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Its scholars study many different kinds of cultural groups—from hunter-gatherer clans to corporations to nations—investigating cognitive structures, social structures, biases, and behaviors.

Michael Morris • Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together

Rene Girard made a stellar career out of locking on to a critical question that usually gets swept under the rug—Why did every single ancient civilization practice human sacrifice, and why did the Old World stop in the 1st millennium BC? His answers were kind of nonsense, but the underlying historical observation that human sacrifice is the civiliz... See more

Ben Landau-Taylor x.com

His ideas do not magically make us stop being mimetic. The mimetic theory gives us a framework to avoid situations that inspire debilitating desires; what type of person to avoid and who to keep close

Jonathan Bi • Lecture I: Introduction to Mimetic Theory | René Girard's Mimetic Theory

Remembering Daniel Kahneman: A Mosaic of Memories and Lessons - By Evan Nesterak - Behavioral Scientist

Evan Nesterak behavioralscientist.org

In primitive societies, such crises were resolved by the "scapegoating mechanism," in which the community, en masse, turned on an unpremeditated victim. The repression of this collective murder and its repetition in ritual sacrifice then formed the foundations of both religion and the restored social order.

O'Reilly Media • Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

So what do humans have to sacrifice for the sake of showing loyalty to others? In the most basic physical terms, we can offer time, resources (money, food, etc.), energy, health, status, fertility, and knowledge. Each of these is a different type of economic good (tangible/intangible, transferable/non-transferable, rivalrous/non-rivalrous, etc.), a

Kevin Simler • Religion, Politics, and Self-Suppression

One corollary of inconsistency-avoidance tendency is that a person making big sacrifices in the course of assuming a new identity will intensify his devotion to the new identity. After all, it would be quite inconsistent behavior to make a large sacrifice for something that was no good. Thus civilization has invented many tough and solemn initiatio

The first is that customs, traditions, and the like are subject to Darwinian selection. Henrich is not always clear on exactly what is being selected for—is it individuals who follow a tradition, groups whose members all follow the tradition, or the tradition itself?—but the general gist is that traditions stick around longest when they are a... See more

Tanner Greer • Tradition is Smarter Than You Are

A culture evolves as some elements are learned and others are overlooked as the rising generation re-creates the society. Close studies implicate particular biases in social learning. Conformity bias means that widespread customs are more likely to be learned than rare customs. Prestige bias means that those associated with success and status are m