Bering's argument that human beings are endowed with a cognitive system dedicated to forming illusory representations of psychological immortality relies on the claim that children's beliefs in the afterlife are not the result of religious teaching. We suggest four reasons why this claim is unsatisfactory.

The dominant view in the cognitive science of religion (the ‘Standard Model’) is that religious belief and behaviour are not adaptive traits but rather incidental byproducts of the cognitive architecture of mind. Because evidence for the Standard Model is inconclusive, the case for it depends crucially on its alleged methodological superiority to selectionist alternatives. However, we show that the Standard Model has both methodological and evidential disadvantages when compared with selectionist alternatives. We also consider a pluralistic approach, which holds that (...) religion or various aspects of religion originated as byproducts of evolved cognitive structures but were subsequently co-opted for adaptive purposes. We argue that when properly formulated, the pluralistic approach also has certain advantages over the Standard Model. (shrink)

Abstract. Although the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), a current approach to the scientific study of religion, has exerted an influence in the study of religion for almost twenty years, the question of its compatibility or incompatibility with theism has not been the subject of serious discussion until recently. Some critics of religion have taken a lively interest in the CSR because they see it as useful in explaining why religious believers consistently make costly commitments to false beliefs. Conversely, some (...) theists have argued for the compatibility of religious belief with basic CSR results. In this article, we contribute to the incipient discussion about the worldview relevance of the CSR by arguing that while a theistic reading of the field only represents one interpretative option at most, antitheistic claims about the incompatibility of the CSR with theism look like they may be harder to maintain than first appearances might suggest. (shrink)

The neuropsychology of religious activity in normal and selected clinical populations is reviewed. Religious activity includes beliefs, experiences, and practice. Neuropsychological and functional imaging findings, many of which have derived from studies of experienced meditators, point to a ventral cortical axis for religious behavior, involving primarily the ventromedial temporal and frontal regions. Neuropharmacological studies generally point to dopaminergic activation as the leading neurochemical feature associated with religious activity. The ventral dopaminergic pathways involved in religious behavior most closely align with the (...) action-extrapersonal system in the model of 3-D perceptual–motor interactions proposed by Previc . These pathways are biased toward distant space and also mediate related extrapersonally dominated brain functions such as dreaming and hallucinations. Hyperreligiosity is a major feature of mania, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, temporal-lobe epilepsy and related disorders, in which the ventromedial dopaminergic systems are highly activated and exaggerated attentional or goal-directed behavior toward extrapersonal space occurs. The evolution of religion is linked to an expansion of dopaminergic systems in humans, brought about by changes in diet and other physiological influences. (shrink)

Evolutionary moral realism is the view that there are moral values with roots in evolution that are both specifically moral and exist independently of human belief systems. In beginning to sketch the outlines of such a view, we examine moral goods like fairness and empathetic caring as valuable and real aspects of the environments of species that are intelligent and social, or at least developing along an evolutionary trajectory that could lead to a level of intelligence that would enable individual (...) members of the species to recognize and respond to such things as the moral goods they in fact are. We suggest that what is most morally interesting and important from a biological perspective is the existence and development of such trajectories, rather than the position of one particular species, such as our own, on one particular trajectory. (shrink)

Recent studies of the evolution of religion have revealed the cognitive underpinnings of belief in supernatural agents, the role of ritual in promoting cooperation, and the contribution of morally punishing high gods to the growth and stabilization of human society. The universality of religion across human society points to a deep evolutionary past. However, specific traits of nascent religiosity, and the sequence in which they emerged, have remained unknown. Here we reconstruct the evolution of religious beliefs and behaviors in early (...) modern humans using a global sample of hunter-gatherers and seven traits describing hunter-gatherer religiosity: animism, belief in an afterlife, shamanism, ancestor worship, high gods, and worship of ancestors or high gods who are active in human affairs. We reconstruct ancestral character states using a time-calibrated supertree based on published phylogenetic trees and linguistic classification and then test for correlated evolution between the characters and for the direction of cultural change. Results indicate that the oldest trait of religion, present in the most recent common ancestor of present-day hunter-gatherers, was animism, in agreement with long-standing beliefs about the fundamental role of this trait. Belief in an afterlife emerged, followed by shamanism and ancestor worship. Ancestor spirits or high gods who are active in human affairs were absent in early humans, suggesting a deep history for the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies. There is a significant positive relationship between most characters investigated, but the trait “high gods” stands apart, suggesting that belief in a single creator deity can emerge in a society regardless of other aspects of its religion. (shrink)

