Citation in APA format: Norenzayan, A. (2025). Religion. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, E. J. Finkel, & W. B. Mendes (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (6th ed.). Situational Press. https://doi.org/10.70400/WGPJ9715

Religion 

Ara Norenzayan, University of British Columbia 

The afterlife. Immortal souls. Rebirth. Sacrifice. Sacred values. Small, medium, and big gods. Special intermediaries between humans and gods. Monumental architecture. Ceremonial burial. Imagined moral communities. Socially mandated, causally opaque group conventions. Extravagant displays of faith in the unseen. Painful ordeals to appease the gods. Self-transcendence. 

If extraterrestrial social psychologists were to observe human societies and report back, these would be some of the remarkable features of human social and mental life on Earth that they would find interesting. Moreover, being well-trained specialists, these extraterrestrial researchers would zoom in on one or another of these intriguing behaviors and inclinations and get to work, developing causal models to understand them. Then a few of these researchers -- after talking to the cultural anthropologists -- would begin to suspect that these phenomena are somehow linked. 

Our alien social psychologists would eventually realize that human societies organize themselves around mysterious metaphysical commitments combined with unquestioned social norms. These "ultimate sacred postulates" (Rappaport, 1999; Atran, 2002) appear to be deeply rooted in emotions and social identities (rather than reasoning or observation) and are neither debatable nor negotiable. They would come to appreciate that these beliefs and behaviors constitute an evolutionary puzzle –persistent and widespread despite their inscrutability and apparent costliness to the self. Excited, they may turn to the ethnolinguists, who later confirm that there is indeed an umbrella word that some (though not most) societies on Earth apply to these beliefs and behaviors. That word, in the English language, would be "religion." 

As a reliable feature of human minds and social lives, religion appears in some form or another in every society ever known (Boyer, 2001; Purzycki & Sosis, 2022; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004). Today, most people live their lives deeply immersed in various religious traditions, despite considerable secularization in some places in the last 200 years (Pew Research Center, 2015; Lanman, Bullivant, Farias, & Lee, 2019). Religion wrestles with humanity's deepest fears and channels its highest aspirations. Its ubiquity and remarkable persistence through time are a clue that the roots of religious sentiments run deep in the human mind. 

Nevertheless, until very recently, religion has mostly been left out of social psychology's scope of inquiry. Textbooks rarely cover it, and the term infrequently appears in subject indexes. Although there has been robust growth in the number of published articles on the topic in the field's flagship journals, proportionally, it remains a small topic relative to its importance in human affairs. This volume of The Handbook of Social Psychology is breaking new ground by including, for the first time in its history, a chapter on religion.

This state of affairs also characterizes psychology more broadly. At the time of this writing, the Annual Review of Psychology, which boasts the highest citation impact of all psychology journals, has, in its 70+ years of history, published just four articles that mention religion in their abstracts or list it as a keyword. By comparison, there are 42 articles on language. Only food and eating (another overlooked topic of great importance to people worldwide) had equally meager coverage, with just five articles. Widening the scope further, the science as a whole has given religion the cold shoulder. As the biologist D.S. Wilson put it, "more scientific articles have been published about the evolution of one species of fish – the guppy -- than about the evolution of religion." (Wilson, 2008). 

Times are changing, however. There has been a marked increase in published research on religion in social and personality psychology (for a special issue, see Saroglou & Cohen, 2021). Even major interdisciplinary journals such as Science, Nature, and PNAS now publish research on religion, a rare occurrence just two decades ago. 

Why the Social Psychology of Religion? 

As a complex and far-reaching subject, religion attracts interest from all the social science disciplines, from history to economics, sociology, and anthropology. There is also growing attention from human evolutionary studies (Culotta, Nov. 6, 2009; Wilson, 2002) and neuroscience (McNamara, 2009). Social psychology, situated at the intersection of psychology and the rest of the social sciences, is especially well suited to "adopt" religion as a critical topic and serve as a nexus field for its interdisciplinary study (for the role of personality psychology in this project, see Saroglou, 2009). Aspects of religion appear in many of the field's core areas (see Table 1). 

Moreover, social psychology is well suited to undertake two complementary research projects that are at the heart of the scientific study of religion: One to explain its cross-culturally stable features, such as those found in supernatural concepts and ritualized behaviors (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Boyer, 2001; Saroglou, 2011; Purzycki, & Sosis, 2022; Xygalatas, 2022); and two, to make sense of the significant variability across cultures and through time, such as different conceptions of the afterlife or the emphasis on belief or practice (Norenzayan, 2016; Saroglou & Cohen, 2013). Both questions -- about cross-cultural universals in human thought and behavior (Sagiv & Schwartz, 2022; Norenzayan & Heine, 2005; Triandis, 1978; Lonner, 1985; Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Klineberg, 1954), as well as about cultural variability (Awad et al., 2020; D. Cohen, 2001; Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Witkin & Berry, 1975) -- have preoccupied social psychology since its inception. In this regard, the study of religion plays to the strengths of social psychology, its explanatory reach, and its methodological toolkit. 

Table 1: Aspects of Religion and the Traditional Sub-Areas of Social Psychology, Roughly Corresponding to the Topic Areas of The Handbook of Social Psychology, 6th Ed. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, religion is a crucial topic for the field because it is a powerful lens through which social psychologists can peek into human thought and behavior. In religion, we find phenomena, puzzles, and debates central to the field, such as the nature and limits of human rationality, perception of the social world, the fundamentals of social life, moral and existential psychology, and the origins of cooperation and conflict. 

Religion: A (Very) Brief Intellectual History  

The early pioneers of modern psychology, sociology, and anthropology recognized that religion occupies a central place in any comprehensive theoretical understanding of human social thought, behavior, and society. Accordingly, they devoted a great deal of thought to it. Foundational works by William James, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and others continue to influence contemporary theories and research programs in social psychology (reflecting the times, they were all European men). After briefly highlighting how their views on religion have informed current work, this chapter discusses the neglect of religion in social psychology and the reasons behind it. 

No book from the last 150 years has had as much influence on the psychology of religion as William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. In this classic, James focused almost entirely on the primacy of direct and immediate religious experiences and beliefs, which he saw as a universal part of the human condition. Accordingly, he subtitled his book A Study in Human Nature. He defined religion as "the experiences of human individuals insofar as they see themselves related to whatever they regard as divine." (James, 1902). 

As such, he considered theological doctrines, religious institutions, and social structures of secondary importance compared to subjective religious experience. Thus, in James' view, explanations of religion must turn to psychology; with this move, he made religion a centerpiece of the nascent field he was founding. 

Like James, Sigmund Freud also saw individual psychology as the key to the scientific understanding of religion. However, unlike James, Freud considered religion a manifestation of irrationality and pathology responding to the human predicament of living with existential terror. In Freudian terms, the religious impulse is a powerful defense mechanism that offers wish fulfillment in the face of thoughts of death and surrounding existential anxieties (Freud, 1927/1990; see also Burkert, 1996, for a treatment of this perspective). 

Whereas psychologists saw religion as an aspect of individual psychology, the sociologists of religion considered it a fundamentally socio-cultural system. Émile Durkheim (1964), one of the founders of sociology, defined it as "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things." While Durkheim made this fundamental distinction between the sacred and the profane, Karl Marx famously proceeded to erase it, seeing religion as the cultural means to reify capitalism's economic deprivation and inequality. However, in a further twist, another late 19th-century giant, Max Weber (2010/1905), flipped this Marxian notion on its head. He argued that economic institutions and structures are themselves shaped by particular religious traditions. This thesis was laid out in The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which Weber argued that the Protestant Reformation, with its moralization of work, worldly success, thrift, and efficiency, laid the foundation of capitalism (Weber, 2010/1905). These social theorists, as well as foundational work by anthropologists (e.g., Geertz, 1966), continue to influence contemporary research on and theorizing about religion to this day. 

While these works predate social psychology's beginnings, Allport's (1960) The Individual and his Religion was perhaps the earliest book that set the groundwork for the social and personality psychology of religion. As a practicing Protestant and building on the Jamesian tradition, Allport explored religion's connection to core constructs of psychology, such as the self, personality, lifespan development, prejudice, and mental well-being. He also introduced the idea of intrinsic vs. extrinsic religious orientations (Allport & Ross, 1967), distinguishing between religious involvement for its own sake in contrast to being a means to other ends, such as forging critical social relationships and attaining status. Building on this tradition, Daniel Batson and colleagues (Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993) introduced quest, a third religious orientation. Unlike either intrinsic or extrinsic orientations, quest reflects doubt and curiosity about spiritual matters. Anticipating the recent demographic surge of the spiritual but not religious movement, a quest mindset embraces life's existential contradictions and tragedies. Although not widely adopted today in social psychology, these conceptual distinctions influence personality psychology research. 

The Story of the Neglect of Religion in Social Psychology 1970s-1990s 

 The founders of psychology were quite attentive to religion. So why has religion failed to attract much interest in mainstream social psychology, or for that matter, psychology in general? Here are four possible explanations: 

1. The idea of "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) was popularized by the evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould (1997), who argued that science and religion were two separate domains of inquiry. Science is about facts and causal explanations; religion is about values and moral choices. Therefore, religion should not meddle in science (as it had for centuries by stifling unpalatable scientific theories). In return, science should not meddle in religion (as it had for centuries by questioning religious dogma). This view may have discouraged psychologists and other scientists from studying religion for fear of trampling on the delicate truce between science and religion. 

2. University professors are less religious than the general population, and psychologists (including social psychologists) and biologists tend to be some of the least religious academics in the United States (Gross & Simmons, 2009). It is often said that research is "me-search." If so, the field would be inclined to overlook a phenomenon that is not important or visible to its community of practitioners.  

3. The deeply-ingrained "process-content" distinction in psychology (Rozin, 2001) may be another factor. If the field's priority is to focus on the processes of how the social mind works (social judgment, group influence, person perception), then real-world "content" areas (religion, sex, food, territoriality, economic exchange) fall by the wayside. 

4. Psychology's narrow sampling from WEIRD populations, particularly among the university-educated (Norenzayan, 2016; Henrich et al., 2010; Fryberg, 2012), might have rendered religion invisible to researchers. If one does not study what one does not see, it is little surprise that religion has not been a priority research topic when samples that make up the bulk of psychology come from irreligious populations. 

These different explanations have some plausibility and point to the priorities, commitments, and blind spots of the field. However, none offers a complete answer. For example, the "content-blindness" of social psychology did not prevent the field from turning its attention to other important content, such as well-being and happiness (Lyubomirsky & Layous, 2025). Moreover, how is it that social psychology's radar missed religion while maintaining a decades-long cultural fixation on the United States, a historically religious country? Without going deep into these arguments, it is clear that until recently, the field did not see religion as a critical topic of interest. However, there is a growing recognition that social psychologists and other social and cognitive scientists can learn much about religious representations and behaviors, just as they would about any other enduring aspects of human minds and cultures. 

Fretting Over Definitions 

The answer to the question "What is religion?" necessarily raises a thorny issue that has been a central preoccupation among theorists of religion for more than a century. The divergent definitions discussed above illustrate this issue. Additionally, a long intellectual tradition in the humanities continues to critique the term "religion," whether it is a cultural construction, what should be included, and what should be left out (Stausberg, 2010; Taves, 2009). After more than a century of debate, a consensus has yet to emerge on how to define the term. That so much ink has been spilled about a semantic issue may be surprising, given that these sorts of debates do not play an outsized role in psychology, which prioritizes the operationalization of variables and corresponding empirical demonstrations. 

Nevertheless, these conversations among religious studies scholars, historians, and philosophers are important for social psychology. Decisions about what features to study and what to leave out are important theoretical choices that affect generalizability and can shape theoretical models and influence the direction of empirical research. Relatedly, these debates are also valuable in helping identify culturally biased assumptions that may creep into research (assuming that the religion researchers see in their cultures and historical milieus are typical of religion in general). Conversely, these definitional debates can take input from empirical research on the cultural distribution of religious beliefs and behaviors worldwide and through history and their causal connections in human psychology. These two endeavors can be synergistic. Theoretical and empirical research can proceed parallel to and interact with these interrogations of the term "religion." 

