"O Lord… You Perceive my Thoughts from Afar": Recursiveness and the Evolution of Supernatural Agency

By Jesse M. Bering, Dominic D. P. Johnson. 2005

130 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d017f2d7017bfee1b0e76752c1f9a424cb86fcf

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. Jesse L. Preston
2. Dominic D. P. Johnson
3. Ryan S. Ritter
4. J. Hernandez
5. Benjamin G. Purzycki
6. Richard Sosis
7. Daniel M. Wegner
8. Kurt Gray

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Ryan S. Ritter
2. Jesse L. Preston
3. J. Hernandez
4. M. Murray
5. J. Schloss
6. Nicholas Epley
7. Adam Waytz
8. Benjamin G. Purzycki

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Adam Waytz
2. Jesse L. Preston
3. Nicholas Epley
4. Ryan S. Ritter
5. J. Hernandez
6. Kurt Gray
7. M. Murray
8. J. Schloss

Citations in the corpus

• Our Gods: Variation in Supernatural Minds (2011, background): “As such, commitment to supernatural agents may function to inhibit self-interested behavior, and thus in turn contribute to the evolution and persistence of human cooperation (Bering & Johnson 2005; Johnson 2005; Norenzayan & Shariff 2008).”
• Principles of Religious Prosociality: A Review and Reformulation (2010, methodology): “The supernatural principle thereby provides an effective means of maintaining social order, by creating a system of moral self-enforcement, fueled by fear and guilt (cf. Bering & Johnson, 2005; Johnson & Bering, 2006).”
• Causes and consequences of mind perception. (2010, background): “61 Oldridge, D.J. (2004)StrangeHistories: the Trial of the Pig, theWalking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds, Routledge 62 Gray, K.”
• Evolutionary accounts of belief in supernatural punishment: a critical review (2011, background): “According to some proposals, the optimal implementation would involve belief in moralizing gods or some other form of supernatural sanctioning (Bering & Johnson, 2005; Johnson & Bering, 2009; Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008).”
• Religion, self-regulation, and self-control: Associations, explanations, and implications. (2009, background): “Most religious belief systems posit gods or spirits that observe humans' behavior, pass judgment, and then administer rewards or sanctions (Bering & Johnson, 2005).”
• Hand of God, Mind of Man: Punishment and Cognition in the Evolution of Cooperation* (2006, background): “…ethnographic evidence suggests that the threat of supernatural punishment for norm transgressions exerts a powerful effect on people’s behaviour – believers literally alter their everyday decisions in order to avoid supernatural retribution (see examples in Bering and Johnson 2005; Boyer 2001).”