Theiss Bendixen

• Aarhus University

The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology is an essential guide to the study of moral cognition and behavior. Originating as a philosophical exploration of values and virtues, moral psychology has evolved into a robust empirical science intersecting psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and neuroscience. Contributors to this interdiscip...

Extant coleoid cephalopods include over 800 species of octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, which have drawn scientific and public interest for their complex behavior and cognition. Of these, approximately 10% (79) species have adult specimens with recorded measures of central nervous system size distributed across various sources. Here, we use a comb...

Sociality has been argued to be the main selection pressure for the evolution of large brains and complex behavior on the basis of data from mammals and birds. Coleoid cephalopods have large brains, complex nervous systems and show signs of intelligent behavior comparable to that of birds, cetaceans, and primates. However, many cephalopods live lar...

Some cultural evolutionary models predict that under stressful reductions of well-being, individuals will be more attracted and fastidiously adhere to traditional systems of norms that promote solidarity and cooperation. As religious systems can bolster human relationships with a variety of mechanisms, the material insecurity hypothesis of religion...

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...

How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which r...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Assessing relationships between culture and cognition is central to psychological science. To this end, free-listing is a useful methodological instrument. To facilitate its wider use, we here present the free-list method along with some of its many applications and offer a tutorial on how to prepare and statistically model free-list data as a depe...

Beliefs play a central role in our lives. They lie at the heart of what makes us human, they shape the organization and functioning of our minds, they define the boundaries of our culture, and they guide our motivation and behavior. Given their central importance, researchers across a number of disciplines have studied beliefs, leading to results a...

Scientific journals may counter the misuse, misreporting, and misinterpretation of statistics by providing guidance to authors. We described the nature and prevalence of statistical guidance at 15 journals (top-ranked by Impact Factor) in each of 22 scientific disciplines across five high-level domains (N = 330 journals). The frequency of statistic...

Evolutionary theories of religion frequently assume that the presence of moralizing gods is positively associated with social complexity. An influential source of evidence for this assumption comes from researchers using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample’s moralizing high gods variable as a proxy measure of their outcome of interest (the presence...

Journals exert considerable control over letters, commentaries and online comments that criticize prior research (post-publication critique). We assessed policies (Study One) and practice (Study Two) related to post-publication critique at 15 top-ranked journals in each of 22 scientific disciplines ( N = 330 journals). Two-hundred and seven (63%) j...

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

The COVID-19-pandemic offers a unique, if tragic, opportunity to assess the impact of a worldwide crisis on religion. Theories from various disciplines including the psychology of religion and cultural evolution suggest that crises cause higher levels of religiosity. However, such theories also predict that levels of religiosity should remain stabl...

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries...

The social sciences have long recognized a relationship between religion and social ecology. Upon closer inspection, religious systems not only correspond to important features of a society’s social ecology, but also appear to directly address these features. In this article, we examine the prospect that these salient features may be framed as game...

Evolutionary theories of religion frequently assume that the presence of moralizing gods is positively associated with social complexity. An influential source of evidence for this assumption is the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), which uses the moralizing high gods variable to measure the outcome of interest (the presence of moralizing gods...

In this review, we discuss three vision impairments in the cognitive science of religious beliefs. We first assess the CSR’s improvements upon previous generations’ “mindblindness.” We also address “contextblindness,” the CSR’s relative lack of focus on the extant environment’s role in the formation and retention of religious beliefs. Finally, we a...

How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which r...

The COVID-19-pandemic offers a unique, if tragic, opportunity to assess the impact of a world-wide crisis on religion. Theories from various disciplines including the psychology of religion and cultural evolution suggest that crises cause higher levels of religiosity. However, such theories also predict that levels of religiosity should remain stab...

Assessing relationships between culture and cognition is central to psychological science. To this end, free-listing is a useful methodological instrument. To facilitate its wider use, we here present the free-list method along with some of its many applications and offer a tutorial on how to prepare and statistically model free-list data as a depe...

