Ara Norenzayan
Biographic Data
| ID | 80144 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ara Norenzayan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ara |
| FAMILY NAME | Norenzayan |
| SIGNATURE | NORENZAYAN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0009-0004-3238-1167 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 729 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
End of world beliefs are common, diverse, and predict how people perceive and respond to global risks
Do you believe the world will come to an end within your lifetime, and does that belief change the way you see existential threats to humanity? One third of Americans answer yes to the first question; we venture to answer the second question here. Stories about the end of the world are historically and globally prevalent and come in many flavors. End of world beliefs have been hypothesized to shape processes of risk perception and social behavior…
The varieties of nonreligious experience: Meaning in life among believers, non-believers, and the spiritual but not religious
Supplemental material is available online at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2153599X.2025.2546324
Political Common Ground on Preserving Nature: Environmental Motives Across the Political Spectrum
Environmental issues are becoming increasingly politically polarized, making common ground essential. This research investigated the political common ground of environmental motives—the reasons why nature is worth preserving. Natural language processing of liberals’ and conservatives’ open text responses (Study 1: N = 1,544) identified 12 central motives. Political common ground was shared on the most cited motives: Human survival, moral obligati…
Appealing to the minds of gods: Religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies
How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which religious beliefs and behaviors will be associated. To evaluate these criteria, we examine the conten…
The Evolution of Religion and Morality: Volume I
A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being
The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N=10,535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-…
Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures
Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses t…
Global supernatural beliefs
Karma and God: Convergent and divergent mental representations of supernatural norm enforcement
Few studies have directly examined mental representations of supernaturally monitored morality, as they are reflected in world religions as conceptions of karma and God.In seven samples (total N= 3861), we use an open-ended free-list task to investigate participants' mental representations of God and karma, among culturally diverse samples from the USA and India, including Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and non-religious participants.Key results sho…
Material insecurity predicts greater commitment to moralistic and less commitment to local deities: A cross-cultural investigation
The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community sizes with diverse religious traditions including animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, we con…
The moralization bias of gods’ minds: A cross-cultural test
There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute…
Guiding the evolution of the evolutionary sciences of religion: A discussion
The Evolution of Religion and Morality project: Reflections and looking ahead
This special issue marks the formal end to the Evolution of Religion and Morality project and highlights the overall findings with particular attention to our second wave of data collection. In this concluding article, we first briefly detail how the project came about and how it developed. We then catalogue our contributions, summarizing the empirical results of key synthetic investigations that were part of the overall project. In an effort to …
The religiosity gender gap in 14 diverse societies
Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this "gender gap" may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation into the prevalence of, and explanations for, the religiosity gender gap in 2,002 individuals from 14 d…
How is analytical thinking related to religious belief? A test of three theoretical models
The replicability and importance of the correlation between cognitive style and religious belief have been debated. Moreover, the literature has not examined distinct psychological accounts of this relationship. We tested the replicability of the correlation (N = 5284; students and broader samples of Canadians, Americans, and Indians); while testing three accounts of how cognitive style comes to be related to belief in God, karma, witchcraft, and…
Beyond Weird: A review of the last decade and a look ahead to the global laboratory of the future
Cognitive Biases and Religious Belief: A Path Model Replication in the Czech Republic and Slovakia With a Focus on Anthropomorphism
We examined cognitive biases that underlie individual differences in supernatural beliefs in nationally representative samples from the Czech Republic and Slovakia (total N = 2,022). These countries were chosen because of their differing levels of religious belief despite their cultural similarity. Replicating a previous study with North American samples, we found that anthropomorphism was unrelated to belief in God but was consistently related t…
Supernatural norm enforcement: Thinking about karma and God reduces selfishness among believers
The cognitive and cultural foundations of moral behavior
The evolution of religion and morality: A synthesis of ethnographic and experimental evidence from eight societies
Understanding the expansion of human sociality and cooperation beyond kith and kin remains an important evolutionary puzzle. There is likely a complex web of processes including institutions, norms, and practices that contributes to this phenomenon. Considerable evidence suggests that one such process involves certain components of religious systems that may have fostered the expansion of human cooperation in a variety of ways, including both cer…
Analytic atheism revisited
What are the causes and consequences of belief in karma
