Pub Date : 2020-06-19DOI: 10.1177/0084672420926261
Elizabeth G. Ruffing, Chance A. Bell, Steven J. Sandage
Religious leaders face numerous mental health challenges, and prior research suggests that some experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to work-related experiences. This study employed a diverse sample of 274 religious leaders to (a) qualitatively describe the types of work-related experiences they identify as particularly stressful or overwhelming, (b) assess the prevalence of PTSD symptoms associated with these experiences, and (c) test hypothesized associations between PTSD symptoms and narcissism. The study found that the stressful experiences reported typically involved relational conflict, having limited resources, or caring for people suffering. Over half of the sample endorsed symptoms that were above the cutoff for a clinical concern for PTSD, and PTSD symptoms were significantly associated with symptoms of both vulnerable narcissism and grandiose narcissism. Practical implications for the ongoing formation and support of religious leaders are discussed.
{"title":"PTSD symptoms in religious leaders: Prevalence, stressors, and associations with narcissism","authors":"Elizabeth G. Ruffing, Chance A. Bell, Steven J. Sandage","doi":"10.1177/0084672420926261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420926261","url":null,"abstract":"Religious leaders face numerous mental health challenges, and prior research suggests that some experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to work-related experiences. This study employed a diverse sample of 274 religious leaders to (a) qualitatively describe the types of work-related experiences they identify as particularly stressful or overwhelming, (b) assess the prevalence of PTSD symptoms associated with these experiences, and (c) test hypothesized associations between PTSD symptoms and narcissism. The study found that the stressful experiences reported typically involved relational conflict, having limited resources, or caring for people suffering. Over half of the sample endorsed symptoms that were above the cutoff for a clinical concern for PTSD, and PTSD symptoms were significantly associated with symptoms of both vulnerable narcissism and grandiose narcissism. Practical implications for the ongoing formation and support of religious leaders are discussed.","PeriodicalId":44899,"journal":{"name":"Archive for the Psychology of Religion-Archiv Fur Religionspsychologie","volume":"46 1","pages":"21 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82358848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-07DOI: 10.1177/0084672420926259
Adam Anczyk, H. Grzymała-Moszczyńska, Agnieszka Krzysztof-Świderska, Jacek Prusak
The article concentrates on answering the main question to be addressed, as stated in its title: which psychology(ies) serves us best? In order to achieve this goal, we pursue possible answers in history of psychology of religion and its interdisciplinary relationships with its sister disciplines, anthropology of religion and religious studies, resulting with sketching a typology of the main attitudes towards conceptualising psycho-cultural interface, prevalent among psychologists: the Universalist, the Absolutist and the Relativist stances. Next chosen examples from the field of applied psychology are presented, as the role of the cultural factor within the history of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM) development is discussed alongside presenting research on the phenomenon of ‘hearing voices’, in order to show the marked way for the future – the importance of including the cultural factor in psychological research on religion.
{"title":"Which psychology(ies) serves us best? Research perspectives on the psycho-cultural interface in the psychology of religion(s)","authors":"Adam Anczyk, H. Grzymała-Moszczyńska, Agnieszka Krzysztof-Świderska, Jacek Prusak","doi":"10.1177/0084672420926259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420926259","url":null,"abstract":"The article concentrates on answering the main question to be addressed, as stated in its title: which psychology(ies) serves us best? In order to achieve this goal, we pursue possible answers in history of psychology of religion and its interdisciplinary relationships with its sister disciplines, anthropology of religion and religious studies, resulting with sketching a typology of the main attitudes towards conceptualising psycho-cultural interface, prevalent among psychologists: the Universalist, the Absolutist and the Relativist stances. Next chosen examples from the field of applied psychology are presented, as the role of the cultural factor within the history of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM) development is discussed alongside presenting research on the phenomenon of ‘hearing voices’, in order to show the marked way for the future – the importance of including the cultural factor in psychological research on religion.","PeriodicalId":44899,"journal":{"name":"Archive for the Psychology of Religion-Archiv Fur Religionspsychologie","volume":"28 1","pages":"295 - 316"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86669836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-06DOI: 10.1177/0084672420917451
R. Scardigno, G. Mininni
As the “Sacred Place”—meant as the new space for religions offered by the Internet—demands for continuous investigations on the encounter between traditional narratives and social practices, the rapid growth of Question and Answering websites asks for improving social research about the Authenticity of the religious feeling as well as their responsibility in the construction of a shared knowledge. In this background, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of Q&A websites as additional interpretative resources in accordance with different religious forms of life. About 800 extracts—composed by questions and answers—from the religious pages of Stack Exchange were analyzed, in accordance with social discursive psychology, through bottom-up and top-down pathways. In relation to the different emerging questioners’ profiles, the rhetoric of “closeness” and “openness” reveal a dialectic trend of these websites in offering both supplementary and extending religious experiences.
