Jamin Halberstadt

University of Otago · Department of Psychology

Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like “moral” and “immoral”? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent to which they perceive moral character as “localized” (varying along many contextually embedded dimensio...

The relationship between emotion and attention is vital for adaptation. Trained attention to bodily sensations can heighten emotional awareness, including during "visceroception" (sensing the viscera, principally the heart, lungs and gut), which has been linked to emotion intensity and regulation. However, is not always clear when bodily attention...

The practice of burying objects with the dead is often claimed as some of the earliest evidence for religion, on the assumption that such "grave goods" were intended for the decedents' use in the afterlife. However, this assumption is largely speculative, as the underlying motivations for grave-good practices across time and place remain little und...

Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like “moral” and “immoral”? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent that they perceive moral character as “localized” (varying along many contextually embedded dimensions)...

Focusing on one's body can improve the awareness and regulation of emotion. Interoception – sensing the physiological condition of the body, particularly of the viscera – appears to play an important role. While the majority of previous research studies have examined interoceptive sensitivity (i.e., detection of objectively measurable physiological...

Van Dyck et al. [8] developed a two-stage protocol to estimate interoceptive (gastric) sensitivity independently of stomach volume. They provided no foreknowledge of the second stage (reaching stomach fullness), following the initial stage (drinking until satiated), therefore preventing longitudinal research. The current study provided foreknowledg...

Affect is involved in many psychological phenomena, but a descriptive structure, long sought, has been elusive. Valence and arousal are fundamental, and a key question-the focus of the present study-is the relationship between them. Valence is sometimes thought to be independent of arousal, but, in some studies (representing too few societies in th...

The motivational account of religion—that belief fulfills a psychological need—has been both historically popular and empirically supported. It is also potentially informative about religious interpretations of negative events (e.g., that they are part of God’s benevolent plan). Yet, it is not clear what cognitive mechanism(s) might link negative e...

Objective Depression has unfavourable effects on emotion perception, and potential downstream consequences on social functioning. However, it is not clear if depressed individuals themselves are aware of these effects. We explored the relation between the independent and interactive contributions of depressive symptoms and rumination on self-percei...

Evolutionary models and empirical evidence suggest that outgroup threat is one of the strongest factors inducing group cohesion; however, little is known about the process of forming such cohesive groups. We investigated how outgroup threat galvanizes individuals to affiliate with others to form engaged units that are willing to act on behalf of th...

Although anecdotal evidence suggests that control-threatening situations are associated with an increase in conspiracy beliefs, existing research does not support this "compensatory control" hypothesis. In the current study, we test a more refined hypothesis: that the link between control threat and conspiracy beliefs is domain specific, such that...

The motivational account of religious belief – that belief fulfills some psychological need – has been historically popular, and recent studies have identified a causal role for anxiety in particular. However, the cognitive mechanisms by which anxiety ultimately produces religious belief are unclear. In two studies, we show that anxiety intensifies...

While lack of control is one plausible explanation for conspiracy beliefs, the experimental evidence is mixed. We present two naturalistic studies that offer some limited support for the control hypothesis. In the first, Macedonians living in (North) Macedonia (N = 116) completed a conspiracy ideation scale immediately after a national referendum o...

Objectives: We examined empathic accuracy, comparing young versus older perceivers, and young versus older emoters. Empathic accuracy is related to but distinct from emotion recognition because perceiver judgments of emotion are based, not on what an emoter looks to be feeling, but on what an emoter says s/he is actually feeling. Method: Young (...

Cognitive scientists have attributed the ubiquity of religious narratives partly to the favored recall of minimally counterintuitive ( MCI ) concepts within those narratives. Yet, this memory bias is inconsistent, sometimes absent, and without a functional rationale. Here, we asked if MCI concepts are more fitness relevant than intuitive concepts,...

Religion and science are two major sources of knowledge. Some accounts suggest that religious belief inhibits people from trusting scientific information, and encourages conflict between religion and science. We draw from theories of human motivation to challenge this claim, instead suggesting that religious people perceive less conflict between sc...

It is widely believed that conspiracy theory beliefs are the product of perceived lack of control. However, to date there is mixed evidence, at best, to support this claim. We consider the reasons why conspiracy theory beliefs do not appear to be based in any straightforward way on control beliefs, interrogating existing findings and presenting new...

Despite considerable interest in the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) during early childhood, until recently, there has been little consideration about whether and how ToM skills continue to change into adulthood. Furthermore, the false-belief task, which is believed to capture the underlying mechanisms of ToM, is rarely used in studies of ToM w...

Perceived lack of control is widely believed to motivate, at least partly, belief in conspiracy theories. We question the theoretical foundations of this belief and meta‐analyze existing published and unpublished studies to assess the overall effect of lack of control on conspiracy beliefs. The overall effect was small and not statistically signifi...

