Jesper Sørensen
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 346273 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jesper Sørensen |
| NOMBRES | Jesper |
| APELLIDO | Sørensen |
| FIRMA | SØRENSEN J |
| AFILIACIONES | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2344-6534 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 40 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 55 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2000 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Acting under uncertainty
For various reasons, the concept of magic has been disputed for several decades. Argued to be a pejorative assessment of other peoples' religious rites, magic is broadly understood as a vacuous concept without any explanatory value. While critique of former approaches is necessary, it is doubtful that terminological cleansing is helpful, or that dismantling distinctions such as that between magic and religion will make us any wiser. Building on p…
Building better models
Selecting Penalty Parameters of High-Dimensional M-Estimators Using Bootstrapping after Cross Validation
Representation without representationalism
Disparate Ontologies
Disparate Ontologies? Takes a critical look at Philippe Descola’s four-field anthropological model for ontologies among hunter-gatherer societies. Descola’s model juxtaposes animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism as reflecting different expressions of interiority and physicality and queries those four ontological concepts as comparative units of analysis. While Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture (2013) was a ground-breaking exploration of …
Forskningshistoriske vaccinationsprogrammer
Religionsvidenskaben karakteriseres ofte som udspændt mellem centrifugale kræfter, der udgøres af de filologisk forankrede specialestudier af bestemte religiøse traditioner, og den centripetale kraft, der udgøres af fænomenologiens etablering af en formlære, som beskriver religiøse fænomener uafhængigt af deres historiske manifestationer. I dette essay præsenterer jeg en alternativ karakteristik: Inspireret af den tyske filosof Peter Sloterdijks …
Historiske og teoretiske baggrunde for Covid-19-pandemiens påvirkning af den danske befolkning
Denne artikel præsenterer udsnit af den historiske og teoretiske baggrund for undersøgelsen af COVID-19 pandemiens indvirkning på danskernes religiøsitet. Vi har lagt vægt på fire nedlagspunkter, der hver på sin måde bidrager til at tegne et billede af den religions- og kulturhistoriske samt teoretiske kontekst. Først søger vi at indplacerer forestillingen om døden i forhold til en bred religions- og kulturhistorisk horisont. Fra den kristne trad…
Covid-19-krisen
Denne artikel leverer en oversigt over og en gennemgang af de konkrete politiske indgreb, som den danske regering foretog med henblik på at opdæmme smittespredning i de første måneder af COVID-19-pandemien i Danmark 2020
Håndvask og fællessang. Ritualer og ritualiserede handlinger i Coronaens tid
Baseret på data fra vores spørgeskemaundersøgelse undersøger vi i denne artikel, hvorledes og i hvilken udstrækning COVID-19 pandemien har påvirket danskerne brug af ritualer. På baggrund af en teoretisk redegørelse for forskelige ritualteorier, præsenterer vi en heuristisk model, der inddeler ritualer i 5 dimensioner: (1) ritualets formodede virkning; (2) ritualets erfarede betydning; (3) ritualets coping-potentiale; (4) ritualets evne til at sk…
Temanummerets forord
Forord til temanummeret om COVID-19, religion og trivsel i Danmark
Tidslinje
Dette er en oversigt over Coronasygdommens første måneder i Danmark
Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis
Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis comprises 41 chapters that push for a new way of conducting the study of religion, thereby, transforming the discipline into a genuine science of religion. The chapters explore how a new scholarly synthesis, founded on the triadic space constituted by evolution, cognition, cultural and ecological environment, may develop. Different perspectives and themes relating to this overarch…
Magic
Magic is a contested concept in anthropology and related disciplines. No consensus exists as to its exact definition but prototypical usage centers on procedures aimed at changing the state or essence of persons, acts, and events through certain special and nontrivial kinds of actions with opaque causal mediation. Magic is a central concept in early theories in anthropology, including intellectualist, symbolic, and pragmatic approaches. Since the…
Gerardus van der Leeuw. Et forstudie til en kognitiv revurdering af mana
English abstract: This article has a double focus. First, and in line with the special theme of this issue, it will address and discuss the celebrated, later rebuked and finally almost forgotten ‘hero’ from our discipline’s historical cabinet of curiosity, the Dutch phenomenologist of religion and theologian, Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890-1950). Van der Leeuw’s work had its primary impact in the first part of the 20th century, but came to play a s…
Western Esotericism and Cognitive Science of Religion
Cognitive Science of Religion and Western EsotericismWhy would cognitive science be relevant for history of religion or historiography in general and the study of western esotericism in particular?Two problems initially materialize when addressing this question.The first pertains to the concrete material analyzed by the historian and the relation between synchronic and diachronic analysis.Cognitive science studies the mechanisms of the human mind…
