Papers by F. LeRon Shults
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Feb 6, 2019
Researchers in the social sciences are increasingly using modelling and simulation (M&S) as a res... more Researchers in the social sciences are increasingly using modelling and simulation (M&S) as a research approach. They create virtual worlds to discover relations across variables, and to test theories and potential policies. We introduced this research approach to students in the department of Development Studies at our university. The goal was to investigate the way in which such students can gain meta-knowledge about M&S-based research, that is, general knowledge about its nature and rationale. We organized a seminar to introduce the research approach and illustrated it with a simulation of the behaviour of agents with varying levels of tolerance towards their outgroup neighbours (based on Schelling's segregation model). We analysed students' interactions through a socio-cultural lens. Students were able to gain meta-knowledge about M&S-based research, which they judged as useful for their future as professionals when working on development projects.
Many people recognize that teaching basic skills in primary schools (reading, writing, and arithm... more Many people recognize that teaching basic skills in primary schools (reading, writing, and arithmetic) is no longer sufficient for pupils in the digital age. Therefore, governments now increasingly ask schools to add other skills (oral, digital) and to create connections between subjects (e.g., use mathematics in history lessons). In this study, we explored how social simulations can be used in primary education to meet these new goals. We conducted an expert appraisal (a qualitative Delphi method) with four experts specializing in innovating primary education. We selected three simulations that were freely available on the web, relevant for pupils’ lives and had a limited number of parameters. They dealt with segregation, gossip spread and population dynamics. We asked the experts to critically discuss these. Afterward, we analyzed the videotaped discussions in terms of affordances and constraints. The results showed that the affordances of social simulations include their broad ap...
Researchers at our university use modelling and simulation (M&S) to study religious conflicts, an... more Researchers at our university use modelling and simulation (M&S) to study religious conflicts, and we wanted to introduce undergraduate students of religion to this research approach. Hence, we started a three-year educational design research project to empirically study ways to introduce these students to M&S as a viable research method in their discipline. The research project will entail several iterations, which aim to have a feasible and effective design of lessons and a better understanding of the learning processes. The first iteration was exploratory and is reported here. For this exploration, we organised a seminar, which was videotaped for post hoc analysis. The seminar started with an introduction of research methods to study violent human behaviour, comparing experiments in which people are exposed to violence in real and virtual worlds. Afterwards, the students explored an agent-based simulation based on Schelling’s segregation model. The seminar was concluded as a plen...
arXiv (Cornell University), Sep 20, 2020
Study 1 collected data on the relationships between nationalism, religiosity, national and religi... more Study 1 collected data on the relationships between nationalism, religiosity, national and religious identification, threat perception, and sentiment toward different groups (using the same measures as the World Values Survey), particularly focusing on immigrants. Data was also collected on social media use and consumption of TV based media. Participants were also asked about their experience during the Covid-19 pandemic and their infection status. Methods An online survey was developed and deployed online with SurveyGizmo. Participants (N=2000) were recruited online through posting on forums and sharing in online social networks. Most participants were recruited on MTurk. Measures There were many survey measures used to assess our key variables. These are described here: Covid-19 infection status Participants were asked if they had tested negative for Covid-19, if they had symptoms and weren't tested, if they currently had it, and if they had recovered.
Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 2020
This article offers a brief epidemiological analysis and description of some of the main cognitiv... more This article offers a brief epidemiological analysis and description of some of the main cognitive (and coalitional) biases that can facilitate the emergence and enable the maintenance of a broad category of toxic traditions, which will be referred to here as "religious" belief-behaviour complexes (BBCs) or "theisms". I argue that such BBCs played an "adaptive" role in the Upper Paleolithic and have continued to "work" throughout most of human history by enhancing the species' capacity for material production and promoting its biological reproduction. However, today the theist credulity and conformity biases that surreptitiously shape these kinds of social assemblages have now become maladaptive in most contexts in the Anthropocene. In order to help address the pressing global challenges our species faces, such as extreme climate change, excessive consumer capitalism, and escalating cultural conflict, I commend the use of "prebunking" and other debiasing strategies in our attempts to reduce the toxicity of theisms in the body politic.