{"title":"An authentic feeling? Religious experience through Q&A websites","authors":"R. Scardigno, G. Mininni","doi":"10.1177/0084672420917451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420917451","url":null,"abstract":"As the “Sacred Place”—meant as the new space for religions offered by the Internet—demands for continuous investigations on the encounter between traditional narratives and social practices, the rapid growth of Question and Answering websites asks for improving social research about the Authenticity of the religious feeling as well as their responsibility in the construction of a shared knowledge. In this background, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of Q&A websites as additional interpretative resources in accordance with different religious forms of life. About 800 extracts—composed by questions and answers—from the religious pages of Stack Exchange were analyzed, in accordance with social discursive psychology, through bottom-up and top-down pathways. In relation to the different emerging questioners’ profiles, the rhetoric of “closeness” and “openness” reveal a dialectic trend of these websites in offering both supplementary and extending religious experiences.","PeriodicalId":44899,"journal":{"name":"Archive for the Psychology of Religion-Archiv Fur Religionspsychologie","volume":"10 1","pages":"211 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80986605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-24DOI: 10.1177/0084672420909459
Daniel Yi, Jo-Ann Tsang
We present evidence for a complex relationship between religiousness and Haidt’s moral foundations, with data from four experiments, measuring 21 different dimensions of personal religiousness and utilizing six different religious primes. The more conservative dimensions of religiousness, such as intrinsic religious orientation and religious attendance, were positively related to binding moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and purity and sometimes related to the individualizing foundation of care. However, other, less conservative dimensions of religiousness, such as quest and extrinsic religious orientations, were unrelated or negatively related to binding foundations. Benevolent God concept was the only religious measure that was positively related to all five moral foundations. We did not find reliable effects of religious primes on endorsement of moral foundations. Results suggest a consistent but complicated relationship between religiousness and moral foundations at a dispositional level.
{"title":"The relationship between individual differences in religion, religious primes, and the moral foundations","authors":"Daniel Yi, Jo-Ann Tsang","doi":"10.1177/0084672420909459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420909459","url":null,"abstract":"We present evidence for a complex relationship between religiousness and Haidt’s moral foundations, with data from four experiments, measuring 21 different dimensions of personal religiousness and utilizing six different religious primes. The more conservative dimensions of religiousness, such as intrinsic religious orientation and religious attendance, were positively related to binding moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and purity and sometimes related to the individualizing foundation of care. However, other, less conservative dimensions of religiousness, such as quest and extrinsic religious orientations, were unrelated or negatively related to binding foundations. Benevolent God concept was the only religious measure that was positively related to all five moral foundations. We did not find reliable effects of religious primes on endorsement of moral foundations. Results suggest a consistent but complicated relationship between religiousness and moral foundations at a dispositional level.","PeriodicalId":44899,"journal":{"name":"Archive for the Psychology of Religion-Archiv Fur Religionspsychologie","volume":"23 1","pages":"161 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80693904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0084672420910809
A. Lockhart
The article offers a critical analysis of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) as applied to new and quasi-religious movements, and uncovers implicit conceptual and theoretical commitments of the approach. A discussion of CSR’s application to new religious movement (NRM) case studies (charismatic leadership, paradise representations, Aḥmadiyya, and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness) identifies concerns about the theorized relationship between CSR and wider socio-cultural factors, and proposals for CSR’s implication in wider processes are discussed. The main discussion analyses three themes in recent work relating CSR to religious and religion-like activities that extend and reframe the model. These include (1) identification of distinctive and accessible cognitive pathways associated with new forms of religious belief and practice (in particular in ‘New Age’ movements), (2) application of CSR to movements and practices outside traditional definitions of religion (near death experiences, conspiracy theories, virtual reality), and (3) engaging CSR in wider cultural processes and negotiations (religion in healthcare settings, and the definition of the study of esoteric religious traditions within academic domains). The conclusion identifies two particular findings: (1) that application of CSR in these areas renders underlying cognitive processes more available to scrutiny and (2) that CSR is employed to identify and enlarge the category of religion. The conclusion suggests that the study of CSR in its application to NRMs and quasi-religion identifies a wide field of common and overlapping themes and interests in which CSR is a more active operand than is commonly assumed.
