Adam Cohen

Arizona State University | ASU · Department of Psychology

Moral foundations theory proposes five domains of morality-harm, fairness, loyalty, purity, and authority. Endorsement of these moral domains is assessed by the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ), a 30-item scale that has undergone intense measurement scrutiny. Across five samples (N = 464,229), we show greatly improved model fit using a Bifacto...

Religion makes unique claims (e.g., the existence of supernatural agents) not found in other belief systems, but is religion itself psychologically special? Furthermore, religion is related to many domains of psychological interest, such as morality, health and well-being, self-control, meaning, and death anxiety. Does religion act on these domains...

Wordle is a daily, online brainteaser. The widespread popularity of the game in the early months of 2022 has also led to widespread cheating. Here, we use data from Google Trends and Twitter to explore correlates of cheating on Wordle. We find that cheating behavior is negatively related to religiosity and cultural tightness. Although this is a ben...

Deciding what to eat is a choice we make many times per day, and each time it is crucial to our survival. Religion and culture are two guiding structures for what we may and may not eat. Food taboos exist in many cultures and religions though they vary in content. Some theorists propose food taboos may have evolved to protect us from pathogens, amo...

Social scientists have greatly advanced our understanding of how people think and feel about God as a person-like, supernatural being. However, there has been insufficient research and theory investigating abstract God representations. Furthermore, previous research has assessed beliefs about God with descriptors generated by the researchers. We co...

Religion makes unique claims (such as in the existence of supernatural agents) not found in other belief systems, but is religion itself psychologically special? Furthermore, religion is related to many domains of psychological interest, like morality, health and well-being, self-control, meaning, and death anxiety. Does religion act on these domai...

Negative stereotypes about atheists are widespread, robust, rooted in distrust, and linked to discrimination. Here, we examine whether social perceivers in the US might additionally hold any positive stereotypes about atheists (and corresponding negative stereotypes of the religious). Experiments 1 (N = 401) and 2 (N = 398, preregistered) used meth...

To date, the study of cultural tightness has been largely limited to exploring the strictness of social norms and the severity of punishments at the level of nations or regions. However, cultural psychologists concur that humans gather cultural information from more than just their nationality. Gender is a cultural identity that confers its own soc...

The COVID-19 pandemic allowed for a naturalistic, longitudinal investigation of the relationship between faith and science mindsets and concern about COVID-19. Our goal was to examine two possible directional relationships: (Model 1) COVID-19 concern ➔ disease avoidance and self-protection motivations ➔ science and faith mindsets versus (Model 2) s...

Existential nihilism is on the rise in modern societies, but no previous work has investigated the social psychology of seeing no meaning in life. In the current research, five studies (N = 1,634) show that targets' existential nihilist beliefs elicit a range of negative stereotypes about personality traits, commonly valued social traits, and targe...

This manuscript investigates the stereotypes people hold toward existential nihilists and what explains them.

Negative stereotypes about atheists are widespread, robust, rooted in distrust, and linked to discrimination. Here, we examine whether social perceivers in the US might additionally hold any positive stereotypes about atheists (and corresponding negative stereotypes of the religious). Experiments 1 (N = 401) and 2 (N = 398, preregistered) used meth...

Is fundamentalism universal across religious cultures? We investigated this issue by focusing on 3 questions: (a) the dimensionality of fundamentalism, as measured by the Religious Fundamentalism Scale (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 2004); (b) the very nature of fundamentalism as denoting dogmatic belief, moral rigorism, or strong groupness; and (c) inte...

Based on theorization on the four basic dimensions of religiousness, Believing, Bonding, Behaving, and Belonging, and corresponding cognitive, emotional, moral, and social motives and functions of religion, we developed a measure and investigated cross-cultural consistency of the four dimensions as well interindividual and cross-cultural variabilit...

Which people are most likely to harbor prejudice toward atheists? Recent research suggests that perceptions of (non)religious individuals tend to track lifestyle (i.e., family and sexual) choices. We draw on this work, proposing that anti-atheist prejudice stems, in part, from the conflict that arises among competing mating strategies. Across four...

Which people are most likely to harbor prejudice toward atheists? Recent research suggests that perceptions of (non)religious individuals tend to track lifestyle (i.e., family and sexual) choices. We draw on this work, proposing that anti-atheist prejudice stems, in part, from the conflict that arises among competing mating strategies. Across four...

