The new science of religious change
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8712882 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Joshua Conrad Jackson (0000-0002-2947-9815, corresponding author), Nava Caluori (0000-0003-1632-4512), Kurt Gray (0000-0001-5816-2676), Michele J Gelfand (0000-0002-9780-9230), Michele Gelfand |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 76 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 838-850 |
| Publication date | 2021-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Psychologist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-066X • E-ISSN: 1935-990X |
| Publisher | American Psychological Association (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1037/amp0000818 |
| PMID | 34914425 |
| OpenAlex | W4200491754 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
Humans have believed in gods and spirits since the earliest days of the Holocene, and many people still believe in them today. Although the existence of religious belief has been a human constant, the nature and prevalence of religion has changed dramatically throughout human history. Here we describe the emerging science of religious change. We first outline a multilevel framework for studying religious change drawn from theories of socioecological psychology and cultural evolution. We illustrate this framework with four case studies featuring two ancient religious changes (the rise of punitive religions and doctrinal rituals) and two modern religious changes (the rise of atheism and nontraditional religions). We then review useful methods for examining religious change, including ethnographic coding, agent-based modeling, and time-series analysis. Next, we explore future directions, highlighting the need for predictive forecasts, nonlinear models, and non-Western samples. We also outline ten key questions that need to be answered for a fuller understanding of religious change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
Atheism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · MEDLINE · Political science · PsycINFO · Sociology · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Psychology · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence · Law · Philosophy · Social Psychology
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Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing
Two questions for the cultural evolutionary science of religion
Shifting themes in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion
Religious people view both science and religion as less epistemically valuable than non-religious people view science
Religion as a natural laboratory for understanding human behavior
Different is the Faith of a Child, Different is the Faith of an Adult, I Just Managed to Get This Faith, My Own” - Qualitative Study on the Concept of Religious Deidentification. Conclusions from the Analysis of a Polish Sample
Yearning for Something More
| Citations per year | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |