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- Religion has survived and thrived for more than 100,000 years. It exists in every culture, with more than 85 percent of the world’s population embracing some sort of religious belief. Researchers who study the psychology and neuroscience of religion are helping to explain why such beliefs are so enduring.
www.apa.org/monitor/2010/12/believeA reason to believe - American Psychological Association (APA)
Dec 18, 2018 · The quick and easy answer to why people are religious is that God – in whichever form you believe he/she/they take (s) – is real and people believe because they communicate with it and perceive...
- Nick Perham
Nick obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of...
- Cognitive Psychology
Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman made his mark in many...
- Faith
How online Ramadan content has brought Muslim ideas around...
- Nick Perham
Apr 7, 2015 · The merest acquaintance with the humans on planet Earth and their religions immediately raises two questions: (1) Why are there so many religions? and (2) Why are religious people so immune to ...
Our religious services of today may seem worlds away from the mammalian play and empathy that emerged in our deep past, and indeed institutionalised religion is much more advanced than a...
Jul 6, 2021 · Key points. At least 18,000 different gods, goddesses and various animals or objects have been worshipped by humans. Spirituality, or religiosity, has been mapped to a brain circuit that was...
- Predisposed to Believe
- Neural Underpinnings
- Pro-Sociality
There’s no one cognitive tendency that undergirds all our religious beliefs, says Barrett. “It’s really your basic, garden-variety cognitions that provide the impetus for religious beliefs,” he says. A common thread to those cognitions is that they lead us to see the world as a place with an intentional design, created by someone or something. Youn...
Neuroscience research supports the idea that the brain is primed to believe, says Jordan Grafman, PhD, director of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. This tendency, he says, is spread throughout the brain, and probably arose from neural circuits developed for other uses. “The idea that...
Religion may serve another key purpose — it allows people to live in large, cooperative societies, says Norenzayan. In fact, the use of religion as a social tool may largely explain its staying power and cross-cultural ubiquity. “Religion is one of the big ways that human societies have hit on as a solution to induce unrelated individuals to be nic...
Nov 9, 2011 · The vast majority of the world’s 7 billion people practice some kind of religion, ranging from massive worldwide churches to obscure spiritual traditions and local sects. Nobody really knows how many religions there are on …
Sep 19, 2018 · Having defined what religion is, Smith then turns to outline why people are religious, which is a long list. Humans are religious because religion provides community, identity, meaning, ecstasy, aesthetic enjoyment, social control, and emotional energy from worship and collective action.
