Why do humans develop some cultural elements, such as religion, music, and stories, so reliably? In the target article, Singh provides an important answer: these packages of complex culture become common precisely because they appeal to humans – people might perceive them as instrumental in achieving some of their goals, or simply as enjoyable or interesting. This emphasis on individual motivations adds to previous approaches, which have typically focused on heuristics such as conformity or prestige biases.

Here, I suggest that Singh’s approach resonates with the concept of affordances and that this approach can be useful not only for understanding cross-culturally common phenomena but also for understanding nuances in cultural variation.

Gibson (Reference Gibson1979) proposed that the perceptual system is organized around affordances – opportunities offered by the environment to a perceiver. A chair, for example, is not seen merely as an elevated flat surface, but as something that “invites” or “affords” the opportunity to sit. However, for someone desperate to defend himself from an intruder, a chair might instead pose the affordance of “weapon” (Ko & Neuberg, Reference Ko and Neubergin press). Thus, what matters is not simply what an object is, but what it enables the perceiver to do.

This concept has been productively extended beyond the perception of the physical world. In social perception, people are highly attuned to characteristics in others that cue potential threats and opportunities (McArthur & Baron, Reference McArthur and Baron1983; Neuberg, Kenrick, & Schaller, Reference Neuberg, Kenrick, Schaller, Fiske, Gilbert and Lindzey2010). Likewise, different environments afford distinct opportunities and threats for different individuals (Ko & Neuberg, Reference Ko and Neubergin press).

Subjective selection could also be thought of as operating through the perception of cultural affordances – the opportunities and threats that participation in or endorsement of a cultural element afford. (Note that others have used “cultural affordances” in slightly different ways, such as to refer to the types of behavior or expression that one’s culture allows.)

Singh focuses primarily on explaining cross-cultural similarities. Because people share many universal motivations, there is substantial overlap in which cultural elements are perceived as useful. However, this approach may similarly be valuable for understanding variation, both between and within cultures. Just as the perceived affordance of a chair might vary with the perceiver’s goals and abilities, the same cultural variant might offer tangible benefits to some individuals but might significantly inhibit the goals of others.

By considering how goals and problems differ between societies and between individuals, we can consider how and why they might vary in the cultural affordances they perceive. To demonstrate how this approach might apply to variation, consider the example of religion.

The perception of cultural affordances likely varies as a function of features of the cultural variant as well as the goals, abilities, and vulnerabilities of the individual. By considering these factors, one might make several predictions about the cultural affordances people will perceive in religion. As reviewed in the target article, prosocial religions include strong norms that favor cooperation. Accordingly, individuals tend to promote punitive religious beliefs to the extent that they are motivated to police others’ behavior and believe that religious norms effectively promote cooperation (Fitouchi et al., Reference Fitouchi, Singh, André and Baumard2025).

Religious involvement can provide other affordances, too. In much of the world, religious commitment is more strongly correlated with attitudes towards family and sexuality than with endorsement of cooperative values (Moon, Reference Moon2021). Given that many world religions emphasize sexual morality, one possibility is that those who benefit from such norms will find religious beliefs to be more plausible or meaningful. This might explain patterns in religiosity across the lifespan: young adults often become somewhat less religious, while becoming a parent tends to increase religiosity (Blekesaune & Skirbekk, Reference Blekesaune and Skirbekk2023). In such cases, it is not that religious beliefs change, but that religion provides different affordances for people at different life stages.

One implication of this approach is that the underpinnings of a given cultural variant might differ across time and place. The perception of cultural affordances likely relies not only on properties of the cultural variant but also on the ability of the perceiver to gain benefits from it. Thus, it is not necessarily the case that the same cognitive biases or motivations will facilitate religious belief in every case. This might explain why some common patterns in religiousness vary across cultures. Whereas religious belief is typically negatively correlated with socioeconomic status and women tend to be more religious than men, there are instances where religion is more of a tool of the elite (Seabright, Reference Seabright2024) and where men are more religious than women (Irons, Reference Irons and Nesse2001; Moon, Tratner, & McDonald, Reference Moon, Tratner and McDonald2022). This might suggest that previous findings do not reflect some inherent propensity for certain groups to be religious, but rather that, in the societies where these findings were produced, these groups were more likely to perceive religion as affording important opportunities. Considering how people perceive cultural affordances may provide a useful framework for understanding such nuances.

Culture is an emergent property of the decisions of individuals (Baumard & André, Reference Baumard and André2025), and Singh provides a valuable framework for understanding what makes individuals choose certain cultural variants. My hope is that this perspective can help understand not only super-attractors that recur across cultures, but also nuanced patterns of variation that arise when different individuals and societies perceive culture as providing distinct opportunities and constraints.