Papers by Ernest Thomas Lawson
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2012
While earlier approaches to religious thought and practice searched for 'magic bullet' approaches... more While earlier approaches to religious thought and practice searched for 'magic bullet' approaches to explain religious thought and behavior, seeing it as an example of irrationality, illusion, integrative force, symbolism, or false explanations of origins, cognitive scientific approaches have suggested that we see it rather as an aggregate of the products of various cognitive mechanisms. Studies in the cognitive science of religion, informed by experimental work, have converged on a standard model of explaining religious thought and behavior by focussing on the role of minimally counter-intuitive concepts, agent and animacy detection, ritual representations, notions of contagion and contamination avoidance, theory of mind, coalitions, and moral intuitions.
Mothers in numerous species exhibit heightened aggression in defense of their young. This shift t... more Mothers in numerous species exhibit heightened aggression in defense of their young. This shift typically coincides with the duration of lactation in nonhuman mammals, which suggests that human mothers may display similarly accentuated aggressiveness while breast feeding. Here we report the first behavioral evidence for heightened aggression in lactating humans. Breast-feeding mothers inflicted louder and longer punitive sound bursts on unduly aggressive confederates than did formula-feeding mothers or women who had never been pregnant. Maternal aggression in other mammals is thought to be facilitated by the buffering effect of lactation on stress responses. Consistent with the animal literature, our results showed that while lactating women were aggressing, they exhibited lower systolic blood pressure than did formula-feeding or never-pregnant women while they were aggressing. Mediation analyses indicated that reduced arousal during lactation may disinhibit female aggression. Together, our results highlight the contributions of breast feeding to both protecting infants and buffering maternal stress.
Despite the frequent reliance on conventional wisdom (CW) about potential threats in political, p... more Despite the frequent reliance on conventional wisdom (CW) about potential threats in political, policy, intelligence, and other domains, until now there have been few empirical studies addressing the spread, common features, or differences of precautionary preoccupations across ecologies. This study exhibits some of our initial investigations of any significant variation or subordination of dominant potential danger themes within and between populations and ecologies.
Creative writing is a multifaceted endeavor requiring verbal skills, extensive content knowledge ... more Creative writing is a multifaceted endeavor requiring verbal skills, extensive content knowledge and the motivation to persist in spite of obstacles. In this chapter we focus particularly on creative writing in the form of science fiction and fantasy. We begin with a presentation of a particular view of creativity, namely the creative cognition approach that emphasizes knowledge and how it is used. We then consider ways in which access to that knowledge can, on the negative side limit, and on the positive side guide the originality and believability of new stories that authors generate. Along the way, we also make suggestions about ways in which novice and experienced writers can produce texts that are more engaging as well as informative and compelling.
Rituals are common in religion, sports, culture, and specific life-stages (Childhood, parenthood,... more Rituals are common in religion, sports, culture, and specific life-stages (Childhood, parenthood, etc.), raising the question of why being engaged in such activities and what could be its benefit, and how rigid they are. Here we analyzed 19 episodes of a Zulu Umsindo dance performed by 10 women. This ritual comprised common acts performed in all dance episodes, personal acts performed by the same individual but not by other individuals, and sporadic acts that varied among and within the performance of individuals. There were significantly more sporadic that personal acts, and more personal than common acts, with only one act being performed in all 19 episodes of the dance. Idiosyncratic acts comprised about 90% of the dance repertoire, attesting a high flexibility in ritual performance. Despite this high flexibility, the dance attained a seemingly rigid form due to three properties: (i) fixed temporal order that was preserved in all the dance episodes; (ii) a few common acts that were preserved in all or most individuals; and (iii) high rate of repetition of the common acts. These properties rendered the ritual its rigid form, along with enabling the dancers to display great flexibility in act repertoire. This analysis sheds new light on the content and structure of collective rituals, implicating on how social transmission may occur. Finally, the Zulu dance was a part of Umsindo (wedding) with overt expression of joy and thus seems to possess a communicative value in group solidarity without a direct involvement of precautionary systems.
