A Unified Psychological and Anthropological Model of Religion

There are many definitions of religion, some more useful than others, and some more scientific than others. As Edwin A. Locke mentions in the commentary of ​Organizational Behavior: A Management Challenge​, "valid definitions and concepts are not arbitrary social construction...they are based, first and foremost, on observing reality and then conceptualizing one's observations1." That is also exactly what science does. Both psychology and anthropology have provided many tools to study religion. However, there seems to be an insufficient level of integration between the two fields, and it is rare to find a definition, or model, of religion that integrates both fields of study on the topic of religion. Taking models from cognitive psychology and models from anthropology, and showing how they can work together, can provide us with an added level of understanding of the nature of religion. To that effect, I propose an integration between recent work in fMRI research and Ninian Smart’s Seven Dimensions of Religion. When studying religion, it is important to start by identifying what is meant by the word “religion.” The following are a number of issues with many definitions and models of religion. First, definitions of religion tend to be focused on western religion and especially Christianity. Other models, such as the one by Boyle and Ramble, rely on a notion of “counterintuitive” belief2. Anthropologically speaking, such models of religion are problematic because they place value judgements on the belief system and assert a sense of universal intuition. This issue is perhaps best summarized through a quote by Clifford Geertz. This analytical dissolution of the unspoken premise from which common sense draws its authority--that it presents reality neat--is not intended to undermine that authority by to relocate it. If common sense is as much an interpretation of the immediacies of experience, a gloss on them, as are myth, painting, epistemology, or whatever, then it is, like them, historically constructed and, like them, subjected to historically defined standards of judgment. It can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, developed, formalized, contemplated, even taught, and it can vary dramatically from one people to the next. It is, in short, a cultural system, though not usually a very tightly integrated one, and it rests on the same basis that any other such system rests; the conviction by those whose possesion it is of its value and validity. Here, as elsewhere, things are what you make of them3. Common sense, simply put, is not common. An individual’s sensibility is derived from his cultural upbringing. Therefore if a person is immersed within a culture that expresses certain religious beliefs, such as the existence of witches and curses, it might very well be common sense that Kern, Mary C., Christine L. Langlands, Linda K. Stroh, Gregory B. Northcraft, and Margaret A. Neale. Organizational Behavior: A Management Challenge. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. 2 Boyer, P., and C. Ramble. "Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross-cultural Evidence for Recall of Counter-intuitive Representations." Cognitive Science 25, no. 4 (2001): 535-64. doi:10.1016/s0364-0213(01)00045-3. 3 Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983. 1 he is sick, not because of some pathogen, but rather because a witch has placed a curse on him. It does not matter that a researcher might find the interpretation bizarre. While there are of course competing theories in numerous fields of study, and while psychology and anthropology are different fields, science is science, the goal of science is to investigate reality. It is the method through which anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, physicists, and so on, identity truth about the universe. The existence of competing fields is not the same as a failure to recognize and understand theories on the same topic, expressed by different fields. it is unreasonable for two fields of science to simply hold two different incompatible theories as true. Yet that is exactly what is happening when it comes to psychology and anthropology of religion. If the concept of religion is itself a reasonable topic of study, then there must be a way to integrate psychological and anthropological thought on the topic. Using techniques, such as fMRI, it is possible to look for associations between external stimuli and brain responses, and identify stimuli which trigger the similar response in the brain. In recent years, a number of fMRI studies have been produced, studying the cognitive nature of religion. Harris et al. utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activity in two groups. The first group they identified as religious and the second group they identified as non-religious. The participants were shown religious or non-religious statements. Non-religious stimulus appeared to engage regions of the brain involved in knowledge, while religious stimulus tended to activate the medial parietal