Purpose in Life (PIL) is often associated with grand achievements and existential beliefs, but recent theory suggests that it might ultimately track gainful pursuit of basic evolved goals. Five studies (N=1,993) investigate the relationships between fundamental social motives and PIL. In Study 1, attribution of a life goal pursuit to disease avoida...

Religion has often been conceptualized as a collection of beliefs, practices, and proscriptions that lift people’s thoughts and behaviors out of the metaphorical gutter of sex and selfishness toward lives full of meaning, contemplation, and community service. But religious beliefs and behaviors may serve selfish, sexual motivations in ways that are...

Science and analytical thinking have been linked with atheism. We propose dual pathways whereby scientific engagement may have paradoxical effects on belief in God. Logical aspects of science, associated with analytical thinking, are associated with unbelief. However, people can also be awed by scientific information, and awe is associated with fee...

Psychologists studying religiosity and spirituality (R/S) often face several challenges when conducting their research, such as collecting data from nationally representative samples, cross-cultural generalizability, statistical power, and integrated multilevel approaches. We examined one potential solution—the use of Representative, Open-Access Da...

God representations are complex and there is no standard, relatively short, and easy to administer measure reflecting both anthropomorphic and abstract representations of God. We developed a new measure with 5 dimensions: limitless, authoritarian, mystical, benevolent, and ineffable (the LAMBI scale). In Study 1, we used exploratory factor analysis...

Convincing people who doubt the validity of climate change and evolution to change their beliefs requires overcoming a set of ingrained cognitive biases

Religious people are more trusted than nonreligious people. Although most theorists attribute these perceptions to the beliefs of religious targets, religious individuals also differ in behavioral ways that might cue trust. We examined whether perceivers might trust religious targets more because they heuristically associate religion with slow life...

Cambridge Core - Macroeconomics - Generating Generosity in Catholicism and Islam - by Carolyn M. Warner

We conducted two studies investigating the extent to which self-identification as SBNR was associated with: (H1) the development of idiosyncratic religious beliefs and exposure to religious diversity; and/or (H2) negative attitudes toward organized religion and being hurt by members of a religious group. In Study 1, SBNRs scored higher than Religio...

Decisions to trust help form the basis of relationships and society yet little is known about their neurophysiology. We told participants they were playing a coin toss game with a trustworthy and an untrustworthy person and measured their neural activity with EEG as they decided whether to trust those fictitious interaction partners. Target people...

We present a synthesized biological and cultural approach to religion. We discuss religion in terms of evolutionary byproducts, adaptation, cultural learning, and cultural evolution to help explain where religion originates. Specifically, we propose that religion first appeared because it is a robust byproduct of several adaptive modules, that thes...

School attacks against children seriously threaten the belief that the world is a just place, in which good people get rewarded and bad people get punished. However, to what extent and in which way belief in a just world (BJW) plays a role in reaction to school attacks have not been investigated, especially in the Chinese context, in which people a...

For almost 50 years, psychologists have been theorizing about and measuring religiosity essentially the way Gordon Allport did, when he distinguished between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. However, there is a historical debate regarding what this scale actually measures, which items should be included, and how many factors or subscales exist....

How robust is the perceived association between immorality and atheism? Studies across 13 countries demonstrate that immoral behaviour is intuitively associated with atheism: people routinely assume that an immoral person is likely to be an atheist, and this effect is consistent across a wide range of societies, though with notable variation.

This study proposes that certain religious and spiritual beliefs—specifically, representations of God—play an indirect but influential role in individuals' cognitive processing of 1) sustainability behaviors, 2) the importance of pro-environmental policies, and 3) the willingness to vote for pro-environmental policies. Across three studies, this re...

Many studies have seemingly demonstrated that anonymous individuals who are shown artificial cues of being watched behave as if they are being watched by real people. However, several studies have failed to replicate this surveillance cue effect. In light of these mixed results, we conducted two meta-analyses investigating the effect of artificial...

This poster presents the research from the paper ’Artificial surveillance cues do not increase generosity: Two meta-analyses.’

