Here's a paper arguing that the Catholic church's intense* concern with incest, eventually defined broadly enough to include distant cousins and "spiritual kin," explains large parts of WEIRD** culture and psychology: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6466/eaau5141

The correlations, and maybe causality, seems to be that changing the rules on who could marry weakened kinship ties, and that in turn reduced conformity and obedience to elders, and increased individualism and "impersonal prosociality," which seems to mean the tendency to trust and try to help strangers as well as family and friends.

This jumped out at me as "unintended consequences" because the short article in *Science* talked about the Catholic Church's "Marriage and family program," with the implication that this was the result of a deliberate, unified policy--but that phrasing but that turns out to be the authors' coinage for long-term policies against marriages to create alliances between families, and then discouraging second, third, and even sixth cousin marriages and arranged marriages, and encouraging or requiring newly married couples to set up their own households.

Whatever the intentions of the people who created those policies, I'm confident that their goals did not include increasing individualism and independence, while reducing conformity and obedience.

* compared to most other cultures and religions, including other forms of Christianity

**a great acronym, for "Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic"
redbird: "Road Not Maintained: Travel at Own Risk" (roadsign)
( Dec. 4th, 2012 04:32 pm)
I don't care how good your cause is, if you cold-call me and start by telling me that "as always, this call may be monitored or recorded," I'm going to interrupt, tell you this isn't acceptable, and hang up.

If I am calling you on business, not only may your organization have a legitimate reason for this, I have less of a choice. I need to talk to my health insurance company, credit card, etc. I don't need to talk to someone who is calling to ask me for a political contribution.

That's aside from the implication that the organization doesn't think its own staff can be trusted to do their jobs without someone listening in on the calls. If you can't trust them to ask for money, I can't trust them not to misuse my credit card information if I say yes. (I normally explain to such solicitors, politely, that I don't make contributions over the phone, and they are welcome to send a letter.)
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