Martin Lang

Masaryk University | MUNI · Department for the Study of Religions

The explanatory gap between the life sciences and the humanities that is present in the study of human phenomena impedes productive interdisciplinary examination that such a complex subject requires. Manifested as epistemological tensions over reductionism vs. holism, nature vs. nurture, and the study of micro vs. macro context , the divergent rese...

Around the world, people engage in practices that involve self-inflicted pain and apparently wasted resources. Researchers theorized that these practices help stabilize within-group cooperation by assorting individuals committed to collective action. While this proposition was previously studied using existing religious practices, we provide a cont...

People face stressors that are beyond their control and that maladaptively perpetuate anxiety. In these contexts, rituals emerge as a natural coping strategy helping decrease excessive anxiety. However, mechanisms facilitating these purported effects have rarely been studied. We hypothesized that repetitive and rigid ritual sequences help the human...

This commentary highlights the important contributions of the target book to the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion and identifies several issues and challenges that should be addressed in future work. The crucial challenges pertain to the need for more thorough theoretical modeling of what religious beliefs add to the effects of ritual b...

The prevalence of religious beliefs and practices is puzzling from evolutionary viewpoint, but previous research suggested that religious traditions provide health and cooperative benefits. Seemingly in contrast with this claim are worldwide secularization trends where people disaffiliate from religions and belief in god(s). Previous theories sugge...

The study tests two competing explanations of the secularization process related to rationalizing worldviews and decreasing existential insecurity. While the former explanation argues that people are unwilling to join religious groups because of increasing mechanistic understanding of the world that clashes with religious views, the latter argues t...

Collective gatherings are often associated with the alignment of psychophysiological states between members of a crowd. While the process of emotional contagion has been studied extensively in dyads as well as at the population level, our understanding of its operation and dynamics as they unfold in real time in real‐world group contexts remains li...

In their target article, White et al. celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), looking back on what has been done as well as into the possible futures that await this academic discipline. We are joyous to join this celebration as we consider ourselves ardent members of this discipline and wish to see the discipline...

Research suggests that costly displays of commitment increase trust and cooperation. In five studies (total n > 1,700), we investigated whether costly behaviours are more effective in promoting trust when integrated within a religious rather than secular context using the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela as a costly display of commitment. First...

Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behavior, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulate...

Robin Dunbar’s book How Religion Evolved brings back the ethos of “big theories” that was characteristic of scholars of religion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although the previous approaches were rightfully criticized for unilinear views of cultural evolution, the aftermath of these critiques condemned (perhaps a bit prematurely) big...

A reliable assortment of committed individuals is crucial for success in intergroup conflict due to the danger of shirking. Theory predicts that reliable communication of commitment is afforded by costly, "wasteful" gestures. Across three pre-registered studies (total N = 1,112, general US population), we let participants choose between groups with...

Link: bit.ly/ritual_anxiety The near- omnipresence of religious systems across the globe and throughout human history has led researchers to hypothesize that religious systems fulfil important adaptive functions in their specific niches (Lang & Kundt, 2020; Sosis, 2017, 2019).1 Two functions have been of particular interest: promoting group coordi...

We examined the relationship between religious rituals and how people perceive moral norms. Prominent anthropological theories propose that rituals charge associated moral norms with objectivity such that moral norms are perceived as absolute and independent of time and space. We used two cross-sectional datasets to test this hypothesis and conduct...

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...

Evolutionary theories suggest that gods of world religions are associated with moralizing qualities and impartial behavior toward co-religionists, and that secular authorities approximate this effect. However, there is a lack of theorizing and experimental studies regarding the influence of local religions on inter-personal conduct. In the current...

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...

This special issue marks the formal end to the Evolution of Religion and Morality project and highlights the overall findings with particular attention to our second wave of data collection. In this concluding article, we first briefly detail how the project came about and how it developed. We then catalogue our contributions, summarizing the empir...

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...

Social desirability reporting leads to over estimations of church attendance. To date, researchers have treated over-reporting of church attendance as a general phenomenon, and have been unable to determine the demographic correlates of inaccuracy in these self-reports. By comparing over eight months of observational data on church attendance (n =...

