Cognitive science of religion

Cognitive science of religion studies how ordinary mental processes shape religious concepts, experiences, rituals, and beliefs. It draws on psychology, anthropology, and cognitive science to explain recurring features of religion.

Hyperactive agency detection: A proposed tendency to detect agents behind ambiguous events, even when none are present. It offers one account of why unseen agents appear in religious explanations.
Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes such as perception, memory, attention, and reasoning. It provides experimental methods for examining the mental processes involved in religious thought.
E. B. Tylor: An English anthropologist whose work helped establish anthropology as a comparative study of culture. His account of animism made explanations of religion through human reasoning an early anthropological project.
Adaptationism: The approach that explains a trait as an adaptation shaped by natural selection for a function. It contrasts with accounts that treat religious tendencies as side effects of other cognitive capacities.
Religious cognition and cooperation: The study of how religious beliefs and practices relate to cooperation within groups. Researchers debate whether religious cognition promotes cooperation or mainly reflects other social processes.
Theory of mind: The ability to infer other beings’ beliefs, desires, intentions, and feelings. Attributing minds to gods draws on capacities used to understand other people.
Cognitive anthropology: The study of how people organize and transmit knowledge within cultural settings. It connects mental representations to the cultural settings where religious ideas circulate.
Émile Durkheim: A French sociologist who analyzed religion as a social institution grounded in collective life. His social account offers a major historical counterpart to cognitive explanations.
Memetics: The study of cultural information as replicators that spread and compete, modeled on genes. Its replicator metaphor differs from cognitive accounts centered on how minds reconstruct cultural ideas.
Big Gods: The idea that morally concerned, powerful deities helped sustain cooperation in large societies. This hypothesis tests whether beliefs about monitoring gods altered cooperation as societies grew.

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