Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Religion

Item

Title

Religion

Author

Purzycki, Benjamin Grant

Kiper, Jordan

Shaver, John

Finkel, Daniel N.

Sosis, Richard

Research Area

Social Institutions

Topic

Religious Institutions

Abstract

Religions are complex systems that can adapt to diverse environments because of the dynamic relationship of their internal parts. The most fundamental of these parts includes supernatural beliefs, rituals, and myths. The social scientific study of religion focuses on these parts and builds on previous generations of research to provide distal explanations for religion as a dynamic phenomenon. In recent years, interest in the social science of religion has turned to the cognitive and behavioral studies of religion. The cognitive science of religion documents the mental organization and structure of religious thought, while the behavioral science of religion focuses on ritual behavior as the building block of sociality. Key issues for future research include the ontogeny of religion, the cognitive and cross‐cultural representation of religious concepts, the relationship between religion and reproduction, and the evolution of religion. With these new frontiers have come a variety of novel methodologies but also an emphasis on the need for comparative ethnography.

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Identifier

etrds0280

extracted text

Religion
BENJAMIN GRANT PURZYCKI, JORDAN KIPER, JOHN SHAVER,
DANIEL N. FINKEL, and RICHARD SOSIS

Abstract
Religions are complex systems that can adapt to diverse environments because of
the dynamic relationship of their internal parts. The most fundamental of these parts
includes supernatural beliefs, rituals, and myths. The social scientific study of religion focuses on these parts and builds on previous generations of research to provide
distal explanations for religion as a dynamic phenomenon. In recent years, interest
in the social science of religion has turned to the cognitive and behavioral studies
of religion. The cognitive science of religion documents the mental organization and
structure of religious thought, while the behavioral science of religion focuses on ritual behavior as the building block of sociality. Key issues for future research include
the ontogeny of religion, the cognitive and cross-cultural representation of religious
concepts, the relationship between religion and reproduction, and the evolution of
religion. With these new frontiers have come a variety of novel methodologies but
also an emphasis on the need for comparative ethnography.

INTRODUCTION
The social scientific study of religion has an extensive and diverse history that
began in the late nineteenth century. Early cultural anthropologists expended
considerable effort documenting and making sense of the religious traditions
found around the world. Such research continues to this day with additional
focus on understanding the evolutionary, cognitive, and behavioral bases
for religious traditions. Members of virtually every human community have
complex supernatural beliefs and devote significant resources toward ritualistic behavior. Variations in such beliefs and behaviors are the products of
cognitive and behavioral developments that arose in the course of human
evolution. Provided the centrality of religion to the human experience, it is
no wonder that religion has captured the attention of generations of anthropologists and remains an important avenue of research today.
Although religions exhibit systematic variation, anthropologists observe
that religions are not the static and conservative systems that some scholars
of religion presume them to be. Instead, religions are complex systems that
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

can acclimate to diverse environments, largely due to the dynamic interaction of their interrelated parts. The three most important of these parts, which
we will discuss throughout this piece, are the following:
•

•

•

Supernatural beliefs: beliefs in discarnate agents who interact with and
possess knowledge about the world, and beliefs about forces and
essences that permeate this and unseen worlds.
Rituals: patterned behaviors that are explicitly directed toward nonempirical or supernatural agencies to achieve some goal on behalf of participants.
Myths: narratives of unseen events that often explain natural and supernatural phenomena.

The cross-cultural examination of these features of religion, and others
(e.g., taboo, moral obligations, authorities), has revealed to anthropologists
that religion appears to have a phylogenetic history, with recurrent patterns
of systemic variation across environments. Both of these aspects, in addition
to evidence that religion can promote survival and reproductive success,
suggest that religion has an evolutionary origin as an adaptive system with
advantages for individuals. Of course, religions often appear to be quite
taxing for participants and even counterproductive to their own self-interest,
which poses a central and vexing problem for social scientists of religion:
If religion has a distal explanation (i.e., promoting individual survival and
reproduction), what is it?
In this essay, we provide an overview of the intellectual foundations and
social scientific approaches to understanding religion. This overview is then
followed by a discussion of contemporary research and how it draws from
and develops the previous generations’ insights. We focus specifically on the
cognitive and evolutionary study of religion, both of which offer new insights
into the complex relationships between mind, culture, and the social and natural forces that shape them. We then turn to a discussion of what lies on the
horizon for future endeavors.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The term religion comes from the Latin root religare, which means “to
bind.” However, what is being bound, and to what? Although this question
remains, and is likely to remain, open to various interpretations, social
scientists largely agree that religion binds individuals to their community
through (among other things) myths, rituals, and beliefs. Discovering how
religion “binds” communities is one of the core pursuits of contemporary
research, which suggests that religion has been at the center of human

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3

communities for some time. Archaeological evidence in the form of burials
from the Upper Paleolithic suggests that humans have practiced religion for
at least 30,000 years. Furthermore, anthropologists have long observed that,
contrary to modern societies in the West, where there is a clear demarcation
between religious and secular life, traditional cultures do not necessarily
make this distinction and religious beliefs and practices often permeate
all domains of life. As a result, anthropologists have spent considerable
effort documenting religion as a means to describe other cultures, and also
outlining the manners in which religion shapes the very fabric of society.
Following traditional studies of religion in western history (e.g., Herodotus,
Euphemerus, Denis Diderot, Max Müller), early anthropologists, such as
Edward Burnett Tylor and Sir James Frazer, studied the function of magic
and myths in non-western societies. They surmised that magic and myths
were central to most societies, because they together served as a kind of
“primitive science” and substantiated beliefs in supernatural beings. These
beings were not only thought to control nature and human affairs, but also
the order of society itself.
Of course, these early studies were rather crude representations of religion
and largely based on “arm chair” speculations. It was not until the work
of Émile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown that
the anthropology of religion truly began in its own right. All three theorists recognized that myths were not primitive sciences or naïve worldviews,
but rather narratives that impart content and semantic understanding to ritual. In turn, ritual serves as the heart of religion insofar as it ameliorates
anxieties, promotes collective conscience, and encourages social solidarity,
all of which bind members to one another with deep and abiding loyalty.
For example, Malinowski observed that religious rituals among Trobriand
Islanders functioned to increase social participation in the social and economic transactions of the community, and also to ameliorate individual anxieties over gardening and deep sea fishing. In short, these scholars adopted
varieties of functionalism—one being the idea that society is comprised of
parts that work together for stability—and ascribed religion in particular
with social and individual functions.
Subsequent anthropologists built on these seminal observations. For
instance, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Clifford Geertz observed that rituals
bind communities together by endowing them with common symbols,
moods, and concepts, which engender the community with a collective
understanding of reality. Likewise, Victor Turner, among others, noted
that ritual behavior is fundamentally communicative, conveying messages
between group members, the most significant of which is commitment to
group membership and beliefs. Building on this insight, Roy Rappaport
showed that because ritual signals acceptance of community values and

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

individual responsibilities therein, it constitutes the very nature of the social
contract. Modern scholars continue to expand on the importance of ritual as
a means to group ethos and social institutions with evidence that it promotes
high levels of cooperation and large-scale social organization.
In addition to research on the relationship between myth and ritual, and the
value of ritual for cooperation, considerable research has focused on supernatural beliefs, namely, the structure and forms of such beliefs. Both Sigmund
Freud and Émile Durkheim believed that supernatural beliefs arise from, and
are constrained by, the projection of human social interaction onto unseen
agents, and the desire to rely on such agents to make the unexplainable intelligible. Clifford Geertz extended this intellectualist stance of religion insofar
as he characterized religion as a symbolic system wreathed in truth-value
(i.e., treated as being true rather than being internally understood as merely
symbolic). This led many anthropologists to focus on religion as a system of
meaning making and to promote methodological interpretivism in order to
make sense of how other societies made sense of their worlds.
Following the ethnographic tradition of Franz Boas, anthropologists in
the early twentieth century expended considerable effort documenting the
enormous cross-cultural variation in religious systems. Perhaps the most
important outcome of this work is the recognition that the nature of religious
diversity is not arbitrary, but rather reliably reflects significant features of
socio-political organization and ecology. To illustrate, anthropologists often
recognize four major types of religious institutions: shamanic, communal,
Olympian or polytheistic, and monotheistic. Early studies showed that the
main predictors of these institutions were the following: subsistence strategies (e.g., foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, and agriculture), economic
specialization, sovereignty of decision-making groups, and the presence or
absence of written culture. For example, foragers were often shamanistic,
horticulturalists and pastoralists were often communal, and agriculturalists
were often Olympian or monotheistic. Later anthropological research has
revealed remarkable correspondence between religious institutions and
cultural variation. For instance, shamanic religions often focus on individual
health concerns, group cooperation, and ecological management. Communal
religions unite different clans or lineages under ancestor or totemic worship.
Many polytheistic religions exist in large and interconnected communities
with priesthoods dedicated to religious knowledge. Monotheistic religions
typically exist in state-level societies and, unlike other religious systems,
worship a transcendent god who places significant moral demands on large
populations.
However, because cultures and religious systems are not isolated phenomena, most cultural research on religion in the late twentieth century has
focused less on broad classifications and more on the components of religion

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5

in cultural contexts. For instance, inspired by Arnold van Gennep, Victor
Turner showed that beliefs concerning rites of passage have a common structure and are always embedded in local understandings of change, transition,
and identity. In so doing, Turner not only demonstrated that rites of passage
are structurally similar across cultures, but also that they correspond to key
features of their respective societies. Such research continued in the tradition
of Boas by embracing particularism (i.e., documenting a specific culture)
but went beyond it by crafting models that were applicable to multiple
traditions. For instance, Roy D’Andrade and Melford Spiro found that the
relationship between gods and their believers tended to reflect the nature
of the parent–child relationships characteristic of the society in question. In
a similar vein, Guy Swanson demonstrated that high gods and punishing
gods vary across cultures but are disproportionately found among large,
agricultural, and socially stratified societies. These findings suggest that
even though religious systems are locally unique, they are neither arbitrary
nor unbound collections of beliefs and behaviors. Rather, religious systems
are at the very least correlated with specific environments, but quite likely
change in order to overcome problems in specific environments.
This observation dovetailed nicely with the cognitive revolution and generative linguistics, which thereafter prompted anthropologists to embrace a
more universalistic view of cultural systems. It once again became acceptable
for anthropologists to explore the instinctual bases of culture and to isolate
particular faculties constituting human nature. However, inspired by the
nativist turn, anthropologists also undertook wide-ranging investigations
into the complex relationship between culture and human cognition. At
about the same time, evolutionary psychology emerged as a new science of
the mind. With the aim of understanding how evolution constrained modes
of cognition, evolutionary psychology postulates and tests aspects of human
thought, such as propensities, biases, predispositions, and generative faculties. In so doing, it has identified a host of mental faculties that are prevalent
today but evolved to overcome the adaptive challenges of our ancestors. It
was in this context of inquiry—that is, amid the study of cultural variation
and cognitive evolution—that the cognitive science of religion was born.
Presently, there are disagreements about the evolutionary processes that
led to the emergence of religion. Generally, cognitive approaches assume
that the mental faculties required for religious concept formation and
retention evolved for other purposes, and that there is no specialized mental
faculty devoted to religion. As such, many cognitive researchers treat
religion as a by-product of evolved cognition rather than an adaptation in
and of itself, despite the widespread recognition that religious beliefs often
promote adaptive behavior, even in modern contexts. Behavioral researchers
typically argue that religion is indeed an adaptation that displays signs

