Religious beliefs apparently challenge our view of human cognition as an evolved system that provides reliable information about environments. We propose that properties of religious beliefs are best understood in terms of a dual-processing model, in which a variety of evolved domain-specific systems provide stable intuitions, whereas other systems produce explicit, often deliberate comments on those intuitions. This perspective accounts for the fact that religious beliefs are apparently diverse but thematically similar and that they are immune to refutation and more attractive to imaginative individuals.
AstutiR. (2001). Are we all natural dualists? A cognitive developmental approach. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 7, 1–18.
2.
BarrettH. C.BehneT. (2005). Children’s understanding of death as the cessation of agency: A test using sleep versus death. Cognition, 96, 93–108.
3.
BarrettJ. L. (2000). Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 29–34.
4.
BarrettJ. L. (2004). Why would anyone believe in God?Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
5.
BastianB.JettenJ.FasoliF. (2011). Cleansing the soul by hurting the flesh. Psychological Science, 22, 334–335.
6.
BaumardN.AndréJ.-B.SperberD. (2013). A mutualistic approach to morality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 1–36.
7.
BaumardN.ChevallierC. (2012). What goes around comes around: The evolutionary roots of the belief in immanent justice. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 12, 67–80.
8.
BeringJ. M. (2002). Intuitive conceptions of dead agents’ minds: The natural foundations of afterlife beliefs as phenomenological boundary. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2, 263–308.
9.
BlochM. (2008). Why religion is nothing special but is central. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363, 2055–2061.
10.
BloomP. (2007). Religion is natural. Developmental Science, 10, 147–151.
11.
BoyerP. (1994a). Cognitive constraints on cultural representations: Natural ontologies and religious ideas. In HirschfeldL. A.GelmanS. (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain-specificity in culture and cognition (pp. 391–411). New York: Cambridge University Press.
12.
BoyerP. (1994b). The naturalness of religious ideas: A cognitive theory of religion. Berkeley: University of California Press.
13.
BoyerP. (1998). Cognitive tracks of cultural inheritance: How evolved intuitive ontology governs cultural transmission. American Anthropologist, 100, 876–889.
14.
BoyerP. (2001). Religion explained: Evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York: Basic Books.
15.
BoyerP.BarrettH. C. (2005). Domain specificity and intuitive ontology. In BussD. M. (Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 96–118). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
16.
BoyerP.LienardP. (2006). Why ritualized behavior? Precaution systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 595–613.
17.
BulbuliaJ. (2004). Religious costs as adaptations that signal altruistic intention. Evolution and Cognition, 10, 19–42.
18.
CohenE. E. A.Ejsmond-FreyR.KnightN.DunbarR. I. M. (2010). Rowers’ high: Behavioural synchrony is correlated with elevated pain thresholds. Biology Letters, 6, 106–108.
19.
EpleyN.WaytzA.CacioppoJ. T. (2007). On seeing human: A three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychological Review, 114, 864–886.
20.
EvansE. M. (2001). Cognitive and contextual factors in the emergence of diverse belief systems: Creation versus evolution. Cognitive Psychology, 42, 217–226.
21.
EvansJ. S. B. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 255–278.
22.
FesslerD.NavarreteC. (2003). Meat is good to taboo: Dietary proscriptions as a product of the interaction of psychological mechanisms and social processes. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 3, 1–40.
HaidtJ. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814–834.
25.
IronsW. (2001). Religion as a hard-to-fake sign of commitment. In NesseR. (Ed.), Evolution and the capacity for commitment (pp. 292–309). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
26.
KelemenD. (2004). Are children “intuitive theists?” Reasoning about purpose and design in nature. Psychological Science, 15, 295–301.
27.
KonvalinkaI.XygalatasD.BulbuliaJ.SchjødtU.JegindøE.-M.WallotS.. (2011). Synchronized arousal between performers and related spectators in a fire-walking ritual. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 108, 8514–8519.
28.
LegareC. H.GelmanS. A. (2008). Bewitchment, biology, or both: The co-existence of natural and supernatural explanatory frameworks across development. Cognitive Science, 32, 607–642.
29.
LuhrmannT. M. (2005). The art of hearing God: Absorption, dissociation, and contemporary American spirituality. Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, 5, 133–157.
30.
McKayR. T.DennettD. C. (2009). The evolution of misbelief. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 493–561.
31.
NelissenR.ZeelenbergM. (2009). When guilt evokes self-punishment: Evidence for the existence of a Dobby effect. Emotion, 9, 118–122.
PyysiainenI. (2001). How religion works: Towards a new cognitive science of religion. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
34.
RozinP.MillmanL.NemeroffC. (1986). Operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 703– 712.
35.
SperberD. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
36.
SperberD. (2000). Metarepresentation in an evolutionary perspective. In SperberD. (Ed.), Metarepresentations: A multidisciplinary perspective (pp. 117–138). New York: Oxford University Press.
37.
ToobyJ.CosmidesL. (1995). Mapping the evolved functional organization of mind and brain. In GazzanigaM. S.BizziE.CaramazzaA. (Eds.), The cognitive neurosciences (pp. 1185–1197). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
38.
TriversR. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–57.
39.
WallaceB. A.ShapiroS. L. (2006). Mental balance and well-being: Building bridges between Buddhism and Western psychology. American Psychologist, 61, 690–701.
40.
WiltermuthS. S.HeathC. (2009). Synchrony and cooperation. Psychological Science, 20, 1–5.