This synergy is where our extraterrestrial social psychologists can excel at what they do: they can work to understand the religion of the Earthlings by "fractionating" the construct. This process involves operationalizing the particular phenomenon of interest (such as supernatural justice beliefs, extreme rituals, and magical thinking) and developing hypotheses to explain it (Taves, 2009; Barrett, 2000). This move has the added benefit that the fuzziness surrounding the term becomes a feature, not a bug, which deserves to be studied as well (as some evolutionary theories of religion do; see Norenzayan, 2016; Boyer, 2001). With this, the definitional problem is no longer an obstacle to social psychological research. Religion becomes another empirically tractable but definitionally elusive topic in the field (such as "happiness," "wisdom," and "altruism"). 

This approach that treats "religion" as a construct with fuzzy boundaries sidesteps the definitional problem. It also tackles another important but sticky question: Is religion something unique that sets it apart from other inscrutable belief-behavior systems tied to communities of devoted actors? Or is it cut from the same cloth as fervent soccer enthusiasts, vegan culture, socialism, national pride, or eco-spirituality? The answer from this approach is that, psychologically, religion is not inherently different from other belief-behavior systems that social psychologists study. These systems share common features (rituals that validate a particular moral order, costly commitments by coordinating social actors, and certain things that become sacred and immune to compromise). However, the mystical vision of a shaman holed in a cave is not religion. Appeasing an angry god, alone on a mountaintop, is not religion. A community with a shared reality is not religion. Treating certain things as sacred is not religion, and ritual self-immolation in and of itself is not religion. The more these different elements converge, the more "religion-like" the resulting bundle becomes. What makes something religious is not the necessary presence of any one element but the social configuration of these elements and their cultural integration. Moreover, there are always borderline cases, and the label is simply a convenient pointer to certain converging aspects of social reality. 

As this discussion wraps up, one final point: it is helpful to distinguish between "religion" and "religiosity," which are covered in this chapter. The former refers to a package of particular traits and inclinations (rituals, afterlife beliefs, the sacred) that tend to go together across cultures and throughout history, as illustrated in Table 1. The latter is the intensity of involvement in religious traditions, including beliefs, thoughts, and rituals, reflecting situational, cultural, and individual differences. 

With these observations and reflections in place, the next section of this chapter reviews research that seeks to understand the psychological foundations supporting religious phenomena – cognitive, motivational, and cultural learning. Next for discussion is the role of religion in four social psychological areas of interest: cultural psychology, cooperation and conflict, justice beliefs, and well-being. The chapter ends with concluding thoughts, outstanding questions, and future directions. Throughout, the explanatory frameworks will move from the micro (individual psychology) to the macro (historical and cultural dynamics). 

PSYCHOLOGICAL PATHWAYS TO RELIGION 

Worldwide ethnographic evidence identifies religion as a human universal, present in every known culture. It is also ancient – possibly even more ancient than settled agriculture, as the archeological remains of the oldest known religious temple suggest (Schmidt, 2010). Nevertheless, religion is also characterized by considerable diversity across cultures and throughout history. How does psychology give rise to recurring features of religious beliefs and behaviors while generating diversity worldwide? This complex question can be tackled by examining the cognitive, motivational, and cultural learning pathways to religion. Although sometimes seen as competing accounts with distinct literatures, a more fruitful approach would seek eventual integration (e.g., White, Baimel, & Norenzayan, 2021; Saroglou & Cohen, 2021). These are the core elements of an overarching framework that anchors religion in psychology. 

Cognitive Pathways 

Despite their significant diversity, spirits, souls, gods, karma, and other supernatural beliefs worldwide have common features. What are these features, and what, if anything, in our social cognition channels these beliefs into recurrent forms? The cognitive perspective on religion posits that supernatural beliefs are rooted in mental templates that recruit intuitive processes and reliably develop across disparate cultural contexts. These cognitive templates are hypothesized to facilitate the cultural resonance of religious beliefs, although the extent of their role continues to be debated (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Barrett, 2000; Boyer, 2001; McCauley, 2011; Gervais, Willard, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2011).   

The gods, spirits, and ghosts that are most common around the world are believed to possess anthropomorphic mental states; as well, frequently, they enter into interpersonal relationships with believers and responding to their fears and wishes. These features may reflect socio-cognitive abilities that evolved to guide social interactions among human agents, such as the tendency to perceive agency in spontaneous, self-directed movements (Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2004), seeing faces in the clouds and hearing voices in the wind (Guthrie, 1993), and infer mental states, goals, and intentions guiding otherwise-unpredictable behavior (Waytz et al., 2010; Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007). Alternatively, consider the belief in creationism (Kelemen, 2004), which seems to fall out of the human proclivity to reason about the intentional design behind observable phenomena (Kelemen, 2004). Similarly, the belief that minds exist independently of bodies and continue to survive after death (a core tenet of many religious systems) may be a by-product of the mind-body dualism that results from two distinct cognitive systems (Bloom, 2005). One system is shaped by the psychological expectations that spontaneous, goal-directed motion is driven by mental processes, and the other is shaped by physical expectations about how inert physical objects interact. Intuitive psychology and intuitive physics generate different expectations about behavior, rely on different neural processes, and show different developmental trajectories. In each of these cases, intuitive cognitive templates that evolved to help humans navigate their natural and social environments constrain and channel the variety of supernatural beliefs we see around the world. 

If supernatural beliefs rely on the intuitive cognitive tendencies that people worldwide share, two implications follow. First, supernatural concepts that fit with these intuitions are likely to be prevalent worldwide; second, individual differences in supernatural belief can be predicted by individual differences in the habitual reliance on these intuitive thinking processes. These theoretical considerations make several predictions about the recurrent forms these supernatural beliefs are likely to take and the features of human thinking most likely to support these beliefs. 

Consistent with the first prediction, dualism, teleological thinking, and belief in anthropomorphic spirits and gods are recurrent features of religions around the world, reliably emerging even in disparate societies with little shared cultural ancestry or horizontal cultural diffusion (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Boyer, 2001; Purzycki, 2013; Purzycki & Sosis, 2022; Chudek et al., 2018). There is also growing evidence for the second prediction. In what follows, some of this evidence and related findings are highlighted regarding four critical areas of religious cognition: belief in God, belief in karma, magical thinking, and mystical experiences.   

Belief in God 

The most straightforward prediction is that there is a positive relationship between measures of intuitive thinking (System 1 processes that are fast, automatic, and non-conscious) and belief in God and other supernatural beings. Conversely, there is a small but negative association between belief in God and analytic thinking, that is, System 2 processing that is slow, effortful, and reflective. These associations are small, but it is important to note that they are obtained using a variety of measures of intuitive and analytic thinking and are robust to various demographic controls, such as gender, age, and education level, and cognitive controls, such as question order and verbal intelligence (Pennycook, Ross, Koehler, & Fugelsang, 2016; Yilmaz, 2021; Stagnaro, Ross, Pennycook, & Rand, 2019; but see Gervais et al., 2018). Moreover, recent research that tested several theoretical models found partial support for a dual-process interpretation of these associations, that the tendency to engage analytical thinking overrides underlying intuitions related to supernatural beliefs (for further details, see Baimel, White, Sarkissian, & Norenzayan 2021; see also Yilmaz, 2021). 

Other interpretations are possible, however, and the exact theoretical explanation for these findings will continue to be debated. Moreover, the current evidence does not justify causal inference, as initial experimental evidence that analytic thinking reduces religious belief (e.g., Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012, Study 2) has failed to replicate in high-powered studies (see Camerer et al., 2018; Sanchez, Sundermeier, Gray, & Calin-Jageman, 2017); further research is needed to establish the causal pathways linking intuitive thinking and supernatural beliefs (as well as to evaluate alternative non-causal hypotheses).  

Beyond measures of intuitive thinking, the cognitive templates discussed above have also been found to predict individual differences in belief, but the results are more mixed and vary by context. For example, individual differences in mentalizing are related to greater belief in a personal God in samples drawn from religious populations (e.g., Norenzayan et al., 2012; Baimel, 2018; but see van Leeuwen & van Elk, 2018 for an alternative account). Nevertheless, this association is not found in some studies, particularly in irreligious countries such as the Netherlands. As a result, some researchers are skeptical of this finding (Maij et al., 2017). To address the replicability of this association and its boundary conditions, Baimel (2018) conducted a more fine-grained set of analyses in a high-powered study drawing on Christian and Hindu samples. As expected from cognitive theories, individual differences in mentalizing were robustly related to belief in a personal god who possesses mental states and interacts with humans. However, there was no relationship with belief in an abstract God, a distant and universal force or spirit that does not engage mentalizing systems (Baimel, 2018). Although sparse, there is also some evidence linking mind-body dualism and teleological thinking to belief in God and other paranormal beliefs (Willard & Cingl, 2017; Willard & Norenzayan, 2013; Willard, Cingl, & Norenzayan, 2020).  

Belief in Karma 

Karma is a complex cultural belief system centered on ethical causation across lifetimes (Obeyesekere, 2002). It is congruent with the common intuition that “what goes around, comes around” and that individual actions in one lifetime are morally congruent with outcomes in another (White & Norenzayan, 2019). Belief in karma reflects elements that can be traced to teleological thinking since it implies intention and purpose to life events; it might recruit mind-body dualism since a person’s essence is reincarnated in a new body and karmic consequences manifest across lifetimes; karma may even be intuitively anthropomorphized as a god-like supernatural agent watching and remembering people’s actions, thereby karma can engage believers’ mentalizing abilities (White, 2017).  

These ideas were tested in studies covering Christian samples in Canada and the USA, Hindus in India, and Buddhists in Singapore (White, Willard, Baimel, & Norenzayan, 2021). Belief in karma was reliably and positively correlated with intuitive thinking, just as belief in God was. The same network of cognitive templates that predicted belief in God also predicted various beliefs in karma. These associations were present among people who affiliate with cultural traditions that teach karma, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. They were also present among Christians who affiliate with a tradition that does not teach it. Additionally, beliefs in God, karma, and even witchcraft – despite their apparent dissimilarities and different cultural histories – are positively intercorrelated. These findings, taken together, increase confidence in the idea that there are similar cognitive mechanisms underlying the diversity in supernatural beliefs. 

Conspiracy Beliefs  

Belief in conspiracy theories is often thought of as having “quasi-religious” qualities. It shares some psychological similarities with a religious worldview, such as elaborate sensemaking in the face of uncertainty and threat and a commitment to the idea that powerful unseen forces guide peoples’ fate (Franks, Bangerter, & Bauer, 2013). In a meta-analysis of studies conducted in Germany, Poland, and the US, Frenken, Bilewicz, & Imhoff (2022) found that religiosity and conspiracy beliefs were positively correlated, especially in the two more religious countries, the US and Poland. Moreover, a right-wing political orientation and supernatural beliefs statistically accounted for a large part of this relationship. However, these variables were largely uncorrelated in Germany, the least religious country of the three. These results hint at different cognitive and motivational links between religious and conspiracy beliefs open for future research (see Frenken et al., 2022).     

Magical Thinking 

The cognitive pathway is also crucial to another theme with intimate links to religion: magical thinking (Nemeroff & Rozin, 2000). This is a common form of everyday thinking that seemingly unrelated events are causally connected, typically through supernatural forces.  One such form of magical thinking is thought-action fusion (TAF), rooted in the intuition that thoughts and behaviors are inextricably connected, that specific thoughts could be immoral, or that having certain thoughts might lead to catastrophic events (Berle & Starcevic, 2005). TAF needs to be better understood, but there is some evidence that it correlates with religiosity in some contexts and for some people (Siev & Cohen, 2007).  

Moreover, the pathological extreme of TAF appears to play a role in one OCD-spectrum disorder linked to religious contexts, that is, scrupulosity – a highly debilitating condition involving religious obsessions such as sinning or performing rituals incorrectly (see Dulaney & Fiske, 1994, for underlying psychological continuities between OCD and cultural and religious rituals). These links are interesting but poorly understood and deserving of further study. 

