Science on Religion Research News
Is the media fueling global conflict?
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- Published: 06 April 2017
- Written by John H. Shaver
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Journalists don't make the news – they just report it, right? Not so fast. Anthropologist Scott Atran believes that radical Islamic terrorists use the Western media to manipulate attitudes and to create and escalate conflict. He notes that while recent terrorist attacks have resulted in many tragic causalities, with the help of the Western media, the actions of a few men have affected millions. The Western media’s framing of terrorist events as “assaults on freedom,” coupled with erroneous conceptions of Islam and Muslims, has given terrorists a ready-made platform to communicate their messages to the world. Is the media, then, the oxygen fueling global conflict, creating an “us” vs. “them” narrative, escalating hostilities, thereby playing right into the goals of terrorists?
Study finds sadomasochism evokes spiritual experiences
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- Published: 17 January 2017
- Written by Joseph Allen
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Religious devotees endure torturous scenarios for the warm embrace of human connection. Some kneel and stand repeatedly to please their priest and fellow congregants. Others fast and chant for days on end to fulfill their guru's program of enlightenment. At the extreme edge of the ritual spectrum, aspirants turn to self-flagellation, scarification, and even ultra-violent Philippine reenactments of the crucifixion, with real nails and the scars to prove it. It's along these gruesome lines that the spirituality of BDSM (bondage-domination/discipline-submission/sadomasochism) emerges. A new study suggests that ritualized masochistic practices may induce an altered state of consciousness.
Religion affects our behavior by shaping neural rewards
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- Published: 14 September 2016
- Written by Jonathan Morgan
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If I were to offer you $50 today or the chance to wait four months for $70, which would you take? The way you answer that question reflects what psychologists call delay discounting. That's just a fancy term to describe the way value changes over time – $70 is clearly more than $50, but when that $70 is four months away, it's not worth as much. People vary pretty widely in their discounting rates, and there's lots of research sorting through the various factors that influence these preferences.* As you might have guessed, religion is one of those factors. A new study from our team at Boston University helps explain some of the reasons why.
Thinking analytically, accepting evolution
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- Published: 01 February 2016
- Written by Christopher Halloran
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It sometimes seems like evolution and religion have had a bad relationship almost from the start. In 1874, the Princeton theologian Charles Hodge asked, “What is Darwinism?” His answer: atheism. To this day, people on both sidesof the issue continue to think that believing in God means not accepting evolution, and vice versa. This antagonism has bled into the cognitive science of religion. There’s a growingbody of literature that’s saying – not always outright – that religion and science use different ways of thinking. Can people’s performance on an analytical thinking test predict if they’re creationists or if they accept evolution?
Psychologists write about “bullshit”
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- Published: 06 January 2016
- Written by Joseph Allen
- Hits: 4436
Anyone who's been to the West Coast or visited hippie towns like Covington, VT or Asheville, NC has undoubtedly heard some version of the New Age spiel. It generally involves “energy work,” “intuition,” and somewhere along the way, “quantum” something gets dropped into the mix—as in “quantum healing,” “quantum intention,” or “quantum intuitive energy work.” What does that even mean? And who buys this stuff? A recent study led by Gordon Pennycook seeks to answer the latter question, regardless of whether New Age clichés mean anything at all. According to the authors, the propensity to interpret garbled phrases as profound is a sign of “Bullshit Receptivity,” and it's correlated with low intelligence and high gullibility.
Is Hindu worship just helicopter parenting?
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- Published: 21 December 2015
- Written by Joseph Allen
- Hits: 4121
Freud famously hypothesized that the Judeo-Christian God is a psychological projection of nagging parental issues. Thomas B. Ellis of Appalachian State University in North Carolina continues this psychoanalytic tradition by explaining the origins and purpose of Hindu puja, or devotional worship, as compensation for emotionally distant parenting. The religious studies professor contends that puja soothes imbalanced adults starved for parental affection. This desire for emotional contact is transferred onto the stone idol. Affection-starved children also cling to their collectivist communities and become averse to contact with outsiders. Ellis's theory would seem damning of Indian culture if he didn't also argue that puja expresses social adaptations which aid survival in tropical regions fraught with contagious diseases. Such practices may look neurotic to outsiders, but they work.
