A Building Block Approach to Complex Cultural Concepts

The building block approach (BBA) is a metatheoretical framework for studying the complex relationship between human psychology and cognition on the one hand, and socio-cultural formations and practices on the other. As such the BBA belongs to the wider project of consilience between the sciences and the humanities. The aim is to provide a common language that allows scholars in the humanities and social sciences to bring psychological and neuroscientific research to bear on the study of culturally embedded experiences, practices, and group formations, including those related to religion\s. The building block approach is premised on the idea that human experience and practice are typically expressed in terms of “complex cultural concepts” (CCCs) embedded in social formations. To explain them, we need to redescribe the phenomena of interest in behavioral terms and decompose them into components (or building blocks) in order to reconstruct how the phenomena emerged and identify mechanisms that interact to produce them. The process for doing this is referred to as reverse engineering.This approach thus treats “religion” as a complex cultural concept and “religions” as social formations, breaks both down into components (referred to here as decomposing or reverse engineering), and seeks to explain how the components interact and, thus, the mechanism or process whereby (through their interaction) they form religious as well as nonreligious formations. Reverse engineering is the research strategy at the heart of the building block approach. Simply put, reverse engineering entails a series of steps designed to take apart a complex system and analyze its constituent parts to (1) find out how it works and (2) trace how the parts (events, actions, and representations) have been assembled and labeled in specific formations. It thus is the basic strategy for learning more about human experience as it is mediated by CCCs in social formations.