IBCSR's Spectrums Project is an ambitious attempt to apply what is known about ideological spectrums in politics and morality to the field of religious beliefs and practices. The Project's goal is twofold: firstly, to deepen understanding of why human beings adopt a spectrum of religious and theological viewpoints; and secondly, to discover strategies for mitigating the problems associated with religious extremism and polarized religious discourse. IBCSR's main partners in this project are Dr. Catherine Caldwell-Harris in Boston University's Psychology Department and Dr. Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California. The project's post-doctoral fellow is Dr. Aimee Radom, who recently completed a dissertation on a related topic. This project is funded by Boston University's School of Theology, the Doug & Gay Lane Foundation, the Lakeside Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

Key personnel: Wesley J. Wildman (PI), Catherine Caldwell-Harris, Ravi Iyer, Aimee Radom, Connor P. Wood, Nicholas DiDonato.

The Neuroscience and Religious Cognition Project proposes to identify the alterations in neural systems in patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) that could account for previously observed reductions in religiosity and in fluent access to religious concepts. The project uses advances in functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging (fcMRI) techniques, new psychophysical cognitive priming techniques, and classical ‘on-off’ levodopa (LD) comparative techniques to identify brain system alterations linked with religious cognition changes in these patients. In addition, two doctoral students and one post-doctoral fellow are being trained in the scientific background and experimental techniques relevant to this project. The post-doc will receive advanced training in fcMRI analyses relevant to ‘religion and brain’ issues while the doctoral students will be integrated into all aspects of hypothesis testing procedures of the project. We believe our work with these patients will identify key sources of their deficits as well as illuminate fundamental issues in the neuroscience of religious beliefs, behaviors, and experiences.

Key personnel: Patrick McNamara (PI), Wesley J. Wildman (Co-PI), Raymon Durso, David Salat, Christopher Halloran, Jonathan Morgan, Yorghos Tripodis, Dustin Clark, Brian Teed, and a host of research assistants.

IBCSR's Quantifying Religious Experience Project (QRXP) develops methods for measuring the distinctive cognitive and emotional features of religious experiences. The purpose of this project is to furnish a basis for the comparison of religious and spiritual experiences across demographic groups (such as men and women) and across cultures. Such comparisons can be extremely important for an adequate interpretation of religious and spiritual experiences. QRXP is funded by the John Templeton Coundation, Boston University, and IBCSR. A rich de-identified dataset of narratives, phenomenological profiles, and expert ratings is available to researchers who wish to pursue their own analyses.

Key personnel: Wesley J. Wildman (PI), Ron Pekala, Nik Zanetti, Ian Cooley.

The Simulating Religion Project (SRP) is a cluster of subprojects aiming to apply modeling and simulation techniques to the scientific study of religion. Modeling and simulation depends on data, so building and finding datasets is vital. There has been little past simulation research in religion. Extant work has posited very simple human minds, simple interactions, simple behaviors, and simple modes of change. This is for good reasons: excessive complexity in a simulation obscures the relevant lines of causality and causes us to lose cognitive control over our own model. But this leaves us with a problem: too much simplicity gives wrong answers, and too much complexity gives unclear and confused ones. SRP integrates multiple theories of religious cognition and produces tools that are capable of testing hypotheses regarding religion’s social and cultural effects. In particular, the Simulating Religion Project will try to answer questions such as, “What are the factors that contribute to civilizational transformation?”, “What role does religion play in social change?”, and “How do evolved cognitive, emotional and social tendencies interact?” Simulation techniques permit a newly persuasive approach to such questions, complementing approaches pursued in other disciplines.

SRP subprojects: Modeling Religion Project (MRP, 2015-2018) | Modeling Religion in Norway (MODRN, 2016-2019)

Key personnel: Wesley J. Wildman (PI), Patrick McNamara, Luke Matthews, Rich Sosis, Charles Nunn, F. LeRon Shults, Saikou Diallo, Justin E. Lane, Connor P. Wood, Christopher Lynch, Ross Gore, Jose Padilla, Ruben Mancha, Jenn Lindsay, Kate Stockly

IBCSR's Spirituality and Health Causation Project aims to move beyond the hundreds of correlational studies identifying the health effects of religious and spiritual practices to identify the causal, biochemical mechanisms that mediate spirituality-health connections. IBCSR's partners in this project are Dr. Katherine Verdolini Abbott and Dr. Nicole Li at the University of Pittsburgh. The Spirituality and Health Causation Project is funded in part by an NIH subcontract through the University of Pittsburgh and by Boston University.

Key personnel: Wesley J. Wildman (PI), Katherine Verdolini Abbott, Nicole Li, Joel Daniels.

The Economics, Science and Religion Project aims to develop an anthropologically sophisticated theoretical account of the relationship between religion and science in the Euro-American, post-Enlightenment context in conversation with historical and philosophical analyses of the academic study of economics. To this end, the project explores contemporary debates among historians and philosophers of economics over whether the construction of economic theories is most properly regarded as a scientific or a religious enterprise. The aim of the project is not to resolve these debates but to leverage them for the sake of constructing a theoretical account of the relationship between science and religion that is attuned to the intertwined religious and scientific dimensions of human inquiry in an era when economic theorizing plays a large role in shaping human interactions, all the way from local patterns of social organization to the global dynamics of national and international politics.

Key personnel: Kirk Wegter-McNelly.

The Cognitive Style and Religious Attitudes Project is a collaboration between two doctoral students at Boston University, Jonathan Morgan and Connor Wood, as well as Dr. Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California and doctoral student Thomas Talhelm of the University of Virginia. The objective of the project is to test a group of related hypotheses that make predictions about cognitive style, religious attitudes, and the local-cosmopolitan axis of psychological orientation. The team hopes that their research data, which will be gathered through online surveys at the website ExploringMyReligion.org, will help shed light on how social, cultural, cognitive, and personality factors influence – and are influenced by – religious belief. The resulting publications will contribute to conversations in the scientific study of religion, political psychology, moral psychology, political science, and related fields.

Key personnel: Jonathan Morgan, Connor P. Wood, Ravi Iyer, Thomas Talhelm.

The biological evolution of sex in our planetary ecosystem is a complex story covering millions of species and billions of years. The human species further complicates this story with the bio-cultural evolution of sex and gender in complex social niches. Religion and spirituality have played important roles in this process, both influencing and being influenced by sex and gender differences. This project employs perspectives from biological and cultural evolution, developmental biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, social construction, cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, and ethics to understand the intricate multi-directional influences among sex, gender, religion, and spirituality. The Sex Differences and Religion Project has several components. (1) An examination of sex-based differences in religious experiences, using surveys and neuroimaging. (2) The generation of two comprehensive annotated bibliographies, one containing resources relevant to the biology of sex differences, including the genetic and developmental basis for sexual dimorphism and intersex morphology, and the other containing resources relevant to the links among sex, gender, religion, and spirituality. (3) The generation of a cross-cultural dataset supporting phylogenetic analysis of the cultural evolution of religion. (4) A bio-cultural-social-ethical analysis of the controversies surrounding sex differences, sexual attraction, sexual behavior, sexual norms, intersex, and the social construction of gender, particularly as these complex issues influence and are influenced by religion and spirituality. The Sex Differences and Religion Project is led by IBCSR Directors Patrick McNamara and Wesley Wildman with the support of Boston University PhD student and IBCSR Doctoral Fellow Kate Stockly-Meyerdirk.

Key personnel: Wesley J. Wildman, Patrick McNamara, Luke Matthews, kate Stockly, Stephanie Arel, Megan DeFranza.