Wesley J. Wildman

Cultural inheritance or cultural diffusion of religious violence? A quantitative case study of the Radical Reformation

Abstract Religion throughout the historical record is consistently associated with large-scale cooperative activities. These cooperative activities sometimes involve coordinated acts of violence, particularly against religious out-groups. Using phylogenetic and social network analyses, we investigated whether religious violence is inherited from parent congregations or is acquired from contemporaneous purveyors of violent ideologies. We examined these questions among sixteenth-century Anabaptists, who constitute a prominent historical system with both violent and pacifist congregations. We found that ideology advocating violence was typically inherited from parent congregations, while the majority of other theological traits spread among contemporaneous groups. Violent ideology may be learned independently from most other characteristics of an overall belief system, and/or it may be determined more by congregationally inherited economic and political factors than by theology.

Evaluating Reliance on Narratives in the Psychological Study of Religious Experiences

In studying religious and spiritual experiences (RSEs), psychologists of religion have relied heavily on narratives. How sound is this practice? Using the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI), we diagnosed basic features of RSEs as narrated by 39 participants. This information permitted comparison with third-party ratings of narratives of the same experiences using the PCIs phenomenological categories. Analyzing participant ratings against baseline happy and ordinary experiences showed that the RSEs in our sample possess distinctive phenomenological features. Analyzing participant ratings against third-party ratings of RSE narratives disclosed significant and intelligible differences. Psychologists of religion should rely on RSE narratives where they are effective at communicating experiential content and supplement them with other approaches where narratives are less effective. Combining best practices from both approaches yields a more complete description of RSEs.

Challenges Facing the Neurological Study of Religious Behavior, Belief, and Experience

The neurological study of religious behavior, belief, and experience faces many challenges related to research conception, experimental design, and interpretation of results. Some of these problems are common to other types of neurological study of behavioral and cognitive phenomena. Others are distinctive to the specifically religious domain of behavior, belief, and experience. This paper discusses eight of these problems and three key strategic principles for mitigating them. It then proposes an eight-step framework for research into the neurology of religious behavior, belief, and experience that implements the three strategic principles and addresses all eight of the problems.

Modelling terror management theory: computer simulations of the impact of mortality salience on religiosity

ABSTRACT This article outlines the development – and reports on the experimental findings – of two computational models designed to simulate the dynamic systems and behavioural patterns identified and clarified by research on terror management theory. The causal architectures of these models are informed by empirical research on the effects of mortality salience on “religiosity” (and vice versa). They are also informed by research on the way in which perception of personal and environmental hazards activate evolved cognitive and coalitional precautionary systems that can intensify anxiety-alleviating behaviours such as imaginative engagement with supernatural agents postulated within a religious coalition. The capacity of the models to produce emergent patterns and behaviours that are similar to the results of other empirical studies supports the plausibility of their causal architectures. After tracing some of the literature that supports the causal dynamics of our models, we present the two models, describe the experiments, and report the results. We conclude by discussing the importance of the findings, the limitations of the models, and directions for future research.

The scientific study of atheism

This issue of Religion, Brain & Behavior focuses on the scientific study of atheism. With a pair of target articles from Catherine Caldwell-Harris and Dominic Johnson, a large collection of expert commentaries on those articles, and two responses from the authors, this is one of the richest discussions of the scientific study of atheism in print. Johnson reviews the various ways of conceiving of atheism in evolutionary terms, while Caldwell-Harris analyzes the evidence for atheism as a matter of individual differences. These two essays represent fundamentally contrasting strategies for making sense of atheism and it is likely that future scientific study will have to navigate between the two perspectives. Atheism is becoming a topic of fascination for researchers in the scientific study of religion because the naturalness of religion makes atheism unexpected. If human beings spontaneously produce beliefs in supernatural entities and naturally embrace behaviors that take such entities for granted, then the existence of people such as atheists who reject supernatural entities truly is a puzzle. One explanation is that people just differ in regard to their tendency to postulate supernatural entities for making sense of their lives this is the ‘‘individual differences’’ explanation that Caldwell-Harris explores. Yet it is conceivable that atheism may also have significant functions in the long span of human evolution the many ways in which these functions can be conceived collectively are the ‘‘evolutionary’’ explanations that Johnson reviews. The perplexities surrounding the scientific study of atheism begin with the viability of the basic terminology. ‘‘Atheism’’ combines the Greek word theos, which means ‘‘god,’’ with the negative particle in Greek (a-). Thus, atheism literally means ‘‘no-god’’ and connotes the metaphysical belief that there are no divine beings. First used by ancient philosophers to describe an attitude to the gods of Greek mythology, in the west it has come to mean especially the refusal to accept the existence of the god of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There was an ancient form of atheism in South Asia known as the Cārvāka school. Like atheistic philosophers in ancient Greece, the ancient Cārvākas rejected the gods of popular mythologies. But that view eventually became extinct and has had no role in the development of Indian philosophy except as an object lesson in the non-viability of rejecting belief in gods. The usage of ‘‘atheism’’ to express rejection of the existence of gods strikes most people as straightforward. But its use in the scientific study of religion is actually conceptually quite tangled, from three points of view. First, the cognitive mechanisms giving rise to religious behaviors produce beliefs in many more kinds of supernatural entities than just those rejected in atheism. After all, supernatural entities include ghosts, jinn, ancestors, bodhisattvas, angels, demons, life forces, entelechies, and anything else that involves intentional awareness or agency with no matter-energy substrate. Using the word ‘‘atheism’’ to describe the Religion, Brain & Behavior Vol. 2, No. 1, February 2012, 1 3

What are “The Hilbert Problems” in the Study of Religion?

