Discusses what the cognitive science of religion is and outlines the chapter of the volume.

Reliance on convenience samples for psychological experiments has led to the oversampling of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) populations (Henrich et al. 2010a). Our analysis of academic articles from six leading psychology journals revealed a significantly lower but still very high percentage of studies from European and English-speaking nations (92%), compared to a decade ago (95%), largely due to more studies from Asia (6%). Further analysis of four cognitive science of religion (CSR) journals showed how a more representative field is possible (67% from the Western and Other region), with proportionately more studies in Latin America (4%) and Africa (7%) than psychology (<1% each). Thanks to its interdisciplinary nature, CSR is in a good position to address “WEIRD” problems and may be able to offer psychology methodological and epistemological tools that involve diversifying sample populations, increasing ecological validity, capturing the causes and consequences of cultural variation, and developing novel methodologies. Despite the challenges, we encourage more researchers to embrace the lessons offered by CSR’s history of global and interdisciplinary research. Where WEIRD identifies the populations we need to stop privileging, conducting work that is not just Worldwide, but also In Situ, Local, and Diverse (WILD) is what researchers themselves can aspire to. Just as nineteenth century “armchair anthropologists” were replaced by generations of ethnographers who went out into the real world to study human variation, so modern day psychologists need to conduct experiments outside the lab with suitably heterogeneous populations.

Here, we present two case studies which combine ethnographic fieldwork with quantitative methods to describe religious behaviour in two ecologically valid settings. Case Study 1 describes the use of mixed methods to explore whether different types of supernatural agents are associated with different categories of moral transgression in Burma, a syncretic and multi-religious environment which naturally lends itself to this question. In this case study, ethnography plays a key role in designing appropriate questionnaire measures, generating hypotheses, and interpreting the behaviour of experimental participants. Case Study 2 describes the use of mixed methods to investigate the interrelationships between religious scandals and the emergence of ex-Catholicism in Ireland, a country noted for its recent and rapid secularization. Here, ethnography plays a key role in elucidating the limitations of early experimental designs and generating further hypotheses, while surveying in turn addresses issues of representativeness in the fieldwork. Together, these case studies serve to illustrate a number of advantages and challenges that come with adopting a mixed methods approach. We close by outlining four reasons for mixing qualitative and quantitative methods when studying religious cognition in the field, using the case studies above as examples. These are: 1) methodological triangulation, 2) assessment of instruments and procedures, 3) qualitative/quantitative iteration, and 4) capturing the current context in scenarios where existing ethnographic research is sparse or deficient.

Since its inception, the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) has to a large extent moved from a cognitively-informed but interpretative focus to a hypothesis-driven experimental one. The experimental turn has allowed CSR scholars to practice more thoroughly interdisciplinary research and to engage in productive debates and collaborations with other disciplines. This direction has brought many benefits. However, CSR scholars will need to keep in mind that the strength of the field lies in its firm grounding in cultural expertise, and it is in this capacity that it can make its most important contributions.

Within the last two decades, the cognitive science of religion has gained momentum, and this has led to a call for dedicated experimental studies addressing this level of explanation. However, what does such an experimental turn mean for the study of religion more generally? How does it affect what we study and the methods we use to study it? Does it alter with whom we cooperate, where we publish and what scholarly discussions we take part in? In this article, we discuss how the experimental study of religious phenomena changes the theoretical subject matter and how it involves a new relation between theoretical modeling, methodological reduction and generalization. We argue that, similar to all new approaches, an experimental methodology is likely to alter the study of religion in the short run, but in the longer perspective experimental approaches are likely to take their place beside other approaches that constitute the broader field of the academic study of religion.

Are there any methodological issues unique to the psychology of religion? The claim has been made that the psychology of religion was decisively hampered by its inability to conduct true experiments. Looking at the past half-century, it is shown that there are no limits on experimentation in the field, and that both interesting theories and original experiments have been mainstreaming it within psychology. The rise of CSR has been a major stimulus, together with other fruitful approaches. Challenging CSR notions can only lead to more progress. The need for treating both biological and historical generalizations with caution may force psychologists to focus on cross-cultural experimentation, which promises significant insights.