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of fitness-enhancing qualities. Although the general consensus is that
religion is impossible without preadaptations and biological constituents,
there remains considerable debate regarding the status of religion as an
adaptation.
With that in mind, the following section centers on the latest research in
the social scientific study of religion. Specifically, it offers a brief survey of
contemporary understandings regarding the cognitive and behavioral study
of religious systems, which remain the two most distinctive forms of inquiry
today.
CUTTING EDGE RESEARCH
THE COGNITIVE STUDY OF RELIGION
Contemporary research on supernatural belief focuses on documenting the
cognitive organization and structure of religious thought. Beginning with
Stewart Guthrie, cognitive scientists of religion have attempted to understand how supernatural beliefs are constrained by the limits of cognitive
processing, why humans attribute mental states to entities such as gods or
spirits, and why such entities are so often concerned about what people do.
Significantly, research spearheaded by Jesse Bering, Pascal Boyer, Dominic
Johnson, Ara Norenzayan, and Azim Shariff shows that supernatural agents
are particularly concerned with socially strategic information and breaches
of prosocial contracts.
Many within the cognitive science of religion hold that the human mind
has domain-specific organization and is comprised of modules that evolved
for handling specific types of information. For instance, the cognitive mechanisms designed to compute linguistic information are not the same as those
used to make sense of spatial depth or to detect pain. With foundations rooted
in this perspective, researchers began to apply evolutionary theory to these
proposed mental faculties in order to investigate how such faculties may
have been adaptive in our past. As such, current research devotes a considerable amount of attention to understanding the universal qualities of religious
concepts by appealing to the cognitive systems that all humans share.
The mind’s ability to attribute mental states to other entities is central
to contemporary understandings of religious cognition. Humans do this
so effortlessly that it can often be difficult to convince ourselves that
something does not have mental states. Stewart Guthrie laid the theoretical
foundations for this work, arguing that promiscuous agency-detection and
anthropomorphism undergird a considerable amount of religious thought.
Humans are equipped with a variety of agency-detection systems, often
collectively referred to as a theory of mind. While there is considerable

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7

debate over whether or not nonhuman primates have the ability to detect
internal mental states of other beings, it is quite clear that humans rapidly
make sense of things by appealing to the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and
perceptions of other beings. Many researchers, including Justin Barrett and
Scott Atran, argue that supernatural agent concepts are natural extensions
of these systems insofar as people assign agency in an attempt to explain
events, weird happenings, and misfortune to name a few.
Another central theme of the cognitive study of religion, which developed
in the wake of the nativist turn, involves the ways in which humans make
systematic inferences about various objects in our world. According to
Pascal Boyer, these inferences appear to be a part of our evolved conceptual
repertoire, and religious concepts often violate such inferences. For instance,
“a man who walks on water” violates deep assumptions we have about
physics—things normally sink. A “statue that listens to your prayers”
applies mental states to a human-made object. Such ideas are often disclosed
in narratives that are not only easy to remember, but also tend to be unverifiable and unfalsifiable. In some cases, these ideas appear to have a memory
advantage over more mundane ideas (e.g., “a squirrel that drinks water”)
and also over maximally strange ideas, which are too taxing to compute (e.g.,
“a couch that disappears on Wednesdays but only when the moon is new”).
This literature is now regularly referred to as minimally counterintuitive theory
(or MCI Theory). Mythological narratives often have such counterintuitive
agents, objects, and events in them, and their counterintuitiveness offers a
particular salience that heightens retention and transmission.
In an attempt to develop a cognitive theory of religious ritual, Harvey
Whitehouse articulated what he calls the “modes of religiosity.” This is a
theory that aims to understand how religious rituals fall into two general
categories (doctrinal and imagistic), which correspond to the two primary
memory systems (long-term memory and episodic memory). The two
categories of ritual are the doctrinal and imagistic, while the two memory
systems are long-term memory and episodic memory. On the one hand, the
“doctrinal mode”—frequently repetitive and low arousal rituals, such as
communion—corresponds to long-term memory insofar as it combines with
complex religious teachings to be woven into the worldview of the adherent.
On the other hand, the “imagistic mode”—infrequent but highly arousing
rituals, such as fire walking—corresponds to episodic memory insofar as
they are imbued with emotional salience that allows the adherent to retain
information from the particular ritual.
This research is largely devoted to making sense of the defining properties
of religious thought and behavior and what cognitive mechanisms are
responsible for those properties. However, these studies do not generally
focus on what religion does. Still, other studies have systematically assessed

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the functional effects of religion or religious priming, a line of work which
tests the Supernatural Monitoring or Punishment Hypotheses. Religious
priming has been shown to increase human cooperation and generosity,
as well as reduce rates of breaching social rules and expectations (e.g.,
cheating). Interestingly, this occurs when people are primed with punishing
god concepts; but when people are primed with forgiving god concepts,
they actually increase cheating behavior. Accordingly, research on punishing
gods—or what Ara Norenzayan calls “big gods”—points to an important
distal function of religion, which is to promote prosocial behavior and
minimize antisocial behavior.
THE BEHAVIORAL STUDY OF RELIGION
As we have already seen, because most early anthropologists agreed that
ritual behavior builds social solidarity, they argued that ritual was a building
block of sociality. Since then, anthropologists have shown that religion is
an important part of early socialization into groups. With adolescence as a
period of “experience expectant” learning, young individuals are at a prime
age for being ritually indoctrinated into groups and taught supernatural
worldviews. Religious training and indoctrination at this point in the
lifespan imbues cultural precepts and symbols with emotional valences,
which occurs just as the cognitive and motivational systems of the brain are
maturing. Besides inculcating religious worldviews, this process is central
to the internalization of the particular moral norms of society, which become
enlivened by being couched in religious narratives.
Regardless of whether the ritual concerns indoctrination, sacrifices, or rites
of passage, anthropologists observe that rituals are often extremely costly,
both physically and materially. For this reason, William Irons suggested
that it was the extreme costs of rituals—and all religious behaviors for that
matter—that makes them such reliable forms of communication. In other
words, rituals and other religious behaviors are costly signals that convey
the intentions and commitments of adherents. To demonstrate the logic
behind this observation, consider the problem of cooperation. Individuals
in all societies must decide whom to trust. Although people can tell one
another that they can be trusted, they can also lie about such commitments.
However, if persons are expected to undertake costly behaviors, which are
too hard to fake, then their commitments can be discerned. According to
Irons, religious behaviors constitute such costly acts. By going on vision
quests, performing initiation rites, or memorizing religious texts, a person
communicates to others that he or she is trustworthy and committed to
the group. Because these behaviors are difficult to fake, those who pay the
costs in performing them are rewarded with increased cooperation. This

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suggests that the costliest religious behaviors will occur where the payoffs
of cooperation are the greatest.
Research by Richard Sosis et al. has provided empirical support for the
costly signaling hypothesis of religious behaviors. For example, Sosis
undertook a series of empirical studies of nineteenth century US communes
and found that religious communes out-survived their secular counterparts.
Sosis has also found that levels of cooperation vary between religious and
secular kibbutzim in Israel, with the former being far more cooperative.
Studies have also found that groups engaged in long-term warfare, which
face the collective action problem of motivating warriors, often employ the
most taxing of initiation rites. Such research demonstrates that investments
in the form of religious behavior generally incur high levels of cooperation.
Moreover, studies along these lines support the hypothesis that religious
behavior can be adaptive.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The multifaceted nature of religion affords the scientific study of religion
enormous potential to bridge cognitive, psychological, behavioral, and ecological sciences. Given that religious beliefs and behaviors often appear to be
adaptive, and comprised of an evolved suite of cognitive mechanisms that
motivate diverse behavioral responses to variant ecologies, future work must
be multidisciplinary and simultaneously research multiple levels of religious
phenomena. On the one hand, future work must address the nature of religious development in individuals. On the other hand, research must explore
the nature of the evolution of supernatural belief systems, as well as the interaction of individual level and group level evolutionary dynamics. Important
to the study of religious phenomena is the systematic collection of ethnographic data, and that data collection at all levels of specificity allow for
cross-cultural comparison. In the present section, we point more specifically
to directions in which future research may lead.
THE ONTOGENY OF RELIGION
The developmental literature of religious cognition draws primarily from
the psychological literature, but important new work suggests that a considerable amount of religious cognition is quite intuitive. There is evidence
that children prefer teleological explanations even when their parents prefer other options. Moreover, children’s innate tendency toward belief in a
Cartesian duality of mind and body may prime them for other supernatural beliefs, such as souls, afterlife, or non-corporeal/invisible supernatural
agents. There is also emerging support of the prediction that children are

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

particularly adept at attributing supernatural agents with more knowledge
than normal humans. Rebekah Richert and Justin Barrett’s “preparedness
hypothesis” suggests that children effortlessly make sense of gods’ agency,
and recent work shows that children intuitively ascribe supernatural agents
with perceptual abilities above and beyond normal agents. Future research
would benefit from examining whether or not children intuitively ascribe
particular domains of knowledge to gods as well such as socially strategic
or moral information about people (see above). This would serve to further
unify the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion. Of course, there is
a dearth of cross-cultural developmental work conducted in non-Abrahamic
traditions. A likely outcome of such cross-cultural work would be a renewed
interest in the foundational works of van Gennep and Turner on rites of passage and transition.
Recent work has also acknowledged that both natural and supernatural
explanations for events can and do coexist harmoniously in our minds. For
example, while in the developing world there is now a clear understanding of
the biological aspects of the transmission of HIV, witchcraft is still cited as an
explanation for it. This new understanding, along with evidence that supernatural explanations actually increase rather than decrease with age, suggests that as children develop they are able to conceive of more sophisticated
causal explanations, combining their growing understanding of the natural
world with their accumulated cultural knowledge of theological specifics.
Future research must acknowledge the role of supernatural causal explanation as integral, rather than a simplistic mode that is quickly outgrown.
COGNITION, CULTURE, AND COMMUNICATION
Human cognitive representational systems are remarkably complex with
structures still largely mysterious to scientists, but models of cognitive architecture will undoubtedly become more refined as time passes. Similarly,
cognitive scientists of religion are still a very long way off from understanding the cross-cultural variation in religious cognition. As contemporary
cognitive scientists of religion largely focus on Western populations to assess
the merit of their theories, one central question that needs to be pursued
is whether or not religious cognition varies across populations to any
significant degree. Of course, it does so superficially insofar as people have
different deities, varying models of their gods’ knowledge and concerns,
mythological traditions and so forth, but how various pan-human faculties
interact with acquired habits and representational structures requires investigation. Do different populations employ different cognitive systems when
reasoning about supernatural agents or rituals? More concretely, if supernatural agents are perceived to be the spirits of ancestors, are kin recognition

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systems engaged? Are spatial systems employed when reasoning about
totemic spirits? Are the cognitive systems designed to make sense of human
dominance hierarchies triggered when deities are seen as all-powerful? Such
questions bring cognitive concerns to bear on the anthropological tradition.
Such an approach would wed concern for cognitive systems with context.
Also key to progress is uncovering how, when, and why people communicate religious ideas to each other. While cognitive approaches largely
focus on the content of religious communication, and cultural evolutionary
approaches to learning focus on transmission and retention biases people
have, we have little understanding of the contexts in which people glean
religious information. One area of importance is the cultural evolutionary
approach of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson and their students. Cultural
evolutionary theorists regularly discuss a number of transmission biases
that maximize the “cultural fitness” of social learning. The prestige bias, for
instance, is the tendency to replicate behaviors and beliefs that are expressed
by successful individuals. In the case of religion, it should be fairly clear
that religious leadership often expresses, transmits, maintains, and modifies
doctrine. The conformist bias on the other hand explains that people will
tend to follow what the majority is doing. Tendencies for conformist learning
inform mental models just as much (if not more so) than what we learn from
our elders and other prestigious individuals.
RELIGION, REPRODUCTION, AND DIVERSITY
It is also becoming increasingly important to investigate the nature and
effects of different levels of parental investment in religious socialization
on adult behavior, particularly on adult reproductive behavior. Research
has shown that religious individuals exhibit higher levels of fertility than
nonreligious individuals, and that there is extraordinary variation in fertility
levels across religious groups. The mechanisms by which religions positively impact fertility levels are unclear, and future work must examine how
religious beliefs impact fertility, how energetically costly religious behavior
is coordinated with reproductive pursuits, and how religious communities
foster cooperative breeding niches.
Understanding the relationship between religion and fertility is also crucial
to understanding why some religions spread and stabilize more successfully
than others. Recent research by Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill demonstrates that the amount of religious diversity in a geographic region is positively correlated with pathogen stress in the physical environment. While
we have focused here on the variation of religious systems as responses to
diverse socioecological environments, in a rapidly globalizing world, other

