Advanced Review
Religious thought and behavior
Ernest Thomas Lawson∗
While earlier approaches to religious thought and practice searched for ‘magic
bullet’ approaches to explain religious thought and behavior, seeing it as an
example of irrationality, illusion, integrative force, symbolism, or false explanations
of origins, cognitive scientific approaches have suggested that we see it rather as
an aggregate of the products of various cognitive mechanisms. Studies in the
cognitive science of religion, informed by experimental work, have converged on
a standard model of explaining religious thought and behavior by focussing on
the role of minimally counter-intuitive concepts, agent and animacy detection,
ritual representations, notions of contagion and contamination avoidance, theory
of mind, coalitions, and moral intuitions. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
How to cite this article:
WIREs Cogn Sci 2012. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1189
INTRODUCTION
Whether they reside in Katmandu or Kalamazoo,
people sometimes say some very puzzling things
and at certain moments engage in some very odd
behavior, especially when these statements and acts
occur in religious contexts. For example, the Dorze
of Ethiopia claim that leopards are Christian animals
and observe the fasts of the Orthodox Church and,
therefore, will not kill their goats on those feast days.1
The Dorze have no qualms, however, about protecting
their livestock from marauding leopards on those same
days. What is interesting about this example is the idea
that that predator is constrained by ritual observance
but at the same time, the people are not willing to
take the chance that such ritual observance can be
completely trusted. Or take the example of a common
practice among the Zulu of the Amazizi district in
KwaZulu/Natal where it is obligatory for a young
woman to wear the fat of a recently slaughtered cow
as a shawl without tearing it in preparation for her
wedding. If it is torn, this counts as a sign that she is not
a virgin2
(Figure 1). Or take the American creationist
who believes that it is important to get a flu shot every
year because he knows that the flu virus mutates but
nevertheless claims that evolution ‘is just a theory’
and that the world and everything in it was created by
God in short order, perhaps in as little as seven days
or if, by chance, a day is perhaps metaphorical it can
be reconceived as a thousand years.
∗Correspondence to: t.lawson@qub.ac.uk
Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Earlier discussions of these forms of thought and
associated behaviors by philosophers, ethnographers,
and psychologists have focussed on whether such
statements and practices are instances of superstition
or irrationality at worst or metaphor or symbolism
at best.3
A great deal of intellectual energy was
expended in the first half of the twentieth century
in trying to identify the ‘magic bullet’ that might
account for the widespread nature of religious thought
and its associated practices. Some social scientists,
for example, argued that religious thought serves to
provide the intellectual means to unify or integrate
a cultural system4
or they thought that religious
thought serves as an organizing principle of power that
justifies a special elite (Marx), or perhaps that religious
thought is an early example of human attempts to
explain origins later superseded by the emergence of
scientific modes of thought (Tylor) or that given the
centrality of relationships of power in social situations
that religious thought reinforces and justifies male
dominance. In each case, it was hoped that some key
idea would bring everything into perspective. Despite
such attempts, however, these approaches simply left
too many features of religious thought and practice
unexplained. Ultimately, they did not move us much
closer to develop an explanatory understanding of
these odd and even bizarre patterns of thought because
they failed to identify the psychological mechanisms
involved.
Even when attention was paid to psychological
mechanisms, early psychological theorizing tended to
either focus on the illusory nature of religious notions
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Advanced Review wires.wiley.com/cogsci
FIGURE 1 | Zulu rite of virginity.
(Freud)5
or sought out paradigmatic cases of religious
experiences with the hope that they might provide
clues about why religious ideas and practices arise
with such regularity across cultures. William James,6
for example, was particularly interested in the kinds of
psychological processes that led to religious thought
and underwrote religious practice. He regarded
religious experience in general and mystical experience
in particular as paradigmatic cases of religious
thought. By focussing on religious experience, he
and his followers tended to view such experiences
as primarily affective and emotional and as at some
distance from rational thought and even antithetical
to it. However, a great deal of religious thought,
when viewed in cross-cultural perspective, has little
if anything to do with such special experiences,
especially mystical ones. Generalizing from such
special cases, for example, from altered states of
consciousness, to the vast majority and statements
and practices that arise in religious contexts, misses
what is most interesting about them from a scientific
point of view.