AI & Society, 2020
Public policies are designed to have an impact on particular societies, yet policy-oriented compu... more Public policies are designed to have an impact on particular societies, yet policy-oriented computer models and simulations often focus more on articulating the policies to be applied than on realistically rendering the cultural dynamics of the target society. This approach can lead to policy assessments that ignore crucial social contextual factors. For example, by leaving out distinctive moral and normative dimensions of cultural contexts in artificial societies, estimations of downstream policy effectiveness fail to account for dynamics that are fundamental in human life and central to many public policy challenges. In this paper, we supply evidence that incorporating morally salient dimensions of a culture is critically important for producing relevant and accurate evaluations of social policy when using multi-agent artificial intelligence models and simulations.
Secularism & Nonreligion, 2020
Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2020
PlosONE, 2019
We present a study of the dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity for 26 countries... more We present a study of the dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity for 26 countries with a Christian heritage, based on the 1998 and 2008 rounds of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Religion survey, using both exploratory and multi-group confirmatory factor analyses. The results of the exploratory factor analysis showed that three factors, common to Christian and religiously unaffiliated respondents, could be extracted from our initially selected items and suggested the testing of four different three-factor models using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. For the model with the best fit and measurement invari-ance properties, we labeled the three resulting factors as "Beliefs in afterlife and miracles", "Belief and importance of God" and "Religious involvement." The first factor is measured by four items related to the Supernatural Beliefs Scale (SBS-6); the second by three items related to belief in God and God's perceived roles as a supernatural agent; and the third one by three items with the same structure found in previous cross-cultural analyses of religiosity using the European Values Survey (ESS) and also by belief in God. Unexpectedly, we found that one item, belief in God, cross-loaded on to the second and third factors. We discussed possible interpretations for this finding, together with the potential limitations of the ISSP Religion questionnaire for revealing the structure of religiosity. Our tests of measurement invari-ance across gender, age, educational degree and religious (un)affiliation led to acceptance of the hypotheses of metric-and scalar-invariance for these groupings (units of analysis). However, in the measurement invariance tests across the countries, the criteria for metric invariance were met for twenty-three countries only, and partial scalar invariance was accepted for fourteen countries only. The present work shows that the exploration of large multinational and cross-cultural datasets for studying the dimensionality and invariance of social constructs (in our case, religiosity) yields useful results for cross-cultural comparisons, but is also limited by the structure of these datasets and the way specific items are coded.
Deleuze & Guattari Studies, 2020
This article explores some of the ways in which the conceptual apparatus of A Thousand Plateaus, ... more This article explores some of the ways in which the conceptual apparatus of A Thousand Plateaus, and especially its machinic metaphysics, can be connected to recent developments in computer modeling and social simulation, which provide new tools for thinking that are becoming increasingly popular among philosophers and social scientists. Conversely, the successful deployment of these tools provides warrant for the flat ontology articulated in A Thousand Plateaus and therefore contributes to the “reversal of Platonism” for which Deleuze had called in his earlier works, such as Logic of Sense. The first major section offers a brief exposition of some key concepts in A Thousand Plateaus in order to set the stage for the second and third major sections, which argue that the fabrication of a metaphysics of immanence can be accelerated by connecting its conceptual apparatus more explicitly to insights derived from philosophical analyses of computational modeling and simulation and the social scientific use of Manuel DeLanda’s “assemblage theory.” The article concludes with a summary of the argument and a brief consideration of some of the potential ethical and political implications of this interdisciplinary engagement.
