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Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought, theory, and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive sciences. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.
Although religion has been the subject of serious scientific study since at least the late nineteenth century, the study of religion as a cognitive phenomenon is relatively recent. While it often relies upon earlier research within anthropology of religion [1] and sociology of religion, cognitive science of religion considers the results of that work within the context of evolutionary and cognitive theories. As such, cognitive science of religion was only made possible by the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and the development, starting in the 1970s, of sociobiology and other approaches explaining human behaviour in evolutionary terms, especially evolutionary psychology.
While Dan Sperber foreshadowed cognitive science of religion in his 1975 book Rethinking Symbolism, the earliest research to fall within the scope of the discipline was published during the 1980s. Stewart E. Guthrie's "A cognitive theory of religion" [2] was significant for examining anthropomorphism in religion. This work ultimately led to the development of the concept of the hyperactive agency detection device, which is a key concept within cognitive science of religion. The work of Scott Atran on Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science contrasted the cognitive processing of attention-arresting, and therefore memorable and culturally transmissible, aspects of counter-intuitive "mythico-religious beliefs" (e.g., bodiless beings) with counter-intuitive aspects of scientific thinking that also initially violate common-sense ontological assumptions about the structure of the world (e.g., invisible creatures).
The field was formally established in the 1990s. During that decade, a large number of highly influential and foundational books and articles were published. These included Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms by E. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley, Naturalness of Religious Ideas by Pascal Boyer, Inside the Cult and Arguments and Icons by Harvey Whitehouse, and Guthrie's book-length development of his earlier theories in Faces in the Clouds. In the 1990s, these and other researchers, who had been working independently in a variety of different disciplines, discovered each other's work and found valuable parallels between their approaches, with the result that something of a self-aware research tradition began to coalesce.[ citation needed ] By 2000, the field was well-enough defined for Justin L. Barrett to coin the term 'cognitive science of religion' in his article "Exploring the natural foundations of religion". [3]
The field remains somewhat loosely defined, bringing together researchers from various subfields. Much of the cohesion in the field comes not from shared detailed theoretical commitments but from a shared methodological perspective: the willingness to view religion in cognitive and evolutionary terms.
Despite a lack of agreement concerning the theoretical basis for work in cognitive science of religion, it is possible to outline some tendencies. Most significant of these is reliance upon the theories developed within evolutionary psychology. That particular approach to evolutionary explanations of human behaviour is particularly suitable to the cognitive byproduct explanation of religion that is most popular among cognitive scientists of religion. [4] This is because of the focus on byproduct and ancestral trait explanations within evolutionary psychology. A particularly significant concept associated with this approach is modularity of mind, used as it is to underpin accounts of the mental mechanisms seen to be responsible for religious beliefs. Important examples of work that falls under this rubric are provided by research carried out by Pascal Boyer and Justin L. Barrett.
These theoretical commitments are not shared by all cognitive scientists of religion, however. Ongoing debates regarding the comparative advantages of different evolutionary explanations for human behaviour [5] find a reflection within cognitive science of religion with dual inheritance theory recently gaining adherents among researchers in the field, including Armin Geertz and Ara Norenzayan. The perceived advantage of this theoretical framework is its ability to deal with more complex interactions between cognitive and cultural phenomena, but it comes at the cost of experimental design having to take into consideration a richer range of possibilities.
The view that religious beliefs and practices should be understood as nonfunctional but as produced by human cognitive mechanisms that are functional outside of the context of religion. Examples of this are the hyperactive agent detection device and the minimally counterintuitive concepts [6] or the process of initiation [7] explaining Buddhism and Taoism. The cognitive byproduct explanation of religion is an application of the concept of spandrel and of the concept of exaptation explored by Stephen Jay Gould among others. The view that religious beliefs and practices are evolutionary spandrels has a number of critics. [8]
Concepts that mostly fit human preconceptions but break with them in one or two striking ways. These concepts are both easy to remember (thanks to the counterintuitive elements) and easy to use (thanks to largely agreeing with what people expect). Examples include talking trees and noncorporeal agents. Pascal Boyer argues that many religious entities fit into this category. [9] Upal labelled the fact that minimally counterintuitive ideas are better remembered than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive ideas as the minimal counterintuitiveness effect or the MCI-effect. [10]
Cognitive scientist Justin L. Barrett postulates that this mental mechanism, whose function is to identify the activity of agents, may contribute to belief in the presence of the supernatural. Given the relative costs of failing to spot an agent, the mechanism is said to be hyperactive, producing a large number of false positive errors. Stewart E. Guthrie and others have claimed these errors can explain the appearance of supernatural concepts.