In addition to a set of beliefs, religion is fundamentally a corporeal practice. Across religions, specific postures adopted for prayer and worship may not simply reflect arbitrary customs but are closely intertwined with religious experience. This contribution reviews embodiment theory and related empirical evidence showing how body postures influence our emotions, thoughts, and decision-making. We propose a typology of postures adopted in religious practices along the dimensions of expansiveness-constrictiveness and upward-downward body orientation, and review the corpus of published/unpublished research on the embodiment of worship. We further discuss that in addition to enabling the experiential and ritualistic aspect of religion, embodiment serves at least four functions: communicative, social, cognitive, and intrapersonal. Finally, we suggest contextual and individual differences variables that may constrain the choice and psychological consequences of postures within and outside religious contexts. Together, we emphasize that the locus of religion’s psycho-social “effects” is not only in the mind or the brain but in the full body.

Social psychologists have frequently used priming methodologies to explore how religion can impact behaviour. Despite this, no consensus currently exists on whether religious priming effects are replicable or consistently observed across a range of spiritual beliefs. Moreover, mixed evidence highlights possible methodological shortcomings within the priming literature as well as theoretical ambiguity regarding the contents of different primes. The current article examines four types of religious priming methodologies that are frequently used in social-psychological research (explicit, implicit, subliminal, and contextual) and critically inspects the current landscape of the religious priming literature. We highlight theoretical issues and suggest methodological improvements that should facilitate a clearer understanding of when and how religion influences human behaviour.

This chapter serves as an introduction to a small collection of essays dedicated to the study of religious experience in the ancient Mediterranean world. First, the chapter addresses the challenges of a historical study of religious experiences. Second, a model of religious experience is outlined that connects neurological, textual, cognitive, and ritual aspects of religious experience. Finally, the essays in the collection are briefly introduced.

This essay examines the biblical passage of Daniel 9 in light of the second chapter of Patrick McNamara’s book The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (2009).This biblical text is one in which Daniel performs funerary rites and prayers, acts that generate a visionary experience of an angel who reveals to him a revised interpretation of Jeremiah’s prophecy concerning the 70 year duration of the exile. The author proposes that the experience of grief aroused by the ritualized mourning and the performance of prayer elements that emphasize petition and confession of sin, succeeds in layering experiences of self-diminishment. Ruminative behaviour that characterizes grief is understood as an imaginative practice (Boyer 2009) that makes present a deity who would have been otherwise obscured given the political circumstances of the second century historical context of the Book of Daniel and allows for the adaptive modification of Jeremiah’s prestigious prophecy by a much later second century community.

This chapter addresses the neuroscientific background of ancient tours of heaven. McNamara’s work on religious experience is used in the context of other philosophical, cognitive, and neuroscientific research. After discussing the definition and phenomenology of subjective experience, the chapter outlines three possible understandings of religious experience in the cognitive research tradition. The chapter then situates ancient tours of heaven in the context of flights and ascents in religious traditions and discusses how neuroscientific evidence sheds light on various aspects of such experiences. In particular, McNamara’s work is combined with Michael Marsh’s study of extracorporeal experiences to account for the two-phase narrative sequence of the tours. The model is applied to the tour of heaven in the Ascension of Isaiah, followed by a brief discussion of other early Jewish and Christian apocalypses.

This chapter outlines how the perspective of De Sublimitate concerning the effect of great literature resembles ancient and modern notions of religious experience. To demonstrate this similarity, the chapter draws on McNamara’s concept of the decentering process in religious experience. This concept of the decentering process serves as a framework for understanding how an encounter with writing that the author deems to be hupsos (“sublime” or “elevated”) has similar decentering effects. The chapter engages, but also moves slightly beyond, McNamara’s understanding of the role of language in the decentering process. The first part of the chapter provides an overview of McNamara’s concept of decentering. In particular, it highlights four aspects of the decentering process: (1) the loss of agency; (2) the experience of ecstasy; (3) the role of the emotions; and (4) the cognitive changes that occur during and after the process. The second part of the chapter demonstrates the presence of similar ideas in De Sublimitate’s discussion of the effects of encountering literature that is characterized as hupsos. The concluding section considers how this reading of De Sublimitate aids in an understanding of the relationship between religious texts and religious experience, drawing a connection with Celia Deutsch’s concept of “text work” as religious experience.

