Cultural evolution can spread maladaptive behaviors that destroy social cooperation

Evidence

Cultural evolution can create groups where, under the right conditions, any behavior spreads and becomes common, not only cooperative behaviors. This is why we often see subcultures or entire cultures stuck in a pattern or “equilibrium” that seems maladaptive and hurts the group and the individuals. A case in point is the mass paranoia and distrust that was seen in police states like the former Soviet Union and its satellite states. Another example is the recent spread of witchcraft and sorcery-based killings in certain parts of Liberia, creating an environment of such pervasive mutual suspicion that even the most basic forms of social cooperation could not flourish. These cases show that not all cultural or religious beliefs and practices lead to prosocial behavior. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 447

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s integration project: the same mechanism that spreads prosocial Big God religions can spread destructive suspicion equilibria — relevant to how the Japanese apostasy apparatus engineered distrust. — connects to: Resource scarcity shifts evolutionary success from competition toward cooperation — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1048; Cultural learning can transmit behaviors that natural selection eliminates. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 185; Mentalizing may have evolved for cultural learning rather than for social manipulation — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 191 (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Though brief, the point that cultural evolution is value-neutral — capable of locking groups into maladaptive equilibria just as easily as prosocial ones — is a genuinely penetrating complement to the standard cooperative-religion account.