Papers by Prof. Joseph Bulbulia
The neural basis of religion: Joseph Bulbulia and Uffe Schjoedt
Why “costly signalling” models of religion require cognitive psychology
An Evolutionary EXPLORATION1
Common sense holds there are distinctive religions, an intuition that informs most scholarship an... more Common sense holds there are distinctive religions, an intuition that informs most scholarship and teaching in religious studies and the social sciences, but the intu ition is somewhat misleading. In spite of apparent religious difference, recent psy chological inquiry suggests that religion emerges from a single panhuman psychological design that strongly constrains variation. There is some variation in the religiosity of individuals and groups, but not the variation of "traditionsThis paper uses recent research in the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion to explore some basic properties of the mental architecture that generates human religiosity, includ ing features that enhance the illusion of religious dfference.
Neuropsychologia, Jun 1, 2017
Beliefs profoundly affect people's lives, but their cognitive and neural pathways are poorly unde... more Beliefs profoundly affect people's lives, but their cognitive and neural pathways are poorly understood. Although previous research has identified the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as critical to representing religious beliefs, the means by which vmPFC enables religious belief is uncertain. We hypothesized that the vmPFC represents diverse religious beliefs and that a vmPFC lesion would be associated with religious fundamentalism, or the narrowing of
Biology and Philosophy, Nov 1, 2004
The following reviews recent developments in the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religio... more The following reviews recent developments in the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion, and argues for an adaptationist stance.
Signalling theory and the evolution of religious cooperation
Religion, Sep 1, 2011
How does religion motivate cooperation? How do the factors (genetic and cultural) that cause thes... more How does religion motivate cooperation? How do the factors (genetic and cultural) that cause these motivations variously evolve, and why are they conserved? Cooperative-signalling theories of religion answer these questions by generalising from well-supported principles and research in the life sciences. Cooperative-signalling theories are interesting because they explain existing puzzles in the data about religions, and lead to testable hypotheses. This article discusses how signalling theory has been applied to explain the ...
How Do Religious Identities and Basic Value Orientations Affect Each Other Over Time?
International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, Dec 7, 2013
ABSTRACT
The Arts Transform The Cognitive Science of Religion
Journal for the cognitive science of religion, Jan 11, 2014
The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is becoming increasingly experimental. Its methods are wi... more The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is becoming increasingly experimental. Its methods are winning the hearts of next-generation humanities scholars of religion. Yet many present-generation humanities scholars of religion remain unaware of recent advances and have yet to participate. I hope to persuade such scholars that it is worth attempting collaborative science. CSR research will benefit from a fuller participation of mature humanities scholars of religion because their training affords a rich knowledge of religious facts. By the same token, humanities scholars of religion should be interested in scientific approaches because cumulative intellectual progress in every empirical discipline relies on hypothesis-driven research. My argument comes in three parts. First, I clarify the exciting possibilities for cumulative intellectual progress that hypothesis-driven research uniquely affords. Second, I describe recent advances from humanities/CSR collaborations, hazarding a few predictions about what to expect next. Third, I offer practical advice to humanities scholars about how to pursue productive CSR collaborations.
Ritual and Cooperation
Supernatural beliefs and ritual activities co-occur, suggesting that the evolutionary functions o... more Supernatural beliefs and ritual activities co-occur, suggesting that the evolutionary functions of beliefs and rituals might be linked. However, this link has not received sufficient attention in the evolutionary literatures on religion. This chapter reviews how ‘commitment signalling’ theory explains the co-evolution of religious beliefs and rituals, focusing on religion’s role in cultural evolution of cities and states. Religious rituals and religious beliefs conspired to support the evolution of cooperative trade networks, as well as the evolution of normative, intergenerational social inequality.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Feb 1, 2021
More than 1 billion people worldwide report no religious affiliation. These religious "nones" rep... more More than 1 billion people worldwide report no religious affiliation. These religious "nones" represent the world's third largest religion-related identity group and are a diverse group, with some having previous religious identification and others never identifying as religious. We examined how 3 forms of religious identification-current, former, and never-influence a range of cognitions, emotions, and behavior. Three studies using nationally representative samples of religious Western (United States), secular Western (Netherlands, New Zealand) and Eastern (Hong Kong) cultures showed evidence of a religious residue effect: Formerly religious individuals (i.e., religious "dones") differed from never religious and currently religious individuals in cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes. Study 1 (n ϭ 3,071) offered initial cross-cultural evidence, which was extended in a preregistered replication study that also included measures of charitable contribution (Study 2; n ϭ 1,626). Study 3 (N ϭ 31,464) found that individuals who deidentified were still relatively likely to engage in prosocial behavior (e.g., volunteering) after leaving religion. This research has broad implications for understanding changing global trends in religious identification and their consequences for psychology and behavior.
