Jesse M. Bering

University of Otago

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...

Awe is a valued emotion in science communication and assumes a variety of functions in relation to the cultural mandates of the various spaces where it is represented. Based on a reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with 22 science communication practitioners, we constructed seven themes referencing this emotion’s various sociocultural roles i...

The emotions most valued by a culture tend to be depicted more often, and more saliently, in their cultural products than those that are not. The content of such representations will also vary in relation to the particular mandates (e.g. beliefs, values, norms) of those cultural spaces. In the present research, we conducted a study in three section...

Many nonbelievers may engage in supernatural thinking despite their statements to the contrary. Using belief in the afterlife as a test case, we examine, across two studies, the possible discrepancy between what people say they believe and how they reason implicitly. In Study 1, participants completed a mindfulness task during which a light went of...

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...

Objectives Given the centrality of science over the course of the COVID-19 crisis, we evaluate changes in people’s beliefs in the power of science in the United States over the first four months of the pandemic. Study design Post-hoc analysis of cross-sectional survey data. Methods A convenience sample of 1,327 participants was recruited through...

Guest deaths are an inevitable aspect of the hospitality industry. In Study 1, participants read a vignette in which the previous guest died of natural causes, suicide, or homicide. Those who learned of a death (a) saw the room as less valuable, (b) opted to stay in a more basic room in which no death occurred, despite both rooms being offered for...

Unbidden confession—confession made by a transgressor in the absence of interrogation—presents an evolutionary puzzle because it guarantees social exposure and places the person at risk of punishment. We hypothesize that unbidden confession may be an ancestrally adaptive behavior and is difficult to inhibit under certain social conditions, particul...

Morality and disgust are culturally relative

A large body of previous research has found that people exhibit a cognitive bias to reason teleologically about natural kinds, explaining them in terms of intelligent design and inherent purpose. In the present study, we examined whether people are also cognitively biased to explain naturally occurring events in terms of inherent purpose (i.e., mis...

Evolutionary developmental psychology, an emerging subdiscipline of evolutionary approaches to human behavior and cognition, focuses on the adaptive nature of psychological mechanisms built into the brains of juveniles, some of which may serve immediate demands at different stages of development, and some of which serve preparatory roles for maturi...

If your son likes sissy stuff or your daughter shuns feminine frocks, he or she is more likely to buck the heterosexual norm. But predicting sexual preference is still an inexact science

Do animals other than humans have a sense of humor? Maybe so

We propose a coevolutionary model of secrecy and stigmatization. According to this model, secrecy functions to conceal potential fitness costs detected in oneself or one’s genetic kin. In three studies, we found that the content of participants’ distressing secrets overlapped significantly with three domains of social information that were importan...

Cognitive scientists of religion and evolutionary theorists alike have been increasingly arguing in recent years that religion is “natural” in the sense of being motivated by core, evolved psychological intuitions. Atheism, and irreligion more generally, appear to pose problems for the naturalness hypothesis, especially considering the significant...

Transsexuals are illuminating the biology and psychology of sex—and revealing just how diverse the human species really is By Jesse Bering

Tattling, defined as the reporting to a second party of norm violations committed by a third party, is a frequent but little-studied activity among young children. Participant observation and quantitative sampling are used to provide a detailed characterization of tattling in 2 preschools (initial mean age = 4.08 years, N = 40). In these population...

To see an inherent purpose in life is to see an intentional, creative mind - usually God - that had a reason for designing it this way and not some other way. If we subscribe wholly and properly to Darwin's theory of natural selection, however, we must view human life generally and our own lives individually as arising through solely non-intentiona...

in press). Snakes, spiders and strangers: How the evolved fear of strangers may misdirect efforts to protect children from harm. J. M. Lampinen & K. Sexton-Radeks' Protecting children from violence: Evidence based interventions. New York: Psychology Press.

"In this chapter, we will argue that stranger fear is an evolved predisposition that increased fitness over the course of human history. In modern, developed societies, however, the same native bias against strangers may obscure perception of the greater threat of child harm posed by familiar peers, acquaintances, friends and kin."

An evolutionary psychological perspective has much to offer the study of Internet behavior. However, cyber-psychologists have hitherto neglected this rich theoretical tradition and evolutionary psychologists have been slow to apply their perspective to computer-mediated behavior. This paper applies an evolutionary perspective to the study of Intern...

Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die

Previous studies investigating altruistic punishment have confounded the effects of two independent variables: information transmission (or breach of privacy) and personal identification (or breach of anonymity). Here we report findings from a brief study in which participants were asked to respond to a social norm violation (i.e., an anonymous act...

In the present study, a modified dictator game was used to test the hypothesis that the threat of gossip would encourage prosocial decision making. All participants were asked to distribute an endowment between themselves and an anonymous second party. Half of the participants were told that the second party would be discussing their economic decis...

Just as there is remarkable continuity between the structures, abilities, and behaviors of closely related species, so too are there equally remarkable differences. Because only our species has evolved the social cognitive mechanisms that enable a heightened sensitivity to the minds of others, only our species suffers the psychological consequences...

The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards th...

Language is a uniquely human behaviour, which has presented unique adaptive problems. Prominent among these is the transmission of information that may affect an individual’s reputation. The possibility of punishment of those with a low reputation by absent third parties has created a selective pressure on human beings that is not shared by any oth...

The present article examines how people's belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the t...

The commentaries are a promising sign that a research programme on the cognitive science of souls will continue to move toward empirical and theoretical rigor. Most of the commentators agree that beliefs in personal immortality, in the intelligent design of souls, and in the symbolic meaning of natural events can provide new insight into human soci...

Children ages 3-9 years were informed that an invisible agent (Princess Alice) would help them play a forced-choice game by "telling them, somehow, when they chose the wrong box," whereas a matched control group of children were not given this supernatural prime. On 2 unexpected event trials, an experimenter triggered a simulated unexpected event (...

The evolution of human cooperation remains a puzzle because cooperation persists even in conditions that rule out mainstream explanations. We present a novel solution that links two recent theories. First, Johnson & Kruger (2004) suggested that ancestral cooperation was promoted because norm violations were deterred by the threat of supernatural pu...

Comments on Kassin's review (see record 2005-03019-002) of the psychology of false confessions. The authors note that Kassin's review makes a compelling argument for the need for legal reform in police interrogation practices. Because his work strikes at the heart of the American criminal justice system--its fairness--the value of Kassin's empirica...

We investigated whether (a) people positively reevaluate the characters of recently dead others and (b) supernatural primes concerning an ambient dead agent serve to curb selfish intentions. In Study 1, participants made trait attributions to three strangers depicted in photographs; one week later, they returned to do the same but were informed tha...

Children aged from 4;10 to 12;9 attending either a Catholic school or a public, secular school in an eastern Spanish city observed a puppet show in which a mouse was eaten by an alligator. Children were then asked questions about the dead mouse's biological and psychological functioning. The pattern of results generally replicated that obtained ear...

Across religious belief systems, some supernatural agents are nearly always granted privileged epistemic access into the self's thoughts. In addition, the ethnographic literature supports the claim that, across cultures, supernatural agents are envisioned as (1) incapable of being deceived through overt behaviors; (2) preoccupied with behavior in t...

Although recently there have been a few voices of dissent, most evolutionists tend to agree that religion is not an adaptation, at least not in the sense that we might speak of mate retention or reciprocal altruism as adaptations. Alternatively, religious beliefs are treated as causal epiphenomena-unimportant, posthoc explanations for adaptive beha...

Atran & Norenzayan's (A&N's) target article effectively combines the insights of evolutionary biology and interdisciplinary cognitive science, neither of which alone yields sufficient explanatory power to help us fully understand the complexities of supernatural belief. Although the authors' ideas echo those of other researchers, they are perhaps t...

By concentrating on the unconscious processes driving evolutionary mechanisms, evolutionary psychology has neglected the role of consciousness in generating human adaptations. The authors argue that there exist several "Darwinian algorithms" that are grounded in a novel representational system. Among such adaptations are information-retention homic...

Consciousness, as a higher-order cognitive capacity allowing for the explicit representation of abstract mental states, might be the incidental byproduct of design features from other adaptive systems, such as those governing expansion of the frontal lobes in primates. Although such abilities may have occurred entirely by chance, the standardized e...

By concentrating on the unconscious processes driving evolutionary mechanisms, evolutionary psychology has neglected the role of consciousness in generating human adaptations. The authors argue that there exist several "Darwinian algorithms" that are grounded in a novel representational system. Among such adaptations are information-retention homic...