LOOKING FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL
MECHANISMS
In the past two decades, cognitive scientists have
begun to realize that a magic bullet approach is
too simplistic and misses the possibility that many
psychological mechanisms might be at play in the
production of both the ideas that emerge in religious
contexts and the many practices, particularly ritual
activity, that frequently accompanies the emergence of
such ideas. By focussing on the religious thought and
practice as an example of complex systems of cognitive
processing, cognitive scientists have sought to move
the discussion forward from purely interpretive
endeavors (religious thought is an example of a,
b, or c) to a mature explanatory understanding by
identifying and analyzing the cognitive processes that
seem to lead to the types of statements and practices
alluded to above. Cognitive scientists have developed
hypotheses intended to answer questions such as why,
if they are so strange, such ideas and practices are
so easily transmitted within and between generations?
Why is it that ideas and behaviors that have no obvious
utility get transmitted, while Darwinian ideas have
to battle to receive a hearing? What psychological
mechanisms account for the generation of such ideas
in the first place? What further theoretical and
experimental work might lead to more satisfying
results than those typically offered by an earlier
generations of social and behavioral scientists as well
as scholars in the humanities?
SOME SURPRISES
Cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists
have proffered some surprising answers. For example,
they have begun to show by experimental means
that certain aspects of religious thought when tied to
processes such as animacy detection, agent detection,
theory of mind, or threat detection is parasitic on such
mechanisms. A specific process that has been suggested
is that of the hyperactive agency detector now typically
referred to as HADD. From an evolutionary point
of view, any organism that is structured to identify
agents in the environment has a selective advantage
over organisms that do not because being able to
distinguish between something that is simply moving
under its own power and something that is moving
toward you with the intention of possibly harming
you would be of great value not only to a lively future
but also to your reproductive capacities. Any such
mechanism, of course, would be liable to produce
false positives because it is better to be safe than sorry.
This idea was first suggested by Robert McCauley and
subsequently developed by a number of scientists in
the cognitive science of religion.7
Given the tendency
toward producing false positives raises the possibility
of detecting agents even when they are not there. So
people not only see ghosts on dark nights in quiet
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
WIREs Cognitive Science Religious thought and behavior
alleys but also see faces in the clouds.8
To make sense
of this ‘tweaking’ of our detection mechanisms, we
need to focus on the differences between the intuitive
and the reflective thoughts.
INTUITIVE AND REFLECTIVE
THOUGHT
Humans have a capacity for reflecting not only on
the world but also on their reflections. They also have
intuitions that simply seem to come with the territory.
These intuitions have been called our na¨ıve or folks
systems of knowledge. Typically, our intuitions speak
to our basic expectations of what the world is like.
They are our early, quick, and dirty ‘theories’ of what
is out there and not yet informed by science (see Ref
9 for a recent development of this idea). Our folk
or na¨ıve systems of knowledge (folk physics, folk
biology, folk psychology) by and large serve us in
good stead in our day-to-day traffic with the world.
We do not try to walk through walls except when
we are not paying attention, we expect our plants
to grow if we water them, and we expect to get
a tongue lashing if we see a deep frown on our
friends face. We do not need scientific psychology
to get on with it. We also know that our capacity
for reflection, which often leads to highly abstract
modes of thought, takes time to develop and very
often requires institutional support. Its highest form
is scientific theorizing, and when we need serious
explanations of why we cannot walk through walls,
why plants get diseases even when watered, and why
frowns do not always signal what we expect them
to, we grasp for scientific knowledge.10
So given the
role that our folks systems play in every day life, it
is no accident that religious notions so easily get a
ride because they are able to co-opt the mechanisms
at work. As Boyer11
has shown, when our minds
engage in the process of representing a cue about an
artificial object such as a statue, all we have to do is to
transfer a property from the intentional domain to the
domain of artifacts in order for the resulting notion
to be interesting enough to attract our attention and
transmit it to others, for example, a tree that talks.
So given our folk intuitions, only minimal tweaking
of these intuitions by violating some feature of a basic
category or transferring a feature from one category
to another will give us minimally counter-intuitive
ideas that, because of their counter-intuitiveness, will
provide interesting enough to go through to the next
generation.
Even when our capacity for reflective thought
achieves a highly developed state such as it does
in mature sciences, it is available for co-option by
theologians and the institutions that support them.
Some of the most abstract reasoning in Western literature
can be found in theological texts, for example,
the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas or the
Institutes of Calvin or more recently The Systematic
Theology of Paul Tillich. Their very abstractness
provides a lure to those gifted with solving intricate
puzzles or those who like challenges that lead to
discovering intricate relationships between terms.
