RELIGION and COGNITION

An Introduction by István Czachesz

Religion in networks

Religion: social aspects

Whereas cognitive science traditionally examined the individual mind, social aspects of cognition are receiving increasing attention in contemporary research. Special attention has been paid to the connection of religion with cooperation and altruism.

E.g. P. Hammerstein (ed.), Genetic and cultural evolution of cooperation (2003), R. Sosis & C. Alcorta, "Signaling, solidarity and the sacred" (Evolutionary Anthropology 2003).

Network theory

Social relations between people form networks. It has been found that any two people in the world are separated only by surprisingly few social relations. Small world networks can emerge basically in two ways:

  1. Many networks grow by preferential attachment. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In such a scale-free network, there will be a few nodes that possess a great number of connections, whereas the majority of nodes have only very few. The internet, for example, belongs to this type of small worlds.
  2. In regular networks, each node is connected to an equal number of neighbours: distant nodes are separated by many connections. Agrarian societies approach this model. Regular networks turn into small worlds when a few long distance connections are added to them.

E.g. M. Buchanan, Nexus (2002).

Religious movements make use of social networks. It is important to realise that society is made up of parallel networks. We do not share the same sort of information with everyone in our environment. For example, gossip spreads along different networks than do scientific discoveries.
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