A more specific form, sympathetic magic, appears in many rituals, superstitions, and various religious beliefs. It consists of two principles: similarity and contagion. The intuition behind the principle of similarity that the “image equals the object” explains, for example, why, in witchcraft, cursing at the image of a person is believed to affect the person or why a religious icon depicting a deity is felt to serve as a unique conduit to the deity. Moreover, the intuition behind the principle of contagion, that “once in contact, always in contact,” explains the practice of putting a spell on someone by “obtaining” a piece of hair belonging to that person or why an object belonging to a venerated person or saint is thought to have healing properties. These magical intuitions are also at play in other behaviors. For example, in celebrity auctions, objects perceived to have been in more immediate physical contact with a well-liked celebrity fetch higher prices (Newman & Bloom, 2014). Contagion – or rather the fear of it – also figures prominently in many rituals, whether individual or cultural, within or without religious contexts (Boyer & Lienard, 2020). 

Mystical Experiences 

What is a mystical experience, and what are its psychological elements? So far, we have seen that the cognitive perspective explains various beliefs in supernatural agents and phenomena. However, people do not just believe; they often have supernatural and mystical experiences. One influential hypothesis is that there is a common core to these experiences– an “eternal unanimity,”—as William James called it, that finds resonance across the world’s spiritual traditions (see also Stace, 1960). 

Despite its allure and importance, the psychological literature on mystical experiences is limited. One line of empirical work by Hood and colleagues has built on the conceptual foundations of James and Stace, and operationalized the components of mystical experience in a self-report instrument (Hood & Chen, 2013; Hood, 2006). These include the loss of the self into a greater unity; a sense of being outside of spatial and temporal constraints; feelings of oneness with the world; blissful feelings; a sense of the holy in all things, a broadening of one’s understanding of the world (noetic quality); and the sense that the experience cannot be conveyed in words (that is, ineffability). There is some limited evidence that these experiences are cross-culturally recurrent. They can be found in samples from Iran, the United States, and Tibetan Buddhist monks (Hood, 2006). However, broader cross-cultural studies are needed to establish the commonalities and differences in these experiences. 

But why do some people, not others, have such vivid experiences of gods and spirits? And why are these experiences reported more often in some cultures than others? These questions take much work to answer, particularly as they require cross-cultural studies that combine qualitative and quantitative methods. In one line of research to answer these questions, Luhrmann and colleagues (Luhrmann et al., 2021; Luhrmann, 2012) describe a particular cultural model that views the mind as “porous” or inter-penetrable with the outside world. This goes beyond the intuition that minds and worlds regularly interact. Examples include notions such as that wishes can come true, curses can harm other people, or that telepathy is real (in some ways, mind-world porosity has echoes in TAF). They hypothesized that mind-world “porosity,” combined with individual differences in “absorption” – whether people become “absorbed” in their experiences (such as getting lost in music) explain “anomalous” religious experiences such as encountering spirits in dreams, being possessed by demons, or conversing with God. 

Luhrmann and colleagues conducted a series of cross-cultural studies of Charismatic Evangelicals, where such experiences are commonly reported, and comparison groups of mainline Protestants and Buddhists, where they are less common. Their samples came from Ghana, Thailand, China, Vanuatu, and the United States. Higher scores on porosity and absorption increased the odds of reporting these spiritual experiences. 

To summarize, the cognitive perspective explains (1) cross-cultural and historical regularities pointing to particular cognitive templates that anchor a variety of religious beliefs and behaviors, interacting with cultural models of the mind and self, (2) individual differences in the strength of religious beliefs, experiences, and behaviors, partly arising from individual differences in the accessibility of these cognitive templates. These cognitive templates canalize religious beliefs and experiences into recurring forms. However, people do not entertain religious beliefs only because they are intuitively plausible and a good fit to our cognitive repertoire. People also lean on religion to contend with the fundamental existential anxieties of human life (Burkert, 1996). Next for discussion are these motivational pathways to religion. 

Motivational Pathways 

People are more likely to turn to religion in places where human suffering abounds. The fundamental existential human motivations for order, control, meaning, and immortality are a crucial factor behind the commitment to supernatural beliefs as potent, meaningful, and relevant to everyday life (Laurin & Kay, 2017; Park, Edmondson, & Hale-Smith, 2013; Vail et al., 2010). This motivational perspective has received extensive attention in social psychology centered on just-world beliefs (Callan et al., 2014; Hafer & Rubel, 2015), Terror Management Theory (Vail et al., 2010), and compensatory control mechanisms (Kay, Gaucher, McGregor, & Nash, 2010). 

Existential Insecurity 

Extensive evidence from sociology has been amassed in support of this existential insecurity hypothesis. Around the world, societies facing more significant existential threats, such as poverty, food insecurity, disease prevalence, short life spans, and high infant mortality, are far more likely to be religious than existentially secure societies (Norris & Inglehart, 2004; Ruiter & Tubergen, 2009; Gelfand et al., 2011). Further evidence comes from a study across the United States: states with a higher prevalence of suffering (such as infant mortality and poverty) tend to be more religious (Gray & Wegner, 2010). 

The link between harsh life conditions and stronger societal emphasis on religion can be understood, in part, as a reflection of tight vs. loose configuration of cultural norms worldwide, as theorized by Gelfand and colleagues (2011). In this perspective, although in all societies, people are responsive to norms that guide social life, cultures reliably vary on how strictly or “tightly” norms are enforced. Societies facing chronic external (e.g., natural disasters, wars) and internal (free riding, crime) threats respond by “tightening up,” and one way to do so is to turn to religious institutions and belief systems which provide a variety of time-tested norm-enforcement mechanisms (Gelfand, 2018; Norenzayan et al., 2016). Of course, once societies facing threats do turn to tight-norm enforcement sanctified by a sacred order, history shows that greater social cohesion through religious sanctioning can also serve to legitimize political authority, inequality, and hierarchical relations (Norenzayan et al., 2016; Solt, Habel, & Grant, 2011; more on this later). 

Almost all the data linking existential insecurity and religious involvement in psychology, sociology, and economics come from state-level societies culturally saturated with world religions and their Big Gods -- all-knowing, interventionist, and morally involved. This limitation raises the interesting question: when existential insecurity is high, do people turn to any god or mainly to these Big Gods? Baimel et al. (2022) sought to answer this question by using data from 1820 participants collected in 14 societies with diverse religious traditions, including animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism. The relationship between food insecurity (as a measure of material insecurity) and commitment to two often coexisting types of deities, local and moralizing (measured as time spent thinking about them), was assessed. Results showed that food insecurity was related to a more significant commitment to moralizing gods, supporting the existential insecurity hypothesis; however, food insecurity was associated with less commitment to local deities, who tend to have limited powers of norm-enforcement and less involvement in human moral affairs. Although more research is needed to understand this latter finding, existential insecurity appears to be related mainly to the traditions centered on the norm-enforcing Big Gods of Christianity, Islam, and other world religions. This is consistent with the idea that societies facing chronic existential insecurities turn to religion to “tighten-up” their norm-enforcement.

One methodological challenge in this research is worth mentioning: the correlational nature of most of the evidence, which is why third-variable explanations have been an important consideration among researchers. One approach is experimental work, showing that various threats, such as death awareness and loss of control, increase religious tendencies in the lab. For example, mortality salience has been found to induce compensatory behavior like increased commitment to religious beliefs among Americans (Vail et al., 2010; Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006; Dechesne et al., 2003; Jackson et al., 2018) and among Taiwanese students mortality salience similarly increased belief in karma (Yen, 2013). However, care should be taken to interpret these results given that this experimental literature tends to come from studies with small sample sizes compared to the above-mentioned cross-cultural comparisons. (See Jong, 2021, for a critique of the literature on death anxiety and religion). 

Another approach to tackle this issue has been the use of statistical techniques to assess causal pathways. The cross-national comparisons discussed above have found that the link between existential insecurity (such as poverty and economic inequality) and several measures of religious commitment (belief in God, religious participation, and importance of religion in one’s life) is robust to demographic controls (age, gender, education level), and to possible mechanisms proposed by other theories, such as state regulation of religion, religious markets, science education, and individualism (Ruiter & Tubergen, 2009).  Another notable study addressed the issue of causality with yet another approach – a time series analysis in national samples in the United States over 50 years between 1955-2005 (Solt et al., 2011). By measuring changes in economic inequality (a classic measure of existential insecurity) and changes in religiosity (and controlling for GDP growth), they showed that increases in inequality in one year predicted substantial increases in religiosity in the next. However, reversing the analysis, they found no evidence of causation in the opposite direction; changes in religiosity in one year did not predict future changes in inequality. This finding supports the conclusion that, at least in the United States, there is a robust pathway from existential insecurity to religion (and not the other way around). 

A promising alternative account of the link between harsh lives and religion is Gray and Wegner’s (2010) dyadic morality theory, which maintains that an intuitive understanding of moral harm involves moral agents and moral patients. In conditions of deprivation, anomalous harm befalls victims without obvious perpetrators due to disease, natural disasters, and other misfortunes. This motivates people to attribute suffering to God, the ultimate, omnipresent moral agent (Gray & Wegner, 2010). This type of moral completion is plausibly a factor in how people respond to misfortune. However, it is a sense-making account (rather than a coping account) and is most applicable to attributions to God and other powerful supernatural agents (rather than religious involvement more broadly). 

Most likely, there are a variety of motivational mechanisms at play. For instance, beliefs rooted in sympathetic magic may prompt people to acquire particular objects or perform rituals that produce a desired goal. Some gods (though not all) offer a pleasant afterlife to believers who worship them and follow a particular set of norms, and in an imagined just world where people get what they deserve and deserve what they get, prosocial behavior and hard work are rewarded, and injustice is rationalized away. Belief in unseen forces is a potent way to satisfy the motivation to see the world as justly ordained by a supernatural order, allowing believers to feel in control of otherwise uncontrollable events.  This account has been proposed as an explanation of ritualized actions (Hobson, Schroeder, Risen, Xygalatas, & Inzlicht, 2018), some aspects of magical thinking (Ofori, Tod, & Lavallee, 2017; Rudski & Edwards, 2007), belief in witchcraft (Singh, 2018), anthropomorphism (Epley, Akalis, Waytz, & Caccioppo, 2008), belief in a controlling god (Laurin & Kay, 2017; Kay et al., 2008), and belief in a just world (Hafer & Rubel, 2015).  

Natural Disasters, Pandemics, and Religious Coping 

Motivational accounts generally propose that the need to feel a sense of control and meaning in life orients people to supernatural beliefs to maintain psychological well-being when these motivations are threatened.  This compensatory mechanism leads to the (seemingly counter-intuitive) prediction that experiencing or anticipating misfortune does not erode faith for most people; instead, it increases it. In turn, more religious involvement serves as an emotional shield from these threats and supports coping. This is most evident in the link between natural disasters and religiosity. 

Worldwide, living in places vulnerable to uncontrollable natural disasters such as earthquakes is associated with more religiosity (Bentzen, 2018). While this finding should be treated with caution as any correlational finding, two additional considerations strengthen the conclusion that religious coping is the key mechanism at play. First, the results remain strong after controlling for various demographic variables, climactic and geographic features, and other alternative explanations (Bentzen, 2018). Second, while all disaster categories were predictive of religiosity, the effect was most substantial for earthquakes, the natural disaster that is frequent, but most unforeseeable. Next were volcanoes (unforeseeable but rare) and storms (foreseeable but rare). This pattern aligns with the explanation that what motivates people to turn to religion to cope with external threats is psychological uncertainty when facing uncontrollable threats. 

