Following up on an earlier paper with Mijke Rhemtulla on the connections between crime and national rates of heaven and hell belief, Lara Aknin and I have been looking at how the balance of these religious beliefs predict national happiness rates. Our new paper, recently published in PLoS One shows a very similar connection to the one we see with crime rates. Here’s a link to the paper, titled The Emotional Toll of Hell: Cross-National...
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Our new paper with Mijke Rhemtulla on how nations’ rates of belief in Heaven and Hell oppositely predict crime rates has just been posted at PLoS One. Click here to see the paper (open-access to everyone), and here to see the University of Oregon press release. Abstract: Researchers have proposed that the emergence of religion was a cultural adaptation necessary for promoting self-control. Self-control, in turn, may serve as a...
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Our new paper with Kristin Laurin, Joe Henrich and Aaron Kay, Outsourcing punishment to god: Beliefs in divine control reduce earthly punishment, is now published online at the Proceedings of the Royal Academy B (Biological Sciences). You can download a pdf here.
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Check out our new paper in Nature Climate Change on the 6 challenges and 6 solutions for getting people to care about and act on climate change, with Ezra Markowitz. You can download the paper here.
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Read Azim and Jess Tracy’s new paper on the evolution of emotion expressions in Current Directions in Psychology, plus a debate with Lisa Feldman Barrett.
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