JOURNAL ARTICLES
& Book Chapters
Asterisks indicate refereed publications; sole-authored unless otherwise indicated.
M. Willis Monroe, Rachel Spicer, Gino Canlas, Travis Chilcott, Stephen Christopher, Megan Daniels, Andrew J. Danielson, Matthew Hamm, Caroline Arbuckle MacLeod, William Noseworthy, Ian Randall, Robyn Faith Walsh, Michael Muthukrishna, Edward Slingerland. “On the Category of ‘Religion’: A Taxonomic Analysis of a Large-Scale Database,” (PDF) Journal of the American Academy of Religion (in press)
Rachel Spicer, M. Willis Monroe, Matthew Hamm, Andrew Danielson, Gino Canlas, Ian Randall, Edward Slingerland. “Religion and Ecology: A Pilot Study Employing the Database of Religious History,” Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology (Volume 3, 2022: 10073).
Edward Slingerland, M. Willis Monroe and Michael Muthukrishna. “The Database of Religious History (DRH): Ontology, Coding Strategies and the Future of Cultural Evolutionary Analyses.” Religion, Brain and Behavior (published online May 28 2023).
Edward Slingerland. “Response to Wesley J. Wildman's Commentary on Edward Slingerland’s Drunk by the Author,” Religious Studies Review 49.1: 41-43 (March 2023)
Thornton, Mark, Sarah Wolf, Brian Reilly, Edward Slingerland and Diana Tamir. “The 3d Mind Model characterizes how people understand mental states across modern and historical cultures,” Affective Science 1-12 (January 22, 2022).
Hong, Kevin, Edward Slingerland and Joseph Henrich. “Magic and empiricism in early Chinese rainmaking -- A cultural evolutionary analysis.” Current Anthropology (accepted; preprint available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353451705_Magic_and_empiricism_in_early_Chinese_rainmaking_--_A_cultural_evolutionary_analysis)
Beheim, Bret, Quentin Atkinson, Joseph Bulbulia, Will Gervais, Russell Gray, Joseph Henrich, Martin Lang, M. Willis Monroe, Michael Muthukrishna, Ara Norenzayan, Benjamin Purzycki, Azim Shariff, Edward Slingerland, Rachel Spicer, Aiyana Willard. 2021. “Treatment of missing data determines conclusions regarding moralizing gods,” (PDF) Nature 595: E29-34. *
This Matters Arising critiques a 2019 Nature article by Whitehouse, et al. (since retracted) that used the Seshat archaeo-historical databank to argue that beliefs in moralizing gods appear in world history only after the formation of complex “megasocieties” of around one million people. Inspection of the authors’ data shows that 61% of Seshat data points on moralizing gods are missing values, mostly from smaller populations below one million people, and during the analysis the authors re-coded these data points to signify the absence of moralizing gods beliefs. When we confine the analysis only to the extant data or use various standard imputation methods, the reported finding is reversed: moralizing gods precede increases in social complexity.
Muthukrishna, Michael, Joseph Henrich and Edward Slingerland. “Psychology as a Historical Science,” (PDF) Annual Review of Psychology 72 (January 2021, published on-line October 2020). *
Psychology has traditionally seen itself as the science of universal human cognition, but it has only recently begun seriously grappling with cross-cultural variation. Here we argue that the roots of cross-cultural variation often lie in the past. We review examples of research that may be classified as historical psychology, introduce sources of historical data and methods for analyzing them, explain the critical role of theory, and discuss how psychologists can add historical depth and nuance to their work.
Slingerland, Edward, Quentin D. Atkinson, Carol Ember, Oliver Sheehan, Michael Muthukrishna, Joseph Bulbulia, and Russell D. Gray. 2020. “Coding Culture: Challenges and Recommendations for Comparative Cultural Databases,” Evolutionary Human Sciences 2: e29. *
Considerable progress in explaining cultural evolutionary dynamics has been made by applying rigorous models from the natural sciences to historical and ethnographic information collected and accessed using novel digital platforms. However, future progress requires recognition of the unique challenges posed by cultural data, such as recognising the critical role of theory, selecting appropriate units of analysis, data gathering and sampling strategies, winning expert buy-in, achieving reliability and reproducibility in coding, and ensuring interoperability and sustainability of the resulting databases. We conclude by proposing a set of practical guidelines to meet these challenges.
“Introduction: Cognitive Science and Chinese Philosophy,” in Huang, Kevin and Edward Slingerland (editors), Guoji Hanxue luncong 國際漢學論叢 Special Issue on Chinese Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology in Hong Kong, in press.
Nichols, Ryan, Edward Slingerland, Kristoffer Neilbo, Peter Kirby and Carson Logan. 2021. “Supernatural agents and prosociality in historical China: micro-modeling the cultural evolution of gods and morality in textual corpora,” Religion Brain and Behavior 11: 46-64. *
“Response to Jim Behuniak,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 18.3: 485-488 (2019).