Not by Genes Alone excellently explains Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd's important ideas about human gene-culture co-evolution to a broader audience but remains short of a larger vision of civilization. Several decades ago Ralph Burhoe had seen that fertile possibility in Richerson and Boyd's work. I suggest getting past present reductionistic customs to a scientific perspective having an integral place for virtue. Subsystem agency is part of this view, as is the driving role of abundance, whose ultimate origins are (...) in the mysterious, quintessentially energetic Big Bang. The free-rider problem may not impede higher social organization as inexorably as Richerson and Boyd believe; "the tragedy" of enervating leakage from "the commons" may often be less influential than an invigorating flow of externalities to the commons. Eukaryotic origins mark the origin of inevitable wider sharing as higher living systems evolve. I use a metaphor of flesh and spirit in drawing a parallel between that turning point and the wide sharing that occurs in civilization. This helps solve the enigma of the demographic transition. Why do so many productive participants in first-world societies severely restrict their selfish-gene reproduction to below replacement birth rate? It is not because culture is maladaptive but because civilization's brain and womb have become partially differentiated in distinct populations. Considerations of social boundaries, myths of sacrifice, and human creativity help in understanding how human social evolution taps potentials present in reality. Human beings' diverse vigorous activities—the organized ones and the inadvertent ones, the wise and the foolish, the good and the bad, the carefully thoughtful and the merely playful—provide the ground of being, or primordial soup, for cultural entities that transcend our intentions. If we have it right for the most part and are fortunate, we will continue to emerge at higher levels. (shrink)

Within the Cognitive Science of Religion, Justin Barrett has proposed that humans possess a hyperactive agency detection device that was selected for in our evolutionary past because ‘over detecting’ (as opposed to ‘under detecting’) the existence of a predator conferred a survival advantage. Within the Intelligent Design debate, William Dembski has proposed the law of small probability, which states that specified events of small probability do not occur by chance. Within the Fine-Tuning debate, John Leslie has asserted a tidiness principle (...) such that, if we can think of a good explanation for some state of affairs, then an explanation is needed for that state of affairs. In this paper I examine similarities between these three proposals and suggest that they can all be explained with reference to the existence of an explanation attribution module in the human mind. The forgoing analysis is considered with reference to a contrast between classical rationality and what Gerd Gigerenzer and others have called ecological rationality. (shrink)

The naturalistic approach to metaethics is sometimes identified with a supervenience theory relating moral properties to underlying descriptive properties, thereby securing the possibility of objective knowledge in morality as in chemistry. I reject this approach along with the purely anthropological approach which leads to an objectionable form of relativism. There is no single method for arriving at moral objectivity any more than there is a single method that has taken us from alchemy to modern chemistry. Rather, there is an ensemble (...) of instruments, techniques, experiments and observations that contribute to eliminating moral error, delivering what we are entitled to call greater objectivity. (shrink)

Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors—as an evolutionary by-product—the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in (...) rituals and devotions involving costly displays exploits various aspects of our evolved psychology to deepen people's commitment to both supernatural agents and religious communities. Third, competition among societies and organizations with different faith-based beliefs and practices has increasingly connected religion with both within-group prosociality and between-group enmity. This connection has strengthened dramatically in recent millennia, as part of the evolution of complex societies, and is important to understanding cooperation and conflict in today's world. (shrink)

Authors of non-liberal proposals experience more collegial objections than others do. These objections are often couched as criticism of determinism, reductionism, or methodological individualism, but from a scientific viewpoint such criticism could be easily answered. Underneath it is a wish to harness scientific belief in service of positive social values, at the cost of reducing objectivity.

