Experimental Study of Religious Concepts

Experimental Studies Of Supernatural And Religious Concepts

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Blog and News:

New article by Ilkka Pyysiainen on Religion and the evolution of the human mind. See below.

New texts by Istvan Czachez:

1) The "Transmission" article in its final version (pdf, still pre-print):
2) A new article under publication on metamorphoses (pdf draft)
3) Another very sketchy article on religion and cognition (pdf draft).
See also Isvtan's personal homepage.

Harvey Whitehouse's new model of domain-specific and general processes. See below.

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Unpublished: Preprints, drafts & reports

Atran, S. & Norenzayan, A. Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion. Forthcoming in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural byproduct of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an “Innate Releasing Mechanism,” or “agency detector,” whose proper (naturally selected) domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival – such as predators, protectors, and prey – but that actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, and faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order. However, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims.
Click here for a preprint.

Atran, S. The Strategic Threat from Suicide Terror.
Click here for pdf.

Bering, J., Bjorklund, D.F. The Natural Emergence of ‘Afterlife’ Reasoning as a Developmental Regularity. forthcoming Developmental Psychology. Click here for pdf.
Participants were interviewed about the biological and psychological functioning of a dead agent. In Experiment 1, even 4- to 6-year-olds stated biological processes cease at death, although this trend was more apparent among 6- to 8-year-olds. In Experiment 2, 4- to 12-year-olds were asked about psychological functioning. The youngest children were equally likely to state both cognitive and psychobiological states continue at death, whereas the oldest children were more likely to state cognitive states continue. In Experiment 3, children and adults were asked about an array of psychological states. With the exception of preschoolers, who did not differentiate most of the psychological states, older children and adults were likely to attribute to dead agents epistemic, emotional, and desire states. These findings suggest developmental mechanisms underlie intuitive accounts of dead agents’ minds.

Boyer, P. Religion and Cognition. Review of Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust and David Sloane Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral. Forthcoming, Current Anthropology. Click here for html version.

Bulbulia, J. Religious Costs as Adaptations that Signal Altruistic Intention. Click here.
abstract: Most cognitive psychologists explain supernatural understandings as cognitive byproducts acquired in specific but fairly common cultural circumstances. This paper uses evolutionary game theory and the biology of animal signalling to promote a contrary view. It explains religious cognition as an exquisite adaptation that enhances individual reproductive success by facilitating reciprocal altruism. The key to understanding the design innovation of religious altruism lies in the specific costs that religious thought and practice impose on the believing organism. These costs play a strategic role in displaying authentic commitment to policies of social exchange, applying critical safeguards to defection from co-operative ventures. The following account explains a suite of otherwise anomalous cognitive features associated with religious thought, such as strong emotional responses to unseen persons and forces; belief in supernatural punishments and reward; illusions about the moral goodness of co-religionists and the vices of heretics; and dispositions to invest in expensive and wasteful ritual displays. The paper offers some testable predictions about the psychological architecture that generates religious thought and suggests some new horizons for psychological exploration.

Czachesz, I. The Transmission of Early Christian Thought: Insights from Cognitive Science. Click here for pdf.
I do not attempt to locate the origin of textual traditions in the life of first century Christians. Instead, I hypothesise a set of pre-existent traditions, such as pieces of Jewish and Hellenistic literature, oral tradition about messianic or charismatic figures, including Jesus, popular sayings and wisdom collections (again, possibly including Jesus’ own words), etc. My question is how and why Early Christian ideas (as reflected in the texts)
came to existence from those building blocks. Second, to understand the how of this procedure, I employ the results of modern cognitive science. Whereas form-criticism drew on some ideas of contemporary folklore studies, today a huge quantity of cognitive research is available to explain the rules of perception, the mechanisms of memory, and other aspects of the transmission of texts and ideas.

