The common-is-moral association is stronger among less religious people

Religious people discount the future less

The propensity for religious belief and behavior is a universal feature of human societies, but religious practice often imposes substantial costs upon its practitioners. This suggests that during human cultural evolution, the costs associated with religiosity might have been traded off for psychological or social benefits that redounded to fitness on average. One possible benefit of religious ...

Future-oriented People Show Stronger Moral Concerns

Previous research has shown that moral concerns weigh more heavily when people are experimentally induced to think about the distant vs. near future. The current research demonstrates that this also applies to people whose thinking is intrinsically and generally oriented toward the future rather than the present. More specifically, we show that people with a future time perspective are more con...

Less Is More: How Reduced Activity Reflects Stronger Recognition

The mechanisms of recognition involve reductions of activity in the medial temporal lobe. This preview discusses recent fMRI and MEG data from Gonsalves et al. (this issue of Neuron) that provide some of the strongest evidence to date demonstrating that reduced medial temporal activity is correlated with stronger recognition of items in humans. This result provides an important test of theories...

Obesity and diabetic retinopathy: What is the association?

What is the association between religious affiliation and children’s altruism?

Decety et al.[1] examined the relationships between household religiosity and sociality in children sampled from six countries. We were keenly interested in Decety et al.[1]'s conclusions about a negative relationship between religiosity and generosity - measured with the Dictator Game - as our team has investigated related questions, often with potentially contrasting findings [2-5]. We argue ...