The scientific study of religion has thus far overlooked the study of beliefs and practices that are centered on the notion of karma: ethical causation across one or different lifetimes. Here, we outline a set of pertinent questions about karmic beliefs and practices ripe for research, namely (1) their cultural distribution around the world, (2) their structure and content, and (3) their psychological and cultural antecedents and consequences
Coordinating bodies and minds: Behavioral synchrony fosters mentalizing
Religious Priming: A Meta-Analysis With a Focus on Prosociality
Priming has emerged as a valuable tool within the psychological study of religion, allowing for tests of religion’s causal effect on a number of psychological outcomes, such as prosocial behavior. As the literature has grown, questions about the reliability and boundary conditions of religious priming have arisen. We use a combination of traditional effect-size analyses, p-curve analyses, and adjustments for publication bias to evaluate the robus…
Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality
Using economic games, the authors examine the role of religion in the persistence of human cooperation; individuals who claim that their gods are moralizing, punitive and knowledgeable about human affairs are more likely to play fairly towards geographically distant co-religionists. How has cooperation persisted in human societies that are increasingly large and complex, where simple relatedness is not necessarily sufficient? These authors examin…
European Journal of Social Psychology
Based on a conversational analysis of experimental procedures and consistent with the principle of relevance, we predicted that participants' verbal responses will be in ̄uenced by their tacit inferences about the researcher's epistemic goals, derived from their knowledge of the researcher's academic aliation.We tested this prediction in a core area of social-personality and cultural psychology, causal attribution.University students provided cau…
Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality
Growing cross-cultural evidence suggests that East Asians are less likely to show the correspondence bias, or a preference for explanations of behavior in terms of traits, dispositions, or other internal attributes of the target. The scope of this evidence spans several research paradigms and diverse methodologies. The cultural difference, however, appears not to be caused by an absence of dispositional thinking in East Asian cultures. Indeed, ex…
Cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning
The authors examined cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning among East Asian (Chinese and Korean), Asian American, and European American university students. We investigated categorization (Studies 1 and 2), conceptual structure (Study 3), and deductive reasoning (Studies 3 and 4). In each study a cognitive conflict was activated between formal and intuitive strategies of reasoning. European Americans, more than Chinese and Ko…
Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice
Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world). The sociofunctional approach to prejudice, combined with a cultural evolutionary theory of religion's effects on cooperation, suggest that anti-atheist prejudice is particularly motivated by distrust. Consistent with this theoretical framework, a broad sample of American adults revealed that distrust characterized …
Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know
Psychological universals, or core mental attributes shared by humans everywhere, are a foundational postulate of psychology, yet explicit analysis of how to identify such universals is lacking. This article offers a conceptual and methodological framework to guide the investigation of genuine universals through empirical analysis of psychological patterns across cultures. Issues of cross-cultural generalizability of psychological processes and 3 …
The Pace of Life in 31 Countries
This study compared the pace of life in large cities from 31 countries around the world. Three indicators of pace of life were observed: average walking speed in downtown locations, the speed with which postal clerks completed a simple request (work speed), and the accuracy of public clocks. Overall, pace of life was fastest in Japan and the countries of Western Europe and was slowest in economically undeveloped countries. The pace was significan…
Mean Gods Make Good People: Different Views of God Predict Cheating Behavior
Fear of supernatural punishment may serve as a deterrent to counternormative behavior, even in anonymous situations free from human social monitoring. The authors conducted two studies to test this hypothesis, examining the relationship between cheating behavior in an anonymous setting and views of God as loving and compassionate, or as an angry and punishing agent. Overall levels of religious devotion or belief in God did not directly predict ch…
Like a camera in the sky? Thinking about God increases public self-awareness and socially desirable responding
Cross-Cultural Differences in Helping Strangers
Independent field experiments in 23 large cities around the world measured three types of spontaneous, nonemergency helping: alerting a pedestrian who dropped a pen, offering help to a pedestrian with a hurt leg trying to reach a pile of dropped magazines, and assisting a blind person cross the street. The results indicated that a city's helping rate was relatively stable across the three measures, suggesting that helping of strangers is a cross-…
Supernatural norm enforcement: Thinking about karma and God reduces selfishness among believers
Mortality salience and religion: Divergent effects on the defense of cultural worldviews for the religious and the non‐religious
Religious and non‐religious individuals differ in their core beliefs. The religious endorse a supernatural, divinely inspired view of the world, while the non‐religious hold largely secular worldviews. As a result they may respond differently to existential threats. Three studies confirmed this prediction. After a mortality salience (MS) or control prime, Canadian participants read, and responded to, an essay hostile to Western civilization, alle…
