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  1. The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.Ara Norenzayan, Azim F. Shariff, Will M. Gervais, Aiyana K. Willard, Rita A. McNamara, Edward Slingerland & Joseph Henrich - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39:e1.
    We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10–12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, (...)
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  • How Children and Adults Represent God's Mind.Larisa Heiphetz, Jonathan D. Lane, Adam Waytz & Liane L. Young - 2016 - Cognitive Science 40 (1):121-144.
    For centuries, humans have contemplated the minds of gods. Research on religious cognition is spread across sub-disciplines, making it difficult to gain a complete understanding of how people reason about gods' minds. We integrate approaches from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and neuroscience to illuminate the origins of religious cognition. First, we show that although adults explicitly discriminate supernatural minds from human minds, their implicit responses reveal far less discrimination. Next, we demonstrate that children's religious cognition often matches adults' implicit (...)
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  • Religion as an Evolutionary Byproduct: A Critique of the Standard Model.Russell Powell & Steve Clarke - 2012 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (3):457-486.
    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 (...)
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  • Causes and Consequences of Mind Perception.Adam Waytz, Kurt Gray, Nicholas Epley & Daniel M. Wegner - 2010 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14 (8):383-388.
    Perceiving others? minds is a crucial component of social life. People do not, however, always ascribe minds to other people, and sometimes ascribe minds to non-people. This article reviews when mind perception occurs, when it does not, and why mind perception is important. Causes of mind perception stem both from the perceiver and perceived, and include the need for social connection and a similarity to oneself. Mind perception also has profound consequences for both the perceiver and perceived. Ascribing mind confers (...)
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  • Ethics and Religion: Two Kantian Arguments.John E. Hare - 2011 - Philosophical Investigations 34 (2):151-168.
    This paper describes and defends two arguments connecting ethics and religion that Kant makes in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. The first argument is that the moral demand is too high for us in our natural capacities, and God's assistance is required to bridge the resulting moral gap. The second argument is that because humans desire to be happy as well as to be morally good, morality will be rationally unstable without belief in a God who can bring (...)
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  • Why the debunking threat won’t go away.Halvor Kvandal - 2023 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 94 (3):299-316.
    A central claim often made to debunk religious beliefs is that they would be formed regardless of whether they are true or false. One way to support this claim is to apply findings from the cognitive science of religion. However, this use of science in an argument against religious beliefs has been strongly criticized. This article is about weaknesses in that criticism. I consider two arguments. Firstly, the critic of debunking can argue that the debunker makes empirically dubious claims about (...)
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  • Is supernatural belief unreliably formed?Hans Van Eyghen - 2018 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 85 (2):125-148.
    I criticize 5 arguments for the conclusion that religious belief is unreliably formed and hence epistemically tainted. The arguments draw on scientific evidence from Cognitive Science of Religion. They differ considerably as to why the evidence points to unreliability. Two arguments conclude to unreliability because religious belief is shaped by evolutionary pressures; another argument states that the mechanism responsible for religious belief produces many false god-beliefs; a similar argument claims that the mechanism produces incompatible god-beliefs; and a final argument states (...)
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  • Sorting through, and sorting out, anthropomorphism in CSR.K. Mitch Hodge - 2018 - Filosofia Unisinos 19 (3).
    This article reviews and discusses the various ways by which researchers in the cognitive science of religion have empirically demonstrated that neurotypical humans (a.k.a., the folk) represent supernatural agents through the cognitive analogical processes of anthropomorphism. These include attributing a human-like mind, human-like physical and mental limitations, and human-like sociability. Additionally, the article points to several problematic issues that CSR must needs address, such as how to better demarcate when the folk are anthropomorphizing versus simply attributing agency, and how CSR’s (...)
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  • Robots As Intentional Agents: Using Neuroscientific Methods to Make Robots Appear More Social.Eva Wiese, Giorgio Metta & Agnieszka Wykowska - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8:281017.
