Justin L. BarrettFuller Theological Seminary · School of Psychology
Justin L. Barrett
PhD
About
80
Publications
37,261
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
5,576
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
June 2011 - October 2015
August 2006 - June 2011
Publications
Publications (80)
This edited volume represents a snapshot the current state cognitive science of religion with contributions from many well-established contributors to the field as well as a few newcomers. The first section broadly sets the historical and theoretical stage. Its three chapters introduce readers to the historical, theoretical, and methodological foun...
This chapter investigates the way human minds intuitively conceive of the world by dividing up objects according to their kinds: natural kinds, nominal kinds, and artifacts. People intuitively hold certain expectation sets (i.e., spatiality, physicality, or mentality expectation sets, etc.) for different ontological categories. When a concept fits...
Over time, more psychologists have become contributors to the cognitive science of religion (CSR), but when are they doing CSR and when are they doing psychology of religion? Does it matter? This chapter sketches contemporary scientific reflections on notions of death and the afterlife to illustrate the subtle differences between CSR and the psycho...
This paper introduces a tool designed to mitigate a longstanding challenge to developing social anthropological theories of ritual – how to generate enough comparable case studies for rigorously testing the predictive strength and generalizability of the theory under scrutiny. Our “constitutive relevance of models” (CRoM) test identifies structural...
Lawson and McCauley's ritual form hypothesis (RFH) appeals to natural cognition to capture several commonly observed features of religious rituals in one explanatory theory: (1) their repetition in the life of a participant tends to be distributed in bipolar fashion (typically only once in a lifetime or repeatedly, on the order of annually, monthly...
Despite a wealth of research exploring developmental patterns of children’s understanding of the thoughts and desires of another (or, their theory of mind), relatively little research has explored children’s developing understanding of supernatural minds. Of the work that exists, very few studies have explored whether patterns are similar in other...
Several theory-of-mind (ToM) studies have explored how children differentiate ordinary minds (humans, dogs) and extraordinary minds (God, spirits), but these studies have yielded divergent results and interpretations and have not offered cross-cultural comparisons of samples. To address these limitations, children (3–5 years old) in 4 different cou...
If “Big Gods” evolved in part because of their ability to morally regulate groups of people who cannot count on kin or reciprocal altruism to get along (Norenzayan, 2013), then powerful gods would tend to be good gods. If the mechanism for this cooperation is some kind of fear of supernatural punishment (Johnson & Bering, 2006), then we may expect...
Adolescence is one of the most common periods during which people report religious transformations (Regnerus & Uecker, 2006), but few studies have examined what variables might precipitate a transformation during this time. Based on early writings of James (1902) and Starbuck (1911), we tested the hypotheses that adolescents are more likely to expe...
Cognitive science has distinguished between two types of thinking: intuitive and reflective. Intuitive cognition is fast and automatic, whereas reflective cognition is slow and deliberate. These two types of cognitive systems mutually influence each other. Together, intuitive and reflective cognition may determine how cognitively natural or unnatur...
Experimental methods are the only valid tool for drawing causal conclusions in the study of human thought and behavior. An experiment is a comparison of at least two conditions: the control condition (the baseline situation) and an experimental condition (what happens when a new factor is added to the baseline situation). The dependent variable in...
The cover story from the February 7, 2009 issue of New Scientist was Michael Brooks’ “Born believers: How your brain creates God”—a story full of references to scientists studying the naturalness of religious beliefs, particularly in children. The article ends with this: “Would a group of children raised in isolation spontaneously create their own...
This chapter reviews the cognitive development that influences children’s understanding of nonhuman minds. A summary of prior research is introduced and followed by an overview of two competing hypotheses. The anthropomorphism hypothesis argues that children’s understanding of nonhuman minds generally parallels their understanding of human minds, w...
E. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley’s “ritual form hypothesis” appeals to a cognitive mechanism—an “action representation system”—to explain (predict) patterns in human reasoning about three classes of religious ritual. Our attempt to test their theory’s predictions using a sample of traditional Chinese rituals, as described to us by contemporary...
The concept of grace has, in the psychology of religion, been largely neglected as a legitimate topic for empirical inquiry. We define grace here as a gift given unconditionally and voluntarily to an undeserving person by an unobligated giver, the giver being either human or divine. We explore the concept of grace within a variety of religious trad...