Justin Barrett and Frank Keil12
designed
experiments to tease out the difference between
our folks systems of knowledge and our capacity
for abstract thought. Subjects were first queried
about their beliefs about God was like. It should
come as no surprise that God was regarded as
having the standard properties commonly attributed
to him in various religious traditions, such as,
omniscience, omnipotence, atemporal, and so on.
Subjects were clear that the doctrines about God’s
nature were fundamental. Nevertheless, when subjects
were presented with stories about God’s actions in the
world, they reported His actions in anthropomorphic
terms rather in the doctrinal terms they had insisted
on. God, for example, did one thing after another
rather than simultaneously. Of particular interest was
the subjects systematic misremembering of events in
the direction of folks systems of knowledge.
Pyysiainen, in his new book Supernatural
Agents: Why we believe in Souls, Gods and Buddhas,13
also affirms the usefulness of the distinction between
the intuitive and the reflective thoughts but focuses
on the folk psychology and, in particular on theory
of mind, and argues that theology, a clear example of
abstract thought, emerges out of our folk knowledge.
He thinks that beliefs about superhuman agents are
natural emerging, as they do, out of our intuitions
especially those about other minds.
When all is said and done, of course, finding
the reference for these tweaked intuitions and the
elaborate development of them in theological exercises
is deeply problematic and requires an explanation.
From a utilitarian point of view, such religious
intuitions with their counter-intuitive features present
a puzzle and raise the problem of how such ideas are
transmitted in the first place.14
We shall focus next,
therefore, on cultural transmission.
TRANSMISSION
Not all ideas that are entertained are transmitted.
We do have passing thoughts that are not expressed
and are quickly forgotten. We also, however, have
ideas that we take very seriously but no one else
does and they quickly die their own little deaths.
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Advanced Review wires.wiley.com/cogsci
Some ideas, however, do manage to attract our
attention. A significant amount of experimental
work has shown that even very young children in
experimental situations pay attention to phenomena
that go against their expectations. We only have to
slightly alter a few of the properties of a stimulus
for it to command our attention. To call attention
to a tree in our pathway while we walk is noticed
momentarily until we have passed it, but calling
attention to a tree that is reputed not only to
understand what we say in a special language but
also to be capable of making some change in our
health certainly attracts our attention. So, for example,
ritual practitioners among the Yoruba of Nigeria
speak to a tree in a special language because of its
putative healing properties.15
Interestingly, this tree
(Rauwolfia Vomitoria) does possess a bark, which has
various medicinal properties. Reserpine, an alkaloid, is
derived from its bark and has been used for high blood
pressure. It is also used for various other illnesses
including acting as a tranquilizer for the mentally ill.
One of the marks of religious notions is that they
consist of features that both violate some of our expectations
of concepts such as ‘person’, ‘living thing’, or
‘artificial object’ and confirm others.16,17
It seems that
ideas that violate some aspect of a concept such as
‘person’, for example, stand a greater chance of being
remembered and, therefore, transmitted within and
between generations.18
When highly emotional states
become associated with such ideas, they have an even
greater chance of successful transmission. ‘The cognitive
alarm hypothesis suggests that high emotion tends
to both marshal and to focus cognitive resources on
its apparent causes, which, if vindicated by subsequent
developments, marks the events as especially
memorable’ (Ref 18, p. 113) Harvey Whitehouse, a
cognitive anthropologist who has done field work in
Papua New Guinea, sees memorability as playing a
fundamental role in explaining the emergence and
persistence of religious thought. Because he is interested
in how religions change, he has pursued studies
that focus on the role that memory plays in the transmission
of religious concepts and the behavior they
inform and the cognitive processes by which such concepts
are encoded. His theory provides one account of
cultural transmission by suggesting that frequency is a
significant variable in explaining why certain kinds of
religious concepts are remembered and transmitted.19
The more frequently a religious ritual is performed,
the more its memorability is enhanced. But the less
frequently a religious ritual is performed, the more it
requires the inclusion of emotional factors if its transmission
likelihood is to be enhanced. He gives many
accounts of how rituals that generate emotional states
induced by food and sleep deprivation, punishment,
and so on serve to ensure the transmission of religious
concepts to future generations.