According to the prosocial adaptation account of religion, religious beliefs and practices should be understood as having the function of eliciting adaptive prosocial behaviour and avoiding the free rider problem. [11] Within the cognitive science of religion this approach is primarily pursued by Richard Sosis. David Sloan Wilson is another major proponent of this approach and interprets religion as a group-level adaptation, but his work is generally seen as falling outside the cognitive science of religion.
Practices that, due to their inherent cost, can be relied upon to provide an honest signal regarding the intentions of the agent. Richard Sosis has suggested that religious practices can be explained as costly signals of the willingness to cooperate. A similar line of argument has been pursued by Lyle Steadman and Craig Palmer. Alternatively, D. Jason Slone has argued that religiosity may be a costly signal used as a mating strategy insofar as religiosity serves as a proxy for "family values".
In the context of cognitive science of religion, dual inheritance theory can be understood as attempting to combine the cognitive byproduct and prosocial adaptation accounts using the theoretical approach developed by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, among others. The basic view is that while belief in supernatural entities is a cognitive byproduct, cultural traditions have recruited such beliefs to motivate prosocial behaviour. A sophisticated statement of this approach can be found in Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich (2010). [12]
Anthropology of religion is the study of religion in relation to other social institutions, and the comparison of religious beliefs and practices across cultures. The anthropology of religion, as a field, overlaps with but is distinct from the field of Religious Studies. The history of anthropology of religion is a history of striving to understand how other people view and navigate the world. This history involves deciding what religion is, what it does, and how it functions. Today, one of the main concerns of anthropologists of religion is defining religion, which is a theoretical undertaking in and of itself. Scholars such as Edward Tylor, Emile Durkheim, E.E. Evans Pritchard, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, and Talal Asad have all grappled with defining and characterizing religion anthropologically.
Ritualization refers to the process by which a sequence of non-communicating actions or an event is invested with cultural, social or religious significance. This definition emphasizes the transformation of everyday actions into rituals that carry deeper meaning within a cultural or religious context. Rituals are symbolic, repetitive, and often prescribed activities that hold religious or cultural significance for a certain group of people. They serve various purposes: promoting social solidarity by expressing shared values, facilitating the transmission of cultural knowledge and regulating emotions.
Pascal Robert Boyer is an Franco-American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He studied at université Paris-Nanterre, and taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge, with Jack Goody, working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. Boyer is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is a 2001 book by cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer, in which the author discusses the evolutionary psychology of religion and evolutionary origin of religions.
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist, anthropologist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; relevance theory; the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest.
Justin L. Barrett is an American experimental psychologist, Founder and President of Blueprint 1543, a nonprofit organization. He formerly was the Director of the Thrive Center for Human Development in Pasadena, California, Thrive Professor of Developmental Science, and Professor of Psychology at Fuller Graduate School of Psychology. He previously was a senior researcher and director of the Centre for Anthropology and Mind at the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Harvey Whitehouse is chair of social anthropology and professorial fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford.
The evolutionary psychology of religion is the study of religious belief using evolutionary psychology principles. It is one approach to the psychology of religion. As with all other organs and organ functions, the brain's functional structure is argued to have a genetic basis, and is therefore subject to the effects of natural selection and evolution. Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand cognitive processes, religion in this case, by understanding the survival and reproductive functions they might serve.
Ernest Thomas (Tom) Lawson is an honorary professor at the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's University Belfast. He is the executive editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture (JCC) and co-founder of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR). He is a founding member and has served as the first President of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (IACSR).
Sociological, psychological, and anthropological theories about religion generally attempt to explain the origin and function of religion. These theories define what they present as universal characteristics of religious belief and practice.
