Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. The field employs methods and theories from a very broad range of disciplines, including:
cognitive psychologyCognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
,
evolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
,
cognitive anthropologyCognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences often through close collaboration with historians,...
,
artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
,
cognitive neuroscienceCognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...
, neurobiology,
zoologyZoology |zoölogy]]), is the branch of biology that relates to the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct...
, and
ethologyEthology is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology....
. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious memes by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.
History
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 religionThe anthropology of religion involves the study of religious institutions in relation to other social institutions, and the comparison of religious beliefs and practices across cultures.-History:...
and
sociology of religionThe sociology of religion concerns the role of religion in society: practices, historical backgrounds, developments and universal themes. There is particular emphasis on the recurring role of religion in all societies and throughout recorded history...
, cognitive science of religion considers the results of that work within the context of evolutionary and cognitive theories, transforming what had been seen as moribund disciplines. As such, cognitive science of religion was only made possible by the
cognitive revolutionThe cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences. It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research...
of the 1950s and the development, starting in the 1970s, of
sociobiologySociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context. Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology,...
and other approaches explaining human behaviour in evolutionary terms, especially
evolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
.
While
Dan SperberDan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics: developing, with British psychologist Deirdre Wilson, relevance theory in the latter; and an approach to cultural evolution known as the...
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. Among this work, Stewart Guthrie's
"A cognitive theory of religion" Current Anthropology 21 (2) 1980 was significant for examining the significance of anthropomorphism within religion, work that ultimately led to the development of the concept of the hyperactive agency detection device – a key concept within cognitive science of religion.
The real beginning of cognitive science of religion can be dated to the 1990s, however. During that decade a large number of highly influential books and articles were published which helped to lay the foundations of cognitive science of religion. These included Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms, written by
E. Thomas LawsonProfessor Ernest Thomas Lawson is a research scientist at the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's University Belfast. He is the executive editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture and co-founder of the North American Association for the Study of Religion...
and Robert McCauley, Naturalness of Religious Ideas by
Pascal BoyerPascal Boyer is a French anthropologist, and Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis.He is a Guggenheim Fellow.-Work:...
, as well as Guthrie's book-length development of his 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. By 2000, the field was well-enough defined for
E. Thomas LawsonProfessor Ernest Thomas Lawson is a research scientist at the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's University Belfast. He is the executive editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture and co-founder of the North American Association for the Study of Religion...
to coin the term 'cognitive science of religion' in his article
"Toward a cognitive science of religion" Numen 47.
Since 2000, cognitive science of religion has grown explosively, similarly to other approaches that apply evolutionary thinking to sociological phenomena. Each year an ever greater number of researchers is becoming involved in the field, with theoretical and empirical developments proceeding at a very rapid pace. The field remains somewhat loosely defined, bringing together as it does researchers who come from a variety of different traditions. Much of the cohesion in the field comes not from shared detailed theoretical commitments but from a general willingness to view religion in cognitive and evolutionary terms as well as from the willingness to engage with the work of the others developing this field. A vital role in bringing together researchers is played by the
International Association for the Cognitive Science of ReligionThe International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion , is a scholarly association dedicated to the promotion of the Cognitive Science of Religion...
, formed in 2006.
Theoretical basis
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 psychologyEvolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
. 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. 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 mindModularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of separate innate structures which have established evolutionarily developed functional purposes...
, 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 BoyerPascal Boyer is a French anthropologist, and Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis.He is a Guggenheim Fellow.-Work:...
and
Justin L. BarrettJustin L. Barrett is senior researcher of the Centre for Anthropology and Mind and The Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University.-Career:...
.
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 find a reflection within cognitive science of religion with
dual inheritance theoryDual inheritance theory , also known as gene-culture coevolution, was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution...
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.
Cognitive byproduct
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 minimally counterintuitive concepts. The cognitive byproduct explanation of religion is an application of the concept of
exaptationExaptation, cooption, and preadaptation are related terms referring to shifts in the function of a trait during evolution. For example, a trait can evolve because it served one particular function, but subsequently it may come to serve another. Exaptations are common in both anatomy and behaviour...
explored by
Stephen Jay GouldStephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation....
among others.
Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts
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 BoyerPascal Boyer is a French anthropologist, and Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis.He is a Guggenheim Fellow.-Work:...
argues that many religious entities fit into this category.