{"title":"New religious movements and quasi-religion: Cognitive science of religion at the margins","authors":"A. Lockhart","doi":"10.1177/0084672420910809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420910809","url":null,"abstract":"The article offers a critical analysis of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) as applied to new and quasi-religious movements, and uncovers implicit conceptual and theoretical commitments of the approach. A discussion of CSR’s application to new religious movement (NRM) case studies (charismatic leadership, paradise representations, Aḥmadiyya, and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness) identifies concerns about the theorized relationship between CSR and wider socio-cultural factors, and proposals for CSR’s implication in wider processes are discussed. The main discussion analyses three themes in recent work relating CSR to religious and religion-like activities that extend and reframe the model. These include (1) identification of distinctive and accessible cognitive pathways associated with new forms of religious belief and practice (in particular in ‘New Age’ movements), (2) application of CSR to movements and practices outside traditional definitions of religion (near death experiences, conspiracy theories, virtual reality), and (3) engaging CSR in wider cultural processes and negotiations (religion in healthcare settings, and the definition of the study of esoteric religious traditions within academic domains). The conclusion identifies two particular findings: (1) that application of CSR in these areas renders underlying cognitive processes more available to scrutiny and (2) that CSR is employed to identify and enlarge the category of religion. The conclusion suggests that the study of CSR in its application to NRMs and quasi-religion identifies a wide field of common and overlapping themes and interests in which CSR is a more active operand than is commonly assumed.","PeriodicalId":44899,"journal":{"name":"Archive for the Psychology of Religion-Archiv Fur Religionspsychologie","volume":"38 1","pages":"101 - 122"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74975906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0084672420909460
J. V. Van Slyke, K. Szocik
This article considers the application of sexual selection theory to the study of religion by discussing the basic concepts and theories in sexual selection and then outlines possibilities of its application to the study of the evolution of religion. The first section outlines basic principles in the sexual selection account, including the evolution of human mating strategies based on dimorphism, gender differences in human mating strategies, and the role of different cultural activities in mating dynamics. Such an overview may be useful for the readers who are less familiar with the basic assumptions of the sexual selection theory. The remaining sections demonstrate how religion may function as a signal for mating qualities associated with a long-term mating strategy and how different facets of religiosity may help to support long-term mating strategies. The key idea of the article is that there are good reasons to try to explain the evolution of at least some of the components of religion in terms of sexual selection.
{"title":"Sexual selection and religion: Can the evolution of religion be explained in terms of mating strategies?","authors":"J. V. Van Slyke, K. Szocik","doi":"10.1177/0084672420909460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420909460","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the application of sexual selection theory to the study of religion by discussing the basic concepts and theories in sexual selection and then outlines possibilities of its application to the study of the evolution of religion. The first section outlines basic principles in the sexual selection account, including the evolution of human mating strategies based on dimorphism, gender differences in human mating strategies, and the role of different cultural activities in mating dynamics. Such an overview may be useful for the readers who are less familiar with the basic assumptions of the sexual selection theory. The remaining sections demonstrate how religion may function as a signal for mating qualities associated with a long-term mating strategy and how different facets of religiosity may help to support long-term mating strategies. The key idea of the article is that there are good reasons to try to explain the evolution of at least some of the components of religion in terms of sexual selection.","PeriodicalId":44899,"journal":{"name":"Archive for the Psychology of Religion-Archiv Fur Religionspsychologie","volume":"39 1","pages":"123 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85688632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0084672420909436
L. Turner
Recent years have seen a growing willingness in the evolutionary cognitive science of religion (ECSR) to embrace an inclusive, theoretically pluralistic approach and the emergence of a broad consensus around some key themes that collectively constitute a central theoretical core of the field. Nevertheless, ECSR still raises serious problems for some in the humanities. In exploring the reasons for the perception of conflict between humanistic and cognitive evolutionary approaches to religion, I suggest that both ECSR’s default account of the origins of religion and religion’s role in social bonding rely upon notions of culturally unmediated universal cognitive mechanisms that preclude alternative humanistic explanations. I subsequently suggest that the gap between humanistic approaches and the evolutionary study of religion more broadly conceived may be narrowed by further expanding ECSR to include recent research into the brain opioid theory of social attachment (BOTSA), which emphasises the emotional rather than cognitive basis of religion’s social bonding functions. Finally, I outline a possible evolutionary account of the earliest forms of religious ideas and practices, which decouples the origins of religion from the evolution of specialised cognitive machinery and which humanists are likely to find more amenable than mainstream ECSR.
