A most dangerous tale: the universality, function, and evolution of blood libels

Blood libels are about two religiously/culturally different groups - Christians and Jews - and an accusation that a child or a young woman had been kidnapped and murdered due to opaque religious requirements. Contrary to how the literature depicts them, blood libels are not tied to Judeo-Christian cohabitation: similar accusations can be found in many cultures. The paper makes two claims regarding the morphology and the function of these ancient conspiracy theories. Firstly, threatening narratives about outgroups take the shape of the blood libel as it taps into several evolved preferences of the mind, and this correspondence in turn contributes to the cultural success of the narrative. The second claim is that these narratives are coalition signals, fostering coordinated group action against a threat. Using the framework of Cultural Attraction Theory, the paper identifies environmental and psychological factors of attraction to arrive at experimentally testable constructs.