Past Minds
How do historians understand the minds, motivations, intentions of historical agents? What might evolutionary and cognitive theorizing contribute to this work? What is the relation between natural and cultural history? Historians have been intrigued by such questions ever since publication in 1859 of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, itself the historicization of biology. This interest reemerged in the latter part of the twentieth century among a n…
Attentional resource allocation and cultural modulation in a computational model of ritualized behavior
How do cultural and religious rituals influence human perception and cognition, and what separates the highly patterned behaviors of communal ceremonies from perceptually similar precautionary and compulsive behaviors? These are some of the questions that recent theoretical models and empirical studies have tried to answer by focusing on ritualized behavior instead of ritual. Ritualized behavior (i.e., a set of behavioral features embedded in rit…
Job Mobility and the Great Recession
Youngjoo Cha Sociological Science, May 2, 2014 DOI 10.15195/v1.a12 Abstract This study examines how inter-organizational mobility affects earnings inequality based on gender and parenthood under different macroeconomic conditions
Does Goal-Demotion Enhance Cooperation
Social scientists have long assumed that religion – and more specifically religious rituals – promotes cooperation. It has also been claimed that ritual plays an essential role in enhancing prosociality and cooperation. In this study, using a controlled laboratory experiment, we investigate if a conspicuous and recurrent feature of collective ritualized behaviour, goal-demotion, promotes lasting cooperation. We report that goal-directed collectiv…
Mystical Experience in the Lab
We review previous attempts to study mystical experience and point to problems inherent to certain methodologies. Focusing on studies that use controlled environments we advocate taking an experimental approach to mysticism. To demonstrate the viability of this approach, we report findings from a new study that probes the potential for eliciting mystical experiences in the laboratory. We find that our experimental paradigm is indeed enough to eli…
The resource model and the principle of predictive coding
Prediction Error During Functional and Non-Functional Action Sequences
By means of the computational approach the present study investigates the difference between observation of functional behavior (i.e. actions involving necessary integration of subparts) and non-functional behavior (i.e. actions lacking necessary integration of subparts) in terms of prediction error. Non-functionality in this proximal sense is a feature of many socio-cultural practices, such as those found in religious rituals private and social,…
Cognitive resource depletion in religious interactions
We explore the cognitive effects of three common features of religious interactions: (1) demand for the expressive suppression of emotion; (2) exposure to goal-demoted and causally opaque actions; and (3) the presence of a charismatic authority. Using a cognitive resource model of executive function, we argue that these three features affect the executive system in ways that limit the capacity for individual processing of religious events. We fra…
Spontaneous processing of functional and non-functional action sequences
Characterizing ritual and ritualized behaviors has been a core issue in anthropology and the study of religion for more than a century. Although varying in emphasis, most theories point toward several specific behavioral features that distinguish ritual from instrumental behavior. Specifically, we have chosen to focus on the derivedness from instrumental behavior, intentional underspecification and goal-demotion. In contrast to instrumental or fu…
Fortidens sind
Artiklen diskuterer forholdet mellem historiografiske studier på den ene side og kognitive og evolutionære teorier og modeller på den anden. På den baggrund præsenteres tre epistemologiske modeller for interaktionen mellem psykologi, historie og sociokulturelle systemer og disse diskuteres i forhold til forskerens mål med undersøgelse. Der argumenteres for, at historiografien nødvendigvis må inddrage aktuelle psykologiske modeller for ikke at byg…
Cognitive resource depletion in religious interactions
We explore the cognitive effects of three common features of religious interactions: (1) demand for the expressive suppression of emotion; (2) exposure to goal-demoted and causally opaque actions; and (3) the presence of a charismatic authority. Using a cognitive resource model of executive function, we argue that these three features affect the executive system in ways that limit the capacity for individual processing of religious events. We fra…
Acts That Work
Questions of agency are central for understanding ritual behavior in general and representations of ritual efficacy in particular. Religious traditions often stipulate who are entitled to perform particular rituals. Further, representations of unobservable superhuman agents are often explicitly described as the 'real' ritual agents. Recent investigations into the processes underlying action representations and social cognition can help explain ho…
