Religion is a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon that has inspired and perplexed philosophers, psychologists, and social commentators for centuries. The cognitive science of religion is the most recent attempt to decipher its role in the world. It puts aside theistic and atheistic biases, and tries to understand the psychology underpinning religious thought, belief, and behavior.

The cognitive science of religion asks why religion is cross-culturally popular, which cognitive mechanisms ensure its popularity, how did they evolve, and which psychological traits dispose us to belief? Of principle concern is how religion became so pervasive when its associated behavior is a costly use of time and resources. Would natural selection favor such wasteful endeavor, or is our tendency to piety a byproduct of other adaptive traits? The following sections summarize key findings in the cognitive science of religion.

Some stories are so memorable that they resonate within cultures for millennia.Pascal Boyer and Charles Ramble suggested that stories which violate our intuitions about the world are particularly captivating and memorable. They performed an experiment to compare the memorability of intuitive and counterintuitive objects. The counterintuitve items included such things as a living person built from plaster, and objects that don't like you staring at them. They found that people from several different cultures were more likely to remember the counterintuitive objects.

Boyer and Ramble surmised that religions enjoy a cultural advantage because their counterintuitive gods are attention-grabbing and memorable. However, the experimenters discovered an optimum level of bizarreness. Objects that are too counterintuitive are not well remembered, but objects that are minimally counterintuitive are `just right'. For example, a god that is emotionally and physically human, but which can read your mind and pass through walls is more likely to be remembered than a god with no human features. Inclusion of these mundane characteristics makes the god memorable because it allows inferences to be drawn about what the god is thinking, how it will behave, and how it will impact human life. Boyer and others have remarked that many religions employ such gods.

 Minimally counter intuitive gods capture our attention and are memorable.

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4. Religious Concepts Are Easily Communicated

If useful information such as social norms and moral rules (e.g. love thy neighbor) is included in a narrative, the information receives a transmission advantage if the story includes a minimally counterintuitive object. Religious narratives may therefore increase the commonality of adaptive, pro-social information. This co-opting of evolved cognitive biases for an alternative, social role is an example of Dual Inheritance Theory.

The evidence suggests that this interplay between genes and culture is quite intricate. For example, we may have evolved new cognitive biases that encourage religious belief for socially beneficial reasons. The following sections provide some examples.

Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan found that unconsciously priming people to think about gods, spirits, and prophets made them more likely to be generous in an economic game. Another compelling example emerged in the work of Jesse Bering. He found that when people were left alone to play a game, they were less likely to cheat when told a ghost was in the room with them. A further study looked at how religious rituals can motivate pro-social behavior. The researchers found that painful rituals in particular led to more charitable giving by participants and observers of the ritual.

These studies suggest humans have evolved to consider the existence of punitive supernatural agents, and to respond with increased displays of moral, pro-social, and cooperative behavior. This is likely to be adaptive, meaning it provides advantages that aid the survival of its adherents and the groups they belong to.

Jesse Bering found that people intuitively attribute emotions, desires, and beliefs to the dead. For example, they'll say a dead person still loves his wife, believes his wife loves him, and wants to be alive. However, they're far less likely to attribute biological qualities to the dead, such as hunger, thirst, sensory perception, or a functional brain. This disparity appears to be caused by an intuitive belief that an essence or soul that encapsulates the important, psychological aspects of one's being survives death. Thus, it may be natural to believe in an afterlife, and to utilize one's `theory of mind' to imagine a disembodied location for our thoughts, beliefs, and desires.

A connection between this research and our intrigue for counterintuitive agents is apparent. As death is inescapable in our intuitive world, religious, paranormal, and superstitious beliefs offer a unique opportunity. By definition, counterintuitive agents circumvent the laws of reality, meaning they could provide their human allies with a way to circumvent death.

Anxiety is elicited when an uncontrollable or uncertain threat looms on the horizon. It's an unpleasant emotion that motivates precautionary behavior to restore control or certainty to the situation. Death is best described as an `existential anxiety' for this reason, and religious belief may be one way to restore control.

Many `mortality salience' experiments have measured the effects of existential anxiety on levels of religious belief. For example, Ara Norenzayan and Ian Hansenasked people to think about what would happen to them when they die. Afterwards, people's level of belief in gods and other supernatural agents increased. Some studies have replicated these results, finding increased belief among believers and atheists alike, but others found that atheists showed reduced belief in gods after thinking about death. Terror Management Theory claims this is because atheists are responding to death anxiety with `worldview defense'. Reducing their belief in deities reinforces their worldview, providing an alternative source of comfort.

