bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Towards a Cognitive Science of New Religious Movements
Authors: Upal M. Afzal 
Published: June 2005

AbstractTraditionally cognitive scientists have had little to say about religion (and even less to say about new religious movements (NRMs)) partly because religion is arguably a social phenomenon (Bainbridge et al. 1994) and partly because of the pervasive scientific bias of relegating religion to the heap of the irrational, the illogical, and 'a fading vestige of the prescientific times' (Lewis 2003). While sociologists of religion have been studying NRMs, their analysis has been limited to the macro-level. Recent trends in sociology and economics focused on the so called rational choice theories (Iannaccone 1998) and in cognitive sciences of religion (Barrett 2000; Boyer 2001) offer the hope of moving in the direction of a more complete explanation of emergence of new religious movements by providing both macro and micro level analyses. I believe that a closer interaction between these two developments is possible, indeed necessary, for the development of a scientific theory of NRMs that weds the macro and the micro levels. I illustrate the benefits of this approach by focusing on a hitherto ignored phenomenon, the emergence of charismatic leaders who inspire new religious movements. The primary aim of this paper is to identify the contextual factors (both social and cognitive) that cause self-interested utility maximizing agents to take actions that result in new religious movements (NRM). Our secondary aim is to identify factors that cause other self interested utility maximizing agents to align themselves with NRM founders and become the believers. I illustrate how various tools of cognitive science including computer modeling can help in this regard.
Children's Acceptance of Conflicting Testimony: The Case of Death
Authors: Harris Paul , Giménez Marta 
Published: June 2005

Abstract
Children aged 7 and 11 years were interviewed about death in the context of two different narratives. Each narrative described the death of a grandparent but one narrative provided a secular context whereas the other provided a religious context. Following each narrative, children were asked to judge whether various bodily and mental processes continue to function after death, and to justify their judgment. Children displayed two different conceptions of death. They often acknowledged that functioning ceases at death and offered appropriate biological justifications for that judgment. However, they also claimed that functioning continues after death and offered appropriate religious justifications. The tendency to claim that functioning continues after death was more frequent among older children than younger children, more frequent in the context of the religious narrative as opposed to the secular narrative and more frequent with respect to mental processes than bodily processes. Particularly among older children, two distinct conceptions of death appear to co-exist: a biological conception in which death implies the cessation of living processes and a metaphysical conception in which death marks the beginning of the afterlife.
Embodiment in Religious Knowledge
Authors: Barsalou Lawrence , Barbey Aron , Simmons W. Kyle , Santos Ava 
Published: June 2005

Abstract
Increasing evidence suggests that mundane knowledge about objects, people, and events is grounded in the brain's modality-specific systems. The modality-specific representations that become active to represent these entities in actual experience are later used to simulate them in their absence. In particular, simulations of perception, action, and mental states often appear to underlie the representation of knowledge, making it embodied and situated. Findings that support this conclusion are briefly reviewed from cognitive psychology, social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. A similar representational process may underlie religious knowledge. In support of this conjecture, embodied knowledge appears central to three aspects of religious experience: religious visions, religious beliefs, and religious rituals. In religious visions, the process of simulation offers a natural account of how these experiences are produced. In religious beliefs, knowledge about the body and the environment are typically central in religious frameworks, and are likely to affect the perception of daily experience. In religious rituals, embodiments appear central to conveying religious ideas metaphorically and to establishing them in memory. To the extent that religious knowledge is like non-religious knowledge, embodiment is likely to play central roles.
Religious Practice, Brain, and Belief
Authors: Livingston Kenneth 
Published: June 2005

AbstractIt is a common assertion that there is a fundamental epistemological divide between religious and secular ways of knowing. The claim is that knowledge of the sacred rests on faith, while knowledge of the natural world rests on the evidence of our senses. A review of both the psychological and the neurophysiological literatures suggests, to the contrary, that for many people, religious experiences provide powerful reasons to believe in the supernatural. Examples are given from reports of mystical or transcendent experiences to show that those experiences are taken as evidence in support of religious belief, both by those who have the experiences, and by those who are connected in various ways to the believer. A large body of research shows that such experiences can be linked directly to particular neurophysiological events, but it is argued that this is not sufficient to support a simple reductionist analysis. Studies are described that make it clear that anomalous experiences do not become meaningful until interpreted through the lens of prior belief, and that existing religious doctrine is the most common source of that interpretive framework. It is argued that religious systems tend to promote practices that increase the likelihood of religious experiences that are easily interpreted as evidence in support of core beliefs of the tradition. There is thus an evolving synergy between the experienced and the doctrinal, but it is a synergy that is at bottom supported by ordinary processes of induction and deduction, operating on distinctive kinds of evidence.
The Emotional Coherence of Religion
Authors: Thagard Paul 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThis paper uses a psychological/computational theory of emotional coherence to explain several aspects of religious belief and practice. After reviewing evidence for the importance of emotion to religious thought and cognition in general, it describes psychological and social mechanisms of emotional cognition. These mechanisms are relevant to explaining the acquisition and maintenance of religious belief, and also shed light on such practices as prayer and other rituals. These psychological explanations are contrasted with ones based on biological evolution.
Pretending as Imaginative Rehearsal for Cultural Conformity
Authors: Bogdan Radu 
Published: June 2005