Franks, B. Negation and Doubt in Religious Representations: Context-Dependence, Emotion and Action. Click here.
Religious representations are often held to be counter-intuitive, in that they represent properties that contradict deeply-held assumptions about the natural world and its behaviour. In this paper, I consider some implications of understanding such counter-intuitiveness not in terms of simple negation of those assumptions (as is also widely assumed), but rather in terms of casting them into doubt. Doubting such properties implies that possessors of the representations are not certain about whether religious entities follow ontological assumptions about the natural world or negate them. However, religious doctrines and culture also carry the promise that such doubt can and will be resolved, so that believers have the anticipation of arriving at a clear knowledge of the ontological nature of gods, spirits, and so on. Such conceptual doubt and the promise of its resolution imply that the content of religious representations is more sensitive to context than widely countenanced. Now, since this doubt concerns ontological properties whose truth or falsity cannot be assessed by ordinary empirical means, the important kinds of context are ones that do not primarily offer new empirical information. Instead, they prompt resolution by providing input whose force can be to change belief in the doubted properties into belief in their truth or falsity. I argue that these inputs come from three key sources, which may interact – religious actions or rituals, emotions, and social deference. These sources follow well-understood patterns for both religious and non-religious representations. However, given that they do not provide new information per se, the resulting resolutions of doubt may not easily generalise beyond the specific contexts of action, emotion and social relations that produces those resolutions. As a result, holders of religious representations are seen as recurrently revisiting their doubts, with rituals, emotions and social deference providing means of – usually, temporary – resolution.

Franks, B. The Role of “The Environment” in Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology. Click here for pdf.
Evolutionary Psychology is widely understood as involving the integration of evolutionary theory and cognitive psychology. In this paper, I suggest that there may be some reasons to doubt that the assumptions of evolutionary theory and of cognitive psychology are as directly compatible as is widely assumed. These reasons relate to three different problems of specifying adaptive functions as the basis for demarcating cognitive mechanisms: the disjunction problem, the grain problem and the environment problem. Each of these problems can be understood in terms of incompatible characterisations of the nature and role of “the environment” in the two approaches. Purported solutions to the problems appear to require detailed information concerning the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness), with the disjunction problem placing the lowest requirement, the environment problem lacing the highest requirement, and the grain problem placing an intermediate one. In each of these cases, it is argued, such information may not be easily forthcoming, because obtaining any such information may require iterating through successively more distant EEA’s with no principled stopping point. This issues in different possibilities for pursuing an evolutionary approach to psychology which circumvents these problems.

Kelemen, D. Are children intuitive theists? Reasoning about design and purpose in nature, forthcoming Psychological Science. Click here for pdf.
Separate bodies of research suggest that young children (i) have a broad tendency to reason about natural phenomena in terms of a purpose and (ii) an orientation towards intention-based accounts of natural entity origins. This article explores these results further by drawing together recent findings from various areas of cognitive developmental research to address the following question: Rather than being “artificialists” in Piagetian terms, are children “intuitive theists” –disposed to view natural phenomena as resulting from non-human design? A review of research on children’s agency concepts, imaginary companions and understanding of artifacts suggests that, by around 5 years of age, this description may have explanatory value and practical relevance.

Knight, N., Sousa, P., Barrett, J.L., Atran, S.A. "Children's attributions of beliefs to humans and gods. Cross-cultural evidence", forthcoming Cognitive Science. Click here for pdf.
The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run with a sample of Maya children aged 4 to 7, and place them in the context of several psychological theories of cognitive development. Children were found to attribute beliefs in different ways to humans and God. The evidence also speaks to the debate concerning the universality and uniformity of the development of folk-psychological reasoning.

Pyysiainen, Ilkka. Amazing grace: Religion and the evolution of the human mind.
(To appear in: In Where man and God meet: How the brain and evolutionary sciences are revolutionizing our understanding of religion and spirituality, edited by Patrick McNamara. New York: Greenwood Publishers: Praeger Perspectives Imprint, 2006.)
Click here for Word file.
Religious believers and atheists share at least one common assumption: they both believe that they know why religion exists. For the believer, religion exists because it is true; for the atheist, religion exists because it is not true. In the believer’s case, religion is explained by some such thing as God’s revelation. Thus, religion has an explanation only in so far that it really is true. In the atheist’s case, religion is explained in terms of human ignorance. Religion exists because people are ignorant and credulous. For the atheist, religion thus has an explanation only in so far it is not true. In both cases the explanation of religion starts from the contents of religious thinking and experience. Read on ...

