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Before and After the Interregnum: The Evolution of the Two “Modes” of Religion

Matt J. Rossano

in Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

Chapter 6 examines the evolutionary origins of religion prior to the African Interregnum period and looks at what happen to religion after this period. Prior to the Interregnum, it is argued that the ... More

Chapter 6 examines the evolutionary origins of religion prior to the African Interregnum period and looks at what happen to religion after this period. Prior to the Interregnum, it is argued that the social lives of our primate and hominin ancestors, especially their social rituals and social emotions, laid the groundwork for the eventual emergence of the “supernaturalized” religion that emerged during the Interregnum. A key transitional moment came about 500,000 ybp when our ancestors evolved the capacity to engage in “group mimesis”—that is, they were able to sing, chant, dance, and march together in rhythm. These group-based rituals had powerful consciousness-altering and social bonding effects. After the interregnum, increased social stratification encouraged the emergence of ancestor worship and with it religious narratives and mythologies. As society and religion became increasingly complex and stratified the basic framework for classic paganism began to take form.Less

Social Emotions

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis

in A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution

This chapter examines the role of social emotions such as guilt and shame in supporting human cooperation, and how these could have evolved. It first models the process by which an emotion such as ... More

This chapter examines the role of social emotions such as guilt and shame in supporting human cooperation, and how these could have evolved. It first models the process by which an emotion such as shame may affect social behavior in a simple public goods game before discussing how shame and guilt along with internalized ethical norms foster cooperation to be sustained with minimal levels of costly punishment, resulting in mutually beneficial interactions at limited cost. It also explains how the internalization of norms and the expression of these norms in a social emotion such as guilt and shame induce the individual to place a contemporaneous value on the future consequences of present behavior, rather than relying upon an appropriately discounted accounting of its probable payoffs in the distant future. The chapter suggests that shame, guilt, and other social emotions may function like pain by providing personally beneficial guides for action that bypass the explicit cognitive optimizing process.Less

Socialism with Modesty

Julien A. Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno, and Fabrice Teroni

in In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion

In this chapter, which responds to chapter 1, we use the value pluralism that is part of our account of shame to criticize the idea that shame is a social emotion, i.e. that it necessarily connects ... More

In this chapter, which responds to chapter 1, we use the value pluralism that is part of our account of shame to criticize the idea that shame is a social emotion, i.e. that it necessarily connects with social values and discloses our submission to external standards or our concern for how we appear in the eyes of others. Shame, we first argue, is never heteronomous. We then claim that the relevant values need not have to do with our social standing or invasion of our privacy, and that shame elicited by the appearance one gives should be distinguished from other types of shame. The role of others, we contend, is most of the time confined to triggering our realization that we are or have behaved in a way that is below the threshold of what we personally deem acceptable. Finally, we argue that shame does not require the subject to take the perspective of another upon what she is or what she does.Less

How Positive Social Emotions Motivate Actions for the Future Self: Building Bonds, Attaining Ambitions, and Establishing Esteem

Lisa A. Williams and David DeSteno

in Positive Emotion: Integrating the Light Sides and Dark Sides

Strong social relationships, goal-attainment, and feeling esteemed by peers are critical components of adaptive social life and well-being. This chapter provides an overview of how positive social ... More

Strong social relationships, goal-attainment, and feeling esteemed by peers are critical components of adaptive social life and well-being. This chapter provides an overview of how positive social emotions motivate behaviors that lead to such benefits. In particular, this chapter will focus on how positive social emotions foster forward-looking social motivations (e.g., perseverance, leadership, prosocial behavior and affiliation). Despite carrying costs for the current self, such motivations have beneficial payoffs for the future self (e.g., skill attainment, social esteem, and rewarding social relationships). The process of weighing costs and benefits for the current self against those for the future self is termed intertemporal choice. This chapter reviews a growing corpus of empirical research on the functions of the positive social emotions pride and gratitude in shaping intertemporal choice toward the future-self. We review how both trait-like dispositions and the moment-to-moment experience of these emotions enact such outcomes. We conclude by suggesting new avenues for scientific inquiry into the “light side” of positive social emotions.Less

Insight, Consistency, and Plans for Living

Allan Gibbard

in Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics

This chapter discusses moral reasoning. It presents a situation wherein morality lies outside the scope of empirical science. It notes that science itself rests on intuitions about the justification ... More