In this chapter I review “Ritual Mourning in Daniel’s Interpretation of Jeremiah’s Prophecy” by Angela Kim Harkins; “Tours of Heaven in Light of the Neuroscientific Study of Religious Experience” by István Czachesz; “(Religious) Language and the Decentering Process: McNamara and De Sublimitate on the Ecstatic Effect of Language” by Christopher T. Holmes. I present an argument that we need neuroscience in order to understand religious cognition as it occurs today and as it was presented in these ancient religious texts. The reason neuroscience is not merely an optional item in the toolbox but absolutely necessary is because religious cognition is characterized by decentering and decentering cannot be understood in the absence of reference to its brain mechanisms. Decentering crucially involves a four-step process whose steps are united not by any inherent logic but rather by the brain processes that produced them in the first place.

This contribution offers a tentative systemization of different strands of method and theory in the sub-field of cognitive historiography in the form of a decalogue and 30 reflections. The primary aim is to clarify the role of both interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-disciplinary integration. The secondary goal is to provide interested readers, colleagues, and young researchers from a wide range of different academic branches across the two cultures with a crash course and a protocol to basic collaborative research. An indicative and essential bibliography is also provided. This introductory opinion piece is open for further comments, additions, suggestions, and discussions.

The cult of Cybele and Attis was an ancient cult disseminated throughout the entire Roman Empire. Among the rites held by its followers, there were the so-called Day of Blood (dies sanguinis) which, according to the Calendar (or Chronography) of Philocalus (354 CE), was celebrated on 24 March. On this day the worshipers and priests (galli) of Cybele/Attis flagellated themselves until they bled profusely, and with their blood they sprinkled Cybele’s effigy as well as the altars of the temple, while the initiates castrated themselves and offered their testes to the goddess as a real-life imitation of what happened mythologically to the goddess’ consort Attis. The present contribution offers a preliminary systemization of this glaringly maladaptive and quite puzzling belief-behaviour complex in the anthropological and neurocognitive frame of the so-called extreme rituals, highlighting the specific in-group benefit reaped by worshipers and initiates (e.g., community cohesion through costly signalling and credibilityenhancing displays).

The chapter offers an overview of the cult of Bona Dea in light of the gendered social framework of ancient Roman society. Intrasexual competition and patriarchal, institutionalized sociodicy are taken into account, respectively, as ultimate and proximate explanations of the Bona Dea mythography. The diffusion of the cult and its spread in the literary environment are also tentatively explained by the presence of specific narrative elements (e.g. metamorphosis), some of which are apt to elicit strong reactions (i.e. rape, incest). Finally, the December cult devoted to the goddess is interpreted as a teletropic ritual device both symbiotic/euphoric (i.e. stress-relieving) and exploitative (i.e. a top-down concession enhancing psychological dependence on masculine hierarchy).

Modern psychological research has devoted considerable attention to physiological disgust and “moral” disgust, finding both similarities and significant differences between them. Of particular interest is the plausible evolutionary hypothesis that physiological disgust provides the phylogenetic basis for social or moral disgust. To a considerable extent, these distinctions are comparable to the different categories of pollution which have been identified in the Hebrew Bible, specifically the distinction between so-called “ritual” and “moral” impurities. It will be argued that the evolutionary framework employed for the study of disgust can shed light on the role of pollution beliefs in shaping moral discourse in ancient Israel. This evolutionary perspective will serve as the basis for a renewed examination of the social implications of purity, duly stressed in Mary Douglas’ influential treatise Purity and Danger (1966). However, in contrast with Douglas’ symbolic approach to pollution, which presupposed a top-down process rooted in disembodied rationality, this article outlines a bottom-up account grounded in physiological concerns related to disgust and infectious disease. This embodied framework enables the identification of two distinct mechanisms by which pollution can take on broader socio-moral implications, specifically those embedded in purity practices themselves and those emerging from the rhetorical extensions of purity language. The article concludes with a discussion of how this historical evidence can encourage a reconsideration of some prevalent assumptions in modern experimental research of moral disgust.

