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1,785 results for "cognitive science of religion" — page 1 of 90
G_4_04 — Cognitive Science of Religion and the Anthropology of Belief
The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is an interdisciplinary field that explains religious belief and practice as natural products of evolved cognitive mechanisms rather than supernatural revelation or cultural invent
T_5_18 — Cognitive Science of Religion: How Minds Create Gods
The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is an interdisciplinary field — emerging in the 1990s from cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and neuroscience — that explains religious beliefs and practice
T_5_04 — Psychology of Religion and Spirituality
The psychology of religion investigates why humans believe in supernatural agents, how religious practices affect cognition and well-being, and what psychological functions religion serves. The field was inaugurated by W
ZC_5_17 — Ritual Efficacy Mechanisms: How Ritual Produces Real-World Effects
Ritual — formalized, repetitive, symbolic action that is culturally prescribed and often marked as distinct from ordinary behavior — is a universal feature of human societies, found in religious ceremonies, civic commemo
B_5_06 — Deification of Natural Phenomena: Thunder, Earthquakes, Disease as Entities
Across virtually every documented human culture, natural phenomena — storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, epidemics, drought — have been personified as intentional agents: gods, demons, or spirits with desires, emoti
INTERDOC_58 — The Mechanism of Suppression: Institutional Cognitive Dissonance from 4th-Century Councils to 21st-Century Peer Review
Suppression of inconvenient knowledge is not primarily about conspiracy. It is about a psychological-institutional mechanism that recurs across very different historical contexts using very different surface vocabularies
ZC_1_05 — Psychology of Religion & Spiritual Experience
The psychology of religion — the empirical study of religious and spiritual experience, belief, and behavior — was inaugurated by William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which established that relig
G_4_13 — HADD and Agency Detection — Why We See Beings Everywhere
The Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD) — a term coined by cognitive scientist Justin Barrett (2000) building on work by Stewart Guthrie (1993) and Pascal Boyer (2001) — refers to the proposed cognitive mechanism
B_5_12 — Cognitive Science of Monster Concepts: Why Humans Invent Creatures
Why do all human cultures independently generate remarkably similar monster concepts — predatory hybrids, shape-shifters, reanimated corpses, giant serpents, invisible watchers? Cognitive science offers a compelling fram
ZC_2_11 — Sociology of Religion
The sociology of religion examines religion as a social phenomenon — how religious beliefs, practices, and institutions shape and are shaped by social structures. Foundational approaches: Émile Durkheim (The Elementary F
T_5_13 — Psycholinguistics: Language and Thought, Sapir-Whorf, and the Cognitive Science of Language
Psycholinguistics — the scientific study of the cognitive processes underlying language comprehension, production, and acquisition — investigates how the mind/brain processes the ~1 billion words a person hears, reads, s
H_2_09 — The Galileo Affair — Science, Religion, and Power
The Galileo affair — the Roman Inquisition's condemnation of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) for defending the Copernican heliocentric model — is the archetypal case of religious authority suppressing scientific knowledge, i
P_5_10 — Philosophy of Religion: Faith, Reason, and Mystical Experience
The philosophy of religion is the branch of philosophy that critically examines the concepts, arguments, and experiences at the heart of religious belief and practice — not from within any particular faith tradition but
P_5_18 — Comparative Religion & the Science of Sacred Traditions
Comparative religion — the systematic study of the world's religious traditions through cross-cultural analysis — emerged as an academic discipline in the 19th century with Friedrich Max Müller's translation of the Sacre
P_5_19 — Mircea Eliade: Sacred and Profane, Eternal Return, History of Religions
Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), Romanian-born historian of religions, was arguably the most influential scholar of comparative religion in the 20th century. His core concepts — hierophany (the manifestation of the sacred in o
K_5_04 — Neuroscience of Belief
Belief — the mental state of holding something to be true — is a cornerstone of conscious experience, shaping perception, memory, emotion, decision-making, and behavior. The neuroscience of belief has revealed that belie
ZG_3_05 — Language and Thought: Cognitive Semantics
The relationship between language and thought — whether the language we speak shapes, constrains, or determines how we perceive, categorize, and reason about the world — is one of the oldest and most debated questions in
ZC_3_02 — Sociology of Science and Knowledge
Sociology of knowledge examines how social conditions shape what counts as knowledge. Karl Mannheim (Ideology and Utopia, 1929/1936) argued that thought is "existentially determined" — shaped by the thinker's social posi
T_1_11 — History of Psychology
Psychology's formal history as an independent discipline spans approximately 150 years — from Wilhelm Wundt's founding of the first experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig (1879) to the present day. The discipline
ZD_5_18 — Complexity Science: The Santa Fe Institute and the Science of Emergence
Complexity science — the interdisciplinary study of systems composed of many interacting components whose collective behavior cannot be predicted from individual parts — emerged as a distinct field in the 1980s, catalyze
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