In this commentary of McCauley and Graham’s book on mental abnormalities and religions, we identify a number of challenges, and present possible extensions of their proposed research. Specifically, we argue that no specialized religious cognition should be assumed, and instead suggest that the cases of mental abnormalities discussed in the book spe...

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...

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...

Humans have evolved various social behaviors such as interpersonal motor synchrony (i.e., matching movements in time), play and sport or religious ritual that bolster group cohesion and facilitate cooperation. While important for small communities, the face-to-face nature of such technologies makes them infeasible in large-scale societies where ris...

Although scientists agree that replications are critical to the debate on the validity of religious priming research, religious priming replications are scarce. This paper attempts to replicate and extend previously observed effects of religious priming on ethical behavior. We test the effect of religious instrumental music on individuals’ ethical...

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...

While the occurrence of rituals in anxiogenic contexts has been long noted and supported by ethnographic, quantitative and experimental studies, the purported effects of ritual behaviour on anxiety reduction have rarely been examined. In the present study, we investigate the anxiolytic effects of religious practices among the Marathi Hindu communit...

The present article is an elaborated and upgraded version of the Early Career Award talk that I delivered at the IAPR 2019 conference in Gdańsk, Poland. In line with the conference’s thematic focus on new trends and neglected themes in psychology of religion, I argue that psychology of religion should strive for firmer integration with evolutionary...

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...

Identity fusion theory has become a popular psychological explanation of costly self-sacrifice. It posits that while maintaining one's own individual identity, a deep affinity with one's group can contribute to sacrifice for that group. We test this and related hypotheses using a behavioral economic experiment designed to detect biased, self-intere...

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...

Identify fusion theory has become a popular psychological explanation of costly self-sacrifice, with recent work positing that an interaction between negative outgroup relations and fusion with one's ingroup which would lead to sacrificial behavior that benefits the ingroup. We test this hypothesis using a behavioral economic experiment designed to...

Many human groups achieve high levels of trust and cooperation, but these achievements are vulnerable to exploitation. Several theorists have suggested that when groups impose costs on their members, these costs can function to limit freeriding, and hence promote trust and cooperation. While a substantial body of experimental research has demonstra...

Male parental investment can contribute to the fitness of both sexes through increased fertility and child survivorship. The level and intensity of parental investment are dependent upon ecological variations: in harsh and demanding environments, the need for biparental care increases. Moreover, when environmental pressures increase, uncertainty ov...

Behavioural synchronization has been shown to facilitate social bonding and cooperation but the mechanisms through which such effects are attained are poorly understood. In the current study, participants interacted with a pre-recorded confederate who exhibited different rates of synchrony, and we investigated three mechanisms for the effects of sy...

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...

Snodgrass, Most, and Upadhyay present exciting and intriguing research on the complex relationship between religious ritual and anxiety. They suggest, based on their results, that rituals may be “good medicine” for chronically stressed populations. While we concur that ritual behavior can serve as an antianxiety agent in certain situations, we are...

Music is a natural human expression present in all cultures, but the functions it serves are still debated. Previous research indicates that rhythm, an essential feature of music, can enhance coordination of movement and increase social bonding. However, the prolonged effects of rhythm have not yet been investigated. In this study, pairs of partici...

Religion can have an important influence in moral decision-making, and religious reminders may deter people from unethical behavior. Previous research indicated that religious contexts may increase prosocial behavior and reduce cheating. However, the perceptual-behavioral link between religious contexts and decision-making lacks thorough scientific...

In their target article, Taves and Asprem suggest disassembling religious experiences into events, and studying the formation and interpretation of religious experiences using the approach of cognitive science. We support such an approach and especially embrace using experimental methods to better understand how religious experiences can be generat...

Despite the wide occurrence of ritual behavior in humans and animals, much of its causal underpinnings, as well as evolutionary functions, remain unknown. A prominent line of research focuses on ritualization as a response to anxiogenic stimuli. By manipulating anxiety levels, and subsequently assessing their motor behavior dynamics, our recent stu...

Environmental uncertainty and uncontrollability cause psycho-physiological distress to organisms [1-3], often impeding normal functioning [4, 5]. A common response involves ritualization, that is, the limitation of behavioral expressions to predictable stereotypic and repetitive motor patterns [6-8]. In humans, such behaviors are also symptomatic o...