Religion has been a subject of study for centuries, with scholars approaching this topic from a plethora of perspectives. Applying an evolutionary perspective to the study of religion represents a relatively new approach, and yet the last few decades have seen an impressive collection of hypotheses developed and empirical findings gathered from thi...
The amount of psychological literature focusing on human thriving and flourishing has grown in recent years, but this topic is currently subject to much conceptual ambiguity. Evolutionary psychology, though often not included in discussions on optimal human development, provides a framework that benefits considerations of human thriving. Humans exh...
Are human tendencies toward religious and spiritual thoughts, feelings, and actions outcomes of “natural” cognition? This volume revisits the “naturalness theory of religious cognition” through discussion of new qualitative and quantitative studies examining the psychological foundations of religious and spiritual expression in historical and conte...
Notions of human thriving are abundant in psychological literature. Christian theology provides resources for shaping these notions by emphasizing particular aspects of thriving. The present paper argues for the importance of attending to the God-given telos of humanity as presented in Scripture. This paper investigates how the doctrines of Christo...
Analytic thought has been implicated in reduction of religious belief on the premise that intuitive cognitive systems facilitate religious belief and conscious inhibition encourages rejection of religious beliefs. Inherent in these studies are priming techniques to induce analytic thinking, resulting in reductions of religiosity and/or religious be...
Do children attribute mortality and other life-cycle traits to all minded beings? The present study examined whether culture influences young children's ability to conceptualize and differentiate human beings from supernatural beings (such as God) in terms of life-cycle traits. Three-to-5-year-old Israeli and British children were questioned whethe...
Is reasoning about religious ritual tethered to ordinary, nonreligious human reasoning about actions? E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley's ritual form hypothesis (RFH) constitutes a cognitive approach to religious ritual - an explanatory theory that suggests people use ordinary human cognition to make specific predictions about ritual properti...
Cognitive approaches have recently been proposed for understanding art appreciation, emphasizing the role of perceived artist's intentions and messages in how lay people define what is "art" and what is "good" art. In particular, it is argued that a work of art automatically triggers speculation about the artist's intention, and that it is intuitiv...
The study of intellectual humility is still in its early stages and issues of definition and measurement are only now being explored. To inform and guide the process of defining and measuring this important intellectual virtue, we conducted a series of studies into the implicit theory - or ‘folk’ understanding - of an intellectually humble person,...
The psychological study of conversion has long been concerned with the functionality of conversion, or the ability of religious and spiritual transformation to foster positive change in people’s lives. The epistemic, intrapsychic, and moral sociability functions of transformation were tested in a sample of adolescents attending religious summer cam...
Recent work in cognitive science of religion (CSR) is beginning to converge on a very interesting thesis—that, given the ordinary features of human minds operating in typical human environments, we are naturally disposed to believe in the existence of gods, among other religious ideas (e.g., see Atran [2002], Barrett [2004; 2012], Bering [2011], Bo...
The experiment presented provides partial cross-cultural empirical support for Pascal Boyer's theory of the transmission of minimally counterintuitive (MCI) ideas. Boyer hypothesized that concepts with a small number of counterintuitive features are better remembered and more faithfully communicated than extremely counterintuitive concepts or compa...
The correspondence hypothesis maintains that people with secure parental attachments will experience gradual religious conversions, with internal working models of childhood attachment figures forming the basis of attachment to God. The compensation hypothesis predicts that people with insecure attachments will experience sudden and dramatic conver...
Our minds solve fundamental problems in a way that leaves a god-shaped space just waiting to be filled by religion
We report the results of a cross-cultural investigation of person-body reasoning in the United Kingdom and northern Brazilian Amazon (Marajó Island). The study provides evidence that directly bears upon divergent theoretical claims in cognitive psychology and anthropology, respectively, on the cognitive origins and cross-cultural incidence of mind-...
Some contemporary philosophers defend the claim that it is rational to believe that God exists even if that belief is not
based on evidence. Many such defenses are developed from a religious epistemology inspired by the work of Thomas Reid's “common
sense” epistemology that posits the existence of numerous cognitive faculties that nonreflectively d...