No one would wish the ordeal of an earthquake on anyone. However, if it were to strike a population, one would wish that researchers could get closer to causality by assessing whether earthquake exposure as an exogenous shock brings about greater religious engagement. This is precisely what Sibley and Bulbulia (2012) did, drawing on an ongoing, longitudinal survey of attitudes and beliefs in New Zealand. Following the devastating 2011 Christchurch earthquake, religiosity spiked in an otherwise secularizing country. Moreover, this was the case only among those who lived in regions directly affected by the earthquake (Sibley & Bulbulia, 2012). These two findings suggest that people turn to religion when facing uncontrollable threats. But it is not just natural disasters that compel people to turn to religion. Henrich et al. (2019) found that another type of exogenous shock – war – also mattered. Different intensities of war experiences in samples in Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, and Uganda were followed by increased religious commitment even several years later. In another study investigating health threats, Pelham et al. (2017) tracked higher than usual weekly Google search volume for life-threatening illnesses, such as cancer and diabetes, covering twelve years across sixteen countries. As the volume of these searches increased, so did the volume of searches for religious content (e.g., God, prayer) in the following week. 

Health threats are especially daunting when they have global repercussions that affect all aspects of life. Religious responses to pandemics like the Bubonic Plague are well-known to historians. But the question as to whether the COVID-19 pandemic led to a revival of religion is of special interest as many societies are on a secularizing path. The answer is a clear yes, judging from online behavior. Bentzen (2021) examined daily online searches in 95 countries and found that searches for “prayer” spiked by about 50% (relative to total searches) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interestingly, this increase was not explained by compensation for the closure of religious institutions and generalized to all levels of income and existential security. We know this because country-specific lockdown dates did not drive the wave in prayer searches or fluctuate with public worship days. It was estimated that roughly 55% of the world’s population turned to prayer to cope with COVID. Far from undermining confidence in a loving and all-powerful God, people turn to religion more when they face more threats in their lives (see Kubotani & Engstrom, 2005; Liamputtong et al., 2012). 

Sacred Values 

A discussion of religion's motivational foundations is incomplete without considering sacred values. Although pervasive in many contexts, sacred values are often linked to passionately held religious and other metaphysical beliefs (Atran & Ginges, 2012; Sheikh, Ginges, Coman, & Atran, 2012). But what exactly are sacred values, and how are they different from instrumental values? A house with a “For Sale” sign is a possession with an instrumental value, but an old house that has remained in one’s family for multiple generations is a possession of sacred value. So is a country’s national flag to many citizens, children’s lives to their parents, and a holy site of a faith tradition to its believers. 

Several fundamental properties have been hypothesized that differentiate sacred from instrumental values. First, sacred values are driven by rule-based (deontological) moral reasoning rather than cost-benefit (utilitarian) moral reasoning.  Second, they are felt to be qualitatively different from quantifiable things such as money. Third, trade-offs between the sacred and the non-sacred—actual or hypothetical, such as trading a sacred land for large amounts of money—are taboo and trigger powerful negative moral emotions such as outrage and disgust (Tetlock, 2003; Atran & Ginges, 2012). Fourth, theorists of sacred values have argued that there is a particular cognitive and motivational signature to them, such as quantity insensitivity (a minor violation is as bad as a significant violation), moral universalism (what is sacred is sacred everywhere and at all times), and denial through wishful thinking of any benefits gained from transgressing a sacred value (Tetlock, 2003). Fifth, because sacred values are presumably immune to cost-benefit reasoning, people are motivated to endure immense costs to defend what they hold sacred (Atran & Ginges, 2012). 

Future research can build on these insights in two ways. First, relative to their critical importance – in moral psychology, motivational psychology, in science-education, intergroup relations, and conflict resolution – sacred values have received far less attention than their instrumental counterparts (which is the mainstay of modern economic theory). Moreover, the empirical linkages between religious and metaphysical worldviews and sacred values (e.g., Sheikh et al. 2012) are poorly understood in the present psychological literature. One hypothesis that applies to culturally shared sacred values is that cooperative communities are more successful in buffering their members from potential defection if their norms and values are divinely ordained and, therefore, not open to negotiation (Atran & Henrich, 2010). 

To summarize the motivational perspective, people turn to their religious traditions to seek control, justice, meaning, and immortality, especially in poverty, famine, war, and natural disasters that pose grave and chronic threats to life. Put another way, religious traditions worldwide are culturally calibrated to respond to these fundamental human motivations. From this perspective, religion has been an enduring aspect of human lives because these existential insecurities have defined lives for most people in most of human history. Consistent with this, evidence shows strong links between existentially insecure life conditions and religious commitment. Moreover, social life is imbued with sacred values that animate individuals and groups.  Social psychology has been a significant contributor to the motivational psychology of religion and has much to offer for a better understanding of sacred values and their intimate connections to religious and cultural belief systems.  

Cultural Learning Pathways 

 Would Tarzan believe in God? In an entertaining essay, Banerjee and Bloom (2013) asked this critical question about the origins of religion. Put another way, the question is, how much of religion requires elaborate cultural input, and how much results from a trigger-happy mind ready to jump to supernatural conclusions? It may seem self-evident to social psychologists that people get much of their religion from their families and surrounding communities. However, this is not a foregone conclusion, as the Tarzan question above points to an ongoing debate. There is an influential line of thinking in the cognitive science of religion that human minds come strongly prepared to entertain certain religious beliefs and behaviors (as discussed earlier in the cognitive perspective), rendering cultural learning considerations less critical (e.g., Boyer, 2001; Barrett, 2004; Baumard & Boyer, 2013; McCauley, 2011). 

However, the human brain is a cultural brain. Parallel to genetic inheritance, it is heavily dependent on the cultural inheritance system, that is, non-genetic, social transmission of beliefs, behaviors, and skills, to the extent that far exceeds what is observed in other species, including our closest primate relatives (Kashima & Gelfand, 2025; Chudek, Muthukrishna & Henrich, 2016; Richerson & Boyd, 2005). This process accumulates norms and know-how over generations (Tomasello, 2001; Richerson & Boyd, 2005) and enables dynamic cultural change (Kashima, Bain, & Perfors, 2019). At the root of this inheritance system is a sophisticated psychological repertoire guiding several cultural learning mechanisms: conformist, prestige-based, and credibility-enhancing displays or CREDs. All three transmission mechanisms are essential for propagating religious beliefs and behaviors. After briefly considering conformist and prestige-based transmission, this section focuses on CREDs because they are particularly interesting and necessary for spreading specific belief-ritual packages. Therefore, they have received the most attention among researchers. 

Conformist transmission is selectively acquiring beliefs and behaviors held by most people in one’s group. This mechanism kicks in, especially when the world is complex, and individual learning by trial and error is unlikely to succeed or is very costly (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). This is why human social psychology is so sensitive to normative and informational conformity (Asch, 1956). The same sensitivity also applies to religion. One study that illustrates the importance of conformist transmission to religion’s endurance drew on cross-national data from the World Values Survey. Being raised religious, combined with living in a country where a majority of the older population attends religious services weekly, increased the odds of believing in God from 60% to 99% (Gervais & Najle, 2015).

In contrast to conformist transmission, in prestige-based transmission, cultural learners selectively learn from individuals perceived to possess essential knowledge or skill that the group lacks (Cheng, 2020). One example of a recurrent religious institution that crucially depends on prestige-based cultural learning is shamanism – which Singh (2017) defines broadly to include spiritual influencers such as prophets, gurus, and medicine men and women. Shamanism draws on a variety of intuitions to persuade community members that its practitioners possess the highly prized skills to anticipate and influence unpredictable yet significant events. To achieve this, shamans gain status by undergoing transformative experiences such as trances and initiations (for more on shamanism, see Singh, 2017 and associated commentaries). 

CREDS and CRUDS 

Credibility-enhancing displays or CREDs (Henrich, 2009; Lanman & Buhrmester, 2016) are actions that cultural models display that convey a genuine commitment to corresponding beliefs that learners might consider adopting. For example, a political activist willing to wait in line for hours to vote is displaying a CRED about the importance of voting (or the importance of voting for a particular cause), which could inspire others to vote. New converts who donate all their belongings to their new religion are showing that, as the saying goes, “they are walking the walk, not just talking the talk.” CREDs are at play in domains of life in which people depend on others to learn relevant knowledge and norms but are also vulnerable to manipulation (Chudek et al., 2016; Willard, Henrich, and Norenzayan, 2016). This is why, from a young age, children are quite attentive to adults’ credibility (Harris & Corriveau, 2020; Corriveau, Chen, & Harris, 2015).  

CRED psychology explains aspects of some important but puzzling aspects of many religions, such as why believers spend substantial time and energy attending religious services, donating time and resources, and refraining from dietary, sexual, and other self-serving behaviors. CREDs also explain extreme religious behaviors such as celibacy, self-scarification, fasting, and, significantly, martyrdom (Henrich, 2009).  

CREDs also explain why childhood exposure to religion is strongly associated with a lifelong commitment to religion. Among Americans, a child’s exposure to caregivers who engage in credible religious commitment (e.g., religious charity work, weekly religious attendance) is a good predictor of belief in God (Lanman & Buhrmester, 2016). In an extensive survey of academic scientists in elite US universities known for their irreligious cultural milieus, childhood exposure to religion was the strongest predictor of who remained religious (Ecklund & Scheitle, 2007). Exposure to religious CREDs during childhood also explains the considerable variance in cross-national differences in religious beliefs, such as between the USA and the Netherlands (Maij et al., 2017) as well as between Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which also differ markedly in religiosity but are otherwise culturally and geographically similar (Willard & Cingl, 2017). 

In a rare field study of its kind, Xygalatas and colleagues (2013) measured participation in and witnessing one extreme Hindu ritual, the Kavadi, practiced among devotees of the Tamil war god Murugan in Mauritius. Those who were “high ordeal” participants in this intense, painful ritual underwent a series of torments involving skewers inserted into the cheeks, walking on beds of nails, and climbing while carrying hefty loads. When subsequently given the opportunity, they donated more money (anonymously) to the local Hindu temple than those who were “low ordeal” participants. Especially interesting was that donations were equally high among those who witnessed the “high ordeal” Kavadi but did not participate. In addition, donation sizes correlated with self-reports of the pain involved. These findings should be interpreted with care as there was no random assignment, and self-selection cannot be ruled out decisively; nevertheless, these and other findings suggest that extreme rituals that often appear in religions and baffle outside observers act as CREDs and are associated with a greater likelihood of transmitting the faith, gains in social status, higher well-being and more emotional resilience, and more strong group cohesion and cooperation (Xygalatas, 2022). 

CREDs are essential for explaining why religious fervor can be contagious. However, when describing why religious decline unfolds the way it does, we must turn to CRUDs (Credibility Undermining Displays, see Lanman & Buhrmester, 2016), the mirror opposite of CREDs. In a recent study, Turpin and Willard (2022) investigated religious church membership patterns in the Republic of Ireland, where trust in the Catholic Church has declined more quickly than in other majority-Catholic societies in Europe (Donnelly & Inglis, 2010). Ireland is also noteworthy for the highly publicized scandals involving pedophile priests, which have rocked national public opinion.

Those exposed to fewer religious CREDs during childhood were more likely to describe themselves as ex-Catholics and less likely to believe in God. Among those who remained Catholic, fewer religious CREDs predicted weaker endorsement of traditional Catholic beliefs. The perceived prevalence of pedophile priests (CRUDs) predicted the rejection of the church's moral authority. This is interesting, as it shows that while exposure to CREDs reinforces faith, exposure to CRUDs undermines it by unintentionally (and credibly) advertising religious hypocrisy. 

In summary, there is rich theorizing linking cultural learning to the transmission and propagation of religion (see, for example, Gervais et al., 2011; Henrich, 2007; Singh, 2017). The cultural learning perspective is crucial for two reasons: (1) it provides mechanisms by which religious beliefs and practices are culturally transmitted within communities of believers, and (2) it explains the theodiversity found in human populations, that is, why cultural groups differ so much in some of their core beliefs and practices (Norenzayan, 2016).  