{"title":"Emotional bonds: Bridging the gap between evolutionary and humanistic accounts of religious belief","authors":"L. Turner","doi":"10.1177/0084672420909436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420909436","url":null,"abstract":"Recent years have seen a growing willingness in the evolutionary cognitive science of religion (ECSR) to embrace an inclusive, theoretically pluralistic approach and the emergence of a broad consensus around some key themes that collectively constitute a central theoretical core of the field. Nevertheless, ECSR still raises serious problems for some in the humanities. In exploring the reasons for the perception of conflict between humanistic and cognitive evolutionary approaches to religion, I suggest that both ECSR’s default account of the origins of religion and religion’s role in social bonding rely upon notions of culturally unmediated universal cognitive mechanisms that preclude alternative humanistic explanations. I subsequently suggest that the gap between humanistic approaches and the evolutionary study of religion more broadly conceived may be narrowed by further expanding ECSR to include recent research into the brain opioid theory of social attachment (BOTSA), which emphasises the emotional rather than cognitive basis of religion’s social bonding functions. Finally, I outline a possible evolutionary account of the earliest forms of religious ideas and practices, which decouples the origins of religion from the evolution of specialised cognitive machinery and which humanists are likely to find more amenable than mainstream ECSR.","PeriodicalId":44899,"journal":{"name":"Archive for the Psychology of Religion-Archiv Fur Religionspsychologie","volume":"31 1","pages":"28 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88960922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0084672420909477
F. Watts
The papers in this Special Issue arise from a conference on Religion, Evolution, and Social Bonding, held in Eynsham Hall, Oxfordshire, UK, in July 2019, organised by the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR). The conference was part of a programme of research on Religion and the Social Brain, funded by a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust to ISSR (TRT 0153), for which the Society is very grateful. In this short editorial introduction, I will briefly introduce some of the key ideas of the following papers, leaving subtleties and nuances to the papers themselves. This set of papers considers the interaction between evolutionary theory and religion quite broadly. It includes work on the evolution of religion itself, in which there are still many interesting issues to be explored. However, it also considers human evolution more broadly and the role of religion in that. There are benefits in nesting work on the evolution of religion in a broader approach to human evolution. We assume that it is helpful to focus on both the preconditions for the evolutionary development of religion and the consequences of that development. The debate about whether religion is adaptive or a by-product has tended to focus attention on one or the other. We want to consider both. We assume that there are certain human capacities that are necessary for religion to begin to emerge in the course of evolution, and also that religion has significant consequences for human evolution more generally. Much recent work on the evolution of religion has been nested within the cognitive science of religion (CSR), which assumes that cognitive evolution plays the primary role in the evolution of religion. However, we are pleased to note that there has recently been a significant broadening in how the CSR proceeds, influenced by people such as Armin Geertz. CSR has now become more willing to consider biological and social factors, as well as cognitive ones. The approach set out here sits uneasily with a narrowly defined evolutionary CSR, but can be situated within a more broadly conceived one that is open to social and biological factors. Leon Turner discusses this further in the opening paper in this Special Issue.
{"title":"Editorial introduction","authors":"F. Watts","doi":"10.1177/0084672420909477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420909477","url":null,"abstract":"The papers in this Special Issue arise from a conference on Religion, Evolution, and Social Bonding, held in Eynsham Hall, Oxfordshire, UK, in July 2019, organised by the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR). The conference was part of a programme of research on Religion and the Social Brain, funded by a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust to ISSR (TRT 0153), for which the Society is very grateful. In this short editorial introduction, I will briefly introduce some of the key ideas of the following papers, leaving subtleties and nuances to the papers themselves. This set of papers considers the interaction between evolutionary theory and religion quite broadly. It includes work on the evolution of religion itself, in which there are still many interesting issues to be explored. However, it also considers human evolution more broadly and the role of religion in that. There are benefits in nesting work on the evolution of religion in a broader approach to human evolution. We assume that it is helpful to focus on both the preconditions for the evolutionary development of religion and the consequences of that development. The debate about whether religion is adaptive or a by-product has tended to focus attention on one or the other. We want to consider both. We assume that there are certain human capacities that are necessary for religion to begin to emerge in the course of evolution, and also that religion has significant consequences for human evolution more generally. Much recent work on the evolution of religion has been nested within the cognitive science of religion (CSR), which assumes that cognitive evolution plays the primary role in the evolution of religion. However, we are pleased to note that there has recently been a significant broadening in how the CSR proceeds, influenced by people such as Armin Geertz. CSR has now become more willing to consider biological and social factors, as well as cognitive ones. The approach set out here sits uneasily with a narrowly defined evolutionary CSR, but can be situated within a more broadly conceived one that is open to social and biological factors. Leon Turner discusses this further in the opening paper in this Special Issue.","PeriodicalId":44899,"journal":{"name":"Archive for the Psychology of Religion-Archiv Fur Religionspsychologie","volume":"10 1","pages":"3 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79275493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0084672420906215
R. Bretherton, Robin I. M. Dunbar
The study of church growth has historically been divided into two strands of research: the Church Growth Movement and the Social Science approach. This article argues that Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis represents a legitimate and fruitful third strand in the study of church growth, sharing features of both previous strands but identical with neither. We argue that five predictions derived from the Social Brain Hypothesis are accurately borne out in the empirical and practical church growth literature: that larger congregations lead to lower active engagement from members; that single-leader congregations are limited to around 150 members; that congregations of 150 are further stratified into smaller functioning groups; that congregations expanding beyond 150 members undergo internal tensions and are forced to reorganise; and that congregations larger than 150 will require structural sub-divisions to retain active member involvement. While these assertions are reflected in the church growth literature and articulate the common sense assumptions of church growth experts, the Social Brain Hypothesis offers a coherent theoretical framework which unifies these observations and thereby represents a distinctive contribution to church growth studies.