What are “The Hilbert Problems” in the Study of Religion? Joseph Bulbulia, Wesley J. Wildman, Richard Sosis & Michael L. Spezio To cite this article: Joseph Bulbulia, Wesley J. Wildman, Richard Sosis & Michael L. Spezio (2015) What are “The Hilbert Problems” in the Study of Religion?, Religion, Brain & Behavior, 5:4, 263-265, DOI: 10.1080/2153599X.2015.1084470 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2015.1084470

Religion, SCAN, and developing standards of inquiry

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Religion and Emotion

Ayear ago, in issue 5.3, this space alerted readers and prospective authors to new standards of rigor in the practice of inquiry and reporting for neuroimaging approaches in social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience (SCAN; Spezio, Bulbulia, Wildman, & Sosis, 2015). Sketches of simple guidelines and accompanying examples provided good evidence for the promise of SCAN for the study of religion, along with cautions about relying on older models and former standards of inference and statistical reporting. One area of recent research into religion that may seem to be an obvious choice for further refinement of theories and methods in affective neuroscience is the interdisciplinary inquiry into religion and emotion. Yet this has to date not been the case, even taking the most recent work into account. One reason for the relatively minimal engagement of affective neuroscience by the study of religion and emotion is because the study of religion and emotion is nearly as varied as the study of religion itself. The many varieties include influential approaches from the humanities and social theory expressing deep suspicion, sometimes even hostility, toward any scholarly inquiry suggesting that at least some aspects of religion are not wholly reliant on language and may transcend cultural context and specificity. Another reason for the difficulty of engagement is that affective neuroscience has historically marginalized ethological, anthropological, and philosophical approaches that stress contextual and cultural influences. Affective neuroscience has often emphasized affective averaging and an unreflective positivism. It has paid scant attention to evolutionary lessons from paleoanthropology, despite its numerous claims to links with Darwin’s famous The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872). And until very recently, it has been insensitive to individual, developmental, and cultural differences, as well as interspecies differences that ethologists have worked so hard to elucidate. Are these obstacles to engagement and understanding surmountable? Recent research suggests that they are, at least in part. Yet the main challenge to creating more generative, interand transdisciplinary programs of research into religion and emotion remains the fact that, for the most part, the methods on which each perspective’s claims depend are known only by the experts in that perspective. Affective neuroscientists do not commonly engage with books on affect theory, the affective turn, cultural and paleoanthropologies of affect, and philosophies of affect/emotion. Most programs that train affective neuroscientists do not explicitly address the history of emotion as a relatively recent invention, nor do they take stock of the field’s dependence on the West’s long history of dualism and oppositionalism with regard to affects and cognitions. On the other hand, affective theorists in the humanities and social theory do not always cite or build their arguments on peer-reviewed, scientific research papers. On occasion these scholars have engaged popular accounts of science, such as trade books written by influential scientists, but that is not the same as reading original research articles. Published journal articles are obviously much more nuanced and detailed than the popular accounts, and this is the literature that scientists themselves read and use.

Ethnography and Experiments in the Scientific Study of Religion

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Bio-Cultural Approaches to Social Forms

For more than a century, we have relied on sociologists to explain the varied forms of human sociality, from political parties to religious organizations, from families to class hierarchies. The task of the sociologist is to interpret the emergent system of human life from the perspective afforded by its group character. Sociologists have battled internally over the extent to which abstracting the human-group perspective from the entire emergent system of human life leads to mistakes of interpretation or theoretical blind spots. For example, when we focus on the social construction of human life and behavior, do we underestimate biological factors such as shared cognitive-emotional structures? Psychologists grapple with a similar challenge of estimating what price might be paid for abstracting the individual-level perspective from the entire emergent system of human life. Many sociologists and psychologists are increasingly realistic about the risks of oversimplification that might be associated with their disciplinary practices, including the elision of salient explanatory factors. We suspect this is partly because of high-quality interdisciplinary work showcasing the sciences of culture and the sciences of cognition combined to make sense of human life at all levels. These bio-cultural approaches to social forms have been growing in influence within the scientific study of religion during the last decade due to their production of a wide range of illuminating results. For example, the study of ritual has been transformed by taking account of information about the physiological, emotional, cognitive, and health effects of rhythmic-affective bodily states. The moral functions of religious groups are cast in a new light by research in moral psychology. This issue of Religion, Brain & Behavior presents a target article (with discussion) and several research articles that represent this sea change in the scientific understanding of social forms in relation to religion. Collectively, the papers in this issue illustrate the diversity of bio-cultural techniques used to shed new light on religious sociality. The target article in this issue is by Uffe Schjoedt, Jesper Sørensen, Kristoffer Nielbo, Dimitris Xygalatas, Panagiotis Mitkidis, and Joseph Bulbulia. This research team employs a familiar framework within ritual theory, namely, one in which collective rituals facilitate the transmission of cultural ideas. They then attempt to identify specifically cognitive features of religious ritual practices that increase the susceptibility of participants to religious authorities and the narratives that such authorities propound. They hypothesize that the susceptibility to authority is a direct result of the way that the identified cognitive features inhibit the ability of individuals from exercising their usual methods of interpreting their experience. The novelty here is to articulate a standard assumption of ritual-theory with an analysis of human cognition, exemplifying bio-cultural methods. The commentaries make for a fascinating discussion. As the response by the target article authors indicates, the commentators pushed hard on the model, the evidence, and the supposed neglect of Religion, Brain & Behavior, 2013 Vol. 3, No. 1, 1 2, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2012.747257