The International Association for the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion (IACESR), founded in 2006, is a scholarly association dedicated to the promotion of the Cognitive Science of Religion. The IACESR is an interdisciplinary association, including scholars from a wide variety of disciplines in the human, social, natural and health sciences that are interested in the academic, scientific study of religious phenomena. The IACESR seeks to advance the naturalistic study of religion. It is strictly scientific and does not encourage or welcome those who are interested in dialogue between science and religion, attempt to find religion in science and science in religion, or attempt to validate religious or spiritual doctrines through cognitive science.
The evolutionary origin of religion and religious behavior is a field of study related to evolutionary psychology, the origin of language and mythology, and cross-cultural comparison of the anthropology of religion. Some subjects of interest include Neolithic religion, evidence for spirituality or cultic behavior in the Upper Paleolithic, and similarities in great ape behavior.
Muhammad Afzal Upal is a writer and a cognitive scientist with contributions to cognitive science of religion, machine learning for planning, and agent-based social simulation.
Cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer argued that minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCI) i.e., concepts that violate a few ontological expectations of a category such as the category of an agent, are more memorable than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive (MXCI) concepts. A number of experimental psychology studies have found support for Boyer's hypothesis. Upal labelled this as the minimal counterintuitiveness effect or the MCI-effect.
The context-based model of the counterintuitiveness effect is a cognitive model of The Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect i.e., the finding by many cognitive scientists of religion that minimally counterintuitive concepts are more memorable for people than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive concepts
Cognitive ecology of religion is an integrative approach to studying how religious beliefs covary with social and natural dynamics of the environment. This is done by incorporating a cognitive ecological perspective to cross-cultural god concepts. Religious beliefs are thought to be a byproduct of domain-specific cognitive modules that give rise to religious cognition. The cognitive biases leading to religious belief are constraints on perceptions of the environment, which is part and parcel of a cognitive ecological approach. This means that they not only shape religious beliefs, but they are determinants of how successfully cultural beliefs are transmitted.
Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena within social and natural contexts. It is an integrative perspective drawing from aspects of ecological psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary ecology and anthropology. Notions of domain-specific modules in the brain and the cognitive biases they create are central to understanding the enacted nature of cognition within a cognitive ecological framework. This means that cognitive mechanisms not only shape the characteristics of thought, but they dictate the success of culturally transmitted ideas. Because culturally transmitted concepts can often inform ecological decision-making behaviors, group-level trends in cognition are hypothesized to address ecologically relevant challenges.
Joseph A. Bulbulia is a Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Science at Victoria University of Wellington (2020-present). He was the Maclaurin Goodfellow Chair in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts at University of Auckland (2018-2020). He previously served as a Professor in the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Bulbulia is regarded as one of the founders of the contemporary evolutionary religious studies. He is a past president of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and is currently co-editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior. Bulbulia is one of four on the Senior Management Team of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a national longitudinal study started in 2009 that has repeatedly sampled over 45,000 New Zealanders. He is an associate investigator for Pulotu, a database of 116 Pacific cultures purpose-built to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of religion. In 2016 Bulbulia won a Research Excellence Award at Victoria University.
The theory of divergent modes of religiosity (DMR) is intended to explain how religions are created, transmitted, and changed. DMR theory was first developed by anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse following his ethnographic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. The theory proposes that religions tend to coalesce around two divergent modes, termed imagistic and doctrinal, which are distinguished primarily by their ritual practices. The imagistic mode is characterized by infrequently performed, high arousal rituals (e.g. initiation rites) and is associated with small scale, exclusive religious groups. In contrast the doctrinal mode is characterized by frequently performed, low arousal rituals (e.g. daily recitations of sacred texts) and is associated with larger inclusive communities, as found in the major world religions.
Cognitive science of new religious movements is the study of new religious movements (NRMs) from the perspective of cognitive science. The field employs methods and theories from a variety of disciplines, including cognitive science of religion, sociology of religion, scientific study of religion, anthropology, and artificial life. Scholars in the field seek to explain the origin and evolution of new religious movements in terms of ordinary universal cognitive processes.
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