{"title":"Dunbar’s Number goes to Church: The Social Brain Hypothesis as a third strand in the study of church growth","authors":"R. Bretherton, Robin I. M. Dunbar","doi":"10.1177/0084672420906215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420906215","url":null,"abstract":"The study of church growth has historically been divided into two strands of research: the Church Growth Movement and the Social Science approach. This article argues that Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis represents a legitimate and fruitful third strand in the study of church growth, sharing features of both previous strands but identical with neither. We argue that five predictions derived from the Social Brain Hypothesis are accurately borne out in the empirical and practical church growth literature: that larger congregations lead to lower active engagement from members; that single-leader congregations are limited to around 150 members; that congregations of 150 are further stratified into smaller functioning groups; that congregations expanding beyond 150 members undergo internal tensions and are forced to reorganise; and that congregations larger than 150 will require structural sub-divisions to retain active member involvement. While these assertions are reflected in the church growth literature and articulate the common sense assumptions of church growth experts, the Social Brain Hypothesis offers a coherent theoretical framework which unifies these observations and thereby represents a distinctive contribution to church growth studies.","PeriodicalId":44899,"journal":{"name":"Archive for the Psychology of Religion-Archiv Fur Religionspsychologie","volume":"77 1","pages":"63 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77373778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0084672420909479
F. Watts
Several accounts of the evolution of religion distinguish two phases: an earlier shamanic stage and a later doctrinal stage. Similarly, several theories of human cognition distinguish two cognitive modes: a phylogenetically older system that is largely intuitive and a later, more distinctively human system that is more rational and articulate. This article suggests that cognition in the earlier stage in the evolution of religion is largely at the level of intuition, whereas the cognition of doctrine or religion is more conceptual and rational. Early religious cognition is more embodied and is more likely to carry healing benefits. The evolutionary origins of religion in humans seem to depend on developments in the cognitive architecture. It is further suggested that the cognition of early religion shows less conceptual differentiation, is characteristically participatory rather than objectifying and is less individualistic. The development of religion in recent centuries appears to show some approximate recapitulation of the stages through which religion originally evolved.
{"title":"The evolution of religious cognition","authors":"F. Watts","doi":"10.1177/0084672420909479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420909479","url":null,"abstract":"Several accounts of the evolution of religion distinguish two phases: an earlier shamanic stage and a later doctrinal stage. Similarly, several theories of human cognition distinguish two cognitive modes: a phylogenetically older system that is largely intuitive and a later, more distinctively human system that is more rational and articulate. This article suggests that cognition in the earlier stage in the evolution of religion is largely at the level of intuition, whereas the cognition of doctrine or religion is more conceptual and rational. Early religious cognition is more embodied and is more likely to carry healing benefits. The evolutionary origins of religion in humans seem to depend on developments in the cognitive architecture. It is further suggested that the cognition of early religion shows less conceptual differentiation, is characteristically participatory rather than objectifying and is less individualistic. The development of religion in recent centuries appears to show some approximate recapitulation of the stages through which religion originally evolved.","PeriodicalId":44899,"journal":{"name":"Archive for the Psychology of Religion-Archiv Fur Religionspsychologie","volume":"8 1","pages":"100 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72712684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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