Part I. Experimental Studies: 2. Experiment in psychology 3. Experiments on perceiving III Experiments on imaging 4-8. Experiments on remembering: (a) The method of description (b) The method of repeated reproduction (c) The method of picture writing (d) The method of serial reproduction (e) The method of serial reproduction picture material 9. Perceiving, recognizing, remembering 10. A theory of remembering 11. Images and their functions 12. Meaning Part II. Remembering as a Study in Social Psychology: 13. Social psychology 14. Social psychology and the matter of recall 15. Social psychology and the manner of recall 16. Conventionalism 17. The notion of a collective unconscious 18. The basis of social recall 19. A summary and some conclusions.

Remembering. A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, Cambridge (University Press) 1964.

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

The cultural origins of human cognition

Anthropomorphism describes the tendency to imbue the real or imagined behavior of nonhuman agents with humanlike characteristics, motivations, intentions, or emotions. Although surprisingly common, anthropomorphism is not invariant. This article describes a theory to explain when people are likely to anthropomorphize and when they are not, focused on three psychological determinants--the accessibility and applicability of anthropocentric knowledge (elicited agent knowledge), the motivation to explain and understand the behavior of other agents (effectance motivation), and the desire for social contact and affiliation (sociality motivation). This theory predicts that people are more likely to anthropomorphize when anthropocentric knowledge is accessible and applicable, when motivated to be effective social agents, and when lacking a sense of social connection to other humans. These factors help to explain why anthropomorphism is so variable; organize diverse research; and offer testable predictions about dispositional, situational, developmental, and cultural influences on anthropomorphism. Discussion addresses extensions of this theory into the specific psychological processes underlying anthropomorphism, applications of this theory into robotics and human-computer interaction, and the insights offered by this theory into the inverse process of dehumanization.

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On seeing human: A three-factor theory of anthropomorphism.

Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will -- those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

The Illusion of Conscious Will

In both natural and religious thinking, people have ntultiple versions of the same concepts that may be contradictory. In the domain of religious concepts, these ntultiple levels of representation in single individuals may be termed "Theological Correctness." Versions of religioiis concepts range front fairly simple or concrete to very complex and abstract. Selection of the, concept to be used in any given context is largely dependent on the cognitive processing demands of the task. In tasks in which there is great derrtand to draw quick and rich inferences, a basic concept comprised largely of intuitive knowledge, is used. In tasks in which there is less demand, as when one is slowly and carefully riflecting on one's knowledge, more complicated, intuition violating theoretical concepts may be drawn upon. In the domain of religious concepts these concepts closely match traditional theology and so may be termed theological concepts. Implications for data gathering and theorizing in the study of religion are discussed. Finally, these observations suggest the. importance of insights from cognitive sciertce, for the study of religion.

Theological Correctness: Cognitive Constraint and the Study of Religion

Concepts of gods, like any other concepts, are informed and constrained by cross-cultural regularities of the human mind-brain. Specifically, divine beings that are represented as intentional agents are subject to the cognitive intuitions that govern all intentional agents. These intuitions may include psychological and physical attributes not endorsed by a given theological tradition. Experimental evidence is presented supporting the presence of these cognitive constraints and a resulting divergence between stated theological beliefs and implicit concepts. Hindu residents of northern India completed questionnaires regarding attributes of Brahman, Shiva, Vishnu, or Krishna and also participated in a narrative comprehension task. Results revealed striking differences in how the gods were conceived in the two contexts. Theoretical developments in the scientific study of religion during the 1990s have been distinguished by the growing influence of cognitive science. As Stewart Guthrie remarked in 1996, "New efforts at producing a general theory [of religion] have appeared. Although these range from irrationalist, wishful-thinking theories to rationalist and linguistic ones, they increasingly emphasize cognition' (412). This swell of theoretical work only serves to magnify the paucity of empirical scholarship using cognitive methods and insights to address issues in the study of theistic and other cultural systems. The present project addresses this evidential shortcoming by examining the general question of how cognitive architecture informs and constrains conceptualizations of the Divine. In brief, as with any other concept, concepts of gods must largely conform to the undergirding cognitive intuitive assumptions universally held for the ontological category of gods. Since gods are typically understood as intentional agents, they must satisfy the (often) tacit assumptions of agenthood. 1

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1388144

Cognitive Constraints on Hindu Concepts of the Divine

Cognitive science of religion brings theories from the cognitive sciences to bear on why religious thought and action is so common in humans and why religious phenomena take on the features that they do. The field is characterized by a piecemeal approach, explanatory non-exclusivism, and methodological pluralism. Topics receiving consideration include how ordinary cognitive structures inform and constrain the transmission of religious ideas, why people believe in gods, why religious rituals and prayer tend to have the forms that they do, why afterlife beliefs are so common, and how human memory systems influence socio-political features in religious systems. Cognitive Science of Religion is often associated with evolutionary science and anti-religious rhetoric but neither is intrinsic nor necessary to the field.

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Cognitive Science of Religion: What Is It and Why Is It?

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:823921d6-045d-490c-8c18-c51561577c88/download_file?safe_filename=The%2Bscience%2Bof%2Breligious%2Bbeliefs%2B&file_format=application%2Fpdf&type_of_work=Journal+article

The science of religious beliefs

Boyer's theory of counterintuitive cultural concept transmission claims that concepts that ideas that violate naturally occurring intuitive knowledge structures enough to be attention-demanding but not so much to undermine conceptual coherence have a transmission advantage over other concepts (Boyer et al. 2001: 535-64). Because of the prominence of these counterintuitive concepts in religious belief systems, Boyer's theory features prominently in many cognitive treatments of religion. Difficulties in identifying what are and are not counterintuitive concepts in this technical sense, however, has made empirical treatment of Boyer's theory irregular and difficult to evaluate. Further, inability to quantify just how counterintuitive a given concept is has made ambiguous specifying where the alleged cognitive optimum lies. The present project attempts to clarify Boyer's theory and presents a formal system for coding and quantifying the "counterintuitiveness" of a concept, and hence, facilitates empirical scrutiny of the theory.

Justin L. Barrett

Papers

Theological Correctness: Cognitive Constraint and the Study of Religion

Cognitive Constraints on Hindu Concepts of the Divine

Cognitive Science of Religion: What Is It and Why Is It?

The science of religious beliefs

Coding and Quantifying Counterintuitiveness in Religious Concepts: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections