Under what conditions does religion become a salient social identity? By measuring religious attachment among the people living astride the Burkina Faso–Côte d’Ivoire border in West Africa, an arbitrary boundary that exposes otherwise similar individuals to different political contexts, this article makes a case for the importance of the political environment in affecting the weight that people...

Motivated thinking leads people to perceive similarity between the self and ingroups, but under some conditions, people may recognize that personal beliefs are misaligned with the beliefs of ingroups. In two focal experiments and two replications, we find evidence that perceived belief similarity moderates ingroup favoritism. As part of a charity donation task, participants donated money to a c...

Quantum bases of consciousness & free will are considered with implications of two cognitive modes of consciousness (direct religious/creative, in quantum-coherent transitional & altered states, & indirect perceptually/rationally mediated, in classically-reduced normal states). Implications for local & global psychosomatics, and religious & transpersonal phenomena, are considered too. Condition...

Religious coping now represents a key variable of interest in research on health outcomes, not only because many individuals turn to their faith in times of illness, but also because studies have frequently found that religious coping is associated with desirable health outcomes. The purpose of this article is to familiarize readers with recent investigations of religious coping in samples with...

Patient requests for "inappropriate" medical treatment (violations of the standard of care) based on religious beliefs should have special standing. Nevertheless, not all such requests should be honored, because some are morally disturbing. The trouble lies in deciding which ones count. This paper proposes criteria that would qualify a religious belief as medically valid to help physicians deci...

In this paper we emphasize the specific role that religious groups have in supplying social contacts and collective activities. For short, we call these services “friendship services”. We focus on religious groups in which there are individuals who could be labelled as entrepreneurs in the religious market, that is, individuals who incur some costs in return for compensation, like tithes, that ...

Why do religious minorities respond in different ways to economic development? We develop a model of religious organizations based on a historical case study of Jewish emancipation in nineteenth century Europe. In Germany, a liberal Reform movement developed in response to emancipation, while ultra-Orthodox Judaism emerged in eastern Europe. Our explanation for this polarization contributes to ...

A considerable body of research cross-culturally examines the evolution of religious traditions, beliefs and behaviors. The bulk of this research, however, draws from coded qualitative ethnographies rather than from standardized methods specifically designed to measure religious beliefs and behaviors. Psychological data sets that examine religious thought and behavior in controlled conditions t...