On its own, the formation of cooperative and often complex groups is a major way in which humans construct more predictable environments for ourselves, bringing the inherent precarity of the natural world and other people within that world more and more into our control.

To make social living computationally tractable, political systems and shared worldviews may have arisen to restrict the possibility space of group living through a shared understanding of duties, rights, and responsibilities.

These systems not only dictate our expectations for social life and human behavior, but also allow the group to work from a shared set of assumptions about what beliefs and behaviors are acceptable and valued. In predictive processing terms, ideologies and worldviews comprise hierarchical generative models specifying a set of predictions about the world and other people that facilitates group cooperation when shared with other members of the group.

Although any particular set of rules and regulations may be arbitrary, and different groups of people can choose to set these rules in different ways, having a shared system that all members of a group adhere to reduces the variance in group members’ thoughts and behaviors, rendering the social world more predictable.