The cognitive science of religion (CSR) arose out of attempts to “science up” religious studies and the anthropology of religion without eliminating interpretive approaches. While maintaining this historical orientation, CSR holds promise to help bridge to other areas within the scientific study of religion. Particularly fruitful areas of future co...
The cognitive science of religion (CSR) is a scientific approach to the study of religion that combines methods and theory from cognitive, developmental and evolutionary psychology with the sorts of questions that animate anthropologists and historians of religion. Specifically, CSR explores causal explanations of religious phenomena (thoughts, ide...
What influences people’s appreciation of works of art? In this paper, we provide a new cognitive approach to this big question, and the first empirical results in support of it. As a work of art typically does not activate intuitive cognition for functional artefacts, it is represented as an instance of non-verbal symbolic communication. By applica...
While emerging cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion have generated important empirical findings and conceptual
advances, Nathaniel Barrett is quite right to pursue integration with historical and cultural studies and to challenge the
reductionism that is, if not endemic to, at least popularly ascribed to these approaches. However, we arg...
Commonly scholars in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) have advanced the naturalness of religion thesis. That is, ordinary cognitive resources operating in ordinary human environments typically lead to some kind of belief in supernatural agency and perhaps other religious ideas. Special cultural scaffolding is unnecessary. Supernaturalism fal...
The present study sought to (1) determine whether Barrett's counterintuitiveness coding and quantifying scheme (CI-Scheme) could be applied to cultural materials with sufficient intercoder reliability, (2) provide evidence concerning just how counterintuitive is too counterintuitive for a concept to be a recurrent cultural idea, and (3) test whethe...
Forty-nine members of the Oxford public took part in a controlled free-recall experiment, the first 'minimal counterintuitiveness theory' study to control concept inferential potential and participant selective-attention timing. Recall of counterintuitive ideas (MCI) was compared with recall of ideas expressing necessary epistemic incongruence (i.e...
part of a larger study on ‘spiritual fruit formation’ in adolescents, teenaged participants in Young Life outreach “camping” programs completed surveys immediately before and immediately after the camping experience. Participants were American teens attending standard Young Life camps in the United States (Lake Champion, New York and Sharp Top Cove...
Boyer's theory of counterintuitive cultural concept transmission claims that concepts that ideas that violate naturally occurring intuitive knowledge structures enough to be attention-demanding but not so much to undermine conceptual coherence have a transmission advantage over other concepts (Boyer et al. 2001: 535-64). Because of the prominence o...
Why have humans, throughout history and across cultures, shown a strong tendency to believe in the existence of superhuman intentional agents and attached this belief to notions of morality, misfortune, and the creation of the world? The answer emerging from the cognitive science of religion appears to be that explicit beliefs are informed and cons...
Abstract We report the findings of a programmatic series of studies designed to investigate the cognitive underpinnings of cross-culturally recurrent forms of possession belief. Possession phenomena are frequently portrayed in the anthropological literature as incompatible with common cultural assumptions and biases guiding Western notions of “self...
Virtual reality (VR) is often described as a gateway to a religious or spiritual experience but why? In this article, using theories and evidence taken from the cognitive science of religion (CSOR), we hypothesize that human minds may interact with VR-hosted phenomena in a manner highly similar to that in which they interact with supernatural conce...
Through the lenses of cognitive science of religion, successful god concepts must possess a number of features. God concepts must be (1) counterintuitive, (2) an intentional agent, (3) possessing strategic information, (4) able to act in the human world in detectable ways and (5) capable of motivating behaviors that reinforce belief. That Santa Cla...
To investigate possible cognitive factors influencing the cross-cultural incidence of spirit possession concepts and to develop a more refined understanding of the precise contours of 'intuitive mind-body dualism' (Bloom, 2004), two studies were conducted that explored adults' intuitions about the relationship between minds and bodies. Specifically...
Cognitive science of religion (CSR) brings theories from the cognitive sciences to bear on why religious thought and action is so common in humans and why religious phenomena take on the features that they do. The field is characterized by a piecemeal approach, explanatory non-exclusivism, and methodological pluralism. Topics receiving consideratio...
The rapid but disproportionate growth of the cognitive science of religion in some areas, coupled with the desire to meaningfully connect with more traditional, function-inspired classifications, has left the field with an incomplete and sometimes inconsistent typology of religious and related actions. We address this shortcoming by proposing a sys...
