Notes

Introduction

1. Blackmore, S. J. (1996). In search of the light: Adventures of a parapsychologist. Prometheus.

2. Limb, C. J., & Braun, A. R. (2008). Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: An fMRI study of jazz improvisation. PLoS ONE, 3(2), e1769.

3. I should note that nearly all of the citations in this book are from multiauthored papers. So rather than using the cumbersome “Joshua Greene and colleagues” throughout the book, I will use only one of the authors, usually the first; Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293(5537), 2105–2108; As this book was going to press, I read Greene’s new book. In it he claims that the brain area associated with more utilitarian thinking is the DLPFC and the deontological area is the VMPFC. These two areas are both in the frontal lobe, and, in contrast with general tendencies in the brain, the utilitarian thinking area is further forward than the deontological one. It could be an exception to the general frontal/
deliberative and back-of-the-brain/hardwired pattern often found in the brain; Greene, J. (2013). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them. Penguin.

4. DeCaro, M. S., Thomas, R. D., & Beilock, S. L. (2008). Individual differences in category learning: Sometimes less working memory capacity is better than more. Cognition, 107(1), 284–294.

5. Gendler calls this quasi-belief an “alief,” a “mental state triggered by ambient environmental factors, generating very real emotional and behavioral responses, but the person experiencing that mental state isn’t convinced that the trigger reflects something true.” Gendler, T. S. (2008). Alief and belief. The Journal of Philosophy, 105(10), 634–663. Cited in: Bering, J. (2011). The belief instinct: The psychology of souls, destiny, and the meaning of life. W. W. Norton.

6. Boden, M. T., Berenbaum, H., & Topper, M. (2012). Intuition, affect, and peculiar beliefs. Personality and Individual Differences, 52(7), 845–848.

7. Davis, H., & McLeod, S. L. (2003). Why humans value sensational news. Evolution and Human Behavior, 24(3), 208–216.

8. Curry, A. (2010a). The mathematics of terrorism. Discover, 31(6), 38–43.

9. Terrorism leads to fear: Healy, A. F., Aylward, A. G., Bourne Jr., L. E., & Beer, F. A. (2009). Terrorism after 9/11: Reactions to simulated news reports. American Journal of Psychology, 122(2), 153–165; Crime documentaries: Kort-Butler, L. A., & Sittner Hartshorn, K. J. (2011). Watching the detectives: Crime programming, fear of crime, and attitudes about the criminal justice system. Sociological Quarterly, 52(1), 36–55; Appel, M. (2008). Fictional narratives cultivate just-world beliefs. Journal of Communication, 58(1), 62–83.

10. Dutton, D. (2009). The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure, and human evolution (p. 110). Bloomsbury Press.

11. Marsh, E. F., & Fazio, L. K. (2006). Learning errors from fiction: Difficulties in reducing reliance on fictional stories. Memory & Cognition, 34(5), 1140–1149.

12. Byrne, D. (2012). How music works. San Francisco, CA: McSweeny’s.

13. For a review see: Winner, E. (1982). Invented worlds: The psychology of the arts (pp. 66–67). Harvard University Press.

14. Dutton, D. (2009). The art instinct (p. 30).

15. McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122.

16. Empathy: Mar, R. M., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., de la Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the stimulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(5), 694–712; Prosocial behavior: Johnson, B. (2012). Religion and philanthropy. Unpublished manuscript, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. African Americans: Katz, P. A., & Zalk, S. R. (1978). Modification of children’s racial attitudes. Developmental Psychology, 14(5), 447–461; No mental state descriptions: Peskin, J., & Wilde Astington, J. (2004). The effects of adding metacognitive language to story texts. Cognitive Development, 19(2), 253–273.

17. Marsh, E. F., & Fazio, L. K. (2006). Learning errors from fiction.

18. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. Basic Books, 132.

19. MacCoby, E. E. (1998). The two sexes: Growing up apart, coming together (the family and public policy). Harvard University Press; Baumeister, R. F., & Sommer, K. L. (1997). What do men want? Gender differences and two spheres of belongingness: Comment on Cross and Madson. Psychological Bulletin, 122(1).

20. Gal, D., & Rucker, D. D. (2010). When in doubt, shout!: Paradoxical influences of doubt on proselytizing. Psychological Science, 21(11), 1701–1707. This causes an interesting interpretation of the death of Jesus. Early disciples followed Jesus and then he was killed. Perhaps their evangelism is a result of their savior dying.

21. Epstein, S., Pacini, R., Denes-Raj, V., & Heier, H. (1996). Individual differences in intuitive-experiential and analytical-rational thinking styles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2(71), 390–405; Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Seli, P., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief. Cognition, 123(3), 335–346.

22. Waller, N. G., Kojelin, B. A., Bouchard, T. J., Lykken, D. T., & Tellegen, A. (1990). Genetic and environmental influences on religious interests, attitudes, and values: A study of twins reared apart and together. Psychological Science, 1(3), 138–142. Perhaps even more surprisingly, it’s the same for people’s political beliefs.

23. Clow, A., & Fredhoi, C. (2006). Normalisation of salivary cortisol levels and self-report stress by a brief lunchtime visit to an art gallery by London city workers. Journal of Holistic Healthcare, 3(2), 29–32.

24. Rice, T. W. (2003). Believe it or not: Religious and other paranormal beliefs in the United States. Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion, 42(1), 95–106.

25. Moore, S. G. (2012). Some things are better left unsaid: How word of mouth influences the storyteller. Journal of Consumer Research. 38(6), 1140-1154.

26. Wilson, T. D., Centerbar, D. B., Kermer, D. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). The pleasures of uncertainty: Prolonging positive moods in ways people do not anticipate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(1), 5–21.

1: Hardwiring for Socializing

1. It’s not clear how long humans have had hierarchical societies. Current nomadic hunter-gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian. It has been suggested that hierarchy became widespread when people became more sedentary and started using agriculture: Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon Books. Chapter 8: The Conservative Advantage.

2. In fact, according to the social-intelligence hypothesis, the rapid brain growth of our recent evolutionary history is due to this arms race of our abilities to keep up with complex social networks: Dunbar, R. I. M. (1993). Coevolution of neocortical size, group size, and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16(4), 681–735.

3. Agenticity: Shermer, M. (2011). The believing brain: From ghosts and gods to politics and conspiracies: How we construct beliefs and reinforce them as true. Times Books; Hypertrophy of social cognition: Boyer, P. (2003). Religious thought and behavior as by-products of brain function. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7(3), 119–124; Overactive theory of mind: Bering, J. (2011). The belief instinct: The psychology of souls, destiny, and the meaning of life. W.W. Norton & Company; Hypersensitive agency detection: Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon Books. Dennett, D. C. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Penguin Books; Anthropomorphism: Guthrie, S. E. (1993). Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford University Press.

4. Isola, P., Xiao, J., Torralba, A., & Oliva, A. (2011). What makes an image memorable? In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), (pp. 145-152), Colorado Springs, CO. IEEE.

5. Wilkins, D., Schults, B., & Linduff, K. M. (2008). Art Past, Art Present. (S. Touborg, Ed.) (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson.

6. Dunbar, R. I. M. (1993). Coevolution of neocortical size, group size, and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16(4), 681–735.

7. Trick, L. M. & Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1994). Why are small and large numbers enumerated differently?: A limited-capacity preattentive stage in vision. Psychological Review, 101(1), 80–102.

8. McNeil, W. H. (1995). Keeping together in time: Dance and drill in human history. Harvard University Press; For an explanation of why Europeans gave it up, see: Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind. Chapter 10: The Hive Switch.

9. Byrne, D. (2012). How music works. San Francisco, CA: McSweeny’s. Chapter 2: My Life In Performance.

10. Hogan, P. C. (2003). Cognitive science, literature, and the arts: A guide for humanists. Routledge.

11. Zwaan, R. A. (1994). Effect of genre expectations on text comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 20(4), 920–933.

12. Harris, P. L. (2000). The work of the imagination. Blackwell.

13. Gabriel, S., & Young, A. (2011). Becoming a vampire without being bitten: The narrative collective assimilation hypothesis. Psychological Science, 22(8), 990–994.

14. Cohen, J. (2004). Parasocial break-up from favorite television characters: The role of attachment styles and relationship intensity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 21(2), 187–202.

15. Gilbert, D. T. (1991). How mental systems believe. American Psychologist, 46(2), 577–609. Gueraud, S., Harmon, M. E., & Peracchi, K. A. (2005). Updating situation models: The memory-based contribution. Discourse Processes, 39(2-3), 243–263.

16. Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173.

17. Castelli, F., Frith, C., Happe, F., & Frith, U. (2002). Autism, Asperger syndrome and brain mechanisms for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes. Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 125(8), 1839–1849.

18. Of course I mean realistic according to what people believe to be consistent with human psychology (sometimes called “folk psychology’’), and not necessarily realistic according to people’s actual psychology. Storytelling conventions can seem realistic not because we see them played out in real life but because we are used to seeing them in the media. One unrealistic behavior I see in films quite often is when people drop what they’re holding when sufficiently surprised. This never happens in real life. In fact, in one women’s self-defense course my friend took, they had to train women to drop their bags in order to effectively defend themselves, because normally they won’t. Another example is the frequent occurrence of Freudian slips during sexual tension (that is, sexual slips of the tongue, such as saying “just a sex” instead of “just a sec”). As unrealistic as these behaviors are, we find them acceptable in television and movies.

19. Legare, C. H., & Gelman, S. A. (2008). Bewitchment, biology, or both: The co-existence of natural and supernatural explanatory frameworks across development. Cognitive Science, 32(4), 607–642.

20. Pronin, E., Wegner, D. M., McCarthy, K., & Rodriguez, S. (2006). Everyday magical powers: The role of apparent mental causation in the overestimation of personal influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(2), 218–231.

21. Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2010). Blaming God for our pain: Human suffering and the divine mind. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1), 7–16.

22. Schizotypals, whom I will deal with in chapter 3, also tend to like science fiction and fantasy, though I don’t have an explanation for this.

23. Zunshine, L. (2006). Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel. Ohio State University Press.

24. Connellan, J., Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Batki, A., & Ahluwalia, J. (2000). Sex differences in human neonatal social perception. Infant Behavior and Development, 23, 113–118.

25. Johnstone, K. (1999). Impro for storytellers. Routledge/Theatre Company.

26. If you are skeptical that a game can be a work of art, I highly recommend an excellent online review of the Russian computer game Pathologic: Smith, Q. (2008). Butchering Pathologic. Retrieved from http://www.rockpaper
shotgun.com/2008/04/10/butchering-pathologic-part-1-the-body/ (March 13, 2011). Another great example is the computer game The Graveyard.

27. The NPD Group (2009a). Entertainment trends in America. Retrieved from http://www.npd.com/lps/Entertainment_Trends2009/ (March 8, 2011); The NPD Group (2009b). More Americans play video games than go out to the movies. Retrieved from https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press
-releases/pr_090520// (February 2, 2014). Thompson, C. (2007). Halo 3: How Microsoft labs invented a new science of play. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/ff_halo?currentPage=all (October 18, 2010).

28. Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames (page 2). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

29. Libby, L. K., Shaeffer, E. M., & Eibach, R. P. (2009). Seeing meaning in action: A bidirectional link between visual perspective and action identification level. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138(4), 503–516.

