Belief in karma: How cultural evolution, cognition, and motivations shape belief in supernatural justice

Difficulty-as-Improvement: The Courage to Keep Going in the Face of Life's Difficulties

When a task or goal is hard to think about or do, people can infer that it is a waste of their time (difficulty-as-impossibility) or valuable to them (difficulty-as-importance). Separate from chosen tasks and goals, life can present unchosen difficulties. Building on identity-based motivation theory, people can see these as opportunities for self-betterment (difficulty-as-improvement). People use this language when they recall or communicate about difficulties (autobiographical memories, Study 1; "Common Crawl" corpus, Study 2). Our difficulty mindset measures are culture-general (Australia, Canada, China, India, Iran, New Zealand, Turkey, the United States, Studies 3-15, N = 3,532). People in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD)-er countries slightly agree with difficulty-as-improvement. Religious, spiritual, conservative people, believers in karma and a just world, and people from less-WEIRD countries score higher. People who endorse difficulty-as-importance see themselves as conscientious, virtuous, and leading lives of purpose. So do endorsers of difficulty-as-improvement-who also see themselves as optimists (all scores lower for difficulty-as-impossibility endorsers).

Is Difficulty Mostly About Impossibility? What Difficulty Implies May Be Culturally Variant

Difficulty can signal low odds (impossibility) and high value (importance). We build on culture-as-situated cognition theory's description of culture-based fluency and disfluency to predict that the culturally fluent meaning of difficulty is culture-bound. For Americans, the culturally fluent understanding of ability is success-with-ease-not-effort, hence difficulty implies low odds of ability. This may disadvantage American institutions and practices-learning requires gaining competence and proficiency through effortful engagement. Indeed, Americans (Studies 1, 3-8; N = 4,141; Study 2, the corpus of English language) associate difficulty with impossibility more than importance. This tendency is not universal. Indian and Chinese cultures imply that difficulty can equally signal low odds and value. Indeed, people from India and China (Studies 9-11, N = 762) are as likely to understand difficulty as being about both. Effects are culture-based; how much people endorse difficulty-as-importance and difficulty-as-impossibility in their own lives did not affect results.

Belief in karma is associated with perceived (but not actual) trustworthiness

Believers of karma believe in ethical causation where good and bad outcomes can be traced to past moral and immoral acts. Karmic belief may have important interpersonal consequences. We investigated whether American Christians expect more trustworthiness from (and are more likely to trust) interaction partners who believe in karma. We conducted an incentivized study of the trust game where interaction partners had different beliefs in karma and God. Participants expected more trustworthiness from (and were more likely to trust) karma believers. Expectations did not match actual behavior: karmic belief was not associated with actual trustworthiness. These findings suggest that people may use others’ karmic belief as a cue to predict their trustworthiness but would err when doing so.

Consumer altruism and risk taking: why do altruistic consumers take more risks?

This research studies an interesting and counter-intuitive relationship between consumer altruism and risk taking. While these two constructs have been studied extensively by extant research, there is scant research which has studied the relationship between them – perhaps due to the expectation that individuals who are chronically more altruistic are very different from those who are more risk taking. This research tests this expectation by formally studying the relationship between altruism and risk taking using a mixture of survey-based and experimental methodology. First four studies test the relationship between altruism and risk-taking using survey-based methodology involving some of the most prominent scales for measuring trait altruism and risk taking. The final study investigates the influence of trait altruism on situational social risk taking. Trait altruism and risk taking are found to be significantly positively correlated with each other, with the relationship being the strongest for social risk taking. Further, the relationship is not significant for ethical risk taking. Additionally, it was found that trait optimism could be the underlying cause for the relationship. Further, it was also found that trait altruism was significantly positively correlated with situational social risk taking. Contributions emerge for the literatures on consumer altruism, risk taking, and optimism by filling an important theoretical gap related to the inter-relationships between these three constructs. Additionally, this research has important implications for practice by informing nonprofit organizations about an erstwhile unknown facet of altruistic people – their tendency to take risks. This opens new avenues for nonprofit practitioners to explore when looking to expand the scope and size of their initiatives, and to innovate on their current offerings in a variety of ways. Additionally, it provides insights that can help for-profit marketers to increase participation in their activities.

A phylogenetic analysis of revolution and afterlife beliefs

Beliefs about the fate of humanity and the soul after death may structure behaviours of religious groups. Here we test theories from religious studies: that belief in an imminent apocalypse co-evolved with and facilitated revolutionary violence, whereas belief in reincarnation caused people to acquiesce to existing social orders and withdraw from political activism. We test these hypotheses by building a cultural phylogeny of historical Islamic sects and schools from the seventh to twentieth centuries and use phylogenetic comparative methods to show that these two types of belief display distinct relationships with intergroup violence. There is substantial evidence that apocalyptic beliefs co-evolved with revolutionary violence, whereas reincarnation beliefs were evolutionarily stable in peaceful groups. In both cases, violence precedes the emergence of beliefs, which suggests that conditions that generate revolutionary violence changed beliefs rather than beliefs generating violence. We also found that apocalyptic beliefs are associated with accelerated group extinction, although causal relationships cannot be determined.

How cultural learning and cognitive biases shape religious beliefs

What explains the ubiquity and diversity of religions around the world? Widespread cognitive tendencies, including mentalizing and intuitive thinking, offer part of the explanation for recurrent features of religion, and individual differences in religious commitments. However, vast diversity in religious beliefs points to the importance of the cultural context in which religious beliefs are transmitted. Cultural evolutionary theory provides the basis of a unified explanation for how cognition and culture interact to shape religious beliefs, in ways that are uniquely adapted to local ecological pressures. These insights lay the groundwork for future research regarding how cultural learning interacts with other evolved aspects of human psychology to generate the recurrent and the diverse forms of religious commitments observed around the world.