Slone, J. & Mort, J.G. On The Epistemological Magic Of Ethnographic Analysis (Forthcoming in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion). Click here for pdf.
Analyses of religious behavior by cultural (i.e. hermeneutic) scholars of religion are impoverished because the intuitive interpretive method employed in field work analysis fails to fill an explanatory gap in religious studies because of (1) the reliance upon informant (ethnographic) data that itself requires explanation, and (2) the rejection of relevant scientific explanatory models required to explain that data. We argue that field work is often necessary for data acquisition but not sufficient for analysis, that stringent methods of evaluation are a necessary component of the analysis of religious behavioral data, and that such tools are currently available to scholars willing to engage methods and theories outside the humanities. Noticing tendencies in ethnographic interpretation (in this case of sub-Saharan African communities), examining fresh interdisciplinary approaches, and revisiting fundamental metatheoretical issues concerning the nature of explanatory reasoning may help to mitigate the generally ineffective state of scholarship in the field.

Sorensen, J. Acts that work: cognitive aspects of ritual agency. To appear in Cognitive Semiotics, 2005. Click here for word file.
Though social factors alone can explain certain developments of the style and content of ritual actions, they seem unable to explain why ritual action or ritualization seems to be such a persistent phenomenon and what ritualised behaviour can accomplish for participants that non-ritualised actions cannot. Social change merely seems to influence form and content of ritual action, but not the fact that rituals are performed. In order to address these questions, we need to turn our attention to some of the fundamental cognitive aspects of ritual action: how do ritual actions produce representations of efficacy? Why are they represented as forceful actions? And what role do agents and agency play in producing ritual efficacy and force? In order to address these interdependent representations of efficacy, force and agency found in ritual actions, we need to take a look at how these inherent aspects of actions are conceived in non-ritual everyday cognition, thereby reaching a better understanding of what makes ritual action special. This will lead to a short discussion of the extents to which cognitive representations of agency, force and efficacy depend on the current position of a ritual in an idealised ‘developmental cycle of ritual’.

Sorensen, J. Religion, Evolution, and an Immunology of Cultural Systems, forthcoming, Evolution and Cognition (Vol.10/No.1).
My two objections [to cultural epidemiology] can be summarised in (a) a rejection of the notion that culture is only a statistical phenomena without any causal efficacy, and (b) a rejection of the epiphenomenalism involved in the argument that all aspects of culture and religion can be explained by reference to cognitive processes of individuals alone. Click here for html.

Sorensen, J. Ritual as Action and Symbolic Expression, to appear in TRANSformation, special edition 2004.
I will concentrate on ritual as a special modality of human behaviour, as something that we can explore from different angles and thereby hopefully shed some light on both ritual behaviour itself, and on its relation to other types of human behaviour, in particular aesthetic genres. Click here for html.

Lauren Owsianiecki, Afzal Upal, D. Jason Slone, Ryan D. Tweney. Role of Context in the Recall of Counterintuitive Concepts. Click here for pdf.
Counterintuitive concepts have been identified as major aspects of religious belief, and have been used to explain the retention and transmission of such beliefs. To resolve some inconsistencies in the literature concerning counterintuitiveness, we conducted three experiments to study the effect of context on recall. Five types of items were used: intuitive, minimally counterintuitive, maximally counterintuitive, minimally counterintuitive with contradictory context, and intuitive with contradictory context. Items were presented with context or without context and participants were asked to recall them. Maximally counterintuitive concepts were found to have the poorest recall in both immediate and delayed recall conditions and regardless of the presence or absence of context. No significant differences were found in the recall rates of minimally counterintuitive concepts and intuitive concepts, although delayed recall affected minimally counterintuitive concepts less than intuitive concepts, suggesting the possibility of differential “fitness.” Presence of contradictory context was found to be able to change minimally counterintuitive items into the functional equivalents of intuitive items (and vice versa). When relevant context was present, minimally counterintuitive concepts were recalled significantly better than intuitive concepts, which is consistent with the findings of Barrett & Nyhof (2001). For items presented as lists, intuitive items were recalled better, consistent with the findings of Norenzayan & Atran (in press, 2004). Thus, context was the key element affecting recall and the discrepancy among prior studies (and the much earlier studies of Bartlett, 1932) was resolved. The results imply that no “item-centered” explanation of the formation and transmission of religious concepts can be adequate in itself. Instead, the nature of the surrounding context must be included in any such account.