THE EMERGENCE OF A STANDARD
MODEL: TOWARD A COGNITIVE
SCIENCE OF RELIGION
Given the work on religious thought and practice by
cognitive scientists in the past two decades, Pascal
Boyer11,20
has argued that it is now possible to speak
of a standard model of religious thought and behavior
in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Such
work even has a label and is known as the cognitive
science of religion.21
This subdiscipline in cognitive
science has been driven by the work of Lawson and
McCauley14
who provided the first systematic treatise
in the cognitive science of religion, Pascal Boyer,11,22
Barrett,12,23
Pyysiainen,24,25
Eilam et al.,26
Slone,27
Atran,28
McCauley and Lawson,18
and Tremlin.29
There is general agreement among these scholars
about the essential features of the model, which are as
follows:
1. Minimally counter-intuitive concepts play a
fundamental role in religious thought and
inform religious ritual practice. Such concepts
are informed by the properties of general
notions such as ‘person’, ‘living thing’, and
‘man-made object’. These tweaked concepts
capture our attention because they both go
against some standard property of the concept
in question, while at the same time, they also
reinforce other features of the same concept. For
example, the notion of a ghost or spirit, which
has wide cross-cultural spread, both violates
our expectation of the physical features of
personhood (spirits can move through solid
objects) and confirms other features, such
as the capacity to communicate with people
under some conditions.11,12
Minimally counterintuitive
notions riding on the back of folk
ontologies are found in many different cultures
and are diagnostic of religious concepts. In
fact, it is their attention-grabbing property that
partially accounts for their memorability.16,17
2. Some minimally counter-intuitive concepts are
specifically associated with intentional agents.14
Such agents are regarded as having some
special, nor-ordinary qualities (e.g., they may
be ubiquitous, know your thoughts, and have
special powers). In fact, such properties make
them appear to be superhuman agents.14
Gods,
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
WIREs Cognitive Science Religious thought and behavior
spirits, angels, demons, ancestors, and ghosts
populate the world of superhuman agents. From
a psychological point of view, such concepts
are simply minor variations on standard theory
of mind.12
Such variations might emerge from
theory of mind but their significance is profound
in their effect on human behavior.
3. Ethnographic studies over the past century have
demonstrated how widespread ritual activity is.
While the world is full of rituals, some rituals
are specifically tied to assumptions about
superhuman agents. So while a man may wash
his face in the same way every morning, in a
religious situation, washing ones face may have
a clear association with an agent with special
qualities who requires one to wash ones face
not only every morning but most do so three
times and then sing a song. Failure to do so
opens the door to danger. It is not surprising
there that rituals associated with superhuman
agents will be regarded as particularly compelling.
What is of particular scientific interest
is that where in a ritual superhuman agents are
represented enables us to make a number of
predictions about whether such rituals are one
off or repeatable, whether they are central or
peripheral in the ritual system, whether they
permit the substitution of instruments, and so
on.14,18,30,31
4. Mary Douglas32
alerted us to the importance
of notions such as purity and impurity, cleanliness,
and pollution. Notions such as purity
and pollution are widespread in religions across
cultures and through time. From the point of
view of the cognitive science of religion, such
religious notions are by-products of deep-seated
intuitions about contagion and contamination
that seem to be triggered in interesting ways
and unexpected ways, for example, refusal to
drink from a glass into which someone has spit
even if the glass has been thoroughly washed.
Rozin and his colleagues22,33
think that such
behavior is derived from, and relevant to, contagion
and contamination-avoidance patterns of
behavior that have an evolutionary explanation.
While much of the earlier psychological studies
attempted to account for religious thought and
behavior in terms of the psychology of fear,
recent work in the cognitive science of religion
focuses on notions in precautionary psychology
that focus on potential rather than imminent or
manifest danger. The point being investigated by
evolutionary psychologists is whether precautionary
behavior provides a selective advantage.
What is interesting is that at the cultural level
of analysis, we find that the thematic content of
many religious rituals focuses on the avoidance
of possible threats by performing stylized, patterned
behavior. In fact, much recent work on
obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has begun
to pay attention on the relationship between religious
ritual behavior and pathological behavior
from a non-Freudian perspective.34,35
5. Predation, assault, and the risk of death are with
us no matter what period we live in, whether we
reside in Paleolithic caves or float in the narrow
corridors of the space station. Threats to wellbeing
have fed and supported the development
of notions such as souls as spirits because while
biological death is easily understood even by
young children, psychological death is a much
more difficult concept to assimilate.36
The decay
of a dead body is easy enough to observe. Just
think of the road kill on public highways that
young children frequently observe. So young and
old alike know that bodies are subject to death
and decay. What is cross-culturally widespread
is a set of notions expressed in many different
ways that persons are more than bodies.
