Cognition, Culture, and Religion: Surveying the Field

in D. Xygalatas, & WW McCorkle (eds.), Mental Culture: Classical Social theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion, 2013

Cultures are the collective output of human mental abilities. (Sperber 1985a: 3) Th e academic study of religion spans many disciplines. Given its thematic rather than methodological orientation, it has always borrowed its tools from diverse academic domains in order to make sense of religious phenomena. And as the fi eld developed in parallel with other social disciplines, it also shares with them common ancestors -some of the founders and greatest fi gures of disciplines like modern philosophy, psychology, anthropology and sociology are also widely considered to be among the founders of the academic study of religion (McCorkle & Xygalatas 2012). Cognitive science is also widely interdisciplinary, spanning many scientifi c domains and levels of analysis, since it emerged as the cumulative result of work in fi elds as diverse as computer science, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, anthropology and neuroscience. Cognitive science provided a paradigm shift in the study of human behaviour which became known as the "cognitive revolution" (Barkow 2006) and resulted in the abrupt collapse of the previously dominant behaviourist view of human nature. What was revolutionary about this new perspective was that the mind was no longer seen as a blank slate but as a complex computational system that is pre-equipped with universal mental mechanisms that underlie all human thought and behaviour (Pinker 2002). Th is radically diff erent view of human nature implied a shift not only in theory but also in method. Th e application of this perspective in the study of religious thought and behaviour brought about the cognitive science of religion (CSR).

The Routledge companion to the study of religion, 2005

Cambridge University Press, 2001

Religion in Mind summarizes and extends the last decade's advances in the cognitive study of religion using empirical research from psychology and anthropology to illuminate various components of religious belief, ritual, and experience. The book examines cognitive dimensions of religion within a naturalistic view of culture, while respecting the phenomenology of religion and drawing together teachers of religion, psychologists of religion, and cognitive scientists. Expert contributors focus on phenomena such as belief-fixation and transmission; attributions of agency; anthropomorphizing; counterintuitive religious representations; the well-formedness of religious rituals; links between religious representations and emotions; and the development of god concepts. The work encourages greater interdisciplinary linkages between scholars from different fields and will be of interest to researchers in anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, and cognitive science. It also will interest more general readers in religion and science.

Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2012

The cognitive science of religion tries to explain how human mental architecture canalizes the spread of cultural ideas. Co-evolutionary theories aim at explaining the cultural stability of ideas and practices by constructing models of social behavior. I try to show that both research programs provide useful insights for the construction of mechanical explanations of the mental representation and transmission of religious ideas. Combining cognitive predispositions and their expression in forms of social behavior paves way for a more integrated explanatory framework.

Numen, 2005

2011

Religion Compass, 2007

Cognitive science of religion (CSR) brings theories from the cognitive sciences to bear on why religious thought and action is so common in humans and why religious phenomena take on the features that they do. The field is characterized by a piecemeal approach, explanatory non-exclusivism, and methodological pluralism. Topics receiving consideration include how ordinary cognitive structures inform and constrain the transmission of religious ideas, why people believe in gods, why religious rituals and prayers tend to have the forms that they do, why afterlife beliefs are so common, and how human memory systems influence socio-political features in religious systems. CSR is often associated with evolutionary science and anti-religious rhetoric but neither is intrinsic nor necessary to the field.

This paper is a critical review of anthropology and cognitive science that proposes social, cognitive, and neural mechanisms that convert culturally transmitted ideas into beliefs, discussed in relation to Geertz's classic definition of religion ('Religion as a cultural system', 1966). Literal and analogical uses of language, and a capacity for mentalizing thought, allow the creation of systems of symbols that vary between groups, contributing to the systematic group-level differences that we refer to as 'culture'. A combination of social referencing, mentalizing, and emotion perception enables enculturation to occur by attention to stable, repetitive conjunctions of meanings and emotions in the social environment, promoting the formation of cognitive-affective schemata. In addition to informal enculturation in routine social interaction, cultural systems such as religions organize and protect transmission of valued knowledge. Religious rituals are culturally invented symbolic displays that transmit conceptions of the world and imbue them with emotional and motivational significance. Two kinds of ritual are distinguished: high frequency, low arousal rituals belonging to a 'doctrinal' religious mode, and low frequency, high arousal rituals belonging to an 'imagistic' religious mode (Whitehouse 2000). 'Doctrinal' rituals allow the extraction of semantic memories and associated emotions through repeated participation and exposure. 'Imagistic' rituals are particularly associated with intense emotion, episodic memory formation, and the formation of social ties. Religious rituals, especially imagistic rituals, employ two major strategies to convey conceptions of the world and invest them with a heightened sense of reality and emotion: (1) a 'sensory' route evokes salient thought and experience by orchestrating multiple reinforcing social-emotional signals and other stimuli, engaging attention, emotion, and arousal; (2) a 'semantic' route uses enigmatic verbal and non-verbal symbols to engage an analogical/right hemispheric processing strategy to make sense of what is authoritatively presented as real but incompletely understood. Both routes are hypothesized to activate the mesolimbic dopamine system amongst other components of cognitive-affective processing, so that the 'moods and motivations' evoked by the ritual performance seem 'uniquely realistic'. These social, cognitive, and neural processes constitute ways in which religious ideas are turned into convictions.

2002

Pascal Boyer - why do gods and spirits matter at all? supernatural gadgets and social mind adaptations Ilkka Pyysiainen - religion and the counter-intuitive Justin L. Barrett - dumb gods, petitionary prayer, and the cognitive science of religion Stewart Guthrie - animal animism: evolutionary roots of religious cognition Pertti Saariluoma - does classification explicate the contents of concepts? E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley - cognitive constraints on religious ritual form - a theory of participants' competence with religious systems Harvey Whitehouse - implicit and explicit knowledge in the domain of ritual Jeppe Sinding Jensen - the complex worlds of religion - connecting cultural and cognitive analysis Veikko Anttonen - identifying the generative mechanisms of religion - the issue of origin revisited Jesper Sorensen - "the morphology and function of magic" revisited Matti Kamppinen - explaining religion - cognitive and evolutionary mechanisms.

Revista de Estudos da Religião, 2005