JOURNAL ARTICLES
& Book Chapters
Cognitive Science of Religion
Why do human beings have religious beliefs and engage in religious behaviors? Are religious beliefs linked in any way to moral judgments, and do they enhance in-group cooperation? Are such links universal cross-culturally? Might the combination of religious beliefs/behaviors and moral judgments have arisen through cultural group selection? Is thorough-going atheism or physicalism really psychologically possible for human beings?
These are questions that I am exploring with my colleagues at HECC and other international institutions, in the form of collaborative journal review articles, experimental research projects, large-scale text analyses and through the construction of a massive database of human religious-cultural history (see Norenzayan et al. 2007 below for an outline of our basic hypotheses, which won the Daniel Wegner Theoretical Innovation Award from SPSP).
These questions are also the focus of a large grant awarded to UBC in 2012 that established the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC); see our site for the details of work we did there.
Asterisks indicate refereed publications; sole-authored unless otherwise indicated.
Beheim, Bret, Quentin Atkinson, Joseph Bulbulia, Will Gervais, Russell Gray, Joseph Henrich, Martin Lang, M. Willis Monroe, Michael Muthukrishna, Ara Norenzayan, Benjamin Purzycki, Azim Shariff, Edward Slingerland, Rachel Spicer, Aiyana Willard. 2021. “Treatment of missing data determines conclusions regarding moralizing gods,” (PDF) Nature 595: E29-34. *
This Matters Arising critiques a 2019 Nature article by Whitehouse, et al. (since retracted) that used the Seshat archaeo-historical databank to argue that beliefs in moralizing gods appear in world history only after the formation of complex “megasocieties” of around one million people. Inspection of the authors’ data shows that 61% of Seshat data points on moralizing gods are missing values, mostly from smaller populations below one million people, and during the analysis the authors re-coded these data points to signify the absence of moralizing gods beliefs. When we confine the analysis only to the extant data or use various standard imputation methods, the reported finding is reversed: moralizing gods precede increases in social complexity.
Nichols, Ryan, Edward Slingerland, Kristoffer Neilbo, Peter Kirby and Carson Logan. 2021. “Supernatural agents and prosociality in historical China: micro-modeling the cultural evolution of gods and morality in textual corpora,” Religion Brain and Behavior 11: 46-64. *
Slingerland, Edward, M. Willis Monroe, Brenton Sullivan, Robyn Faith Walsh, Daniel Veidlinger, William Noseworthy, Conn Herriott, Ben Raffield, Janine Larmon Peterson, Gretel Rodríguez, Karen Sonik, William Green, Frederick S. Tappenden, Amir Ashtari, Rachel Spicer, Michael Muthukrishna, “Historians Respond to Whitehouse et al. 2019, ‘Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history,’” (PDF) Journal of Cognitive Historiography 5: 1-2 (2020). *
A critique of the Seshat Databank coding methodology used in Whitehouse et al. 2019
Brenton Sullivan, Michael Muthukrishna, Frederick Tappenden and Edward Slingerland, “Exploring the Challenges and Potentialities of the Database of Religious History for Cognitive Historiography,” (PDF) Journal of Cognitive Historiography 3:1-2: 12-31 (2018). *
Tappenden, Frederick and Edward Slingerland. “Introduction: Religion, Digital Humanities, and Cognitive Historiography,” (PDF) Journal of Cognitive Historiography 3:1-2: 7-11 (2018). *
“China as the Radical “Other”: Lessons for the Cognitive Science of Religion,” in Religious Cognition in China: “Homo Religiosus” and the Dragon, ed. Ryan Hornbeck, Justin Barrett and Madeleine Kang, pp. 55-75. Springer. *
Slingerland, Edward and Brenton Sullivan. “Durkheim With Data: The Database of Religious History (DRH),” (PDF) Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85.2: 312-347 (2017). *
Norenzayan, Ara, Azim Shariff, Aiyana Willard, Edward Slingerland, Will Gervais, Rita McNamara and Joseph Henrich. “Parochial Prosocial Religions: Historical and Contemporary Evidence for a Cultural Evolutionary Process.” (PDF) Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2016).
“Big Gods, Historical Explanation, and Bringing Religious Studies Out of the Intellectual Ghetto,” (PDF) Religion (September 2015). *
Norenzayan, Ara, Azim Shariff, Aiyana Willard, Edward Slingerland, Will Gervais, Rita McNamara and Joseph Henrich. “The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions,” (PDF) Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2014). *
“Toward a Second Wave of Consilience in the Cognitive Scientific Study of Religion” , (PDF) Journal for Cognitive Historiography 1.1: 121-130 (2013). *
Slingerland, Edward, Joseph Henrich and Ara Norenzayan. “The Evolution of Prosocial Religions,” (PDF) in Cultural Evolution: Strüngmann Forum Reports, Vol. 12, ed. Peter Richerson and Morton Christiansen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2013). *
“Cognitive Science and Religious Thought: The Case of Psychological Interiority in the Analects,” (PDF) in Mental Culture: Classical Social Theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion, ed. Dimitris Xygalatas and Lee McCorkle. London: Acumen Publishing, Religion, Cognition and Culture Series (2013). *
Turchin, Peter, Harvey Whitehouse, Pieter François, Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard. “A Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution.” (PDF) Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History 3: 271–293 (December 2012).
“Back to the Future: A Response to Martin and Wiebe,” (PDF) Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80.3: 611-617 (2012).
Bulbulia, Joseph and Edward Slingerland. “Religious Studies as a Life Science,” (PDF) Numen 59.5: 564–613 (2012). *
Slingerland, Edward and Joseph Bulbulia. “Evolutionary Science and the Study of Religion,” (PDF) Religion 41.3: 307-328 (September 2011). *
“Who’s Afraid of Reductionism? The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76.2 (June 2008): 375-411. *
Accompanied by “Reply to Cho & Squier” (418-419) and “Response to Cho & Squier” (449-454).
As of December 2012, this article was listed by JAAR as its #1 most cited article.