Bloom37
argues that we have a deep tendency to
be Cartesian dualists. Because of this tendency,
humans tend to wonder about what happens
to this ‘more’ when the body dies. Much new
experimental work is teasing out the underlying
cognitive processes that lead to such intuitions.
Scholars of comparative religion have amassed
copious information about the widespread
nature of afterlife beliefs. And the study of the
mechanisms that are involved in the development
of afterlife beliefs is now underway.
6. Being initiated into a group by means of a set of
ritual practices provides important information
about social status, commitment, and proper
affiliation. Such products of ritual participation
provide signals or marks that show ones membership
in an in-group and identify outsiders.18
Not only do such marks signal identity but
they also serve to encourage those who are still
outside to become affiliated and join the coalition.
Marks that identify membership can be
anything from wearing special clothes, to going
naked, to shaving ones head, to exhibiting special
scars, to being proud possessors of unique
jewelry, and to being dressed identically. Symbols
such as these serve to advertize our shared
commitment to costly activities. We show that
we are willing to pay the price for the benefits
provided.28
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Advanced Review wires.wiley.com/cogsci
7 All human beings have moral intuitions about
what is fair and what is not, what is right and
what is not, what is good and what is not, and
what is responsible behavior and what is not.
Obviously, in different cultural contexts, the
contents of such notions differ to some extent.
Religious notions easily co-opt these notions of
the fair, the right, and the good, and when associated
with the notions of superhuman agents,
they acquire a particular force because if it is
good to do something, it is even better to do
if the gods know that you are doing it. And if
it is wrong to do something, if some counterintuitive
agent might be watching you then you
had better not do it. Boyer22
argues, therefore,
that religious morality is parasitic on evolved
intuitions that are there, religion or not. The
ready availability of counter-intuitive agents
with special qualities is typically construed as
interested parties in decision making. If I am
already tuned to wondering about what I ought
to do in a particular case, and if I believe that my
actions are observable by an interested superhuman
agent, then the decision that I make will be
affected by that belief.
CONCLUSION
The cognitive science of religion is clearly a progressive
rather than a degenerative research program
as an increasing number of scientists develop what
is obviously an inferentially rich project. Scientists
from ethology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology,
cross-cultural psychiatry, cognitive, social and evolutionary
psychology, and evolutionary anthropology
have joined philosophers of science in multidisciplinary
research programs that explore issues relevant
to our understanding of religious thought and
behavior. A crucial, if recent, movement emphasizes
identifying the evolutionarily bequeathed cognitive
mechanisms (in very fundamental domains) that
underlie religious behaviors, rather than focusing on
‘religion’ per se, as viable research objects.22,38–41
For example, a group of researchers have recognized
the relevance of studies in threat detection,
risk assessment, and precautionary psychology for
identifying mechanisms that play a role in ritualization,
an area with clear links to everyday and
pathological behaviors as well as cultural/religious
rituals.34,35,42–50
Researchers have also begun targeting
the roles of specific neuropeptides and the specific
contexts complicit in regulating trust and cooperation
tendencies.51,52
In addition, the coalitional behaviors
of individuals in groups has recently been investigated
by ethologists who have focused on behaviorally
identifiable hierarchies that often dictate how coalitional
behaviors manifest (particularly within religious
communities).53
This has been done via studies on
humans and other animal species, the latter often providing
animal models that can be extrapolated onto
human behaviors.26,54,55
Each of these examples illustrates
the renewed focus on providing explanations
from a cognitive science perspective, particularly by
introducing innovative but historically viable methods
into the general study of religious thought and
behavior.
Perhaps of even greater significance is the
increasing attention being paid to cross-cultural studies
that includes data collection generated by experimental
studies in diverse populations. While the
forefront of scientific progress has been centered in
the United States and other Western countries, there
is evidence of a new recognition of resources and
expertise in important crucibles of varying human
behaviors and genetic pools.56
These include subSaharan
Africa, Eastern Europe, the Levant, North
African, and Southeast Asia as well as the traditional
research populations of the United States and Western
Europe. The cooperation between scholars in these
areas and the sharing of resources and natural human
laboratories has the potential to provide crucial insight
into the important quest to account for both variations
and similarities between populations in terms
of the role of neurocognitive systems and their actual
environmental domains.
The future of the cognitive approaches to theorizing
about religious thought and behavior is in
the integration of evidence gathered in multiple cultures
and populations and by scholars in heretofore
seemingly disparate disciplines.
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