We present two datasets from a project about the relationship between traumatic life experiences and religiosity. These include data from 1,754 individuals in the United States (n = 322), Brazil (n = 205), China (n = 202), India (n = 205), Indonesia (n = 205), Russia (n = 205), Thailand (n = 205), and Turkey (n = 205). Surveys were consistent acros...

We present two datasets from a project about the relationship between traumatic life experiences and religiosity. These include data from 1,754 individuals in the United States (n = 322), Brazil (n = 205), China (n = 202), India (n = 205), Indonesia (n = 205), Russia (n = 205), Thailand (n = 205), and Turkey (n = 205). Surveys were consistent acros...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Scientific interest in religion often focusses on the “puzzle of belief”: how people develop and maintain religious beliefs despite a lack of evidence and the significant costs that those beliefs incur. A number of researchers have suggested that humans are predisposed towards supernatural thinking, with innate cognitive biases engendering, for exa...

Prejudiced attitudes and political nationalism vary widely around the world, but there has been little research on what predicts this variation. Here we examine the ecological and cultural factors underlying the worldwide distribution of prejudice. We suggest that cultures grow more prejudiced when they tighten cultural norms in response to destabi...

We present three datasets from a project about the relationship between death anxiety and religiosity. These include data from 1,838 individuals in the United States (n = 813), Brazil (n = 800), Russia (n = 800), the Philippines (n = 200), South Korea (n = 200), and Japan (n = 219). Measures were largely consistent across samples: they include meas...

The Mickey Mouse problem refers to the difficulty in predicting which supernatural agents are capable of eliciting belief and religious devotion. We approached the problem directly by asking participants to invent a “religious” or a “fictional” agent with five supernatural abilities. Compared to fictional agents, religious agents were ascribed a hi...

We present three datasets from a project about the relationship between death anxiety and religiosity. These include data from 1,838 individuals in the United States (n = 813), Brazil (n = 800), Russia (n = 800), the Philippines (n = 200), South Korea (n = 200), and Japan (n = 219). Measures were largely consistent across samples: they include meas...

Beliefs in conspiracy theories, generally considered to be a unidimensional construct, are associated with negative outcomes. The existing measures of conspiracy theory beliefs have number of shortcomings. We present the development of a novel measure of the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories and report the discovery of a second factor that...

Some research suggests that reminders of religious beliefs and concepts can decrease immoral behavior, such as cheating, via fear of supernatural punishment among other mechanisms. However, one of the most common natural religious primes, petitionary prayer, could in theory have the opposite effect, as it implies and asserts external attributions f...

Can people discriminate good from bad reasons for their beliefs about God? Research shows that religious believers favor intuitive processing, suggesting they may be less discriminating than nonbelievers. Indeed, in Experiment 1 and a replication, people listed 15 reasons for their beliefs about God, then evaluated the quality of either their first...

Thank you to everyone who showed an interest in this preprint. It is now published! I originally made the preprint private because it was only meant for a few select people to read while it went through review. Thank you all for your patience!

Objective: Previous research has shown contradictory evidence for the relationship between religiosity and trauma; exposure to traumatic life events has been associated with both increases and decreases in religiosity over time. On the basis of a long theoretical tradition of linking death and religious belief and recent empirical evidence that th...

The minimal group paradigm has consistently shown that people will discriminate to favor their own group over an out-group, even when both groups are created arbitrarily by an experimenter. But will people actually form groups that are so arbitrary? And could something as trivial as a randomly assigned nametag color serve as a fault-line during gro...

In the first experimental test of the potential of natural disasters to produce identity fusion, we asked residents of Christchurch, New Zealand, to recall their experience of the city’s devastating 2011 earthquake. Compared to a control condition, recall increased participants’ fusion with their community as a function of the fear they felt and, i...

Separate research streams have identified synchrony and arousal as two factors that might contribute to the effects of human rituals on social cohesion and cooperation. But no research has manipulated these variables in the field to investigate their causal-and potentially interactive-effects on prosocial behaviour. Across four experimental session...

Religion has long been speculated to function as a strategy to ameliorate our fear of death. Terror management theory provides two possible causal pathways through which religious beliefs can fulfil this function. According to the “worldview defence” account of terror management, worldviews reduce death anxiety by offering symbolic immortality: on...

The 10-item scale measures the tendency to believein supernatural entities such as immaterial agents, afterlife/otherworld places,and miraculous earthly events. The scale is intended to be a valid indicator of the cognitive component of religiosity, capturing ten cross-cultural beliefs that appearas religious themes in various religious contexts in...

