A Year of Progress in CERC’s Scientific Study of Religion
by Ryan Nichols
CERC concluded the academic year with a conference drawing together affiliates of the grant from across the world. Special efforts were made to bring humanities scholars of religion into the conversation. A total of 67 researchers attended the conference and 50 of them presented posters. The event included presentations of work ranging from Emma Cohen’s study of accent as a guide to social preferences and cooperation to Charles Muller’s dictionaries of Buddhism and of Sinitic characters to Kiley Hamlin’s findings about reward and punishment in preverbal infants. Some of the posters are available below. But conversation across disciplines, where it happened, was strained by an expected undertone of skepticism from scientists about the work of humanists and humanists about the work of scientists . Especially humanists.
The questions that guide CERC are common to social sciences and humanities, but it remains unclear how to unify work across this divide that is focused on answering these questions. During the conference, project co-director Mark Collard initiated a conversation about theoretical and methodological components needed for building a bridge between traditional research on religion by humanists and scientific research on religion by anthropologists, psychologists and other social sciences. During his talk he identified points of contact between the two approaches. The Q&A turned up a number of semi-helpful suggestions for accelerating interdisciplinary collaboration.
Not everyone would concur with that judgment, however.
For example, two deans of the traditional humanistic study of religion were passing notes in the seats directly in front of me. That’s no big deal. At all. It was the content of the last note during Mark’s session that got my attention. It simply read: “Much ado about nothing.” Like Statler and Waldorf, the irrepressibly pessimistic critics casting practiced aspersions from the balcony seats at Muppets’ shows, these two scholars weren’t buying it. Not much of a surprise considering that these authors write papers saying that researchers studying religion with scientific methods are “delusory”.
In the interests of attempting to foster productive discussion amongst the Statlers and Waldorfs out there who were not able to attend, what follows are brief descriptions of a variety of results presented at the conference.
POSTER SESSION 1
Azim Shariff and his Culture and Morality Lab continue to do ground-breaking work in the psychology of religion. In addition to his creativity as a researcher, one reason to regularly read Azim’s work is that his results get support from mixed methods including laboratory experiments, economic games, and the use of big data to look at trends at the state level. His conference poster highlighted work with Mijke Rhemtulla about the effects of belief in heaven and belief in hell on crime rates. Their regression separates rates of belief in hell from rates of belief in heaven, and uses data from 67 countries. Covariates like poverty and income inequality were shown not have effects on average crime rate. Belief in God, hell and heaven did, though. In the published paper they conclude, “Controlling for the effect of belief in heaven, a 1 SD increase in belief in hell resulted in an almost 2 SD decrease in national crime rate; conversely, controlling for the effect of hell, a 1 SD increase in belief in heaven resulted in an almost 2 SD increase in national crime rate” (2). Wow.
Session 1 brimmed with exciting findings from the likes of Emma Cohen, Kiley Hamlin, Will Gervais, Jonathan Lanman, and many people here at UBC, including Ara Norenzayan, Rita McNamara, Aiyana Willard, Joe Henrich, and my officemate Ben Purzycki, who presented data from his comparative studies of supernatural minds project drawing from data collected during fieldwork in the Tuva Republic.
(Tom Shultz wrote about his experience at the conference and making a poster for an interdisciplinary audience here – ed.)
POSTER SESSION 2
The majority of posters in Session 2 were presented by researchers at LEVYNA, the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion, at Masaryk University. The leadership of Dimitris Xygalatas, LEVYNA’s commitment to multidisciplinary, and its researchers’ talents for triangulating answers to big questions go some way toward explaining why its approaches to core questions about religion are among the most innovative. I say this in part because of a trend that ran through the LEVYNA posters: this group is bent on closing explanatory gaps that crop up through ecological confounds by unifying methods familiar from experimental psychology, field anthropology and much more. A psychologist might prime participants by having them perform a ritual and test for prosociality; a sociologist can look at group synchrony behavior in the context of religious services; an economist could correlate denominational rituals with variables like giving to the in-group. Studies of this form offer appreciable answers to core CERC questions—see here for our list of those questions. But without studying religious cognition, emotion and behavior in situ and from distinct methodological perspectives, our answers to these questions risk familiar charges of ecological invalidity.
Enter LEVYNA. In her presentation Eva Kundtová Klocová presented an experimental design about a study of ritual. Eva’s design framed four hypotheses about ritual—specifically, about the embodiment of ritual in one of several physical positions. For example, Eva hypothesized that participants in prostrate and kneeling positions will score higher on subordinance than other participants. Participants were run through ritual positions familiar from a number of religions. Rather than rest content with self-reported measurements on scales of dominance and submission, Eva collected saliva samples with the intention to test for lower testosterone and higher cortisol in participants taking submissive postures. CERC wants to know answers to questions including, “How do rituals work, cognitively and socially? Does ritual participation deepen commitment to the group?” LEVYNA’s research is yielding compelling results that hint at well-rounded answers—in other words, answers that unify data about embodiment, physiology, hormones, emotions and prosociality.