have argued that non-cultural regularities in how actions are conceptualized inform and constrain... more have argued that non-cultural regularities in how actions are conceptualized inform and constrain participants' understandings of religious rituals. This theory of ritual competence generates three predictions: 1) People with little or no knowledge of any given ritual system will have intuitions about the potential effectiveness of a ritual given minimal information about the structure of the ritual. 2) The representation of superhuman agency in the action structure will be considered the most important factor contributing to effectiveness. 3) Having an appropriate intentional agent initiate the action will be considered relatively more important than any speci c action to be performed.
Zygon, 2005
Abstract. Cognitive science is beginning to make a contribution to the science-and-religion dialo... more Abstract. Cognitive science is beginning to make a contribution to the science-and-religion dialogue by its claims about the nature of both scientific and religious knowledge and the practices such knowledge informs. Of particular importance is the distinction between folk knowledge and abstract theoretical knowledge leading to a distinction between folk science and folk religion on the one hand and the reflective, theoretical, abstract form of thought that characterizes both advanced scientific thought and sophisticated theological reasoning on the other. Both folk science and folk religion emerge from commonsense reasoning about the world, a form of reasoning bequeathed to us by the processes of natural selection. Suggestions are made about what scientists and theologians can do if they accept these claims.
Historical Reflections-reflexions Historiques, 1994
Numen-international Review for The History of Religions, 2000
... has coordinated, distilled and extended the particular explanatory theories of human cognitio... more ... has coordinated, distilled and extended the particular explanatory theories of human cognition provided by ... discuss the relevance of cognitive science for the study of the religious ideas and ... Theorizing about religion as a set of cultural phenomena from a cognitive perspective is ...
Religion, 2008
This study presents an attempt to integrate two theories about ritual: the theory that McCauley a... more This study presents an attempt to integrate two theories about ritual: the theory that McCauley and Lawson developed in Bringing Ritual to Mind; Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms and the theory that Boyer and Liénard presented in a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, ‘Why ritualized behavior in humans? Precaution systems and action-parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals’
Journal of The American Academy of Religion, 1993
... We shall maintain (1) that behind both of these crises lurk important epistemological problem... more ... We shall maintain (1) that behind both of these crises lurk important epistemological problems, (2) that historians of ... in section V that researchers in the study of religion look to the cognitive sciences for ... It is by now no secret that anthropologyin its role as the science of culture ...
Theorizing about religious ritual systems from a cognitive viewpoint involves (1) modeling cognit... more Theorizing about religious ritual systems from a cognitive viewpoint involves (1) modeling cognitive processes and their products and (2) demonstrating their influence on religious behavior. Particularly important for such an approach to the study of religious ritual is the modeling of participants' representations of ritual form. In pursuit of that goal, we presented in Rethinking Religion a theory of religious
Mothers in numerous species exhibit heightened aggression in defense of their young. This shift t... more Mothers in numerous species exhibit heightened aggression in defense of their young. This shift typically coincides with the duration of lactation in nonhuman mammals, which suggests that human mothers may display similarly accentuated aggressiveness while breast feeding. Here we report the first behavioral evidence for heightened aggression in lactating humans. Breast-feeding mothers inflicted louder and longer punitive sound bursts on unduly aggressive confederates than did formula-feeding mothers or women who had never been pregnant. Maternal aggression in other mammals is thought to be facilitated by the buffering effect of lactation on stress responses. Consistent with the animal literature, our results showed that while lactating women were aggressing, they exhibited lower systolic blood pressure than did formula-feeding or never-pregnant women while they were aggressing. Mediation analyses indicated that reduced arousal during lactation may disinhibit female aggression. Together, our results highlight the contributions of breast feeding to both protecting infants and buffering maternal stress.
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Papers by Ernest Thomas Lawson