Integrating the Cognitive, Motivational, and Cultural Learning Pathways 

In summary, this section outlined the key psychological foundations of religion. Cognitive and motivational accounts of supernatural beliefs can explain (1) the cross-cultural and historical recurrence of cognitive templates for religious beliefs, such as the prevalence of belief in personal gods who intervene in human affairs and relieve various existential anxieties; (2) Individual differences in the strength of supernatural beliefs, partly arising from various cognitive and motivational biases; and (3) how situations that tap into motivations for psychological control, meaning, and immortality orient people towards religions. As important as cognitive and motivational perspectives are, they are incomplete accounts without aid from cultural learning. The considerable variability of beliefs across religious traditions, cultures, and historical time is left unexplained.  

For instance, most people understand and can mentally represent the concepts of “karma” and “god,” but only a subset of these people are concerned about karma or God in their everyday lives. Alternatively, consider the “Zeus Problem” in the cognitive science of religion, (Gervais, Willard et al., 2011). Zeus, Mercury, Horus, Viracocha, and countless other gods commanded a large and devout following in one historical period but lost their cultural relevance and turned into mythical figures in another. Put another way, of all the plausible gods that fit nicely with human cognitive proclivities, in any given time and cultural context, only a few are believed to be real, relevant, and worthy of devotion – typically the ones that speak to human existential fears, are widely accepted in one’s group, are championed by prestigious models in one’s culture, and are supported by credible displays of faith. 

Supernatural beliefs are more culturally resilient when they fit with existing intuitions, as cognitive theories have proposed; however, intuitions do not necessarily compel people to endorse supernatural beliefs.  In the case of beliefs about gods, for example, the tendency to think about human minds is an essential precursor to thinking about god’s mind, but this does not mean that perceiving human minds inevitably results in faith in gods (Andersen, 2017; Gervais, Willard, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2011; van Leeuwen & van Elk, 2018; Willard & Cingl, 2017).   

As important as the cultural learning pathway is, however, it leaves open some key questions that are answered by the cognitive and motivational tracks. For example, cultural learning does not tell us why some religious content reoccurs in different cultural and historical contexts (e.g., why mind-body dualism is a common feature of religious beliefs or why redundancy and compulsion repeatedly appear in so many rituals). Moreover, the cultural perspective in isolation does not tell us why specific cognitive templates and emotional states, but not others, incline people to religion, such as why anthropomorphic gods who alleviate existential fears have more cultural resonance and are more widespread. Neither does it tell us why receptivity to religion varies even among people who have had similar cultural exposure to religion.  

How does religion endure, and why does it take the patterns that it does? The answer to these questions points to at least three distinct but interacting pathways grounded in social psychology. Religion endures and takes the patterns that we observe because it is reliably diffused and stabilized by cultural learning strategies that result in group-specific cultural configurations. It endures also because its diversity is constrained by a core set of cognitive templates and biases. As well, it endures because it is modulated by deep-seated existential motivations that animate our species.  

As just discussed, taken in isolation, each one of these pathways has its limitations and blind spots. Moreover, there are plenty of knowledge gaps and unfinished work. The conceptual work needed to compare these pathways and identify areas of agreement and disagreement has just begun. Building on these psychological foundations, the remainder of this chapter is an overview of how religious traditions and religious involvement mediate social psychological processes. To focus this discussion, four important areas in the field are covered: (1) cultural psychology, (2) cooperation and conflict, (3) justice beliefs, and (4) psychological well-being.  

RELIGION IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 

Cultural Psychology 

Earlier in this chapter, a case was made detailing how religious beliefs and rituals spread and stabilized due to human capacities for cultural learning, such as conformist and prestige-based transmission and credibility-enhancing displays. This raises the interesting question: To what extent do religions permeate a population’s culture and, in doing so, transform their psychology? To get answers, we must turn to cultural psychology. This field has made great strides in documenting various ways that psychological processes are calibrated to different cultural environments (Fryberg, 2012; Fiske et al., 1998; Heine & Norenzayan, 2006; Henrich et al., 2010). Cultural variation in psychology is well-documented, but the search for explanations of the origins of this variation is a more recent endeavor.  Three lines of research suggest that religions are a significant factor in the origins of cultural diversity. 

The Protestant Ethic 

The Protestant Reformation was the seminal event of 16th-century Europe and shook the continent to its foundations. It also led to massive cultural changes in the Western world that are felt to this day. Martin Luther and later John Calvin and other Protestant leaders led the charge, opposing what they considered to be the heretical policies and practices of the Catholic Church, such as the sale of indulgences, as well as the extravagant rituals performed by a powerful priesthood class that distracted from the pursuit of the true faith and personal salvation. This emphasis on individual salvation through a personal relationship with God, the encouragement of worldly success, and the notion of a “personal calling” that moralized hard work became the central elements of the new movement.  

New cultural movements can trigger a chain of unintended consequences that last for centuries. Such was the case when a particular religious idea led to the spread of literacy, a cultural practice that rewires the entire brain by shifting face recognition to the right hemisphere, thickening the corpus callosum, and enhancing verbal memory, among many other modifications (Dehaene, 2013). The Protestant leaders preached the value of literacy for everyone – which, until then, was an esoteric skill that few possessed. Was it because Luther and his followers were prescient, recognizing literacy's value for education or economic pursuits? No, they saw literacy as the gate to personal salvation. Since believers no longer had to rely on the clergy to interpret the Bible, they had to read the word of God themselves.  

Economists Becker and Woessmann (2009) wanted to know if the reformation led to the spread of literacy in Germany. They showed that by the 19th century, areas in Germany that had converted to Protestantism had higher literacy rates than Catholic regions and higher income and non-agricultural employment. Moreover, because salvation equally applied to boys and girls, the Protestant Reformation reduced the gender gap in literacy. To discount the reverse causation argument that people who were already literate adopted Protestantism at higher rates, Becker and Woessmann further showed that geographic distance from Wittenberg, the epicenter that radiated the reformation outward to the rest of Europe, tracked literacy rates in Germany.  

This new social movement had other downstream psychological consequences; not all were noble. The reformation’s elevation of work as a moral duty and a path to salvation contributed to a lingering “blame the victim” mindset. Consistent with this, more vigorous belief in the Protestant Work Ethic in majority Protestant countries such as the USA, Canada, and the UK correlates with prejudice towards some disadvantaged groups and fosters negative attitudes towards government policies to help them (Rosenthal, Levy, & Moyer, 2011).   

Several lines of research support the idea that the Protestant cultural orientation is implicated in social psychological processes. Protestants are more likely than Catholics to show the fundamental attribution error (FAE). This “fundamentalist attribution error” (Li et al., 2012) reflects the well-known and widely documented tendency to see behaviors as reflecting individual dispositions rather than social contexts and roles (Gilbert, 1998; Nisbett et al., 2001). This difference is particularly stark in relation to work, which is moralized in the Protestant (especially Calvinist, such as Presbyterian and Methodist) denominations but not in Catholicism. Consequently, Protestant culture encourages the notion that work interactions ought to be impersonal, unemotional, and formal. Consistent with this, Sanchez-Burks (2002) demonstrated that American Protestants are less spontaneously attentive to relational cues in work settings than Catholics. Nevertheless, a country’s Protestant cultural heritage appears to be a more important predictor of the Protestant work ethic values its citizens have than an individual’s Protestant upbringing (Georgi & Marsh, 1990). This aligns with other evidence that cultural religiosity can influence individual psychology independent of individual-level religious involvement and often is more consequential (see Gebauer & Sedikides, 2021). 

In judgments of moral transgressions, Protestants, part of a cultural tradition that places great importance on the primacy of privately held beliefs, tend to focus on the transgressors’ intentions and character traits. In contrast, Jews, Catholics, and Hindus (i.e., traditions that tend to emphasize religious practice) prioritize as much, or even more, the outcomes of the transgressors’ behavior (Laurin & Plaks, 2014; Andersen et al., 2017). As a result of this cultural prioritizing of personal beliefs, Protestant participants were more likely than a comparable sample of Jewish participants to condemn targets who had offensive thoughts without acting on them (e.g., whether it is morally wrong for a son to dislike his parents in his heart; A. Cohen & Rozin, 2001). The Protestant penchant for worrying about sinful thoughts may also have other downstream implications, for example, how unacceptable thoughts are channelled into creative pursuits, akin to the Freudian defense mechanism known as “sublimation” (Baumeister, Dale, & Sommer 1998; see D. Cohen, Kim, & Hudson 2014; Kim, Zeppenfeld, & D. Cohen 2013).  

Ever since Tocqueville (1840/1990), many scholars have observed that the Protestant heritage of the United States is a root factor that explains the religious traditionalism, extreme individualism, meritocracy, and moralization of work that define contemporary American culture (for a review, see Uhlmann & Sanchez-Burks, 2014). Despite its growing ethnic and religious diversity, the Protestant ethic continues to shape the founding institutions and traditions of the United States (A. B. Cohen, 2009; Uhlmann & Sanchez-Burks, 2014; Norenzayan, 2016), as well as being “exported” around the world through Evangelical missionary activity and American cultural influence (see for example, Jenkins, 2007). Thus, social psychology has much to gain by a deeper analysis of its psychological impact, also because the field is now taking steps to overcome its narrow sampling base of primarily middle-class, European-descent US-based participants (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010; Rad, Martingano, & Ginges, 2018; Brady, Fryberg, & Shoda, 2018). 

Origins of WEIRD Psychology 

While the role of the Protestant cultural tradition in the psychology of Western populations has become well-documented, new work suggests that earlier historical developments in the Western Church (Latin Christianity) that predate Luther and the Reformation by centuries already had set in motion a cultural path that gave rise to what has come to be known as WEIRD psychology (Henrich, 2020). 

A growing body of research shows that populations around the globe vary substantially along several critical psychological dimensions and that people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies often end up at the extreme ends of these global distributions (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). People socialized in WEIRD contexts are more individualistic, tend to have independent self-construals, endorse impersonal morality and cooperation (and less nepotism), think more analytically, and show less conformity and obedience. 

But what explains this global variation in psychological traits, and why are WEIRD populations often at the tail end of these dimensions of variability? In a landmark study, Schulz et al. (2019) developed a cultural evolutionary theory that traces the origin of WEIRD psychology to a particular set of religious practices and doctrines found in the Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies in the Middle Ages. These policies – particularly the banning of polygamy and cousin marriage – unravelled Europe’s traditional kin-based institutions, which were gradually replaced by nuclear families and impersonal institutions. Because peoples’ social psychological makeup is calibrated to culturally dominant norms and institutions, these strict church policies altered the psychological makeup of European-descent populations away from the collectivism of dense, kin-based social networks. They aligned them with the individualistic traits better suited for life in societies defined by impersonal relationships, voluntary organizations, and nuclear family structures.  

The authors conducted a series of empirical tests that drew from historical measures of kinship networks and duration of Church exposure and combined that with an array of psychological variables from contemporary populations. Results showed that countries with more prolonged historical exposure to the Western Church and less intensive kinship networks (such as lower cousin marriage rates) have populations more reflective of WEIRD psychology. Moreover, more prolonged exposure to the Western Church in Europe predicted weaker kinship networks and greater individualism. 

Religious Affiliation and Global Cultural Variation 

Casting a much wider net, we may ask whether the enduring religious traditions of the world have explanatory power concerning global variation in cultural traits. Cultural evolutionary theories suggest that world religions have consolidated standard practices, beliefs, and values, despite large geographic distances and ethnolinguistic differences (Norenzayan et al., 2016). From this, it follows that affiliation with religious traditions would be reliably associated with global variation in cultural values. 

However, it is far from evident that this should be the case. An alternative hypothesis is that national cultures, with their powerful homogenizing institutions and shared geography and language, overwhelm any similarities between members of the same religious traditions who live in different countries. If so, religious denominations could be better described as identity labels rather than distinctive cultural groups with shared values and beliefs. Also, heterogeneity within world religions such as Islam and Buddhism, or even large denominations such as Catholicism or Shia, might be too large and heterogeneous to allow for the detection of shared cultural traits. 

