Exploring the natural foundations of religion

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, this research is expanding the domain of concepts and causal reasoning in general. This review examines recent research into religious rituals, communication and transmission of religious knowledge, the development of god-concepts in children, and the origins and character of religious concepts in adults. Together, these studies consistently emphasize and support the notion that the cultural phenomena typically labeled as 'religion' may be understood as the product of aggregated ordinary cognition. The new cognitive science of religion should eventually provide a fuller account of the distinctive and apparently extraordinary properties of religion.     

Why Brains Are Not Computers,Why Behaviorism Is Not Satanism,and Why Dolphins Are Not Aquatic Apes

Modern psychology has, to all intents and purposes, become synonymous with cognitive psychology, with an emphasis on the idea that the brain is a form of computer, whose job is to take in sensory input, process information, and produce motor output. This places the brain at a remove from both the body and environment and denies the intimate connection that exists between them. As a result, a great injustice is done to both human and nonhuman animals: On the one hand, we fail to recognize the distinctive nature of nonhuman cognition, and on the other hand, we continue to promote a somewhat misleading view of human psychological capacities. Here, I suggest a more mutualistic, embodied, enactive view might allow us to ask more interesting questions about how animals of all kinds come to know their worlds, in ways that avoid the (inevitable) anthropocentric baggage of the cognitivist viewpoint.     

Performance of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) on a quantity discrimination task is similar to that of African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana)

Animal Cognition - Using an object-choice task, we measured the relative quantity discrimination ability of Asian elephants. Two zoo-housed elephants were given auditory cues of food being dropped...     

Intuitive Dualism and Afterlife Beliefs: A Cross-Cultural Study

It is widely held that intuitive dualism—an implicit default mode of thought that takes minds to be separable from bodies and capable of independent existence—is a human universal. Among the findings taken to support universal intuitive dualism is a pattern of evidence in which “psychological” traits (knowledge, desires) are judged more likely to continue after death than bodily or “biological” traits (perceptual, physiological, and bodily states). Here, we present cross-cultural evidence from six study populations, including non-Western societies with diverse belief systems, that shows that while this pattern exists, the overall pattern of responses nonetheless does not support intuitive dualism in afterlife beliefs. Most responses of most participants across all cultures tested were not dualist. While our sample is in no way intended to capture the full range of human societies and afterlife beliefs, it captures a far broader range of cultures than in any prior study, and thus puts the case for afterlife beliefs as evidence for universal intuitive dualism to a strong test. Based on these findings, we suggest that while dualist thinking is a possible mode of thought enabled by evolved human psychology, such thinking does not constitute a default mode of thought. Rather, our data support what we will call intuitive materialism—the view that the underlying intuitive systems for reasoning about minds and death produce as a default judgment that mental states cease to exist with bodily death.     

Emotion words shape emotion percepts

People believe they see emotion written on the faces of other people. In an instant, simple facial actions are transformed into information about another's emotional state. The present research examined whether a perceiver unknowingly contributes to emotion perception with emotion word knowledge. We present 2 studies that together support a role for emotion concepts in the formation of visual percepts of emotion. As predicted, we found that perceptual priming of emotional faces (e.g., a scowling face) was disrupted when the accessibility of a relevant emotion word (e.g., anger) was temporarily reduced, demonstrating that the exact same face was encoded differently when a word was accessible versus when it was not. The implications of these findings for a linguistically relative view of emotion perception are discussed.     

Chasing the Title VII Holy Grail: The Pitfalls of Guaranteeing Adverse Impact Elimination

Purpose

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologists with a unique role as professional test developers and consultants involved in assisting organizations in establishing the job-relatedness/validity defense to charges of discrimination, specifically charges based on an adverse or disparate impact theory. However, these activities have transmogrified into the fairly common occurrence of public municipalities and organizations demanding the reduction or absence of adverse impact as part of the scope of work or contracts and for practitioners and consultants to guarantee adverse impact reduction or elimination a priori. Plaintiffs and their experts also routinely argue that the observed adverse impact could have been allayed or eliminated if the defendant had only just used alternative testing methods. This then begs the following question: “Are there well established techniques and procedures that can reduce, minimize, or eliminate adverse impact in a predictable, generalizable, and replicable fashion in the same manner that we might guarantee validity?” The present paper seeks to answer this question.

Approach and Findings

With the preceding as a backdrop, the present paper identifies and discusses four overlooked critical attributes of adverse impact that collectively and in conjunction work against and obviate adverse impact reduction and elimination guarantees.

Conclusions and Implications

We conclude that the search for guaranteed adverse impact reduction or elimination is a “Holy Grail” and that we should avoid predictions and guarantees regarding adverse impact elimination in specific situations, including those based on the inclusion of “alternative” selection devices. However, in the context of civil rights legislation, and the intersection of I/O psychologists with said legislation, what we can guarantee as a science and profession are sound and valid tests and assessment devices that can be defended accordingly should the use of said tests and devices be challenged.     

Re-introduction to cross-cultural studies of the EPQ

Cross-cultural projects were undertaken, over some 25 years, to standardise the EPQ (both Adult and Junior forms) for many countries (See Appendix B for a list).