    Robots are increasingly envisaged as our future cohabitants. However, while considerable progress has been made in recent years in terms of their technological realization, the ability of robots to inter-act with humans in an intuitive and social way is still quite limited. An important challenge for social robotics is to determine how to design robots that can perceive the user’s needs, feelings, and intentions, and adapt to users over a broad range of cognitive abilities. It is conceivable that if robots (...)
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  • What Cognitive Science of Religion Can Learn from John Dewey.Hans Van Eyghen - 2018 - Contemporary Pragmatism 15 (3):387-406.
    Cognitive science of religion is a fairly young discipline with the aim of studying the cognitive basis of religious belief. Despite the great variation in theories a number of common features can be distilled and most theories can be situated in the cognitivist and modular paradigm. In this paper, I investigate how cognitive science of religion (CSR) can be made better by insights from John Dewey. I chose Dewey because he offered important insights in cognition long before there was cognitive (...)
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  • Becoming believers: Studying the conversion process from within.Aaron C. T. Smith & Bob Stewart - 2011 - Zygon 46 (4):806-834.
    Abstract Employing an extended case method ethnography (Burawoy 1998), the researcher joined five new members forming a spiritualist's group under the leadership of an experienced advocate. Over a period of eighteen months, the researcher attended all the group's activities and events. Data were collected to reflexively interrogate the process theory of conversion proposed by Lewis Rambo (1993). The data revealed conversion to be a multifaceted and dynamic process of cognitive change, mediated by structural, and contextual forces. The results provide a (...)
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  • Naturalistic Explanation for Religious Belief.David Leech & Aku Visala - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (8):552-563.
    Recent decades have seen the emergence of various cognitive and biological explanations of religious belief that claim to be better scientifically supported than predecessor explanations. This article provides an overview of such explanations and some of the philosophical discussions they have evoked. Contemporary naturalistic explanations of religious belief come in three types: cognitive explanations, evolutionary explanations and co‐evolutionary explanations. Some writers have claimed that scientifically plausible biological and psychological accounts of religious belief make religious belief itself irrational because they reveal (...)
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  • Religious belief as acquired second nature.Hans Van Eyghen - 2020 - Zygon 55 (1):185-206.
    Multiple authors in cognitive science of religion (CSR) argue that there is something about the human mind that disposes it to form religious beliefs. The dispositions would result from the internal architecture of the mind. In this article, I will argue that this disposition can be explained by various forms of (cultural) learning and not by the internal architecture of the mind. For my argument, I draw on new developments in predictive processing. I argue that CSR theories argue for the (...)
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  • False beliefs and naive beliefs: They can be good for you.Roberto Casati & Marco Bertamini - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6):512-513.
    Naive physics beliefs can be systematically mistaken. They provide a useful test-bed because they are common, and also because their existence must rely on some adaptive advantage, within a given context. In the second part of the commentary we also ask questions about when a whole family of misbeliefs should be considered together as a single phenomenon.
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  • Cognitive Science and the Naturalness of Religion.Robert N. McCauley & Emma Cohen - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (9):779-792.
    Cognitive approaches to religious phenomena have attracted considerable interdisciplinary attention since their emergence a couple of decades ago. Proponents offer explanatory accounts of the content and transmission of religious thought and behavior in terms of underlying cognition. A central claim is that the cross‐cultural recurrence and historical persistence of religion is attributable to the cognitive naturalness of religious ideas, i.e., attributable to the readiness, the ease, and the speed with which human minds acquire and process popular religious representations. In this (...)
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  • Is God a zombie? Divine consciousness and omnipresence.Raphaël Millière - 2014 - International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 75 (1):38-54.
    While nobody will ever know what it may be like to be God, there is a more basic question one may try to answer: does God have phenomenal consciousness, does He have experiences within a conscious point of view (POV)? Drawing on recent debates within philosophy of mind, I argue that He doesn’t: if God exists, ‘He’ is not phenomenally conscious, at least in the sense that there is no ‘divine subjectivity’. The article aims at displaying an incompatibility between God’s (...)
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  • The minds of gods: A comparative study of supernatural agency.Benjamin Grant Purzycki - 2013 - Cognition 129 (1):163-179.