Human Simulation: Perspectives, Insights, and Applications. S.Y. Diallo, et al (eds), Springer, 2019
American Journal of Philosophy & Theology, 2018
I am extremely grateful to Brandon Daniel-Hughes and Jeffrey Speaks for their careful reading of ... more I am extremely grateful to Brandon Daniel-Hughes and Jeffrey Speaks for their careful reading of my proposals in Theology after the Birth of God and Practicing Safe Sects and for their insightful suggestions for clarifying the project and following out its social implications. Both essays were instructive and provocative, providing exactly the kind of critical and constructive commentary that authors hope their work will evoke. We share a great deal in common, including a robustly naturalist metaphysics, an appreciation for the pragmatic philosophical tradition, and a deep (even "pastoral") concern about the psychological and political shape of future human communities ("sects" in the most general sense). Instead of focusing primarily on these points of agreement, however, I will highlight the main differences that remain between us, those relatively small differences that make the most difference in our proposed rhetorical and practical strategies.
Proceedings of the Spring Simulation Conference, 2019
Philosophical reflection on and around Modeling and Simulation (M&S) is often focused on the ethi... more Philosophical reflection on and around Modeling and Simulation (M&S) is often focused on the ethical and epistemological implications of empirical findings or innovative methods within the field. In this paper I highlight some of the metaphysical implications of developments within M&S. I argue that the rise of simulation within and across scientific disciplines is accelerating the reversal of Platonism, whose emphasis on transcendence and reliance on hierarchical, static categories has dominated western philosophy for over two millennia. The success of M&S methodologies opens up new conceptual space for articulating a metaphysics of immanence that may provide a more adequate basis for understanding and solving many of the problems facing contemporary human societies.
We propose a generative agent-based model of the emergence and escalation of xenophobic anxiety i... more We propose a generative agent-based model of the emergence and escalation of xenophobic anxiety in which individuals from two different religious groups encounter various hazards within an artificial society. The architecture of the model is informed by several empirically validated theories about the role of religion in intergroup conflict. Our results identify some of the conditions and mechanisms that engender the intensification of anxiety within and between religious groups. We define mutually escalating xenophobic anxiety as the increase of the average level of anxiety of the agents in both groups over time. Trace validation techniques show that the most common conditions under which longer periods of mutually escalating xenophobic anxiety occur are those in which the difference in the size of the groups is not too large and the agents experience social and contagion hazards at a level of intensity that meets or exceeds their thresholds for those hazards. Under these conditions agents will encounter out-group members more regularly, and perceive them as threats, generating mutually escalating xenophobic anxiety. The model’s capacity to grow the macro-level emergence of this phenomenon from micro-level agent behaviors and interactions provides the foundation for future work in this domain.
The title of this article is borrowed from a phrase found in the writing of philosopher Gilles De... more The title of this article is borrowed from a phrase found in the writing of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who suggests that Christianity contains “a germ of tranquil atheism.” The first section highlights the significance of “the event” of Christianity for Deleuze, which has almost nothing to do with Jesus’ death and almost everything to do with the secretion of atheism. Section two explains how Deleuze’s critique of the repressive and oppressive mechanisms of Christianity (the poster child for the Despotic machine) and of the symbol of Christ (the poster child for the White Face) can be complemented and strengthened by insights from the bio-cultural sciences of religion. Like all religious assemblages held together by shared belief in imagined punitive gods, Christianity, along with its obsession with the religious Figure of Christ, will eventually die. Can we be worthy of that event: the death of Christianity, whose timely demise, ironically, is hurried along by that “germ of tranquil atheism” that it could not help but secrete.
Journal of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2018
This article offers an affirmative construal of atheism: the attempt to make sense of the world w... more This article offers an affirmative construal of atheism: the attempt to make sense of the world with naturalist explanations and to act sensibly in society following secularist principles (i.e., without relying on supernatural agents or complying with supernatural authorities). After briefly describing the conceptual framework behind this positive conception of a non-religious worldview, we outline the construction and present the findings of two computational models that simulate some of the cognitive and coalitional mechanisms that engender and nurture religious and non-religious worldviews. These models allow us to explore the causal dynamics within complex adaptive systems involving (dis)belief in supernatural agents and (dis)affiliation from religious institutions.