Abstract.The biological and cognitive approach to religion has matured somewhat and reveals interesting results. Nevertheless, some questions arise about its foundation and development. The essay offers a review of current research in the cognitive field, focusing on its conclusions, the internal discussions, and the problems that need more study or correction. Emphasis is placed on a more intricate account of the factors involved in religious experience, discussing the proper use of the discoveries of biocognitive research and the limits that should (...) be placed on said conclusions. (shrink)

Proposing a change to the view on psychoactive drug use in non-addicts touches a sensitive issue because of its potential implications to addiction prevention, therapeutic practice, and drug policy. Commentators raised nine questions that ranged from clarifications, suggested extensions of the model to supporting data previously not regarded, to assumptions on the implications of the model. Here, we take up the suggestions of the commentators to expand the model to behavioral addictions, discuss additional instrumentalization goals, and review the evidence from (...) laboratory animal studies on drug instrumentalization. We consider further the role of sociocultural factors and individual development in the establishment in drug instrumentalization and addiction. Finally, we clarify which implications we think this model may have. We conclude that drug instrumentalization theory can be further applied to other behaviors but will require a sensitive debate when used for drug and addiction policy that directly affects prevention and treatment. (shrink)

Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) central hypothesis is that strong in-group norms were formed in part to foster parochial social alliances so as to enable cultural groups to adaptively respond to parasite stress. Applied to ancestral hominid environments, the story fits with evolutionary theory and the fragmentary data available on early hominid social formations and their geographical distributions. Applied to modern social formations, however, the arguments and inferences from data are problematic.

What is ‘counterintuitive’? There is general agreement that it refers to a violation of previously held knowledge, but the precise definition seems to vary with every author and study. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the notion of ‘counterintuitive’ and provide a more philosophically rigorous definition congruent with the history of psychology, recent experimental work in ‘minimally counterintuitive’ concepts, the science vs. religion debate, and the developmental and evolutionary background of human beings. We conclude that previous definitions of (...) counterintuitiveness have been flawed and did not resolve the conflict between a believer’s conception of the supernatural entity (an atypical “real kind”) and the non-believer’s conception (empty name/fictional). Furthermore, too much emphasis has been placed on the universality and (presumed) innateness of intuitive concepts (and hence the criteria for what is counterintuitive)—and far too little attention paid to learning and expertise. We argue that many putatively universal concepts are not innate, but mostly learned and defeasible—part of a religious believer’s repertoire of expert knowledge. Nonetheless, the results from empirical studies about the memorability of counterintuitive concepts have been convincing and it is difficult to improve on existing designs and methodologies. However, future studies in counterintuitive concepts need to embed their work in research about context effects, typicality, the psychology of learning and expertise (for example, the formation of expert templates and range defaults), with more attention to the sources of knowledge (direct and indirect knowledge) and a better idea of what ‘default’ knowledge really is. (shrink)

Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. This study examines whether children's concept recall similarly is sensitive to the degree of conceptual counterintuitiveness (operationalized as a concept's number of ontological domain violations) for items presented in the context of a fictional narrative. Seven- to nine-year-old children (...) who listened to a story including both intuitive and counterintuitive concepts recalled the counterintuitive concepts containing one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2), but not three (Experiment 3), violations of intuitive ontological expectations significantly more and in greater detail than the intuitive concepts, both immediately after hearing the story and 1 week later. We conclude that one or two violations of expectation may be a cognitive optimum for children: They are more inferentially rich and therefore more memorable, whereas three or more violations diminish memorability for target concepts. These results suggest that the cognitive bias for minimally counterintuitive ideas is present and active early in human development, near the start of formal religious instruction. This finding supports a growing literature suggesting that diverse, early-emerging, evolved psychological biases predispose humans to hold and perform religious beliefs and practices whose primary form and content is not derived from arbitrary custom or the social environment alone. (shrink)

