SOURCE MAIN FINDINGS
Batson, C. D., Schoenrade, P., & Ventis, W. L. (1993).
Religion and the individual: A social-psychological
perspective. New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.
Christie, A. N. (2019). On religion, lying, and social
preferences. Economics Letters, 174, 161-164.
Leal Filho, W., Dahms, L. M., & Consorte-McCrea, A.
(2019). Sustainability and religion: past trends and future
perspectives. In Sustainability and the Humanities (pp. 611-
619). Springer, Cham.
Herbstrith, J. C., Kuperus, S., Dingle, K., & Roth, Z. C.
(2019). Religion in the public schools: An examination of
school personnel knowledge of the law and attitudes toward
religious expression. Research in Education,
0034523718821705.
More than a body of information, social psychology is
the application of a particular method, the scientific
method, to study the behavior of individuals in society.
. . . This book reports our attempt to apply this method
to the study of religion. Our concern is with the role of
religion in the life of the individual—its origins,
development, dynamics, functions, and
consequences—rather than with religion as a social
institution. . . . Our goal is to provide a clear and
coherent social-psychological picture of individual
religion, a picture that does not do violence to its
diversity and mystery yet is still scientifically sound.
We tried to keep three different sets of readers in mind:
(1) anyone with an interest in religion; (2) students—
including students of social psychology, psychology of
religion, and sociology of religion; and (3) our
professional colleagues. (PsycINFO Database Record
(c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).
This study explores the relation between religion and
lying and social preferences. The empirical results
reveal that high inner religiosity is correlated with
truth-telling. The religious are more influenced by
equity concerns. The study also reveals the complexity
of religiosity.
This introductory paper offers some perspectives on
sustainability and religion, and outlines some areas
where further attention is needed.
Many Americans are familiar with the First
Amendment, but its application to prayer and religious
activities in public schools is often misunderstood.
Religious beliefs are increasingly diverse in the United
States. Therefore, it seems imperative that school
personnel are aware of the law and sensitive to an array
of religious practices. We conducted two studies that
explored school personnel’s (a) understanding of laws
on religious expression in public schools; (b) attitudes
toward religious expression in public schools; and (c)
tolerance for different religions. Key Study 1 findings
were that school personnel with more service years had
less accurate knowledge of religious expression laws
than school personnel with fewer service years, and
more knowledge was related to increased sensitivity to
religious practices in schools. Study 2 conceptually
replicated these relations with a sample of pre-service
teachers and found that Right-wing Authoritarianism
mediated the relation between knowledge of the law

Moon, J. W., Krems, J. A., & Cohen, A. B. (2018).
Religious People Are Trusted Because They Are Viewed as
Slow Life-History Strategists. Psychological science,
0956797617753606.
Tonna, M., Marchesi, C., & Parmigiani, S. (2019). The biological
origins of rituals: An interdisciplinary perspective. Neuroscience & behavior in human individuals as well as every
Biobehavioral Reviews.
Beggrow, E. P., & Sbeglia, G. C. (2019). Do disciplinary contexts
impact the learning of evolution? Assessing knowledge and
misconceptions in anthropology and biology students. Evolution:
Education and Outreach, 12(1), 1.
and religious sensitivity, presenting an avenue for
interventions to increase religious sensitivity.
Religious people are more trusted than nonreligious
people. Although most theorists attribute these
perceptions to the beliefs of religious targets, religious
individuals also differ in behavioral ways that might
cue trust. We examined whether perceivers might trust
religious targets more because they heuristically
associate religion with slow life-history strategies. In
three experiments, we found that religious targets are
viewed as slow life-history strategists and that these
findings are not the result of a universally positive halo
effect; that the effect of target religion on trust is
significantly mediated by the target’s life-history traits
(i.e., perceived reproductive strategy); and that when
perceivers have direct information about a target’s
reproductive strategy, their ratings of trust are driven
primarily by his or her reproductive strategy, rather
than religion. These effects operate over and above
targets’ belief in moralizing gods and offer a novel
theoretical perspective on religion and trust.
Ritual behavior is ubiquitous, marking animal
motor patterns, normal and psychopathological
human culture. Moreover, formal features of
rituals appear to be highly conserved along
phylogeny and characterized by a circular and
spatio-temporal structure typical of habitual
behavior with internal repetition of non-
functional acts and redirection of attention to
the “script” of the performance. A continuity,
based on highly conserved cortico-striatal
loops, can be traced from animal rituals to
human individual and collective rituals with
psychopathological compulsions at the crossing
point. The transition from “routinization” to
“ritualization” may have been promoted to deal
with environmental unpredictability in non-
social contexts and, through motor
synchronization, to enhance intra-group
cohesion and communication in social contexts.
Ultimately, ritual, following its biological
constraints exerts a “homeostatic” function on
the environment (social and non-social) under
conditions of unpredictability.
Evolution education research has focused on
biology populations, while other disciplines
organized around evolutionary theory—such as
biological anthropology—remain understudied.
Cognitive science and education research
suggest that learning evolution within the
context of human evolution might cause
increased understanding of evolutionary theory,
as well as reasoning patterns relating to
evolutionary change different from those
stemming from learning evolution in a more

Belzen, J. A. (2018). What, why and how? Meta-Reflections on
Cultural Psychological Approaches to the Scientific Study of
Phenomena Called Religious. Integrative Psychological and
Behavioral Science, 1-30.
Chicago
generalized context. Biological anthropology
students could offer a test of this hypothesis.
This study incorporates this underrepresented
population into the evolution education
literature in order to generate insights into the
effects of disciplinary context on evolutionary
knowledge and reasoning.
This deliberately essayistic paper deals with
strengths of and limits to cultural psychology,
especially in its application to research on
religion. It is presented as only one possible
approach, composite in itself and drawing on a
variety of theories, insights, methods and
techniques, but working on one of the
fundamental aspects of human psychological
functioning, and therefore as indispensable to
efforts to explore and understand anything
called religious as any other psychological
approach may be. Furthermore, the paper
makes an explicit plea for an interdisciplinary
approach to psychology. Whether researchers
will employ cultural psychology or another
approaches from contemporary psychological
sciences will depend on their personal
preferences, their professional training, the type
of context they are functioning and hopefully
also on the kind of phenomenon pointed out to
them as religious by a certain (sub)culture.
Keywords
Cultural
psychology Interdisciplinarity Religion Essay
Modesty