Experimenting with religion : the new science of belief /
"Whatever else it might be, religion is a human psychological phenomenon, and psychologists have been interested in it since the beginning of the discipline. In recent decades, psychologists have been pushing back against naysayers who assert that religion simply cannot be studied scientificall...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2023]
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "Whatever else it might be, religion is a human psychological phenomenon, and psychologists have been interested in it since the beginning of the discipline. In recent decades, psychologists have been pushing back against naysayers who assert that religion simply cannot be studied scientifically, cannot be brought into a lab and quantified. They have been figuring out ways to measure various aspects of religiosity, and to rigorously test theories about why people hold the beliefs that they do about gods, souls, and rituals. They have been experimenting with religion. Experimenting with Religion brings the reader behind the scenes, into the labs where scientists have been working to understand religion. This book describes a series of experiments, puts them in their intellectual context, and interviews the scientists themselves, asking them about where their ideas come from and how these turn into actual experimental data to be interpreted. Each chapter covers a related series of studies, with topics ranging from what children believe about the afterlife to how people assess the effectiveness of spells and charms. Written in the aftermath of the replication crisis in psychology, this book is also a meditation on psychological science itself, and whether and how it can help us understand anything at all, let alone religion"--Publisher's description. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xii, 186 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780197677568 0197677568 0190875550 9780190875565 0190875569 9780190875558 |