AbstractPretend play and pretense develop in distinct phases of childhood as ontogenetically adaptive responses to pressures specific to those phases, and may have evolved in different periods of human ancestry. These are pressures to assimilate cultural artifacts, norms, roles, and behavioral scripts. The playful and creative elements in both forms of pretending are dictated by the variable, open-ended, and evolving nature and function of the cultural tasks they handle. The resulting creativity of the adult intellect is likely to be a distant and indirect by-product of temporary and specific ontogenetic responses to temporary and specific ontogenetic challenges, particularly cultural ones.
Linkages between Number Concepts, Spatial Thinking, and Directionality of Writing: The SNARC Effect and the REVERSE SNARC Effect in English and Arabic Monoliterates, Biliterates, and Illiterate Arabic Speakers
Authors: Zebian Samar 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThe current investigations coordinate math cognition and cultural approaches to numeric thinking to examine the linkages between numeric and spatial processes, and how these linkages are modified by the cultural artifact of writing. Previous research in the adult numeric cognition literature has shown that English monoliterates have a spatialised mental number line which is oriented from left-to-right with smaller magnitudes associated with the left side of space and larger magnitudes are associated with the right side of space. These associations between number and space have been termed the Spatial Numeric Association Response Code Effect (SNARC effect, Dehaene, 1992). The current study investigates the spatial orientation of the mental number line in the following groups: English monoliterates, Arabic monoliterates who use only the right-left writing system, Arabic-English biliterates, and illiterate Arabic speakers who only read numerals. Current results indicate, for the first time, a Reverse SNARC effect for Arabic monoliterates, such that the mental number line had a right-to-left directionality. Furthermore, a weakened Reverse SNARC was observed for Arabic-English biliterates, and no effect was observed among Illiterate Arabic speakers. These findings are especially notable since left-right biases are neurologically supported and are observed in pre-literate children regardless of which writing system is used by adults. The broader implications of how cultural artifacts affect basic numeric cognition will be discussed.
"O Lord… You Perceive my Thoughts from Afar": Recursiveness and the Evolution of Supernatural Agency
Authors: Bering Jesse , Johnson Dominic 
Published: June 2005

AbstractAcross religious belief systems, some supernatural agents are nearly always granted privileged epistemic access into the self's thoughts. In addition, the ethnographic literature supports the claim that, across cultures, supernatural agents are envisioned as (1) incapable of being deceived through overt behaviors; (2) preoccupied with behavior in the moral domain; (3) punitive agents who cause general misfortune to those who transgress and; (4) committed to an implicit social contract with believers that is dependent on the rules of reciprocal altruism. The present article examines the possibility that these factors comprise a developmentally based, adaptive information-processing system that increased the net genetic fitness of ancestral human beings living within complex social groups. In particular, the authors argue that fear of supernatural punishment, whether in this life or in the hereafter, encouraged the inhibition of selfish actions that were associated with "real" punishment (and thus real selective impairments) by actual group members.
Cultural Difference in the Application of the Diagnosticity Principle to Schematic Faces
Authors: Zhou Guomei , Fu Xiaolan , Hayward William , Locke Vance , Pellicano Elizabeth 
Published: June 2005

Abstract
Tversky's (1977) diagnosticity principle implies that categorization affects similarity, and that similarity in turn is based on context. However, Nisbett, Peng, Choi, and Norenzayan (2001) suggest that Chinese and Westerners differ in their sensitivity to context and categorization. Because of these differences, it is not clear whether Chinese should follow the diagnosticity principle. To explore these possibilities, we conducted a cross-cultural experiment using participants from Australia and China to repeat the experiment of Tversky (1977) using schematic faces as stimuli. Results showed that Australians, but not Chinese, made similarity judgments in a manner compatible with the diagnosticity principle. We suggest that: 1) the use of the diagnosticity principle depends upon contextual variables for Chinese people; and 2) Chinese participants judged neutral schematic faces as more positive than Western participants did.
A Topical Note on Accessing Scientific Refinement
Authors: Schmidt Colin 
Published: June 2005