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religions and the degree of religious diversity in the environment are becoming increasingly important selective pressures that likely shape the evolution
of religious systems.
Another important avenue for future research in an increasingly global
world is the relationship between religion and human rights, especially as
institutions and inter-cultural practices. In this respect, the main issues are
the following. First, it remains an open question whether human rights,
as a global institution, can remain divorced of religion, as in the West, or
whether it requires religion to have moral traction in nonwestern societies.
Second, debates continue between anthropologists over the foundations of
human rights: namely, whether human rights are universalizing because
they emerge from—and countenance—world religions, or whether human
rights are a new form of ethics for the globalized world. Third, many
anthropologists are finding that human rights are only realizable for cultures
outside of the West if they are grounded in local religious systems. However,
it remains unclear what types of religious systems are generally accepting
or rejecting of human rights claims, and why. Finally, it is unknown how
human rights will influence religious systems, and vice versa.
EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES OF RELIGION
If it is the case that religious systems do solve locally specific problems that
social and natural environments pose for people, how this is accomplished
is likely to generate some of the more compelling debates within the field.
As it currently stands, cognitive anthropologists attempt to understand the
structures of the human mind responsible for the content and distribution of
religious concepts in attempts to uncover cognitive biases which all humans
share. However, behavioral approaches are generally unconcerned about
internal motivational states, evolved cognitive mechanisms, and mental
models pertaining to religion. Cultural evolutionary approaches to religion
focus on the source of transmission. In particular, who transmits ideas
plays a very important role in which ideas are retained and made prevalent
throughout a population. A more dynamic view attempts to come to terms
with all of these processes and how the content of religion corresponds to the
aforementioned problems found in our environments. Some have attempted
to begin to make sense of religion dynamically by appealing to religion as a
niche in its own right; people must navigate religious environments, which
impose their own rules, regulations, expectations, and consequences for
breaching them.
An area of particular interest with potential links to ritual behavior is
inter-personal synchrony. Research into the behavioral impact of synchronous action provides a possible proximate mechanism by which rituals

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may lead to social bonding. It appears that synchronous movement as
well as synchronous vocalizations can enhance feelings of affiliation, boost
trust and cooperation, promote compassion and helping, and lead to more
generally positive affect toward fellow group members. Many rituals feature
synchronous behavior including music, chanting, dancing, or other forms
of rhythmic and/or vocal entrainment. This could well be one way in
which religious participation leads to social cohesion, and may even be
one primary mechanism by which the costly signaling theory of religion
operates. Long bouts of synchronous behavior can also lead to altered states
of ecstatic consciousness, during which participants may feel both a “loss of
self” and a simultaneous “connection with other.” This state, likely mediated
by physiological and hormonal changes similar to those brought about by
the use of psychoactive substances, could be part of a process in which
an individual identity becomes extended or merged psychologically with
a group identity. Future research into this phenomenon should examine
both the physiology underlying the effect by measuring changes in relevant
hormones as well as exploring areas of the brain that could be involved
in such responses. It is possible that there is an important role for parts of
the brain involved in Theory of Mind, including mirror neurons, which are
known to be active when individuals observe others’ actions.
Despite the progress in understanding how religion benefits people, the
social sciences of religion have little understanding of cases when religious
systems fail people. In such cases, are members investing too much into their
religion? Are there cases when religious costs are not expensive enough to
reliably indicate commitment and therefore the religion dissolves? Are there
cases where the relationship between ritual and belief are in some way qualitatively incompatible such that a system cannot last? If so, what were the
evolutionary processes that lead to these outcomes? Such research may be
primarily limited to the historical record, but nevertheless it is an important
missing piece for understanding why it is that people are religious.
METHODOLOGY
Regardless of the theoretical orientation of the research, we are in dire need
of thorough and directly comparable ethnography. Cross-cultural work is of
the utmost importance, particularly at a time when traditional economies and
worldviews are increasingly becoming more globalized. As anthropologists
have long known, important elements of religious worldviews correspond
to local economy and social structure. As such, religious diversity around
the world is quite likely to be reduced in significant ways. A reinvigorated
ethnographic science of religion is in order, and we are sorely in need of rich,
descriptive, and comparable data for testing predictions borne out by the

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social sciences of religion. This requires a systematic regime of data collection
in order to craft consensus models of what it is people claim they believe in
and how these models have some impact on the world. Such an undertaking
would be quite expensive in terms of travel, organization, and management,
but without it, our understanding of variation in religion will remain impoverished.
A related concern that warrants consideration is the often-expressed lack of
methodological rigor in the data collection process of ethnography. Crudely
put, there is a gap between qualitative and quantitative ethnographic data
that needs to be narrowed in order to make progress. A new generation of
ethnographers has emerged who embrace quantitative data collection in
order to frame their focus of studies in such a way as to make studies directly
comparable and falsifiable. Emma Cohen’s work among Afro-Brazilian cults
and Dimitris Xygalatas’ work with fire-walkers in Greece and Spain point
to the fact that not only are ethnographers enriching our understanding of
particular traditions, but they are also paving the way for approaches which
inform concerns for cognitive universals and the evolutionary forces which
shape their expression.
Regardless of the theoretical background or methodology of the research,
the future social scientific study of religion has as a bright future as it does
an illustrious past. Its study has the potential to unify what are now distinct approaches into a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental
elements of human social life. While we cannot know for certain what the
future study of religion will bear, we have faith that it will be fruitful.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Purzycki was supported by the SSHRC-funded Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) during the preparation of this essay. Sosis
thanks and acknowledges support from a CTI Fellowship (Evolution and
Human Nature), ESRC Large Grant (REF RES-060-25-0085) entitled “Ritual,
Community, and Conflict.” and the James Barnett Endowment for Humanistic Anthropology.
FURTHER READING
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New
York, NY: Basic Books.
Guthrie, S. E. (1995). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Lansing, J. S. (2007). Priests and programmers: Technologies of power in the engineered
landscape of Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Rappaport, R. A. (1999). Ritual and religion in the making of humanity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Reynolds, V., & Tanner, R. (1995). The social ecology of religion (2nd ed.). New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Turner, V. (1995). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Hawthorne, NY:
Aldine de Gruyter.
Voland, E., & Schiefenhövel, W. (Eds.) (2009). The biological evolution of religious mind
and behavior. Berlin, Germany: Springer.
Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of religiosity: A cognitive theory of religious transmission.
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Winzeler, R. L. (2007). Anthropology and religion: What we know, think, and question.
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

BENJAMIN GRANT PURZYCKI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Benjamin Grant Purzycki earned his PhD. in anthropology at the University
of Connecticut. He works on the evolution of religious systems and religious
cognition, particularly how people make sense of their gods’ minds. He has
conducted fieldwork in the Tyva Republic (Tuva) and has published works
in a variety of journals including Current Anthropology, Cognitive Science, Religion, Brain and Behavior, and Skeptic Magazine.
Professional webpage: http://bgpurzycki.wordpress.com/
Curriculum Vitae: http://bgpurzycki.wordpress.com/cv/
JORDAN KIPER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Jordan Kiper is a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Connecticut. He works on human sociality and cooperation, collective violence, and
the evolution of religion and morality. He has conducted fieldwork in the
Balkans.
JOHN SHAVER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
John Shaver is a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Laboratory for the
Experimental Research of Religion, Masaryk University. He works on understanding intracultural variation in ritual behavior, the relationships between
religion and fertility, and the evolution of syncretic religions. He has conducted fieldwork in Fiji.
DANIEL N. FINKEL SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Daniel N. Finkel is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at
the University of Connecticut. His research interest is the impact of engaging
in synchronous action on social cognition, particularly cooperation and trust.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

RICHARD SOSIS SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Richard Sosis is James Barnett Professor of Humanistic Anthropology and
Director of the Evolution, Cognition, and Culture Program at the University
of Connecticut. His work has focused on the evolution of cooperation and the
adaptive significance of religious behavior, with particular interest in the relationship between ritual and intragroup cooperation. To explore these issues,
he has conducted fieldwork with remote cooperative fishers in the Federated States of Micronesia and with various communities throughout Israel,
including Ultra-Orthodox Jews and members of secular and religious kibbutzim. He is cofounder and coeditor of the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior,
which publishes research on the biological study of religion.
RELATED ESSAYS
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation (Sociology), Kevin J. Christiano
The Inherence Heuristic: Generating Everyday Explanations (Psychology),
Andrei Cimpian
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge
Understanding the Adaptive Functions of Morality from a Cognitive Psychological Perspective (Psychology), James Dungan and Liane Young
Micro-Cultures (Sociology), Gary Alan Fine
The Neurobiology and Physiology of Emotions: A Developmental Perspective (Psychology), Sarah S. Kahle and Paul D. Hastings
Regime Type and Terrorist Attacks (Political Science), Kara Kingma et al.
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology (Archaeology), Kirsi O. Lorentz
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker



Religion
BENJAMIN GRANT PURZYCKI, JORDAN KIPER, JOHN SHAVER,
DANIEL N. FINKEL, and RICHARD SOSIS

Abstract
Religions are complex systems that can adapt to diverse environments because of
the dynamic relationship of their internal parts. The most fundamental of these parts
includes supernatural beliefs, rituals, and myths. The social scientific study of religion focuses on these parts and builds on previous generations of research to provide
distal explanations for religion as a dynamic phenomenon. In recent years, interest
in the social science of religion has turned to the cognitive and behavioral studies
of religion. The cognitive science of religion documents the mental organization and
structure of religious thought, while the behavioral science of religion focuses on ritual behavior as the building block of sociality. Key issues for future research include
the ontogeny of religion, the cognitive and cross-cultural representation of religious
concepts, the relationship between religion and reproduction, and the evolution of
religion. With these new frontiers have come a variety of novel methodologies but
also an emphasis on the need for comparative ethnography.

INTRODUCTION
The social scientific study of religion has an extensive and diverse history that
began in the late nineteenth century. Early cultural anthropologists expended
considerable effort documenting and making sense of the religious traditions
found around the world. Such research continues to this day with additional
focus on understanding the evolutionary, cognitive, and behavioral bases
for religious traditions. Members of virtually every human community have
complex supernatural beliefs and devote significant resources toward ritualistic behavior. Variations in such beliefs and behaviors are the products of
cognitive and behavioral developments that arose in the course of human
evolution. Provided the centrality of religion to the human experience, it is
no wonder that religion has captured the attention of generations of anthropologists and remains an important avenue of research today.
Although religions exhibit systematic variation, anthropologists observe
that religions are not the static and conservative systems that some scholars
of religion presume them to be. Instead, religions are complex systems that
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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can acclimate to diverse environments, largely due to the dynamic interaction of their interrelated parts. The three most important of these parts, which
we will discuss throughout this piece, are the following:
•

•

•

Supernatural beliefs: beliefs in discarnate agents who interact with and
possess knowledge about the world, and beliefs about forces and
essences that permeate this and unseen worlds.
Rituals: patterned behaviors that are explicitly directed toward nonempirical or supernatural agencies to achieve some goal on behalf of participants.
Myths: narratives of unseen events that often explain natural and supernatural phenomena.