To naturalize religion, we must identify what religion is, and what aspects of it we are trying to explain. In this paper, religious social institutional behavior is the explanatory target, and an explanatory hypothesis based on shared primate social dominance psychology is given. The argument is that various religious features, including the high status afforded the religious, and the high status afforded to deities, are an expression of this social dominance psychology in a context for which it did not evolve: (...) high-density populations made possible by agriculture. (shrink)

We outline a theory of one puzzling aspect of human cognition: a tendency to exaggerate the degree to which agency is manifested in the world. We call this over‐coherent thinking. We use Pylyshyn's idea of cognitive penetrability to help characterize this notion. We argue that this kind of thinking is essentially narrative in form rather than theoretical. We develop a theory of the relation between the degree of narrativity in a representation and its aptness to represent, and to express, mind. (...) We review the prospects for several theories about how over‐coherent thinking gains a purchase on motivation. We argue that progress in this difficult area may require the abandonment of a categorical belief/imagination distinction in favour of vaguely specified clusterings in a many‐dimensional cognitive space. We conclude with the idea that an error‐prone system for the retention of ideas that are low in some of the characteristics generally thought desirable in belief might emerge as a result of an arms‐race between deceivers and deceiver‐detectors. (shrink)

Religiosity has been linked with prosocial behavior and a preference for religious ingroups over outgroups. Yet, there are important differences in religious people’s beliefs, values, and practices. Fundamental and quest orientation toward religion may differentially predict intergroup bias in prosociality. Also, individualizing and binding moral foundations may have diverse effects on ingroup and outgroup bias in helping, as moral foundations theory suggests that individualizing and binding foundations differ in how much they focus on ingroup and outgroup moral considerations. In this (...) study, we examined the relationship between religious dimensions, moral foundations, prosocial behavior, and intergroup bias in helping. We found evidence for the effect of individualizing foundations, religious fundamentalism, and quest religion above and beyond demographics and other religious dimensions on intergroup bias in helping. Furthermore, there were independent positive effects of individualizing foundations, religious activity, and age, and independent negative effects of female gender and religious fundamentalism on prosocial behavior. This study provides a more nuanced understanding of the relations between religion, prosociality, and moral intuitions in a Muslim context. (shrink)

The cognitive science of religions’ By-Product Theory contends that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of maturationally natural cognitive systems. Those systems address fundamental problems of human survival, encompassing such capacities as hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Across cultures they typically arise effortlessly and unconsciously during early childhood. They are not taught and appear independent of general intelligence. Theory of mind undergirds an instantaneous and automatic intuitive understanding (...) of minds, mental representations, and their implications for agents’ actions. By-Product theorists hypothesize about a social cognition content bias, holding that mentalizing capacities inform participants’ implicit understanding of religious representations of agents with counter-intuitive properties. That hypothesis, in combination with Baron-Cohen’s account of Autistic Spectrum Disorder in terms of diminished theory of mind capacities, suggests an impaired religious understanding hypothesis. It proposes that people with ASD have substantial limitations in intuitive understanding of and creative inferences from such representations. Norenzayan argues for a mind-blind atheism hypothesis, which asserts that the truth of these first two hypotheses suggests that people with ASD have an increased probability, compared to the general population, of being atheists. Numerous empirical studies have explored these three hypotheses’ merits. After carefully pondering distinctions between intuitive versus reflective mentalizing and between explicit versus implicit measures and affective versus cognitive measures of mentalizing, the available empirical evidence provides substantial support for the first two hypotheses and non-trivial support for the third. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have increasingly turned to cultural transmission to explain the widespread nature of religion. One key hypothesis focuses on memory, proposing that that minimally counterintuitive (MCI) content facilitates the transmission of supernatural beliefs. We propose two caveats to this hypothesis. (1) Memory effects decrease as MCI concepts become commonly used, and (2) people do not believe counterintuitive content readily; therefore additional mechanisms are required to get from memory to belief. In experiments 1–3 (n = 283), we examined the relationship (...) between MCI, belief, and memory. We found that increased tendencies to anthropomorphize predicted poorer memory for anthropomorphic-MCI content. MCI content was found less believable than intuitive content, suggesting different mechanisms are required to explain belief. In experiment 4 (n = 70), we examined the non-content-based cultural learning mechanism of credibility-enhancing displays (CREDs) and found that it increased participants’ belief in MCI content, suggesting this type of learning can better explain the transmission of belief. (shrink)