Slingerland, Edward, M. Willis Monroe, Brenton Sullivan, Robyn Faith Walsh, Daniel Veidlinger, William Noseworthy, Conn Herriott, Ben Raffield, Janine Larmon Peterson, Gretel Rodríguez, Karen Sonik, William Green, Frederick S. Tappenden, Amir Ashtari, Rachel Spicer, Michael Muthukrishna, “Historians Respond to Whitehouse et al. 2019, ‘Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history,’” (PDF) Journal of Cognitive Historiography 5: 1-2 (2020). *
A critique of the Seshat Databank coding methodology used in Whitehouse et al. 2019
Nielbo, Kristoffer, Ryan Nichols and Edward Slingerland. “Mining Past Minds: Data-Intensive Knowledge Discovery in the Study of Historical Textual Traditions,” Journal of Cognitive Historiography 3:1-2: 93-118 (2018). *
Brenton Sullivan, Michael Muthukrishna, Frederick Tappenden and Edward Slingerland, “Exploring the Challenges and Potentialities of the Database of Religious History for Cognitive Historiography,” (PDF) Journal of Cognitive Historiography 3:1-2: 12-31 (2018). *
Tappenden, Frederick and Edward Slingerland. “Introduction: Religion, Digital Humanities, and Cognitive Historiography,” (PDF) Journal of Cognitive Historiography 3:1-2: 7-11 (2018). *
Nichols, Ryan, Edward Slingerland, Kristoffer Nielbo, and Uffe Bergeton. “Modeling the Contested Relationship Between Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi: Preliminary Evidence from a Machine- Learning Approach,” (PDF) Journal of Asian Studies 77.1: 19-57 (2018). *
“China as the Radical “Other”: Lessons for the Cognitive Science of Religion,” in Religious Cognition in China: “Homo Religiosus” and the Dragon, ed. Ryan Hornbeck, Justin Barrett and Madeleine Kang, pp. 55-75. Springer. *
“Metaphor, Blending, and Cultural Variation: A Reply to Camus,” (PDF) Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 16.3: 431-435 (2017).
Slingerland, Edward, Ryan Nichols, Kristoffer Nielbo and Carson Logan. “The Distant Reading of Religious Texts: A “Big Data” Approach to Mind-Body Concepts in Early China,” (PDF) Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85.4: 985–1016 (2017). *
Slingerland, Edward and Brenton Sullivan. “Durkheim With Data: The Database of Religious History (DRH),” (PDF) Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85.2: 312-347 (2017). *
Norenzayan, Ara, Azim Shariff, Aiyana Willard, Edward Slingerland, Will Gervais, Rita McNamara and Joseph Henrich. “Parochial Prosocial Religions: Historical and Contemporary Evidence for a Cultural Evolutionary Process.” (PDF) Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2016).
“Big Gods, Historical Explanation, and Bringing Religious Studies Out of the Intellectual Ghetto,” (PDF) Religion (September 2015). *
“Crafting Bowls, Cultivating Sprouts: Unavoidable Tensions in Early Chinese Confucianism,” (PDF) Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 14.2: 211-218. *
“Scientific Morality,” in This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress, ed. John Brockman, 365-368. New York: Harper (2015).
Norenzayan, Ara, Azim Shariff, Aiyana Willard, Edward Slingerland, Will Gervais, Rita McNamara and Joseph Henrich. “The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions,” (PDF) Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2014). *
Jiang, Ashlan Falletta-Cowden, Sveinn Sigurdsson, Rita McNamara, Madeline Sands, Shirajum Munira, Edward Slingerland and Joseph Henrich. “Impartial Institutions, Pathogen Stress and the Expanding Social Network” (PDF) (12 manuscript pages), Human Nature (October 2014).
“Toward a Second Wave of Consilience in the Cognitive Scientific Study of Religion” , (PDF) Journal for Cognitive Historiography 1.1: 121-130 (2013). *
Bulbulia, Joseph, Armin Geertz, Quentin Atkinson, Emma Cohen, Joseph Henrich, Ara Norenzayan, Edward Slingerland, Harvey Whitehouse, Thomas Widlok and David Sloan Wilson. “The Cultural Evolution of Religion: Group Report 4,” (PDF) in Cultural Evolution: Strüngmann Forum Reports, Vol. 12, ed. Peter Richerson and Morton Christiansen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2013). *
Norenzayan, Ara, Joseph Henrich and Edward Slingerland. “Religious Prosociality: A Synthesis,” (PDF) in Cultural Evolution: Strüngmann Forum Reports, Vol. 12, ed. Peter Richerson and Morton Christiansen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2013). *