POSTER SESSION 3
Session 3 featured research at the intersection of the Social Sciences and Humanities. The poster by Sydney Levine and David Rose (not displayed) presented a well-designed study at these crossroads. Their experimental design aimed to test competing hypotheses about the formation of the moral/conventional distinction. Historically moral norms characterize universalizable rules, which are thought to elicit a set of stereotypical responses. Conventional norms are not regarded as universalizable and ipso facto subject to greater psychological variation. Shaun Nichols, in Sentimental Rules, argued on behalf of a theory of “sentimental norms” according to which we respond to a norm as a moral norm just in case the norm is associated with certain affective states. Sentimental norms theory is criticized on the basis of recent studies using vignettes and collecting responses about the morality of the behavior portrayed in them. These studies purport to show variance in ratings of permissibility of moral transgressions, a hallmark of the application of conventional rather than moral norms. But Levine and David show that vignette studies used for this purpose are subject to severe confounds having to do with significant variations in the amount and type of affect prompted by vignettes that portray harms. They show that the level of affect correlated strongly with the severity of moral judgment. This provides a corrective to previous work on the psychology of conventional and moral norms, and leads the way to more refined testing by experimental philosophers of features of non-cognitive moral judgment.
(More information on Masahiro Shimoda’s SAT Daizōkyō Text Database and Charles Muller’s Digital Dictionary of Buddhism and CJKV-English Dictionary can be found here and here, respectively, to supplement their posters below. -ed)
POSTER SESSION 4
A number of the posters in Session 4 summarized several studies rather than presenting a single experiment. Torrance Kirby highlighted several ongoing projects at CREOR, McGill University’s Centre for Research on Religion, including efforts to understand “cognitive ecologies” in Early Modern Europe and to reappraise the relationship between certain sermons and conversion experiences in 16th-century England. Joseph Bulbulia and his co-authors reported their Bayesian analysis of images drawn from a study of a fire-walking ritual in San Pedro Manrique, Spain. Incoming post-doc Brenton Sullivan’s poster reported his study of the rise of monasteries in Tibet. The rise and fall of mega-monasteries in this region has been attributed to systems of patronage, decentralized organization and a lax system of discipline. Brenton undertook a systematic review of a variety of literature in an effort to improve our understanding of these historical processes, including reading of monastic gazetteers, biographies, “constitutions” and Qing imperial documents. He found key processes explaining the maintenance of mega-monasteries to include creation of offices, a system of wealth distribution, rotating abbacy and more. And then there is Quentin Atkinson’s poster, presenting remarkable results using novel techniques of data analysis across fields of research including religion, language, and sociality, and field work in the Pacific.
All in all, we’ve been busy around here. With the novel methods and boundary-pushing, multi-disciplinary results tied together with theoretical care on display at the year-end CERC conference, what’s left to say to the Statlers and Waldorfs?
More to the point: do we care to say it?
Attendees:
Adam Baimel | UBC |
Aiyana Willard | UBC |
Amelia Barker | Simon Fraser University |
Anders Petersen | Aarhus University |
Anne Murphy | UBC |
Ara Norenzayan | UBC |
Ayesha Chaudry | UBC |
Azim Shariff | University of Oregon |
Ben Purzycki | UBC |
Brenton Sullivan | UBC – University of Virginia |
Caitlyn Placek | Washington State University |
Charles Muller | University of Tokyo |
Christoph Hauert | UBC |
David Vaclavic | LEVYNA |
Dietmar Neufeld | UBC |
Dimitris Xygalatas | LEVYNA |
Don Baker | UBC |
Don Wiebe | University of Toronto |
Edward Slingerland | UBC |
Emma Cohen | University of Oxford |
Eva Klocova | LEVYNA |
Hadassah Head | Binghamton University |
Harvey Whitehouse | University of Oxford |
Ian McDonald | Binghamtom University |
Jesper Sorenson | Aarhus University |
Jessica De Villiers | UBC |
Jessica Main | UBC |
Jessica Munson | Simon Fraser University |
Joe Henrich | UBC |
Jonathan Lanman | Queen’s University Belfast |
Joseph Bulbulia | Victoria University |
Joy Dixon | UBC |
Justin Lane | University of Oxford |
Katherine Young | McGill University |
Kiley Hamlin | UBC |
Kristoffer Nielbo | Aarhus University |
Luther Martin | University of Vermont |
Lyle Eslinger | University of Calgary |
Mark Collard | Simon Fraser University |
Martin Lang | LEVYNA |
Masahiro Shimoda | University of Tokyo |
Megan Daniels | Stanford University |
Paul Reddish | LEVYNA |
Penny Tok | LEVYNA |
Peter Nosco | UBC |
Pieter Francois | University of Oxford |
Quentin Atkinson | University of Auckland |
Radek Kundt | LEVYNA |
Ray Siemens | University of Victoria |
Richard Sosis | University of Connecticut |
Rita McNamara | UBC |
Robin Yates | McGill University |
Roger Beck | University of Toronto |
Rumee Ahmed | UBC |
Ryan Nichols | UBC – Cal State Fullerton |
Samin Saadat | UBC |
Susan Birch | UBC |
Sydney Levine | Rutgers University |
Taylor Davis | UBC |
Theresa He | UBC |
Tinu Ruparell | University of Calgary |
Tom Shultz | McGill University |
Torrance Kirby | McGill University |
Uffe Schoedt | Aarhus University |
Wai Lun Tam | Chinese University of Hong Kong |
Will Gervais | University of Kentucky |
Yasha Hartberg | Binghamton University |