To test these rival hypotheses, White, Muthukrishna, and Norenzayan (2021) measured cultural distances between religious groups within and between countries using the World Values Survey over a period of 15 years. A wide array of cultural beliefs, values, and preferences were targeted (for a more stringent test, demographic characteristics and religious beliefs and values were excluded). These cultural variables included politics, outgroup/ingroup members, social relationships and child-rearing, economics, sexuality, and law.  

  The results showed that individuals who shared a religious tradition and commitment to religion were more culturally similar (even after removing religious values and beliefs), both within and across countries, than those with different affiliations and levels of religiosity. Moreover, distances between denominations within a world religion largely matched up with their shared cultural descent, consistent with what we know about the historical evolution of religions. Interestingly, nonreligious individuals across countries also shared some cultural values, hinting at the formation of a global secular culture. While nation-states were a stronger predictor of cultural traits than religious traditions, the cultural similarity of coreligionists was independent of country effects and remained robust, controlling for individual demographic characteristics and geographic and linguistic distances between groups. 

These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that religious traditions contribute to a broad range of culturally shared beliefs and values. But astute readers will surely see that these data patterns are also consistent with the possibility that people may choose a religious tradition that reflects their previously-held beliefs and values. This alternative explanation presupposes that people freely choose their religious affiliation – an enshrined right in some countries but a forbidden taboo in others. To tease apart these two accounts, White et al. utilized the between-country variability in government restriction of religious freedom and tested whether the cultural similarity among coreligionists was moderated by it. It was not. Sharing a religious tradition predicted cultural traits as much in more restrictive countries where freely choosing a religion is difficult as in less restrictive countries, contradicting the self-selection account.  

While work on the origins of cultural variability is still in its early stages, social psychological contributions have identified several factors, including the structure of norms and norm-enforcement (Gelfand, 2018; Kashima & Gelfand, 2023), intellectual traditions (Nisbett et al., 2001), parasite prevalence (Murray & Schaller, 2010), economic development (Hamamura, 2012) subsistence patterns and ecology (Talhelm & Oishi, 2019; Sng, Neuberg, Varnum, & Kenrick, 2018). Religious traditions are another significant factor in the origin story of human cultural diversity around the globe (A. B. Cohen, 2009; Norenzayan, 2016; Gebauer & Sedikides, 2021; Henrich, 2020). 

Cooperation and Conflict 

Large-Scale Cooperation 

Large-scale cooperation is a hallmark of our species and a deep scientific puzzle. Until about 10,000 years ago, all human ancestors lived in small, foraging bands. How did homo sapiens, with a social psychological makeup calibrated for small-scale living among kin and allies, expand the cooperative sphere and bring about life in large, complex societies? This is a puzzle because genetic relatedness plummets with increasing group size, and cooperative strategies based on direct or indirect reciprocity fail. Anonymity invades relationships, free-riding escalates, and cooperation breaks down (Henrich & Muthukrishna, 2021). 

Social psychology, combined with insights from cultural evolutionary theorizing can be fruitfully applied to the puzzle of large-scale cooperation. As a bonus, this project promises to offer solutions for another scientific puzzle in cultural evolution: the emergence of world religions. Powerful “Big Gods” and forces like Karma--moralizing, omniscient, and interventionist--are now a widespread feature of human cultures and central to the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) as well as the Dharmic ones (Hinduism, Buddhism and their offshoots). This is despite the relative infrequency of these Big Gods in small-scale societies as well as during most of our species’ evolutionary history (For reviews of this “Big Gods” theory, see Norenzayan, 2013; Norenzayan et al., 2016; Atran & Henrich, 2010. For alternative formulations of this argument rooted in evolved psychology rather than cultural evolution, see Bering, 2012; Johnson, 2015; Schloss & Murray, 2011 for discussion). 

The theory sketches a coevolutionary dance between societal size and complexity on the one hand and a religious belief-ritual amalgam on the other. The idea is that as human ancestors began spreading around the globe, intergroup competition escalated over time. Larger, more cohesive groups outcompeted smaller and more fractured ones. However, societies could only expand while remaining cohesive if they mitigated the erosive effects of anonymity on cooperation.  

No doubt, several interrelated factors were at play in the expanded cooperation of human groups – political institutions that fused disparate tribes, markets that encouraged mutually-beneficial trade, new norms that dictated fair treatment of strangers, and modes of economic production such as the domestication of plants and animals that brought about stable food production and surplus (Henrich & Muthukrishna, 2021). However, another critical factor that likely transformed social interactions in large groups was the sincere commitment to Big Gods (as well as belief in forces such as karma), who care about the moral sphere, watch when no one is watching, and punish norm-violations when no one is around to punish. As these groups expanded, belief in these Big Gods, supported by extravagant displays of faith and systems of ritual, spread with them. These imagined moral communities often competed with one another for resources, territory, and adherents, with high levels of within-group solidarity and raising the specter of intergroup conflict. In this way, cultural evolution harnessed our species’ tribal moral instincts to stretch the cooperative sphere to all coreligionists, even when they were strangers spread across geographic and, in many cases, ethnic boundaries (Graham & Haidt,  2010; Norenzayan, 2013; Norenzayan et al., 2016; Atran & Henrich, 2010).  

The theory is based on several lines of converging evidence from different levels of analysis. First, this theory predicts that as society's scale (and complexity) increases, so does the prevalence of moralizing deities and forces. Second, the theory predicts that commitment to moralizing gods and forces should be linked to greater prosocial behavior towards strangers. Third, reminders of moralizing gods among believers should increase cooperative tendencies towards co-religionist strangers. 

Consistent with these first points, the anthropological record shows that moralizing gods and extravagant rituals coevolved with large, complex human societies (Norenzayan et al., 2016). For example, there is a robust association between the prevalence of Big Gods in the ethnographic record and societal size (e.g., Roes & Raymond, 2003). Evidence from Austronesian societies also indicates that even though full-fledged Big Gods are uncommon in this geographical area, supernatural punishment beliefs precede increases in societal complexity rather than merely following increases in societal complexity (Watts et al., 2015).  

Therefore, societal scale and complexity are two factors that co-evolved with increasingly moralizing, omniscient, and punitive gods. However, several other factors are also important. Cross-cultural analyses have shown that these gods are more common in geographical areas with greater ecological duress and more unpredictable climates (Botero et al., 2014), in societies where intensive, large-scale agriculture dominates economic life (Peoples & Marlowe, 2012), social norms are tighter (Jackson et al., 2021) and where there is the chronic threat of intergroup conflict (Caluori et al., 2020). Accordingly, in a cross-cultural study, freely-listed data about local deities’ moral concerns matched the costly threats to local coordination and cooperation dilemmas (Bendixen et al., 2023). 

 One plausible account for these patterns is that people mentally project features of their ecologies and social worlds onto their gods. People living in harsh climates imagine harsh gods, tight societies invent uptight gods, groups engaging in warfare put forth warlike gods, etc. However, the logic outlined above offers another parsimonious account: External threats to cooperation and social cohesion come in many forms. Moreover, some threats, such as water scarcity or warfare, if not curtailed, jeopardize the survival of the entire group. It follows that societies that stumble on effective supernatural norm enforcement can better cope with these threats by mobilizing groups for collective action. In turn, these groups are more likely to outlast others. 

These observations are also consistent with work by Gelfand and colleagues on tightness-looseness. As discussed earlier, cultures reliably vary on how strictly or “tightly” norms are enforced. Evidence shows that external threats, from chronic exposure to pathogens to historical shocks such as wars, natural disasters, and economic downturns, orient societies towards tighter norm enforcement (Gelfand et al., 2011). Among the myriad ways societies tighten up, supernatural norm enforcement is a common cultural evolutionary strategy found in history and across groups (Jackson et al., 2021; Atkinson & Bourrat, 2011). In turn, the tightness or looseness of norm enforcement has powerful downstream consequences in shaping the social psychology of individuals, such as conformity, self-control, and third-party punishment (Gelfand, 2018; Gelfand et al., 2011; Harrington & Gelfand, 2014). 

The second line of evidence comes from cross-cultural field studies combining experimental and ethnographic methods. These studies capture a significant portion of the world’s religious diversity and subsistence patterns, so it is possible to compare belief in moralizing (Big) gods to small, local gods who are less concerned about morality and have more limited powers of punishment. This allows for a test of the hypothesis that commitment to moralizing gods, particularly belief in their punishing capacities, is associated with less self-interested behavior and more prosocial behavior towards co-religionist strangers. In contrast, it was hypothesized that commitment to local gods with a limited scope of moral concern and less punitiveness would be unrelated to prosocial behavior. These hypotheses were supported in an initial study (Purzycki et al., 2016) which was subsequently replicated and extended in an expanded sample of over 2200 participants across 15 cultures (Lang et al., 2019; see also Purzycki et al., 2022). 

Further evidence regarding the influence of belief in moralizing gods and belief in karma on prosocial behavior comes from experimental research in contemporary settings (Shariff et al., 2016; White, Kelly, Shariff, & Norenzayan, 2019). A key prediction of this theory is that these beliefs elicit prosocial behavior in situations that otherwise would ordinarily result in selfishness (Johnson, 2015). The past decade has generated substantial research on religious priming and prosociality, using implicit, explicit, and contextual priming of religious concepts to elicit prosocial behavior, such as generosity in dictator games.  A meta-analysis of over 11,000 participants from 93 studies (Shariff, Willard, Andersen, & Norenzayan, 2016) found a religious priming effect on prosocial behavior.  However, the reliability and boundary conditions of religious priming effects and how to correct for publication bias are still a matter of ongoing debate (see van Elk et al., 2015; for failed replications, see Billingsley, Gomes, & McCullough, 2018; Gomes & McCullough, 2015; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2015). For these reasons, high-powered, preregistered replications are called to resolve such debates. 

That is what White, Kelly, Shariff, & Norenzayan (2019) did. White et al.’s studies also investigated several additional hypotheses that can be derived from the theory outlined above and tested in the lab. Specifically, they are (1) the hypothesis that any religious concept that shares a concern with human morality would be expected to promote generosity, even if these concepts differ in their cultural histories (such as God and karma); (2) the hypothesis that the effect of these beliefs on generosity is most likely when participants have no other incentive to act generously (that is, when selfishness is the baseline behavior), and conversely, the effect will diminish as the baseline behavior approaches a fair split (this is because participants rarely go beyond a fair split and the religion effect would be crowded out by other factors); and (3) the hypothesis that moralizing religious concepts will increase generosity for those who sincerely believe that moralizing supernatural entities are real and involved in one’s life but will have little or no effect among non-believers.  

These hypotheses were tested in a series of experiments among samples of American Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians, as well as non-religious individuals (White et al., 2019; see also Pasek et al., 2023, for additional evidence and cross-cultural replications). The experiments adapted a procedure from Ginges, Sheikh, Atran, and Argo (2016). They measured how thinking about God and karma affected giving in the anonymous dictator game, directly framing the task in the context of participants’ religious beliefs.  This explicit supernatural framing method departed from traditional implicit priming paradigms, which are commonly used but have proven less reliable than explicit primes in high-powered replication attempts (Billingsley et al., 2018).  In another significant departure from religious priming experiments, White et al. manipulated religious concepts within subjects by having participants allocate money in several trials, both before and after being asked to “think about karma” or “think about god” while making their decisions. This within-subjects paradigm increased statistical power and tested whether participants’ baseline generosity moderated the supernatural framing effect—something hypothesized but not tested in past between-subjects paradigms (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2015). 

Results replicated past findings that thinking about God increased giving in the dictator game among believers of God. Results also confirmed that thinking about karma similarly increased giving among believers of karma across several religiously diverse American samples of karma believers, namely Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists. As predicted, this effect was moderated by baseline selfishness. This could be one explanation as to why some earlier replication attempts did not find an effect (e.g., Gomes & McCullough, 2015, where baseline levels of donations approached a fair split, crowding out any effect of religious primes on generosity). The effects of belief in God and karma were comparable and consistent with predictions and meta-analytic results. Moreover, as predicted, nonbelievers did not respond to the religious reminders, consistent with the idea that the effect depends on commitment to religious belief. These results were also robust to various controls, such as hypothesis guessing and familiarity with the dictator game and within- or between-subjects designs.  

