The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

religious practices help members solve coordination problems. For example, trust and therefore trade are greatly enhanced when all parties are part of the same religious community, and when religious beliefs say that God knows and cares about the honesty of the parties. (The anthropologist Pascal Boyer53 points out that gods and ancestor spirits are often thought to be omniscient, yet what they most care about in this vast universe is the moral intentions hidden in the hearts of the living.) Respect for rules is enhanced when rules have an element of sacredness, and when they are backed up by supernatural sanction and the gossip or ostracism of one’s peers. Wilson’s claim is that religious ideas, and brains that responded to those ideas, co-evolved. Even if the belief in supernatural entities emerged originally for some other reason, or as an accidental byproduct in the evolution of cognition (as some scholars have claimed),54 groups that parlayed those beliefs into social coordination devices (for example, by linking them to emotions such as shame, fear, guilt, and love) found a cultural solution to the free-rider problem and then reaped the enormous benefits of trust and cooperation.