30. Tavinor, G. (2005). Videogames and interactive fiction. Philosophy and Literature, 29(1), 24–40.

31. Dunbar, R. I. M. (2004). Gossip in evolutionary perspective. Review of General Psychology, 8(2), 100–110.

32. Gossip forms a social bond: De Backer, C., Larson, C., & Cosmides, L. (2007). Bonding through gossip? The effect of gossip on levels of cooperation in social dilemma games. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, San Francisco, CA; Gossip is often correct: Simmons, D. B. (1985). The nature of the organizational grapevine. Supervisory Management, 30(11), 39–42; Gossip prevents selfish behavior: Beersma, B., & Van Kleef, G. A. (2011). How the grapevine keeps you in line: Gossip increases contributions to the group. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2(6), 642–649.

33. Kelly, A. E. (1999). Revealing personal secrets. Current directions in psychology science, 8(4), 105–109.

34. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought (p. 124). Basic Books.

35. McAndrew, F. T., Bell, E. K., & Garcia, C. M. (2007). Who do we tell, and whom do we tell on? Gossip as a strategy for status enhancement. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 37(7), 1562–1577.

36. Bering, J. (2011). The belief instinct.

37. Gambetta, D. (1994). Godfather’s gossip. European Journal of Sociology, 35(2), 199–223.

38. Purzycki, B. G., Finkel, D. N., Shaver, J., Wales, N., Cohen, A. B., & Sosis, R. (2012). What does god know? Supernatural agents’ access to socially strategic and non-strategic information. Cognitive Science, 36(5), 846–869.

39. Arena, M. P., & Howe, J. S. (2008). A face can launch a thousand shares—and an 0.80% abnormal return. Journal of Behavioral Finance, 9(3), 107–116.

40. Slovic, P. (2007). “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2), 79–95.

41. Hobbs, D. R., & Gallup Jr., G. G. (2011). Songs as a medium for embedded reproductive messages. Evolutionary Psychology, 9(3), 390–416.

42. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained (p. 231).

43. Morris, M. W., Sheldon, O. J., Ames, D. R., & Young, M. J. (2007). Metaphors and the market: Consequences and preconditions of agent and object metaphors in stock market commentary. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 102(2), 174–192.

44. Kelemen, D. (2004). Are children “intuitive theists”? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature. Psychological Science. 15(5), 295–301.

45. Bering, J. (2011). The belief instinct.

46. Schoenherr, J., Thomson, R., & Davies, J. (2011). Expanding the space of cognitive science (pp. 1424–1429). Proceedings of the 33rd annual meeting of the cognitive science society, Boston, MA.

47. Novella, S. (2000). UFOs: The psychocultural hypothesis. Retrieved from http://www.theness.com/index.php/ufos-the-psychocultural-hypothesis/ (September 13, 2012).

48. Malmstrom, F. V. (2005). Close encounters of the facial kind: Are UFO alien faces an inborn facial recognition template? Skeptic, 11(4), 44–47.

49. Harmon, L. D., & Julesz, B. (1973). Masking in visual recognition: Effects of two-dimensional filtered noise. Science, 180(4091), 1194–1197.

50. Atkinson, J. (2002). The developing visual brain. Oxford University Press.

51. Perina, K. (2004). Cracking the Harvard X-Files. In D. Sobel & J. Cohen (Eds.), The best American science writing 2004 (pp. 115–123). HarperCollins.

52. Bering, J. (2011). The belief instinct.

53. Schjoedt, U., Stødkilde-Jørgensen, H., Geertz, A. W., & Roepstorff, A. (2009). Highly religious participants recruit areas of social cognition in personal prayer. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 4(2), 199–207.

54. James, W. (1988). The listening ebony: Moral knowledge, religion, and power among the Uduk. Clarendon Press.

55. Sanderson, S. K., & Roberts, W. W. (2008). The evolutionary forms of the religious life: A cross-cultural, quantitative analysis. American Anthropologist, 110(4) 454–466.

56. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained (p. 159).

57. Barrett, J. L. (2007). Cognitive science of religion: What is it and why is it? Religion Compass, 1(6), 768–786.

58. Caldwell-Harris, C., Fox Murphy, C., Velazquez, T., & McNamara, P. (2011). Religious belief systems of persons with high functioning autism. Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Boston, MA.

59. Previc, F. H. (2006). The role of the extrapersonal brain systems in religious activity. Consciousness and Cognition, 15(3), 500–539.

60. Norenzayan, A., Gervais, W. M., & Trzesniewski, K. H. (2012). Mentalizing deficits constrain belief in a personal god. PLoS One, 7(5), e36880. Paek, E. (2006). Religiosity and perceived emotional intelligence among Christians. Personality and Individual Differences, 41(3), 479–490.

61. Discussed in: Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion Explained (pp. 145–147).

62. Waytz, A., Morewedge, C. K., Epley, N., Monteleone, G., Gao, J.-H., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2010). Making sense by making sentient: Effectance motivation increases anthropomorphism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(3), 410-435.

63. Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological Science, 17(10), 847–853.

64. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion Explained (pp. 292–283).

2: Wizard’s First Rule

1. Goodkind, T. (1994). Wizard’s first rule. Tor Books.

2. Nasrallah, M., Carmel, D., & Lavie, N. (2009). Murder, she wrote: Enhanced sensitivity to negative word valence. Emotion, 9(5), 609–618; Cimpian, A., Brandone, A. C., & Gelman, S. A. (2010). Generic statements require little evidence for acceptance but have powerful implications. Cognitive Science, 34(8), 1452–1482.

3. As reported in: Dutton, D. (2009). The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure, and human evolution (p. 18). Bloomsbury Press.

4. Cook, M., & Mineka, S. (1990). Selective associations in the observational conditioning of fear in rhesus monkeys. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 16(4), 372–389; Mineka, S., & Cook, M. (1988). Social learning and the acquisition of snake fear in monkeys. In T. R. Zentall & B. G. Galef (Eds.), Social learning: Psychological and biological perspectives (pp. 51–74). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

5. People are also more likely to form a food aversion from subsequent nausea than from subsequent unpleasant noise. In this case, they have a built-in expectation that certain foods might make them feel sick, but not that certain foods might produce sounds they find unpleasant. This ends up affecting their beliefs about cause and effect in the world. Thanks to Anthony Francis for this insight. For information about the Baldwin effect, see: Baldwin, M. J. (1896). A new factor in evolution. The American Natualist, 30(354), 441–451.

6. Dodd, M. D., Balzer, A., Jacobs, C. M., Gruszczynski, M. W., Smith, K. B., & Hibbing, J. R. (2012). The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: Connecting physiology and cognition to preferences. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367(1589), 640–649.

7. Nial, P., & McGregor, I. (2009). Conservative shift among liberals and conservatives following 9/11/01. Social Justice Research, 22(2-3), 231–240.

8. Munro, G. D. (2010). The scientific impotence excuse: Discounting belief-threatening scientific abstracts. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40(3), 579–600.

9. Kuhn, D., Weinstock, M., & Flaton, R. (1994). How well do jurors reason? Competence dimensions of individual variation in a juror reasoning task. Psychological Science, 5(5), 289–296.

10. The classic experimental example of the congruence bias is the Wason card task. In it, participants are asked to turn over cards to see if a given rule is being followed (for example, every card with an even number on one side must have a vowel on the other). Unless the rule is in a domain in which the participants are familiar (e.g., drinking laws), they tend not to turn cards over that would falsify the rule. In other words, they seek information congruent with their belief, rather than information that would refute it. Tut tut. For the Wason card task, see: Wason, P. C. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 129–140.

11. They might indeed be on the same scale, differing only in valence. See: Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press. page 182.

12. Wypijewski, J. (1998). Painting by numbers: Komar and Melamid’s scientific guide to art. University of California Press.

13. For a discussion, see chapter 1 of: Dutton, D. (2009). The art instinct.

14. Balling, J. D., & Falk, J. H. (1982). Development of visual preference for natural environment. Environment and Behavior, 14(1), 5–28. Elizabeth Lyons, however, failed to replicate these findings: Lyons, E. (1983). Demographic correlates of landscape preference. Environment and Behavior, 15, 487–511.

15. These findings are from: Orians, G. H., & Heerwagen, J. H. (1992). Evolved responses to landscapes. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford University Press. And from: Appleton, J. (1975). The experience of landscape. Wiley. Cultural influences, of course, can override these instincts. The British are known for surrounding their properties with tall, opaque hedges. Presumably they value privacy more than their ability to see their surroundings from their homes.

16. Sporrle, M., & Stich, J. (2010). Sleeping in safe places: An experimental investigation of human sleeping place preferences from an evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary Psychology, 8(3), 405–419.

17. Curry, A. (2010b). Where the wild things are. Discover, 31(2), 58–65.

18. Lyons, E. (1983). Demographic correlates of landscape preference; Synek, E., & Grammer, K. (1998). Evolutionary aesthetics: Visual complexity and the development of human landscape preferences. Retrieved from http://
evolution.anthro.univie.ac.at/institutes/urbanethology/projects/urbanisation
/landscapes/indexland.html (May 26, 2007).

19. Nisbet, E. K., & Zelenski, J. M. (2011). Underestimating nearby nature: Affective forecasting errors obscure the happy path to sustainability. Psychological Science, 22(9), 1101–1106.

20. Pettijohn, T. F., II , & Sacco Jr., D. F. (2009). Tough times, meaningful music, mature performers: Popular billboard songs and performer preferences across social and economic conditions in the USA. Psychology of Music, 37(2), 155–179.

21. Knobloch-Westerwick, S., Gong, Y., Hagner, H., & Kerbeykian, L. (2012). Tragedy viewers count their blessings: Feeling low on fiction leads to feeling high on life. Communication Research 40, 747—766.

22. There is evidence to suggest that there is a social reason for horror movies too. Couples leaving thrillers were observed to be especially likely to be touching each other in some way, such as holding hands: Wiseman, R. (2011). 59 seconds: Change your life in under a minute. Anchor Books. Perhaps fear drives the couples closer together because they feel they need to bond together to resist a common threat. Men who watch horror films with women enjoy them more if the women appear more frightened, and women enjoy them more if the man appears unmoved: Zillmann, D., Weaver, J. B., Mundorf, N., & Aust, C. F. (1986). Effects of an opposite-gender companion’s affect to horror on distress, delight, and attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(3), 586–594.

23. Revonsuo, A. (2000). The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(6), 877–901.

24. Yet another theory holds that dreaming is one part of the mind trying to make sense of junk from some other part of the mind. I don’t see this as a competing theory, however, because the way the junk gets interpreted still needs an explanation, and it could be that the junk gets interpreted as threat-simulation narratives. In other words, both theories could be right.

25. Gackenbach, J., & Kuruvilla, B. (2008). The relationship between video game play and threat simulation dreams. Dreaming, 18(4), 236–256. Computer gaming appears to have other benefits. The competence of a surgeon is well-predicted by the number of hours clocked playing them. Playing violent computer games can increase pain tolerance, as well as aggression: Stephens, R., & Allsop, C. (2012). Effect of manipulated state aggression on pain tolerance. Psychological Reports: Disability and Trauma, 111, 311–321.

26. I will note that finding research on the Web for this kind of happy ending is difficult because of the abundance of the other kind. McGranahan, D. V., & Wayne, I. (1948). German and American traits reflected in popular drama. Human Relations, 1(4), 429–455.

27. For the distinction between obsessive and pleasurable activities see: Marsolais, J. (2003). Les passions de l’âme: On obsessive and harmonious passion. Personality and Social Psychology, 85(4), 756–767.

28. Winstanley, C. A., Cocker, P. J., & Rogers, R. D. (2011). Dopamine modulates reward expectancy during performance of a slot machine task in rats: Evidence for a “near-miss” effect. Neuropsychopharmacology, 36(5), 913–925.

