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  1. The Weirdness of the World.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2024 - Princeton University Press.
    How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental (...)
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  • Dualists and physicalists agree, free will is incompatible with determinism.Mark Wulff Carstensen, Stephan Sellmaier, Paul C. J. Taylor & Ophelia Deroy - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Belief in substance dualism, the idea that mind and matter are two different kinds of substances, has been found to be a strong predictor of belief in free will. Why? Here, we test whether believing that mind and matter are different kinds of substance correlates with differences in how people think of free will and/or differences in how people interpret the scenarios used to test their conceptions. We provided participants (N = 515) with two hypothetical scenarios where the world was (...)
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  • Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion: Interpreting Human Nature and the Mind.Robert Vinten (ed.) - 2023 - London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    Advancing our understanding of one of the most influential 20th-century philosophers, Robert Vinten brings together an international line up of scholars to consider the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas to the cognitive science of religion. Wittgenstein's claims ranged from the rejection of the idea that psychology is a 'young science' in comparison to physics to challenges to scientistic and intellectualist accounts of religion in the work of past anthropologists. Chapters explore whether these remarks about psychology and religion undermine the frameworks (...)
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  • The Illusion of the Enduring Self.Katalin Balog - forthcoming - In Martine Nida-Rümelin & Julien Bugnon (eds.), The Phenomenology of Self-Awareness and the Nature of Conscious Subjects. Routledge.
    This paper is primarily about metaphysics; specifically, about a Cartesian view of the self, according to which it is a simple, enduring, non-material entity.I take a critical look at Nida-Rümelin’s novel conceptual arguments for this view and argue that they don’t give us decisive reasons to uphold the Cartesian view. But in Nida-Rümelin’s view, what is at stake in these arguments is not merely theoretical: the truth – and our beliefs about it – has practical consequences as well. In her (...)
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  • Exceptionalist naturalism: human agency and the causal order.John Turri - 2018 - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71 (2):396-410.
    This paper addresses a fundamental question in folk metaphysics: how do we ordinarily view human agency? According to the transcendence account, we view human agency as standing outside of the causal order and imbued with exceptional powers. According to a naturalistic account, we view human agency as subject to the same physical laws as other objects and completely open to scientific investigation. According to exceptionalist naturalism, the truth lies somewhere in between: we view human agency as fitting broadly within the (...)
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  • Descartes' Mistake: How Afterlife Beliefs Challenge the Assumption that Humans are Intuitive Cartesian Substance Dualists.K. Mitch Hodge - 2008 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 8 (3-4):387-415.
    This article presents arguments and evidence that run counter to the widespread assumption among scholars that humans are intuitive Cartesian substance dualists. With regard to afterlife beliefs, the hypothesis of Cartesian substance dualism as the intuitive folk position fails to have the explanatory power with which its proponents endow it. It is argued that the embedded corollary assumptions of the intuitive Cartesian substance dualist position (that the mind and body are diff erent substances, that the mind and soul are intensionally (...)
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  • Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion.Hervey C. Peoples, Pavel Duda & Frank W. Marlowe - 2016 - Human Nature 27 (3):261-282.
    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 (...)
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  • Dead-Survivors, the Living Dead, and Concepts of Death.K. Mitch Hodge - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (3):539-565.
    The author introduces and critically analyzes two recent, curious findings and their accompanying explanations regarding how the folk intuits the capabilities of the dead and those in a persistent vegetative state. The dead are intuited to survive death, whereas PVS patients are intuited as more dead than the dead. Current explanations of these curious findings rely on how the folk is said to conceive of death and the dead: either as the annihilation of the person, or that person’s continuation as (...)
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  • The effect of abstract versus concrete framing on judgments of biological and psychological bases of behavior.Kim Nancy, Samuel Johnson, Woo-Kyoung Ahn & Joshua Knobe - forthcoming - Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.
    Human behavior is frequently described both in abstract, general terms and in concrete, specific terms. We asked whether these two ways of framing equivalent behaviors shift the inferences people make about the biological and psychological bases of those behaviors. In five experiments, we manipulated whether behaviors are presented concretely (i.e. with reference to a specific person, instantiated in the particular context of that person’s life) or abstractly (i.e. with reference to a category of people or behaviors across generalized contexts). People (...)
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  • The Natural Foundations of Religion.Mark Collier - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (5):665-680.