Hyperactive Agency Detection Device
Postulated mental mechanism whose function is to identify the activity of agents. Given the relative costs of failing to spot an agent, the mechanism is said to be hyperactive, producing a large number of
false positive errorsIn statistical test theory the notion of statistical error is an integral part of hypothesis testing. The test requires an unambiguous statement of a null hypothesis, which usually corresponds to a default "state of nature", for example "this person is healthy", "this accused is not guilty" or...
. Stewart Guthrie and others have claimed these errors can explain the appearance of supernatural concepts.
Prosocial adaptation
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 freeloader problem. Within the cognitive science of religion this approach is primarily pursued by Richard Sosis.
David Sloan WilsonDavid Sloan Wilson is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He is a son of the author Sloan Wilson.-Academic career:...
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.
Costly signaling
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.
Dual inheritance
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-Noblemen:* Robert Boyd, 1st Lord Boyd , Scottish statesman* Robert Boyd, 4th Lord Boyd , Scottish nobleman, grandson of the 1st Lord Boyd* Robert Boyd, 5th Lord Boyd , Scottish nobleman* Robert Boyd, 7th Lord 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 Atran S. and Henrich J. (2010)
"The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions" Biological Theory 5.1.
Leading researchers
Researchers in the field include:
- Scott Atran
Scott Atran is an American and French anthropologist.-Education and early career:Atran was born in New York City in 1952 and he received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. While a student at Columbia, he became assistant to anthropologist Margaret Mead at the American Museum of...
, Directeur de Recherche, Institut Jean NicodThe Institut Jean Nicod is a CNRS research center based in Paris, France. Founded in 2000, its name commemorates the French philosopher and logician Jean Nicod...
, CNRS, Paris
- Justin L. Barrett
Justin L. Barrett is senior researcher of the Centre for Anthropology and Mind and The Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University.-Career:...
, senior researcher at the University of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
- Jesse Bering
Jesse Bering is the Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture and a Reader in the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. A research psychologist by training, he writes the popular weekly Bering in Mind a featured blog/column for the Scientific...
, Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen's University Belfast
- Pascal Boyer
Pascal Boyer is a French anthropologist, and Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis.He is a Guggenheim Fellow.-Work:...
, Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. LouisWashington University in St. Louis is a private research university located in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1853, and named for George Washington, the university has students and faculty from all fifty U.S. states and more than 110 nations...
- Armin W. Geertz, Chair of Religion, Cognition and Culture research unit at Aarhus University
- E. Thomas Lawson
Professor Ernest Thomas Lawson is a research scientist at the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's University Belfast. He is the executive editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture and co-founder of the North American Association for the Study of Religion...
, Honorary Professor and Research Scientist at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen's University Belfast
- Luther H. Martin, Emeritus Professor at the University of Vermont
The University of Vermont comprises seven undergraduate schools, an honors college, a graduate college, and a college of medicine. The Honors College does not offer its own degrees; students in the Honors College concurrently enroll in one of the university's seven undergraduate colleges or...
- Robert McCauley, Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, Emory University
Emory University is a private research university in metropolitan Atlanta, located in the Druid Hills section of unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The university was founded as Emory College in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia by a small group of Methodists and was named in honor of...
- Dan Sperber
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics: developing, with British psychologist Deirdre Wilson, relevance theory in the latter; and an approach to cultural evolution known as the...
, Directeur de Recherche, Institut Jean NicodThe Institut Jean Nicod is a CNRS research center based in Paris, France. Founded in 2000, its name commemorates the French philosopher and logician Jean Nicod...
, CNRS, Paris
- Harvey Whitehouse
Harvey Whitehouse is an anthropologist and a leading figure in the cognitive science of religion. Professor Whitehouse holds a Statutory Chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and is a Professorial Fellow of Magdalen College...
, professor of social anthropologySocial Anthropology is one of the four or five branches of anthropology that studies how contemporary human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long-term, intensive field studies , the social organization of a particular person: customs,...
at the University of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
Publications
- Atran, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2004). "Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion". Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27, 713-770.
- Barrett, J.L. "Cognitive Science of Religion: What Is It and Why Is It?" Religion Compass 2007, vol 1.
- Barrett, J.L. "Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2000, vol. 4 pp 29–34
- Barrett, J.L. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? AltaMira Press, 2004.