Mystical Experience in the Lab
We review previous attempts to study mystical experience and point to problems inherent to certain methodologies. Focusing on studies that use controlled environments we advocate taking an experimental approach to mysticism. To demonstrate the viability of this approach, we report findings from a new study that probes the potential for eliciting mystical experiences in the laboratory. We find that our experimental paradigm is indeed enough to eli…
Job Mobility and the Great Recession
Youngjoo Cha Sociological Science, May 2, 2014 DOI 10.15195/v1.a12 Abstract This study examines how inter-organizational mobility affects earnings inequality based on gender and parenthood under different macroeconomic conditions
Acts That Work
Prediction Error During Functional and Non-Functional Action Sequences
By means of the computational approach the present study investigates the difference between observation of functional behavior (i.e. actions involving necessary integration of subparts) and non-functional behavior (i.e. actions lacking necessary integration of subparts) in terms of prediction error. Non-functionality in this proximal sense is a feature of many socio-cultural practices, such as those found in religious rituals private and social,…
Does Goal-Demotion Enhance Cooperation
Social scientists have long assumed that religion – and more specifically religious rituals – promotes cooperation. It has also been claimed that ritual plays an essential role in enhancing prosociality and cooperation. In this study, using a controlled laboratory experiment, we investigate if a conspicuous and recurrent feature of collective ritualized behaviour, goal-demotion, promotes lasting cooperation. We report that goal-directed collectiv…
Magic among the Trobrianders
Udgivelsesdato: 1. december
Agent and Instrument in Judgements of Ritual Efficacy
Justin Barrett and E. Thomas Lawson (2001) were among the first to operationalize experimentally a traditional topic of anthropology: 'ritual'. Using a similar experimental protocol, the authors further investigate the cognitive underpinning of representations of ritual actions. Participants were asked to judge the likelihood of success of variants of a series of prototypical ritual actions. In line with Barrett and Lawson's findings, it was expe…
Theosophy. Metaphors of the Subject
No abstract available
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DEN Magiske Illusion? En kognitiv tilgang til magiske ritualer
The concept of magic is one of the most contested concepts in anthropology. It has been criticised as an illusion created by early anthropology's primitivist understanding of other - notably non-European - cultures. This has led to a general agreement to abandon the term, if not in praxis then theoretically. The author questions whether the concept should be abandoned and instead he proposes a reformulation based on the realisation that magic is …
Magi og effikacitet - en kognitiv tilgang
The aim of this article is to discuss the issue of ritual efficacy in the light of recent research in cognitive science and anthropology. It is claimed that the issue of ritual efficacy is directly related both to the establishment of ritual as en emic and an ethic category of actions, and to the criteria of rationality utilised on the judgement of ritual actions. The basic question is how ritual actions are distinguished from non-ritual actions …
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Det er langt vaek
The question of ritual
Why does ritual continue to be an issue in religious studies and in anthropology? In this paper the author proposes a cognitive approach to rituals, focusing those aspects of rituals that are distinct from other types of actions, together with what cognitive responses these differences provoke. It will be argued that rituals violate basic causal assumptions and by doing so, trigger off cognitive processes in order to ascribe purpose and meaning t…
Anmeldelser
Religion in Mind
Agent and Instrument in Judgements of Ritual Efficacy
Justin Barrett and E. Thomas Lawson (2001) were among the first to operationalize experimentally a traditional topic of anthropology: 'ritual'. Using a similar experimental protocol, the authors further investigate the cognitive underpinning of representations of ritual actions. Participants were asked to judge the likelihood of success of variants of a series of prototypical ritual actions. In line with Barrett and Lawson's findings, it was expe…
Ideernes Epidemiologi Og Kulturens Immunologi
In recent developments in anthropology and the science of religion, the concept of culture has been criticised as being without any explanatory value. Thus, proponents of cognitive anthropology have argued that culture, instead of explaining anything by itself, is the thing in need of explanation. Dan Sperber and Pascal Boyer have independently argued that in order to understand the diffusion of cultural ideas, we need to pay close attention to t…
Acts That Work
Questions of agency are central for understanding ritual behavior in general and representations of ritual efficacy in particular. Religious traditions often stipulate who are entitled to perform particular rituals. Further, representations of unobservable superhuman agents are often explicitly described as the 'real' ritual agents. Recent investigations into the processes underlying action representations and social cognition can help explain ho…
