Director
Prof. Harvey Whitehouse
Institution The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford
How can we best understand the relationship between religion and morality? In 2015, Harvey Whitehouse and Ryan McKay published a peer-viewed white paper in Psychological Science. In it, they surveyed the state of the psychology of religion and morality research. They concluded that, for the most part, studies equate “religion” with “belief in God” and “morality” with some form of prosocial behavior. This has led to inconsistent (and imprecise) findings about the nature of the relationship between religion and morality. To move the field forward, the authors of this paper argued for breaking down religion and morality into their underlying cognitive components. Our project will conduct psychological research on these two topics so essential to the Templeton World Charity Foundation: religion and morality. Using both social psychology and the cognitive science of religion, this project will investigate the foundations that underlie expressions of religion and morality across cultures. Its primary goal is to produce discovery science about the nature of the relationship between religion and morality. Underpinning this proposal is the “fractioning” approach to religion and morality suggested by Whitehouse and McKay. The primary intended outputs are theoretical articles published in peer-reviewed journals and substantive empirical articles.
Project Resources
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has ...
This Retake article presents a corrected and extended version of a Letter published in Nature (Whitehouse et al., 2019) which set out to test ...
This study examined the extent to which children's concepts of God correspond with their parents' concepts of God. It also examined how parent...
The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion...
Anthropologists and historians of religion have commonly contrasted “great” (literate, authoritative, and centrally regulated) traditions with...
Claims to supernatural power have been used as a basis for authority in a wide range of societies, but little is known about developmental ori...
The fusion of personal and group identities can lead to self-sacrificial progroup behavior, from acts of charity to violent extremism. Two pat...
Moralizing religions encourage people to anticipate supernatural punishments for violating moral norms, even in anonymous interactions. This i...
Human rituals exhibit bewildering diversity, from the Mauritian Kavadi to Catholic communion. Is this diversity infinitely plastic or are ther...
This debate took place at the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference in Oxford on 21 September 2018, following the model of th...
Anthropologists and religious scholars have long debated the relationship between doctrinal Theravada Buddhism, so-called ‘animism’, and other...
Abstract The world faces serious environmental problems. To solve them we must work together. Fortunately, humans are a very cooperative speci...
We investigated if interpersonal synchrony can lead to a sense of agency over another’s movement (extended self-agency). In Experiment 1, we f...
Previous research suggests that how people conceive of minds depends on the culture in which they live, both in determining how they interact ...
Football-related violence (hooliganism) is a global problem. Previous work has proposed that hooliganism is an expression of social maladjustm...
There may be very good Christian theological reasons to oppose human biotechnological enhancement. It is, however, difficult to discern what t...
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