Several papers have reported that artificial surveillance cues, such as images of watching eyes, cause anonymous participants to behave as if they are actually under surveillance, thus increasing moral behavior. In a series of four experiments, we found no evidence that artificial surveillance cues impact reported moral judgment, self-rated possess...

Religion is an important topic to understand in cross-cultural psychology. More theorizing and empirical work has gone into Western religions than Eastern religions. We briefly review work on cultural differences among Western religious groups, using the framework of individualism and collectivism. Such work raises questions on how religions and cu...

Do people treat horoscopes as mere entertainment, or does reading horoscopes have more substantial consequences? Building upon research on the expectancy effect as well as on literature highlighting the influence of astrology on individuals, we hypothesized that reading positive versus negative horoscopes would affect people’s perceptions, emotions...

This article reviews research on religion and well-being, focusing primarily on Western, traditional religions. We provide some nuance, caveats, and future directions for further research. We discuss how and why religious groups may differ in their well-being, that there may be important subgroup differences, that there are multiple dimensions to b...

Belief in a personal God has been central in research and theory in the psychology of religion and spirituality. Beliefs may seem to be less important to Jews. Indeed, recent national surveys suggest that even some observant Jews report disbelief in God. Yet there are historical, philosophical, theological, and cultural reasons to suggest that Jewi...

The Big Gods model focuses on belief in an authoritarian God as a psychological mechanism that inhibits antisocial behavior and facilitates the formation of tight, cohesive groups. Recent empirical evidence suggests, however, that belief in a benevolent God is more likely to inspire helping and inclusivity. Both kinds of beliefs are necessary to ex...

Evolutionary theories of religion have focused almost exclusively on anthropomorphic representations of God and of God as having a mind. However, religious beliefs extend to notions about material entities as well and, we propose, religious cognition can involve many distinct cognitive systems and social motivations including kin care, essentialist...

Past research has found a robust effect of prejudice against atheists in largely Christian-dominated (belief-oriented) samples. We propose that religious centrality of beliefs vs. practices influences attitudes toward atheists, such that religious groups emphasizing beliefs perceive non-believers more negatively than believers, while groups emphasi...

This article provides a conceptual framework for studying the effects of religion on consumer behavior, with the goal of stimulating future research at the intersection of these two topics. We delineate religion as a multidimensional construct and propose that religion affects consumer psychology and behavior through four dimensions-beliefs, ritual...

One prominent theory is that prosociality is promoted by the belief in an authoritarian God. Building upon this theory, we developed a theoretical model in which beliefs about the self and the world and volunteer motives account for differential effects of benevolent and authoritarian God representations on secular volunteerism (benefiting those ou...

Trust is a critical aspect of social interaction. One might predict that individuals trust religious out-groups less than religious in-groups, and that costly signals performed by members of religious in-groups increase trust while costly signals performed by members of religious out-groups decrease trust. We examined how Christian participants per...

There is a debate as to whether religion increases prosociality. Darley and Batson’s (1973) classic Good Samaritan study provided evidence against religious prosociality because priming religion among Christian seminary students did not increase the likelihood of helping an ailing confederate. Conceptually replicating this study, we primed undergra...

Religion affects psychological processes in many important ways and is the subject of increasing attention on the part of psychologists. I discuss four reasons why religion is important, including that religion is a central foundation for moral judgment (e.g., Protestants but not Jews find lustful thoughts to be morally suspect) and that religion s...

Compassion is an affective response to another's suffering and a catalyst of prosocial behavior. In the present studies, we explore the peripheral physiological changes associated with the experience of compassion. Guided by long-standing theoretical claims, we propose that compassion is associated with activation in the parasympathetic autonomic n...

Religions such as Catholicism and Islam are generators of substantial amounts of charitable donations and volunteer work, and they sustain themselves as organizations. How do they produce charitable public goods and their own religious club goods when they are open to extensive free-riding? We argue that mainstream religions facilitate club and pub...

We assessed the degree of discomfort reported by U.S. and Czech Holocaust survivors (Study 1) and Jewish American college students (Study 2) to the prospect of physical proximity to a wide range of contemporary Germans with varying linkages to Nazi Germany, and a range of objects or activities associated with Germany (e.g., riding in a Volkswagen)....

