Data From Dead Minds: Radically Expanding the Subject Pool Through Engagement with Historical Sources

HARVARD→

Social psychologists, cognitive scientists and evolutionary theorists are gradually becoming more concerned about the potential problems involved in drawing conclusions about universal human cognition from subjects drawn almost exclusively from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) societies. In this talk, I will discuss the promise and challenges involved in attempting to draw inferences about religious psychological processes from “dead minds”—that is, the traces of past cognition conveyed by historical texts and artifacts. Our inability to run controlled experiments on dead subjects imposes some limits on the usefulness of this data, but I will argue that this is more than outweighed by the diversity, accessibility and sheer quantity of data from dead minds. I will conclude with two case examples illustrating how historical data is being used to explore human religious cognition—specifically, afterlife beliefs and the existence of folk mind-body dualism—in ways that complement ongoing experiment work with contemporary subjects.