In Understanding Religion through Artificial Intelligence, Justin E. Lane looks at the reasons why humans feel they are part of a religious group, despite often being removed from other group members by vast distances or multiple generations. To achieve this, Lane offers a new perspective that integrates religious studies with psychology, anthropology, and data science, as well as with research at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI).After providing a critical analysis of approaches to religion and social cohesion, Lane proposes a new model for religious studies, which he calls the "Information Identity System." This model focuses on the idea of conceptual ties: links between an individual's self-concept and the ancient beliefs of their religious group. Lane explores this idea through real-world examples, ranging from the rise in global Pentecostalism, to religious extremism and self-radicalization, to the effect of 9/11 on sermons. Lane uses this lens to show how we can understand religion and culture today, and how we can better contextualize the changes we see in the social world around us
Abstract This paper aims to explain patterns of Charismatic revival by utilizing a quantitative lens on church growth in Singapore during the mid-1900s. The research digitized and then analyzed data from the archives of the Methodist Church of Singapore between the years 1889 and 2012. The annual conference reports recorded several variables over this 123-year period such as church membership, baptisms, and professions of faith. In recent years, it also records the average Sunday attendance at each of 23 churches throughout Singapore. This paper presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the historical data and concludes that, in line with predictions from the cognitive science of religion (CSR), religious revival can serve to energize religious communities that are primarily reliant on rituals with high frequency and low-arousal (see Whitehouse 2004). Typically, high frequency and low-arousal rituals allow for high levels of consensus and social identification among large religious groups. However, as a byproduct of their high frequency and low-arousal, the repeated rituals are predicted to suffer from the effects of tedium, which lowers motivation for the information presented during the rituals and can have negative effects on group cohesion. The ethnographic and historical records investigated within the theory of Divergent Modes of Religiosity (DMR) have suggested that short bursts of reinvigoration can be used to revitalize motivation in doctrinal religions. While the data from Singapore's Clock Tower Revival events in the 1970s suggest that such an event did occur, the DMR, as traditionally formulated, is unable to capture the dynamics of Singaporean Christian demographics because 1) it does not clearly account for the high number of converts who have entered the religion and 2) it cannot account for the sustained presence of high-arousal rituals in the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches in Singapore since the Clock Tower Revival. Demographic data from Singapore, in particular the Singaporean Methodist church, complicate CSR's current approach to tedium because it appears that the religious communities in Singapore have not only sustained their motivation, they have grown since the initial revival period in the 1970s, suggesting that new amendments to our approach to tedium in doctrinal religions may be appropriate (Lane, 2021, 2019; Lane, Shults, & McCauley, 2019). As such, this paper discusses how the data from the Methodist church in Singapore are more easily explained through the use of a new approach toward understanding social cohesion in religions that relies on a cognitive (i.e., information processing) approach that links social and personal information schemas with rehearsal, memory, and personal experiences. The theory also aims to formulate its claims with sufficient specificity to be modeled in computer simulations (Lane 2018, 2013) to be further tested against other historical groups, which this paper discusses in regards to future directions for the research.
"The past two decades have seen a growing interest in evolutionary and scientific approaches to religion. The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting and emerging field. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the handbook pulls together scholarship in the following areas: evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR), cultural evolution and the complementarity of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and cultural evolution. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including: Cliodynamics, cultural group selection, costly signalling, dual inheritance theory, literacy, transmitting narratives, prosociality, supernatural punishment, cognition and ritual, meme theory, fusion theory, sexual selection, agency detection, evoked culture, social brain hypothesis, theory of mind, developmental psychology, emergence theory, social learning, cultural cybernetics, cultural epidemiology, evolutionary and cultural psychology, memetics, by-product and adaptationist theories of religion, systems and information theory, and computer modelling. This is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and anthropology, the Handbook will also be very useful to those in related fields, such as psychology, sociology of religion, cognitive biology, and evolutionary biology"--
Abstract In this study we examined the applicability of personality measures to assessing God representations, and we explored how the overlap between personality judgments of self and God relate to strength of (dis)belief and closeness to God among atheists and agnostics. Using sample of 1,088 atheists/agnostics, we applied Goldberg's Big Five bipolar markers as a standardized measure of personality dimensions, along with measures of identity fusion with God, belief strength, and sociosexuality, as this trait has been shown to be relevant in predicting religiosity. Our study revealed that personality measures can be used for research on the personality of supernatural agents. We also found that personality self-assessments were related to the assessments of God personality. Agreeableness was positively related to the perception of emotional stability of God, while conscientiousness and surgency were negatively related to perceived intellect and surgency of god, respectively. Also, intellect of the participants was related negatively to perceptions of God's emotional stability and intellect. Perceived distance between the assessment of one's own personality and the personality of God predicted the strength of (dis)belief, thus opening new interpretations into possible sources of belief and disbelief. Finally, echoing previous studies, we found that conscientiousness of God had a negative effect on SOI-R score.
Understanding vaccine hesitancy has become increasingly important during the COVID-19 pandemic as governments around the globe have been struggling to convince portions of their populations to participate in vaccination protocols. Here we report on a nationally representative survey of the United Kingdom in which data revealed that individuals indicated more willingness to take unfamiliar or fictitious vaccines (putatively produced by the US government health program Medicare and the now defunct fraudulent healthcare company Theranos) than they were to take the Sputnik and Sinovac vaccines (developed by the Russian and Chinese governments respectively). The data show that the critical factor in vaccine hesitancy among the respondents was anxiety rather than familiarity with vaccines.
Understanding vaccine hesitancy has become increasingly important during the COVID-19 pandemic as governments around the globe have been struggling to convince portions of their populations to participate in vaccination protocols. Here we report on a nationally representative survey of the United Kingdom in which data revealed that individuals showed more willingness to take fictitious vaccines (putatively produced by the US government Medicare program and the now defunct healthcare company Theranos) than to take the Sputnik and Sinovac vaccines (developed by the Russian and Chinese governments respectively). The data indicate that the critical factor in vaccine hesitancy among the respondents was anxiety rather than familiarity with vaccines. ; publishedVersion