Evolutionary theorists have explained universals in religion, but no integrative theory exists to explain why multiple aspects of religion vary within and between individuals and groups. We propose how four dimensions of religions - beliefs about nonhuman agents, religious rituals, community structures, and moral concerns and values - may change in...

Many religious individuals use ordinary social cognitions when thinking about God's characteristics. In the absence of a generally accepted measure, we developed a measure assessing God representations as authoritarian (A-God) and benevolent (B-God) using 4 community samples of Christians. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (Studies...

Evolutionary theorists have explained universals in religion, but no integrative theory exists to explain why multiple aspects of religion vary within and between individuals and groups. We propose how four dimensions of religions – beliefs about nonhuman agents, religious rituals, community structures, and moral concerns and values – may change in...

Emerging adulthood is a period when religious beliefs are likely to be shaped. Studying the influence of religious culture on prosocial behavior among emerging adults aids our understanding of the process and effects of religious socialization. Mormon religious culture places a particularly strong emphasis on caring for family and fellow Mormons. B...

Religion is a powerful influence on social attitudes and behavior. Paradoxically, religion is correlated with both aggressive and prosocial tendencies. We argue that different concepts of God as authoritarian (controlling, commanding, punishing) or benevolent (helping, forgiving, protecting) play distinct, yet crucial, roles in leading people to be...

Humans have perennially faced threats of violence from other humans and have developed functional strategies for surviving those threats. Five studies examined the relation between threats of violence and agreeableness at the level of nations, individuals, and situations. People living in countries with higher military spending (Study 1) and those...

Some argue that there is an organic connection between being religious and being politically conservative. We evaluate an alternative thesis that the relation between religiosity and political conservatism largely results from engagement with political discourse that indicates that these characteristics go together. In a combined sample of national...

Current evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion posit that supernatural agent concepts emerge from cognitive systems such as theory of mind and social cognition. Some argue that these concepts evolved to maintain social order by minimizing antisocial behavior. If these theories are correct, then people should process information about super...

Attribution theory has long enjoyed a prominent role in social psychological research, yet religious influences on attribution have not been well studied. We theorized and tested the hypothesis that Protestants would endorse internal attributions to a greater extent than would Catholics, because Protestantism focuses on the inward condition of the...

In introducing this Special Issue we first consider six ways of thinking about how culture and religion relate to each other: Religion may be part of culture, constitute culture, include and transcend culture, be influenced by culture, shape culture, or interact with culture in influencing cognitions, emotions, and actions. Second, we present the m...

Religio-cultural groups endorse an astounding diversity of beliefs and rituals regarding food. The authors theorize that such practices in part originate and persist because they (a) mark in-group membership through the consumption of unique foods and the establishment of common food rituals, (b) signal status through fasting or ingesting certain f...

This is an article about culture and religion. First, I discuss how social psychologists usually teach culture in their Social Psychology classes, focusing on east-west differences in individualism and collectivism. Then I propose that religious groups are cultures, because they have all of the defining features of cultures (such as beliefs and val...

Psychological science has consistently highlighted links between gratitude and religion, however mediating pathways by which religion relates to gratitude remain ambiguous. Further, it is unclear whether religious gratitude (e.g., gratitude to God) is more related to well-being than general gratitude. To address these gaps, we assessed for both rel...

This chapter briefly reviews the history of the psychology of gender, with its origins in Western psychology. The chapter then moves to discuss interesting new cultural and cross-cultural research on gender and psychology, within the areas of developmental and social psychology. Specifically, it discusses the role ecology plays in shaping gender ro...

Little is known about changes in religious coping and their relations to adolescents' and young adults' functioning. In 686 Italian youths, trajectories of religious coping were identified from age 16-17 years to age 22-23 years; cohorts of youths reported at 3 of the 4 assessments. Four trajectories of religious coping were identified: decreasing,...

This research examines the hypothesis that religiosity has two competing psychological influences on the social welfare attitudes of contemporary Americans. On the one hand, religiosity promotes a culturally based conservative identity, which in turn promotes opposition to federal social welfare provision. On the other hand, religiosity promotes a...

We propose a psychology of worldview as an integrative framework for the study of culture and religion. We propose six aspects of worldview, each influenced by national and religious cultures: ontology (existential beliefs), epistemology (what can be known and how one should reason), semiotics (language and symbols used to describe the world), axio...