The Neural Basis of Religious Cognition
Current Directions in Psychological Science, Feb 3, 2020
Religion’s neural underpinnings have long been a topic of speculation and debate, but an emerging... more Religion’s neural underpinnings have long been a topic of speculation and debate, but an emerging neuroscience of religion is beginning to clarify which regions of the brain integrate moral, ritual, and supernatural religious beliefs with functionally adaptive responses. Here, we review evidence indicating that religious cognition involves a complex interplay among the brain regions underpinning cognitive control, social reasoning, social motivations, and ideological beliefs.
Religion, Sep 1, 2011
Applying evolutionary analyses to the study of religion is fraught with complications and potenti... more Applying evolutionary analyses to the study of religion is fraught with complications and potential misunderstandings. Most notably, the evolutionary sciences do not offer one clear procedure to study religion or any human activity. Here we describe the behavioral ecological approach to religion. We explain the theoretical motivations behind behavioral ecological research and discuss the methodologies employed to conduct this research. We argue that despite limitations, behavioral ecology can offer important benefits to religious scholarship by providing a coherent and powerful framework for generating, testing, and discarding hypotheses about specific aspects of religious behaviors and cultures.
Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction? An Adaptationist Alternative to The Cultural Maladaptationist Hypothesis
Method & Theory in The Study of Religion, 2008
This paper develops an alternative to Dennett's meme-theoretic explanation for religious comm... more This paper develops an alternative to Dennett's meme-theoretic explanation for religious commitment. First I build an argument in defense of Dennett's position, drawing on a cultural evolution literature that he mentions but does not develop (Dennett 2006). Then I describe data that even this enhanced account leaves poorly explained. Next I draw on commitment signaling theory to produce an account that explains these puzzling data. I show how religious culture provides a pervasive example of human epistemic niche construction. An adaptationist analysis of religious culture exposes how the propagation of costly misunderstandings massively reduce the cognitive burdens of Machiavellian social complexity.
Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2008
We describe the results of an experiment testing for the presence of strong altruism among Christ... more We describe the results of an experiment testing for the presence of strong altruism among Christians in New Zealand. Th e study examined anonymous participant generosity to cohort. We found that in modifi ed dictator games, anonymous Christians in New Zealand gave signifi cantly more to Canadian Christians than anonymous New Zealand citizens gave to their fellow citizens. Th e gifting opportunities occurred after anonymous benefactors observed recipients willingly undertake costly acts of group commitment. We found that mean gifting after witnessing a fellow group member metaphorically "fall on a hand grenade" to punish a member of an out-group was almost four times greater in the Christian group than it was in the New Zealand control. Our data support the hypothesis that religious altruism (here, anonymously rewarding the costly punishment of a religious out-grouper) exists and is especially strong among Christians in New Zealand. Th e data also weakly support a multi-level selection hypothesis for the evolution of religious altruism.
More than 1 billion people worldwide report no religious affiliation. These religious "nones" rep... more More than 1 billion people worldwide report no religious affiliation. These religious "nones" represent the world's third largest religion-related identity group and are a diverse group, with some having previous religious identification and others never identifying as religious. We examined how 3 forms of religious identification-current, former, and never-influence a range of cognitions, emotions, and behavior. Three studies using nationally representative samples of religious Western (United States), secular Western (Netherlands, New Zealand) and Eastern (Hong Kong) cultures showed evidence of a religious residue effect: Formerly religious individuals (i.e., religious "dones") differed from never religious and currently religious individuals in cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes. Study 1 (n ϭ 3,071) offered initial cross-cultural evidence, which was extended in a preregistered replication study that also included measures of charitable contribution (Study 2; n ϭ 1,626). Study 3 (N ϭ 31,464) found that individuals who deidentified were still relatively likely to engage in prosocial behavior (e.g., volunteering) after leaving religion. This research has broad implications for understanding changing global trends in religious identification and their consequences for psychology and behavior.