To summarize, in the ethnographic record, the prevalence of moralizing gods increases as societies get larger and more complex; in addition, in field experiments across cultures, greater commitment to moralizing gods is associated with more impartiality towards co-religionists who are strangers (i.e., anonymous to the participant except for their religious affiliation); experimental results that go beyond these correlational findings support the causal argument that thinking about a moralizing God or karma increases generosity towards strangers. Taken together and combined with other evidence (reviewed by Norenzayan et al., 2016), these findings support the theory that religions with moralizing gods have been a mobilizing factor in the scaling-up of the cooperative sphere. 

Social Control and Intergroup Conflict 

It should become evident at this point that the solidarity-building capacity of prosocial religions has its dark side. As history shows, political and economic inequality within cooperative but hierarchically organized groups is often legitimized through supernatural sanctioning, as Marx noted (1844), cementing political power by those who rule. A case in point is the practice of ritualized human sacrifice supported by religious authorities. A study by Watts et al., (2016) drawing on a geographically diverse sample of 93 traditional Austronesian societies showed that religiously motivated human sacrifice, although rare in egalitarian societies, was quite common in the highly stratified societies in their sample. They further showed that the presence of human sacrifice cemented the political rule of the elites once stratification arose. This finding supports the idea that some religious practices can be co-opted as a social control mechanism that benefits political rulers. 

Moreover, the tribal social psychology of our species means that religiously motivated but group-bounded social solidarity can, sometimes, turn toxic for people who are seen to fall outside of the imagined moral boundaries of the group (such as perceived religious out-groups and atheists). Neuberg et al. (2014) tested this hypothesis in a study based on the Global Group Relations Project consisting of 194 ethnic, religious, and national groups worldwide. They found that religiously organized societies were more likely to be locked in intergroup conflict, particularly conflict driven by competition over limited resources and perceptions of mutually incompatible values. Consistent with this result, another study that analyzed violent conflicts throughout 3500 years of history found that religion was a factor in 40% of them, although rarely as the main factor that fueled the conflict (Austin, Kranock, & Oommen, 2003). 

 Moral prejudice towards atheists is also connected to religion, although in a different way. In Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky famously asked whether, without belief in God, people turn into moral wild cards; that is, they lack the conviction to choose between right and wrong (Dostoevsky, 2002). Many people think so, even though, on average, daily moral behavior is no different between atheists and religious believers (Hoffmann et al., 2014; for a discussion, see Xygalatas, 2017). Moreover, moral sentiments such as empathy and compassion that support prosociality evolved independently of religion (de Waal, 2013). Secular institutions and norms also boost cooperation and trust, as seen in the highly secular societies in Northern Europe and elsewhere (Norenzayan, 2014). Anti-atheist prejudice is partly the result of this intuition about religion’s perceived necessity for morality. Surveys and experiments show that this prejudice is common across cultures, particularly in majority-religious countries. Interestingly, even in predominantly secular countries, many people implicitly associate moral violations such as cheating with atheism (Gervais et al., 2017). 

  Another way to understand the connection between religion and intergroup conflict is to disentangle the different aspects of religion that often converge in the real world. Ginges, Hansen, and Norenzayan (2009) found a reliable link between ritual participation and the toxic combination of in-group solidarity and out-group aggression. Both extensive survey data and findings from Palestinians and Jewish Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza show that religious ritual participation (as measured by attendance) was a good predictor of the approval of violent martyrdom (such as suicide attacks) against out-groups. In contrast, religious devotion (measured by prayer), disentangled from participation, was unrelated to these outcomes. 

Finally, another perspective has investigated the linkages between sacred values and intergroup conflict. Because the metaphysical grounding of certain moral issues, objects, or territories in supernatural authority transforms these into “sacred” values, it is often observed that religiously motivated groups end up holding uncompromising stances over what they consider nonnegotiable, thus turning some intergroup disputes into intractable conflicts (see Atran & Ginges, 2012; for treatments of religious conflict, see also Haidt 2012; Neuberg et al. 2014; Norenzayan 2013). 

However, there are also clear indications that sometimes aspects of religion can promote positive intergroup attitudes. One unique field study by a team of economists took advantage of a natural experiment to measure the impact of participation in the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, on intergroup attitudes. One cannot randomly assign people to go to the Hajj or stay home. However, this study came very close to such a design. The researchers compared a group of Pakistani Muslims selected to participate in the pilgrimage through a government lottery procedure to a matched group of participants who also applied and were on a waiting list but did not go. They found that Hajj participation increased intergroup tolerance toward Christians and other out-groups (Clingingsmith et al., 2009). 

Evidence also shows that religious beliefs can be associated with positive intergroup attitudes. In one set of studies, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims reported that their God prefers more equal valuation of ingroup and outgroup lives than they themselves do (Ginges et al., 2016). Another study showed that thinking about God decreased the dehumanization of outgroups (Smith et al., 2022). Field and online experiments with Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews in the Middle East, Fiji, and the United States examined how thinking about God affects dictator game offers when the anonymous recipients are religious ingroups vs. outgroups. Reflecting the state of the current literature, there was divided opinion in the research team regarding the predictions. The results showed that at baseline, people donated more to the religious ingroup than the outgroup, consistent with the idea that religious differences can play into intergroup biases. However, thinking about God led to a reliable increase in giving, and this increase was equal to ingroup and outgroup members (Pasek et al., 2023).  

These lines of evidence suggest that cooperation and conflict are linked. However, we need a better understanding of why religion can foster expanded cooperation and feed the flames of conflict and intolerance. Moreover, not only can religion shape intergroup conflict, but intergroup conflict can also shape religion. In a series of studies, Caluori, Jackson, Gray, and Gelfand (2020) found that the threat of intergroup conflict was related to increases in support for a punitive God, most likely because in times of conflict, societies are compelled to favor tighter norms, and norm-enforcement is something punitive gods are good at. This pattern was also found across history: warfare predicted worldwide fluctuations in punitive-God beliefs between 1800 CE and 2000 CE. More broadly, however, theories that explain religious cooperation and those that explain religious conflict and prejudice are often developed in isolation and could be integrated more (Norenzayan, 2016). 

In summary, several lines of research converge towards the conclusion that prosocial religions, with their Big Gods, extravagant rituals, and devotional displays, have played a vital role in the scaling up of human cooperation. This expanded religious solidarity has also opened the door to increased intergroup conflict, legitimizing political power and maintaining social stratification. Alternative accounts have been proposed—that moralizing gods are merely cognitive reflections of evolved moral intuitions about proportionality and fairness or that they are cultural by-products of increases in material security (Baumard & Boyer, 2013; Baumard, Hyafil, Morris, & Boyer, 2015). These accounts do not easily explain the above findings, such as why commitment to moralizing deities and forces such as karma increase prosociality towards distant coreligionists. Moreover, material security levels were unrelated to commitment to moralizing gods in one study (Purzycki et al., 2018); in another, the opposite pattern emerged (Baimel et al., 2022). (For debates on these questions and alternative accounts, see Norenzayan et al., 2016, commentaries and response; see also Watts et al., 2015; Baumard & Boyer, 2013; Beheim et al., 2021; Purzycki et al., 2018). 

Justice Beliefs 

Supernatural Justice Beliefs 

Social psychology has long been interested in justice beliefs (e.g., a preference for interpersonal fairness, belief in a just world, and immanent justice attributions). The belief that “what goes around, comes around” is implicated in many social judgments.  Giving fair rewards to those who deserve it is a preference expressed by young children (McAuliffe, Blake, Steinbeis, & Warneken, 2017; McAuliffe, Jordan, & Warneken, 2015) and is a moral virtue endorsed by adults from diverse cultural contexts (Baumard, André, & Sperber, 2013; Graham et al., 2013; Purzycki et al., 2018).  Similarly, immoral behaviors are viewed as deserving of punishments proportionate to the offense (Carlsmith & Darley, 2008), presumably ensuring that in the long run, people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.   

Human agents can enforce justice when they can observe morally relevant behavior and are willing and able to respond with appropriate rewards and punishments. However, humans are famously limited in what they can do. Good people, as well as bad people, can be cheated and harmed by others’ selfish actions; immoral behavior can go unpunished when human justice cannot identify, locate, or punish the transgressor; and many phenomena that cause suffering cannot be controlled by human actions, including natural disasters, accidents, illnesses, and one’s social status at birth. Despite this, psychologists have documented many patterns of judgment that reflect an expectation of justice that falls outside the constraints of causal human power.  Many people see justice as a general principle seemingly baked into the laws of the universe, and they are motivated to defend this worldview when it is threatened (Hafer & Bègue, 2005; Lerner, 1980).  

For example, many people make dispositional inferences based on people’s experiences, reporting that recent good and bad fortune is due to past actions, or reflects a person’s moral character, even when these past actions and character traits are not specified or unknown to the perceiver (Gilbert, 1998; Lerner, 1980).  Additionally, North American participants are often willing to make immanent justice attributions, such as admitting that a salient past moral transgression causes an uncontrollable misfortune, while firmly rejecting that misfortune is caused by morally irrelevant past actions (Callan, Ellard, & Nicol, 2006; Callan, Sutton, & Dovale, 2010; Young et al., 2011).  Even people who explicitly reject immanent justice attributions show evidence of intuitive reactions consistent with them, as was found in studies with French participants (Baumard & Chevallier, 2012).  

Belief in Karma 

Belief in karma goes further than immanent justice intuitions by holding that one’s moral actions in the here and now result in future good and bad outcomes in a causally opaque process that spans long timescales in cycles of reincarnation (Obeyesekere, 2002). It is, therefore, a composite construct integrating beliefs in justice with reincarnation (White et al., 2019). For populations following traditions centered around karma, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism (with a global population of over 1.5 billion), religious belief and justice beliefs are linked. But it is also surprisingly common among the growing demographic group of the “spiritual but not religious,” even though most people who identify as such were not raised in karmic religious traditions (White, Norenzayan, & Schaller, 2019).  

Karmic bargaining is especially prevalent when belief in a just world is combined with uncertainty about the future. For example, prosocial behavior increased among American students and adults after they wrote about a personal experience that they wanted to turn out well (e.g., waiting to hear from a job interview or anticipating the results of a medical exam) rather than writing about their daily routines (Converse et al., 2012). In another study, job-seekers donated more money to charity when they were mindful of the precariousness of their employment opportunities than when they felt secure in their prospects. In turn, donations increased optimism toward their future. Banerjee and Bloom (2017) also found karmic bargaining among American 4- to 6-year-old children. Children believed that generosity (e.g., donating stickers to another child) would result in a subsequent reward in an unrelated situation (e.g., winning a dice rolling game). 

God Vs. Karma 

Earlier in this chapter, evidence was presented showing that belief in God and belief in karma share core cognitive templates (White et al., 2021). Both God and karma also reflect the convergence of the supernatural and the moral spheres, and experimental work shows that thinking about karma increases generous behavior among believers in dictator games to the same degree as thinking about God (White et al., 2019). These are critical psychological similarities between these two supernatural concepts despite their divergent cultural histories. However, there are divergences between God and karma as well. Believers mentally represent gods as independent agents with anthropomorphic minds. However, karma is commonly seen as an impersonal force or law, merely describing the causal connections between morally relevant actions and events (though sometimes karma is also anthropomorphized, see White & Norenzayan, 2019). Another critical psychological distinction is that the gods typically demand worship, whereas karma does not. Unlike people who believe in karma, people following theistic traditions, therefore, are obligated to perform loyalty displays to their gods. Different behavioral scripts are also called for when remedying the effects of misfortune (Nuckolls, 1992). Believers can pray to the gods and bargain with them to obtain desired outcomes. In contrast, the adverse effects of karma are more likely to be mitigated through divination, penitential actions, or prescribed rituals for accumulating karmic merit (for a detailed discussion, see White & Norenzayan, 2019). 