AbstractIntellectual affinities are intertwined with community feeling. In an Era of E-everything, communities as we once knew them have been split up and remade in a virtual manner. With their uses of the Internet for promoting Science, institutions of higher education have pushed reflections about multi-person activities out of the framework of the Information Society and into that of the Knowledge Community – computer-mediated scientific research and distance learning as cult-ural activities. The current study shows that this shift towards another physical support for the same thirst for knowledge necessitates considering the logical and paradoxical aspects of human dialogue for programs that wish to naturalise the culture acquisition process.
Race, Religion, and Caste: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives
Authors:   Oommen
Published: June 2005

AbstractAlthough race as a biological concept has no validity, racism persists. In spite of the fact that caste is a social construct caste discrimination continues. To understand the reason for this one must trace the career of these concepts. The biological category of race subsequently came to have linguistic/philological, ethnological/cultural and political/national connotations giving birth to Nazism and fascism. Similarly, caste carried a racial connotation in that its social construction can be traced to the Hindu Doctrine of Creation as Varna implied colour. Further, both orientalist scholars and Hindu nationalists used caste and race, race and nation and even religion and race interchangeably. The divide between the fair-skinned upper caste Aryan Hindus and the dark-skinned lower caste Dravidian Hindus also implied racial differences. Therefore, the mechanical insistence on semantic purity of race and caste would adversely affect one's comprehension of the nature of empirical reality in South Asia. While the tendency to equate caste and race in a neat and tidy vein is not sustainable, it is more difficult to eradicate caste discrimination as compared with racism not only because the two share several common characteristics, but also because caste discrimination is sanctioned by religion. Finally, it is important to remember that perceptions people hold about social reality are equally important as social fact, in successfully tackling social problems.
Accelerated Decline of Religious Beliefs in Europe
Authors: Dogan Mattei 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThere is no filiation between the agnosticism of intellectual elites in previous centuries and today's decline of religious beliefs in the populace. The analysis is based on several international mass surveys concerning twenty European countries between 1980 and 2000. Religious beliefs are considered as observable social facts. Seven tables bring empirical evidence. The analysis of survey research are preceded by a review of the current sociological literature, particularly in France, on the "crisis of Catholicism", "dechristianisation", "paganisation", "apostasy", and of the papal encyclics and Episcopal declarations.
The Transition to Capitalism in China and Russia
Authors: Weede Erich 
Published: June 2005

AbstractAt the end of the 1970s the per capita income ratio between the Soviet Union and China was 16 to 1. By now, the gap between Russia and China is closing rapidly. Although the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union contributed to this levelling of per capita incomes, domestic factors and improvements in China look more important: decollectivization of Chinese agriculture, the establishment of township village enterprises in China, economic openness and market-preserving federalism in China. In all these respects, even post-Soviet Russia continues to lag. Admittedly, Russia was faster than China in privatizing state owned enterprises but the preferential treatment of insiders and the weakness of the rule of law or functional substitutes for it neutralized this potential Russian advantage.
Post-Colonial Journeys: Historical Roots of Immigration and Integration
Authors: Riley Dylan , Emigh Rebecca Jean 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThe effect of Italian colonialism on migration to Italy differed according to the pre-colonial social structure, a factor previously neglected by immigration theories. In Eritrea, precolonial Christianity, sharp class distinctions, and a strong state promoted interaction between colonizers and colonized. Eritrean nationalism emerged against Ethiopia; thus, no sharp break between Eritreans and Italians emerged. Two outgrowths of colonialism, the Eritrean national movement and religious ties, facilitate immigration and integration. In contrast, in Somalia, there was no strong state, few class differences, the dominant religion was Islam, and nationalists opposed Italian rule. Consequently, Somali developed few institutional ties to colonial authorities and few institutions provided resources to immigrants. Thus, Somali immigrants are few and are not well integrated into Italian society.
"Spheres of Justice" in the Israeli Kibbutz and Urban Sectors: Adolescents' Views
Authors: Dar Yechezkel , Sabbagh Clara 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThe current study suggests that, in order to enhance our understanding of the dynamics of the "local" system of distributive justice in the Israeli kibbutz, we need to examine its links to the broader society and its correspondent conceptions of justice. Following the notion of "spheres of justice" and using data gathered in 1986, prior to the accelerated de-communalization of the kibbutz, these dynamics are examined by comparing the social justice judgments of kibbutz and urban adolescents. This comparison unveiled a shared pattern in justice systems in which both kibbutz and urban adolescents favor differentiation of particularistic resources (prestige and power) more strongly than differentiation of universalistic resources (learning opportunities and money). At the same time, the comparison also highlighted the distinctive features of the kibbutz's local justice system of stronger differentiation of prestige, the most particularistic resource, and of economic equality, the most universalistic resource. The kibbutz's distinctive system of distributive justice can be attributed to its communal structure, which has been often characterized by the coexistence of egalitarian and equitarian distributive mechanisms.
Islamic Culture and Democracy: Testing the 'Clash of Civilizations' Thesis
Authors: Inglehart Ronald , Norris Pippa 
Published: June 2005

