Costly male rites spread via cultural group selection when they improve fighting success

Evidence

Sosis sees these painful rites as costly behaviors that signal group commitment. He points out that ritual scarification and violence create male solidarity, which keeps freeriding during warfare under control. But there could also be a cultural evolutionary process at work here that involves intergroup competition. Notice that the key predictor that mattered was the prevalence of warfare between groups. It stands to reason that cultural groups that live with a high threat of warfare invent or adopt costly rites to mobilize greater cooperation and solidarity among males. In turn, greater levels of devotion to the group helps men fight better against rival groups. It is also possible that these practices—if they lead to superior fighting success—are imitated more frequently by other groups who find themselves in similar circumstances, leading to the further spread of these costly rites. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 461

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the bigger cultural-evolution account of how costly signaling stabilizes prosocial groups against rivals; resonates with group-selection logic the reader tracks across texts.