29. Fox Tree, J. E., & Weldon, M. S. (2007). Retelling urban legends. American Journal of Psychology, 120, 459–476.

30. Boustany, N. (2005). Wealthy Muslim nations do little to stop spread of polio. Washington Post, August 17, A09.

31. Mooney, C. (2009). Why does the vaccine/autism controversy live on? Discover, 30(6), 58–65.

32. Norenzayan, A., & Hansen, I. G. (2006). Belief in supernatural agents in the face of death. Personality and Social Psychology, 32(2), 174–187; Jackson, C. J., & Francis, L. J. (2004). Are interactions in Gray’s reinforcement sensitivity theory proximal or distal in the prediction of religiosity: A test of the joint subsystems hypothesis. Personality and Individual Differences, 36(5), 1197–1209.

33. On loneliness, see: Gebauer, J. E., & Maio, G. R. (2012). The need to belong can motivate belief in God. The Journal of Personality, 80(2), 465–501. On experienced terrorism, see: Mohmand, M. G. K., Ibrahim, H., Khan, I. S., Akram, U., & Hasnain, F. (2011). On the constant threat of terrorism: Stress levels and coping strategies amongst university students of Karachi. The Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association, 61(4), 410–414. On insecurity, see: Bartkowski, J. P., Xu, X., & Garcia, G. E. (2011). Religion and infant mortality in the United States: A preliminary study of denominational variations. Religions, 3(2), 264–276. On being anxious, see: McGregor, I., Nash, K., & Prentice, M. (2010). Reactive approach motivation (RAM) for religion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(1), 148–161.

34. Dysfunctional: Paul, G. (2009). The chronic dependence of popular religiosity upon dysfunctional psychosociological conditions. Evolutionary Psychology, 7(3), 398–441; Lower standard of living: Rahman, T., Mittelhammer, R. C., & Wandschneider, P. R. (2011). Measuring quality of life across countries: A multiple indicators and multiple causes approach. Journal of Socio-Economics, 40(1), 43–52; Inequality: Ruiter, S., & van Tubergen, F. (2009). Religious attendance in cross-national perspective: A multilevel analysis of 60 countries. American Journal of Sociology, 115(3), 863–895; Less trust: Berggren, N., & Bjornskov, C. (2011). Is the importance of religion in daily life related to social trust? Cross-country and cross-state comparisons. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 80(3), 459–480; Less democratic: Buhlmann, M., Merkel, W., & Muller, B. (2011). Denmark, Finland and Belgium have best democracies. http://www.mediadesk.uzh.ch
/articles/2011/schweizer-demokratie_en.html. According to Gallup WorldView, although the United States appears to be quite religious compared to other industrialized countries, only 65 percent of citizens polled reported that religion was “important to daily life.” There are over 100 countries more religious than the United States on this measure, with thirteen countries rating 98 percent or higher, including Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malawi.

35. Rees, T. (2009a). Atheist nations are more peaceful. http://epiphenom.fieldof
science.com/2009/06/atheist-nations-are-more-peaceful.html. Rees, T. J. (2009b). Is personal insecurity a cause of cross-national differences in the intensity of religious belief? Journal of Religion and Society, 11, 1–24. Immerzeel, T., & van Tubergen, F. (2011). Religion as reassurance? Testing the insecurity theory in 26 European countries. European Sociological Review, OnlineFirst, 1–14. Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust (p. 182).

36. Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust. (p. 75).

37. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought (p. 20). Basic Books.

38. Epley, N., Akalis, S., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2008). Creating social connection through inferential reproduction: Loneliness and perceived agency in gadgets, gods, and greyhounds. Psychological Science, 19(2), 114–120. Hutson, M. (2012). The unbearable uncanniness of being. Psychology Today, 45(4), 50–59. Kay, A. C., Moscovitch, D. A., & Laurin, K. (2010). Randomness, attributions of arousal, and belief in God. Psychological Science, 21(2), 216–218.

39. Bering, J. (2011). The belief instinct: The psychology of souls, destiny, and the meaning of life. W.W. Norton. Chapter 4: Curiously Immortal.

40. Our minds could potentially survive the death of our bodies if those minds were replicated in another substrate, such as some new, manufactured brain, or perhaps if the information in our minds was uploaded to a computer and could function as a program. What I’m saying, more specifically, is that it is absurd to think that our minds could survive brain death if the information in that brain is not copied to some other functioning system.

41. Treisman, D. (2011). The geography of fear. National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper No. 16838: http://www.nber.org/papers/w16838.

42. Ellis, L., Wahab, E. A., & Ratnasingan, M. (2012). Religiosity and fear of death: A three-nation comparison. Mental Health, Religion, & Culture, OnlineFirst, 1–21.

43. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained (pp. 19, 280).

44. Gal, D., & Rucker, D. D. (2010). When in doubt, shout!: Paradoxical influences of doubt on proselytizing. Psychological Science, 21(11), 1701–1707.

45. Pettazzoni, R. (1955). On the attributes of God. Numen, 2(1-2), 1–27.

46. Roes, F. L., & Raymond, M. (2003). Belief in moralizing gods. Evolution and Human Behavior, 24(2), 126–135.

47. Epley, N., Converse, B. A., Delbosc, A., Monteleone, G. A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2009). Believer’s estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(51), 21533–21538.

48. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained (p. 139).

49. Abalakina-Paap, M., Stephan, W. G., Craig, T., & Gregory, W. L. (1999). Beliefs in conspiracies. Political Psychology. Special Issue: Political socialization, 20(3), 637–647.

3: The Thrill of Discovering Patterns

1. Gopnik, A. (2000). Explanation as orgasm and the drive for causal understanding: The evolution, function and phenomenology of the theory-forma
tion system. In F. Keil & R. Wilson (Eds.), Cognition and explanation (pp. 299–323). MIT Press.

2. Shermer, M. (2011). The believing brain: From ghosts and gods to politics and conspiracies: How we construct beliefs and reinforce them as true (p. 5). Times Books.

3. Schilling, M. F. (1990). The longest run of heads. College Mathematics Journal, 21(3), 196–207.

4. Horry, R., Wright, D. B., & Tredoux, C. G. (2010). Recognition and context memory for faces from own and other ethnic groups: A remember-know investigation. Memory & Cognition, 38(2), 134–141. This might be part of why we have what is called the “out-group homogeneity bias,” which makes us think that our in-groups are more variable than groups we are not in; see: Quattrone, G. A., & Jones, E. E. (1980). The perception of variability within in-groups and out-groups: Implications for the law of small numbers. Personality and Social Psychology, 38(1), 141–152.

5. Schmidhuber, J. (2007). Simple algorithmic principles of discovery, subjective beauty, selective attention, curiosity & creativity. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4755, 26–38.

6. Hekkert, P., & van Wieringen, P. C. W. (1996). The impact of level of expertise on the evaluation of original and altered versions of post-impressionistic paintings. Acta Psychologica, 94(2), 112–131.

7. Carbon, C.-C., & Leder, H. (2005). The repeated evaluation technique (RET). A method to capture dynamic effects of innovativeness and attractiveness. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19(5), 587–601.

8. Critchley, M. (1970). The dyslexic child. William Heinemann Medical Books. Lachmann, T., & van Leeuwen, C. (2007). Paradoxical enhancement of letter recognition in developmental dyslexia. Developmental Neuropsychology, 31(1), 61–77.

9. Dehaene, S., & Cohen, L. (2007). Cultural recycling of cortical maps. Neuron, 56(2), 384–398.

10. Oppenheimer, D. M. (2008). The secret life of fluency. Trends in Cognitive Science, 12(6), 237–241.

11. Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093–1096.

12. Adee, S. (2012). Tricksy type: How fonts can mess with your mind. New Scientist, 216(2896–2897), 68–69.

13. Simonton, D. K. (1994). Greatness: Who makes history and why (pp. 234–236). Guilford Press.

14. Begg, I. M., Anas, A., & Farinacci, S. (1992). Dissociation of processes in belief: Source recollection, statement familiarity, and the illusion of truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 121, 446–458.

15. Changizi, M. A., Zhang, Q., Hao, Y., & Shimojo, S. (2006). The structures of letters and symbols throughout human history are selected to match those found in objects in natural scenes. American Naturalist, 167(5), 117–139.

16. These contrasting sentences are attributed to novelist E. M. Forster: Forster, E. M. (1927). Aspects of the novel. Harcourt, Brace.

17. Johnstone, K. (1999). Impro for storytellers. Routledge/Theatre Company.

18. One of the problems with interactive fiction is that with open-ended plots, leave-behinds are difficult to create. Ideally, a narrative is a unified whole, with the ending and the beginning composed so that they mutually reinforce each other. See: http://complicationsensue.blogspot.com/2011/02/how
-branching-stories-fail.html.

19. Moretti, F. (2009). Style, INC. reflections on seven thousand titles (British novels, 1740–1850). Critical Inquiry, 36(1), 134–158.

20. Huron, D. (2006). Sweet anticipation: Music and the psychology of expectation. MIT Press.

21. Bolinger, D. (1986). Intonation and its parts: Melody in spoken English. Stanford University Press.

22. McGlone, M. S., & Tofighbakhsh, J. (2000). Birds of a feather flock conjointly (?): Rhyme as reason in aphorisms. Psychological Science, 11(5), 424–428.

23. Scrabble has made me a fan of using the proper names of letters to refer to them, e.g., ay, bee, cee, dee, etc.

24. The popular conception of schizophrenia is a confusion with dissociative identity (multiple-personality) disorder. Schizophrenia is actually characterized by a disorganization of thought and a reduction in emotional responsiveness. Common symptoms include auditory hallucinations and delusions. John Nash, the Princeton mathematician portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind, had schizophrenia.

25. Kapur, S. (2003). Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience: A framework linking biology, phenomenology, and pharmacology in schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(1), 13–23.

26. Brugger, P., Landis, T., & Regard, M. (1990). A “sheep-goat effect” in repetition avoidance: Extra-sensory perception as an effect of subjective probability? British Journal of Psychology, 81(4), 455–468.

27. Krummenacher, P., Mohr, C., Haker, H., & Brugger, P. (2009). Dopamine, paranormal belief, and the detection of meaningful stimuli. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(8), 1670–1681.

28. Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. (p. 188 and 194). Oxford University Press.

29. Previc, F. H. (2006). The role of the extrapersonal brain systems in religious activity. Consciousness and Cognition, 15(3) (p. 514), 500–539. Pechey, R., & Halligan, P. (2011). The prevalence of delusion-like beliefs relative to sociocultural beliefs in the general population. Psychopathology, 44(2), 106–115.

30. Sapolsky, R. M. (1997). The trouble with testosterone: And other essays on the biology of the human predicament, chapter “Circling the blanket for God” (pp. 241–288). Scribner.

31. Previc, F. H. (2006). The role of the extrapersonal brain systems in religious activity. (p. 525); Radin, P. (1987). The trickster: A study in American Indian mythology. Schocken. The popular media often mentions that there are particular genes for diseases. This is a convenient shorthand, but it’s important to understand that nature would have selected out genes that caused serious illnesses very often. The more cumbersome, accurate way to put it is that certain genes, when expressed too little or too much, or in a particular environment, are a causal factor in etiology. Normal gene expression is often helpful: one gene protects us from malaria but when overexpressed (when it is too productive) can cause sickle-cell anemia. Another protects us from tuberculosis but when overexpressed can give us Tay-Sachs disease. The same gene implicated in cystic fibrosis might protect us from cholera (there’s some evidence for this). Likewise, Radin offers us an explanation for how the “genes for schizophrenia” might have been replicated in human history through the social acceptance of schizotypals as shamans.

