Cognitive science of new religious movements is the study of

new religious movement A new religious movement (NRM), also known as a new religion, is a religious or Spirituality, spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin, or they can be part ...

s (NRMs) from the perspective of

cognitive science Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...

. The field employs methods and theories from a variety of disciplines, including

cognitive science of religion Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought, theory, and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive sciences. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, pract ...

sociology of religion Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology. This objective investigation may include the use both of Quantitative research, quantit ...

, scientific study of religion,

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...

, and

artificial life Artificial life (ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline ...

. Scholars in the field seek to explain the origin and evolution of new religious movements in terms of ordinary universal cognitive processes.

History

The field traces its roots to the beginnings of the field of

in the 1990s, especially in Harvey Whitehouse's work on '

cargo cult Cargo cults were diverse spiritual and political movements that arose among indigenous Melanesians following Western colonisation of the region in the late 19th century. Typically (but not universally) cargo cults included: charismatic prophet ...

s' in

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

and cognitivist work by sociologists of religion

William Sims Bainbridge William Sims Bainbridge (born October 12, 1940) is an American sociologist who currently resides in Virginia. He is co-director of Cyber-Human Systems at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

and

Rodney Stark Rodney William Stark (July 8, 1934 – July 21, 2022) was an American sociologist of religion who was a longtime professor of sociology and of comparative religion at the University of Washington. At the time of his death he was the Distinguished ...

. In a 2005 article titled "Towards a Cognitive Science of New Religious Movements",

Afzal Upal Muhammad Afzal Upal is a writer and a cognitive scientist with contributions to cognitive science of religion, machine learning for planning, and agent-based social simulation. Early life and education He was born in Pakistan with 2 sisters and 3 ...

conceptualized the field and proposed agent-based social simulation as a good complement for Whitehouse's anthropological approach to investigate the origin of new religious movements. Upal developed an information entrepreneurship model-based social simulation to study the origin and evolution of new religious movements. In 2008, Kimmo Ketola used an anthropological case study of Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda (1896–1977), the founder of the

International Society for Krishna Consciousness The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), commonly known as the Hare Krishna movement, is a religious organization that follows the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism. It was founded on 13 July 1966 in New York City by ...

(ISKCON, the Hare Krishna movement) to identify the cognitive processes that underlie religious charisma. In 2013, building on Whitehouse's work,

Olav Hammer Olav Hammer (born 1958) is a Swedish professor emeritus at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense working in the field of history of religion. Career Hammer has written four books in Swedish and one monograph, ''Claiming Knowledge: Strat ...

studied the transmission of new age religious ideas in the West and identifies the contexts that allow them to flourish. In a series of publications, Upal revised the classic cognitive science of religion account of counterintuitiveness to emphasize the role of context and developed the context-based model of minimal counterintuitiveness. Using this generalized model, Upal argued that novelty of a new religious movement's doctrine gives it memorability advantages over more traditional religious ideas and thus explain constant religious innovation. He carried out an in-depth case study of the origin of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at to highlight how such a cognitive approach can help explain the origin and evolution of new religious movements. In a 2009 article, Justin Lane applied Todd Tremlin’s account of an "Agency Detection Device" mental mechanism to the study of small and innovating religious groups. In a psychological study of members of a variety of new religious movements in Belgium, Coralie Buxant, Vassilis Saroglou, Stefania Casalfiore, and Louis-Léon Christians from the Centre for Psychology of Religion at the

Université Catholique de Louvain UCLouvain (or Université catholique de Louvain , French for Catholic University of Louvain, officially in English the University of Louvain) is Belgium's largest French-speaking university and one of the oldest in Europe (originally establishe ...

found that "the pattern of results fit well with what we know from psychology of conversion in general." Alistair Lockhart (2020) carried out the first extensive overview of the field of cognitive science of new religious movements, concluding that the study of cognitive science of religion as applied to new religious movements and quasi-religions shows more common themes than is typically assumed.

References

{{reflist Cognitive science of religion Religious studies Religion and science Psychology of religion

History

See also

References