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  • Reasoning about dead agents reveals possible adaptive trends.Jesse M. Bering, Katrina McLeod & Todd K. Shackelford - 2005 - Human Nature 16 (4):360-381.
    We investigated whether (a) people positively reevaluate the characters of recently dead others and (b) supernatural primes concerning an ambient dead agent serve to curb selfish intentions. In Study 1, participants made trait attributions to three strangers depicted in photographs; one week later, they returned to do the same but were informed that one of the strangers had died over the weekend. Participants rated the decedent target more favorably after learning of his death whereas ratings for the control targets remained (...)
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  • The evolution of misbelief.Ryan McKay & Daniel Dennett - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6):493–510; discussion 510–61.
    From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this rule? How can we account for mistaken beliefs, bizarre delusions, and instances of self-deception? We explore this question in some detail. We begin by articulating a distinction between two general types of misbelief: those resulting from a breakdown in (...)
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  • What Does God Know? Supernatural Agents' Access to Socially Strategic and Non-Strategic Information.Benjamin G. Purzycki, Daniel N. Finkel, John Shaver, Nathan Wales, Adam B. Cohen & Richard Sosis - 2012 - Cognitive Science 36 (5):846-869.
    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 (...)
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  • How prosocial behaviors are maintained in China: The relationship between communist authority and prosociality.Jing Sheng, Shuilian Luo, Bo Jiang, Yousong Hu, Shuang Lin, Li Wang, Yashi Ren, Chunling Zhao, Zixin Liu & Jun Chen - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    ObjectiveNumerous studies have demonstrated that religious belief is associated with prosocial behavior. However, how do they maintain cooperation in societies with a predominating atheist population, such as China? Different primings and a quasi-experiment are used to examine the link between communist authority and prosocial behaviors among college students in China.Materials and methodsIn Study 1, the subjects’ communist authority in the university lab was primed by a communist-authority video. In Study 2, we compared the priming effects of communist authority and religion (...)
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  • Emotional bonds: Bridging the gap between evolutionary and humanistic accounts of religious belief.Léon Turner - 2020 - Archive for the Psychology of Religion 42 (1):6-28.
    Recent years have seen a growing willingness in the evolutionary cognitive science of religion (ECSR) to embrace an inclusive, theoretically pluralistic approach and the emergence of a broad consensus around some key themes that collectively constitute a central theoretical core of the field. Nevertheless, ECSR still raises serious problems for some in the humanities. In exploring the reasons for the perception of conflict between humanistic and cognitive evolutionary approaches to religion, I suggest that both ECSR’s default account of the origins (...)
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  • God’s punishment and public goods.Dominic D. P. Johnson - 2005 - Human Nature 16 (4):410-446.
    Cooperation towards public goods relies on credible threats of punishment to deter cheats. However, punishing is costly, so it remains unclear who incurred the costs of enforcement in our evolutionary past. Theoretical work suggests that human cooperation may be promoted if people believe in supernatural punishment for moral transgressions. This theory is supported by new work in cognitive psychology and by anecdotal ethnographic evidence, but formal quantitative tests remain to be done. Using data from 186 societies around the globe, I (...)
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  • On the adaptive advantage of always being right (even when one is not).Nathalia L. Gjersoe & Bruce M. Hood - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6):521-522.
    We propose another positive illusion that fits with McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) criteria for adaptive misbeliefs. This illusion is pervasive in adult reasoning but we focus on its prevalence in children's developing theories. It is a strongly held conviction arising from normal functioning of the doxastic system that confers adaptive advantage on the individual.
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  • Synchronous rituals and social bonding: Revitalizing conceptions of individual personhood in the evolution of religion.Léon Turner - 2021 - Zygon 56 (4):898-921.
    Zygon®, Volume 56, Issue 4, Page 898-921, December 2021.
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  • Development and Validation of a Porous Theory of Mind Scale.Michiel van Elk, David Maij & Bastiaan Rutjens - 2020 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 20 (1-2):41-65.