The cross-cultural examination of these features of religion, and others
(e.g., taboo, moral obligations, authorities), has revealed to anthropologists
that religion appears to have a phylogenetic history, with recurrent patterns
of systemic variation across environments. Both of these aspects, in addition
to evidence that religion can promote survival and reproductive success,
suggest that religion has an evolutionary origin as an adaptive system with
advantages for individuals. Of course, religions often appear to be quite
taxing for participants and even counterproductive to their own self-interest,
which poses a central and vexing problem for social scientists of religion:
If religion has a distal explanation (i.e., promoting individual survival and
reproduction), what is it?
In this essay, we provide an overview of the intellectual foundations and
social scientific approaches to understanding religion. This overview is then
followed by a discussion of contemporary research and how it draws from
and develops the previous generations’ insights. We focus specifically on the
cognitive and evolutionary study of religion, both of which offer new insights
into the complex relationships between mind, culture, and the social and natural forces that shape them. We then turn to a discussion of what lies on the
horizon for future endeavors.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The term religion comes from the Latin root religare, which means “to
bind.” However, what is being bound, and to what? Although this question
remains, and is likely to remain, open to various interpretations, social
scientists largely agree that religion binds individuals to their community
through (among other things) myths, rituals, and beliefs. Discovering how
religion “binds” communities is one of the core pursuits of contemporary
research, which suggests that religion has been at the center of human

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3

communities for some time. Archaeological evidence in the form of burials
from the Upper Paleolithic suggests that humans have practiced religion for
at least 30,000 years. Furthermore, anthropologists have long observed that,
contrary to modern societies in the West, where there is a clear demarcation
between religious and secular life, traditional cultures do not necessarily
make this distinction and religious beliefs and practices often permeate
all domains of life. As a result, anthropologists have spent considerable
effort documenting religion as a means to describe other cultures, and also
outlining the manners in which religion shapes the very fabric of society.
Following traditional studies of religion in western history (e.g., Herodotus,
Euphemerus, Denis Diderot, Max Müller), early anthropologists, such as
Edward Burnett Tylor and Sir James Frazer, studied the function of magic
and myths in non-western societies. They surmised that magic and myths
were central to most societies, because they together served as a kind of
“primitive science” and substantiated beliefs in supernatural beings. These
beings were not only thought to control nature and human affairs, but also
the order of society itself.
Of course, these early studies were rather crude representations of religion
and largely based on “arm chair” speculations. It was not until the work
of Émile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown that
the anthropology of religion truly began in its own right. All three theorists recognized that myths were not primitive sciences or naïve worldviews,
but rather narratives that impart content and semantic understanding to ritual. In turn, ritual serves as the heart of religion insofar as it ameliorates
anxieties, promotes collective conscience, and encourages social solidarity,
all of which bind members to one another with deep and abiding loyalty.
For example, Malinowski observed that religious rituals among Trobriand
Islanders functioned to increase social participation in the social and economic transactions of the community, and also to ameliorate individual anxieties over gardening and deep sea fishing. In short, these scholars adopted
varieties of functionalism—one being the idea that society is comprised of
parts that work together for stability—and ascribed religion in particular
with social and individual functions.
Subsequent anthropologists built on these seminal observations. For
instance, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Clifford Geertz observed that rituals
bind communities together by endowing them with common symbols,
moods, and concepts, which engender the community with a collective
understanding of reality. Likewise, Victor Turner, among others, noted
that ritual behavior is fundamentally communicative, conveying messages
between group members, the most significant of which is commitment to
group membership and beliefs. Building on this insight, Roy Rappaport
showed that because ritual signals acceptance of community values and

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individual responsibilities therein, it constitutes the very nature of the social
contract. Modern scholars continue to expand on the importance of ritual as
a means to group ethos and social institutions with evidence that it promotes
high levels of cooperation and large-scale social organization.
In addition to research on the relationship between myth and ritual, and the
value of ritual for cooperation, considerable research has focused on supernatural beliefs, namely, the structure and forms of such beliefs. Both Sigmund
Freud and Émile Durkheim believed that supernatural beliefs arise from, and
are constrained by, the projection of human social interaction onto unseen
agents, and the desire to rely on such agents to make the unexplainable intelligible. Clifford Geertz extended this intellectualist stance of religion insofar
as he characterized religion as a symbolic system wreathed in truth-value
(i.e., treated as being true rather than being internally understood as merely
symbolic). This led many anthropologists to focus on religion as a system of
meaning making and to promote methodological interpretivism in order to
make sense of how other societies made sense of their worlds.
Following the ethnographic tradition of Franz Boas, anthropologists in
the early twentieth century expended considerable effort documenting the
enormous cross-cultural variation in religious systems. Perhaps the most
important outcome of this work is the recognition that the nature of religious
diversity is not arbitrary, but rather reliably reflects significant features of
socio-political organization and ecology. To illustrate, anthropologists often
recognize four major types of religious institutions: shamanic, communal,
Olympian or polytheistic, and monotheistic. Early studies showed that the
main predictors of these institutions were the following: subsistence strategies (e.g., foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, and agriculture), economic
specialization, sovereignty of decision-making groups, and the presence or
absence of written culture. For example, foragers were often shamanistic,
horticulturalists and pastoralists were often communal, and agriculturalists
were often Olympian or monotheistic. Later anthropological research has
revealed remarkable correspondence between religious institutions and
cultural variation. For instance, shamanic religions often focus on individual
health concerns, group cooperation, and ecological management. Communal
religions unite different clans or lineages under ancestor or totemic worship.
Many polytheistic religions exist in large and interconnected communities
with priesthoods dedicated to religious knowledge. Monotheistic religions
typically exist in state-level societies and, unlike other religious systems,
worship a transcendent god who places significant moral demands on large
populations.
However, because cultures and religious systems are not isolated phenomena, most cultural research on religion in the late twentieth century has
focused less on broad classifications and more on the components of religion

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5

in cultural contexts. For instance, inspired by Arnold van Gennep, Victor
Turner showed that beliefs concerning rites of passage have a common structure and are always embedded in local understandings of change, transition,
and identity. In so doing, Turner not only demonstrated that rites of passage
are structurally similar across cultures, but also that they correspond to key
features of their respective societies. Such research continued in the tradition
of Boas by embracing particularism (i.e., documenting a specific culture)
but went beyond it by crafting models that were applicable to multiple
traditions. For instance, Roy D’Andrade and Melford Spiro found that the
relationship between gods and their believers tended to reflect the nature
of the parent–child relationships characteristic of the society in question. In
a similar vein, Guy Swanson demonstrated that high gods and punishing
gods vary across cultures but are disproportionately found among large,
agricultural, and socially stratified societies. These findings suggest that
even though religious systems are locally unique, they are neither arbitrary
nor unbound collections of beliefs and behaviors. Rather, religious systems
are at the very least correlated with specific environments, but quite likely
change in order to overcome problems in specific environments.
This observation dovetailed nicely with the cognitive revolution and generative linguistics, which thereafter prompted anthropologists to embrace a
more universalistic view of cultural systems. It once again became acceptable
for anthropologists to explore the instinctual bases of culture and to isolate
particular faculties constituting human nature. However, inspired by the
nativist turn, anthropologists also undertook wide-ranging investigations
into the complex relationship between culture and human cognition. At
about the same time, evolutionary psychology emerged as a new science of
the mind. With the aim of understanding how evolution constrained modes
of cognition, evolutionary psychology postulates and tests aspects of human
thought, such as propensities, biases, predispositions, and generative faculties. In so doing, it has identified a host of mental faculties that are prevalent
today but evolved to overcome the adaptive challenges of our ancestors. It
was in this context of inquiry—that is, amid the study of cultural variation
and cognitive evolution—that the cognitive science of religion was born.
Presently, there are disagreements about the evolutionary processes that
led to the emergence of religion. Generally, cognitive approaches assume
that the mental faculties required for religious concept formation and
retention evolved for other purposes, and that there is no specialized mental
faculty devoted to religion. As such, many cognitive researchers treat
religion as a by-product of evolved cognition rather than an adaptation in
and of itself, despite the widespread recognition that religious beliefs often
promote adaptive behavior, even in modern contexts. Behavioral researchers
typically argue that religion is indeed an adaptation that displays signs

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of fitness-enhancing qualities. Although the general consensus is that
religion is impossible without preadaptations and biological constituents,
there remains considerable debate regarding the status of religion as an
adaptation.
With that in mind, the following section centers on the latest research in
the social scientific study of religion. Specifically, it offers a brief survey of
contemporary understandings regarding the cognitive and behavioral study
of religious systems, which remain the two most distinctive forms of inquiry
today.
CUTTING EDGE RESEARCH
THE COGNITIVE STUDY OF RELIGION
Contemporary research on supernatural belief focuses on documenting the
cognitive organization and structure of religious thought. Beginning with
Stewart Guthrie, cognitive scientists of religion have attempted to understand how supernatural beliefs are constrained by the limits of cognitive
processing, why humans attribute mental states to entities such as gods or
spirits, and why such entities are so often concerned about what people do.
Significantly, research spearheaded by Jesse Bering, Pascal Boyer, Dominic
Johnson, Ara Norenzayan, and Azim Shariff shows that supernatural agents
are particularly concerned with socially strategic information and breaches
of prosocial contracts.
Many within the cognitive science of religion hold that the human mind
has domain-specific organization and is comprised of modules that evolved
for handling specific types of information. For instance, the cognitive mechanisms designed to compute linguistic information are not the same as those
used to make sense of spatial depth or to detect pain. With foundations rooted
in this perspective, researchers began to apply evolutionary theory to these
proposed mental faculties in order to investigate how such faculties may
have been adaptive in our past. As such, current research devotes a considerable amount of attention to understanding the universal qualities of religious
concepts by appealing to the cognitive systems that all humans share.
The mind’s ability to attribute mental states to other entities is central
to contemporary understandings of religious cognition. Humans do this
so effortlessly that it can often be difficult to convince ourselves that
something does not have mental states. Stewart Guthrie laid the theoretical
foundations for this work, arguing that promiscuous agency-detection and
anthropomorphism undergird a considerable amount of religious thought.
Humans are equipped with a variety of agency-detection systems, often
collectively referred to as a theory of mind. While there is considerable

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7

debate over whether or not nonhuman primates have the ability to detect
internal mental states of other beings, it is quite clear that humans rapidly
make sense of things by appealing to the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and
perceptions of other beings. Many researchers, including Justin Barrett and
Scott Atran, argue that supernatural agent concepts are natural extensions
of these systems insofar as people assign agency in an attempt to explain
events, weird happenings, and misfortune to name a few.
Another central theme of the cognitive study of religion, which developed
in the wake of the nativist turn, involves the ways in which humans make
systematic inferences about various objects in our world. According to
Pascal Boyer, these inferences appear to be a part of our evolved conceptual
repertoire, and religious concepts often violate such inferences. For instance,
“a man who walks on water” violates deep assumptions we have about
physics—things normally sink. A “statue that listens to your prayers”
applies mental states to a human-made object. Such ideas are often disclosed
in narratives that are not only easy to remember, but also tend to be unverifiable and unfalsifiable. In some cases, these ideas appear to have a memory
advantage over more mundane ideas (e.g., “a squirrel that drinks water”)
and also over maximally strange ideas, which are too taxing to compute (e.g.,
“a couch that disappears on Wednesdays but only when the moon is new”).
This literature is now regularly referred to as minimally counterintuitive theory
(or MCI Theory). Mythological narratives often have such counterintuitive
agents, objects, and events in them, and their counterintuitiveness offers a
particular salience that heightens retention and transmission.
In an attempt to develop a cognitive theory of religious ritual, Harvey
Whitehouse articulated what he calls the “modes of religiosity.” This is a
theory that aims to understand how religious rituals fall into two general
categories (doctrinal and imagistic), which correspond to the two primary
memory systems (long-term memory and episodic memory). The two
categories of ritual are the doctrinal and imagistic, while the two memory
systems are long-term memory and episodic memory. On the one hand, the
“doctrinal mode”—frequently repetitive and low arousal rituals, such as
communion—corresponds to long-term memory insofar as it combines with
complex religious teachings to be woven into the worldview of the adherent.
On the other hand, the “imagistic mode”—infrequent but highly arousing
rituals, such as fire walking—corresponds to episodic memory insofar as
they are imbued with emotional salience that allows the adherent to retain
information from the particular ritual.
This research is largely devoted to making sense of the defining properties
of religious thought and behavior and what cognitive mechanisms are
responsible for those properties. However, these studies do not generally
focus on what religion does. Still, other studies have systematically assessed