    In the Natural history of religion, Hume attempts to understand the origin of our folk belief in gods and spirits. These investigations are not, however, purely descriptive. Hume demonstrates that ontological commitment to supernatural agents depends on motivated reasoning and illusions of control. These beliefs cannot, then, be reflectively endorsed. This proposal must be taken seriously because it receives support from recent work on our psychological responses to uncertainty. It also compares quite favorably with its main competitors in the cognitive (...)
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  • The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning.Michael Waldmann (ed.) - 2017 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Causal reasoning is one of our most central cognitive competencies, enabling us to adapt to our world. Causal knowledge allows us to predict future events, or diagnose the causes of observed facts. We plan actions and solve problems using knowledge about cause-effect relations. Without our ability to discover and empirically test causal theories, we would not have made progress in various empirical sciences. In the past decades, the important role of causal knowledge has been discovered in many areas of cognitive (...)
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  • Does Belief in Dualism Protect against Maladaptive Psycho-Social Responses to Deep Brain Stimulation? An Empirical Exploration.Jason Shepard & Joshua May - 2014 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 5 (4):40–42.
    We provide empirical evidence that people who believe in dualism are more likely to be uncomfortable with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and to view it as threatening to their identity, humanity, or self. It is (neurocentric) materialists—who think the mind just is the brain—that are less inclined to fear DBS or to see it as threatening. We suggest various possible reasons for this connection. The inspiration for this brief report is a target article that addresses this issue from a theoretical (...)
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  • Tainting the soul: Purity concerns predict moral judgments of suicide.Joshua Rottman, Deborah Kelemen & Liane Young - 2014 - Cognition 130 (2):217-226.
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  • Money is essential: Ownership intuitions are linked to physical currency.Eric Luis Uhlmann & Luke Zhu - 2013 - Cognition 127 (2):220-229.
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  • Lorenz Revisited.David F. Bjorklund, Carlos Hernández Blasi & Virginia A. Periss - 2010 - Human Nature 21 (4):371-392.
    Certain characteristics of childhood immaturity (e.g., infantile facial features) may have been favored by natural selection to evoke positive feelings in adults. We propose that some aspects of cognitive immaturity might also endear young children to adults. In two studies, adults rated expressions of mature and immature thinking attributed to children. Immature thinking in which children expressed a supernatural explanation elicited positive affect reactions, whereas other forms of immature thinking, which made no attribution to supernatural causation, were responded to negatively. (...)
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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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  • Educating the design stance: Issues of coherence and transgression.Norman H. Freeman & Melissa L. Allen - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2):141 - 142.
    Bullot & Reber (B&R) put forth a design stance to fuse psychological and art historical accounts of visual thinking into a single theory. We argue that this aspect of their proposal needs further fine-tuning. Issues of transgression and coherence are necessary to provide stability to the design stance. We advocate looking to Art Education for such fundamentals of picture understanding.
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  • Knowledge and the Objection to Religious Belief from Cognitive Science.Kelly James Clark & Dani Rabinowitz - 2011 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3 (1):67 - 81.
    A large chorus of voices has grown around the claim that theistic belief is epistemically suspect since, as some cognitive scientists have hypothesized, such beliefs are a byproduct of cognitive mechanisms which evolved for rather different adaptive purposes. This paper begins with an overview of the pertinent cognitive science followed by a short discussion of some relevant epistemic concepts. Working from within a largely Williamsonian framework, we then present two different ways in which this research can be formulated into an (...)
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  • Evolutionary Approaches to Epistemic Justification.Helen de Cruz, Maarten Boudry, Johan de Smedt & Stefaan Blancke - 2011 - Dialectica 65 (4):517-535.
    What are the consequences of evolutionary theory for the epistemic standing of our beliefs? Evolutionary considerations can be used to either justify or debunk a variety of beliefs. This paper argues that evolutionary approaches to human cognition must at least allow for approximately reliable cognitive capacities. Approaches that portray human cognition as so deeply biased and deficient that no knowledge is possible are internally incoherent and self-defeating. As evolutionary theory offers the current best hope for a naturalistic epistemology, evolutionary approaches (...)
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  • A study in the cognition of individuals' identity: Solving the problem of singular cognition in object and agent tracking.Nicolas Bullot - 2007 - Consciousness and Cognition 16 (2):276-293.
    This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the (...)
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  • Libertarian Free Will, Naturalism, and Science.Stewart Goetz - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Theological Research 23 (3):157-172.
