Toward an evolutionary psychology of religion and personality

Evolutionary psychology is an emerging paradigm for the social sciences tha t offers a powerful metatheoretical framework for personality psychology an d, as I attempt to demonstrate in this article, for the psychology of relig ion as well. I argue that religion is not an evolved adaptation; rather, th e diverse range of beliefs, behavior, and experience that we collectively r efer to as religion emerge as byproducts of numerous, domain-specific psych ological mechanisms that evolved to solve other (mundane) adaptive problems . These include mechanisms for reasoning about the natural world (naive phy sics and biology), about other people's minds (naive psychology), and about specific kinds of interpersonal relationships (attachment, kinship, social exchange, coalitions, status hierarchies).