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21 " Rituals can be thought of as ensembles of “mind hacks” that exploit the bugs in our mental programs in subtle and diverse ways. Let’s consider three of the most common active ingredients found in communal rituals: synchrony, goal-oriented collaboration, and rhythmic music. Synchrony seems to exploit both our evolved action-representation system and our mentalizing abilities. When moving in step with others, the neurological mechanisms used to represent our own actions and those used for others’ actions overlap in our brains. This is a neurological by-product of how our body’s own representational system is deployed to help model and predict others’ movements—it’s a glitch. The convergence in these representations blurs the distinction between ourselves and others, which leads us to perceive others as more like us and possibly even as extensions of ourselves. For evolutionary reasons, this illusion draws people closer together and creates a feeling of interdependence. "
― Joseph Henrich , The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
22 " Though I’ve given you only a glimpse of some of the institutions of mobile hunter-gatherers, it may already be clear that they are remarkably well designed for surviving in the marginal and unpredictable environments that have dominated our species’ evolutionary history. Ju/'hoansi incest taboos, for example, compel parents to arrange marriages for their children with distant kinfolk, dramatically extending their social networks. These distant connections pay off by providing a safe haven when droughts, floods, injuries, raiding parties, or other disasters strike. "
23 " Of course, not all norms are beneficial, and groups do indeed regularly develop arbitrary norms as well as those that favor powerful constituencies, like old men. Sometimes groups even develop maladaptive norms that are harmful to both individuals and their communities. However, social norms are put to the test when groups with different norms compete. Norms that favor success in competition with other groups tend to survive and spread. Such intergroup competition can occur through violent conflict, as Buckley experienced, but it can also occur when less successful groups copy the practices and beliefs of more successful groups or when more prosperous groups simply grow faster, through higher fertility, lower mortality, or greater net immigration. These and related forms of intergroup competition create a countervailing force that can favor group-beneficial norms over other cultural evolutionary pushes and pulls. "
24 " Because much of our brain development occurs during adolescence, childhood, and even earlier, the social norms that shape our early life experiences may have particularly large effects on our psychology. For example, a growing body of evidence suggests that we may have evolved to make enduring calibrations to aspects of our physiology, psychology, and motivations based on stress and other environmental cues experienced before age five. As adults, these early calibrations may influence our self-control, risk-taking, stress responses, norm internalizations, and relationships. By shaping our early lives, cultural evolution can manipulate our brains, hormones, decision-making, and even our longevity.40 "
25 " Similarly, in making moral or criminal judgments, the importance of intentions depends on the relationship among the parties involved. In the extreme, intentions may be irrelevant for judging the penalty when someone from one clan murders someone from another clan. "
26 " Intensive kin-based institutions bind communities together by intertwining individuals in webs of shared identity, communal ownership, collective shame, and corporate responsibility. In this world, scrutinizing a person’s intentions or other mental states may be less relevant or even counterproductive. In predicting people’s behavior, many contexts are so constrained by social norms and the watching eyes of others that intuiting people’s personal beliefs or intentions won’t help very much. Instead, it’s better to know their social relationships, allies, debts, and obligations. "
27 " If you murder someone in another clan, your fellow clan members will be responsible for paying blood money to the victim’s clan, and the size of this payment won’t depend on whether you killed the guy by accident—your arrow deflected off the deer you were hunting—or by executing a carefully planned homicide. Moreover, if your clan doesn’t pay the prescribed blood money, the victim’s clan will hold all members culpable and seek revenge by killing someone from your clan without regard to the victim’s intentions. By contrast, when ripped from the binding ties of their relational networks, an actor’s intentions, goals, and beliefs become much more important. "
28 " Societies with stronger kin-based institutions at the time of the research paid relatively little attention to people’s intentions in making moral judgments in our vignettes. "
29 " the dosages of both the Western and Orthodox Churches explain about 40 percent of the global differences across countries in the KII and 62 percent of the differences in cousin marriage. For comparison, the time since the origins of agriculture accounts for only an additional 18 percent of the variation in KII, and for 10 percent of the differences in cousin marriage across countries. "
30 " Each century of Western Church exposure cuts the rate of cousin marriage by nearly 60 percent. "
31 " Well-functioning impersonal markets, in which strangers freely engage in competitive exchange, demand what I call market norms. Market norms establish the standards for judging oneself and others in impersonal transactions and lead to the internalization of motivations for trust, fairness, and cooperation with strangers and anonymous others. "
32 " People didn’t start farming because it was individually better for them. To the contrary, it was probably less productive than hunting and gathering, at least initially, and only worked when mixed with foraging. As populations increasingly relied on farming, archaeological studies reveal that the less nutritious diets derived from cereals and other crops produced people who were shorter, sicker, and more likely to die young. However, the effects of sedentism and the productivity of unskilled (young) labor were such that farmers reproduced more quickly than did mobile hunter-gatherers. With the “right” set of institutions, farmers could spread across the landscape like an epidemic, driving out or assimilating any hunter-gatherers in their path. Thus, early farming spread not because rational individuals prefer to farm, but because farming communities with particular institutions beat mobile hunter-gatherer populations in intergroup competition. "