AbstractIn seeking to understand the root causes of the events of 9/11 many accounts have turned to Samuel P. Huntington's provocative and controversial thesis of a 'clash of civilizations', arousing strong debate. Evidence from the 1995-2001 waves of the World Values Survey/European Values Survey (WVS/EVS) allows us, for the first time, to examine an extensive body of empirical evidence relating to this debate. Comparative analysis of the beliefs and values of Islamic and non-Islamic publics in 75 societies around the globe, confirms the first claim in Huntington's thesis: culture does matter, and indeed matters a lot, so that religious legacies leave a distinct imprint on contemporary values. But Huntington is mistaken in assuming that the core clash between the West and Islamic worlds concerns democracy. The evidence suggests striking similarities in the political values held in these societies. It is true that Islamic publics differ from Western publics concerning the role of religious leadership in society, but this is not a simple dichotomous clash — many non-Islamic societies side with the Islamic ones on this issue. Moreover the Huntington thesis fails to identify the most basic cultural fault line between the West and Islam, which concerns the issues of gender equality and sexual liberalization. The cultural gulf separating Islam from the West involves Eros far more than Demos.
The Worldviews of Islamic Publics: The Cases of Egypt, Iran, and Jordan
Authors: Azadarmaki Taqhi , Moaddel Mansoor 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThis paper analyzes the religious beliefs, religiosity, national identity, and attitudes toward Western culture, family, and gender relations of the publics of three Islamic countries. It is based on national representative surveys of 3000 Egyptians, 2532 Iranians, and 1222 Jordanians that were carried out in 2000-2001, as part of the World Values Surveys. We first discuss the views of the respondents concerning key indicators of religious beliefs, religiosity, identity, and attitudes toward Western culture. Then, we describe variations in such values as the ideal number of children, attitudes toward marriage and women, family ties, and trusts in major social institutions in these three countries. Next, we present age and educational differences in religious beliefs, trust in mosque, identity, trust in government, attitude toward women and gender relations. We conclude by pointing to the variation in the nature of the regime as an important determinant of the variations in the worldviews among the public in these three Islamic countries.
Gender Equality and Democracy
Authors: Welzel Christian , Norris Pippa , Inglehart Ronald 
Published: June 2005

AbstractAlthough democratic institutions existed long before gender equality, at this point in history, growing emphasis on gender equality is a central component of the process of democratization. Support for gender equality is not just a consequence of democratization. It is part of a broad cultural change that is transforming industrialized societies and bringing growing mass demands for increasingly democratic institutions. This article analyzes the role of changing mass attitudes in the spread of democratic institutions, using survey evidence from 70 societies containing 80 percent of the world's population. The evidence supports the conclusion that the process of modernization drives cultural change that encourage both the rise of women in public life, and the development of democratic institutions.
Introduction: Diversity of Elite Configurations and Clusters of Power
Authors: Dogan Mattei 
Published: June 2005

AbstractDefinitions of several concepts: ruling class, elite configuration, apex of power, elite interlock, functional elites, elite cousinhood. In the field of elites one notices a preponderance of contemporary American theories which are not all adequate for understanding elites stratification and roles in other parts of the world. A series of binary comparisons between France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Japan, underlines differences and similarities.
"Big Men" in Sub-Saharan Africa: How Elites Accumulate Positions and Resources
Authors: Daloz Jean-Pascal 
Published: June 2005

AbstractIn sub-Saharan Africa, the differentiation between political, administrative, and economic elites remains far from being manifest. What is certain is that we are almost never dealing with impermeable groups, huddled up in their respective spheres. Notwithstanding the cohesive and hegemonic picture painted for ideological reasons by many intellectuals, these elites prove to be very divided in most instances. But this lack of unity is much more related to vertical ethno-regional or factional cleavages than to formal roles. Before analysing the particular character of sub-Saharan Africa in this respect by referring to the "Big Man" analytical model, this essay emphasizes the extent to which this question has been addressed in a partial way in available literature whether expressed through the development theories of the 1960s, the neo-Marxist dependency approaches of the 1970s or the so-called "third wave" of African studies from the 1980s.