32. Horrobin, D. F. (1998). Schizophrenia: The illness that made us human. Medical Hypotheses, 50(4), 269–288.

33. The encyclopedia of mental disorders (2011), Schizotypal personality disorder. Retrieved from http://www.minddisorders.com/ (January 27, 2011).

34. Rogers, P., Davis, T., & Fisk, J. (2009). Paranormal belief and susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(4), 524–542.

35. I am not referring to the religion known as Wicca when I use the terms witches and witchcraft. What I mean by witchcraft is the anthropological definition: the casting of spells by people to hurt other people. Wicca is a particular European religion that is more positive, and is certainly not representative of witchcraft, as defined by anthropologists, worldwide. See: Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought (pp. 193–194). Basic Books.

36. Swami, V., Coles, R., Stieger, S., Pietschnig, J., Furnham, A., Rehim, S., & Voracek, M. (2011). Conspiracist ideation in Britain and Austria: Evidence of a monological belief system and associations between individual psychological differences and real-world and fictitious conspiracy theories. British Journal of Psychology, 102(3), 443–463.

37. Shermer, M. (2011). The believing brain (p. 126).

38. Wood, M. J., Douglas, K. M., & Sutton, R. M. (2012). Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories. Social Psychological and Personality Science, OnlineFirst. Retrieved February 7, 2014 from: http://spp.sagepub.com
/content/3/6/767.short.

39. Wisneski, D., Lytle, B., & Skitka, L. (2009). Gut reactions: Moral conviction, religiosity, and trust in authority. Psychological Science, 20(9), 1059–1063.

40. Finkelhor, D., Williams, L., Burns, N., & Kalinowski, M. (1988). Executive summary—sexual abuse in day care: A national study. University of New Hampshire, Family Research Laboratory. Retrieved from https://www.ncjrs
.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/113095NCJRS.pdf (July 17, 2013).

41. Lipsett, A. (2008). Under-fives have almost no male role models. The Guardian, August 7. Interestingly, though, one study failed to find that parents were prejudiced against male day care workers: Wessell, M. E. (1986). Sex-role orientation and attitudes towards male day care workers. Master’s thesis, Humboldt State University. It could be that men’s fears are mostly unfounded.

42. Bering, J. (2011). The belief instinct: The psychology of souls, destiny, and the meaning of life. W.W. Norton. Chapter 3: Signs, signs, everywhere signs.

43. Xie, J., Sreenivasan, S., Korniss, G., Zhang, W., Lim, C., & Szymanski, B. K. (2011). Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities. Physical Review E: Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics, 84(1), 011130 1–8.

44. Stanovich lists four excellent rules a person (which he calls the “vehicle,’’ because it is the vehicle that genes use to propagate themselves) should follow when accepting memes (ideas): “1. Avoid installing memes that are harmful to the vehicle physically. 2. Regarding memes that are beliefs, seek to install only memes that are true—that is, that reflect the way the world actually is. 3. Regarding memes that are desires, seek to install only memes that do not preclude other memeplexes becoming installed in the future. 4. Avoid memes that resist evaluation’’; Stanovich, K. E. (2004). The robot’s rebellion (p. 185). University of Chicago Press.

45. Legare, C. H., & Souza, A. L. (2012). Evaluating ritual efficacy: Evidence from the supernatural. Cognition, 124(1), 1–15; Norton, M. I., & Gino, F. (forthcoming). Rituals alleviate grieving for loved ones, lovers, and lotteries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. When people do rituals before high anxiety tasks, they end up calmer and more confident, resulting in better performance on that task; see: Brooks, A., Schroeder, J., Risen, J., Gino, F., Galinsky, A., & Norton, M. (2013). Don’t stop believing: Coping with anxiety through rituals. Unpublished manuscript.

46. Whitehouse, H. (2000). Arguments and icons: Divergent modes of religiosity (p. 46). Oxford University Press.

47. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained (p. 191).

48. Bartlett, F. (1932). Remembering. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cited in Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust. (p. 258)

49. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained (pp. 163–164).

50. People remember minimally counterintuitive ideas better than mundane or merely counterfactual ones in certain contexts. Technically, they degrade less in memory even if they are not recalled as well; see: Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust. (p. 102–107).

51. This terminology is from J. L. Barrett (see below) and: Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained. Technically, minimally counterintuitive concepts are members of some “ontological category” (person, animal, plant, artifact, natural/nonliving) with some deviation from the normal state of affairs in some “intuitive knowledge domain” (psychology, biology, physics). These categories form a 15-cell matrix, each cell of which can be filled with ideas that are pretty good candidates for religious inclusion. For example, if you take an animal and violate something about its physics, you might get the idea of a “bird that can turn invisible.’’ If you take a person who violates the psychology domain, you might have a woman who can read minds. See a chart with more examples in: Barrett, J. L. (2000). Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(1), 29—34.

52. Kelly, M. H., & Keil, F. C. (1985). The more things change . . . : Metamorphoses and conceptual structure. Cognitive Science, 9(4), 403–416.

53. Although I believe this is the first book to seriously consider that religion and art are compelling for similar reasons, Scott Atran hints at it in his book: Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust.

54. Trefil, J. (1997). 101 things you don’t know about science and no one else does either. Cassell Illustrated.

55. Bryson, B. (2003). A short history of nearly everything (p. 214). Transworld Publishers.

56. Woese, C. R. (1998). Default taxonomy: Ernst Mayr’s view of the microbial world. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 95(19), 11043–11046.

57. Mayr, E. (1998). Two empires or three? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 95(17), 9720–9723.

4: Incongruity

1. Hoppe, C., & Stojanovic, J. (2008). High-aptitude minds. Scientific American Mind, 19, 60–67.

2. Bering, J. (2011). The belief instinct: The psychology of souls, destiny, and the meaning of life. W.W. Norton. Chapter 6: God as adaptive illusion.

3. Brockman, J. (Ed.). (2007). What is your dangerous idea? Today’s leading thinkers on the unthinkable (p. 252). Harper Perennial.

4. Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press. (p. 36).

5. Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2008). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. University of Chicago Press. Chapter 4: Culture is an adaptation.

6. The cerebral cortex looks much the same everywhere, in contrast with our mid- and hind-brain areas, which are more modular and function specific. This would be expected for the part of our brain theorized to be the general-purpose learner. See: Hawkins, J., & Blakeslee, S. (2004). On intelligence. Times Books.

7. Shaw, P., Greenstein, D., Lerch, J., Clasen, R., Lenroot, N., A., G., & Giedd, J. (2006). Intellectual ability and cortical development in children and adolescents. Nature, 440(7084), 676–679.

8. Gopnik, A. (2000). Explanation as orgasm and the drive for causal understanding: The evolution, function and phenomenology of the theory-formation system. In F. Keil & R. Wilson (Eds.), Cognition and explanation, (pp. 299–323). MIT Press.

9. Smets, G. (1973). Aesthetic judgment and arousal: An experimental contribution to psycho-Aesthetics. Leuven University Press; Munsinger, H., & Kessen, W. (1964). Uncertainty, structure, and preference. Psychological Monographs: General & Applied, 78(9, whole no. 586), 24.

10. Day, H. (1967). Evaluations of subjective complexity, pleasingness, and interestingness for a series of random polygons varying in complexity. Perception & Psychophysics, 2(7), 281–286.

11. Thompson, C. (2007). Halo 3: How Microsoft labs invented a new science of play. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/maga
zine/15–09/ff_halo?currentPage=all (October 18, 2010).

12. Hekkert, P., Snelders, D., & van Wieringen, P. C. W. (2003). “Most advanced, yet acceptable”: Typicality and novelty as joint predictors of aesthetic preference in industrial design. British Journal of Psychology, 94(1), 111–124.

13. Phillips, F., Norman, J. F., & Beers, A. M. (2010). Fechner’s aesthetics revisited. Seeing and Perceiving, 23(3), 263–271.

14. Martindale, C., Moore, K., & Borkum, J. (1990). Aesthetic preference: Anomalous findings for Berlyne’s psychobiological theory. American Journal of Psychology, 103(1), 53–80.

15. Bhatara, A., Tirovolas, A. K., Duan, L. M., Levy, B., & Levitin, D. J. (2011). Perception of emotional expression in musical performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 37(3), 921–934.

16. Moseman, A. (2010). Hot science: The best new science culture. Discover, 31, 30–36.

17. Leonard, A. (2007). William Gibson. Rolling Stone, 1039, 162.

18. Taylor, G. T. (1992). “The cognitive instrument in the service of revolutionary change”: Sergei Eisenstein, Annette Michelson, and the avant-garde’s scholarly aspiration. Cinema Journal, 31(4), 42–59.

19. Feist, G. J., & Brady, T. R. (2004). Openness to experience, non-conformity, and the preference for abstract art. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 22(1), 77–89.

20. De Vries, M., Holland, R. W., Chenier, T., Starr, M. J., & Winkielman, P. (2010). Happiness cools the warm glow of familiarity: Psychophysiological evidence that mood modulates the familiarity-affect link. Psychological Science, 21(3), 321–328.

21. This would be because our stress and exhaustion drain our mental energy that we would need to appreciate incongruity. For my theory behind this, see: Davies, J., & Fortney, M. (2012). The menton theory of engagement and boredom. In Langley, P. (Ed.), Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Advances on Cognitive Systems (pp. 131–143).

22. Schüll, N. D. (2012). Addiction by design: Machine gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton University Press.

23. Denworth, L. (2013). Brain-changing games. Scientific American Mind, 23(6), 28–35. Dye, M. W. G., Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2009). Increasing speed of processing with action video games. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(6), 321–326. Jackson, L. A., Witt, E. A., Games, A. I., Fitzgerald, H. E., von Eye, A., & Zhao, Y. (2012). Information technology use and creativity: Findings from the children and technology project. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2), 370–376. Maurer, D. (2012). Lessons about visual plasticity from adults treated for congenital contracts. Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS-2012), 6638. McFarlane, A., Sparrowhawk, A., & Heald, Y. (2002). Report on the educational use of games. An exploration by TEEM of the contribution which games can make to the education process. Department for Education and Skills. Technical report.

24. Pandelaere, M., Millet, K., & Van den Bergh, B. (2010). Madonna or Don McLean? The effect of order of exposure on relative liking. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 20(4), 442–451.

25. I should mention that this is not a rigorously done scientific study, but was more informal: Capps, R. (2009). The good enough revolution: When cheap and simple is just fine. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough?currentPage=all (January 28, 2011).

26. Krishna Rao, H. P. (1923). The psychology of music. Guluvias Printing Works.

27. Bowling, D. L., Sundararajan, J., Han, S., & Purves, D. (2012). Expression of emotion in Eastern and Western music mirrors vocalization. PloS ONE, 7(3), e31942.

28. Byrne, D. (2012). How music works. San Francisco, CA: McSweeny’s.

29. Blanchard-Fields, F., Coon, R. C., & Mathews, R. C. (1986). Inferencing and television: A developmental study. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 15(6), 453–459.

30. Miura, N., Sugiura, M., Takahashi, M., Sassa, Y., Miyamoto, A., Horie, K., Sato, S., Nakamura, K., & Kawashima, R. (2010). Effect of motion smoothness on brain activity while observing a dance: An fMRI study using a humanoid robot. Social Neuroscience, 5(1), 40–58; Christensen, J. F. & Calvo-Merino, B. (2013). Dance as a subject for empirical aesthetics. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7(1), 76–88.

31. Byrne, D. (2012). How music works. Chapter 10: Harmonia mundi.

32. Lasher, M. D., Carroll, J. M., & Bever, T. G. (1983). The cognitive basis of aesthetic experience. Leonardo, 16,196–199.