regions of the brain, thought to be associated with self referential tasks. An interesting result from the study is that the cognitive signature identified when believers rejected a religious position, was nearly identical to the cognitive signature identified when non-believers accepted a religious position. The regions of the brain which showed differential activation to such stimuli included the ventral striatum, paracingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, the frontal poles, and the inferior parietal cortex4. According to research done by Wiech et al., another region of the brain which religion seems to engage is the VLPFC. This region appears to have an impact on the higher level processing of pain. In the study, when pain was induced in people, religious people experienced a less severe reaction when looking at religious imagery.5 The studies by Harris, Wiech, et al. suggest that there is a collection of cognitive signatures which are associated with a certain class of beliefs, and which are different from non-religious knowledge based positions. Identifying the exact nature of the signatures requires more work, but the evidence for these signatures allows the development of a concept of a religion-like or Harris, Sam, Jonas T. Kaplan, Ashley Curiel, Susan Y. Bookheimer, Marco Iacoboni, and Mark S. Cohen. "The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief." PLoS ONE 4, no. 10 (2009). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007272. 5 Wiech, Katja, Miguel Farias, Guy Kahane, Nicholas Shackel, Wiebke Tiede, and Irene Tracey. "An FMRI Study Measuring Analgesia Enhanced by Religion as a Belief System." Pain 139, no. 2 (2008): 467-76. doi:10.1016/j.pain.2008.07.030. 4 religioid belief. That concept can then be used as the foundation for a unified psychological and anthropological model of religion. In order to create a definition for something, archetypes are useful. Whether or not the archetypes reasonably fit a given definition, produced by the end of the process, definitions usually start with a collection of examples and then by comparing and contrast them, a definition can be produced. If one wanted to define "fruit," he could first look at a collection of things generally considered to be fruit, and also things generally not considered fruit, and see if it is possible to create a definition which reasonably includes the archetypes and excludes things generally not considered to be fruit. The same has been done here. The studies of the objects in question are the archetypes. Archetypes do not rely on a definition for inclusion into the group. Their inclusion is a priori knowledge. In this case, the religiosity of Christian belief is taken as a priori and the cognitive features of those beliefs are identified and used to define religioid belief. The concept of a religioid belief is not enough to define a religion and it does not take into account anthropological theory. Anthropological theory identifies a number of cultural traits that tend to occur in religious institutions. Ninian Smart, instead of trying to define religion, came up with seven characteristics that religions often share. The seven dimensions of religion, as expressed by Smart are ritual, material, doctrinal and philosophical, experiential and emotional, social and institutional, and the narrative and mythic6. Yet something can be a religion and not include some of these dimensions. Likewise, there are secular systems which include some of these dimensions. So in order to use this model, we would first need to be confident that the phenomenon that we are studying is indeed a religion. Probably one of the most damning examples of a nonreligion, which contains most, if not all elements of Smart's Seven Dimensions, is government. It contains every element. Voting for the ritual dimension, flags for the material dimension, government enforced law for the doctrinal and philosophical dimension, national pride for the experiential and emotional dimension, citizenship for the social and institutional dimension, and the history of the founding of the government, and how it came to be in its current form, for the narrative and mythic dimension. So we either have to call government a religious institution, or have to provide something more in order to first identify something as a religion, before using Smart's Seven Dimensions. That is what the cognitive model addressed here does. But there is great utility in Smart’s Seven Dimensions, and that utility increases exponentially when integrated with the cognitive model here. Once a religious cognitive state is identified, we can then address how each instance of one of the dimensions relates to that cognitive state. In doing so, we can define a religion as a set of cultural elements which act to establish, reinforce, or otherwise interact with religioid beliefs. Smart, Ninian. Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. 