Why do religious leaders observe costly prohibitions? Examining taboos on Mentawai shamans

Religious leaders refrain from sex and food across human societies. Researchers argue that this avoidance influences people's perceptions of leaders’ underlying traits, but few, if any, quantitative data exist testing these claims. Here we show that shamans in a small-scale society observe costly prohibitions and that observers infer cooperativeness, religious belief, difference from normal humans and supernatural power from shamans’ adherence to special taboos. We investigated costly prohibitions on shamanic healers, known as sikerei, among the rainforest horticulturalist Mentawai people of Siberut Island. We found that shamans must observe permanent taboos on various animals, as well as prohibitions on sex and food during initiation and ceremonial healing. Using vignettes, we evaluated Mentawai participants’ inferences about taboo adherence, testing three different but not mutually exclusive hypotheses: cooperative costly signalling, credibility-enhancing displays and supernatural otherness. We found support for all three: Mentawai participants infer self-denying shamans to be (a) cooperative, (b) sincere believers in the religious rules and (c) dissimilar from normal humans and with greater supernatural powers. People's inferences about religious self-denial are multidimensional and consistent with several functional accounts.