Recent advances in the evolutionary and cognitive sciences of religion have raised questions about whether the assumptions and findings of these fields as applied to religion conflict with belief in gods. Specifically, three scientific approaches to religion (Neurotheology, Group Selection, and Cognitive Science of Religion) are sketched, and five...
The present study investigated predictions from the preparedness hypothesis that children's God concepts may not be strictly anthropomorphic along certain dimensions. In particular, 39 American children (ages 3 to 7) predicted the visual, auditory, and olfactory perspectives of humans, animals with special senses, and God. Results revealed that pre...
In sketching a preliminary scientific theory of religion, Atran & Norenzayan (A&N) generally agree with cognitive scientists of religion in the factors that coalesce to form religion. At times they misrepresent, however, the notion of “counterintuitive” concepts as they apply to religious concepts, confusing counterintuitive with counterfactual, ca...
The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run with a sample of Maya children aged 4–7, and place them...
Previous research into the perception of agency has found that objects in two-dimensional displays that move along non-inertial-looking paths are frequently attributed intentional agency, including beliefs and desires. The present experiment re-addressed this nding using a tangible, interactive, electromagnetic puzzle. The experimental manipula-tio...
To explore 3- to 7-year-old children's developing understanding of human and non-human minds, a battery of "background knowledge" tasks was administered to 51 American children. The children were asked to speculate about how three other intentional agents (mother, dog, and God) would understand various visual displays. First, children answered when...
Historically, the development of God concepts in human cognition has been explained anthropomorpliically. In other words, for children especially, God is a big, super-human who lives in the sky. Recent empirical research on the development of these concepts may suggest an alternative hypothesis. In this paper, we review this research and outline th...
Religious activities of the Pomio Kivung people of Melanesia challenges a specific claim of Lawson & McCauley's (1990) theory of religious ritual, but does it challenge the general claim that religious rituals are underpinned by ordinary cognitive capacities? To further test the hypothesis that ordinary social cognition informs judgments of religio...
Four studies (two experiments, a journaling study, and a questionnaire) conducted with American Protestant college students explored intuitions concerning petitionary prayer. Since Protestant theology offers little teaching on through which modes of causation God is most likely to act, it was hypothesized that intuitive causal cognition would be us...
Lawson and McCauley (1990) have argued that non-cultural regularities in how actions are conceptualized inform and constrain participants' understandings of religious rituals. This theory of ritual competence generates three predictions: 1) People with little or no knowledge of any given ritual system will have intuitions about the potential effect...
The four experiments presented support Boyer's theory that counterintuitive concepts have transmission advantages that account for the commonness and ease of communicating many non-natural cultural concepts. In Experiment 1, 48 American college students recalled expectation-violating items from culturally unfamiliar folk stories better than more mu...
Little research exists on how children understand the actions of nonhuman agents. Researchers often assume that children overgeneralize and attribute human properties such as false beliefs to nonhuman agents. In this study, three experiments were conducted to test this assumption. The experiments used 24 children in New York (aged 2,11-6,11 years),...
A new cognitive approach to religion is bringing fresh insights to our understanding of how religious concepts are maintained, acquired and used to motivate and direct actions. This approach suggests that seemingly extraordinary thoughts and behaviours can be supported by quite ordinary cognition and may thus be termed ‘natural’. Simultaneously, th...
In both natural and religious thinking, people have ntultiple versions of the same concepts that may be contradictory. In the domain of religious concepts, these ntultiple levels of representation in single individuals may be termed "Theological Correctness." Versions of religioiis concepts range front fairly simple or concrete to very complex and...
Concepts of gods, like any other concepts, are informed and constrained by cross-cultural regularities of the human mind-brain. Specifically, divine beings that are represented as intentional agents are subject to the cognitive intuitions that govern all intentional agents. These intuitions may include psychological and physical attributes not endo...
We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students' concepts of God, both professed theological beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In three story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic God concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and dr...
ABSTRACT The Na,K pump is the indispensable component of excitable tissue that maintains transmembrane ion-based potentials. Adequate human data regarding the developmental trends in Na,K pump activity in childhood are unavailable, but human nonneuronal and animal studies demonstrate a developmental shift toward declining Na,K pump activity with in...