Psychology long neglected the scientific study of religion entirely

Evidence

When I was a graduate student of psychology in the late 1990s, I came across a fascinating book by Pascal Boyer, titled The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. I was instantly captivated. You see, this was a time when psychology and cognitive science had little, if anything, to say about what is religion and what features of the human mind makes us religious. (Even today, religion is hardly on a psychology student’s menu of readings. But there is now considerably more research than before.) … I would flip through psychology textbook after textbook, searching, in vain, for the words religion, belief, supernatural, or ritual. I could not find a single entry, not even in social psychology, my own home field, where one would have expected a mountain of interest in one of the most enduring and deeply affecting aspects of social life around the world. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 355

Categorization

• XREF: Context for the cognitive science of religion literature the reader is synthesizing with Big God and partner-choice mechanisms.