Ominous moods may improve ritual performance
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- Published: 09 December 2015
- Written by Joseph Allen
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To the uninitiated, religious ritual seems like frivolous play-acting. Priests and acolytes follow obscure rules and manipulate symbolic objects, similar to team sports like soccer, or board games like Risk. This connection isn't meant to trivialize the intense subjective meaning of religious rites, but only to point out that both ritual and play are elaborate, seemingly superfluous pastimes that consume enormous amounts of otherwise productive energy. Of what use are either? Yvan Russell, Fernand Gobet, and Harvey Whitehouse hypothesize that the connection between ritual and games is quite significant. Skills acquired by performing rites and playing games should carry over into real world abilities. Their study suggests that the more disturbing a performer's mood is, the more effective that transference will be.
An ambitious theory of humility, compassion, and divine gratitude
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- Published: 02 December 2015
- Written by Joseph Allen
- Hits: 3410
Religiosity is correlated with many different psychological states and behaviors, such as empathy and generosity, or exclusivity and violence. However, the causal connections between belief, experience, and behavior are presently unclear. Psychologists Neal Krause and David Hayward recently completed a seven-year longitudinal study that seeks to tease apart the mental components of a religious life and establish causation. They follow a line of cognitive dominoes falling into each other: religious commitment tips into humility, into compassion, into support for others, into a sense of meaning. The last piece falls on gratitude to God. In the researchers' view, this gratitude is actually indirect thankfulness for the people in the churchgoer's life. Their theoretical scheme is an interesting attempt at integrating the abundant, but disparate research on the cognitive mechanisms underpinning religion.
BREAKING NEWS: Religious children don't share stickers
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- Published: 20 November 2015
- Written by Joseph Allen
- Hits: 7515
Many people believe that religion teaches children to be just and moral. Even if adherents dispense with the unscientific dogma, there’s a lingering sense that religious tradition is necessary to hold society together. Jean Decety disagrees. The distinguished neuroscientist recently led a worldwide study which, according to his team, shows the opposite is true: kids brought up outside the faith are more “prosocial” because they are more generous and less punitive than those raised in religious households. Therefore, the authors assert, a secular society will produce kinder people. Cue group hug and drop the needle on John Lennon's “Imagine.” But what if Decety's entire approach is skewed by faulty definitions of “prosociality”?
Empty nests and empty pews: Church affiliation declines after high school
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- Published: 09 November 2015
- Written by Joseph Allen
- Hits: 3116
Step into any church on Sunday morning and you'll most likely find a congregation split into two distinct groups: parents with their children and cotton-topped old timers. Who's missing here? The young adults. The reasons for this vacuum are still speculative, but the trend is clear, and it appears to ramp up after high school. A team of psychologists from UCLA just completed a four-year longitudinal study looking at the religious transitions from adolescence to young adulthood. Their data show a remarkable decline in formal religious affiliation as kids leave home and head off to college. Having spread their wings, teenagers usually fly away from the sanctuary.
Woe unto the weird: Majorities tend to be spiteful
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- Published: 02 November 2015
- Written by Joseph Allen
- Hits: 16023
Bill Moyers once quipped, “Civilization is a thin veneer of agreeable behavior stretched across the passions of the human heart.” Among the most persistent of these dark passions is ingroup favoritism. Christian versus Muslim, black versus white, liberal versus conservative—anywhere one group outnumbers the other, we typically see the minority get snubbed, insulted, or physically attacked by the majority. Psychologist D.B. Krupp and mathematician Peter Taylor of Queen's University in Ontario recently published a theoretical model of how strife tends to develop between unequal groups. Their work supports the controversial claim that prejudicial violence is at least partially rooted in behavioral genetics. If correct, this provides one explanation for the persistence of ethnic conflict—not an excuse for intolerance.
