title: Religious thought and behavior.
abstract: While earlier approaches to religious thought and practice searched for 'magic bullet' approaches to explain religious thought and behavior, seeing it as an example of irrationality, illusion, integrative force, symbolism, or false explanations of origins, cognitive scientific approaches have suggested that we see it rather as an aggregate of the products of various cognitive mechanisms. Studies in the cognitive science of religion, informed by experimental work, have converged on a standard model of explaining religious thought and behavior by focussing on the role of minimally counter-intuitive concepts, agent and animacy detection, ritual representations, notions of contagion and contamination avoidance, theory of mind, coalitions, and moral intuitions. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012 doi: 10.1002/wcs.1189 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
authors: Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen's University Belfast, UK.
authors: Ernest Thomas
authors: ET
authors: Lawson