    If we have libertarian free will, then it is plausible to believe that the occurrences of certain physical events have irreducible and ineliminable mental explanations. According to a strong version of naturalism, everything in the physical world is in principle explicable in nonmental terms. Therefore, the truth of naturalism implies that libertarian choices cannot explain the occurrences of any physical events. In this paper, I example a methodological argument for the truth of naturalism and conclude that the argument fails. I (...)
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  • Neurodualism: People Assume that the Brain Affects the Mind more than the Mind Affects the Brain.Jussi Valtonen, Woo-Kyoung Ahn & Andrei Cimpian - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (9):e13034.
    People commonly think of the mind and the brain as distinct entities that interact, a view known as dualism. At the same time, the public widely acknowledges that science attributes all mental phenomena to the workings of a material brain, a view at odds with dualism. How do people reconcile these conflicting perspectives? We propose that people distort claims about the brain from the wider culture to fit their dualist belief that minds and brains are distinct, interacting entities: Exposure to (...)
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  • Dualism Revisited: Body vs. Mind vs. Soul.Rebekah Richert & Paul Harris - 2008 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 8 (1-2):99-115.
    A large, diverse sample of adults was interviewed about their conception of the ontological and functional properties of the mind as compared to the soul. The existence of the mind was generally tied to the human lifecycle of conception, birth, growth and death, and was primarily associated with cognitive as opposed to spiritual functions. In contrast, the existence of the soul was less systematically tied to the lifecycle and frequently associated with spiritual as opposed to cognitive functions. Participants were also (...)
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  • Does the Body Survive Death? Cultural Variation in Beliefs About Life Everlasting.E. Watson-Jones Rachel, T. A. Busch Justin, L. Harris Paul & H. Legare Cristine - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (S3):455-476.
    Mounting evidence suggests that endorsement of psychological continuity and the afterlife increases with age. This developmental change raises questions about the cognitive biases, social representations, and cultural input that may support afterlife beliefs. To what extent is there similarity versus diversity across cultures in how people reason about what happens after death? The objective of this study was to compare beliefs about the continuation of biological and psychological functions after death in Tanna, Vanuatu, and the United States. Children, adolescents, and (...)
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  • Purposeful Explanation and Causal Gaps.Stewart Goetz - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (1):141--155.
    In this paper, I argue that a commitment to science and the methodo- logical commitment to causal closure do not require a rejection of the idea that the choices of souls explain the occurrence of certain events in the physical world. Stated slightly differently, I maintain that one can both affirm science and believe that souls causally interfere in the course of events in the physical world. Such an affirmation and belief are compatible. In short, science vis-à-vis the methodological principle (...)
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  • Common minds, uncommon thoughts: a philosophical anthropological investigation of uniquely human creative behavior, with an emphasis on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study.Johan De Smedt - unknown
    The aim of this dissertation is to create a naturalistic philosophical picture of creative capacities that are specific to our species, focusing on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study. By integrating data from diverse domains within a philosophical anthropological framework, I have presented a cognitive and evolutionary approach to the question of why humans, but not other animals engage in such activities. Through an application of cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to the study of these behaviors, I have sought to (...)
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  • A psycho-historical research program for the integrative science of art.Nicolas J. Bullot & Rolf Reber - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2):163-180.
    Critics of the target article objected to our account of art appreciators' sensitivity to art-historical contexts and functions, the relations among the modes of artistic appreciation, and the weaknesses of aesthetic science. To rebut these objections and justify our program, we argue that the current neglect of sensitivity to art-historical contexts persists as a result of a pervasive aesthetic–artistic confound; we further specify our claim that basic exposure and the design stance are necessary conditions of artistic understanding; and we explain (...)
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  • Christian physicalism and the biblical argument for dualism.Ralph Stefan Weir - 2021 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 91 (2):115-138.
    This paper examines whether biblical descriptions of the intermediate state imply dualism of the sort that rules out physicalism. Certain passages in the Bible seem to describe persons or souls existing without their bodies in an intermediate state between death and resurrection. For this reason, these passages appear to imply a form of dualism. Some Christian physicalists have countered that the passages in question are in fact compatible with physicalism. For it is compatible with physicalism that, although we are necessarily (...)
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  • Do Social Constraints Inhibit Analytical Atheism? Cognitive Style and Religiosity in Turkey.Catherine L. Caldwell-Harris, Sevil Hocaoğlu & Jonathan Morgan - 2020 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 20 (1-2):1-21.