Jamin Halberstadt and Jonathan Jong sought to understand the contradictory results. They confirmed that existential anxiety causes atheists to exhibit worldview defense when asked about explicit measures of religious belief, but, for implicit measures, there was a universal increase. Implicit beliefs operate automatically below the level of conscious awareness. For example, an atheist might explicitly deny the existence of souls and a higher power, but they'll still be reluctant to sell their soul to someone, and will describe important events as having a hidden meaning that taught them something significant. Jesse Bering's research into how people believe thoughts, desires, and emotions survive death, or how we cheat less when told a supernatural agent is watching us, are further examples of implicit beliefs that are at odds with explicitly held atheistic beliefs.

It is implicit, unconscious, religious beliefs such as these that appear to be strengthened by existential anxiety. Future research may attempt to understand why explicit religious beliefs are also sometimes strengthened.

Death isn't the only peril that can alter beliefs. Ian McGregor found that asking a group of people to read and comprehend a difficult passage about statistics was enough to make them anxious about looking foolish. The participants subsequently displayed greater religious beliefs and superstitions than a control group. A different experiment made people anxious by asking them to remember uncontrollable events from their past. This lack of control led to increased belief in God as a controlling entity.

Neuroscience is a field that ties psychology to biological processes. An experiment by Michael Inzlicht and his team found that asking people about their religious beliefs led to reduced distress when making errors during a subsequent Stroop task. They measured levels of distress by looking at the anterior cingulate cortex, and saw less activity in response to errors when compared with a control group.

Another compelling study revealed that countries with less welfare (existential security) have higher levels of religious participation. Other investigations have discovered that negative emotions such as grief, guilt, and stress can also strengthen religious belief; and that religion increases life-satisfaction, happiness, well-being, and self-esteem. These and similar works are explored within comfort theories of religion that focus on religion's palliative benefits.

People have a tendency to engage in ritual behavior when real or perceived hazards are present. For example, children sometimes require a bedtime ritual that involves checking the room for monsters, while adults might require a routine for checking electrical appliances are turned off. Ritual behavior might be as simple as always putting the TV remote in the same place; or an elaborate religious ceremony involving many people. OCD sufferers take ritual behavior to its extreme, meticulously performing and repeating their actions.

Pascal Boyer and Pierre Lienard explored the mechanics of ritual behavior. They discovered a common cause is the detection or anticipation of hazards that, according to the performer, would worsen if the ritual wasn't performed. The hazards include such things as contamination (disease), social status loss, interpersonal violence, and predation; all of which would have been present in our ancestral environment. These evolutionary hazards elicit anxiety, which motivates ritual behavior as a precautionary response. Flawless performance of the ritual satisfies the participant that something has been done to avert negative consequences. Cristine Legare and Andre Souza tested this idea and found that inducing anxious feelings related to randomness and a lack of control led to increased belief in the efficacy of rituals.

Boyer and Lienard also identified rituals as repetitive, ordered, meticulous, rigidly unchanging, and bereft of goal-related actions. Flawless performance of a ritual therefore requires extensive cognitive resources. This swamps working memory, preventing the hazard from eliciting further anxiety.

Religious rituals are compelling because they co-opt our evolved disposition for ritual behavior, and provide meaning to actions that are ostensibly meaningless. While many religious rituals deal with the aforementioned hazards, they can also address social concerns, such as natural disasters or crop failures, by placing a god at the center of the ritual. If appeased by flawless performance of the ritual, the god may become a means for perceived control over these concerns. David Hume focused on this etiological approach in his Natural History of Religion.

WHAT IS RELIGION?

Many cognitive scientists define religion as an aggregate phenomenon, reliant on the exploitation of distinct cognitive mechanisms working in tandem. However, it's unlikely that religion sprung into existence in its current form. Most likely, there were earlier proto-religions that only utilized some of these mechanisms. If this is the case, then what drove the evolution of religion? Why were some mechanisms included at the expense of others? A functional approach may be required to answer these questions. For example, were these mechanisms exploited because each can serve a palliative or social function? Future research may provide insight into whether religion has a single unifying function, or really is just the sum of its parts.