Ara norenzayan biography of williams

Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition. God is watching you: Priming God concepts increases prosocial behavior in an anonymous economic game AF Shariff, A Norenzayan Psychological science 18 9 , , Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality. The origin and evolution of religious prosociality A Norenzayan, AF Shariff science , , The birth of high gods.

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Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 27, Why minds create gods: Devotion, deception, death, and arational decision making. Cognitive and emotional processes in the cultural transmission of natural and nonnatural beliefs. Crandall Eds. However, in many parts of the world, secular institutions such as police, judges, and courts are also potent sources of social monitoring that encourage prosocial behavior.

Participants who watched a video about police effectiveness or were subtly primed with secular authority concepts expressed less distrust of atheists than did participants who watched a control video or were not primed, respectively Chapter 4. Furthermore, political intolerance of atheists is reduced in countries with effective secular rule of law Chapter 5.

These studies are among the first to systematically explore the social psychological underpinnings of anti-atheist prejudice, and converge to indicate the centrality of distrust in this phenomenon. How do we decide who merits social status? According to evolutionary theories of emotion, the nonverbal expressions of pride and shame play a key role in this process, functioning as automatically perceived status signals.

Moreover, they indicate that status judgments can be informed as much and often more by automatic responses to nonverbal expressions of emotion as by rational, contextually bound knowledge. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for functional theories of emotion expressions. How do we feel about our obligations? And are there cultural differences in our sense of obligation?

In four studies, I examine cultural differences in the degree to which we feel congruency between our sense of obligation to help others and our sense of agency about helping. Comparing participants from East Asian and Western European cultural backgrounds, I find that a East Asians are more likely than Westerners to feel a sense of congruency between agentic and obligated motivations to help others; b these cultural differences are partially mediated by positive attitudes towards hierarchy and filial values; and c East Asians are more likely to have positive emotional associations with both obligated and agentic motivations to help others.

The studies suggest that East Asians, in comparison to Westerners, are more likely to feel that their obligations are self endorsed and involve a positive emotional experience. Theses completed in or later are listed below. Please note that there is a month delay to add the latest theses.

Ara norenzayan biography of williams

We are in the midst of a global ecological crisis. There is a strong argument that the current cultural view of nature as an instrumental resource is failing us, and we must learn from other cultural and religious conceptions of the human-nature relationship. We designed and validated a item measure of ecospirituality and employed self-report measures and moral trade-off scenarios to address these questions.

Ecospirituality was negatively correlated with viewing nature as an instrumental and utilizable resource. Items on the Ecospirituality Scale were widely endorsed, and the scale was largely uncorrelated with political orientation and other demographic variables. Ecospirituality predicted how people made decisions in environmentally relevant domains, tending to treat nature as a sacred value.

This tendency was expressed in multiple ways: placing a greater importance on deontological principles to inform environmental decisions, explicitly refusing to engage in trade-offs between nature and economic gain, and unconditionally voting for the Green Party. Ecospirituality is a novel topic in psychology and may be important in explaining why some people are willing to make the sacrifices required to live a more sustainable lifestyle.

Human cultural practices are, and have always been, profoundly ritualistic. Yet, only recently has the study of ritual practices gained favor in the psychological sciences. Specifically, there is great intrigue in exploring why certain ritual forms consistently emerge across cultural and historical boundaries as they often exert potent effects on human sociality, cooperation, and cohesion.

For instance, culturally evolved collective rituals often involve some form of synchronized behavior. However, little is known about specific social cognitive effects of synchrony — the act of keeping together in time with others. Here, I hypothesized that synchronizing with others engages, and fosters, our everyday cognitive processes for reasoning about other minds — our theory of mind.

To test this hypothesis, I first demonstrated that participation in a synchronous ritualized task in the lab produced increases on a measure of theory of mind. In a second study, I replicated this effect and demonstrated that it could not be accounted for by general increases in sociality. In a third experiment, I tested the hypothesis that synchrony would foster ability as well as tendencies towards mental state reasoning.

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