University Affairs: new project on religion and prosociality
“According to the project’s website, despite religion’s omnipresence and centrality to human affairs, it remains, from an academic viewpoint, one of the least studied and most poorly understood aspects of human behavior. “In the past, people have done big, sweeping historical cross-cultural projects. But they tended to generalize, and they were doing it all on their own,” says Edward Slingerland, principal investigator of the project and a professor of Asian studies at UBC. “The difference [here] is we’re doing it with a network of experts who are bringing a range of expertise and materials, and we’re putting it all together like a big puzzle.””
Diane Peters, “Does Religion Make Us Better?” University Affairs, November 6th 2013.