While the occurrence of rituals in anxiogenic contexts has been long noted and supported
by ethnographic, quantitative and experimental studies, the purported effects of ritual …

Collective ritual is virtually omnipresent across past and present human cultures and is
thought to play an essential role in facilitating cooperation, yet little is known about its …

There has been increasing interest in the evolutionary study of religion, but perfunctory
fractionalization has limited our ability to explain how and why religion evolved, evaluate …

Cross-cultural beliefs about gods' concerns point to local socioecological challenges. Such
appeals to gods' concerns provide insights for understanding religious cognition specifically …

The present article is an elaborated and upgraded version of the Early Career Award talk
that I delivered at the IAPR 2019 conference in Gdańsk, Poland. In line with the conference's …

Why are antiabortion attitudes more prevalent among conservatives? We show that people
who prioritize courage, deference to authority, and caring for kin are more likely to oppose …

Recent work on the evolution of religion has approached religions as adaptive complexes of
traits consisting of cognitive, neurological, affective, behavioural and developmental features …

Meaning-making has been one of the primary domains of religion throughout history, and
some have claimed that this is religion's central function. Yet, the modern era has seen a …

In this commentary of McCauley and Graham's book on mental abnormalities and religions,
we identify a number of challenges, and present possible extensions of their proposed …

We examined the relationship between religious rituals and how people perceive moral
norms. Prominent anthropological theories propose that rituals charge associated moral …