Forty-nine members of the Oxford public took part in a controlled free-recall experiment, the first 'minimal counterintuitiveness theory' study to control concept inferential potential and participant selective-attention timing. Recall of counterintuitive ideas was compared with recall of ideas expressing necessary epistemic incongruence, analytically true ideas, and ordinary control ideas. The items expressing necessary epistemic incongruence had better recall than other items. MCI items had a mnemonic advantage over intuitive templates for participants twenty-five years and younger after a one-week delay, but (...) MCI items did not have an advantage for older participants. There was no mnemonic advantage for immediate recall of MCI items in any age group. Analyses suggest this general failure to replicate previously found mnemonic advantages may have been due to restricting the items' inferential potential. (shrink)

This paper describes a cross-cultural research project on the relation between how people conceptualize nature and how they act in it. Mental models of nature differ dramatically among and within populations living in the same area and engaged in more or less the same activities. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including dealing with commons problems. Our research also offers a distinct perspective on models of culture, and a unified approach to the study of culture and (...) cognition. We argue that cultural transmission and formation does not consist primarily in shared rules or norms, but in complex distributions of causally-connected representations across minds in interaction with the environment. The cultural stability and diversity of these representations often derives from rich, biologically-prepared mental mechanisms that limit variation to readily transmissible psychological forms. This framework addresses a series of methodological issues, such as the limitations of conceiving culture to be a well-defined system or bounded entity, an independent variable, or an internalized component of minds. (shrink)

Cultural psychologists often describe the relationship between mind and culture as ‘dynamic.’ In light of this, we provide two desiderata that a theory about encultured minds ought to meet: the theory ought to reflect how cultural psychologists describe their own findings and it ought to be thoroughly naturalistic. We show that a realist theory of causal powers — which holds that powers are causally-efficacious and empirically-discoverable — fits the bill. After an introduction to the major concepts in cultural psychology and (...) describing causal power realism, we use a case study — the effects of pathogen prevalence on culture and cognition — to show the explanatory capacities of the powers framework. (shrink)

Much experimental evidence shows that minimally counterintuitive concepts, which violate one intuitive ontological expectation of domain-specific natural kinds, are remembered as well as or better than intuitive concepts with no violations of ontological expectations, and much better than maximally counterintuitive concepts with more than one violation of ontological violations. It is also well established that concepts rated as high in imagery, are recalled better than concepts that are low in imagery. We conducted three studies to test whether imagery levels affected (...) recall rates of intuitive, minimally counterintuitive, and maximally counterintuitive concepts. In study 1, we obtained imagery level ratings for 48 three-word items. In study 2, we used the ratings obtained in study 1 in a 2 × 3 recall task in which imagery was manipulated along with counterintutiveness. High imagery items were recalled significantly better than low imagery items for intuitive and maximally counterintuitive items but not for minimally counterintuitive items. Study 3, replicated the findings from study 2 in a 2 × 2 study using a larger number of intuitive and minimally counterintuitive items. In both studies, High imagery items were recalled significantly better than low imagery items for intuitive but not for minimally counterintuitive items. Thus, minimally counterintuitive concepts appear insulated from imagery effects on recall. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the relationship between cultural and cognitive-psychological processes, and discusses the potential impact of the cognitive sciences on understand...