This chapter discusses moral reasoning. It presents a situation wherein morality lies outside the scope of empirical science. It notes that science itself rests on intuitions about the justification of empirical conclusions. It explains that human's social emotions are especially refined and elaborate. Many of human feelings are intensely social, as with guilt and resentment, with shame and disdain. It adds that humans are beings with language, and make judgments that are expressed with language. It discusses that moral questions are planning questions of a particular kind, questions of how to feel about things, where the feelings in questions are the moral sentiments. It emphasizes that not only do humans think about how things are, but they also act and feel. It also explains how moral intuition works and how plans require intuition.Less

The Male Flash of Anger: Violent Response to Transgression as an Example of the Intersection of Evolved Psychology and Culture

Daniel M. T. Fessler

in Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for social scientists

The male flash of anger illustrates how evolutionary psychology and cultural anthropology provide complementary components in vertically integrated explanations. Anger is a response to transgression ... More

The male flash of anger illustrates how evolutionary psychology and cultural anthropology provide complementary components in vertically integrated explanations. Anger is a response to transgression and accounts for the age- and sex-biased distribution of violent risk-taking behavior. Evolutionary psychology also provides an ultimate explanation for the processes occurring at the level of the neurotransmitter: childhood experience influences adult risk-taking propensities, while culturally-constituted socialization practices and interactional patterns shape childhood experience, inscribing culturally-preferred responses to transgression on individual actors; these tacit lessons are further reinforced by overt morally weighted cultural schemas and lexicons. Cultural group selection can occur because those systems that most successfully meet the challenges posed by the socioecological setting are most likely to prosper and spread. Because any given system is the product of unique historical events, even dysfunctional beliefs and practices may persist.Less

Emotions, sociology, and protest

James M. Jasper

in Collective Emotions

Sociology locates emotions, not in the individual and not in “the group”, but in between these two, in the interactions among individuals. But these interactions are shaped by cultural expectations, ... More

Sociology locates emotions, not in the individual and not in “the group”, but in between these two, in the interactions among individuals. But these interactions are shaped by cultural expectations, hierarchies, organizational commands, and formal and informal rituals; individuals tend to have emotions that are socially appropriate and predictable. So when most members of a group (almost never all of them) feel or display the same emotions at the same time, the reason is not some group mind or automatic contagion (although contagion does exist). It is that the same expectations, social structures, and interactive processes are affecting all of them. Research on the emotions of protest show a number of mechanisms by which these processes operate.Less

Shame

Dan Zahavi

in Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame

This chapter engages with the topic of shame. What does the fact that we feel shame tell us about the nature of self? Does shame testify to the presence of a self-concept, a (failed) self-ideal, and ... More

This chapter engages with the topic of shame. What does the fact that we feel shame tell us about the nature of self? Does shame testify to the presence of a self-concept, a (failed) self-ideal, and a capacity for critical self-assessment, or does it rather, as some have suggested, point to the fact that the self is in part socially constructed? Should shame primarily be classified as a self-conscious emotion or is it rather a distinct social emotion, or is there something misleading about these alternatives? The chapter explores these questions and discusses whether the experience of shame presupposes a possession of a first-person perspective and a capacity for empathy, and whether it exemplifies an other-mediated form of self-experience and to that extent involves a more complex self than the thin experiential self.Less

Introduction: Politicizing the Soldier Image in Modern Chinese History

Yan Xu

in The Soldier Image and State-Building in Modern China, 1924-1945

The introduction first provides a historical background for the book during the period from the 1924 establishment of the Whampoa Military Academy to the 1945 end of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Xu ... More

The introduction first provides a historical background for the book during the period from the 1924 establishment of the Whampoa Military Academy to the 1945 end of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Xu goes on to introduce the major themes that the book aims to engage with, namely state-building and state-society relations in modern China, war and soldiers in Chinese military history and literature, as well as social emotion and mass mobilization in the Chinese Communist Revolution. Xu argues in the introduction that her book focuses on both social and cultural impacts of war in order to treat war as a cultural event for the people it influences rather than simply an analysis of politics and strategy. Xu ends this section by introducing the chapter structure and primary sources of the book.Less

Desires of the Spirit

Simeon Zahl

in The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience

This chapter examines the work of the Holy Spirit in the transformation and sanctification of Christians. It argues that accounts of sanctification that build upon the idea of an instantaneous ... More

This chapter examines the work of the Holy Spirit in the transformation and sanctification of Christians. It argues that accounts of sanctification that build upon the idea of an instantaneous implantation of new moral powers in the Christian upon receipt of the Spirit have significant problems. It then turns to Augustine’s theology of delight and desire to provide an alternative theology of sanctification that is experientially and affectively more persuasive. The second half of the chapter shows that this “affective Augustinian” approach has a number of further advantages. It can account for the fact that sanctifying experience of the Spirit exhibits variability and that human beings are often a mystery to themselves; it can affirm a qualified role for practice and habituation in Christian sanctification without overestimating the transformative power of Christian practice; and it directs attention to the social as well as materially and culturally embedded dimensions of sanctification. The chapter concludes by arguing that an “affective Augustinian” vision of Christian transformation can also account effectively and compassionately for the persistence of sin in Christians.Less