6 Christianity as an Example While a model of religion should not be Christian centric, it should at the very least indicate that Christianity, one of the most prominent religions in the world, is a religion. The first section of this paper already suggests that the belief in a god has the cognitive signature necessary to be considered a religioid belief. There are probably others in Christianity, but the cognitive studies referenced seem to focus largely on god belief. Christianity includes all seven dimensions of religion, and all seven can be related to the god belief. Rituals include baptism, prayer, and the eucharist. All of these are directly or indirectly connected to the belief in the Christian god. Baptism is an acceptance of Christ and therefore god, while prayer and the eucharist are both ways to gain a connection with god. The material aspect of the religion includes the cross, which represents the sacrifice of Christ, and reinforces the existence and actions of god. There aren’t too many other symbols in Christianity, as Christianity largely rejects the use of icons. The doctrinal and philosophical dimension is extensive and includes that there is only one god, the existence of sin, and the absolution of sin by accepting Christ, all of which tie directly to the existence of god and reinforce the worship of god. The doctrinal and philosophy dimension also relates directly to the ethical and legal dimension, which is largely founded on the ten commandments, which are the basic rules which god wants us to follow. The experiential and emotional dimension includes miracles. These miracles are often performed by religious figures. But, the power to perform miracles is not a power that saints and other religious figures have themselves. It is power which is derived from god (citation). The social and institutional dimension is quite sophisticated and complex in Christianity. Not only are there institutions of worship, but there are entire hierarchies of these institutions, such as individual churches, diocese, and the Vatican. The Vatican has at its center, the Pope, who is believed to have the most direct communication with god. This is limited to one aspect of Christianity, the Catholic Church, but there are similar roles in other divisions of Christianity. The Pope has power, largely because it is believed that his word is the word of god (address Papal infallibility). Much of the narrative and mythic dimensions comes from the bible. It includes the creation story and the story of Noah and the Ark, and they generally speak of god’s will and divine intervention. The narrative and mythic dimension helps to reinforce the belief in god, but at the same time, the belief in god helps to reinforce the narrative and mythic dimension. All of the dimensions relate to the god belief and either reinforce it or make sense in light of the belief in a god. The bulk of the components listed above make little to no sense, without the existence of the Christian god. They are all tied together by that belief. That is what makes the collection of cultural elements and religioid beliefs a coherent system and a religion. Furthermore, the unified model of religion helps understand religions, like Christianity, as an interrelationship between psychological traits and cultural elements. Finally, the desire to construct a more uniform and robust definition of religion is not in any way superfluous. Going back to the importance of definitions, as stated in Locke’s commentary on the topic, a definition is required before any metric can be devised. Surveys which attempt to measure religiosity, and studies which rely on identification of religiosity, often do not adequately explain why their measurements are accurate measurements of religiosity. And for this reason, among others, the ability to measure actual religiosity is quite problematic7. McAndrew, Siobhan, and David Voas. "Measuring Religiosity Using Surveys." Accessed March 30, 2018. https://www.ukdataservice.ac.uk/media/263004/discover_sqb_religion_mcandrew_voas.pdf. 7 Bibliography Boyer, P., and C. Ramble. "Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross-cultural Evidence for Recall of Counter-intuitive Representations." Cognitive Science 25, no. 4 (2001): 535-64. doi:10.1016/s0364-0213(01)00045-3. Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Harris, Sam, Jonas T. Kaplan, Ashley Curiel, Susan Y. Bookheimer, Marco Iacoboni, and Mark S. Cohen. "The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief." PLoS ONE 4, no. 10 (2009). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007272. Kern, Mary C., Christine L. Langlands, Linda K. Stroh, Gregory B. Northcraft, and Margaret A. Neale. Organizational Behavior: A Management Challenge. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. McAndrew, Siobhan, and David Voas. "Measuring Religiosity Using Surveys." Accessed March 30, 2018. https://www.ukdataservice.ac.uk/media/263004/discover_sqb_religion_mcandrew_voas.pdf. Smart, Ninian. Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. Wiech, Katja, Miguel Farias, Guy Kahane, Nicholas Shackel, Wiebke Tiede, and Irene Tracey. "An FMRI Study Measuring Analgesia Enhanced by Religion as a Belief System." Pain 139, no. 2 (2008): 467-76. doi:10.1016/j.pain.2008.07.030.