33. Bastian, B., Jetten, J., & Fasoli, F. (2011). Cleansing the soul by hurting the flesh: The guilt-reducing effect of pain. Psychological Science, 22(3), 334–335.

34. Billings, J., & Sherman, P. W. (1998). Antimicrobial functions of spices: Why some like it hot. Quarterly Review of Biology, 73(1), 3–49.

35. Rozin, P. (1996). Towards a psychology of food and eating: From motivation to module to model to marker, morality, meaning, and metaphor. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 5(1), 18–24.

36. Dewaele, J.-M. (2004). The emotional force of swearwords and taboo words in the speech of multilinguals. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 25(2), 204–222.

37. Katz, B. F. (1993). A neural resolution of the incongruity-resolution and incongruity theories of humor. Connection Science, 5(1), 59–75.

38. Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177–181.

39. Some of these ideas were published in: Davies, J. (2012). Academic obfuscations: The psychological attraction of postmodern nonsense. Skeptic, 17(4), 44–47.

40. Mishra, H., Mishra, A., & Shiv, B. (2011). In praise of vagueness: Malleability of vague information as a performance booster. Psychological Science, 22(6), 733–738.

41. McNamara, D. S., & Healy, A. F. (2000). A procedural explanation of the generation effect for simple and difficult multiplication problems and answers. Journal of Memory and Language, 43(4), 652–679.

42. Yang, J., Bachrati, C., Hickson, I., & Brown, G. (2012). BLM and RMI1 alleviate RPA inhibition of topol II_ decatenase activity. PLoS ONE, 7(7), e41208.

43. Boden, M. (2003). The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms. Routledge.

44. Richards, I. A. (1929). Practical criticism. Harcourt Brace. Richards, I. A. (1960). Variant readings and misreading (pp. 241–252). Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Southern Illinois University Press.

45. Whitehouse, H. (2000). Arguments and icons: Divergent modes of religiosity (p. 116). Oxford University Press.

46. Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59 (2), 177–81.

47. Campbell, J., & Moyers, B. (1988). The power of myth (p. 174). Doubleday.

48. Christian fundamentalism, and its focus on literal interpretation of the Bible, is much younger than most people realize. It was a movement that arose in Britain and America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is by no means any kind of return to a traditional way of being Christian. It is a departure from how Christian doctrine was interpreted for over a thousand years. See: Sandeen, E. R. (1970). The roots of fundamentalism: British and American millenarianism, 1800–1930. University of Chicago Press.

49. Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust. (p. 274).

50. Dennett, D. C. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Penguin Books.

51. Mishra, H., Mishra, A., & Shiv, B. (2011). In praise of vagueness: Malleability of vague information as a performance booster. Psychological Science, 22(6), 733–738.

52. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/965349
9/UFO-enthusiasts-admit-the-truth-may-not-be-out-there-after-all.html.

53. Bering, J. (2011). The belief instinct.

54. As an atheist, I don’t see the point in capitalizing he when referring to God.

55. Cited in: Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought (p. 245). Basic Books.

56. Barth, F. (1975). Ritual knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. Yale University Press.

57. Gervais, W. M., & Norenzayan, A. (2012). Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. Science, 336, 493–496.

58. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained.

59. Proulx, T., & Heine, S. J. (2009). Connections from Kafka: Exposure to meaning threats improves implicit learning of an artificial grammar. Psychological Science, 20(9), 1125–1131.

60. Peskin, J., & Wilde Astington, J. (2004). The effects of adding metacognitive language to story texts. Cognitive Development, 19(2), 253–273. Although this is not true for young children who can understand mental states of story characters but need them explicitly mentioned. See: Winner, E. (1982). Invented worlds (p. 299).

61. As of 2008 the official database of the Star Wars Universe has over 30,000 entries, and at the time of this writing a full-time employee at Lucasfilm spent about three quarters of his day updating it: Baker, C. (2008). Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars franchise continuity cop. Retrieved from http://www
.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-09/ff_starwarscano n?currentPage=1 (October 2, 2010).

5: Our Biological Nature

1. Barrow, J. D. (1995). The artful universe: The cosmic source of human creativity. Oxford University Press.

2. Montero, B. (2006). Proprioception as an aesthetic sense. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64(2), 231–242.

3. Cross, E. S., Hamilton, A. F. d. C., & Grafton, S. T. (2006). Building a motor simulation de novo: Observation of dance by dancers. NeuroImage, 31(3), 1257–1267. Zarorre, R. J., Chen, J. L., & Penhune, V. B. (2007). When the brain plays music: Auditory-motor interactions in music perception and production. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(7), 547–558.

4. Koch, S., Holland, R. W., & Knippenberg, A. (2008). Regulating cognitive control through approach-avoidance motor actions. Cognition, 109(1), 133–142.

5. The exceptions are interesting. Musicians can often appreciate a piece of sheet music by “playing” the music in their auditory imagination. Experienced actors and directors can read a screenplay or a script and flesh out the performance in their heads. When I was involved with the VisionQuest Theater Company, I read a play by Craig Lucas called Blue Window and thought it was terrible. We produced the show and watching it performed was an incredible experience. It was a clear indication to me that I did not yet have a director’s vision when reading a play.

6. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.

7. Topolinski, S. (2011). I 5683 you: Dialing phone numbers on cell phones activates key-concordant concepts. Psychological Science, 22(3), 355–360.

8. Zhong, C.-B., & Leonardelli, G. J. (2008). Cold and lonely: Does social exclusion literally feel cold? Psychological Science, 19(9), 838–842.

9. Asch, S. (1955). On the use of metaphor in the description of persons. In Werner, H. (Ed.), On expressive language: Papers presented at the Clark University conference on expressive language behavior (pp. 29–38). Clark University Press.

10. Nonreligious tendencies: Brandt, M. J. & Reyna, C. (2011). The chain of being: a hierarchy of morality. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(5). 428–446; Escalator: Sanna, L. J., Chang, E. C., Miceli, P. M., & Lundberg, K. B. (2011). Rising up to higher virtues: Experiencing elevated physical height uplifts prosocial actions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(2), 472–476.

11. Tolaas, J. (1991). Notes on the origin of some spatialization metaphors. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 6(3), 203–218.

12. Previc, F. H. (2006). The role of the extrapersonal brain systems in religious activity. Consciousness and Cognition, 15(3), 500–539. Tracy, J. L., & Matsumoto, D. (2008). The spontaneous expression of pride and shame: Evidence for biologically innate nonverbal displays. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(33), 11655–11660.

13. Gray, H. M., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315(5812), 619.

14. Weak as smell is, training can make it stronger. Scientists have shown that blindfolded and earmuffed people can track a winding chocolate-coated string across a lawn. They end up zigzagging and sniffing a whole lot, just like dogs do. See: Porter, J., Craven, B., Khan, R. M., Chang, S.-J., Kang, I., Judkewicz, B., Volpe, J., Settles, G., & Sobel, N. (2007). Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans. Nature Neuroscience, 10(1), 27–29.

15. Lee, K., Kim, H., & Vohs, K. D. (2011). Stereotype threat in the marketplace: Consumer anxiety and purchase intentions. Consumer Research, 38(2), 343–357. McKeough, T. (2005, September). Down with perfume. The Walrus. Retrieved from http://walrusmagazine.com/articles/2005.09-style-making
-perfume/ (March 14, 2012).

16. Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near. Penguin Books.

17. Barrow, J. D. (1995). The artful universe (p. 222).

18. Magnus, M. (2001). What’s in a word? Studies in phonosemantics. PhD thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Emotional connotations: Whissell, C. (1999). Phonosymbolism and the emotional nature of sounds: Evidence of the preferential use of particular phonemes in texts of differing emotional tone. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 89, 19–48; Shape connotations: Westbury, C. (2005). Implicit sound symbolism in lexical access: Evidence from an interference task. Brain and Language, 93(1), 10–19; kiki and bouba: Ramachandran, V., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synaesthesia: A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(2), 3–34; oo is sweet: Simner, J., Cuskley, C., & Kirby, S. (2010). What sound does that taste? Cross-modal mappings across gustation and audition. Perception, 39(4), 553–569; Guessing antonyms: Namy, L. L., Nygaard, L. C., Clepper, L., & Rasmussen, S. (2009). Sensitivity to cross-linguistic sound symbolism. Manuscript in preparation; Nasal area: Philps, D. (2011). Reconsidering phonaesthemes: Submorphemic invariance in English “sn- words.” Lingua, 121(6), 1121–1137.

19. Sizes of things: Ohala, J. J. (1997). Sound symbolism. In Proceedings of the 4th Seoul International Conference on Linguistics [SICOL] (pp. 98–103), Seoul, South Korea. Mouth size: Winner, E. (1982). Invented worlds: The psychology of the arts (p. 250). Harvard University Press.

20. Bar, M., & Neta, M. (2007). Visual elements of subjective preference modulate amygdala activation. Neuropsychologia, 45(10), 2191–2200. Peña, M., Mehler, J., & Nespor, M. (2011). The role of audiovisual processing in early conceptual development. Psychological Science, 22(11), 1419–1421.

21. Abel, G. A., & Glinert, L. H. (2008). Chemotherapy as language: Sound symbolism in cancer medication names. Social Science & Medicine, 66(8), 1863–1869.

22. Fernald, A., & Morikawa, H. (1993). Common themes and cultural variations in Japanese and American mothers’ speech to infants. Phonetica, 57, 242–254.

23. Dissanayake, E. (1995). Homo aestheticus: Where art comes from and why (p. 82). University of Washington Press. Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. (1978). Beyond the Milky Way: Hallucinatory imagery of the Tukano Indian. UCLA Latin American Center Publications.

24. Dutton, D. (2009). The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure, and human evolution (p. 35). Bloomsbury Press.

25. Schachner, A., Brady, T. F., Pepperberg, I. M., & Hauser, M. D. (2009). Spontaneous motor entrainment to music in multiple vocal mimicking species. Current Biology, 19(10), 831–836.

26. Fritz, T., Jentschke, S., Gosselin, N., Sammler, D., Peretz, I., Turner, R., Friederici, A. D., & Koelsch, S. (2009). Universal recognition of three basic emotions in music. Current Biology, 19(7), 573–576. Bresin, R., & Friberg, A. (2000). Emotional coloring of computer-controlled music performance. Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 44–63.

27. Bowling, D. L., Sundararajan, J., Han, S., & Purves, D. (2012). Expression of emotion in Eastern and Western music mirrors vocalization. PloS ONE, 7(3), e31942.

28. Davidson, J. (2006). Measure for measure. The New Yorker, August 21, 60–69.

29. DeBodt, E. (2010). Prosodic cues to emotion: Perceptual and acoustic analyses. Master’s thesis, Carleton University.

30. Mobbs, D., & Watt, C. (2011). There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences: How neuroscience can explain seeing bright lights, meeting the dead, or being convinced you are one of them. Trends in Cognitive Science, 15(10), 447–449.

31. Shermer, M. (2011). The believing brain: From ghosts and gods to politics and conspiracies: How we Construct beliefs and reinforce them as true (p. 104). Times Books. Page 104. Geiger, J. (2009). The third man factor: The secret to survival in extreme environments (3rd ed.). Penguin.

32. Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press. Chapter 4: Counterintuitive worlds.

33. Osgood-Hynes, D. (n.d.) Thinking bad thoughts. MGH/McLean OCD Institute. Mash, E. J., & Wolfe, D. A. (2005). Abnormal child psychology (3rd ed). Thomson-Wadsworth. Elkin, G. D. (1999). Introduction to clinical psychiatry. McGraw-Hill Medical Publishing.

