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Humans invest in stories. Recent evolutionary theories claim that cultural selection favours moralising stories that motivate eusociality. These claims leave the cultural prevalence of arbitrary and morally despicable mythologies puzzling. Here, we offer an explicit mathematical model that clarifies how cultural selection may conserve any arbitrary mythology that is initially associated with a social contract. We show how beliefs can help establish trust, overcome a social dilemma - in particular, focusing on the stag hunt game - and establish a social contract. With the contract established, the belief can then be renounced - thus acting as a catalyst - leaving the population in a prosocial state but with the coexistence of even conflicting belief structures. The cycle can thus repeat with a new contract resulting in a layered, intricate belief structure. Previous research on the link between beliefs and cooperation has focused on the moral contents of stories. Free of such an assumption, our analysis can then explain the rise of amoral, nonsensical and fictional narratives.
In this repository the Mathematica codes used for deriving the payoffs of the strategies in both infinite and finite populations are provided.