Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-29T04:05:49.723Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 11 - Religious Beliefs

from Religion and Morality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2022

By
Pascal Boyer
Edited by
Julien Musolino ,
Joseph Sommer  and
Pernille Hemmer
Julien Musolino
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Joseph Sommer
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Pernille Hemmer
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Get access

Summary

Accounts of religious beliefs are often based on the assumption that these constitute a special domain, with cognitive processes of acquisition and communication that would be different from other domains of belief. Against this, I argue that religious beliefs are only a special class of meta-represented or reflective beliefs. The contents of religious beliefs are not unified, either, as there is a stark contrast between the beliefs conveyed by doctrinal, organized religious traditions and those found in small-scale, pragmatic traditions aimed at palliating misfortune. These conceptual clarifications make it possible to provide a better account of the transmission of religious beliefs and their effects, including their use as coalitional signals.

Keywords

beliefcognitionreligionsmeta-representationscoalitional psychology
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cognitive Science of Belief
A Multidisciplinary Approach
 , pp. 235 - 253
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barrett, J. L. (2000) Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(1), 29–34.Google Scholar
Barrett, J. L. & Keil, F. C. (1996) Conceptualizing a nonnatural entity: Anthropomorphism in God concepts. Cognitive Psychology, 31, 219–247.Google Scholar
Barth, F. (1975) Ritual and knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. Universitetsforlaget, Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Baumard, N. & Boyer, P. (2013) Explaining moral religions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 272–280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.04.003Google Scholar
Bellah, R. N. (2011) Religion in human evolution: from the Paleolithic to the axial age. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bloch, M. (2008) Why religion is nothing special but is central. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B Biological Sciences, 363(1499), 2055–2061.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. (1994) Cognitive constraints on cultural representations: natural ontologies and religious ideas. In Hirschfeld, L. A., & Gelman, S. (Eds.). Mapping the mind: domain-specificity in culture and cognition (pp. 391–411). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. (2001) Religion explained. evolutionary origins of religious thought. Basic Books.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. & Bergstrom, B. (2011) Threat-detection in child development: an evolutionary perspective. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(4), 1034–1041.Google Scholar
Child, A. B. & Child, I. L. (1993) Religion and magic in the life of traditional peoples. Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Fessler, D. M. T., Pisor, A. C., & Navarrete, C. D. (2014) Negatively-biased credulity and the cultural evolution of beliefs. PLoS One, 9(4), e95167.Google Scholar
Gambetta, D. (2011) codes of the underworld: how criminals communicate. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Goody, J. (1977) The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Goody, J. (1986) The logic of writing and the organization of society. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Guthrie, S. E. (1993) Faces in the clouds. a new theory of religion. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Harris, P. L. (2000) The work of the imagination. Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Harcourt, Alexander H. & de Waal, Frans (Eds.) (1992) Coalitions and alliances in humans and other animals. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kuran, T. (1998) Ethnic Norms and Their Transformation through Reputational Cascades. Journal of Legal Studies, 27(S2), 623–659.Google Scholar
Kurzban, R. & Neuberg, S. (2005) Managing ingroup and outgroup relationships. In Buss, D. M. (Ed.) The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 653–675). John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Lawson, E. T. & McCauley, R. N. (1990). Rethinking religion: connecting cognition and culture. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leslie, A. M., Friedman, O., & German, T. P. (2004) Core mechanisms in “theory of mind.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(12), 528–533.Google Scholar
Maynard Smith, J. (1982) Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Medina, L. F. (2007) A Unified Theory of Collective Action and Social Change. University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2009) Intuitive and reflective inferences. In Evans, J. S. B. T. & Frankish, K. (Eds.). Two minds. dual processes and beyond (pp. 149–170). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Neuberg, S. L., Kenrick, D. T., and Schaller, M. (2010) Evolutionary Social Psychology. In Fiske, S. T., Gilbert, D. T., & Lindzey, G. (Eds.). Handbook of social psychology, vol. 2. 5th ed. (pp. 761–796). John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Pietraszewski, D. (2013) What is group psychology? Adaptations for mapping shared intentional stances. In Banaji, M. R., Gelman, S. A., Banaji, M. R., & Gelman, S. A. (Eds.). Navigating the social world: what infants, children, and other species can teach us (pp. 253–257). Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pietraszewski, D., Curry, O. S., Petersen, M. B., Cosmides, L., and Tooby, J. (2016) Constituents of Political Cognition: Race, Party Politics, and the Alliance Detection System. Cognition, 140, 24–39. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.03.007Google Scholar
Pyysiainen, I. (2001) How religion works. towards a new cognitive science of religion. Brill.Google Scholar
Recanati, F. (2000) The iconicity of metarepresentations. In Sperber, D. (Ed.). Metarepresentations. A multidisciplinary perspective (pp. 311–360) Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Roth, I. (2007) Imaginative minds. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D. (1996) Explaining culture: a naturalistic approach. Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (1997) Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind and Language, 12(1), 67–83.Google Scholar
Spiro, M. & D’Andrade, R. G. (1958) A Cross-cultural study of some supernatural beliefs. American Anthropologist, 60(3), 456–466.Google Scholar
Stich, S. (1983) From folk-psychology to cognitive science: the case against belief. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2010) Groups in mind: the coalitional roots of war and morality. In Høgh- Olesen, H. (Ed.). Human morality and sociality: evolutionary and comparative perspectives (pp. 191–234). Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, N. (2014) Religious credence is not factual belief. Cognition, 133(3), 698–715.Google Scholar
Whitehouse, H. (2000) Arguments and icons. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woody, E. & Szechtman, H. (2011) Adaptation to potential threat: the evolution, neurobiology, and psychopathology. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(4), 1019–1033.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×