- Barrett, J.L. and Jonathan A. Lanman. "The Science of Religious Beliefs." Religion 38, 2008. 109-124
- Boyer, Pascal. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas University of California Press, 1994.
- Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought Basic Books, 2001
- Boyer, Pascal. "Religious Thought and Behavior as By-Products of Brain Functions," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, pp 119–24
- Boyer, P and Liénard, P. "Why ritualized behavior? Precaution Systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals .Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29: 595-650.
- Cohen, E. The Mind Possessed. The Cognition of Spirit Possession in the Afro-Brazilian Religious Tradition Oxford University Press, 2007.
- Geertz, Armin W. (2004). "Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Religion," in P. Antes, A.W. Geertz, R.R. Warne (Eds.) New Approaches to the Study of Religion Volume 2: Textual, Comparative, Sociological, and Cognitive Approaches. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 347–399.
- Geertz, Armin W. (2008). "From Apes to Devils and Angels: Comparing Scenarios on the Evolution of Religion," in J. Bulbulia et al. (Eds.) The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, & Critiques Santa Margarita: Collins Foundation Press, pp. 43–49.
- Guthrie, S. E. (1993). Faces in the Clouds: A new theory of religion New York: Oxford University Press.
- Knight, N., Sousa, P., Barrett, J. L., & Atran, S. (2004). "Children’s attributions of beliefs to humans and God". Cognitive Science 28(1): 117-126.
- Lawson, E. T. "Toward a Cognitive Science of Religion." Numen 47(3): 338-349(12).
- Lawson, E. T. "Religious Thought." Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science vol 3 (A607).
- Lawson, E. T. and McCauley, RN. Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture Cambridge University Press, 1990.
- Legare, C. and Gelman, S. "Bewitchment, Biology, or Both: The Co-existence of Natural and Supernatural Explanatory Frameworks Across Development." Cognitive Science 32(4): 607-642.
- Light, T and Wilson, B (eds). Religion as a Human Capacity: A Festschrift in Honor of E. Thomas Lawson Brill, 2004.
- McCauley, RN. "The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of Science." Explanation and Cognition (Keil and Wilson eds), pp 61–85. MIT Press, 2000.
- McCauley, RN and Lawson, E. T. Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms Cambridge University Press, 2002.
- McCorkle Jr., William W. Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased: From Corpse to Concept Peter Lang, 2010.
- Norenzayan, A., Atran, S., Faulkner, J., & Schaller, M. (2006). "Memory and mystery: The cultural selection of minimally counterintuitive narratives". Cognitive Science 30, 531-553.
- Nuckolls, C. "Boring Rituals," Journal of Ritual Studies 2006.
- Pyysiäinen, I. How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion Brill, 2001.
- Slone, DJ. Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Slone, DJ (ed). Religion and Cognition: A Reader Equinox Press, 2006.
- Sørensen, J. "A Cognitive Theory of Magic." AltaMira Press, 2006.
- Sperber, D. Rethinking Symbolism Cambridge University Press, 1975.
- Sperber, D. Explaining Culture Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
- Sperber, D. (1975). Rethinking Symbolism Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Tremlin, T. Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Whitehouse, H. (1995). Inside the Cult: Religious innovation and transmission in Papua New Guinea Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Whitehouse, H. (1996a). "Apparitions, orations, and rings: Experience of spirits" in Dadul. Jeannette Mageo and Alan Howard (eds). Spirits in Culture, History, and Mind New York: Routledge.
- Whitehouse, H. (1996b). "Rites of terror: Emotion, metaphor, and memory in Melanesian initiation cults" Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, 703-715.
- Whitehouse, H. (2000). Arguments and Icons: Divergent modes of religiosity Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of Religiosity: a cognitive theory of religious transmission Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
See also
- International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion
The International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion , is a scholarly association dedicated to the promotion of the Cognitive Science of Religion...
(IACSR)
- Issues in Science and Religion
Issues in Science and Religion is a book by Ian Barbour. A biography provided by the John Templeton Foundation and published by PBS online states this book "has been credited with literally creating the contemporary field of science and religion."...
- Evolutionary epistemology
Evolutionary epistemology refers to two distinct topics - on the one hand, the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, and on the other hand, a theory in that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection....
- Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
- Evolutionary psychology of religion
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 and cognition's functional structure have been argued to have a genetic basis,...