In summary, supernatural justice beliefs are rooted in core cognitive, motivational, and cultural processes central to social psychology (White & Norenzayan, 2019). Although justice beliefs are familiar to social psychologists, less is known about their relation to religious concepts. Integrating theories of justice beliefs and theories of religious cognition is beginning and provides opportunities to contribute to an important area of social psychology (see White & Norenzayan, 2019). 

Psychological Well-Being 

If religion persists partly because it soothes the existential anxieties of life, it follows that turning to religion fosters well-being (e.g., Pargament, 2002). A growing body of evidence has shown that religious involvement is related to well-being (Koenig, McCullough, & Larson, 2001). This association is found in surveys relying on self-reports and in analyses of natural language in social media coding for negative and positive emotion words (Ritter, Preston, & Hernandez, 2014). 

However, these earlier studies had a problem: The preponderance of the evidence came from the United States. The United States, with its majority-religious population, high levels of economic inequality (for a wealthy nation), and its WEIRD psychology, is unusual. Are the benefits of religion for well-being inherent to how religion works across cultures or is it the result of the US being a religious country? Do wealth and existential security moderate this relationship? Moreover, are the well-being benefits generalizable to other religions across the globe? Two landmark papers answered these questions (Gebauer, Sedikides, & Neberich, 2012; Diener, Tay, & Myers, 2011).   

Normative Religiosity and Well-Being  

Gebauer et al. (2012) asked whether country-level religiosity (measured by rates of religious attendance and the importance of religion) moderated the link between religion and well-being at the individual level. A study spanning 11 European nations with varying religiosity levels found that individual religious involvement (measured as the importance of religious belief in one’s life) predicted well-being and psychological adjustment, but only in places where religiosity was culturally normative and generally valued by society. This association diminished in countries with secular majorities, and the relationship became null in the most secular countries. It turns out that the benefits of religion for well-being are, to a significant degree, driven by the benefits of living a culturally sanctioned, normative life. Follow-up studies replicated and extended these findings in multiple datasets (Gebauer et al., 2017). 

The robustness of this finding was recently evaluated in a “many-analyst” project, which looked at the extent to which researcher analysis choices affect scientific inference (Hoogeveen et al., 2022). The dataset covered 24 countries and over 10,000 participants. The project involved 120 independent analysis teams from around the world, who could set up a preregistered analysis plan of their own to answer two questions: First, whether there is a positive association between religiosity and well-being, and second, whether the perceived cultural normativity of religion moderates the strength of this association. The question was: Would the independent analysis teams converge on their results, and to what degree? The results showed that 100% found an association between religious involvement and well-being, and 65% found the expected moderation with the perceived cultural normativity of religion. 

Beyond well-being, the benefits of religious involvement also extend to longevity. In a meta-analysis covering 42 studies, McCullough et al. (2000) found that more religious individuals’ odds of survival were, on average, 29% higher than those of less religious individuals, and this difference was not attributable to publication bias and remained robust after a wide range of demographic variables were controlled for. But does the cultural normativity of religion also matter in the longevity of religious and non-religious people? Enter the graveyard to find the answer. Ebert, Gebauer, Talman, and Rentfrow (2020) inferred the religiosity of 6400 deceased individuals in the United States from the symbols and inscriptions on their gravestones and matched them to their longevity. In majority-religious counties, religious individuals had a 2.2-year longevity advantage over non-religious individuals, but no such longevity advantage was found in non-religious counties. Additional analyses showed that the results were robust against 14 different confounds (at the individual and county levels) and alternative explanations. Conceivably, however, this correlational finding could be understood in reverse-causation terms: People who live longer in religious counties are more likely to put religious imagery on their gravestones. While this and other limitations of the gravestone analysis should temper conclusions (e.g., the cost of imagery could differ), both the gravestone method and the survey method (which has its own but different limitations) converge on the same result: the benefits of religious engagement to well-being and longevity pay off mainly in places where religion is normative. 

Wealth, Socioeconomic Status, and Well-Being   

In another influential paper, Diener et al. (2011) asked whether the benefits of religion extend across significant religions around the globe and whether they are moderated by country-level economic development. First, the researchers replicated the finding that in the United States, greater religious involvement (both religious attendance and the importance of religion in one’s life) is related to higher happiness levels. Next, they showed that around the world, spread across 154 nations, the benefits of religiosity for well-being had comparable effect sizes for the four world religions well-represented in the database: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. And critically, they found that religion and well-being are linked in places with low economic development and high existential insecurity (poverty, high infant mortality, hunger). However, this link diminishes in wealthy and secure societies, where happiness levels are generally much higher for everyone regardless of religiosity levels. Diener et al. also confirmed that the benefits of religiosity are moderated by the extent to which religion is normative in a country. 

Two additional papers have further deepened our understanding of how religion alters an important finding in psychology and economics: the relationship between socioeconomic circumstances and well-being. It is well known that low socioeconomic status (SES) is more severe in developing countries compared to wealthy ones. Being in extreme poverty in the United States or Sweden is tough, but being very poor in Bangladesh or Bolivia is an ordeal. Consequently, the psychological burden of low SES would be higher in developing countries than in wealthy countries. But paradoxically, the data suggests the opposite: Lower socioeconomic status is more debilitating in more affluent countries than poorer ones. Why would this be? Berkessel et al. (2021) investigated whether differences in religiosity across countries explain this anomaly. In several large global datasets, they first established that developing countries are more religious than wealthy countries; next, they showed that the high levels of religious involvement at the country level buffered against the harmful effects of low SES on well-being. (See also Joshanloo & Weijers, 2016, for evidence that country-level religion buffers the well-known income inequality-lower happiness link.) 

Similar evidence for the mediating role of country-level religiosity comes from another large cross-country study by Oishi and Diener (2014), who asked why people in poorer countries score higher on self-reported meaning in life, even though poorer countries are less happy than more affluent countries. Using data from an international Gallup survey across 132 nations, they confirmed that poorer nations have higher levels of religiosity, as has been found before. Next, they showed that individuals in poorer nations felt a stronger sense of meaning in life compared to individuals in wealthy nations. In the last step, they showed that the high level of national religiosity statistically explained the greater meaning in poorer (but more religious) countries, which in turn shielded people from life’s adversities. This finding dovetails with evidence that the well-being boosts gained from higher income depend on country-level and individual-level religiosity (See Gebauer, Nehrlich, Sedikides, & Neberich, 2013).  

Possible Psychological Mechanisms 

But why is it that normative religion buffers people from suffering and improves well-being when life is tough? In the literature, researchers have focused on three promising psychological mechanisms. First, religious communities that have survived the test of time bind people together in tight communities. Living a life with strong social ties is a powerful protective factor and a precursor to well-being (Diener et al., 2011). Second, in established religions, believers possess a strong meaning in life (Hicks & King, 2008; Prinzing, Van Cappellen, & Fredrickson, 2022), derived from a divinely-inspired coherent worldview, feelings of significance or wholeness, and a sense of higher purpose. However, the well-being dividends of connectedness and meaning in life matter most when lives are rooted in prevailing cultural norms (Gebauer & Sedikides, 2021; Stavrova, Fetchenhauer, & Schlösser, 2013). After all, a normative life is a more social life where community support is more abundant. A sense of meaning, belonging, and acceptance is more easily attained when people are embedded in communities of like-minded individuals who support and validate their worldviews and life goals. 

With these conclusions in place, several caveats are in order. First, while the cultural normativity of religion reliably moderates the positive link between religiosity and well-being, this trend rarely, if ever, reverses into negative territory (e.g., Hoogeveen et al., 2022; Diener et al., 2011). This suggests that the benefits of normativity alone do not offer a complete explanation -- social connection and meaning are also critical. Second, the benefits of normative religion to well-being do not only extend to religious groups that enjoy majority status; religious minorities, to the extent that they are cohesive cultural communities, can also foster social connection, meaning, and social acceptance (Stavrova et al., 2013). Third, not all aspects of normative religion are associated with greater well-being. Belief in heaven and hell are positively related, but the association between belief in hell and subjective well-being is negative, once belief in heaven is statistically partialled out. These patterns are robust both at the individual as well as cross-country levels (Shariff & Aknin, 2014). Belief in hell is an effective tool for supernatural norm enforcement, but it is costly for one’s peace of mind. 

Fourth, the link between religious involvement and subjective well-being does not imply that secular societies are less happy. On the contrary, some of the most staunchly secular countries, such as those in Scandinavia, also have the highest levels of life satisfaction and daily happiness on the planet. This is because these societies have developed institutions and conditions that foster well-being, including high levels of public trust, high standards of living, and strong social safety nets (remember the moderating role of existential insecurity). Fifth, these three mechanisms are not unique to religion, of course; people can find community, belonging, and meaning in their life’s work, beloved profession, political causes, team sports, or families. But normative religions are especially good at canalizing and synergizing them into a potent mix that supports coping and greater well-being. 

In summary, many cross-cultural studies converge on a more nuanced picture regarding the link between religion and well-being and offer some clues regarding the mediating mechanisms. Religion’s role in well-being is moderated by its cultural normativity and societal existential security. Where suffering is a fact of life, turning to normative religion – for meaning, social support, and cultural acceptance – is a pathway to greater well-being. However, in societies with high levels of wealth and existential security, life satisfaction levels are already very high, religion ceases to be normative, and turning to it does not translate into benefits for psychological well-being. 

Beyond insights about the factors involved in well-being, these conclusions also have another critical methodological takeaway for social psychology: Because the social psychological makeup of individuals is calibrated to the dominant cultural norms and institutions, many psychological phenomena are shaped by population-level variables that cannot be reduced to the individual level. Cross-cultural comparisons are crucial to detect these important moderating factors that change theoretical accounts (see Gebauer & Sedikides, 2021, for a treatment of this topic). 

CODA 

Most people are religious (Pew Research Center, 2015). Religion permeates most peoples' social worlds in its various forms and contents. It is a factor in worldwide events, in relations between groups and between individuals, and in the mental lives of many individuals. After decades of absence, religion is back on the field’s radar, as social psychologists link up with scholars in other disciplines and deploy the field’s sophisticated and varied methods to understand better religion’s psychological origins and impact on social thought and behavior. The social psychology of religion, like the rest of the field, is taking stock of its findings and striving to strengthen the evidentiary value of the literature (e.g., Van Elk & Wagenmakers, 2017; Hoogeveen et al., 2022). There are also promising signs of expanding the breadth and diversity of samples to better reflect global and regional cultural diversity (Norenzayan, 2016; Purzycki et al., 2022; Saroglou & Cohen, 2013, 2021). As the field moves forward, several areas are ripe for exploration. One under-studied area relative to its importance is the psychology of mystical experiences, the role of psychedelics (van Elk et al., 2021; Forstmann, et al., 2020), meditation practices, and other peak experiences (Hood & Chen, 2013; see Yaden et al., 2017 for a review). Another is the variety of ways of unbelieving or distancing oneself from organized religion, among the religious “nones” and “dones,” the spiritual but not religious, agnostics, and atheists (van Tongeren et al., 2021; Lanman et al., 2019; Willard & Cingl, 2017; Pew Research Center, 2015)

Methodologically, an exciting development in the field is the design of broader and better cross-cultural datasets of the ethnographic record (Watts et al., 2021) and the construction of databases of quantitative history to test hypotheses about psychological change over time (Muthukrishna, Henrich, & Slingerland, 2021; Jackson, Gelfand, De, & Fox, 2019). These new methods are often deployed to study religious variation and change – another understudied topic. However, they are suitable for a broad array of questions that would greatly interest social psychology. Finally, as a fruitful area of applied research, there is much to learn about how diverse religious beliefs are at play in human-nature interactions and whether this knowledge can be leveraged to support a global cultural shift towards sustainable living that includes religious and non-religious populations alike (Preston & Baimel, 2021; Sachdeva, 2017; Billet et al., 2023). These and many other unexplored questions are the new frontiers of the social psychology of religion that will define the coming decade. 

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ENDNOTES

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