The Cultural Transmission of Faith Why Innate Intuitions Are Necessary, but Insufficient, to Explain Religious Belief
The cognitive science of religion integrates insights from diverse scientific disciplines to explain how people acquire, represent and transmit religious concepts. This perspective has led to a fruitful research program on the naturalistic origins of religion. However, it has thus far not directly addressed a key component of religion: faith or committed belief. The present review proposes a framework that integrates standard approaches from the …
It was meant to happen: Explaining cultural variations in fate attributions
People often perceive important and improbable life outcomes as "meant to happen," that is, predetermined and inevitable. In 4 studies, we constructed diverse measures of such fate attributions and examined the cultural correlates of this attributional tendency, focusing on ethnic culture and religious affiliation differences. Independently of ethnic culture, Christians were found to endorse fate attributions more than did the nonreligious; and i…
The Devil's Advocate: Secular Arguments Diminish both Implicit and Explicit Religious Belief
The religion-science debate has heated up in recent years, with polemical arguments on both side decrying the other. Given that the dominant view is of religiousness as a relatively fixed personality trait, all of this furor seems excessive. Interested in just how malleable religiousness is, we exposed half of our participants to an argument against the existence of God by Richard Dawkins. Those exposed to Dawkins' arguments showed lower self-rep…
The religiosity gender gap in 14 diverse societies
Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this "gender gap" may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation into the prevalence of, and explanations for, the religiosity gender gap in 2,002 individuals from 14 d…
Memory and Belief in the Transmission of Counterintuitive Content
Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures
Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses t…
Analytic atheism revisited
Telling what they want to know: Participants tailor causal attributions to researchers' interests
Based on a conversational analysis of experimental procedures and consistent with the principle of relevance, we predicted that participants' verbal responses will be influenced by their tacit inferences about the researcher's epistemic goals, derived from their knowledge of the researcher's academic affiliation. We tested this prediction in a core area of social-personality and cultural psychology, causal attribution. University students provide…
Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality
Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality
Growing cross-cultural evidence suggests that East Asians are less likely to show the correspondence bias, or a preference for explanations of behavior in terms of traits, dispositions, or other internal attributes of the target. The scope of this evidence spans several research paradigms and diverse methodologies. The cultural difference, however, appears not to be caused by an absence of dispositional thinking in East Asian cultures. Indeed, ex…
The Pace of Life in 31 Countries
This study compared the pace of life in large cities from 31 countries around the world. Three indicators of pace of life were observed: average walking speed in downtown locations, the speed with which postal clerks completed a simple request (work speed), and the accuracy of public clocks. Overall, pace of life was fastest in Japan and the countries of Western Europe and was slowest in economically undeveloped countries. The pace was significan…
Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition.
The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in diffe…
Cross-Cultural Differences in Helping Strangers
Independent field experiments in 23 large cities around the world measured three types of spontaneous, nonemergency helping: alerting a pedestrian who dropped a pen, offering help to a pedestrian with a hurt leg trying to reach a pile of dropped magazines, and assisting a blind person cross the street. The results indicated that a city's helping rate was relatively stable across the three measures, suggesting that helping of strangers is a cross-…
Cultural Similarities and Differences in Social Inference: Evidence from Behavioral Predictions and Lay Theories of Behavior
The authors investigated social inference practices of Koreans and Americans in two novel domains: behavioral predictions and folk theories of behavior. When dispositional and situational inferences were disentangled, Koreans showed dispositional thinking to the same extent as Americans. This was the case for behavioral predictions based on individual difference information (Study 1) and for endorsements of a dispositionist theory of behavior (St…
Cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning
The authors examined cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning among East Asian (Chinese and Korean), Asian American, and European American university students. We investigated categorization (Studies 1 and 2), conceptual structure (Study 3), and deductive reasoning (Studies 3 and 4). In each study a cognitive conflict was activated between formal and intuitive strategies of reasoning. European Americans, more than Chinese and Ko…
Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion
Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhum…
Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know
Psychological universals, or core mental attributes shared by humans everywhere, are a foundational postulate of psychology, yet explicit analysis of how to identify such universals is lacking. This article offers a conceptual and methodological framework to guide the investigation of genuine universals through empirical analysis of psychological patterns across cultures. Issues of cross-cultural generalizability of psychological processes and 3 …
Belief in Supernatural Agents in the Face of Death