A national-scale typology of orientations to religion poses new challenges for the cultural evolutionary study of religious groups
Religion, brain and behavior, Dec 27, 2019
ABSTRACT Religious groups differ in theology, ritual, and modes of self-governance. However, the ... more ABSTRACT Religious groups differ in theology, ritual, and modes of self-governance. However, the extent to which such differences capture the variation of religious individuals remains unclear. Latent Profile Analysis offers a powerful statistical method for obtaining typologies from the response profiles of religious individuals. Here, we draw on a national sample of religiously-identified New Zealanders (N = 1484) and use LPA to obtain typologies for diversity in attitudes to religion as assessed by a combination of religious orientations, fundamentalism, and religious group narcissism/humility. The most parsimonious model recovers five types. To illustrate the importance of this descriptive typology, we evaluate the predictions of a church-sect theory against it. Consistent with church-sect theory, we find a greater density of intrinsic/exclusive types (Fundamentrinsics and X-trinsics) among informal/marginal religious groups and a greater density of extrinsic/inclusive types (Moderinsics and Disaffected) among established/mainstream churches. However, the data also reveal an unexpected feature: about 50% of religious affiliates across both marginal and mainstream Christian groups present as either Questrinsics or Moderinsics. Collectively, our findings illustrate how rigorous descriptive statistical models may combine with national-scale data to evaluate classical theories of religious change, while also raising new explanatory challenges for future evolutionary scholars of religions.
Introducing a special issue on phase two of the Evolution of Religion and Morality project
Religion, Brain & Behavior
This special double issue, Religion, Brain & Behavior’s first ever double issue, presents res... more This special double issue, Religion, Brain & Behavior’s first ever double issue, presents results from the second phase of the Evolution of Religion and Morality (ERM) project. Results from the first phase of this pioneering and influential project were published in a previous special issue of RBB (2018, volume 8, issue 2) and elsewhere (e.g., Purzycki et al., 2016). The core of this second wave of research employs experimental games—the Dictator Game and Random Allocation Game—as well as demographic and economic data to explore the relationship between beliefs in particular types of supernatural agents and cooperative behavior. Similar to the previous RBB special issue on the ERM project, this issue presents independent articles on each of the field sites from the project. These articles allowed the ERM researchers to describe the cultural and historical context of their field studies, and offered an opportunity to conduct more rigorous intra-field site analyses in ways that were not possible in the synthetic cross-cultural study previously published with the second-wave data (Lang et al., 2019). Each of these studies explores ethnographically-derived questions that afford rich insights about the subsistence, ecological, and economic variation in the collective ERM data set. In addition to these experimental and interview studies, this issue also offers four new synthetic pieces. First, Baimel et al. analyze the relationship between religious commitments and material insecurity. They show that across the 15 ERM field sites, Christian sites exhibit the strongest relationship between religious commitment and belief in a moralizing god, and this relationship is positively predicted by material insecurity. Second, Vardy et al. use the collective ERM data set to explore the oft-cited gender gap in which women exhibit higher levels of religious commitment than men. Consistent with previous research, the ERM findings support a religious gender gap. However, this gap only arises for traditions with a moralizing god. Women do not exhibit greater religious commitments in traditions that worship local gods. Third, Purzycki et al. assess whether the supernatural agents that elicit commitments across the 15 field sites are interested in human morality. As anticipated, even when “official” or “theologically correct” claims deny that the gods maintain moral interest, across the ERM field sites study participants inferred that their gods, even local gods, were generally interested in their moral actions. In the final paper of this special issue, Purzcyki et al. wrap up the 10-year ERM project with a summary target article that examines the methodological and analytic challenges of a large multi-field site cross-disciplinary study. This article assesses the strengths and limitations of both phases of the ERM project, as well as offers advice for researchers aiming to pursue similarly ambitious projects. It provides a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes machinations of a long-term large-scale research endeavor. We elicited commentaries from five well-known scholars in the scientific study of religion—from anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy, and psychology— to comment on this article and the ERM project in general. The special issue concludes with a response to these commentaries from Purzycki et al. The impact of ERM on the biocultural study of religion in particular, and the academic study of religion in general, is only just beginning. In addition to the various scholarly debates that their results have initiated, ERM has strengthened a trend toward cross-cultural projects aimed at understanding variation in religious expression, commitment, and behavior. Indeed, the scientific study
All over the world, people reason dualistically. We consider it more probable that mental states,... more All over the world, people reason dualistically. We consider it more probable that mental states, such as love, continue after biological death than we think bodily states, such as hunger, will continue. However the extent to which culture affects mind-body dualism remains unclear. Here, we draw on a large and diverse cross-cultural sample (24 countries, N = 10195) to systematically quantify cultural variation in tendencies for mind-body dualism. Our findings replicate previous work suggesting that mind-body dualism is culturally universal. Furthermore, our experiment reveals that religion amplifies dualistic tendencies. At the same time, however, the modal response across most countries was the cessation of all states. In addition, explicit afterlife beliefs were more prevalent than implicit afterlife beliefs (i.e., continuity judgments). Overall, these data suggest that intuitive materialism is the cross-cultural norm, with dualism arising from culturally acquired beliefs.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
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Papers by Prof. Joseph Bulbulia