Spirituality, Taboo, and Opportunity for Science

Spirituality is increasingly being examined as a construct related to mental and physical health. The definition of spirituality, however, has been changing. Traditionally, spirituality was used to describe the deeply religious person, but it has now expanded to include the superficially religious person, the religious seeker, the seeker of well-being and happiness, and the completely secular person. Instruments used to measure spirituality reflect this trend. These measures are heavily contaminated with questions assessing positive character traits or mental health: optimism, forgiveness, gratitude, meaning and purpose in life, peacefulness, harmony, and general well-being. Spirituality, measured by indicators of good mental health, is found to be correlated with good mental health. This research has been reported in some of the world's top medical journals. Such associations are meaningless and tautological. Either spirituality should be defined and measured in traditional terms as a unique, uncontaminated construct, or it should be eliminated from use in academic research. Show more

Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and reciprocity, which underpin much of primate sociality, do not readily extend to large unrelated groups. Theory suggests that the evolution of such societies may have required norms and institutions that sustain fairness in ephemeral exchanges. If that is true, then engagement in larger-scale institutions, such as markets and world religions, should be associated with greater fairness, and larger communities should punish unfairness more. Using three behavioral experiments administered across 15 diverse populations, we show that market integration (measured as the percentage of purchased calories) positively covaries with fairness while community size positively covaries with punishment. Participation in a world religion is associated with fairness, although not across all measures. These results suggest that modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history. Show more