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  1. Cognitive Pathways to Belief in Karma and Belief in God.Cindel J. M. White, Aiyana K. Willard, Adam Baimel & Ara Norenzayan - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (1):e12935.
    Supernatural beliefs are ubiquitous around the world, and mounting evidence indicates that these beliefs partly rely on intuitive, cross‐culturally recurrent cognitive processes. Specifically, past research has focused on humans' intuitive tendency to perceive minds as part of the cognitive foundations of belief in a personified God—an agentic, morally concerned supernatural entity. However, much less is known about belief in karma—another culturally widespread but ostensibly non‐agentic supernatural entity reflecting ethical causation across reincarnations. In two studies and four high‐powered samples, including mostly (...)
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  • The cultural evolution of shamanism.Manvir Singh - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41:e66.
    Shamans, including medicine men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex. In this article, I propose a cultural evolutionary theory to explain why shamanism consistently develops and, in particular, (1) why shamanic traditions exhibit recurrent features around the (...)
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  • Parochial prosocial religions: Historical and contemporary evidence for a cultural evolutionary process.Ara Norenzayan, Azim F. Shariff, Will M. Gervais, Aiyana K. Willard, Rita A. McNamara, Edward Slingerland & Joseph Henrich - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39.
    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.
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  • The Cultural Evolution of Oaths, Ordeals, and Lie Detectors.Hugo Mercier - 2020 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 20 (3-4):159-187.
    In a great variety of cultures oaths, ordeals, or lie detectors are used to adjudicate in trials, even though they do not reliably discern liars from truth tellers. I suggest that these practices owe their cultural success to the triggering of cognitive mechanisms that make them more culturally attractive. Informal oaths would trigger mechanisms related to commitment in communication. Oaths used in judicial contexts, by invoking supernatural punishments, would trigger intuitions of immanent justice, linking misfortunes following an oath with perjury. (...)
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  • Explaining the success of karmic religions.Claire White, Paulo Sousa & Karolina Prochownik - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39.
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  • Explaining moral religions.Nicolas Baumard & Pascal Boyer - 2013 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17 (6):272-280.
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  • Supernatural beliefs and the evolution of cooperation.Pierrick Bourrat & Hugo Viciana - 2016 - In James Liddle & Todd K. Shackelford (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion. Oxford University Press.
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  • The Coexistence of Different Explanatory Models of Misfortune: A Case from Serbia.Danijela Jerotijević - 2015 - Human Affairs 25 (3):261-275.
    The paper discusses two concepts of supernatural explanations of misfortune and how they co-exist in a particular socio-cultural environment. The author argues that these two concepts are used differently depending on the position of the person evaluating them. While the concept of supernatural harm is usually used in “first person” narratives, the concept of God’s punishment is used by community members as a warning to all wrongdoers and cheats. Searching for the external source of problems is important for personal self-esteem, (...)
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