Toward an Evolutionary Psychology of Religion and Personality

Evolutionary psychology is an emerging paradigm for the social sciences that offers a powerful metatheoretical framework for personality psychology and, as I attempt to demonstrate in this article, for the psychology of religion as well. I argue that religion is not an evolved adaptation; rather, the diverse range of beliefs, behavior, and experience that we collectively refer to as religion emerge as byproducts of numerous, domain-specific psychological mechanisms that evolved to solve other (mundane) adaptive problems. These include mechanisms for reasoning about the natural world (naive physics and biology), about other people’s minds (naive psychology), and about specific kinds of interpersonal relationships (attachment, kinship, social exchange, coalitions, status hierarchies). Personality psychology is a natural home for the study of religion and spirituality. Scholars have long suspected that a predisposition toward religion is somehow inherent in human nature, and defining human nature—answering the question “what do we know when we know a person?” (McAdams, 1995)—falls within the province of this field. Second, the psychology of religion is largely concerned with questions of individual differences, the second principal focus of personality psychology. Third, religion is a profoundly important, organizing force in Journal of Personality 67:6, December 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK. I am grateful to David Buss, Ralph Hood, Phil Shaver, and Brant Wenegrat for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Correspondence: Lee A. Kirkpatrick, College of William & Mary, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA, 23187-8795. E-mail: [email protected]. many believers’ lives: If psychologists seek to understand “the whole person,” religion and spirituality cannot be ignored (Emmons, in press). Given its ambitious goals, personality psychology requires, perhaps more than any other field of social science, an integrative theoretical framework for conceptualizing grand questions about human nature and individual differences. The emerging paradigm of evolutionary psychology (e.g., Buss, 1995; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992) holds considerable promise as a candidate for this role. Buss (1991) has provided an overview of personality psychology from this perspective, as well as an edited volume of the Journal of Personality (1990) on applications of evolutionary psychology to the study of personality. The purpose of the present article is to show how this paradigm offers a powerful framework for the psychology of religion as well. A Contemporary Evolutionary-Psychological