    Recent studies claim that having an analytical cognitive style is correlated with reduced religiosity in western populations. However, in cultural contexts where social norms constrain behavior, such cognitive characteristics may have reduced influence on behaviors and beliefs. We labeled this the ‘constraining environments hypothesis.’ In a sample of 246 Muslims in Turkey, the hypothesis was supported for gender. Females face social pressure to be religious. Unlike their male counterparts, they were more religious, less analytical, and their analytical scores were uncorrelated (...)
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  • Free will beliefs are better predicted by dualism than determinism beliefs across different cultures.David Wisniewski, Robert Deutschländer & John-Dylan Haynes - 2019 - PLoS ONE 14 (9).
    Most people believe in free will. Whether this belief is warranted or not, free will beliefs are foundational for many legal systems and reducing FWB has effects on behavior from the motor to the social level. This raises the important question as to which specific FWB people hold. There are many different ways to conceptualize free will, and some might see physical determinism as a threat that might reduce FWB, while others might not. Here, we investigate lay FWB in a (...)
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  • No Hope in the Dark: Problems for four-dimensionalism.Jonathan J. Loose - 2019 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (3):31-47.
    Whether or not it is coherent to place hope in a future life beyond the grave has become a central question in the larger debate about whether a materialist view of human persons can accommodate Christian belief. Hud Hudson defends a four-dimensional account of resurrection in order to avoid persistent difficulties experienced by three-dimensionalist animalism. I present two difficulties unique to Hudson’s view. The first problem of counterpart hope is a manifestation of a general weakness of four-dimensional views to accommodate (...)
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  • Why minds cannot be received, but are created by brains.Włodzisław Duch - 2017 - Scientia et Fides 5 (2):171-198.
    There is no controversy in psychology or brain sciences that brains create mind and consciousness. Doubts and opinions to the contrary are quite frequently expressed in non-scientific publications. In particular the idea that conscious mind is received, rather than created by the brain, is quite often used against “materialistic” understanding of consciousness. I summarize here arguments against such position, show that neuroscience gives coherent view of mind and consciousness, and that this view is intrinsically non-materialistic.
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  • The prosocial benefits of seeing purpose in life events: A case of cultural selection in action?Konika Banerjee - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39.
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  • (1 other version)When psychology undermines beliefs.Derek Leben - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (3):328-350.
    This paper attempts to specify the conditions under which a psychological explanation can undermine or debunk a set of beliefs. The focus will be on moral and religious beliefs, where a growing debate has emerged about the epistemic implications of cognitive science. Recent proposals by Joshua Greene and Paul Bloom will be taken as paradigmatic attempts to undermine beliefs with psychology. I will argue that a belief p may be undermined whenever: (i) p is evidentially based on an intuition which (...)
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  • The divided mind of a disbeliever: Intuitive beliefs about nature as purposefully created among different groups of non-religious adults.Elisa Järnefelt, Caitlin F. Canfield & Deborah Kelemen - 2015 - Cognition 140 (C):72-88.
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  • 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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  • Religiosity and the formulation of causal attributions.Jennifer Vonk & Jerrica Pitzen - 2016 - Thinking and Reasoning 22 (2):119-149.
    ABSTRACTResearchers have suggested that religious individuals engage primarily in intuitive over analytic processing. We investigated a connection between specific aspects of religiosity and the attribution of causation to social and physical events. College undergraduates completed measures of religiosity online and were asked to determine the causes of events that varied in type, outcome, and likelihood, as well as the personality characteristics of the protagonist. Individuals with greater intrinsic religious orientation, fundamentalism, who viewed God as loving, who were more dogmatic, and (...)
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  • Ontological confusions but not mentalizing abilities predict religious belief, paranormal belief, and belief in supernatural purpose.Marjaana Lindeman, Annika M. Svedholm-Häkkinen & Jari Lipsanen - 2015 - Cognition 134 (C):63-76.
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  • The essential moral self.Nina Strohminger & Shaun Nichols - 2014 - Cognition 131 (1):159-171.
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  • The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4):665-682.
    The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind. . ???aop.label???
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  • Cognitive biases explain religious belief, paranormal belief, and belief in life’s purpose.Aiyana K. Willard & Ara Norenzayan - 2013 - Cognition 129 (2):379-391.
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  • Teleological reasoning about nature: intentional design or relational perspectives?Sandra R. Waxman & Douglas L. Medin - 2013 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17 (4):166-171.
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  • Materialist spirituality?Paul Voelker - 2011 - Zygon 46 (2):451-460.
