Joseph Henrich Department of Economics and Department of Psychology University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada [email protected] Abstract Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict...

Religiosity and spirituality are defining features of African American life. However, within psychology, research on African American religiosity and spirituality has proceeded without benefit of a conceptual framework. This paper labors toward a framework that examines the roles of religion and spirituality in the development and maintenance of social relationships. We review empirical researc...

Although speculations about the role of fear—and fear of death in particular— in the evolutionary and psychological origins of religion have been around for millennia, it is only in the last decade or so that systematic empirical investigations on the matter have been undertaken. In this paper, we review this recent body of correlational and experimental research to assess theoretical developme...

The subject of religion in political conflict is vast, and it is not possible to do justice to it in these few pages. Fortunately, scholars, political analysts and policymakers can refer to two extraordinary new studies, Marc Gopin‟s, Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence and Peacemaking, [1] and R. Scott Appleby‟s The Ambivalence of the Sacred, [2] for comprehens...

Current psychologies of religion reflect the modernist context in which they are situated. Religion is reduced to what is researchable, generalizable, individual and “thin.” This essay suggests that a psychology of religion which takes seriously the implications of Emmanuel Levinas’s emphasis on ethics and the alterity of the Other would result in a different model of psychotherapy. Levinas’s v...

one of the greatest preoccupations in the field of sociology of religion is a practical (pragmatic) definition of religion and religiosity which is mostly studied in social psychology and can be divided into sociological tradition or collective-social tradition and psychological or subjective-individual tradition. prior to glock and stark, scholars considered different aspects and principles fo...

The Academic Nature of Worldviews ................................................................................ 1 Pre-Darwinian Worldviews ................................................................................................ 2 Darwin’s Worldview ........................................................................................................... 5 Mendel, Population Genetics...

Cultural psychology and experimental existential psychology are two of the fastest-growingmovements in social psychology. In this bookDaniel Sullivan combines both perspectives to present a groundbreaking analysis of culture’s role in shaping the psychology of threat experience. The first part of the book presents a new theoretical framework guided by three central principles: that humans are i...