This article reports findings from a multi-method study of atheism and agnosticism-grouped here as nontheism-in contemporary China, conducted as part of a research program exploring the nature and varieties of nontheism across six countries. We find that, unlike the naturalistic and antireligious forms of atheism prominent in many Western contexts, nontheism in China is characterized by high engagement with supernatural beliefs, low antireligious sentiment, and weak attachment to explicitly nontheistic worldviews and identities. When Chinese nontheists self-identify as atheists, such identification often appears situational, strategic, and linked to social or political expectations. We argue that nontheism in China tends to operate less as an ideological stance and more as a pragmatic orientation embedded in social relationships and instrumental concerns. This mode of nontheism, we suggest, reflects a sociocultural environment in which nontheists generally face little pressure or incentive to develop strong nontheistic positions, aside from the ocasional need to signal adherence to state-endorsed atheism.

We find evidence of belief in belief-intuitive preferences for religious belief over atheism, even among atheist participants-across eight comparatively secular countries. Religion is a cross-cultural human universal, yet explicit markers of religiosity have rapidly waned in large parts of the world in recent decades. We explored whether intuitive religious influence lingers, even among nonbelievers in largely secular societies. We adapted a classic experimental philosophy task to test for this intuitive belief in belief among people in eight comparatively nonreligious countries: Canada, China, Czechia, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam (total N = 3,804). Our analyses revealed strong evidence that 1) people intuitively favor religious belief over atheism and that 2) this pattern was not moderated by participants' own self-reported atheism. Indeed, 3) even atheists in relatively secular societies intuitively prefer belief to atheism. These inferences were robust across different analytic strategies and across other measures of individual differences in religiosity and religious instruction. Although explicit religious belief has rapidly declined in these countries, it is possible that belief in belief may still persist. These results speak to the complex psychological and cultural dynamics of secularization.

Journal Article Imagining the Cognitive Science of Religion: Magic Bullets, Complex Theories, Experimental Adventures, By E. Thomas Lawson Get access Imagining the Cognitive Science of Religion: Magic Bullets, Complex Theories, Experimental Adventures By E. Thomas Lawson Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2023. 171 pages. $90.00 (hardcover), $29.95 (paperback), $26.95 (e-book). Jonathan A Lanman Jonathan A Lanman Queen's University Belfast [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, lfaf020, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfaf020 Published: 14 February 2025

“Credibility Enhancing Displays” are prominent examples of “practicing what is preached.” They have been theorized to play an important cultural-evolutionary role in the transmission of religious beliefs, because they help proselytizers to evade cognitive mechanisms that evolved biologically in response to the challenge of verbal deception. CREDs can include ritual, sacrifice, donation, taboo, emotional display, and more besides. The current chapter describes CREDs from an evolutionary perspective, before outlining their putative role in religious transmission and assessing current evidence. It then considers the implications of CRED theory for the effects of religious hypocrisy on individual belief and for its relationship to the widespread social process known as “secularization.” We close by considering some open questions and future directions for research.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by John Templeton Foundation: [Grant Number 61928].

Abstract This chapter describes how recent work across the social and cognitive sciences can address the question of how religious systems come to fail. It begins by discussing whether it makes scientific sense to talk about “religious systems” before outlining how the success or failure of such systems can be evaluated. A distinction is then drawn between the “mental-representational” and the “social” failure of religious systems. The contributions of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) are examined to explain the differential success of religious systems over time, such that some come to fail while others succeed. Then the relevance of CSR for explaining how and where religious systems lose influence altogether and various forms of nonreligion emerge, a process that has traditionally been called “secularization,” is outlined. The chapter closes with a case study outlining the applicability of the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion to the decline of Catholic belief, practice, and identification, as well as the rise in anti–Catholic Church social action, in early twenty-first-century Ireland.

Asking about religious beliefs, or lack thereof, is a sensitive and complex issue. Due to cultural norms, people may be motivated to respond in a socially desirable way. In addition, deliberating about beliefs may yield different responses than intuition-based responses. To develop a better understanding of the relationship between intuition and self-reported belief, we developed a new implicit measure of supernatural belief. Specifically, we adapted the Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP) to measure supernatural belief. In a preregistered online study of 404 American participants, we found that the strength of associations between supernatural entities (e.g., god, devil, heaven) and the concept "real" (as opposed to the concept "imaginary") predicted self-reported supernatural belief and self-reported religious behavior, and these associations were of comparable magnitude to those found in studies where supernatural belief was measured implicitly using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). These results provide provisional evidence that the AMP can be used as an implicit measure of supernatural belief.

