People often behave as if category members share an essence, and essentialising a category in this way promotes inductive inference. Although natural kind categories have been predominantly studied, some social categories are essentialised and here we consider the inductive potential of religion categories for children in Northern Ireland. We asked seven-, nineand eleven-year olds in Catholic-m...

Th e primary debate among scholars who study the evolution of religion concerns whether religion is an adaptation or a byproduct. Th e dominant position in the fi eld is that religious beliefs and behaviors are a byproduct of cognitive processes and behaviors that evolved for other purposes. A smaller group of scholars maintain that religion is an adaptation for extending human cooperation and ...

The economics of religion is a relatively new field of research in economics. This survey serves two purposes – it is backward-looking in that it traces the historical and sociological origins of this field, and it is forward-looking in that it examines the insights and research themes that are offered by economists to investigate religion globally in the modern world. Several factors have infl...

C. Kim-Prieto (ed.), Religion and Spirituality Across Cultures, Cross-Cultural Advancements in Positive Psychology 9, DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-8950-9_9, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Psychologists hotly debate whether religion enhances the subjective well-being (SWB) of individuals and societies. This issue becomes particularly salient considering that a substantial majority (6...

Many of the links of religiousness with health, well-being, and social behavior may be due to religion's influences on self-control or self-regulation. Using Carver and Scheier's (1998) theory of self-regulation as a framework for organizing the empirical research, the authors review evidence relevant to 6 propositions: (a) that religion can promote self-control; (b) that religion influences ho...

Before asking what U.S. bioethics might learn from a more comprehensive and more nuanced understanding of Islamic religion, history, and culture, a prior question is, how should bioethics think about religion? Two sets of commonly held assumptions impede further progress and insight. The first involves what "religion" means and how one should study it. The second is a prominent philosophical vi...

This article summarizes the literature on the religious mind and connects it to archeological and anthropological data on the evolution of religion. These connections suggest a three stage model in the evolution of religion: One, the earliest form of religion (pre-Upper Paleolithic [UP]) would have been restricted to ecstatic rituals used to facilitate social bonding; two, the transition to UP ...

The proportion of Americans who reported no religious preference doubled from 7 percent to 14 percent in the 1990s. This dramatic change may have resulted from demographic shifts, increasing religious skepticism, or the mix of politics and religion that characterized the 1990s. One demographic factor is the succession of generations; the percentage of adults who had been raised with no religion...

Few seem to have difficulty in distinguishing between religious and secular institutions, yet there is widespread disagreement regarding what “religion” actually means. Indeed, some go so far as to question whether there is anything at all distinctive about religions. Hence, formulating a definition of “religion” that can command wide assent has proven to be an extremely difficult task. In this...