An Emotion Niche for the Cultural Evolution of Social Practices

Abstract

Most of human sociality is organized in culturally evolved practices that have been selected as a function of how readily people invent, notice, remember, report, reproduce, and recruit others to them. Social practices are especially prone to persist and diffuse to the extent that they are inherently. In all of these ways, the kama muta emotion is a psychosocial niche selecting for cultural practices that evoke it. Hence in all sorts of cultures throughout history, we find myriad culturally central and salient kama muta-evoking practices in religion, politics, marketing, media, the arts, and everyday sociality. These practices vary greatly and have culturally and institutionally specific unique features. What they all have in common is the promotion and presentation of sudden intensification of communal sharing. That is, cultural practices are selected when they make immediately and dramatically salient some kind of love, fellowship, solidarity, support, belonging, unity, compassion, or kindness. This elicits kama muta that sustains and spreads the practice. Kama muta generates commitment and devotion to communal sharing. So when the communal sharing relationships that it reinforces enhance fitness at the biological level, then in turn, there is natural selection for the psychosocial disposition to experience kama muta.