Numerous investigators have argued that early ontogenetic immersion in sociocultural environments facilitates cognitive developmental change in human-reared great apes more characteristic of Homo sapiens than of their own species. Such revamping of core, species-typical psychological systems might be manifest, according to this argument, in the eme...

Participants were interviewed about the biological and psychological functioning of a dead agent. In Experiment 1, even 4- to 6-year-olds stated that biological processes ceased at death, although this trend was more apparent among 6- to 8-year-olds. In Experiment 2, 4- to 12-year-olds were asked about psychological functioning. The youngest childr...

In recent years, imitation has played a central role in conceptions of children’s memory, representational, and social cognitive abilities; in nonhuman primate cognitive competencies; and the evolution of human culture. In this paper, we combine data from three studies that assessed deferred imitation in three juvenile, enculturated (human-reared)...

Big Brains, Extended Youth and Social ComplexitySocial Cognition in Children and in ApesThe Role of Developmental Plasticity in Cognitive EvolutionConclusion References

The influence of evolutionary theory in science and human thinking has been pervasive since it was first well-formulated at the middle of the 19th century, and psychology has not been immune to this influence. However, most evolutionary approaches have focused on the study of adult behaviors and have overlooked the processes of ontogenetic emergenc...

The capacity to attribute meaning to personal experiences may rest on a specialized cognitive system enabling this form of causal reasoning. Close examination of these attributional tendencies suggests that this system may be distinct from those underlying other forms of causal reasoning such as a “theory of mind” system in the behavioral domain, a...

Little is known about how the minds of dead agents are represented. In the current experiment, individuals with different types of explicit afterlife beliefs were asked in an implicit interview task whether various mental state types, as well as pure biological imperatives, continue after death. The results suggest that, regardless of one's explici...

Although early comparative psychology was seriously marred by claims of our species'supremacy, the residual backlash against these archaic evolutionary views is still being felt, even though our understanding of evolutionary biology is now sufficiently advanced to grapple with possible cognitive specializations that our species does not share with...

Deferred imitation of object-related actions and generalization of imitation to similar but not identical tasks was assessed in three human-reared (enculturated) chimpanzees, ranging in age from 5 to 9 years. Each ape displayed high levels of deferred imitation and only slightly lower levels of generalization of imitation. The youngest two chimpanz...

The primary causal explanatory model for interpreting behavior, theory of mind, may have expanded into corridors of human cognition that have little to do with the context in which it evolved, questioning the suitability of domain-specific accounts of mind reading. Namely, philosophical-religious reasoning is a uniquely derived explanatory system a...

The primary causal explanatory model for interpreting behavior, theory of mind, may have expanded into corridors of human cognition that have little to do with the context in which it evolved, questioning the suitability of domain-specific accounts of mind reading. Namely, philosophical-religious reasoning is a uniquely derived explanatory system a...

The present theoretical article addresses the empirical question of whether other species, particularly chimpanzees, have the cognitive substrate necessary for experiencing theistic and otherwise non-natural (i.e., non-physical) percepts. The primary representational device presumed to underlie religious cognition was viewed as, in general, the cap...

Evolutionary developmental psychology, an emerging subdiscipline of evolutionary approaches to human behavior and cognition, focuses on the adaptive nature of psychological mechanisms built into the brains of juveniles, some of which may serve immediate demands at different stages of development, and some of which serve preparatory roles for maturi...

Changes in deferred imitation of novel actions on objects were assessed over a 2-year period in two enculturated, juvenile great apes (one chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, and one orangutan, Pongo pygmaeus). Both apes displayed deferred imitation, and both displayed improve ments in deferred imitation over the 2-year period, although the magnitude of i...

Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connecti...

Deferred imitation of object-related actions (e.g., picking up a cloth with a set of tongs) was assessed in 3 enculturated juvenile orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and 3 enculturated juvenile chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). For each task, animals were given 4 min to explore the objects (baseline), followed by a demonstration of the target behavior, and...

Evolutionary developmental psychology, an emerging subdiscipline of evolutionary approaches to human behavior and cognition, focuses on the adaptive nature of psychological mechanisms built into the brains of juveniles, some of which may serve immediate demands at different stages of development, and some of which serve preparatory roles for maturi...

Abstract (77 words) The commentaries,are a promising sign that a research programme,on the cognitive science of