34. Previc, F. H. (2006). The role of the extrapersonal brain systems in religious activity. Consciousness and Cognition, 15(3), 500–539. Aardema, F., & O’Connor, K. (2007). The menace within: Obsessions and the self. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 21, 182–197.

35. Sinclair Stevenson, M. (1920). The rites of the twice-born. Humphrey Milford and Oxford University Press.

36. Ghazali, al- (1106/1953). The faith and practice of al-Ghazali. G. Allen and Unwin.

37. Pyysiainen, I. (2012). Cognitive science of religion: State-of-the-art. Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion. 1(1), 5–28.

38. Gonsalvez, C. J., Hains, A. R., & Stoyles, G. (2010). Relationship between religion and obsessive phenomena. Australian Journal of Psychology, 62(2), 93–102.

39. Nemeroff, C. J., Brinkman, A., & Woodward, C. K. (1994). Magical contagion and AIDS risk perception in a college population. AIDS Education and Prevention, 6(3):249–265. Nemeroff, C., & Rozin, P. (1994). The contagion concept in adult thinking in the United States: Transmission of germs and interpersonal influence. Ethos, 22(2), 158–186.

40. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought (p. 134). Basic Books.

41. Griffiths, R. R., Richards, W. A., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2006). Psilocybin can occasion mystical experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 187(3), 268–283.

42. Granqvista, P., Fredriksona, M., Ungea, P., Hagenfeldta, A., Valindb, S., Larhammarc, D., & Larssond, M. (2005). Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields. Neuroscience Letters, 379(1), 1–6. Booth, J. N., Koren, S. A., & Persinger, M. A. (2005). Increased feelings of the sensed presence and increased geomagnetic activity at the time of the experience during exposures to transcerebral weak complex magnetic fields. International Journal of Neuroscience, 115(7), 1053–1079.

43. Donovan, J. M. (1996). Multiple personality, hypnosis, and possession trance. In R. van Quekelberghe & D. Eigner (Eds.), Yearbook of cross-cultural medicine and psychotherapy 1994/Jahrbuch fur transkulturelle Medizin und Psychotherapie 1994 (pp. 99–112). VWB press.

44. Wolford, G., Miller, M. B., & Gazzaniga, M. (2000). The left hemisphere’s role in hypothesis formation. Journal of Neuroscience, 20(6), RC64.

45. Braithwaite, J. J., Samson, D., Apperly, I., Broglia, E., & Hulleman, J. (2011). Cognitive correlates of the spontaneous out-of-body experience (OBE) in the psychologically normal population: Evidence for an increased role of temporal-lobe instability, body-distortion processing, and impairments in own-body transformations. Cortex, 47(7), 839–853.

46. Malinowski, B. (Ed.). (1948). Magic, science and religion and other essays. Free Press. Gmelch, G. (2000). Baseball magic (revised edition of “Superstition and ritual in American baseball” from Elysian Fields Quarterly,11(3), 25–36). McGraw-Hill/Dushkin.

47. Shermer, M. (2011). The believing brain (p. 78).

48. Brugger, P., & Mohr, C. (2008). The paranormal mind: How the study of anomalous experiences and beliefs may inform cognitive neuroscience. Cortex, 44, 1291–1298. Brugger, P., Gamma, A., Muri, R., Schafer, M., & Taylor, K. I. (1993). Functional hemispheric asymmetry and belief in ESP: Towards a “neuropsychology of belief.” Perceptual and Motor Skills, 77, 1299–1308.

49. Moore, D. W. (2005). Three in four Americans believe in paranormal. Retrieved from http://www.gallup.com/poll/16915/Three-Four-Americans
-Believe-Paranormal.aspx (March 24, 2011). Lyons, L. (2005). Paranormal beliefs come (super)naturally to some. Retrieved from http://www.gallup
.com/poll/19558/Paranormal-Beliefs-Come-SuperNaturally-Some.aspx (March 24, 2011).

50. Ong, J.-R., Hou, S.-W., Shu, H.-T., Chen, H.-T., & Chong, C.-F. (2005). Diagnostic pitfall: Carbon monoxide poisoning mimicking hyperventilation syndrome. American Journal of Emergency Medicine, 23(7), 903–904.

6: Our Psychological Biases

1. The EEA, or environment of evolutionary adaptation, which is generally thought to be a set of preindustrial hunter-gatherer societies, each with around 150 people, during the Pleistocene period.

2. Glassner, B. (1999). The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things. Basic Books.

3. Kort-Butler, L. A., & Sittner Hartshorn, K. J. (2011). Watching the detectives: Crime programming, fear of crime, and attitudes about the criminal justice system. Sociological Quarterly, 52(1), 36–55.

4. Glassner, B. (1999). The culture of fear.

5. Berlin, B., & Kay, P. (1996). Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. University of California Press.

6. Barrow, J. D. (1995). The artful universe: The cosmic source of human creativity. Oxford University Press.

7. Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., & Clore, G. L. (2004). Why good guys wear white: Automatic inferences about stimulus valence based on brightness. Psychological Science, 15(2), 82–87.

8. Lechner, A., Simonoff, J. S., & Harrington, L. (2011). Color-emotion associations in the pharmaceutical industry: Understanding universal and local themes. Color Research & Application, 37(1), 59–71.

9. Guilford, J. P. (1934). The affective value of color as a function of hue, tint, and chroma. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 17(3), 342–370. Winner, E. (1982). Invented worlds: The psychology of the arts (p. 109). Harvard University Press.

10. Zhong, C.-B., Bohns, V. K., & Gino, F. (2010). Good lamps are the best police: Darkness increases dishonesty and self-interested behavior. Psychological Science, 21(3), 311–314.

11. Sherman, G. D., & Clore, G. L. (2009). The color of sin: White and black are perceptual symbols of moral purity and pollution. Psychological Science, 21(8), 1019–1025. Herbert, W. (2009). The color of sin. Scientific American Mind, Nov/Dec, 70–71.

12. Nemeroff, C. & Rozin, P. (1994). The contagion concept in adult thinking in the United States: Transmission of germs and interpersonal influence. Ethos, 22(2) (p. 169), 158–186.

13. Huibers, M. J., de Graaf, L., Peeters, F. P., & Arntz, A. (2010). Does the weather make us sad? Meteorological determinants of mood and depression in the general population. Psychiatry Research, 180(2-3), 143–146.

14. Bubl, E., Kern, E., Ebert, D., Bach, M., & Tebartz van Elst, L. (2010). Seeing gray when feeling blue? Depression can be measured in the eye of the diseased. Biological Psychiatry, 68(2), 205–208.

15. Infant preference: Bornstein, M. H. (1975). Qualities of color vision in infancy. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 19(3), 401–419; Recovery: Barrow, J. D. (1995). The artful universe; Emotional reaction: Robertson, S. A. (1996). Contemporary ergonomics 1996. CRC Press.

16. Innate meaning: Pryke, S. R. (2009). Is red an innate or learned signal of aggression and intimidation? Animal Behavior, 78(2), 393–398; Seeing red when angry: Fetterman, A. K., Robinson, M. D., Gordon, R. D., & Elliot, A. J. (2011). Anger as seeing red: Perceptual sources of evidence. Social Psychology and Personality Science, 2(3), 311–316; Mandrills and color: Setchell, J. M., & Wickings, E. J. (2005). Dominance, status signals and coloration in male mandrills. Ethology, 111(1), 25–50; Red circle most dominant: Little, A. C., & Hill, R. A. (2007). Attribution to red suggests special role in dominance signaling. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 5(1–4), 161–168; Goalie vision: Greenlees, I., Leyland, A., Thelwell, R., & Filby, W. (2008). Soccer penalty takers’ uniform color and pre-penalty kick gaze affect the impressions formed of them by opposing goalkeepers. Journal of Sports Sciences, 26(6), 569–576; Wearing red and winning: Attrill, M. J., Gresty, K. A., Hill, R. A., & Barton, R. A. (2008). Red shirt color is associated with long-term team success in English football. Journal of Sports Sciences, 26(6), 577–582; Opponent behavior: Hill, R. A., & Barton, R. A. (2005). Red enhances human performance in contests: Signals biologically attributed to red coloration in males may operate in the arena of combat sports. Nature, 435, 293; Referees and red: Hagemann, N., Strauss, B., & Leibing, J. (2008). When the referee sees red . . . Psychological Science, 19(8), 769–711.

17. Women wearing red: Elliot, A. J. & Niesta, D. (2008). Romantic red: Red enhances men’s attraction to women. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1150–1164. Niesta Kayser, D., Elliot, A. J. & Feltman, R. (2010). Red and romantic behavior in men viewing women. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 901–908; Higher status: Elliot, A. J., Niesta Kayser, D., Greitemeyer, T., Lichtenfeld, S., Gramzow, R. H., Maier, M. A., & Liu, H. (2010). Red, rank, and romance in women viewing men. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139(3), 399–417; Excitement: Wexner, L. B. (1954). The degree to which colors (hues) are associated with mood-tones. Journal of Applied Psychology, 38(6), 432–435; Heat: Sivik, L. (1997). Color systems for cognitive research. In C. L. Hardin & L. Maffi (Eds.), Color Categories in Thought and Language (pp. 163–192). Cambridge University Press.

18. IQ: Maier, M. A., Elliot, A. J., & Lichtenfeld, S. (2008). Mediation of the negative effects of red on intellectual performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(11), 1530–1540; Red Room: Stone, N. J. (2001). Designing effective study environments. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21(2), 179–190; Creativity: Mehta, R., & Zhu, R. J. (2009). Blue or red? Exploring the effect of color on cognitive task performance. Science, 323(5918), 1226–1229.

19. More creative: Elliot, A. J., Maier, M. A., Moller, A. C., Friedman, R., & Meinhardt, J. (2007). Color and psychological functioning: The effect of red on performance attainment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136(1), 154–168; Vegetation: Ulrich, R. S., & Society of American Florists (2003). Impact of flowers and plants on workplace productivity. SAF; Crime reduction: Kuo, F. E., & Sullivan, W. C. (2001). Environment and crime in the inner city: Does vegetation reduce crime? Environment & Behavior, 33(3), 343–367.

20. Evidence for pink effects on crime: Schauss, A. G. (1979). Tranquilizing effect of color reduces aggressive behavior and potential violence. Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, 8(4), 218–221; Evidence against: Wise, B. K. & Wise, J. A. (1988). The human factors of color in environmental design: A critical review. Technical Report NASA-CR-177498, N89-15532, University of Washington.

21. Förster, J., Epstude, K., & Özelsel, A. (2009). Why love has wings and sex has not: How reminders of love and sex influence creative and analytic thinking. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(11), 1479–1491.

22. Langlois, J. H., Roggman, L. A., Casey, R. J., Ritter, J. M., Rieser-Danner, L. A., & Jenkins, V. Y. (1987). Infant preferences for attractive faces: Rudiments of a stereotype? Developmental Psychology, 23(3), 363–369.

23. Maner, J. K., DeWall, C. N., & Gailliot, M. T. (2008). Selective attention to signs of success: Social dominance and early stage interpersonal perception. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(4), 488–501; Dunn, M. J., & Searle, R. (2010). Effect of manipulated prestige-car ownership on both sex attractiveness ratings. British Journal of Psychology, 101(1), 69–80.

24. Gay porn categories: Ogas, O., & Gaddam, S. (2011). A billion wicked thoughts: What the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire. Dutton Adult; Content of romance stories: Barrett, D. (2010). Supernormal stimuli: How primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose. W. W. Norton.

