Our new paper, Outsourcing punishment to god: Beliefs in divine control reduce earthly punishment (with colleagues Kristin Laurin, Aaron Kay, and Joe Henrich) was just accepted at the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The paper demonstrates how the belief in morally-involved, controlling God, reduces the motivation to punish moral transgressors oneself, and the support for state resources being devoted to punishing...

The Week has an ‘in-depth briefing’ on the rise of atheism in America, which discusses some of our research on atheism and distrust. A true to the topic of how atheists are routinely disparaged, they call Will a sociologist. You can read the article here.

Azim will be presenting a talk on The Psychology of Religion for APS’s Current Directions in Psychological Science Speaker Series April 18th. Details on the event, and how to join the webinar are here: http://www.pearsonhighered.com/currentdirections/index.html Azim’s talk, titled Does Religion Make Us Good? will be 1:00-1:45pm EST, and the abstract is below: 1:00 PM – 1:45 PM Psychology of Religion Does Religion Make us Good?...

Nicholas Kristoff briefly mentions our work in a new op-ed piece title “Learning to Respect Religion.” In it, he suggesting that the intellectual discussion on religion is shifting from the adversarial stance taken by the New Atheists to a more nuanced approach (as exemplified by recent books by Alain de Botton, E.O. Wilson, and Jon Haidt).

Our new paper, Cross-Cultural Evidence that the Nonverbal Expression of Pride is an Automatic Status Signal, with Jess Tracy, Wanying Zhao and Joe Henrich, was just accepted in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. You can download the in-press copy of the paper here. Abstract: To test whether the pride expression is an implicit, reliably developing signal of high social status in humans, a series of experiments measured implicit and...