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the functional effects of religion or religious priming, a line of work which
tests the Supernatural Monitoring or Punishment Hypotheses. Religious
priming has been shown to increase human cooperation and generosity,
as well as reduce rates of breaching social rules and expectations (e.g.,
cheating). Interestingly, this occurs when people are primed with punishing
god concepts; but when people are primed with forgiving god concepts,
they actually increase cheating behavior. Accordingly, research on punishing
gods—or what Ara Norenzayan calls “big gods”—points to an important
distal function of religion, which is to promote prosocial behavior and
minimize antisocial behavior.
THE BEHAVIORAL STUDY OF RELIGION
As we have already seen, because most early anthropologists agreed that
ritual behavior builds social solidarity, they argued that ritual was a building
block of sociality. Since then, anthropologists have shown that religion is
an important part of early socialization into groups. With adolescence as a
period of “experience expectant” learning, young individuals are at a prime
age for being ritually indoctrinated into groups and taught supernatural
worldviews. Religious training and indoctrination at this point in the
lifespan imbues cultural precepts and symbols with emotional valences,
which occurs just as the cognitive and motivational systems of the brain are
maturing. Besides inculcating religious worldviews, this process is central
to the internalization of the particular moral norms of society, which become
enlivened by being couched in religious narratives.
Regardless of whether the ritual concerns indoctrination, sacrifices, or rites
of passage, anthropologists observe that rituals are often extremely costly,
both physically and materially. For this reason, William Irons suggested
that it was the extreme costs of rituals—and all religious behaviors for that
matter—that makes them such reliable forms of communication. In other
words, rituals and other religious behaviors are costly signals that convey
the intentions and commitments of adherents. To demonstrate the logic
behind this observation, consider the problem of cooperation. Individuals
in all societies must decide whom to trust. Although people can tell one
another that they can be trusted, they can also lie about such commitments.
However, if persons are expected to undertake costly behaviors, which are
too hard to fake, then their commitments can be discerned. According to
Irons, religious behaviors constitute such costly acts. By going on vision
quests, performing initiation rites, or memorizing religious texts, a person
communicates to others that he or she is trustworthy and committed to
the group. Because these behaviors are difficult to fake, those who pay the
costs in performing them are rewarded with increased cooperation. This

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9

suggests that the costliest religious behaviors will occur where the payoffs
of cooperation are the greatest.
Research by Richard Sosis et al. has provided empirical support for the
costly signaling hypothesis of religious behaviors. For example, Sosis
undertook a series of empirical studies of nineteenth century US communes
and found that religious communes out-survived their secular counterparts.
Sosis has also found that levels of cooperation vary between religious and
secular kibbutzim in Israel, with the former being far more cooperative.
Studies have also found that groups engaged in long-term warfare, which
face the collective action problem of motivating warriors, often employ the
most taxing of initiation rites. Such research demonstrates that investments
in the form of religious behavior generally incur high levels of cooperation.
Moreover, studies along these lines support the hypothesis that religious
behavior can be adaptive.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The multifaceted nature of religion affords the scientific study of religion
enormous potential to bridge cognitive, psychological, behavioral, and ecological sciences. Given that religious beliefs and behaviors often appear to be
adaptive, and comprised of an evolved suite of cognitive mechanisms that
motivate diverse behavioral responses to variant ecologies, future work must
be multidisciplinary and simultaneously research multiple levels of religious
phenomena. On the one hand, future work must address the nature of religious development in individuals. On the other hand, research must explore
the nature of the evolution of supernatural belief systems, as well as the interaction of individual level and group level evolutionary dynamics. Important
to the study of religious phenomena is the systematic collection of ethnographic data, and that data collection at all levels of specificity allow for
cross-cultural comparison. In the present section, we point more specifically
to directions in which future research may lead.
THE ONTOGENY OF RELIGION
The developmental literature of religious cognition draws primarily from
the psychological literature, but important new work suggests that a considerable amount of religious cognition is quite intuitive. There is evidence
that children prefer teleological explanations even when their parents prefer other options. Moreover, children’s innate tendency toward belief in a
Cartesian duality of mind and body may prime them for other supernatural beliefs, such as souls, afterlife, or non-corporeal/invisible supernatural
agents. There is also emerging support of the prediction that children are

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

particularly adept at attributing supernatural agents with more knowledge
than normal humans. Rebekah Richert and Justin Barrett’s “preparedness
hypothesis” suggests that children effortlessly make sense of gods’ agency,
and recent work shows that children intuitively ascribe supernatural agents
with perceptual abilities above and beyond normal agents. Future research
would benefit from examining whether or not children intuitively ascribe
particular domains of knowledge to gods as well such as socially strategic
or moral information about people (see above). This would serve to further
unify the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion. Of course, there is
a dearth of cross-cultural developmental work conducted in non-Abrahamic
traditions. A likely outcome of such cross-cultural work would be a renewed
interest in the foundational works of van Gennep and Turner on rites of passage and transition.
Recent work has also acknowledged that both natural and supernatural
explanations for events can and do coexist harmoniously in our minds. For
example, while in the developing world there is now a clear understanding of
the biological aspects of the transmission of HIV, witchcraft is still cited as an
explanation for it. This new understanding, along with evidence that supernatural explanations actually increase rather than decrease with age, suggests that as children develop they are able to conceive of more sophisticated
causal explanations, combining their growing understanding of the natural
world with their accumulated cultural knowledge of theological specifics.
Future research must acknowledge the role of supernatural causal explanation as integral, rather than a simplistic mode that is quickly outgrown.
COGNITION, CULTURE, AND COMMUNICATION
Human cognitive representational systems are remarkably complex with
structures still largely mysterious to scientists, but models of cognitive architecture will undoubtedly become more refined as time passes. Similarly,
cognitive scientists of religion are still a very long way off from understanding the cross-cultural variation in religious cognition. As contemporary
cognitive scientists of religion largely focus on Western populations to assess
the merit of their theories, one central question that needs to be pursued
is whether or not religious cognition varies across populations to any
significant degree. Of course, it does so superficially insofar as people have
different deities, varying models of their gods’ knowledge and concerns,
mythological traditions and so forth, but how various pan-human faculties
interact with acquired habits and representational structures requires investigation. Do different populations employ different cognitive systems when
reasoning about supernatural agents or rituals? More concretely, if supernatural agents are perceived to be the spirits of ancestors, are kin recognition

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systems engaged? Are spatial systems employed when reasoning about
totemic spirits? Are the cognitive systems designed to make sense of human
dominance hierarchies triggered when deities are seen as all-powerful? Such
questions bring cognitive concerns to bear on the anthropological tradition.
Such an approach would wed concern for cognitive systems with context.
Also key to progress is uncovering how, when, and why people communicate religious ideas to each other. While cognitive approaches largely
focus on the content of religious communication, and cultural evolutionary
approaches to learning focus on transmission and retention biases people
have, we have little understanding of the contexts in which people glean
religious information. One area of importance is the cultural evolutionary
approach of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson and their students. Cultural
evolutionary theorists regularly discuss a number of transmission biases
that maximize the “cultural fitness” of social learning. The prestige bias, for
instance, is the tendency to replicate behaviors and beliefs that are expressed
by successful individuals. In the case of religion, it should be fairly clear
that religious leadership often expresses, transmits, maintains, and modifies
doctrine. The conformist bias on the other hand explains that people will
tend to follow what the majority is doing. Tendencies for conformist learning
inform mental models just as much (if not more so) than what we learn from
our elders and other prestigious individuals.
RELIGION, REPRODUCTION, AND DIVERSITY
It is also becoming increasingly important to investigate the nature and
effects of different levels of parental investment in religious socialization
on adult behavior, particularly on adult reproductive behavior. Research
has shown that religious individuals exhibit higher levels of fertility than
nonreligious individuals, and that there is extraordinary variation in fertility
levels across religious groups. The mechanisms by which religions positively impact fertility levels are unclear, and future work must examine how
religious beliefs impact fertility, how energetically costly religious behavior
is coordinated with reproductive pursuits, and how religious communities
foster cooperative breeding niches.
Understanding the relationship between religion and fertility is also crucial
to understanding why some religions spread and stabilize more successfully
than others. Recent research by Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill demonstrates that the amount of religious diversity in a geographic region is positively correlated with pathogen stress in the physical environment. While
we have focused here on the variation of religious systems as responses to
diverse socioecological environments, in a rapidly globalizing world, other

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religions and the degree of religious diversity in the environment are becoming increasingly important selective pressures that likely shape the evolution
of religious systems.
Another important avenue for future research in an increasingly global
world is the relationship between religion and human rights, especially as
institutions and inter-cultural practices. In this respect, the main issues are
the following. First, it remains an open question whether human rights,
as a global institution, can remain divorced of religion, as in the West, or
whether it requires religion to have moral traction in nonwestern societies.
Second, debates continue between anthropologists over the foundations of
human rights: namely, whether human rights are universalizing because
they emerge from—and countenance—world religions, or whether human
rights are a new form of ethics for the globalized world. Third, many
anthropologists are finding that human rights are only realizable for cultures
outside of the West if they are grounded in local religious systems. However,
it remains unclear what types of religious systems are generally accepting
or rejecting of human rights claims, and why. Finally, it is unknown how
human rights will influence religious systems, and vice versa.
EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES OF RELIGION
If it is the case that religious systems do solve locally specific problems that
social and natural environments pose for people, how this is accomplished
is likely to generate some of the more compelling debates within the field.
As it currently stands, cognitive anthropologists attempt to understand the
structures of the human mind responsible for the content and distribution of
religious concepts in attempts to uncover cognitive biases which all humans
share. However, behavioral approaches are generally unconcerned about
internal motivational states, evolved cognitive mechanisms, and mental
models pertaining to religion. Cultural evolutionary approaches to religion
focus on the source of transmission. In particular, who transmits ideas
plays a very important role in which ideas are retained and made prevalent
throughout a population. A more dynamic view attempts to come to terms
with all of these processes and how the content of religion corresponds to the
aforementioned problems found in our environments. Some have attempted
to begin to make sense of religion dynamically by appealing to religion as a
niche in its own right; people must navigate religious environments, which
impose their own rules, regulations, expectations, and consequences for
breaching them.
An area of particular interest with potential links to ritual behavior is
inter-personal synchrony. Research into the behavioral impact of synchronous action provides a possible proximate mechanism by which rituals

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may lead to social bonding. It appears that synchronous movement as
well as synchronous vocalizations can enhance feelings of affiliation, boost
trust and cooperation, promote compassion and helping, and lead to more
generally positive affect toward fellow group members. Many rituals feature
synchronous behavior including music, chanting, dancing, or other forms
of rhythmic and/or vocal entrainment. This could well be one way in
which religious participation leads to social cohesion, and may even be
one primary mechanism by which the costly signaling theory of religion
operates. Long bouts of synchronous behavior can also lead to altered states
of ecstatic consciousness, during which participants may feel both a “loss of
self” and a simultaneous “connection with other.” This state, likely mediated
by physiological and hormonal changes similar to those brought about by
the use of psychoactive substances, could be part of a process in which
an individual identity becomes extended or merged psychologically with
a group identity. Future research into this phenomenon should examine
both the physiology underlying the effect by measuring changes in relevant
hormones as well as exploring areas of the brain that could be involved
in such responses. It is possible that there is an important role for parts of
the brain involved in Theory of Mind, including mirror neurons, which are
known to be active when individuals observe others’ actions.
Despite the progress in understanding how religion benefits people, the
social sciences of religion have little understanding of cases when religious
systems fail people. In such cases, are members investing too much into their
religion? Are there cases when religious costs are not expensive enough to
reliably indicate commitment and therefore the religion dissolves? Are there
cases where the relationship between ritual and belief are in some way qualitatively incompatible such that a system cannot last? If so, what were the
evolutionary processes that lead to these outcomes? Such research may be
primarily limited to the historical record, but nevertheless it is an important
missing piece for understanding why it is that people are religious.
METHODOLOGY
Regardless of the theoretical orientation of the research, we are in dire need
of thorough and directly comparable ethnography. Cross-cultural work is of
the utmost importance, particularly at a time when traditional economies and
worldviews are increasingly becoming more globalized. As anthropologists
have long known, important elements of religious worldviews correspond
to local economy and social structure. As such, religious diversity around
the world is quite likely to be reduced in significant ways. A reinvigorated
ethnographic science of religion is in order, and we are sorely in need of rich,
descriptive, and comparable data for testing predictions borne out by the