What are the institutional and spiritual mechanisms which enable religious communities to produce public goods? With the collapse of many states and the retrenchment of social services, much recent political science research has asked what fosters provision of public goods outside of state or government. However, organized religions have an ambiguo...

The study examines the indirect effects of religious fundamentalism on prejudice through cognitive style and fear of invalidity. Undergraduates (n= 199) completed measures of religious fundamentalism, homophobia, modern racism, hostile and benevolent sexism, need for cognition, need for structure, preference for consistency, and fear of invalidity....

Little is known about changes in religious coping and their relations to adolescents' and young adults' functioning. In 686 Italian youths, trajectories of religious coping were identified from age 16-17 years to age 22-23 years; cohorts of youths reported at three of the four assessments. Four trajectories of religious coping were identified: decr...

Certain highly emotional experiences have the potential to produce long-lasting and meaningful changes in personality. Two such experiences are spiritual transformations and experiences of profound beauty. However, little is known about the cognitive appraisals or narrative elements involved in such experiences, how they are similar, and how they d...

This research examines the hypothesis that religiosity has two competing psychological influences on the social welfare attitudes of contemporary Americans. On the one hand religiosity promotes a culturally based conservative identity which in turn promotes opposition to federal social welfare provision. On the other hand religiosity promotes a pro...

It has been presumed that religiosity has an influence on mating behavior, but here we experimentally investigate the possibility that mating behavior might also influence religiosity. In Experiment 1, people reported higher religiosity after looking at mating pools consisting of attractive people of their own sex compared to attractive opposite se...

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of humanlike characteristics to real or imagined nonhuman agents. The word anthropomorphism derives from Greek and, literally translated, means humanlike (ánthrpos) in shape or form (morphos). In our daily lives, we do not have different languages to describe humans versus nonhumans. Therefore, humanlike characte...

Responds to comments by H. Takooshian (see record 2009-24989-012 ) and J. K. Tebes (see record 2009-24989-013 ) on the current author's original article, "Many forms of culture" (see record 2009-04471-003 ). The current author argued that psychologists tend to focus on too narrow a set of cultures (ethnic and national cultures) and some dimensions...

Guided by appraisal-based models of the influence of emotion upon judgment, we propose that disgust moralizes--that is, amplifies the moral significance of--protecting the purity of the body and soul. Three studies documented that state and trait disgust, but not other negative emotions, moralize the purity moral domain but not the moral domains of...

Psychologists interested in culture have focused primarily on East-West differences in individualism-collectivism, or independent-interdependent self-construal. As important as this dimension is, there are many other forms of culture with many dimensions of cultural variability. Selecting from among the many understudied cultures in psychology, the...

Resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSAREST) indexes important aspects of individual differences in emotionality. In the present investigation, the authors address whether RSAREST is associated with tonic positive or negative emotionality, and whether RSAREST relates to phasic emotional responding to discrete positive emotion-eliciting stimuli. A...

Religiosity, especially religious fundamentalism, is often assumed to have an inherent connection with conservative politics. This article proposes that the relationship varies by race in the United States. In Study 1, race moderated the relationships between religiosity indicators and political alignment in a nationally representative sample. In S...

Religiousness, spirituality, and existential beliefs are important sources of well-being yet neither their specific effects nor group variation in them is well understood. In a sample of more than 1,000 older adults, we found that certain existential beliefs or concerns (fear of God, death anxiety, belief in life after death, concerns about being m...

We used reaction time techniques to study individual differences in accessibility of beliefs about the reality of religious targets. Moderately religious people were slower than religious or irreligious people. Religious people were faster than non-religious people. Reaction times to classify religious stimuli are stable over 8 days. We also found...

We argue that a central function of religious attendance in the contemporary U.S. is to support a high-fertility, monogamous mating strategy. Although religious attendance is correlated with many demographic, personality, moral, and behavioral variables, we propose that sexual and family variables are at the core of many of these relationships. Num...

The religion-science debate has heated up in recent years, with polemical arguments on both side decrying the other. Given that the dominant view is of religiousness as a relatively fixed personality trait, all of this furor seems excessive. Interested in just how malleable religiousness is, we exposed half of our participants to an argument agains...