People tend to evaluate information from reliable sources more favourably, but it is unclear exactly how perceivers’ worldviews interact with this source credibility effect. In a large and diverse cross-cultural sample (N = 10,195 from 24 countries), we presented participants with obscure, meaningless statements attributed to either a spiritual gur...

Scientific journals may counter the misuse and misinterpretation of statistical methods by providing statistical guidance to authors. Here, we sought to assess the nature and prevalence of statistical guidance offered to authors by 15 journals (top-ranked by Impact Factor) in each of 22 scientific disciplines (N = 330 journals). For each journal, t...

Critical scrutiny of published research is an important feature of a self-correcting scientific ecosystem. Academic journals exert considerable control over criticism submitted in the form of letters, commentaries, or online comments (post-publication peer review, PPPR). Currently, there is limited empirical data documenting how journals handle PPP...

The target article from Turchin et al. assesses the relationship between social complexity and moralistic supernatural punishment. In our evaluation of their project, we argue that each step of its workflow -- from data production and theory to modeling and reporting -- makes it impossible to test the hypothesis that its authors claim they are test...

The social sciences have long recognized a relationship between religion and social ecology. Upon closer inspection, religious systems not only correspond to important features of a society's social ecology, but also appear to directly address these features. In this article, we examine the prospect that these salient features may be framed as game...

Since the earliest days of the social sciences, the relationship between religion and cooperation has been a central topic. In this chapter, we critically review some cultural evolutionary perspectives on religion and cooperation and consider how they frame the relationships among religious beliefs, behaviors, and the moral rules that motivate coop...

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...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

Beebe and Duffy (2020) offer another addition to a growing body of theoretical and empirical work that questions the explanatory power of so-called minimal counterintuitiveness (MCI). On the basis of three memory experiments and one survey, Beebe and Duffy argue that 1) MCI concepts are at a mnemonic disadvantage relative to both concepts with mora...

This article illustrates how using qualitative and quantitative social scientific methods together can help us examine sociocultural phenomena in precise, informative, and potentially useful ways. Using freely listed ethnographic data about what qualities Tuvans associate with “good” and “bad” Tuvan people, we examine general cultural patterns of T...

People tend to evaluate information from reliable sources more favourably, but it is unclear exactly how perceivers' worldviews interact with this source credibility effect. Here, we present data from a cross-cultural study in which individuals (N = 10,195) from a religiously and culturally diverse sample of 24 countries were presented with obscure...

Cross-cultural beliefs about gods’ concerns point to local socioecological challenges. Such appeals to gods’ concerns provide insights for understanding religious cognition specifically and the evolution of religious systems more generally. Here, we review case studies to this effect, and introduce the “god-problem problem”: to the extent that gods...

Cultural evolution research is the study of how cultural traits (e.g., beliefs and behavioral patterns) stabilize, change and diffuse in populations, and why some cultural traits are more "attractive" (i.e., more likely to spread) than others. As such, cultural evolution is highly relevant for the emerging "science of science communication" (SSC) i...

This article illustrates how using qualitative and quantitative social scientific methods together can help us examine sociocultural phenomena in precise, informative, and potentially useful ways. Using freely listed ethnographic data about what qualities Tuvans associate with "good" and "bad" Tuvan people, we examine general cultural patterns of T...

Serious concerns about research quality have catalysed a number of reform initiatives intended to improve transparency and reproducibility and thus facilitate self-correction, increase efficiency and enhance research credibility. Meta-research has evaluated the merits of some individual initiatives; however, this may not capture broader trends refl...

Laypeople hold beliefs about economics and policy issues—so-called folk-economic beliefs (FEBs)—that are often wrong or misleading according to professional economists. Here, I critically discuss a recent evolutionary–cognitive approach to understanding folk-economic beliefs. According to this approach (Boyer & Petersen 2018a), some economic belief...