Religious people nowadays have more children on average than their secular counterparts. This paper uses a simple model to explore the evolutionary implications of this difference. It assumes that fertility is determined entirely by culture, whereas subjective predisposition towards religion is influenced by genetic endowment. People who carry a certain 'religiosity' gene are more likely than a...

There is a growing recognition of the need to examine religiousness and conduct research on its influence on acculturation and adjustment among ethnic minorities (Güngör et al. in Int J Behav Dev 36:367-373, 2012. doi:10.1177/0165025412448357). The present study compares Turkish minority youth in Bulgaria and Germany by examining relationships among religious identity, acculturation orientation...

Respecting and understanding religious and cultural influences of gender-based violence improves the care provided by forensic nurses.

At the start of the twenty-first century, Catholicism is still the prevailing belief system of most Italians, but a recent project on Italian religion and spirituality, 5 carried out in 2006, has found that Italians are now more interested in spirituality, that they might describe themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, and that they privilege the ‘god within’ rather than the transcendent...

This paper argues that our sociological explanations of the historical advent of gender stratification in the Occident has given too much attention to techno-economic causes and too little attention to religious, cultural and ideological causes. Evidence for this claim is taken from archeology, mythology and anthropology for the relevant historical period (4500 and 3000 BC) in Eurasia. I assert...

In four studies carried out across different cultural, religious, and political contexts, we investigated the association between religion and popular support for suicide attacks. In two surveys of Palestinians and one cognitive priming experiment with Israeli settlers, prayer to God, an index of religious devotion, was unrelated to support for suicide attacks. Instead, attendance at religious ...

Cognitive scientists of religion argue that religious ideas are widespread because they are minimally counterintuitive. Traditional lab studies have found support for a better memory for minimally counterintuitive concepts. This paper presents an in-depth case study of the spread of a counterintuitive religious idea in the real world. It finds that counterintuitiveness alone is not sufficient t...

Two experiments with Middle Eastern participants explored the generalizability of prior research on religious priming and moral behavior to a novel cultural and religious context. Participants in Experiment 1 completed a sentence unscrambling task with religious or non-religious content (in Arabic) before taking an unsupervised math test on which cheating was possible and incentivized. No diffe...

A child's oncological or chronic disease is a stressful situation for parents. This stress may make it difficult for appropriate management strategies aimed at promoting the child's wellbeing and helping him or her cope with a disease to be adopted. In particular, this study focuses on the possible connections between the variable national cultural influences and the parental strategies used to...

BACKGROUND The Mexico-U.S. border region is experiencing rising rates of blood-borne infections among injection drug users (IDUs), emphasizing the need for harm reduction interventions. METHODS We assessed the religious and cultural factors affecting the acceptability and feasibility of three harm reduction interventions--Needle exchange programs (NEPs), syringe vending machines, and safer in...