Previous research on credibility-enhancing displays (CREDs) suggests that long-term exposure to religious role models "practicing what they preach" aids the acceptance of religious representations by cultural learners. Likewise, a considerable amount of anecdotal evidence implicates its opposite, perceived "religious hypocrisy" (forthwith credibility-undermining displays or CRUDs), as a factor in the rejection of religion. However, there is currently little causal evidence on whether behaviors of either kind displayed by religious authorities directly affect pre-existing religious belief. The current study investigated this question by priming Irish self-identified "Catholic Christian" participants with either a clerical CRED or CRUD and subsequently measuring levels of explicit and implicit belief. Our results revealed no effects of immediate CRED or CRUD exposure on either implicit religious belief or three different measures of explicit religiosity. Instead, explicit (but not implicit) religiosity was predicted by past CRED exposure. Prospects and limitations of experimental approaches to CREDs and CRUDs are discussed.

In “Seeking the Supernatural,” Van Leeuwen and van Elk make a welcome contribution to the cognitive science of religion (CSR). They rightly call for a re-examination of the role of agency detection...

Interest in the dynamics of intergroup conflict continues to rise within and beyond anthropology. The cognitive and evolutionary sciences can help us better understand the ubiquity and causal dynamics of intergroup conflict by demonstrating the existence of, first, psychological adaptations for intragroup cooperation and intergroup conflict and, second, sociocultural adaptations for intragroup cooperation and intergroup conflict. Intergroup conflicts impact directly on individual fitness, and natural selection is thought to have produced psychological adaptations that allow individuals to better survive and reproduce in environments of intergroup competition. Such adaptations include an evolved ethnic psychology and tendency to hold some values as sacred. Moreover, sociocultural traditions, such as collective rituals, have evolved in distinct modes (e.g., imagistic and doctrinal) to produce the social cohesion necessary for groups to survive and thrive in diverse resource ecologies, including those characterized by intergroup conflict.

We are grateful to the commentators for their stimulating reflections on our target article. Most, but not all, are supportive of the cultural ecosystem approach and many of the supportive comments...

Willingness to lay down one’s life for a group of non-kin, well documented historically and ethnographically, represents an evolutionary puzzle. Building on research in social psychology, we develop a mathematical model showing how conditioning cooperation on previous shared experience can allow individually costly pro-group behavior to evolve. The model generates a series of predictions that we then test empirically in a range of special sample populations (including military veterans, college fraternity/sorority members, football fans, martial arts practitioners, and twins). Our empirical results show that sharing painful experiences produces “identity fusion” – a visceral sense of oneness – which in turn can motivate self-sacrifice, including willingness to fight and die for the group. Practically, our account of how shared dysphoric experiences produce identity fusion helps us better understand such pressing social issues as suicide terrorism, holy wars, sectarian violence, gang-related violence, and other forms of intergroup conflict.

One of the central aims of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) is to explain why supernatural agent beliefs are so widespread. A related but distinct aim is to explain why some individuals hold supernatural agent beliefs but others do not. Here, we aim to provide an initial test of the power of exposure to what Henrich calls credibility-enhancing displays (or CREDs) in determining whether or not an individual holds explicit supernatural agent beliefs. We present evidence from two studies of Americans suggesting that exposure to CREDs, as measured by a scale we developed and validated, predicts current theism vs. non-theism, certainty of God's existence/non-existence, and religiosity while controlling for overall religious socialization. These results are among the first to empirically support the theorized significance of CREDs for the acquisition of supernatural agent beliefs.

Previous research has found that behavioural synchrony between people leads to greater prosocial tendencies towards co-performers. In this study, we investigated the scope of this prosocial effect: does it extend beyond the performance group to an extended ingroup (extended parochial prosociality) or even to other people in general (generalized prosociality)? Participants performed a simple rhythmic movement either in time (synchrony condition) or out of time (asynchrony condition) with each other. Before and during the rhythmic movement, participants were exposed to a prime that made salient an extended ingroup identity. After the task, half of the participants had the opportunity to help an extended ingroup member; the other half had the opportunity to help an outgroup member. We found a main effect of our synchrony manipulation across both help targets suggesting that the prosocial effects of synchrony extend to non-performers. Furthermore, there was a significantly higher proportion of participants willing to help an outgroup member after moving collectively in synchrony. This study shows that under certain intergroup contexts synchrony can lead to generalized prosociality with performers displaying greater prosociality even towards outgroup members.

Previous research has found that behavioural synchrony between people leads to greater prosocial tendencies towards co-performers. In this study, we investigated the scope of this prosocial effect: does it extend beyond the performance group to an extended ingroup ( extended parochial prosociality ) or even to other people in general ( generalized prosociality )? Participants performed a simple rhythmic movement either in time (synchrony condition) or out of time (asynchrony condition) with each other. Before and during the rhythmic movement, participants were exposed to a prime that made salient an extended ingroup identity. After the task, half of the participants had the opportunity to help an extended ingroup member; the other half had the opportunity to help an outgroup member. We found a main effect of our synchrony manipulation across both help targets suggesting that the prosocial effects of synchrony extend to non-performers. Furthermore, there was a significantly higher proportion of participants willing to help an outgroup member after moving collectively in synchrony. This study shows that under certain intergroup contexts synchrony can lead to generalized prosociality with performers displaying greater prosociality even towards outgroup members.