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Cognitive Science of Religion

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July 2021

July 31, 2021

The Catholic Latin Mass is a Strong Credibility-Enhancing Display

Pope Francis recently restricted the Catholic Tridentine Latin mass. The resulting firestorm of controversy may...

May 2021

May 20, 2021

The Myth of the Egalitarian Noble Savage

Are hunter-gatherer societies really the original egalitarian society? One anthropologist argues against the myth of...

November 2020

November 23, 2020

Ritual, Play, and the Landscape of Value

Back in October, I was privileged to give the keynote talk at a Toronto School...

October 2020

October 29, 2020

Is Your Society Good for (Biological) Fitness?

Back in September, I described a computer model my collaborator Rich Sosis and I built...

September 2020

September 29, 2020

Religions as Complex Adaptive Systems

A shouting match is often perversely compelling in the same way that a road accident...

July 2020

July 31, 2020

Religious Experience and Homo Duplex

Where does religious experience come from? In a new article, I combine Durkheim's concept of...

February 2020

February 21, 2020

Will Cognitive Gadgets Replace Evolutionary Psychology?

Psychologist Cecilia Heyes thinks that evolutionary psychology's main claim – that the mind is made...

January 2020

January 28, 2020

Why Humans Imitate. And Imitate. And Imitate.

Life in 21st-century America – or any wealthy Western nation, really – is a nonstop...

November 2019

November 23, 2019

Videos on War and Painful Ritual

Back in the spring, the Center for Mind and Culture and I hosted a colloquium for...

July 2019

July 16, 2019

Free energy, the brain, and religion

Karl Friston, one of today's foremost neuroscientists, thinks that all brain processing boils down to...

May 2019

May 28, 2019

Did Big Gods Come Before or After Big Societies?

Do "big gods" – supernatural beings who care about human morality and fairness – help...

March 2019

March 16, 2019

How to Do Interdisciplinary Work that Works

This past weekend, a group of senior scholars met for a colloquium in Boston to...

March 08, 2019

A Big Weekend in Boston

Religion is a complicated nut to crack. It encompasses some of the most private and...

February 2019

February 07, 2019

We Trust Religious People More Because They’re Less Sexy

Why do people – even atheists – tend to trust religious believers more? A scientific...

January 2019

January 09, 2019

Gods Are Everywhere Because It’s Hard to Bargain With Them

Why do so many people worship invisible beings, accept the authority of millennia-old texts, or...

December 2018

December 22, 2018

How to “Grow” Shamanism in a Computer Model

Want to try something really difficult? Be a researcher who studies religion in its many...

November 2018

November 29, 2018

Why Postmodernism and Science Can’t Stand Each Other

I’m freshly back from Denver, where the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion...

November 14, 2018

Are Your Political Beliefs Like a Religion?

If you’ve gotten into a political argument on Facebook recently, you might be excused for...

October 2018

October 26, 2018

What Is Religious Studies? Or: No, Grandma, I Am Not Going to Be a Pastor

By trying to rid themselves of theology, religious studies scholars have paradoxically also banished science...

September 2018

September 21, 2018

New Project: Synthesizing Empirical Findings and Theory in the Scientific Study of Religion

There are a lot of fields of study in the modern university. You could major...

August 2018

August 30, 2018

Fun Conference Recap: The International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion 2018

A lot of science happens when scientists are alone. There are the late nights coding...

June 2018

June 28, 2018

Does Marching to the Same Rhythm Always Unite Us? Our New Study Says No

We humans love rhythm. Music, dancing, clapping, singing – no matter what form it comes...

June 20, 2018

A Cognitive (and Social) View of Ritual

Imagine two scenes. In the first, a person chucks a book casually on a table,...

May 2018

May 25, 2018

Cognitive Style, Religious Beliefs, and Individualism

People whose cognitive style is analytical or reflective are less likely to be religious than...

April 2018

April 18, 2018

Why Is Shamanism So Common?

A few years back, I wrote a post here called “Spirit Possession: Everyone’s Doing It.”...

November 2017

November 22, 2017

How Religion Is Like Play

Is religion a form of play? I asked this question in a recent article in Orbiter,...

September 2017

September 30, 2017

How the Brain’s Predictions Shape Religion

A cognitive process called predictive processing may be how the brain generates religious and spiritual...

August 2017

August 30, 2017

Religion and self-regulation: a model (and a trip to Norway)

Last week, I had the good fortune to attend a conference in Norway. For four...

July 2017

July 14, 2017

Supernatural punishment and the evolution of cooperation

Scientist Dominic Johnson thinks belief in supernatural punishment drove the evolution of cooperation. A new...

June 2017

June 26, 2017

Rituals boost self-control

Maybe you’ve heard of the “marshmallow experiment” for testing people's self-control. In this classic psychology...