Upal, Afzal, Simulating the Emergence of New Religious Movements. Click here for html.
Not unlike other social sciences, study of religion in general and study of new religious movements (NRMs) in particular, has suffered from a problem of having too many inter-related free variables and a few data points available to constrain their values. This paper suggests cognitively inspired computer modeling as a technique for exploring, refining and testing theories of religion. Although computer simulation has become a relatively accepted technique for studying social theories, it has rarely been used to study religion. To illustrate this point I describe in detail the Agent-based Information Entrepreneur Model (AIM), a computer model of the recently proposed cognitive theory of new religious movements.

Upal, Afzal, Contextualizing Counterintuitiveness: How context affects comprehension and memorability of counterintuitive concepts. Click here for pdf.
A number of recent studies have shown that minimally counterintuitive concepts are better recalled than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive concepts. This paper presents a computational model that attempts to explain differences in memorability of various concepts by focusing on the role that the context in which a concept appears plays in making the concept more or less intuitive. A concept that appears to be counterintuitive in one context may be intuitive in another context and a concept that seems intuitive in one context may be counterintuitive in another context. The paper reports the details of an experiment conducted to test predictions of the model.

Whitehouse, Harvey. The Cognitive Parsing Model: Nuclear and Global Psychological Systems in the Transmission of Culture.
Click here for pdf.
The ‘Cognitive Parsing Model’ (CPM) is a new method of describing and explaining culture in terms of the changing configurations of psychological mechanisms that underpin behaviour. Our larger aim to to explain various particularities of the cultural repertoire within specified populations and historical periods, thereby extending existing research in the cognitive science of culture that has focused primarily on patterns of cross-cultural recurrence. Further, the CPM holds out the promise of being able to predict cultural trends, given sufficient information on prior distributed behaviour patterns.

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Reprint archive

Atran, S. (2003). Genesis of Suicide Terrorism, Science VOL 299, 7 MARCH 2003. Click here for pdf.

Barrett, J.M. & Keil, F.C. (1996). Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts. COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 31, 219–247. Click here for pdf..

Blakemore, S.-J., Boyer, P., Pachot-Clouard, M., Meltzoff, A. N., & Decety, J. (2003). Detection of contingency and animacy in the human brain, Cerebral Cortex, 13: 837-844. Click here for pdf.

Boyer, P. (2003). Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function, Trends in Cognitive Science, 7(3): 119-124. Click here.

Boyer, P., & Ramble, C. (2001). Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross-cultural Evidence for Recall of Counter-Intuitive Representations. Cognitive Science, 25, 535-564. Click here for pdf.

Boyer, P., (2000). Functional Origins of Religious Concepts: Conceptual and Selection in Evolved Minds [Malinowski Lecture 1999], Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6: 195-214. Click here for pdf.

Livingston, K. (2002) Reason, Faith and the Good Life. Does strong doubt permeate good health? Free Inquiry 30: 41-47. Click here for pdf.

Pyysiainen, I., Lindeman. M., Honkelac, T. (2003) Counterintuitiveness as the hallmark of religiosity, Religion 33: 341–355. Click here for pdf.

Whitehouse, H., MODES OF RELIGIOSITY: TOWARDS A COGNITIVE EXPLANATION OF THE SOCIOPOLITICAL DYNAMICS OF RELIGION, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 14,293-315. Click here for pdf.