Editorial

Religion and Agency

Authors

  • Ryan McKay ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, and Royal Holloway, London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jcsr.v2i2.28574

Keywords:

cognitive science of religion, agency detection, HADD, error management

Author Biography

  • Ryan McKay, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, and Royal Holloway, London

    Ryan McKay is the co-editor of the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion.

References

Barrett, J. L. 2000. “Exploring the natural foundations of religion.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, 29-34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(99)01419-9

———. 2004. “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

———. 2012. Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Beliefs. New York: The Free Press.

———. and J. A. Lanman. 2008. “The science of religious beliefs.” Religion 38(2): 109–124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.religion.2008.01.007

Guthrie, S. E. 1980. “A cognitive theory of religion.” Current Anthropology 21(2): 181–203.

———. 1993. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haselton, M. G. 2003. “The sexual overperception bias: Evidence of a systematic bias in men from a survey of naturally occurring events.” Journal of Research in Personality 37(1): 34–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00529-9

———. and D. M. Buss. 2000. “Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78(1): 81–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.1.81

———. and D. Nettle. 2006. “The paranoid optimist: an integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(1): 47–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_3

Johnson, D. D. P., D. T. Blumstein, J. H. Fowler and M. G. Haselton. 2013. “The evolution of error: Error management, cognitive constraints, and adaptive decision-making biases.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 28(8): 474–481. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2013.05.014

Ma-Kellams, C. 2015. “When perceiving the supernatural changes the natural: Religion and agency detection.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 15: 337–343. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342154

McKay, R. and C. Efferson. 2010. “The subtleties of error management.” Evolution and Human Behavior 31: 309–319.

———. and H. Whitehouse. 2015. “Religion and morality.” Psychological Bulletin 141(2): 447–473. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038455

Morris, P. H., J. White, E. R. Morrison and K. Fisher. 2013. “High heels as supernormal stimuli: How wearing high heels affects judgements of female attractiveness.” Evolution and Human Behavior 34(3): 176–181. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.11.006

Perilloux, C. and R. Kurzban. 2015. “Do men overperceive women’s sexual interest?” Psychological Science 26(1): 70–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797614555727

Riekki, T., M. Lindeman, M. Aleneff, A. Halme and A. Nuortimo. 2013. “Paranormal and religious believers are more prone to illusory face perception than skeptics and non-believers.” Applied Cognitive Psychology 27(2): 150–155. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.2874

van Elk, M. 2013. “Paranormal believers are more prone to illusory agency detection than skeptics.” Consciousness and Cognition 22(3): 1041–1046. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.07.004

———., B. Rutjens, J.van der Pligt and F. van Harreveld. In press. “Priming of supernatural agent concepts and agency detection.” Religion, Brain and Behavior. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2014.933444

Willard, A. K., and A. Norenzayan. 2013. “Cognitive biases explain religious belief, paranormal belief, and belief in life’s purpose.” Cognition 129(2): 379–391. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.07.016

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Published

2015-09-30

Issue

Section

Editorial

How to Cite

McKay, R. (2015). Editorial: Religion and Agency. Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 2(2), 93-96. https://doi.org/10.1558/jcsr.v2i2.28574