ArticleEvolutionary human sciences2020
Why do religious leaders observe costly prohibitions? Examining taboos on Mentawai shamans.
Article in Evolutionary human sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Having a monk in the family and all-cause mortality: a seven-year prospective cohort study.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- "We Never Stop Singing": The Dynamics of the Mental and Physical Health of Czech Religious Pastors during the COVID-19 Pandemic.Journal of religion and health · 2024Article
- Associations between religious/spiritual beliefs and behaviours and dietary patterns: analysis of the parental generation in a prospective cohort study (ALSPAC) in Southwest England.Public health nutrition · 2023Article
- Religious celibacy brings inclusive fitness benefits.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Specialised minds: extending adaptive explanations of personality to the evolution of psychopathology.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Explaining costly religious practices: credibility enhancing displays and signaling theories.Synthese · 2022Article
- The Cultural Evolution of Epistemic Practices : The Case of Divination.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Religious leaders refrain from sex and food across human societies. Researchers argue that this avoidance influences people's perceptions of leaders' underlying traits, but few, if any, quantitative data exist testing these claims. Here we show that shamans in a small-scale society observe costly prohibitions and that observers infer cooperativeness, religious belief, difference from normal humans and supernatural power from shamans' adherence to special taboos. We investigated costly prohibitions on shamanic healers, known as
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.