The Army-People Bond in Mass Culture in Wartime Yan’an

Yan Xu

in The Soldier Image and State-Building in Modern China, 1924-1945

The sixth chapter outlines another political force that influenced modern China: the Chinese Communists during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Xu claims that the CCP constructed the soldier figure here ... More

The sixth chapter outlines another political force that influenced modern China: the Chinese Communists during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Xu claims that the CCP constructed the soldier figure here within the parameters of an emotional bond between the army and the people, believing it to be essential for the state-building agenda that was contingent on winning support from peasants in the area and social integration in the revolutionary base. Xu, furthermore, splits the chapter up by examining first the CCP’s policies in Yan’an for integration and winning support from peasants, then later the army-peasant bond during the yangge movement.Less

An Apology for Moral Shame

Cheshire Calhoun

in Moral Aims: Essays on the Importance of Getting It Right and Practicing Morality with Others

Making a place for shame in the mature moral agent’s psychology would seem to depend on reconciling the agent’s vulnerability to shame with her capacity for autonomous judgment. The standard strategy ... More

Making a place for shame in the mature moral agent’s psychology would seem to depend on reconciling the agent’s vulnerability to shame with her capacity for autonomous judgment. The standard strategy is to argue that mature agents are only shamed before themselves or before those whose evaluative judgments mirror their own. Because this strategy forces us to discount as irrational or immature many everyday experiences of shame, including the shame felt by members of subordinate groups, this chapter argues that shame does not depend on endorsing the shamer’s criticism. Moral criticism has “practical weight” for us and the power to shame when it is seen as issuing from those who are to be taken seriously because they are co-participants with us in a shared social practice of morality. Thus shame is a social emotion.Less

A Social-Contextual View of Envy in Organizations: From Both Envier and Envied Perspectives

Lingtao Yu and Michelle K. Duffy

in Envy at Work and in Organizations

In this chapter, we review the extant literature regarding envy in organizations, identifying the ways people express and respond to envy from two different perspectives: the enviers and the envied. ... More

In this chapter, we review the extant literature regarding envy in organizations, identifying the ways people express and respond to envy from two different perspectives: the enviers and the envied. We propose that social-contextual factors play a large role in how enviers and the envied respond to the experience of envying or being envied (i.e., positively or negatively) and elucidate a framework to categorize a variety of attitudinal, relational, and behavioral responses to envying and being envied. Our perspective recognizes that envy is a natural occurrence in today’s organizations due to a variety of envy-inducing organizational practices and policies; therefore, neither scholars nor practitioners should exclusively look for the permanent elimination of envy, but rather should identify possible antidotes or poisons to envy once it is triggered in organizations.Less

Virtues of Passivity in the English Civil War

in The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science

In the background of the dubious triumph of emotional Cartesianism, this chapter advances the genealogical project of reconstituting social emotions by first showing how they have been obscured: in ... More

In the background of the dubious triumph of emotional Cartesianism, this chapter advances the genealogical project of reconstituting social emotions by first showing how they have been obscured: in this case, by a late-modern fixation on masculine political agency asserted at the expense of political “passivism.’’ The chapter presents sermons to the rebellious Long Parliament (1640–1660) in order to show how a nonreductive, early modern understanding of social passions was incapacitated by a radicalized late-modern active/passive dyad.Less

Memory, imagination, and the evolution of modern language

Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka

in The Social Origins of Language

This chapter suggests that the existence of nascent linguistic communication among archaic humans enabled the evolution of a new type of memory-encoding and recall, word-based episodic recall. ... More

This chapter suggests that the existence of nascent linguistic communication among archaic humans enabled the evolution of a new type of memory-encoding and recall, word-based episodic recall. Episodic recall and imagination — which consists of reconstructing and recombining representations of past experiences to generate novel ones — became free of the experiential cues that were part of individuals’ past experiences. The ability to voluntarily recall a train of episodes and to recombine them gave the individual an insight into others’ minds as well as into her own mind. The chapter argues that imagination-instructing linguistic communication evolved as part of an integrated suite of social practices and cognitive-emotional capacities, and we highlight the role of new memory systems, expanded childhood, and symbolic pretend play in this co-evolutionary process.Less