Culturally counterintuitive concepts are ideas that violate a small number of justifiable expectations raised by shared beliefs of a group of people. Previous studies have shown that ideas that violate a small number of expectations are better remembered by people than ideas that conform to their expectations or ideas that violate a large number of people’s expectations. However, as counterintu...

Although many 19th-century misconceptions about the foreskin have been dispelled since it was shown that infantile phimosis was not an abnormality, the ideas that ritual or religious circumcision arose as a hygiene measure, and that circumcision makes no difference to sexual response, have persisted. The first idea should be dismissed as a myth and the second has been seriously questioned by mo...

This Article explores the authors views on the place of religious debate concerning scientific issues. It outlines the author’s concerns with religion becoming overshadowed by science, even within relgious communities, and his ideas on how religion may be brought to the forefront.

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BACKGROUND Patients at times disagree with medical recommendations for religious reasons. Despite a lively debate about how physicians should respond to patients' religious concerns, little is known about how physicians actually respond. We explored the ways in which physicians interpret and respond to conflict between medical recommendations and patients' religious commitments. METHODS One-t...

Mainstream sociology of religion often presumes that its conceptual categories are universal and complete. They are, however, grounded in the Western intellectual tradition and arise from that tradition’s reflection on Euro-American history. This article outlines an alternate sociology of religion based on the writings of the 14th century Moslem historian Ibn Khaldûn – whose ideas arise from a ...

This research project examined the extent to which an individual’s religion, or lack thereof, impacted their scores on the Individualism Collectivism Scale (Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk, & Gelfand, 1995). This study drew 205 mostly Caucasian participants, who were diverse in terms of gender, income, and education. Data were gathered via online survey, which gathered responses to a demographic for...