    We report the results of an empirical investigation of the extent to which supernatural believers endorse a porous conception of the mind, i.e., the belief that one’s thoughts can be directly perceived by others. We developed a porous theory of mind scale, tested its factor structure by using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and showed its relation with supernatural beliefs in three studies in the Netherlands and one study with North-American participants. We found that endorsement of a PToM is (...)
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  • Effect of Religiosity and Moral Identity Internalization on Prosocial Behaviour.Sukhamjit Kaur - 2020 - Journal of Human Values 26 (2):186-198.
    The main aim of the present research was to study the religiosity and moral identity internalization as effective variables of prosocial behaviour. Sample consisted of 400 emerging adults...
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  • The Dead May Kill You.Claire White, Maya Marin & Daniel M. T. Fessler - 2022 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 22 (3-4):294-323.
    There is considerable evidence that beliefs in supernatural punishment decrease self-interested behavior and increase cooperation amongst group members. To date, research has largely focused on beliefs concerning omniscient moralistic gods in large-scale societies. While there is an abundance of ethnographic accounts documenting fear of supernatural punishment, there is a dearth of systematic cross-cultural comparative quantitative evidence as to whether belief in supernatural agents with limited powers in small-scale societies also exert these effects. Here, we examine information extracted from the Human (...)
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  • The Adaptationist-Byproduct Debate on the Evolution of Religion: Five Misunderstandings of the Adaptationist Program.Richard Sosis - 2009 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 9 (3-4):315-332.
    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 (...)
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  • Learning that there is life after death.L. Harris Paul & Astuti Rita - 2006 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (5):475-476.
    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.
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  • Comic-Book Superheroes and Prosocial Agency: A Large-Scale Quantitative Analysis of the Effects of Cognitive Factors on Popular Representations.James Carney & Pádraig Mac Carron - 2017 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 17 (3-4):306-330.
    We argue that the counterfactual representations of popular culture, like their religious cognates, are shaped by cognitive constraints that become visible when considered in aggregate. In particular, we argue that comic-book literature embodies core intuitions about sociality and its maintenance that are activated by the cognitive problem of living in large groups. This leads to four predictions: comic-book enforcers should be punitively prosocial, be quasi-omniscient, exhibit kin-signalling proxies and be minimally counterintuitive. We gauge these predictions against a large sample of (...)
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  • Biology, Culture and Coevolution: Religion and Language as Case Studies.Francesco Ferretti & Ines Adornetti - 2014 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 14 (3-4):305-330.
    The main intent of this paper is to give an account of the relationship between bio-cognition and culture in terms of coevolution, analysing religious beliefs and language evolution as case studies. The established view in cognitive studies is that bio-cognitive systems constitute a constraint for the shaping and the transmission of religious beliefs and linguistic structures. From this point of view, religion and language are by-products or exaptations of processing systems originally selected for other cognitive functions. We criticize such a (...)
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  • God would be a costly accident: Supernatural beliefs as adaptive.Dominic Dp Johnson, Ryan T. McKay & Daniel C. Dennett - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6):523-524.
    I take up the challenge of whyfalsebeliefs are better than “cautious actionpolicies” (target article, sect. 9) in navigating adaptive problems with asymmetric errors. I then suggest that there areinteractionsbetween supernatural beliefs, self-deception, and positive illusions, rendering elements of all such misbeliefs adaptive. Finally, I argue that supernatural beliefs cannot be rejected as adaptive simply because recent experiments are inconclusive. The great costs of religion betray its even greater adaptive benefits – we just have not yet nailed down exactly what they (...)
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  • The Relationship between Attachment to God, Prosociality, and Image of God.Yunus Bayramoglu, Mehmet Harma & Onurcan Yilmaz - 2018 - Archive for the Psychology of Religion 40 (2-3):202-224.
    Although religiosity fosters some antisocial behaviors (e.g., support for suicide attacks), it is well-known that it also enhances in-group cooperation and prosociality (e.g., donating to charity). Supernatural punishment hypothesis suggests that the fear of punishment from an invisible, potent, and powerful supernatural agent can keep everyone in line, and encourage prosociality. We first investigated this relationship in a predominantly Muslim country and then tested a model suggesting that attachment to God can lead people to think God as authoritarian, which in (...)
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