Análisis de la satisfacción en servicios deportivos

While it is implied in Norenzayan’s original exposition, the target article makes it explicit that big god beliefs admit of degrees. They posit a continuum of big god belief types which contribute to expansion of cooperative groups via self-monitoring, but in proportion to how closely they approach the Big Gods paradigm. So, there is now a continuum or spectrum of ‘Big-Goddishness’, with the canonical big gods such as the Abrahamic god at the most extreme end, and along which other beliefs can be arrayed. The approach here makes sense as it seems to address both theoretical and empirical needs; however I argue that it raises further issues. 2.3.1. Operationalising the Big Gods continuum

First, a spectrum or continuum in no way an ad hoc move. Big God beliefs are evolved traits of a culture; therefore, there must be an evolutionary pathway to such beliefs from the ‘no gods at all’ trait. They need to be able to have emerged more or less incrementally out of other traits that are only incompletely ‘Big-Goddish’ or not Big-Goddish at all; this is implicit in the ‘ratchetting up’ metaphor and therefore just part of the view. Indeed, in this regard the authors are on a firm footing: we know that the Big Gods cultural trait has arisen in a demonstrably incremental manner in at least one case (as the authors describe; the early Abrahamic god Yahweh began as just one tribal god of the Israelites, among several).

It is illustrative here to distinguish two broad processes for modelling the increase of a trait within a population, which I gestured at earlier when outlining my scepticism about the Abrahamic data point. One process would be to imagine agents with traits coded as continuous variables, with the variables of succeeding generations of agents36 depending (in part) on the success of the previous generation. If the trait conveys a fitness advantage in a given environment, then even if it begins set at near zero, we can expect to see a gradual increase in the relevant variables over the whole population over time (as long as there is a mechanism to introduce ‘noise’ or some other source of variation for it to become present at low levels). Yahweh’s evolution from god to God is the paradigm example of this. The alternative is to imagine discrete traits carried by alleles: a fully formed trait that is advantageous might spread

36 _{The generations of an agent-based model formal modelling can refer to reproductive/biological generations of} agents with ‘baked in’ traits that do not change during their lifetime, or alternatively to a population ‘decision state’ with new ‘generations’ occurring when individual agents change their trait. I use the term here purely in a formal manner, i.e. ambiguously between biological generation and decision state.

to fixation by enhancing the relative fitness of its carriers (even in low initial numbers), allowing them to invade the population and out-compete their rivals. This might be one-way belief in a mature Abrahamic God might spread within a previous isolated population, from an initial ‘infection’ event. These are two different mechanisms of spread; the first should be kept in mind when the Yahweh example is appealed to – where the belief trait is endemic but is evolves along a temporal gradient toward a more ‘full-blooded’ deity. Other historical examples cited by the authors, such as the spread of Christianity within the Roman Empire, are more apt for the invasion dynamic: a fully-fledged trait introduced into a population and proliferating to fixation as its carriers reproduce or convert non-believers.

Importantly, both processes model selection at the individual level for explaining intra-cultural changes and are distinct from group selection mechanisms operating at an inter-cultural or meta-population level. In the Abrahamic narrative, group selection processes might (perhaps) be apt for trying to explain the survival of the Abrahamic religion’s early incarnation via Israelite culture (as opposed to its Phoenician, Egyptian or Mesopotamian regional rivals), and/or the spread of a later one via the vehicle of the first Caliphate. While the paper is necessarily abstract and the authors do not explicitly individuate these mechanisms, a systematic application of the view to the history of human religions would have to be careful about the evolutionary processes attributed to each component of the narrative.

And emphasising a continuum with a temporal gradient opens up an interesting response to the critical ethnographic data discussed earlier, i.e. (Atkinson, Latham, and Watts 2014) and (J. Watts, Greenhill, et al. 2015). These studies use binary coding of cultural traits – for example there being ‘Moralising High Gods’ or not – with the cultures coded positively occurred in relatively small numbers (the trait was surprisingly rare). Norenzayan et al do not say as much, but it is open to them to dispute binary coding as distortive and insufficiently subtle: contested examples and ‘not-so-big gods’, such as the gods of pagan Rome, still count as ‘big-goddish’-

enough for their purposes and should ideally be included in a model that ‘scores’ beliefs in a continuous manner (as well as including greater or lesser degrees of social cohesion). While this may not convince their critics, it at least points out a degree of mismatch between theory and criticism. The problem then would be one of empirical tractability – it is not obvious that the ethnographic data is rich and detailed enough.

Because we know that there must be a spectrum, we know that the various cultural incarnations of Mars and Demeter must fall along it somewhere. The only questions are where they fall, and whether time gradients along this spectrum correlate with changing social cohesion in a way that confirms or disconfirms the Big Gods hypothesis: do societies get more cohesive and complex as their gods get bigger? The most appropriate test of the hypothesis would be snapshot studies of how cultures change over time, but again evidence we have simply isn’t fine-grained enough for this.

2.3.2. Issues with the continuum

So, we have both an evidence gap and questions about empirical tractability. The beauty of straight-forwardly scoring a culture as ‘big gods present’ or not is that it is indeed straight forward in a way that incremental scoring isn’t. But there is also a conceptual problem with any continuum proposal: what would it be for a culture to be exactly 80% along the big god spectrum? If the authors’ intentions were to rise above certain criticisms, this has not yet been achieved. The low-resolution tests that went against the Big Gods theory will still stand unless the higher-resolution ones which the authors gesture at can be operationalised. Individual historical correlations are of course available to be appealed to – but given the richness of human cultural history this will always be open to charges of cherry-picking. Genuinely robust empirical evidence of causation (as opposed to psychological plausibility) is still lacking and (if anything) we have gone backward because we don’t know how to operationalise the variable of interest. Beyond the basic notion of a continuum, we have nothing specific to guide us in this respect.

For useful operationalization we would need a better understanding of the theoretical basis of the continuum, its dimensions and their relationship to each other, and ultimately an index apt for proportionality comparisons. If we considering moralising, punishing gods in the way the theory characterises them, then there should be at least three components to the continuum, one for each of the key ‘bigness’ properties of big gods: i) their degree of omniscience in monitoring our actions, ii) their degree of commitment toward moralising/punishing, and iii) their power to punish (i.e. how bad a punishment is expected). These are three orthogonal traits which (conceptually speaking) can vary independently depending on the personality of the projected deity. So understood, any empirically tractable operationalization of the big gods effect would have to decompose it along these three dimensions, perhaps with weightings or combination/multiplier effects, and further weightings for the cultural embeddedness or

eminence of the belief in the mind of the believer etc. This would not be impossible, and as a way of conceptualising the continuum it is reminiscent of the ‘hypercube’ dimensional analyses of (Mitchell 2000). But empirically speaking it would will be time-consuming and fiddly, requiring case-by-case interpretation on ethnographic databases where much of the relevant data might never have been collected, and it would be vulnerable at every turn to charges of subjectivity. Especially given the level of dispute over the relatively simple coding schemes already in use, this does not look like a promising research project.

And translating such a 3-dimensional score into behaviour would not be straight-forward. How would intermediate deities register an effect, and how to calibrate this? For example, a hand- wringing moralising god who sees everything but has with no power to punish might engender some sort of respect from believers, but if fear of supernatural punishment is doing the psychological work then these deities probably won’t have much effect on the behaviour of ne’er-do-wells. Once every god has been scored from zero to one on the three scales of interest, it might be tempting to just multiply those numbers to get their ‘Bigness’ fraction. But consider three gods: one all-knowing and all-powerful but only partially interested in your doing the right thing, another who is entirely interested and all-knowing but only partially able to punish, and a third whose imperfection is that they only know what you’re doing some of the time. Reasonable believers might fear these intermediate gods in quite different ways, with different attendant behavioural effects. It would be useful to know much more about the psychology of god-fear.

