were widely distributed across many species of supernatural agent thereby complicating a claim that high gods constitute a special category in relation to these social functions.
KW - China
KW - Data mining
KW - ancestors
KW - cognitive science of religion
KW - corpus linguistics
KW - cultural evolution
KW - gods
KW - RELIGION
KW - BEHAVIOR
KW - BELIEF
U2 - 10.1080/2153599X.2020.1742778
DO - 10.1080/2153599X.2020.1742778
M3 - Journal article
SN - 2153-599X
VL - 11
SP - 46
EP - 64
JO - Religion, Brain, and Behavior
JF - Religion, Brain, and Behavior
IS - 1
ER -