Four studies examined whether awareness of mortality intensifies belief in supernatural agents among North Americans. In Studies 1 and 2, mortality salience led to more religiosity, stronger belief in God, and in divine intervention. In Studies 3 and 4, mortality salience increased supernatural agent beliefs even when supernatural agency was presented in a culturally alien context (divine Buddha in Study 3, Shamanic spirits in Study 4). The latte…
Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives
We hypothesize that cultural narratives such as myths and folktales are more likely to achieve cultural stability if they correspond to a minimally counterintuitive (MCI) cognitive template that includes mostly intuitive concepts combined with a minority of counterintuitive ones. Two studies tested this hypothesis, examining whether this template produces a memory advantage, and whether this memory advantage explains the cultural success of folkt…
European Journal of Social Psychology
Based on a conversational analysis of experimental procedures and consistent with the principle of relevance, we predicted that participants' verbal responses will be in ̄uenced by their tacit inferences about the researcher's epistemic goals, derived from their knowledge of the researcher's academic aliation.We tested this prediction in a core area of social-personality and cultural psychology, causal attribution.University students provided cau…
God Is Watching You: Priming God Concepts Increases Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game
We present two studies aimed at resolving experimentally whether religion increases prosocial behavior in the anonymous dictator game. Subjects allocated more money to anonymous strangers when God concepts were implicitly activated than when neutral or no concepts were activated. This effect was at least as large as that obtained when concepts associated with secular moral institutions were primed. A trait measure of self-reported religiosity did…
The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality
We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality, experiments measuring religiosity and actual prosocial behavior suggest that this association emerges primarily in contexts where reputational concerns are heightened. Experimentally induced religious …
The Devil's Advocate: Secular Arguments Diminish both Implicit and Explicit Religious Belief
The religion-science debate has heated up in recent years, with polemical arguments on both side decrying the other. Given that the dominant view is of religiousness as a relatively fixed personality trait, all of this furor seems excessive. Interested in just how malleable religiousness is, we exposed half of our participants to an argument against the existence of God by Richard Dawkins. Those exposed to Dawkins' arguments showed lower self-rep…
Religion and Support for Suicide Attacks
In four studies carried out across different cultural, religious, and political contexts, we investigated the association between religion and popular support for suicide attacks. In two surveys of Palestinians and one cognitive priming experiment with Israeli settlers, prayer to God, an index of religious devotion, was unrelated to support for suicide attacks. Instead, attendance at religious services, thought to enhance coalitional commitment, …
Mortality salience and religion: Divergent effects on the defense of cultural worldviews for the religious and the non‐religious
Religious and non‐religious individuals differ in their core beliefs. The religious endorse a supernatural, divinely inspired view of the world, while the non‐religious hold largely secular worldviews. As a result they may respond differently to existential threats. Three studies confirmed this prediction. After a mortality salience (MS) or control prime, Canadian participants read, and responded to, an essay hostile to Western civilization, alle…
Most people are not Weird
The weirdest people in the world?
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions…
It was meant to happen: Explaining cultural variations in fate attributions
People often perceive important and improbable life outcomes as "meant to happen," that is, predetermined and inevitable. In 4 studies, we constructed diverse measures of such fate attributions and examined the cultural correlates of this attributional tendency, focusing on ethnic culture and religious affiliation differences. Independently of ethnic culture, Christians were found to endorse fate attributions more than did the nonreligious; and i…
Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind
An enormous amount of scientific research compels two fundamental conclusions about the human mind: The mind is the product of evolution; and the mind is shaped by culture. These two perspectives on the human mind are not incompatible, but, until recently, their compatibility has resisted rigorous scholarly inquiry. Evolutionary psychology documents many ways in which genetic adaptations govern the operations of the human mind. But evolutionary i…
Mean Gods Make Good People: Different Views of God Predict Cheating Behavior
Fear of supernatural punishment may serve as a deterrent to counternormative behavior, even in anonymous situations free from human social monitoring. The authors conducted two studies to test this hypothesis, examining the relationship between cheating behavior in an anonymous setting and views of God as loving and compassionate, or as an angry and punishing agent. Overall levels of religious devotion or belief in God did not directly predict ch…
Like a camera in the sky? Thinking about God increases public self-awareness and socially desirable responding
Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice
Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world). The sociofunctional approach to prejudice, combined with a cultural evolutionary theory of religion's effects on cooperation, suggest that anti-atheist prejudice is particularly motivated by distrust. Consistent with this theoretical framework, a broad sample of American adults revealed that distrust characterized …
Psychology (47 works) · Social Psychology (41 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (33 works) · Epistemology (31 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (26 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (16 works) · Cognition (15 works)