Eva Kundtová Klocová

Masaryk University | MUNI · Department for the Study of Religions

Public ritual acts convey strategic information about the qualities of ritual actors. Although a prolific literature has examined their role in coordinating collective action in a variety of contexts, one of the most common communicative functions of ritual behavior in nature, i.e. its role in signaling mate quality, has received limited empirical...

In this commentary on An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion by Claire White, I reflect on how the lack of clarification of a key concept, i.e., cognition, leads to a distorted image of the field. This is because different strands of research can now be represented in a cognitivist context. I also ask to what extent this field is stil...

Research testing evolutionary models of religious morality shows that supernatural beliefs in moralizing gods positively affect prosociality. However, the effects of beliefs related to local supernatural agents have not been extensively explored. Drawing from a Mauritian Hindu sample, we investigated the effects of beliefs and practices related to...

Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this “gender gap” may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation int...

The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community size...

There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and...

HUME Lab is a research infrastructure at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University University (FF MU). As a support facility, it helps with the implementation of experiment methodology within research in the humanities and social sciences. The laboratory services are available primarily to researchers from FF MU, but they are also open for any inte...

The global increase in non-religious individuals begs for a better understanding of what non-religious beliefs and worldviews actually entail. Rather than assuming an absence of belief or imposing a predetermined set of beliefs, the current research uses an open-ended approach to investigate which secular beliefs and worldviews non-religious non-th...

Evolutionary perspectives suggest that participation in collective rituals may serve important communicative functions by signaling practitioners' commitment to the community and its values. While previous research has examined the effects of ritual signals at the individual and collective level, there has been limited attention directed to the imp...

People in a state of awe have been found to perceive their needs as small while also expressing intentions to act in a prosocial way, benefitting others at personal cost. However, these findings come largely out of the USA and have focused on intended rather than real prosocial behavior. We propose a contextual model of the awe-prosociality relatio...

There are compelling reasons to expect that representing any active, powerful god or spirit may contribute to cooperation. One possible mechanism underlying this effect is a system that infers that spiritual agents are morally concerned. If individuals cognitive represent deities as agents, and if agents are generally conceptualized as having moral...

Jonathan H. Turner, Alexandra Maryanski, Anders Klostergaard Petersen, and Armin W. Geertz, The Emergence and Evolution of Religion: By Means of Natural Selection

The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to...

The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to...

The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to...

Several prominent evolutionary theories contend that religion was critical to the emergence of large-scale societies and encourages cooperation in contemporary complex groups. These theories argue that religious systems provide a reliable mechanism for finding trustworthy anonymous individuals under conditions of risk. In support, studies find that...

In the version of this Letter originally published, acknowledgement of funding for the authors Annika M. Svedholm-Häkkinen and Tapani Riekki by the Academy of Finland was mistakenly omitted. This has now been included in the Acknowledgements section of the Letter.

Religious belief is a topic of longstanding interest to psychological science, but the psychology of religious disbelief is a relative newcomer. One prominently discussed model is analytic atheism, wherein cognitive reflection, as measured with the Cognitive Reflection Test, overrides religious intuitions and instruction. Consistent with this model...

This chapter focuses on the growing empirical knowledge about the interaction between bodily actions, human thinking, and the cultural embeddedness of human cognition. An approach to ritual based on this expanded view of cognition produces important perspectives and insights for the study of religions. Embodied cognition is a very diverse field and...

Religious belief is a topic of longstanding interest to psychological science, but the psychology of religious disbelief is a relative newcomer. One prominently discussed model is analytic atheism, wherein analytic thinking overrides religious intuitions and instruction. Consistent with this model, performance-based measures of reliance on analytic...

Mounting evidence supports long-standing claims that religions can extend cooperative networks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 . However, religious prosociality may have a strongly parochial component 5 . Moreover, aspects of religion may promote or exacerbate conflict with those outside a given religious group, promoting regional violence 10 , intergroup confli...

The relationship between religion and social behavior has been the subject of longstanding debates. Recent evolutionary models of religious morality propose that particular types of supernatural beliefs related to moralizing and punitive high gods will have observable effects on prosociality. We tested this hypothesis, comparing the effects of dive...

Priming with religious concepts is known to have a positive effect on prosocial behavior, however the effects of religious primes associated with outgroups remain unknown. To explore this, we conducted a field experiment in a multi-cultural, multi-religious setting (the island of Mauritius). Our design used naturally occurring, ecologically relevan...

Experimental research of religious cognition and behaviour is a relatively new methodological tool in the study of religion, promoted and encouraged mainly by the Cognitive Science of Religion. This article argues that empirical testing of scientific hypotheses is a pivotal part of any scientific method, regardless the subject and even though exper...

Major part of religious traditions is built upon strict distinction between the human and superhuman/divine in the domain of power. Superhuman entities are often described as omnipotent or having supernatural powers, while humans are presented as weak, humble and powerless. This distinction is sometimes emphasized not only in teachings, but also in...