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social sciences of religion. This requires a systematic regime of data collection
in order to craft consensus models of what it is people claim they believe in
and how these models have some impact on the world. Such an undertaking
would be quite expensive in terms of travel, organization, and management,
but without it, our understanding of variation in religion will remain impoverished.
A related concern that warrants consideration is the often-expressed lack of
methodological rigor in the data collection process of ethnography. Crudely
put, there is a gap between qualitative and quantitative ethnographic data
that needs to be narrowed in order to make progress. A new generation of
ethnographers has emerged who embrace quantitative data collection in
order to frame their focus of studies in such a way as to make studies directly
comparable and falsifiable. Emma Cohen’s work among Afro-Brazilian cults
and Dimitris Xygalatas’ work with fire-walkers in Greece and Spain point
to the fact that not only are ethnographers enriching our understanding of
particular traditions, but they are also paving the way for approaches which
inform concerns for cognitive universals and the evolutionary forces which
shape their expression.
Regardless of the theoretical background or methodology of the research,
the future social scientific study of religion has as a bright future as it does
an illustrious past. Its study has the potential to unify what are now distinct approaches into a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental
elements of human social life. While we cannot know for certain what the
future study of religion will bear, we have faith that it will be fruitful.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Purzycki was supported by the SSHRC-funded Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) during the preparation of this essay. Sosis
thanks and acknowledges support from a CTI Fellowship (Evolution and
Human Nature), ESRC Large Grant (REF RES-060-25-0085) entitled “Ritual,
Community, and Conflict.” and the James Barnett Endowment for Humanistic Anthropology.
FURTHER READING
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New
York, NY: Basic Books.
Guthrie, S. E. (1995). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Lansing, J. S. (2007). Priests and programmers: Technologies of power in the engineered
landscape of Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Rappaport, R. A. (1999). Ritual and religion in the making of humanity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Reynolds, V., & Tanner, R. (1995). The social ecology of religion (2nd ed.). New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Turner, V. (1995). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Hawthorne, NY:
Aldine de Gruyter.
Voland, E., & Schiefenhövel, W. (Eds.) (2009). The biological evolution of religious mind
and behavior. Berlin, Germany: Springer.
Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of religiosity: A cognitive theory of religious transmission.
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Winzeler, R. L. (2007). Anthropology and religion: What we know, think, and question.
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

BENJAMIN GRANT PURZYCKI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Benjamin Grant Purzycki earned his PhD. in anthropology at the University
of Connecticut. He works on the evolution of religious systems and religious
cognition, particularly how people make sense of their gods’ minds. He has
conducted fieldwork in the Tyva Republic (Tuva) and has published works
in a variety of journals including Current Anthropology, Cognitive Science, Religion, Brain and Behavior, and Skeptic Magazine.
Professional webpage: http://bgpurzycki.wordpress.com/
Curriculum Vitae: http://bgpurzycki.wordpress.com/cv/
JORDAN KIPER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Jordan Kiper is a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Connecticut. He works on human sociality and cooperation, collective violence, and
the evolution of religion and morality. He has conducted fieldwork in the
Balkans.
JOHN SHAVER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
John Shaver is a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Laboratory for the
Experimental Research of Religion, Masaryk University. He works on understanding intracultural variation in ritual behavior, the relationships between
religion and fertility, and the evolution of syncretic religions. He has conducted fieldwork in Fiji.
DANIEL N. FINKEL SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Daniel N. Finkel is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at
the University of Connecticut. His research interest is the impact of engaging
in synchronous action on social cognition, particularly cooperation and trust.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

RICHARD SOSIS SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Richard Sosis is James Barnett Professor of Humanistic Anthropology and
Director of the Evolution, Cognition, and Culture Program at the University
of Connecticut. His work has focused on the evolution of cooperation and the
adaptive significance of religious behavior, with particular interest in the relationship between ritual and intragroup cooperation. To explore these issues,
he has conducted fieldwork with remote cooperative fishers in the Federated States of Micronesia and with various communities throughout Israel,
including Ultra-Orthodox Jews and members of secular and religious kibbutzim. He is cofounder and coeditor of the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior,
which publishes research on the biological study of religion.
RELATED ESSAYS
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation (Sociology), Kevin J. Christiano
The Inherence Heuristic: Generating Everyday Explanations (Psychology),
Andrei Cimpian
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge
Understanding the Adaptive Functions of Morality from a Cognitive Psychological Perspective (Psychology), James Dungan and Liane Young
Micro-Cultures (Sociology), Gary Alan Fine
The Neurobiology and Physiology of Emotions: A Developmental Perspective (Psychology), Sarah S. Kahle and Paul D. Hastings
Regime Type and Terrorist Attacks (Political Science), Kara Kingma et al.
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology (Archaeology), Kirsi O. Lorentz
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker


Religion
BENJAMIN GRANT PURZYCKI, JORDAN KIPER, JOHN SHAVER,
DANIEL N. FINKEL, and RICHARD SOSIS

Abstract
Religions are complex systems that can adapt to diverse environments because of
the dynamic relationship of their internal parts. The most fundamental of these parts
includes supernatural beliefs, rituals, and myths. The social scientific study of religion focuses on these parts and builds on previous generations of research to provide
distal explanations for religion as a dynamic phenomenon. In recent years, interest
in the social science of religion has turned to the cognitive and behavioral studies
of religion. The cognitive science of religion documents the mental organization and
structure of religious thought, while the behavioral science of religion focuses on ritual behavior as the building block of sociality. Key issues for future research include
the ontogeny of religion, the cognitive and cross-cultural representation of religious
concepts, the relationship between religion and reproduction, and the evolution of
religion. With these new frontiers have come a variety of novel methodologies but
also an emphasis on the need for comparative ethnography.

INTRODUCTION
The social scientific study of religion has an extensive and diverse history that
began in the late nineteenth century. Early cultural anthropologists expended
considerable effort documenting and making sense of the religious traditions
found around the world. Such research continues to this day with additional
focus on understanding the evolutionary, cognitive, and behavioral bases
for religious traditions. Members of virtually every human community have
complex supernatural beliefs and devote significant resources toward ritualistic behavior. Variations in such beliefs and behaviors are the products of
cognitive and behavioral developments that arose in the course of human
evolution. Provided the centrality of religion to the human experience, it is
no wonder that religion has captured the attention of generations of anthropologists and remains an important avenue of research today.
Although religions exhibit systematic variation, anthropologists observe
that religions are not the static and conservative systems that some scholars
of religion presume them to be. Instead, religions are complex systems that
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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can acclimate to diverse environments, largely due to the dynamic interaction of their interrelated parts. The three most important of these parts, which
we will discuss throughout this piece, are the following:
•

•

•

Supernatural beliefs: beliefs in discarnate agents who interact with and
possess knowledge about the world, and beliefs about forces and
essences that permeate this and unseen worlds.
Rituals: patterned behaviors that are explicitly directed toward nonempirical or supernatural agencies to achieve some goal on behalf of participants.
Myths: narratives of unseen events that often explain natural and supernatural phenomena.

The cross-cultural examination of these features of religion, and others
(e.g., taboo, moral obligations, authorities), has revealed to anthropologists
that religion appears to have a phylogenetic history, with recurrent patterns
of systemic variation across environments. Both of these aspects, in addition
to evidence that religion can promote survival and reproductive success,
suggest that religion has an evolutionary origin as an adaptive system with
advantages for individuals. Of course, religions often appear to be quite
taxing for participants and even counterproductive to their own self-interest,
which poses a central and vexing problem for social scientists of religion:
If religion has a distal explanation (i.e., promoting individual survival and
reproduction), what is it?
In this essay, we provide an overview of the intellectual foundations and
social scientific approaches to understanding religion. This overview is then
followed by a discussion of contemporary research and how it draws from
and develops the previous generations’ insights. We focus specifically on the
cognitive and evolutionary study of religion, both of which offer new insights
into the complex relationships between mind, culture, and the social and natural forces that shape them. We then turn to a discussion of what lies on the
horizon for future endeavors.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The term religion comes from the Latin root religare, which means “to
bind.” However, what is being bound, and to what? Although this question
remains, and is likely to remain, open to various interpretations, social
scientists largely agree that religion binds individuals to their community
through (among other things) myths, rituals, and beliefs. Discovering how
religion “binds” communities is one of the core pursuits of contemporary
research, which suggests that religion has been at the center of human

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3

communities for some time. Archaeological evidence in the form of burials
from the Upper Paleolithic suggests that humans have practiced religion for
at least 30,000 years. Furthermore, anthropologists have long observed that,
contrary to modern societies in the West, where there is a clear demarcation
between religious and secular life, traditional cultures do not necessarily
make this distinction and religious beliefs and practices often permeate
all domains of life. As a result, anthropologists have spent considerable
effort documenting religion as a means to describe other cultures, and also
outlining the manners in which religion shapes the very fabric of society.
Following traditional studies of religion in western history (e.g., Herodotus,
Euphemerus, Denis Diderot, Max Müller), early anthropologists, such as
Edward Burnett Tylor and Sir James Frazer, studied the function of magic
and myths in non-western societies. They surmised that magic and myths
were central to most societies, because they together served as a kind of
“primitive science” and substantiated beliefs in supernatural beings. These
beings were not only thought to control nature and human affairs, but also
the order of society itself.
Of course, these early studies were rather crude representations of religion
and largely based on “arm chair” speculations. It was not until the work
of Émile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown that
the anthropology of religion truly began in its own right. All three theorists recognized that myths were not primitive sciences or naïve worldviews,
but rather narratives that impart content and semantic understanding to ritual. In turn, ritual serves as the heart of religion insofar as it ameliorates
anxieties, promotes collective conscience, and encourages social solidarity,
all of which bind members to one another with deep and abiding loyalty.
For example, Malinowski observed that religious rituals among Trobriand
Islanders functioned to increase social participation in the social and economic transactions of the community, and also to ameliorate individual anxieties over gardening and deep sea fishing. In short, these scholars adopted
varieties of functionalism—one being the idea that society is comprised of
parts that work together for stability—and ascribed religion in particular
with social and individual functions.
Subsequent anthropologists built on these seminal observations. For
instance, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Clifford Geertz observed that rituals
bind communities together by endowing them with common symbols,
moods, and concepts, which engender the community with a collective
understanding of reality. Likewise, Victor Turner, among others, noted
that ritual behavior is fundamentally communicative, conveying messages
between group members, the most significant of which is commitment to
group membership and beliefs. Building on this insight, Roy Rappaport
showed that because ritual signals acceptance of community values and

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individual responsibilities therein, it constitutes the very nature of the social
contract. Modern scholars continue to expand on the importance of ritual as
a means to group ethos and social institutions with evidence that it promotes
high levels of cooperation and large-scale social organization.
In addition to research on the relationship between myth and ritual, and the
value of ritual for cooperation, considerable research has focused on supernatural beliefs, namely, the structure and forms of such beliefs. Both Sigmund
Freud and Émile Durkheim believed that supernatural beliefs arise from, and
are constrained by, the projection of human social interaction onto unseen
agents, and the desire to rely on such agents to make the unexplainable intelligible. Clifford Geertz extended this intellectualist stance of religion insofar
as he characterized religion as a symbolic system wreathed in truth-value
(i.e., treated as being true rather than being internally understood as merely
symbolic). This led many anthropologists to focus on religion as a system of
meaning making and to promote methodological interpretivism in order to
make sense of how other societies made sense of their worlds.
Following the ethnographic tradition of Franz Boas, anthropologists in
the early twentieth century expended considerable effort documenting the
enormous cross-cultural variation in religious systems. Perhaps the most
important outcome of this work is the recognition that the nature of religious
diversity is not arbitrary, but rather reliably reflects significant features of
socio-political organization and ecology. To illustrate, anthropologists often
recognize four major types of religious institutions: shamanic, communal,
Olympian or polytheistic, and monotheistic. Early studies showed that the
main predictors of these institutions were the following: subsistence strategies (e.g., foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, and agriculture), economic
specialization, sovereignty of decision-making groups, and the presence or
absence of written culture. For example, foragers were often shamanistic,
horticulturalists and pastoralists were often communal, and agriculturalists
were often Olympian or monotheistic. Later anthropological research has
revealed remarkable correspondence between religious institutions and
cultural variation. For instance, shamanic religions often focus on individual
health concerns, group cooperation, and ecological management. Communal
religions unite different clans or lineages under ancestor or totemic worship.
Many polytheistic religions exist in large and interconnected communities
with priesthoods dedicated to religious knowledge. Monotheistic religions
typically exist in state-level societies and, unlike other religious systems,
worship a transcendent god who places significant moral demands on large
populations.
However, because cultures and religious systems are not isolated phenomena, most cultural research on religion in the late twentieth century has
focused less on broad classifications and more on the components of religion

