Religious thought and behavior

Lawson, E. Thomas

doi:10.1002/wcs.1189

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…The last decade has seen a renewed interest in understanding the cognitive and psychological basis of religious thought and behavior. The so-called cognitive science of religion (CSR) starts from an evolutionary account and describes religion as a byproduct of the functioning of our ordinary cognitive faculties (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004;Barrett & Burdett, 2011;Boyer & Lienard, 2006;Lawson, 2012;Pyysiainen, 2012). According to this account, religious beliefs, experiences, and rituals recruit similar cognitive resources as used in everyday practices (judgment, reasoning, action, and social interaction) that originally evolved because they directly conferred an adaptive advantage.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Priming of supernatural agent concepts and agency detection

Elk

Rutjens

Pligt

et al. 2014

Religion, Brain & Behavior

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In evolutionary approaches to religion it is argued that belief in supernatural agents is strongly related to a perceptual bias to over-detect the presence of agents in the environment. We report five experiments that investigate whether processing concepts about supernatural agents facilitates agency detection. Participants were presented with point-light stimuli representing unscrambled or scrambled biological motion, or with pictures of unscrambled or scrambled faces, embedded in a noise mask. Participants were required to indicate for each stimulus whether it represented a human agent or not. Each trial was preceded by a supernatural agent prime, a human agent prime, or an animal prime. Our results showed that primes referring to humans facilitated the detection of agency. More importantly, however, results did not reveal a general effect of supernatural priming on agency detection. In three experiments, a moderating effect of religiosity was observed: supernatural agent primes had a differential effect for religious compared to non-religious participants on agency detection biases and the speed of responding to agent-like stimuli. These findings qualify the relation between supernatural beliefs and agency detection and suggest that when supernatural agent concepts have been acquired through cultural learning, these concepts can modulate agency-detection biases.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Priming of supernatural agent concepts and agency detection

Elk

Rutjens

Pligt

et al. 2014

Religion, Brain & Behavior

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“…Moreover, it contributed to the general but fallacious belief that sand is destined to improve its "maturity" through time (Folk, 1951;Pettijohn, 1954; ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Hubert, 1962). We may speculate, as cognitive neuroscience suggests (Boyer, 2008;McCauley, 2011), that even such a sedimentological version of the purity myth (Garzanti, 2017) may be nurtured by security networks in our brain, that lead us to repel sources of impurity and contamination (Douglas, 2003;Mann, 2005;Lawson, 2012) and to indulge in the teleologic illusion that things are ultimately destined to attain perfection (Popper, 1994).…”

Section: How Is Pure Quartzose Sand Generated?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Congo River sand and the equatorial quartz factory

Garzanti

Vermeesch

Vezzoli

et al. 2019

Earth-Science Reviews

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A never solved problem in sedimentary petrology is the origin of sandstone consisting exclusively of quartz and most durable heavy minerals. The Congo River offers an excellent test case to investigate under which tectonic, geomorphological, climatic, and geochemical conditions pure quartzose sand is generated today. In both upper and lowermost parts of the catchment, tributaries contain significant amounts of feldspars, rock fragments, or moderately stable heavy minerals pointing at the central basin as the main location of the "quartz factory". In Congo sand, quartz is enriched relatively to all other minerals including zircon, as indicated by Si/Zr ratios much higher than in the upper continental crust. Selective elimination of old zircons that accumulated radiation damage through time is suggested by low percentages of grains yielding Archean U-Pb ages despite the basin being surrounded by Archean cratonic blocks. Intense weathering is documented by the lack of carbonate grains in sand and by dominant kaolinite and geochemical signatures in mud. In sand, composed almost entirely of SiO 2 , the weathering effect is masked by massive addition of quartz grains recycled during multiple events of basin inversion since the Proterozoic.Changes in mineralogical, geochemical, and geochronological signatures across Bas-Congo concur to suggest that approximately 10% of the sand supplied to the Atlantic Ocean is generated by rapid fluvial incision into the recently uplifted Atlantic Rise. The Congo River connects with a huge canyon ~ 30 km upstream of the mouth, and pure quartzose sand is thus funnelled directly toward the deep-sea to feed a huge turbidite fan. Offshore sediments on both sides of the canyon are not derived from the Congo River. They reflect mixed provenance, including illite-rich dust windblown from the arid Sahel and augite, hypersthene, and smectite ejected from volcanic centres probably situated along the Cameroon Line in the north.Because mixing of detritus from diverse sources and supply of polycyclic grains almost invariably occurs in the terminal lowland tract of a sediment-routing-system, no ancient sandstone can be safely considered as entirely first-cycle. Moreover, the abundance of pure quartzarenite in the rock record can hardly be explained by chemical weathering or physical recycling alone. The final cleansing of minerals other than quartz, zircon, tourmaline, and rutile requires one or more cycles of chemical dissolution during diagenesis, which operates at higher temperatures and over longer periods than weathering at the Earth's surface.

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“…Prior research has shown that agents violating a minimal number of intuitive expectations (“minimally counterintuitive,” or MCI, agents) are typically remembered better than agents that adhere to expectations, dramatically violate intuitive expectations, or only violate culturally acquired expectations [1, 5–10]. As it could be argued that gods and goddesses are MCI agents, some authors have implicated this memory bias in the development and pervasiveness of religion [11–13]. Indeed, counterintuitive statements are rated more ‘religious’ than intuitive statements [14] and a minimal amount of such content may be an ideal condition for belief [15–17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mickey Mouse problem: Distinguishing religious and fictional counterintuitive agents

Swan

Halberstadt

2019

PLoS ONE

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The Mickey Mouse problem refers to the difficulty in predicting which supernatural agents are capable of eliciting belief and religious devotion. We approached the problem directly by asking participants to invent a “religious” or a “fictional” agent with five supernatural abilities. Compared to fictional agents, religious agents were ascribed a higher proportion of abilities that violated folk psychology or that were ambiguous–violating nonspecific or multiple domains of folk knowledge–and fewer abilities that violated folk physics and biology. Similarly, participants rated folk psychology violations provided by the experimenter as more characteristic of religious agents than were violations of folk physics or folk biology, while fictional agents showed no clear pattern. Religious agents were also judged as more potentially beneficial, and more ambivalent (i.e., similar ratings of benefit and harm), than fictional agents, regardless of whether the agents were invented or well-known to participants. Together, the results support a motivational account of religious belief formation that is facilitated by these biases.

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Religious thought and behavior

Cited by 4 publications

References 38 publications

Priming of supernatural agent concepts and agency detection

Priming of supernatural agent concepts and agency detection

Congo River sand and the equatorial quartz factory

The Mickey Mouse problem: Distinguishing religious and fictional counterintuitive agents

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