Human simulation (applying Modeling and Simulation (M&S) to topics in the humanities, the interpr... more Human simulation (applying Modeling and Simulation (M&S) to topics in the humanities, the interpretative social sciences, and the arts) is a potent extension of social simulation. This paper offers reflections on teaching at this intersection, presenting best practices in pedagogy for undergraduate and graduate students engaged in formal studies, and for established researchers having no structured curriculum. The fact that human simulation is possible drives home the presence of formal patterns in a host of phenomena that for a long time were thought to be inimical to mathematical analysis. That implies a double pedagogical challenge: teaching humanities students to recognize formal structures in the phenomena they study (counter-intuitive for them), and teaching M&S students to collaborate with humanities people who think very differently (equally counter-intuitive). The three perspectives presented here underline the usefulness of human simulation, as well as the difficulties and benefits associated with teaching and learning human simulation. 1 INTRODUCTION Human simulation is defined here as the application of computer modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques in the humanities disciplines, the interpretative social sciences, and the arts (for the sake of convenience, these will be collectively referred to throughout as the humanities disciplines). Human simulation can be regarded as an extension of social simulation, further expanding the range of theories and data that fall within the reach of the computational sciences. As with social simulation so with human simulation: it is impossible to capture everything important about a phenomenon of interest in a computer model of it. Yet M&S can still generate useful insights, enhance theoretical consistency, relate theories to data more effectively, and thereby deepen understanding of the varied phenomena studied within the humanities. These benefits have been clearly recognized within STEM education (e.g. Fishwick et al. 2014), within the field of social simulation (Gilbert and Troitzsch 2005), and also within the encompassing area
This article outlines the development – and reports on the experimental findings – of two computa... more This article outlines the development – and reports on the experimental findings – of two computational models designed to simulate the dynamic systems and behavioural patterns identified and clarified by research on terror management theory. The causal architectures of these models are informed by empirical research on the effects of mortality salience on “religiosity” (and vice versa). They are also informed by research on the way in which perception of personal and environmental hazards activate evolved cognitive and coalitional precautionary systems that can intensify anxiety-alleviating behaviours such as imaginative engagement with supernatural agents postulated within a religious coalition. The capacity of the models to produce emergent patterns and behaviours that are similar to the results of other empirical studies supports the plausibility of their causal architectures. After tracing some of the literature that supports the causal dynamics of our models, we present the two models, describe the experiments, and report the results. We conclude by discussing the importance of the findings, the limitations of the models, and directions for future research.
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Papers by F. LeRon Shults
We invite chapter proposals for an edited volume that we hope will not only be a valuable resource to scholars who study nonreligion but also serve as a textbook for courses in this burgeoning field. Our tentative plan is to include chapters that fall under three broad headings, which will form the three major parts of the book:
Part I. The Study of Nonreligion (methodological, definitional, disciplinary issues)
Part II. Understanding and Explaining Nonreligion (theoretical and empirical analyses) Part III. Philosophical Implications (including political issues and existential arguments)
Tentative Timeline • 15 October 2019-Deadline for chapter proposals. Proposals should include the names of the author(s), a tentative title and a summary of the topic and main argument of the chapter (300-500 words).
If you have any questions (or suggestions) related to the book, including possible chapter topics,
potential publishers or anything else please contact one of the editors:
F. LeRon Shults (Email: [email protected]; Website: www.leronshults.com)
Professor, Institute for Global Development and Social Planning, University of Agder, Norway
Director, NORCE Center for Modeling Social Simulation, Kristiansand, Norway
Thomas J. Coleman III (Email: [email protected]; Website: thomascoleman.guru)
Visiting Professor, Department of Psychology, Grand Valley State University
PhD student, Brain, Belief, and Behaviour Research Lab, Coventry University