25. Shackelford, T. K., Schmitt, D. P., & Buss, D. M. (2005). Universal dimensions of human mate preferences. Personality and Individual Differences, 39(2), 447–458.

26. Eastwick, P. W., & Finkel, E. J. (2008). Speed-dating: A powerful and flexible paradigm for studying romantic relationship initiation. In S. Sprecher, A. Wenzel, & J. Harvey (Eds.), Handbook of relationship initiation (pp. 217–234). Guilford.

27. Karremans, J. C., Verwijmeren, T., Pronk, T. M., & Reitsma, M. (2009). Interacting with women can impair men’s cognitive functioning. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(4), 1041–1044.

28. Genetic fitness: Symons, D. (1979). Evolution of human sexuality. Oxford University Press; Perceived health: Thornhill, R., & Gangestad, S. W. (1993). Human facial beauty: Averageness, symmetry, and parasite resistance. Human Nature, 4(3), 237–269; Actual health: Rhodes, G., Zebrowitz, L. A., Clark, A., Kalick, S. M., Hightower, A., & McKay, R. (2001). Do facial averageness and symmetry signal health? Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, 31–46.

29. Weeden, J., & Sabini, J. (2005). 2005. Psychological Bulletin, 131(5), 635–653.

30. Perceived: Berry, D. S., & Brownlow, S. (1989). Were the physiognomists right?: Personality correlates of facial babyishness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 15(2), 266–279; Actual: Mueller, U., & Mazur, A. (1997). Facial dominance in Homo sapiens as honest signaling of male quality. Behavioral Ecology, 8(5), 569–579; Divorce, infidelity, violence: Booth, A., & Dabbs, J. M., Jr., (1993). Testosterone and men’s marriages. Social Forces, 72, 463–477.

31. Folstad, I., & Karter, A. J. (1992). Parasites, bright males, and the immunocompetence handicap. American Naturalist, 139(3), 603–622.

32. It appears that sexual dimorphism in a species (when males look different from females) often appears when there is competition for mates. See: Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2008). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. University of Chicago Press. Chapter 4: Culture is an adaptation. See also the Wikipedia page on sexual dimorphism.

33. Kruger, D. J. (2006). Male facial masculinity influences attributions of personality and reproductive strategy. Personal Relationships, 13, 451–463.

34. Conditional mating strategy: Kruger, D. J., & Fitzgerald, C. J. (2011). Reproductive strategies and relationship preferences associated with prestigious and dominant men. Personality and Individual Differences, 50(3), 365–360; Cuckold rates: Bellis, M. A., H. K., Hughes, S., & Ashton, J. R. (2005). Measuring paternal discrepancy and its public health consequences. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 59(9), 749–754; Sperm donation: Kruger, D. J. (2006). Male facial masculinity influences attributions of personality and reproductive strategy. Personal Relationships, 13, 451–463.

35. Tallness and dominance: Schwartz, B., Tesser, A., & Powell, E. (1982). Dominance cues in nonverbal behavior. Social Psychology Quarterly, 45(2), 114–120; Submission in animals: Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. (p. 142) Pantheon Books. See also the Wikipedia page on sexual dimorphism for more information.

36. Top of computer screen: Meier, B. P., & Dionne, S. (2009). Downright sexy: Verticality, implicit power, and perceived physical attractiveness. Social Cognition, 27(6), 883–892; Men prefer low-SES women: Greitemeyer, T. (2007). What do men and women want in a partner? Are educated partners always more desirable? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 180–194.

37. Although Richard Dawkins popularized the theory in his book The selfish gene, Hamilton created what he called “nepotistic altruism” as an alternative theory to group selection.

38. Diamond, J. (1992). The third chimpanzee: The evolution and future of the human animal (pp. 101–103). Harper Perennial.

39. Ibid. (p. 108).

40. 0.70 waist-to-hip ratio: Singh, D. (2002). Female mate value at a glance: Relationships of waist-to-hip ratio to health, fecundity, and attractiveness. Neuroendocrinology Letters, 23(4), 81–91; Predicts fecundity: Jasienska, G., Ziomkiewicz, A., Ellison, P. T., Lipson, S. F., & Thune, I. (2004). Large breasts and narrow waists indicate high reproductive potential in women. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 271, 1213–1217; Predicts Intelligence: Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2008). Waist-hip ratio and cognitive ability: Is gluteofemoral fat a privileged store of neurodevelopment resources? Evolution and Human Behavior, 29(1), 26–34.

41. India and China: Singh, D., Renn, P., & Singh, A. (2007). Did the perils of abdominal obesity affect depiction of feminine beauty in the sixteenth to eighteenth century British literature? Exploring the health and beauty link. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 274(1611), 891–894; Hungry man preferences: Nelson, L. D., & Morrison, E. L. (2005). The symptoms of resource scarcity: Judgments of food and finances influence preferences for potential partners. Psychological Science, 16(2), 167–173.

42. Lap dancers: Miller, G., Tybur, J. M., & Jordan, B. D. (2007). Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: Economic evidence for human estrus? Evolution and Human Behavior, 28, 375–381; Fertile days: Bryant, G. A., & Haselton, M. G. (2009). Vocal cues of ovulation in human females. Biology Letters, 5(1), 12–15.

43. Wedekind, C., Seebeck, T., Bettens, F., & Paepke, A. J. (1995). MHC-dependent mate preferences in humans. Proceedings: Biological Sciences, 260(1359), 245–249. Miller, S. L., & Maner, J. K. (2011). Ovulation as a male mating prime: Subtle signs of women’s fertility influence men’s mating cognition and behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(2), 295–308.

44. Roberts, S. C., Gosling, L. M., Carter, V., & Petrie, M. (2008). MHC-correlated odor preferences in humans and the use of oral contraceptives. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 275(1652), 2715–2722.

45. Earnings: Hamermesh, D., & Biddle, J. (1994). American Economic Review,84(5), 1174–1194; Doctors: Hadjistavropoulos, H. D., Ross, M. A., & von Baeyer, C. L. (1990). Are physicians’ ratings of pain affected by patients’ personal attractiveness? Social Science and Medicine, 31(1), 69–72; Hiring: Ruffle, B. J., & Shtudiner, Z. (2010). Are good-looking people more employable? Monaster Center for Economic Research, Working paper 10-06; Attractiveness of talking: Borkenau, P., Maurer, N., Riemann, R., Spinath, F. M., & Angleitner, A. (2004). Thin slices of behavior as cues of personality and intelligence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(4), 599–614.

46. Lomax, A. (1971). Choreometrics and ethnographic filmmaking. Filmmakers Newsletter, 4, 22–30; Critics of Lomax: Kealiinohomoku, J. W. (1991). Review essay: “The Longest Trail—film by Alan Lomax and Forrestine Paulay.” Yearbook for Traditional Music, 23, 167–169. See also: Williams, D. (2007). On choreometrics. Visual Anthropology, 20, 233–239.

47. Richardson, D. C., Spivey, M. J., Edelman, S., & Naples, A. J. (2001). “Language is spatial”: Experimental evidence for image schemas of concrete and abstract verbs. In Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 873–878). Erlbaum. Meteyard, L. & Vigliocco, G. (2009). Verbs in space: Axis and direction of motion norms for 299 English verbs. Behavior Research Methods, 41(2), 565–574.

48. Maas, A., Pagani, D., & Berta, E. (2007). How beautiful is the goal and how violent is the fistfight? Spatial bias in the interpretation of human behavior. Social Cognition, 25(6), 833–852; Soccer fouls: Kranjec, A., Lehet, M., Bromberger, B., & Chatterjee, A. (2010). A sinister bias for calling fouls in soccer. PLoS ONE, 5(7), e11667.

49. Maass, A., & Russo, A. (2003). Directional bias in the mental representation of spatial events: Nature or culture? Psychological Science, 14(4), 296–301. People also tend to imagine time flowing in the same direction as their culture’s writing: Fuhrman, O., & Boroditsky, L. (2010). Cross-cultural differences in mental representations of time: Evidence from an implicit nonlinguistic task. Cognitive Science, 34(8), 1430–1451.

50. Gilovich, T., Vallone, R., & Tversky, A. (1985). The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 17(3), 295–314.

51. Gigerenzer, G., & Brighton, H. (2009). Homo heuristicus: Why biased minds make better inferences. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1(1), 107–143.

52. Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2007). The content and validity of music-genre stereotypes among college students. Psychology of Music, 35(2), 306–326.

53. Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Furnham, A. (2007). Personality and music: Can traits explain how people use music in everyday life? British Journal of Psychology, 98, 175–185.

54. Peel, E. (1946). A new method for analyzing aesthetic preferences: Some theoretical considerations. Psychometrika, 11(2), 129–137.

55. Shermer, M. (1997). Why people believe weird things: Pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time (p. 93). W. H. Freeman.

56. McManus, M., & Davies, J. (under review). The effects of specific physical features on perceived intelligence.

57. Somel, M., Franz, H., Yan, Z., Lorenc, A., Guo, S., Giger, T., & Khaitovich, P. (2009). Transcriptional neoteny in the human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 106(14), 5743–5748.

58. Trut, L. N. (1999). Early canid domestication: The farm-fox experiment. American Scientist, 87, 160–169.

59. The idea was presented by Richard Wrangham, quoted in: Taylor, J. (2009). Not a chimp: The hunt to find genes that make us human. Oxford University Press.

60. McAuliffe, K. (2010). The incredible shrinking brain. Discover, 31(7), 54–59.

61. Morey, D. F. (1992). Size, shape and development in the evolution of the domestic dog. Journal of Archaeological Science, 19(2), 181–204.

62. This also might be happening with bonobos (a great ape similar to a chimpanzee). McAuliffe, K. (2010). The incredible shrinking brain.

63. Judg.me Blog (2012). What makes one appear smarter and more sociable? Retrieved from http://judg.me/blog/judgment-day/ (May 22, 2012). See also the author photograph for this book.

64. Skolnick Weisberg, D., Keil, F. C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., & Gray, J. R. (2008). The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(3), 470–477.

65. Spina, R. R., Ji, L.-J., Guo, T., Zhang, Z., Li, Y., & Fabrigar, L. (2010). Cultural differences in the representativeness heuristic: Expecting a correspondence in magnitude between cause and effect. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(5), 583–597.

66. Friedman, L. F. (2013). Outside in: But it’s all natural! Psychology Today, 38.

67. Eidelman, S., Pattershall, J., & Crandall, C. S. (2010). Longer is better. Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 993–998.

68. Hood, B. M., & Bloom, P. (2008). Children prefer certain individuals over perfect duplicates. Cognition, 106(1), 455–462.

69. Begue, L., Charmoillaux, M., Cochet, J., Cury, C., & deSuremain, F. (2008). Altruistic behavior and the bidimensional just world belief. American Journal of Psychology, 121(1), 47–56.

70. Appel, M. (2008). Fictional narratives cultivate just-world beliefs. Journal of Communication, 58(1), 62–83.

71. Stegmueller, D., Scheepers, P., Rossteutscher, S., & de Jong, E. (2012). Support for redistribution in Western Europe: Assessing the role of religion. European Sociological Review, 28(4), 482–497. The belief in a just world can also make people feel empowered. Belief in a just world predicts earlier “coming out” in gay and bisexual men who, during childhood, had greater femininity. Presumably this is because it makes them feel less likely to be the victim of negative outcomes; see: Bogaert, A., & Hafer, C. (2009). Predicting the timing of coming out in gay and bisexual men from world beliefs, physical attractiveness, and childhood gender identity/role. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 39(8), 1991–2019.

72. Bering, J. (2008). The end?: Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die. Scientific American Mind, 34–31.