Social group dynamics are a defining topic of psychological science, yet the field still lacks methods of tracking groups with precision and control. Previous methods have been hampered by limitations either to external validity (e.g., ecologically deficient environments) or to internal validity (e.g., quasi-experimental designs), but a new techniq...

The "bouba/kiki effect" is the robust tendency to associate rounded objects (vs. angular objects) with names that require rounding of the mouth to pronounce, and may reflect synesthesia-like mapping across perceptual modalities. Here we show for the first time a "social" bouba/kiki effect, such that experimental participants associate round names (...

Previous studies have documented links between sub-clinical narcissism and the active pursuit of short-term mating strategies (e.g., unrestricted sociosexuality, marital infidelity, mate poaching). Nearly all of these investigations have relied solely on samples from Western cultures. In the current study, responses from a cross-cultural survey of...

Mere exposure (i.e., stimulus repetition) and blending (i.e., stimulus averaging) are classic ways to increase social preferences, including facial attractiveness. In both effects, increases in preference involve enhanced familiarity. Prominent memory theories assume that familiarity depends on a match between the target and similar items in memory...

Various theories of religion hypothesize a connection between death anxiety and religiosity. In particular, Terror Management Theory’s worldview defence hypothesis predicts that death anxiety is lowest among very religious and irreligious individuals, and highest among uncertain individuals. Likewise, the supposition that death anxiety motivates re...

The virtues of Hilbert’s mathematical problems – or, at least, the best of them – were that they were simply and unambiguously stated, enticingly difficult, and generated yet more advances in mathematics than just the solution of the problems themselves. In the spirit of Hilbert, albeit in empirical mode, we pose the following question to scholars...

Religion has long been speculated to function as a strategy to ameliorate our fear of death. Terror management theory provides two possible causal pathways through which religious beliefs can fulfil this function. According to the “worldview defence” account of terror management, worldviews reduce death anxiety by offering symbolic immortality: on...

Despite claims about the universality of religious belief, whether religiosity scales have the same meaning when administered inter-subjectively–or translated and applied cross-culturally–is currently unknown. Using the recent “Supernatural Belief Scale” (SBS), we present a primer on how to verify the strong assumptions of measurement invariance re...

CFA Model Fit: Alternative Measurement Models. (PDF)

Unidimensional model for supernatural belief (SB). (EPS)

Essentially unidimensional model (SB) with five facets (correlated uniqueness). (EPS)

Five-dimensional model (High & low agents, after-life entities, places, events). (EPS)

Essentially unidimensional model (SB) with method factor and five facets (correlated uniqueness). (EPS)

Two-dimensional model (negative items and others). (EPS)

Supernatural Belief Scale (Items in English). (PDF)

Psychometric Models and Confirmatory Factor Analysis. (PDF)

Formulas for Reliability Computation. (PDF)

Essentially unidimensional model (SB) plus method factor. (EPS)

Essentially unidimensional model (SB) with method factor and five facets (content factors). (EPS)

Two-dimensional model (agents and others). (EPS)

(DOCX)

(XLSX)

Individuals that combine features of both genders-gender blends-are sometimes appealing and sometimes not. Heretofore, this difference was explained entirely in terms of sexual selection. In contrast, we propose that part of individuals' preference for gender blends is due to the cognitive effort required to classify them, and that such effort depe...

Summary of multilevel modeling (MLM) results for Study 1 and Study 2. (DOCX)

Alternative analyses on the race-morphing dimension in Study 2. (DOCX)

Raw data from Study 1. (SAV)

Raw data from Study 2. (SAV)

This study examined the correlates of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) in older adults. Participants were given tasks measuring emotion recognition, executive functions and fluid IQ and questionnaires measuring RWA, perceived threat and social dominance orientation. Study 1 established higher age-related RWA across the age span in more than 2,600...

Two studies tested the hypothesis that religious homogamy—assortative mating on the basis of religion—can be partly explained by inferences about religious individuals’ openness to experience, rather than attitudes toward religion per se. Results of Study 1 indicated that non-religious participants perceived non-religious targets to be higher in op...

Trying to remember something now typically improves your ability to remember it later. However, after watching a video of a simulated bank robbery, participants who verbally described the robber were 25% worse at identifying the robber in a lineup than were participants who instead listed U.S. states and capitals—this has been termed the “verbal ov...

Trying to remember something now typically improves your ability to remember it later. However, after watching a video of a simulated bank robbery, participants who verbally described the robber were 25% worse at identifying the robber in a lineup than were participants who instead listed U.S. states and capitals—this has been termed the “verbal ov...

Numerous studies have documented subtle but consistent sex differences in self-reports and observer-ratings of five-factor personality traits, and such effects were found to show well-defined developmental trajectories and remarkable similarity across nations. In contrast, very little is known about perceived gender differences in five-factor trait...