Brian Bergstrom
Washington University ~
Department of Psychology
Campus Box 1125 ~ St. Louis, MO 63130
bergstrom@wustl.edu ~ 314-935-4739
Thomas Cole's
"Voyage of Life" (Part III)
What are the psychological
foundations
of religious thought and behavior?
Program:
I am a second-year graduate student at Washington University, working towards a Ph.D. in
psychology. My academic studies fall within the
Behavior, Brain, & Cognition division of the
psychology program, and I collaborate with
Pascal Boyer in his Memory & Development
Lab. Our
research interests, broadly construed, are the cognitive
and evolutionary foundations of religion.
Research:
We study the phenomena of religion using the paradigm
of evolutionary
psychology.
Evolutionary psychology connects cognition to culture,
brain to behavior, biology to human affairs, by
illuminating the evolutionary design of the human
mind. The human brain mediates all experience
(perception, thought, emotion, memory, behavior), and the
human brain -- like any complex, non-random organic
structure -- is the product of evolution by natural and
sexual selection. Many of the information-processing
features of the human brain are best understood as
adaptations: task-specific psychological mechanisms that
evolved to negotiate the adaptive challenges humans faced
under ancestral conditions. An evolutionary approach
allows psychologists to identify the different programs of
the mind (our "mental software"), specify their evolved
functions, and articulate their operational
parameters. A genuinely causal understanding of religion, then, involves
discerning the evolved neuro-cognitive programs that
participate in the production of religious psychology and
specifying how this mental architecture processes
environmental input to produce religious output
(conceptual, emotional, and behavioral). For more
information, see the following links.
Publications:
Bergstrom, B., Moehlmann, B., &
Boyer, P. (2006). Extending the testimony problem:
Evaluating the truth, source, and scope of cultural
information. Child Development, 77(3) :
531-538.
Evolutionary Psychology "Primer"
Specific Research Projects
Evolutionary Psychology Reading
Group 
