The Existential Theory of Mind

By Jesse M. Bering. 2002

221 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c445e8f6576ea4c53e991736faf1e82b010abd2

How researchers see this paper

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

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Daniel M. Wegner
2. Ara Norenzayan
3. Scott Atran
4. Dominic D. P. Johnson
5. B. Heywood
6. Benjamin G. Purzycki
7. Richard Sosis
8. Cara DiYanni

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. Jesse L. Preston
2. Deborah Kelemen
3. B. Heywood
4. Dominic D. P. Johnson
5. Benjamin G. Purzycki
6. Richard Sosis
7. Ara Norenzayan
8. Scott Atran

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Richard Sosis
2. Henk Aarts
3. Jesse L. Preston
4. Ara Norenzayan
5. Benjamin G. Purzycki
6. Scott Atran
7. A. Dijksterhuis
8. Jesse M. Bering

Citations in the corpus

• Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion (2004, background): “7), then this cannot account for people’s tendency to attribute abstract categories of life events to supernatural agents (Bering 2002).”
• “Meant to be”: how religious beliefs and cultural religiosity affect the implicit bias to think teleologically (2014, background): “If teleological reasoning represents a narrative default in interpreting one’s own past (e.g., Bering, 2002a, 2003), then differing levels of cultural religiosity should not affect the tendency to give teleological explanations, which is along the lines of Kelemen’s (2003) findings.”
• Intuitions About Origins: Purpose and Intelligent Design in Children's Reasoning About Nature (2005, background): “This is despite the fact that the topic bears on the interesting issue of how children construe different categories and also how children begin to approach questions that, for adults, fall within the realm of metaphysical reflection (Bering, 2002; Evans & Mull, 2002; Harris, 2000; Johnson, 2000).”
• Hand of God, Mind of Man: Punishment and Cognition in the Evolution of Cooperation* (2006, background): “However, the act of punishing cheats entails costs, so punishment itself represents a “second-order” public good (Hackathorn 1989; Yamagishi 1986).”
• Our Gods: Variation in Supernatural Minds (2011, background): “In addition to detecting others’ mental states, we also attribute particular domains of knowledge and feelings to other minds (Bering 2002; Bering & Shackelford 2004; Johnson 2005).”
• The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience (2017, background): “5-28 Bering, J. M. (2002). The existential theory of mind.”
• "O Lord… You Perceive my Thoughts from Afar": Recursiveness and the Evolution of Supernatural Agency (2005, background): “Although religious systems that make such processes of supernatural punishment explicit tend to illustrate these patterns of causal reasoning most clearly, they appear just as fundamental to human behavior in the abstract (see Bering 2002).”
• Seeing brands as humans: Development and validation of a brand anthropomorphism scale (2020, background): “This is because mental qualities such as intentions, cognition and emotions are perceived as crucial in explaining the behaviour and determining blame and responsibility of an independent entity (Bering, 2002).”
• Effects of subliminal priming of self and God on self-attribution of authorship for events (2008, background): “Bering (2002) suggests that people turn to intentional forces as a way of making sense of life events.”