This chapter explores the potential impact and contribution of the Database of Religious History (DRH) project within the field of Cognitive Historiography. The DRH aims to bring together, in a systematic and open-access format, data on religious groups from across the globe and throughout history. By utilizing robust, open-source technologies and best-practice software principles, the DRH constitutes a novel and innovative approach to historical and cultural studies. As a contribution to the scientific study of both religion and history, the DRH offers data amenable to statistical analyses, thus providing tools for assessing diachronic cultural innovation and adaptation, the testing of grand narrative theories of religious change, and for enriching and revitalizing traditional fields such as comparative religions, history of religion(s), and anthropology of religion. In this chapter we explore the methods employed in collecting and digitizing historical data, identify our unit of analysis, outline the challenges of recruiting historians of various fields, and highlight the DRH’s methodological potential for both Religious Studies and Cognitive historiography.

This chapter introduces the Seshat: Global History Databank, its potential, and its methodology. Seshat is a databank containing vast amounts of quantitative data buttressed by qualitative nuance for a large sample of historical and archaeological polities. The sample is global in scope and covers the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. Seshat allows scholars to capture dynamic processes and to test theories about the co-evolution (or not) of social scale and complexity, agriculture, warfare, religion, and any number of such Big Questions. Seshat is rapidly becoming a massive resource for innovative cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary research. Seshat is part of a growing trend to use comparative historical data on a large scale and contributes as such to a growing consilience between the humanities and social sciences. Seshat is underpinned by a robust and transparent workflow to ensure the ever growing dataset is of high quality.

Text-heavy and unstructured data constitute the primary source materials for many historical reconstructions. In history and the history of religion, text analysis has typically been conducted by systematically selecting a small sample of texts and subjecting it to highly detailed reading and mental synthesis. But two interrelated technological developments have rendered a new data-intensive paradigm – one that can usefully supplement qualitative analysis – possible in the study of historical textual traditions. First, the availability of significant computing power has made it possible to run algorithms for automated text analysis on most personal computers. Second, the rapid increase in full text digital databases relevant to the study of religion has considerably reduced costs related to data acquisition and digitization. However, a limited understanding of the scope, advantages, and limitations of data-intensive methods have created real obstacles to the implementation of this paradigm in historical research. This is unfortunate, because history offers a rich and uncharted field for data-intensive knowledge discovery, and historians already have the much sought after and necessary domain expertise. In this article we seek to remove obstacles to the data intensive paradigm by presenting its methods and models for handling text-heavy data.

This chapter provides a basic overview of the most common methods of computer modelling and simulation that are currently being used to study religion. It focuses on the use (and illustrates the value) of system dynamics models, agent-based models, including game theory and multi-agent artificial intelligence models, and artificial neural networks. General use case examples are provided, and considerations for future research are discussed. We conclude by encouraging scholars interested in religion and related fields to incorporate techniques from the computational science of religion into their collaborative methodological toolkits.

The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is a relatively young but prolific field that has offered compelling insights into religious minds and practices. However, many empirical findings within this field are still preliminary and their reliability remains to be determined. In this paper, we first argue that it is crucial to critically evaluate the CSR literature and adopt open science practices and replication research in particular to move the field forward. Second, we highlight the outcomes of previous replications and make suggestions for future replication studies in the CSR, with a particular focus on neuroscience, developmental psychology, and qualitative research. Finally, we provide a “replication script” with advice on how to select, conduct, and organize replication research. Our approach is illustrated with a “glimpse behind the scenes” of the Cross-Cultural Religious Replication Project, in the hope of inspiring scholars of religion to embrace open science and replication in their own research.

Adopting newly proposed “open science” reforms to improve transparency and increase rigor is hard and can make us, as researchers, feel vulnerable. Nonetheless, these reforms are vital to improving the overall quality and confidence of our collective research. We have, through our own experiences, found that preregistration and detailed analysis plans can help to identify, and potentially avoid, errors. Prepublication has similarly helped us to collaborate and receive feedback on manuscripts, particularly during prolonged periods of peer-review. The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) field is constituted by a diversity of scholars and disciplines, and thus faces somewhat unique challenges in its efforts to establish common practices, standards, and research terminology. In this paper we offer an introduction to the open science reforms of preregistration and prepublication specifically orientated towards the CSR field. We discuss common concerns around these practices, highlighting areas of misunderstanding while conceding and discussing genuine limitations. We conclude with voluntary, low-investment recommendations for best-practices with regards to preregistration and preprints for the field of the Cognitive Science of Religion.

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.

Concluding remarks focusing primarily on some general theoretical and methodological issues raised by the essays in this volume.