73. Bering, J. (2002). Intuitive conceptions of dead agents’ minds: The natural foundations of afterlife beliefs as phenomenological boundary. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2(4), 263–308.

74. Psychological continuity lessens with age: Bering, J. M., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2004). The natural emergence of afterlife reasoning as a developmental regularity. Developmental Psychology, 40(2), 217–233; Catholic kids hold on longer: Bering, J. M., Hernendez-Blasi, C., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2005). The development of “afterlife” beliefs in secularly and religiously schooled children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23(4), 587–607; Wording can affect psychological continuity: Harris, P.L., & Giménez, M. (2005). Children’s acceptance of conflicting testimony: The case of death. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5(1/2), 143–164.

7: Why We Get Riveted

1. Dar-Nimrod, I., & Heine, S. J. (2011). Genetic essentialism: On the deceptive determinism of DNA. Psychological Bulletin, 137(5), 800–818.

2. Holyoak, K. J. (2005). The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning. Cambridge University Press.

3. Dissanayake, E. (1995). Homo aestheticus: Where art comes from and why. University of Washington Press; Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and peligion. Pantheon Books.

4. Derrick, J. L., Gabriel, S., & Tippin, B. (2008). Parasocial relationships and self-discrepancies: Faux relationships have benefits for low self-esteem individuals. Personal Relationships, 15(2), 261–280.

5. Frazier, B. N., Gelman, S. A., Wilson, A., & Hood, B. M. (2009). Picasso paintings, moon rocks, and hand-written Beatles lyrics: Adults’ evaluations of authentic objects. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9, 1–14.

6. Bernhardt, P. C., Dabbs Jr., J. M., Fielden, Julie, A., & Lutter, C. D. (1998). Testosterone changes during vicarious experiences of winning and losing among fans at sporting events. Physiology & Behavior, 65(1), 59–62.

7. Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. HarperCollins.

8. For an eloquent description of this idea see Dawkins’s TED talk “The Queer Universe.”

9. If the solar system were scaled down so that the sun had the diameter of about half a meter, the earth would be 49 meters away and about 0.7 millimeters in diameter, about the size of a grain of sand.

10. This idea was eloquently described in: Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press. Chapter 3: God’s creation: Evolutionary origins of the supernatural. See for an argument for why the predator-prey relationship is more dominant in religions than parent-child.

11. Peltzer, K. (2003). Magical thinking and paranormal beliefs among secondary and university students in South Africa. Personality and Individual Differences, 35(6), 1419–1426.

12. Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust.

13. Dennett, D. C. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Penguin Books.

14. Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust. Chapter 1: An evolutionary riddle.

15. “Then will they become Gods . . . they will never cease to increase and to multiply, worlds without end. When they receive their crowns, their dominions, they then will be prepared to frame earths like unto ours and to people them in the same manner as we have been brought forth by our parents, by our Father and God.” Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 17:143. Retrieved February 9, 2014 from: http://jod.mrm.org/18/257.

16. Harris, S., Kaplan, J. T., Curiel, A., Bookheimer, S. Y., Iacoboni, M., & Cohen, M. S. (2009). The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief. PLoS ONE, 4(10), e0007272.

17. Bloom, P. (2006). Is God an accident? In A. Gawande (Ed.), The best American science writing 2006 (pp. 272–290). HarperCollins.

18. The Aztecs used mushrooms containing psilocybin. Religions north of the Aztecs used peyote, which contains mescaline. Religions south of the Aztecs used leaves and vines containing DMT (dimethyltriptamine). All these drugs are hallucinogens capable of inducing experiences described as “transformative” or “religious”; see: Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind. (p. 228).

19. Interpretation: Roberts, G., & Owen, J. (1988). The near-death experience. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 153(5), 607–617; Falling asleep: Moore, J. (1994). Moveable feasts: The Gurdjieff work. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 9(2), 11–16.

20. Rachman, S. (1997). A cognitive theory of obsessions. Behavior Research and Therapy, 35(9), 793–802. Erikson, E. H. (1958). Young man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history. W. W. Norton.

21. Whitehouse, H. (2000). Arguments and icons: Divergent modes of religiosity (pp. 130–131). Oxford University Press.

22. Landsborough, D. (1987). St Paul and temporal lobe epilepsy. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 50(6), 659–664.

23. Saver, J. L. & Rabin, J. (1997). The neural substrates of religious experience. Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 9(3), 498-510. Hamer, D. (2004). The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired Into Our Genes. (p 132) Doubleday.

24. Radin, P. (1987). The trickster: A study in American Indian mythology. Schocken.

25. Whitehouse, H. (2000). Arguments and icons.

26. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought (pp. 283–285). Basic Books.

27. Ibid. (p. 69).

28. Iannaccone, L. R. (1991). The consequences of religious market structure: Adam Smith and the economics of religion. Rationality and Society, 3(2), 156–177.

29. Dennett, D. C. (2006). Breaking the spell.

30. Ibid.

31. Stanovich, K. E. (2004). The robot’s rebellion. University of Chicago Press.

32. Dennett, D. C. (2006). Breaking the spell.

33. Stanovich, K. E. (2004). The robot’s rebellion.

34. Sanderson, S. K., & Roberts, W. W. (2008). The evolutionary forms of the religious life: A cross-cultural, quantitative analysis. American Anthropologist, 110(4) 454–466.

35. Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust. Chapter 1: Introduction: An evolutionary riddle.

36. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained.

37. I make exceptions for scientists who are working at the cutting edge of their fields. Then they may disagree with the scientific consensus. If no scientists disagreed with the consensus, science would never change! But I do think it is intellectually unjustified to disagree with current scientific findings for those people who are not well versed in the particular scientific field making the claim. So, for example, if you don’t know a lot about physics, you are not intellectually justified in disagreeing with accepted, textbook-level knowledge in physics.

38. Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind.

39. Religious charity: Johnson, B. (2012). Religion and philanthropy. Unpublished manuscript, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Socially strategic: Pyrzycki, B. G., Finkel, D. N., Shaver, J., Wales, N., Cohen, A. B., & Sosis, R. (2012). What does God know? Supernatural agents’ access to socially strategic and non-strategic information. Cognitive Science, 36(5), 846–869; Sacrifice for group: Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust. Chapter 1: Introduction: An evolutionary riddle.

40. Frejka, T., & Westhoff, C. F. (2008). Religion, religiousness, and fertility in the US and Europe. European Journal of Population, 24(1), 5–31. Sosis, R. (2000). Religion and intragroup cooperation: Preliminary results of a comparative analysis of utopian communities. Cross-Cultural Research, 34(1), 70–87. Laboratory and field studies show that when people calculate costs and benefits, it leads to a breakdown in societal common resources; see: Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust. Chapter 8: Culture without mind: Sociobiology and group selection.

41. Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind. (p. 257).

42. Thinking about science makes you moral: Ma-Kellams, C. & Blascovich, J. (2013). Does “science” make you moral? The effects of priming science on moral judgments and behavior. PLOS ONE, 8(3), e57989. For an extended argument, with evidence, see: Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind.

43. Magical thinking: Hutson, M. (2008). Magical thinking. Psychology Today, 41(2), 88–95; Pleasure: Mohr, C., Landis, T., Bracha, H. S., Fathi, M., & Brugger, P. (2005). Levodopa reverses gait asymmetries related to anhedonia and magical ideation. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 255, 33–39; Swimmers: Starek, J. E., & Keating, C. F. (1991). Self-deception and its relationship to success in competition. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 12(2), 145–155.

44. Trees: Atran, S., Medin, D., Ross, N., Lynch, E., Vapnarsky, V., Ucan Ek’, E., Coley, J., Timura, C., & Baran, M. (2002). Folkecology, cultural epidemiology, and the spirit of the commons: A garden experiment in the Mayan lowlands, 1991–2001. Current Anthropology, 43(3), 421–450; Good luck charms: Damisch, L., Stoberock, B., & Mussweiler, T. (2010). Keep your fingers crossed! How superstition improves performance. Psychological Research, 21, 1014–1020; Panic: Inzlicht, M., McGregor, I., Hirsh, J. B., & Nash, K. (2009). Neural markers of religious conviction. Psychological Science, 20(3), 385–392; Negative emotions: Sharp, S. (2010). How does prayer help manage emotions? Social Psychology Quarterly, 73(4), 417–437; Blood pressure: Sorensen, T., Danbolt, L. J., Lien, L., Koenig, H. G., & Holmen, J. (2011). The relationship between religious attendance and blood pressure: The HUNT study, Norway. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, 42(1), 13–28; Stress: Belding, J., Howard, M., McGuire, A., Schwartz, A., & Wilson, J. (2010). Social buffering by God: Prayer and measures of stress. Journal of Religion and Health, 49(2), 179–187; Dopamine: Hamer, D. (2004). The God gene: How faith is hardwired into our genes (p. 165). Doubleday.

45. Mormons: Enstrom, J., & Breslow, L. (2008). Lifestyle and reduced mortality among active California Mormons, 1980–2004. Preventive Medicine, 46(2), 133–136; Attending church: Chida, Y., Steptoe, A., & Powell, L. H. (2009). Religiosity/spirituality and mortality. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 78(2), 81–90; HIV: Finocchario-Kessler, S., Catley, D., Berkley-Patton, J., Gerkovich, M., Williams, K., Banderas, J., & Goggin, K. (2011). Baseline predictors of ninety percent or higher antiretroviral therapy adherence in a diverse urban sample: The role of patient autonomy and fatalistic religious beliefs. AIDS Patient Care & STDs, 25(2), 103–111; Education: Moulton, B. E., & Sherkat, D. E. (2012). Specifying the effects of religious participation and educational attainment on mortality risk for U.S. adults. Sociological Spectrum, 32(1), 1–19.

46. Vaccinated: Ruijs, W. L. M., Hautvast, J. L. A., van der Helden, K., de Vos, S., Knippenberg, H., & Hulscher, M. E. J. L. (2011). Religious subgroups influencing vaccination coverage in the Dutch Bible belt: An ecological study. BMC Public Health, 11(102); Past life belief: Meyersburg, C. A., & McNally, R. J. (2011). Reduced death distress and greater meaning in life among individuals reporting past life memory. Personality and Individual Differences, 50(8), 1218–1221; Anxiety: Inzlicht, M., McGregor, I., Hirsh, J. B., & Nash, K. (2009). Neural markers of religious conviction. Psychological Science, 20(3), 385–392; Hearing about religion: Inzlicht, M. & Tullett, A. M. (2010). Reflecting on God: Religious primes can reduce neurophysiological response to errors. Psychological Science, 21(8), 1184–1190; Happier: Steger, M. F., & Frazier, P. (2005). Meaning in life: One link in the chain from religiousness to well-being. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52(4), 574–582; Belief certainty: Galen, L. W., & Kloet, J. D. (2010). Mental well-being in the religious and the non-religious: Evidence for a curvilinear relationship. Mental Health, Religion, and Culture, (iFirst), 1–17; Agnostics: Morchon, D., Norton, M. I., & Ariely, D. (2011). Who benefits from religion? Social Indicators Research, 101, 1–15; Religion valued: Diener, E., Tay, L., & Myers, D. G. (2011). The religion paradox: If religion makes people happy, why are so many dropping out? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(6), 1278–1290.

47. Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust. Chapter 1: Introduction: An evolutionary riddle.

48. This interesting theory has not, to my knowledge, been directly tested. It is described in: Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust. Chapter 1: Introduction: An evolutionary riddle, and Chapter 4: Counterintuitive worlds: The mostly mundane nature of religious beliefs.

49. Epley, N., Converse, B. A., Delbosc, A., Monteleone, G. A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2009). Believer’s estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(51), 21533–21538.