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in cultural contexts. For instance, inspired by Arnold van Gennep, Victor
Turner showed that beliefs concerning rites of passage have a common structure and are always embedded in local understandings of change, transition,
and identity. In so doing, Turner not only demonstrated that rites of passage
are structurally similar across cultures, but also that they correspond to key
features of their respective societies. Such research continued in the tradition
of Boas by embracing particularism (i.e., documenting a specific culture)
but went beyond it by crafting models that were applicable to multiple
traditions. For instance, Roy D’Andrade and Melford Spiro found that the
relationship between gods and their believers tended to reflect the nature
of the parent–child relationships characteristic of the society in question. In
a similar vein, Guy Swanson demonstrated that high gods and punishing
gods vary across cultures but are disproportionately found among large,
agricultural, and socially stratified societies. These findings suggest that
even though religious systems are locally unique, they are neither arbitrary
nor unbound collections of beliefs and behaviors. Rather, religious systems
are at the very least correlated with specific environments, but quite likely
change in order to overcome problems in specific environments.
This observation dovetailed nicely with the cognitive revolution and generative linguistics, which thereafter prompted anthropologists to embrace a
more universalistic view of cultural systems. It once again became acceptable
for anthropologists to explore the instinctual bases of culture and to isolate
particular faculties constituting human nature. However, inspired by the
nativist turn, anthropologists also undertook wide-ranging investigations
into the complex relationship between culture and human cognition. At
about the same time, evolutionary psychology emerged as a new science of
the mind. With the aim of understanding how evolution constrained modes
of cognition, evolutionary psychology postulates and tests aspects of human
thought, such as propensities, biases, predispositions, and generative faculties. In so doing, it has identified a host of mental faculties that are prevalent
today but evolved to overcome the adaptive challenges of our ancestors. It
was in this context of inquiry—that is, amid the study of cultural variation
and cognitive evolution—that the cognitive science of religion was born.
Presently, there are disagreements about the evolutionary processes that
led to the emergence of religion. Generally, cognitive approaches assume
that the mental faculties required for religious concept formation and
retention evolved for other purposes, and that there is no specialized mental
faculty devoted to religion. As such, many cognitive researchers treat
religion as a by-product of evolved cognition rather than an adaptation in
and of itself, despite the widespread recognition that religious beliefs often
promote adaptive behavior, even in modern contexts. Behavioral researchers
typically argue that religion is indeed an adaptation that displays signs

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of fitness-enhancing qualities. Although the general consensus is that
religion is impossible without preadaptations and biological constituents,
there remains considerable debate regarding the status of religion as an
adaptation.
With that in mind, the following section centers on the latest research in
the social scientific study of religion. Specifically, it offers a brief survey of
contemporary understandings regarding the cognitive and behavioral study
of religious systems, which remain the two most distinctive forms of inquiry
today.
CUTTING EDGE RESEARCH
THE COGNITIVE STUDY OF RELIGION
Contemporary research on supernatural belief focuses on documenting the
cognitive organization and structure of religious thought. Beginning with
Stewart Guthrie, cognitive scientists of religion have attempted to understand how supernatural beliefs are constrained by the limits of cognitive
processing, why humans attribute mental states to entities such as gods or
spirits, and why such entities are so often concerned about what people do.
Significantly, research spearheaded by Jesse Bering, Pascal Boyer, Dominic
Johnson, Ara Norenzayan, and Azim Shariff shows that supernatural agents
are particularly concerned with socially strategic information and breaches
of prosocial contracts.
Many within the cognitive science of religion hold that the human mind
has domain-specific organization and is comprised of modules that evolved
for handling specific types of information. For instance, the cognitive mechanisms designed to compute linguistic information are not the same as those
used to make sense of spatial depth or to detect pain. With foundations rooted
in this perspective, researchers began to apply evolutionary theory to these
proposed mental faculties in order to investigate how such faculties may
have been adaptive in our past. As such, current research devotes a considerable amount of attention to understanding the universal qualities of religious
concepts by appealing to the cognitive systems that all humans share.
The mind’s ability to attribute mental states to other entities is central
to contemporary understandings of religious cognition. Humans do this
so effortlessly that it can often be difficult to convince ourselves that
something does not have mental states. Stewart Guthrie laid the theoretical
foundations for this work, arguing that promiscuous agency-detection and
anthropomorphism undergird a considerable amount of religious thought.
Humans are equipped with a variety of agency-detection systems, often
collectively referred to as a theory of mind. While there is considerable

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7

debate over whether or not nonhuman primates have the ability to detect
internal mental states of other beings, it is quite clear that humans rapidly
make sense of things by appealing to the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and
perceptions of other beings. Many researchers, including Justin Barrett and
Scott Atran, argue that supernatural agent concepts are natural extensions
of these systems insofar as people assign agency in an attempt to explain
events, weird happenings, and misfortune to name a few.
Another central theme of the cognitive study of religion, which developed
in the wake of the nativist turn, involves the ways in which humans make
systematic inferences about various objects in our world. According to
Pascal Boyer, these inferences appear to be a part of our evolved conceptual
repertoire, and religious concepts often violate such inferences. For instance,
“a man who walks on water” violates deep assumptions we have about
physics—things normally sink. A “statue that listens to your prayers”
applies mental states to a human-made object. Such ideas are often disclosed
in narratives that are not only easy to remember, but also tend to be unverifiable and unfalsifiable. In some cases, these ideas appear to have a memory
advantage over more mundane ideas (e.g., “a squirrel that drinks water”)
and also over maximally strange ideas, which are too taxing to compute (e.g.,
“a couch that disappears on Wednesdays but only when the moon is new”).
This literature is now regularly referred to as minimally counterintuitive theory
(or MCI Theory). Mythological narratives often have such counterintuitive
agents, objects, and events in them, and their counterintuitiveness offers a
particular salience that heightens retention and transmission.
In an attempt to develop a cognitive theory of religious ritual, Harvey
Whitehouse articulated what he calls the “modes of religiosity.” This is a
theory that aims to understand how religious rituals fall into two general
categories (doctrinal and imagistic), which correspond to the two primary
memory systems (long-term memory and episodic memory). The two
categories of ritual are the doctrinal and imagistic, while the two memory
systems are long-term memory and episodic memory. On the one hand, the
“doctrinal mode”—frequently repetitive and low arousal rituals, such as
communion—corresponds to long-term memory insofar as it combines with
complex religious teachings to be woven into the worldview of the adherent.
On the other hand, the “imagistic mode”—infrequent but highly arousing
rituals, such as fire walking—corresponds to episodic memory insofar as
they are imbued with emotional salience that allows the adherent to retain
information from the particular ritual.
This research is largely devoted to making sense of the defining properties
of religious thought and behavior and what cognitive mechanisms are
responsible for those properties. However, these studies do not generally
focus on what religion does. Still, other studies have systematically assessed

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the functional effects of religion or religious priming, a line of work which
tests the Supernatural Monitoring or Punishment Hypotheses. Religious
priming has been shown to increase human cooperation and generosity,
as well as reduce rates of breaching social rules and expectations (e.g.,
cheating). Interestingly, this occurs when people are primed with punishing
god concepts; but when people are primed with forgiving god concepts,
they actually increase cheating behavior. Accordingly, research on punishing
gods—or what Ara Norenzayan calls “big gods”—points to an important
distal function of religion, which is to promote prosocial behavior and
minimize antisocial behavior.
THE BEHAVIORAL STUDY OF RELIGION
As we have already seen, because most early anthropologists agreed that
ritual behavior builds social solidarity, they argued that ritual was a building
block of sociality. Since then, anthropologists have shown that religion is
an important part of early socialization into groups. With adolescence as a
period of “experience expectant” learning, young individuals are at a prime
age for being ritually indoctrinated into groups and taught supernatural
worldviews. Religious training and indoctrination at this point in the
lifespan imbues cultural precepts and symbols with emotional valences,
which occurs just as the cognitive and motivational systems of the brain are
maturing. Besides inculcating religious worldviews, this process is central
to the internalization of the particular moral norms of society, which become
enlivened by being couched in religious narratives.
Regardless of whether the ritual concerns indoctrination, sacrifices, or rites
of passage, anthropologists observe that rituals are often extremely costly,
both physically and materially. For this reason, William Irons suggested
that it was the extreme costs of rituals—and all religious behaviors for that
matter—that makes them such reliable forms of communication. In other
words, rituals and other religious behaviors are costly signals that convey
the intentions and commitments of adherents. To demonstrate the logic
behind this observation, consider the problem of cooperation. Individuals
in all societies must decide whom to trust. Although people can tell one
another that they can be trusted, they can also lie about such commitments.
However, if persons are expected to undertake costly behaviors, which are
too hard to fake, then their commitments can be discerned. According to
Irons, religious behaviors constitute such costly acts. By going on vision
quests, performing initiation rites, or memorizing religious texts, a person
communicates to others that he or she is trustworthy and committed to
the group. Because these behaviors are difficult to fake, those who pay the
costs in performing them are rewarded with increased cooperation. This

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suggests that the costliest religious behaviors will occur where the payoffs
of cooperation are the greatest.
Research by Richard Sosis et al. has provided empirical support for the
costly signaling hypothesis of religious behaviors. For example, Sosis
undertook a series of empirical studies of nineteenth century US communes
and found that religious communes out-survived their secular counterparts.
Sosis has also found that levels of cooperation vary between religious and
secular kibbutzim in Israel, with the former being far more cooperative.
Studies have also found that groups engaged in long-term warfare, which
face the collective action problem of motivating warriors, often employ the
most taxing of initiation rites. Such research demonstrates that investments
in the form of religious behavior generally incur high levels of cooperation.
Moreover, studies along these lines support the hypothesis that religious
behavior can be adaptive.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The multifaceted nature of religion affords the scientific study of religion
enormous potential to bridge cognitive, psychological, behavioral, and ecological sciences. Given that religious beliefs and behaviors often appear to be
adaptive, and comprised of an evolved suite of cognitive mechanisms that
motivate diverse behavioral responses to variant ecologies, future work must
be multidisciplinary and simultaneously research multiple levels of religious
phenomena. On the one hand, future work must address the nature of religious development in individuals. On the other hand, research must explore
the nature of the evolution of supernatural belief systems, as well as the interaction of individual level and group level evolutionary dynamics. Important
to the study of religious phenomena is the systematic collection of ethnographic data, and that data collection at all levels of specificity allow for
cross-cultural comparison. In the present section, we point more specifically
to directions in which future research may lead.
THE ONTOGENY OF RELIGION
The developmental literature of religious cognition draws primarily from
the psychological literature, but important new work suggests that a considerable amount of religious cognition is quite intuitive. There is evidence
that children prefer teleological explanations even when their parents prefer other options. Moreover, children’s innate tendency toward belief in a
Cartesian duality of mind and body may prime them for other supernatural beliefs, such as souls, afterlife, or non-corporeal/invisible supernatural
agents. There is also emerging support of the prediction that children are

