Religion, in promoting outlandish beliefs and costly rituals, increases ingroup trust but also
may increase mistrust and conflict with outgroups. Moralizing gods emerged over the last …

Tremendous progress has been made in discerning the neurocognitive basis of value-
based decision making and learning. Although the majority of studies to date have …

Uncompromising wars, revolution, rights movements, and today's global terrorism are in part
driven by “devoted actors” who adhere to sacred, transcendent values that generate actions …

Partisan bias and hostility have increased substantially over the last few decades in the
American electorate, and previous work shows that partisan strength and sorting help drive …

Evolutionary, neuroscientific, and cognitive perspectives in psychology have converged on
the idea that some attitudes are moralized—a distinctive characteristic. Moralized attitudes …

Political scientists commonly distinguish issues that are moral from ones that are not. The
distinction is taken to be important for understanding persuadability, the stability of opinions …

The topic of belief has been neglected in the natural sciences for a long period of time.
Recent neuroscience research in non-human primates and humans, however, has shown …

Fear of transnational terrorism, along with a revitalization of sectarian nationalism, is
sundering social and political consensus across the world. Can psychology help? The focus …

Violent extremism is often explicitly motivated by commitment to abstract ideals such as the
nation or divine law—so-called “sacred” values that are relatively insensitive to material …

In the current hypothesis paper, we propose that focusing attention on silence can be used
as a paradigm conceptually similar to sensory deprivation, to study consciousness without …