© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156853711X591297 Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 353–365 brill.nl/jocc he Hypnotic Stag Hunt Joseph Bulbulia* FHSS Religious Studies, Victoria University, P.O. Box 600. Wellington, New Zealand *E-mail: joseph.bulbulia@vuw.ac.nz Abstract Evolutionary researchers argue that religion evolves to support cooperation, where it is assumed that cooperation is threatened by freeriding. I identify a distinct threat to cooperation from uncertainty. I briefly explain how the distinction between freeriding and uncertainty is relevant to both ultimate and proximate explanations of the biocultural mechanisms that express religious traits. Keywords Affordance, cooperation, evolution, niche construction, religion, signalling Insecure Cooperation Naturalists find a general threat for the evolution of cooperation from free- riding. he idea is that cooperation brings goods inaccessible to individuals acting alone. However, cooperative goods also invite ‘freeriding’, taking from a collective bounty without sufficient giving (Hardin, 1968). Because free- riding is individually more profitable than cooperation, cooperation’s evolu- tion requires mechanisms that adjust payoffs so that freeriding does not pay (Nowak, 2006). Yet freeriding is not cooperation’s only problem. Indeed, cooperation appears to receive a more fundamental threat from a combination of uncer- tainty and risk – from what I will call insecurity. To see this, consider a game called ‘the stag hunt’ (Skyrms, 2004). We sup- pose that partners may either hunt stags (cooperate) or hares (defect), but not both simultaneously. Stag portions pay better than hares, but benefits arrive only after a beast has been captured. Suppose, for simplicity, that a stag is always captured when all hunt stags but never otherwise; the hare is always captured when hunted, irrespective of what others do.