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

particularly adept at attributing supernatural agents with more knowledge
than normal humans. Rebekah Richert and Justin Barrett’s “preparedness
hypothesis” suggests that children effortlessly make sense of gods’ agency,
and recent work shows that children intuitively ascribe supernatural agents
with perceptual abilities above and beyond normal agents. Future research
would benefit from examining whether or not children intuitively ascribe
particular domains of knowledge to gods as well such as socially strategic
or moral information about people (see above). This would serve to further
unify the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion. Of course, there is
a dearth of cross-cultural developmental work conducted in non-Abrahamic
traditions. A likely outcome of such cross-cultural work would be a renewed
interest in the foundational works of van Gennep and Turner on rites of passage and transition.
Recent work has also acknowledged that both natural and supernatural
explanations for events can and do coexist harmoniously in our minds. For
example, while in the developing world there is now a clear understanding of
the biological aspects of the transmission of HIV, witchcraft is still cited as an
explanation for it. This new understanding, along with evidence that supernatural explanations actually increase rather than decrease with age, suggests that as children develop they are able to conceive of more sophisticated
causal explanations, combining their growing understanding of the natural
world with their accumulated cultural knowledge of theological specifics.
Future research must acknowledge the role of supernatural causal explanation as integral, rather than a simplistic mode that is quickly outgrown.
COGNITION, CULTURE, AND COMMUNICATION
Human cognitive representational systems are remarkably complex with
structures still largely mysterious to scientists, but models of cognitive architecture will undoubtedly become more refined as time passes. Similarly,
cognitive scientists of religion are still a very long way off from understanding the cross-cultural variation in religious cognition. As contemporary
cognitive scientists of religion largely focus on Western populations to assess
the merit of their theories, one central question that needs to be pursued
is whether or not religious cognition varies across populations to any
significant degree. Of course, it does so superficially insofar as people have
different deities, varying models of their gods’ knowledge and concerns,
mythological traditions and so forth, but how various pan-human faculties
interact with acquired habits and representational structures requires investigation. Do different populations employ different cognitive systems when
reasoning about supernatural agents or rituals? More concretely, if supernatural agents are perceived to be the spirits of ancestors, are kin recognition

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systems engaged? Are spatial systems employed when reasoning about
totemic spirits? Are the cognitive systems designed to make sense of human
dominance hierarchies triggered when deities are seen as all-powerful? Such
questions bring cognitive concerns to bear on the anthropological tradition.
Such an approach would wed concern for cognitive systems with context.
Also key to progress is uncovering how, when, and why people communicate religious ideas to each other. While cognitive approaches largely
focus on the content of religious communication, and cultural evolutionary
approaches to learning focus on transmission and retention biases people
have, we have little understanding of the contexts in which people glean
religious information. One area of importance is the cultural evolutionary
approach of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson and their students. Cultural
evolutionary theorists regularly discuss a number of transmission biases
that maximize the “cultural fitness” of social learning. The prestige bias, for
instance, is the tendency to replicate behaviors and beliefs that are expressed
by successful individuals. In the case of religion, it should be fairly clear
that religious leadership often expresses, transmits, maintains, and modifies
doctrine. The conformist bias on the other hand explains that people will
tend to follow what the majority is doing. Tendencies for conformist learning
inform mental models just as much (if not more so) than what we learn from
our elders and other prestigious individuals.
RELIGION, REPRODUCTION, AND DIVERSITY
It is also becoming increasingly important to investigate the nature and
effects of different levels of parental investment in religious socialization
on adult behavior, particularly on adult reproductive behavior. Research
has shown that religious individuals exhibit higher levels of fertility than
nonreligious individuals, and that there is extraordinary variation in fertility
levels across religious groups. The mechanisms by which religions positively impact fertility levels are unclear, and future work must examine how
religious beliefs impact fertility, how energetically costly religious behavior
is coordinated with reproductive pursuits, and how religious communities
foster cooperative breeding niches.
Understanding the relationship between religion and fertility is also crucial
to understanding why some religions spread and stabilize more successfully
than others. Recent research by Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill demonstrates that the amount of religious diversity in a geographic region is positively correlated with pathogen stress in the physical environment. While
we have focused here on the variation of religious systems as responses to
diverse socioecological environments, in a rapidly globalizing world, other

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

religions and the degree of religious diversity in the environment are becoming increasingly important selective pressures that likely shape the evolution
of religious systems.
Another important avenue for future research in an increasingly global
world is the relationship between religion and human rights, especially as
institutions and inter-cultural practices. In this respect, the main issues are
the following. First, it remains an open question whether human rights,
as a global institution, can remain divorced of religion, as in the West, or
whether it requires religion to have moral traction in nonwestern societies.
Second, debates continue between anthropologists over the foundations of
human rights: namely, whether human rights are universalizing because
they emerge from—and countenance—world religions, or whether human
rights are a new form of ethics for the globalized world. Third, many
anthropologists are finding that human rights are only realizable for cultures
outside of the West if they are grounded in local religious systems. However,
it remains unclear what types of religious systems are generally accepting
or rejecting of human rights claims, and why. Finally, it is unknown how
human rights will influence religious systems, and vice versa.
EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES OF RELIGION
If it is the case that religious systems do solve locally specific problems that
social and natural environments pose for people, how this is accomplished
is likely to generate some of the more compelling debates within the field.
As it currently stands, cognitive anthropologists attempt to understand the
structures of the human mind responsible for the content and distribution of
religious concepts in attempts to uncover cognitive biases which all humans
share. However, behavioral approaches are generally unconcerned about
internal motivational states, evolved cognitive mechanisms, and mental
models pertaining to religion. Cultural evolutionary approaches to religion
focus on the source of transmission. In particular, who transmits ideas
plays a very important role in which ideas are retained and made prevalent
throughout a population. A more dynamic view attempts to come to terms
with all of these processes and how the content of religion corresponds to the
aforementioned problems found in our environments. Some have attempted
to begin to make sense of religion dynamically by appealing to religion as a
niche in its own right; people must navigate religious environments, which
impose their own rules, regulations, expectations, and consequences for
breaching them.
An area of particular interest with potential links to ritual behavior is
inter-personal synchrony. Research into the behavioral impact of synchronous action provides a possible proximate mechanism by which rituals

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may lead to social bonding. It appears that synchronous movement as
well as synchronous vocalizations can enhance feelings of affiliation, boost
trust and cooperation, promote compassion and helping, and lead to more
generally positive affect toward fellow group members. Many rituals feature
synchronous behavior including music, chanting, dancing, or other forms
of rhythmic and/or vocal entrainment. This could well be one way in
which religious participation leads to social cohesion, and may even be
one primary mechanism by which the costly signaling theory of religion
operates. Long bouts of synchronous behavior can also lead to altered states
of ecstatic consciousness, during which participants may feel both a “loss of
self” and a simultaneous “connection with other.” This state, likely mediated
by physiological and hormonal changes similar to those brought about by
the use of psychoactive substances, could be part of a process in which
an individual identity becomes extended or merged psychologically with
a group identity. Future research into this phenomenon should examine
both the physiology underlying the effect by measuring changes in relevant
hormones as well as exploring areas of the brain that could be involved
in such responses. It is possible that there is an important role for parts of
the brain involved in Theory of Mind, including mirror neurons, which are
known to be active when individuals observe others’ actions.
Despite the progress in understanding how religion benefits people, the
social sciences of religion have little understanding of cases when religious
systems fail people. In such cases, are members investing too much into their
religion? Are there cases when religious costs are not expensive enough to
reliably indicate commitment and therefore the religion dissolves? Are there
cases where the relationship between ritual and belief are in some way qualitatively incompatible such that a system cannot last? If so, what were the
evolutionary processes that lead to these outcomes? Such research may be
primarily limited to the historical record, but nevertheless it is an important
missing piece for understanding why it is that people are religious.
METHODOLOGY
Regardless of the theoretical orientation of the research, we are in dire need
of thorough and directly comparable ethnography. Cross-cultural work is of
the utmost importance, particularly at a time when traditional economies and
worldviews are increasingly becoming more globalized. As anthropologists
have long known, important elements of religious worldviews correspond
to local economy and social structure. As such, religious diversity around
the world is quite likely to be reduced in significant ways. A reinvigorated
ethnographic science of religion is in order, and we are sorely in need of rich,
descriptive, and comparable data for testing predictions borne out by the

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

social sciences of religion. This requires a systematic regime of data collection
in order to craft consensus models of what it is people claim they believe in
and how these models have some impact on the world. Such an undertaking
would be quite expensive in terms of travel, organization, and management,
but without it, our understanding of variation in religion will remain impoverished.
A related concern that warrants consideration is the often-expressed lack of
methodological rigor in the data collection process of ethnography. Crudely
put, there is a gap between qualitative and quantitative ethnographic data
that needs to be narrowed in order to make progress. A new generation of
ethnographers has emerged who embrace quantitative data collection in
order to frame their focus of studies in such a way as to make studies directly
comparable and falsifiable. Emma Cohen’s work among Afro-Brazilian cults
and Dimitris Xygalatas’ work with fire-walkers in Greece and Spain point
to the fact that not only are ethnographers enriching our understanding of
particular traditions, but they are also paving the way for approaches which
inform concerns for cognitive universals and the evolutionary forces which
shape their expression.
Regardless of the theoretical background or methodology of the research,
the future social scientific study of religion has as a bright future as it does
an illustrious past. Its study has the potential to unify what are now distinct approaches into a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental
elements of human social life. While we cannot know for certain what the
future study of religion will bear, we have faith that it will be fruitful.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Purzycki was supported by the SSHRC-funded Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) during the preparation of this essay. Sosis
thanks and acknowledges support from a CTI Fellowship (Evolution and
Human Nature), ESRC Large Grant (REF RES-060-25-0085) entitled “Ritual,
Community, and Conflict.” and the James Barnett Endowment for Humanistic Anthropology.
FURTHER READING
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New
York, NY: Basic Books.
Guthrie, S. E. (1995). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Lansing, J. S. (2007). Priests and programmers: Technologies of power in the engineered
landscape of Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Rappaport, R. A. (1999). Ritual and religion in the making of humanity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Reynolds, V., & Tanner, R. (1995). The social ecology of religion (2nd ed.). New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Turner, V. (1995). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Hawthorne, NY:
Aldine de Gruyter.
Voland, E., & Schiefenhövel, W. (Eds.) (2009). The biological evolution of religious mind
and behavior. Berlin, Germany: Springer.
Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of religiosity: A cognitive theory of religious transmission.
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Winzeler, R. L. (2007). Anthropology and religion: What we know, think, and question.
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

BENJAMIN GRANT PURZYCKI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Benjamin Grant Purzycki earned his PhD. in anthropology at the University
of Connecticut. He works on the evolution of religious systems and religious
cognition, particularly how people make sense of their gods’ minds. He has
conducted fieldwork in the Tyva Republic (Tuva) and has published works
in a variety of journals including Current Anthropology, Cognitive Science, Religion, Brain and Behavior, and Skeptic Magazine.
Professional webpage: http://bgpurzycki.wordpress.com/
Curriculum Vitae: http://bgpurzycki.wordpress.com/cv/
JORDAN KIPER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Jordan Kiper is a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Connecticut. He works on human sociality and cooperation, collective violence, and
the evolution of religion and morality. He has conducted fieldwork in the
Balkans.
JOHN SHAVER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
John Shaver is a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Laboratory for the
Experimental Research of Religion, Masaryk University. He works on understanding intracultural variation in ritual behavior, the relationships between
religion and fertility, and the evolution of syncretic religions. He has conducted fieldwork in Fiji.
DANIEL N. FINKEL SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Daniel N. Finkel is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at
the University of Connecticut. His research interest is the impact of engaging
in synchronous action on social cognition, particularly cooperation and trust.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

RICHARD SOSIS SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Richard Sosis is James Barnett Professor of Humanistic Anthropology and
Director of the Evolution, Cognition, and Culture Program at the University
of Connecticut. His work has focused on the evolution of cooperation and the
adaptive significance of religious behavior, with particular interest in the relationship between ritual and intragroup cooperation. To explore these issues,
he has conducted fieldwork with remote cooperative fishers in the Federated States of Micronesia and with various communities throughout Israel,
including Ultra-Orthodox Jews and members of secular and religious kibbutzim. He is cofounder and coeditor of the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior,
which publishes research on the biological study of religion.
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