    Abstract. Contrary to proposals that seek a harmonious integration of “science and religion” or “science and spirituality,” I argue that contemporary scientific and philosophical work at the mind-brain interface gives us reason to be skeptical of many of the claims found within religious spiritualities. Religious spiritualities typically presume commitment to strong versions of metaphysical dualism, while contemporary mind science gives us every reason to think that the mind is the brain. If materialism is true, what becomes of spirituality? Materialism or (...)
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  • Rethinking Autism, Theism, and Atheism.Ingela Visuri - 2018 - Archive for the Psychology of Religion 40 (1):1-31.
    _ Source: _Volume 40, Issue 1, pp 1 - 31 This anthropologically informed study explores descriptions of communication with invisible, superhuman agents in high functioning young adults on the autism spectrum. Based on material from interviews, two hypotheses are formulated. First, autistic individuals may experience communication with bodiless agents as less complex than interaction with peers, since it is unrestricted by multisensory input, such as body language, facial expressions, and intonation. Second, descriptions of how participants absorb into “imaginary realities” suggest (...)
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  • The Role of Implicit and Explicit Beliefs in Grave‐Good Practices: Evidence for Intuitive Afterlife Reasoning.Thomas Swan, Jesse Bering, Ruth Hughes & Jamin Halberstadt - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (4):e13263.
    The practice of burying objects with the dead is often claimed as some of the earliest evidence for religion, on the assumption that such “grave goods” were intended for the decedents’ use in the afterlife. However, this assumption is largely speculative, as the underlying motivations for grave‐good practices across time and place remain little understood. In the present work, we asked if explicit and implicit religious beliefs (particularly those concerning the continuity of personal consciousness after death) motivate contemporary grave‐good practices. (...)
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  • A Tale of Two Perspectives: How Psychology and Neuroscience Contribute to Understanding Personhood.Erin I. Smith - 2021 - Scientia et Fides 9 (2):35-53.
    Empirical science, such as psychology and neuroscience, employ diverse methods to develop data driven models and explanations for complex phenomena. In research on the self, differences in these methods produce different depictions of persons. Research in developmental psychology highlights the role of intuitive beliefs, such as psychological essentialism and intuitive dualism, in individuals’ singular, cohesive, and stable sense of self. On the other hand, research in neuroscience highlights the de-centralized, distributed, multitudes of neural networks in competition making selves, with arguments (...)
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  • Recent trends in the cognitive science of religion: Neuroscience, religious experience, and the confluence of cognitive and evolutionary research.Robert N. McCauley - 2020 - Zygon 55 (1):97-124.
    Cognitive science of religion (CSR) has increased influence in religious studies, the resistance of religious protectionists notwithstanding. CSR's most provocative work stresses the role of implicit cognition in explaining religious thought and conduct. Exhibiting explanatory pluralism, CSR seeks integrative accounts across the social, psychological, and brain sciences. CSR reflects prominent trends in the cognitive sciences generally. First, CSR is giving greater attention to the new tools and findings of cognitive neuroscience. Second, CSR researchers have done carefully designed, nonlaboratory studies of (...)
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  • Balinese Hindus' Afterlife Beliefs as Stable Contructs: An Effect of High Frequency Domestic Rituals.Anikó Sebestény & Natalie Emmons - 2017 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 17 (5):437-462.
    In this investigation, Balinese Hindus were interviewed to explore the impact of ritual practice on the flexibility and pattern of afterlife beliefs. Adults from communities where ancestral ritual practices are widespread were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. Prior research with the ancestor-worshiping Malagasy Vezo revealed that their responses to such questions varied depending on narrative context and which conception of death they subsequently deployed: A religious conception, wherein death marks the beginning of a new form of (...)
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  • Methodological Consilience of Evolutionary Ethics and Cognitive Science of Religion.Juraj Franek - 2016 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 16 (1-2):144-170.
    For the larger part of modern western intellectual history, it has been assumed that the study of morality and religion requires special methodology, insulated from, and in some important aspects incongruent with, the scientific method commonly used in the realm of natural sciences. Furthermore, even if it would be granted that moral and religious behavior is amendable to scientific analysis, the prospects of using evolutionary theory in particular to do the heavy lifting in explanation of these phenomena have been bleak, (...)
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  • Playing for God’s Team: The Influence of Belief in the Supernatural on Perceptions of Religious, Spiritual, and Natural Cues.Virginia A. Periss & David F. Bjorklund - 2016 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 16 (3-4):215-244.
    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 (...)
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