Cultural disparity—the variation across cultural traits such as knowledge, skill, and belief—is a complex phenomenon, studied by a number of researchers with an expanding empirical toolkit. While there is a growing consensus as to the processes that generate cultural variation and change, general explanatory frameworks require additional tools for identifying, organising, and relating the complex causes that underpin the production of cultural disparity. Here I develop a case study in the cognitive science of religion, and demonstrate how concepts and distinctions (...) drawn from work on contrastive explanation and manipulationist accounts of causation provide such tools for distinguishing explanatory levels, organising causal narratives, and accounting for cross-cultural patterns. (shrink)

It has previously been suggested that the historically and geographically widespread persistence of religious beliefs occurs because it is a by-product of normal cognitive processes, ones which first evolved to confer survival advantages in the social domain. If this theory holds, then it is likely that inter-individual variation in the same biases may predict corresponding variation in religious thoughts and behaviors. Using an online questionnaire, 298 participants answered questions regarding their tendency to detect agency, the degree to which they displayed (...) schizotypal traits, their ability to understand the emotions and motivations of others, and their religious beliefs and behaviors. Path analysis suggests that mentalizing, agency detection, and schizotypal thinking were each independently related to religiosity. Furthermore, schizotypal thinking and agency detection were highly interrelated with one another, whereas mentalizing was not. Although the degree to which an individual engages with religious or spiritual beliefs will be influenced by their cultural and historical context, this paper helps to elucidate the interplay between various cognitive processes that might predispose some individuals but not others toward holding such beliefs in the first place. (shrink)

In our response to the 27 commentaries, we refine the theoretical claims, clarify several misconceptions of our framework, and explore substantial disagreements. In doing so, we show that our framework accommodates multiple historical scenarios; debate the historical evidence, particularly about “pre-Axial” religions; offer important details about cultural evolutionary theory; clarify the termprosociality;and discuss proximal mechanisms. We review many interesting extensions, amplifications, and qualifications of our approach made by the commentators.

This article reports an investigation involving a series of studies carried out to critically examine the hypothesis that presence of 2 or 3 minimally counterintuitive concepts in a story makes it more memorable than stories containing fewer or more of such concepts. The results paint a more complicated picture involving a number of interacting factors with contribution of the counterintuitive concepts to the global story cohesion emerging as a key mediating factor. It was found that addition of counterintuitive concepts only (...) makes stories more memorable if those concepts contribute to the global cohesion of the overall story. (shrink)

The primary debate among scholars who study the evolution of religion concerns whether religion is an adaptation or a byproduct. The dominant position in the field is that religious beliefs and behaviors are byproducts of cognitive processes and behaviors that evolved for other purposes. A smaller group of scholars maintain that religion is an adaptation for extending human cooperation and coordination. Here I survey five critiques of the adapationist position and offer responses to these critiques. Much of the debate can (...) be resolved by clearly defining important but ambiguous terms in the debate, such as religion, adaptation, adaptive, and trait, as well as clarifying several misunderstandings of evolutionary processes. I argue that adaptationist analyses must focus on the functional effects of the religious system, the coalescence of independent parts that constitute the fabric of religion. (shrink)

The minimally counterintuitive (MCI) thesis in the cognitive science of religion proposes that supernatural concepts are prevalent across cultures because they possess a common structure—namely, violations of intuitive ontological assumptions that facilitate concept representation. These violations are hypothesized to give supernatural concepts a memorability advantage over both intuitive concepts and “maximally counterintuitive” (MXCI) concepts, which contain numerous ontological violations. However, the connection between MCI concepts and bizarre (BIZ) but not supernatural concepts, for which memorability advantages are predicted by the von (...) Restorff (VR) effect, has been insufficiently clarified by earlier research. Additionally, the role of inferential potential (IP) in determining MCI concepts’ memorability has remained vague and only rarely controlled for. In a pre‐registered experiment, we directly compare memorability for MCI and MXCI concepts, compared to BIZ concepts, while controlling for IP as well as degree of bizarreness. Results indicate that when IP and bizarreness are controlled for, memorability of counterintuitive and BIZ concepts—relative to intuitive control concepts—is similar across concepts with one, two, and three characteristics. Findings suggest that the MCI and VR effects may be manifestations of the same underlying mechanisms. (shrink)

Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human properties to nonhuman entities, is often posited as an explanation for the origin and nature of God concepts, but it remains unclear which human properties we tend to attribute to God and under what conditions. In three studies, participants decided whether two types of human properties—psychological properties and physiological properties—could or could not be attributed to God. In Study 1, participants made significantly more psychological attributions than physiological attributions, and the frequency of those attributions (...) was correlated both with participants’ religiosity and with their attribution of abstract, theological properties. In Study 2 and Study 3, participants not only showed the same preference for psychological properties but were also significantly faster, more consistent, and more confident when attributing psychological properties to God than when attributing physiological properties. And when denying properties to God, they showed the reverse pattern—that is, they were slower, less consistent, and less confident when denying psychological properties than when denying physiological properties. These patterns were observed both in a predominantly Christian population and a predominantly Hindu population. Overall, we argue that God is conceptualized not as a person in general but as an agent in particular, attributed a mind by default but attributed a body only upon further consideration. (shrink)

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on (...) the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is “no,” then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules (institutions) that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation. (shrink)

Current evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion posit that supernatural agent concepts emerge from cognitive systems such as theory of mind and social cognition. Some argue that these concepts evolved to maintain social order by minimizing antisocial behavior. If these theories are correct, then people should process information about supernatural agents’ socially strategic knowledge more quickly than non-strategic knowledge. Furthermore, agents’ knowledge of immoral and uncooperative social behaviors should be especially accessible to people. To examine these hypotheses, we measured response-times (...) to questions about the knowledge attributed to four different agents—God, Santa Claus, a fictional surveillance government, and omniscient but non-interfering aliens—that vary in their omniscience, moral concern, ability to punish, and how supernatural they are. As anticipated, participants respond more quickly to questions about agents’ socially strategic knowledge than non-strategic knowledge, but only when agents are able to punish. (shrink)

The recent surge of interest in the cognitive science of religion has resulted in a number of studies regarding the memorability of minimally counterintuitive ideas. The present model incorporates ontological templates and their respective inferences, as well as delineates between two major types of violations: schema- and template-level violations. As humor is also defined by its counter-intutiveness at the schema level, this study was designed to find effects this emotion has on retention. Results suggest that humorous statements with parallel violations (...) are recalled significantly better than statements which have only template-level violations, affective statements with only schema-level violations, as well as intuitive statements in both immediate and 1-week follow-up sessions. (shrink)

Adherence to religious belief may serve to promote group cohesion and cooperation by decreasing the costs associated with social exchange. Consistent with this, organized religious ideologies, unlike secular or spiritual based ideologies, have been argued to facilitate cooperation among individuals living in large-scale societies. In the current study, we examined whether hypothetical adults’ explanations of natural events focused on religious ideologies were more effective at eliciting positive-affect compared to spiritual or natural explanations. Results revealed that religious cues were more effective (...) than spiritual cues in eliciting perceptions of positive-affect, but only when participant religiosity was taken into account. Participants high in religiosity favored the religious cues over the spiritual and natural cues, whereas participants high in spirituality showed no preferences. Conversely, participants low in religious belief demonstrated not only a positive bias towards the natural explanations, but also rated the adults expressing the supernatural explanations, in particular the religious explanations, as having greater negative-affect. From an evolutionary perspective, we interpreted the results as providing support that some forms of supernatural thinking, typical of organized religion, are more effective at eliciting feelings of positive and negative affect compared to supernatural beliefs not rooted in organized religion. (shrink)

The consensus in the cognitive science of religion is that some sort of hyperactive agency detection in the human mind is responsible for the origin and spread of beliefs in superhuman agents such as gods, spirits and ancestors among human populations. While it is expressed differently in different authors, they all agree that hyperactive agency detection is a basic function of human cognition. Most well known perhaps is the formulation of this by Justin Barrett as the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (...) or HADD. Problems, however, arise when we begin to consider the neural basis of this: It doesn't add up, or more precisely the HADD does not work that way. Like the magician pulling rabbits from the hat this explanation may be a "self"-conjuring trick, only for us the hat is a HADD and the rabbits are superhuman agents. This paper will try to point to a more parsimonious explanation. (shrink)