Acts That Work
Cognition and Religious Phenomena - A Response to Håkan Rydving
No abstract available
Magic among the Trobrianders
Udgivelsesdato: 1. december
Explaining Christian Origins and Early Judaism
Journal of Religion in Europe 2 (2009) 199–210 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI 10.1163/187489209X437044 brill.nl/jre Journal of Religion in Europe Book Reviews Petri Luomanen, Ilkka Pyysiäinen & Risto Uro (eds.), Explaining Christian Origins and Early Judaism: Contributions from Cognitive and Social Science (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2008), viii + 328 pp., ISBN 978-90-04-16329-4, € 99.00 / $147.00. In recent years, cognitive approaches hav…
Fortidens sind
Artiklen diskuterer forholdet mellem historiografiske studier på den ene side og kognitive og evolutionære teorier og modeller på den anden. På den baggrund præsenteres tre epistemologiske modeller for interaktionen mellem psykologi, historie og sociokulturelle systemer og disse diskuteres i forhold til forskerens mål med undersøgelse. Der argumenteres for, at historiografien nødvendigvis må inddrage aktuelle psykologiske modeller for ikke at byg…
Spontaneous processing of functional and non-functional action sequences
Characterizing ritual and ritualized behaviors has been a core issue in anthropology and the study of religion for more than a century. Although varying in emphasis, most theories point toward several specific behavioral features that distinguish ritual from instrumental behavior. Specifically, we have chosen to focus on the derivedness from instrumental behavior, intentional underspecification and goal-demotion. In contrast to instrumental or fu…
Fortidens sind
Artiklen diskuterer forholdet mellem historiografiske studier på den ene side og kognitive og evolutionære teorier og modeller på den anden. På den baggrund præsenteres tre epistemologiske modeller for interaktionen mellem psykologi, historie og sociokulturelle systemer og disse diskuteres i forhold til forskerens mål med undersøgelse. Der argumenteres for, at historiografien nødvendigvis må inddrage aktuelle psykologiske modeller for ikke at byg…
The resource model and the principle of predictive coding
Prediction Error During Functional and Non-Functional Action Sequences
By means of the computational approach the present study investigates the difference between observation of functional behavior (i.e. actions involving necessary integration of subparts) and non-functional behavior (i.e. actions lacking necessary integration of subparts) in terms of prediction error. Non-functionality in this proximal sense is a feature of many socio-cultural practices, such as those found in religious rituals private and social,…
Cognitive resource depletion in religious interactions
We explore the cognitive effects of three common features of religious interactions: (1) demand for the expressive suppression of emotion; (2) exposure to goal-demoted and causally opaque actions; and (3) the presence of a charismatic authority. Using a cognitive resource model of executive function, we argue that these three features affect the executive system in ways that limit the capacity for individual processing of religious events. We fra…
Job Mobility and the Great Recession
Youngjoo Cha Sociological Science, May 2, 2014 DOI 10.15195/v1.a12 Abstract This study examines how inter-organizational mobility affects earnings inequality based on gender and parenthood under different macroeconomic conditions
Does Goal-Demotion Enhance Cooperation
Social scientists have long assumed that religion – and more specifically religious rituals – promotes cooperation. It has also been claimed that ritual plays an essential role in enhancing prosociality and cooperation. In this study, using a controlled laboratory experiment, we investigate if a conspicuous and recurrent feature of collective ritualized behaviour, goal-demotion, promotes lasting cooperation. We report that goal-directed collectiv…
Mystical Experience in the Lab
We review previous attempts to study mystical experience and point to problems inherent to certain methodologies. Focusing on studies that use controlled environments we advocate taking an experimental approach to mysticism. To demonstrate the viability of this approach, we report findings from a new study that probes the potential for eliciting mystical experiences in the laboratory. We find that our experimental paradigm is indeed enough to eli…
Past Minds
How do historians understand the minds, motivations, intentions of historical agents? What might evolutionary and cognitive theorizing contribute to this work? What is the relation between natural and cultural history? Historians have been intrigued by such questions ever since publication in 1859 of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, itself the historicization of biology. This interest reemerged in the latter part of the twentieth century among a n…
Psychology (24 obras) · Philosophy (19 obras) · Epistemology (15 obras) · Cognition (14 obras) · Sociology (14 obras) · Computer Science (13 obras) · Philosophy (13 obras) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (12 obras) · Cognitive psychology (11 obras) · Cognitive science (9 obras)