All this is not so much a serious proposal as just an illustration of the explanatory gaps in the Big Gods theory. The notion of supernatural monitoring and punishment is intuitive but underspecified, and this only becomes clear if the tri-omni Abrahamic God is taken off the table as a starting point. The point is that you can’t simply ‘scale down’ the all-knowing, all- powerful, all-judging Abrahamic god to use as a conceptual element of a theory; not if

fractional Big-Goddishness is supposed to be empirically tractable. It would be deceptive to ignore the can of worms that this opens. Much more work would need to be done, and it’s not clear (to me at least) what that work would look like. And until such clarity in operationalisation has been achieved, the model has decidedly not positioned itself to address the empirical concerns discussed earlier.

In laying out this worry I of course oversimplified, by talking about divine beings as the sole source of supernatural punishment. This is not the case in target article presentation of the theory. The supernatural punishment/reward systems of non-Big God religions (e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism) are indeed treated as part of the general framework and “reflect historical convergences between religion and public morality, although the precise psychological mechanisms are not as well understood as for the Abrahamic religions” (Norenzayan et al. 2016a, 9). It is the authors intention (thought they admit that there is much work to be done to develop this properly) that beliefs such as karma would also be part of the Big Gods effect in some sense; likewise, Oceanian concepts of mana and tapu. Conceptually speaking, this backtracks somewhat from big gods and the watcher effect to a broader conception of supernatural punishment: to ‘cosmic justice’ in general, with big gods as just particularly agent- based manifestations of this. As already mentioned, while the authors have not stated as much, this move may also provide some basis for pushing back against the findings in (J. Watts, Greenhill, et al. 2015), as this study was conducted in an Oceanian setting where moralising high gods play second fiddle to more abstract mechanisms of mana and tapu, arguably vectors supernatural punishment, moral consequence, or cosmic justice. The predictor in this setting should now be some disjunction of moralising high gods and other cosmic-justice beliefs, so a failed test of one disjunct alone might not be cause for alarm.

This is another alteration which is sensible in principle but pushes the theory further from clarity with respect to empirical tractability. Buddhism for example is probably the only other good case of a ‘break-out’ religion: originating in India but colonising much of East Asia and spreading as far as Japan. It also underpins social structures where it dominates yet is mostly non-theistic – so it stands out as a challenge to the Big Gods theory if not incorporated somehow. But if operationalisation of orthogonal theistic properties was difficult, operationalisation of a disjunction of theistic properties and non-theistic cosmic-justice concepts seems even more ambitious. Should we posit a fourth dimension to the continuum, from the impersonal (Karma) to personal (grumpy old Yahweh)? If so, where do multiple gods fit on that scale? What about the more esoteric God of contemporary monotheism, or of Spinoza? Does this dimension matter much at all (the success of Buddhism might suggest not) and how does it interact with the others? The “how big a god” interpretive issues are also reintroduced in this context, with the authors arguing that many apparently non-Big Gods religions only have this characteristic at the refined, theological level, and for the everyday

lives of believers “anthropomorphic beings often reappear with a vengeance” (Norenzayan et al. 2016b, 49).

Again, this is not a straw-man demand for a fully specific model. Models always over-simplify, so while (for example) just treating size of god as single measurable dimension might do much violence to the difference in theology, it might work fine as an operationalising and modelling strategy. Coding ethnographic data as well is always a matter of interpretation. But if we are going to code and simplify some variables for statistical testing, we need some sort of broad agreement on what sort of methods would be acceptable. What is the appropriate kind of ethnographic dataset? Could you use a disjunctive binary variable e.g. big god, or karma, or tapu, etc.? A weighted variable (or variables)? If so on what principle? Or perhaps a proxy of some kind: e.g. whether is there the local equivalent of the sentiment “what goes around comes around”. What we need is some better sense of what sort of footprint or signature we should expect to see in the cross-cultural data if the theory were true. Until then, dialog on this issue is all too likely to resemble researchers like Watts et al being accused of attacking straw men, while Norenzayan et al are accused of shifting goal posts37_.