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Malka Ceh, PhD, MSc, cNPA

Tag: faith psychology

  • Why You Can’t Argue with Faith: A Look Inside the Believer’s Brain

    Does it happen to you? You meet someone new, and they seem kind and interesting. The vibe is great, the conversation is flowing, and you just mentally categorize them as a rational adult.  Then they casually drop a theological bomb right in the middle of the small talk. One minute, you’re agreeing on the best local coffee, and the next, you are witnessing mind-blowing leaps in reasoning that defy the basic laws of physics. You throw out a well-established scientific fact; they parry with an emotional anecdote. You highlight a massive logical contradiction, and they give you a serene, unfazed smile. 

    In psychoanalysis, there is a fundamental concept called reality testing. It is the critical ability to distinguish what’s going on inside our own heads (our wishes, thoughts, and fantasies) from what is objectively happening in the external world. When you talk to a believer, it can feel like their reality testing has been put on short-time working. It can be maddening to follow their astonishing mental processing. The reason is that their brain is physiologically altered, and you two are playing by different biological rules. To accommodate faith, the human mind is neurologically hijacked and modified to tolerate, and even reward, the holy gibberish. Neuroscience will help you understand how the neural differences translate directly into the biased thinking, logical gaps, and emotional defenses you witness in your believing fellow humans.

    The “Gut Feeling” Default vs. The Analytic Pause

    The way our brains idle at rest tells you a bit about how we process the world. Electroencephalogram (EEG) studies show that, even at rest, non-believers naturally display a lot of deliberative, analytic neural processing. Believers, on the other hand, tend to rely heavily on intuitive and automatic processing (Nash et al., 2022). When we switch on our thinking machines, the distinctions increase.

    When evaluating claims and facts, non-religious folks rely much more on left hemisphere memory networks (Harris et al., 2009; Rim et al., 2019). We literally pause to retrieve factual information from our mental archives. Unsurprisingly, this reliance on analysis makes skeptics slower but more accurate at logical reasoning tasks compared to believers (Pennycook et al., 2013). Believers bypass the analytical pause, opting for a mental shortcut conditioned by religious principles of punishment and reward.  

    The Broken “Oops!” Detector

    So, why don’t they care when you definitively prove their dialectics wrong? The main defendant is their Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC). The ACC is essentially our brain’s cognitive conflict center, or its “Oops!” detector. It fires up when you make an error, face uncertainty, or encounter information that clashes with what you know. Research consistently shows that religious conviction is linked to significantly reduced ACC reactivity (Inzlicht et al., 2009; Senderecka, 2016). Meaning that when a believer faces a logical contradiction, their brain literally does not sound the alarm. They do not feel the uncomfortable pinch of cognitive dissonance. They remain blissfully unbothered by discrepancies. In this way, their faith acts as a neurological buffer against the anxiety of life’s uncertainty (Inzlicht et al., 2009; Senderecka, 2016).

    Logic Replaced by Ego and Reward

    If they aren’t processing facts, what exactly is firing in a believer’s brain during a religious discussion? Emotion and the defense system of their core sense of identity.

    Functional MRI (fMRI) imaging reveals that evaluating religious statements heavily activates several specific brain regions:

    • The Anterior Insula: The brain’s emotion hub (Harris et al., 2009; Rim et al., 2019; Gaw, 2019; Kapogiannis et al., 2014; Grafman et al., 2020; Yeung et al., 2025).  
    • The Precuneus and vmPFC (ventromedial prefrontal cortex): The areas responsible for self-representation and identity (Harris et al., 2009; Rim et al., 2019; Gaw, 2019; Kapogiannis et al., 2014; Grafman et al., 2020; Yeung et al., 2025; Han et al., 2008).  
    • The Ventral Striatum: The brain’s reward and motivation center (Harris et al., 2009; Rim et al., 2019; Gaw, 2019; Kapogiannis et al., 2014; Grafman et al., 2020; Yeung et al., 2025).  

    Translation: To a believer, a theological debate isn’t a logical operation! It is an exercise in processing feelings, defending their literal sense of self, and getting a dopamine hit. You are engaging in heavy thinking, while they are just being sentimental.

    Invisible Friends and Peer Pressure

    We also see massive differences in social processing. Non-religious individuals show far less neural sensitivity to peer influence. Meaning we have much less neurological pressure to conform to the herd (Thiruchselvam et al., 2017).  

    Believers, however, heavily engage their “theory-of-mind” networks, the brain regions we use to figure out what other people are thinking and intending (Kapogiannis et al., 2014; Kapogiannis et al., 2009). They use these social circuits to constantly monitor the presumed intent and emotion of supernatural agents (Kapogiannis et al., 2014; Kapogiannis et al., 2009). Their brains are working overtime to model what an invisible entity thinks of them.

    Structural Changes

    These long-term mental habits even correlate with the physical volume of the brain. Studies indicate that having a pragmatic, doubting personality is associated with an increased volume in the right precuneus (Kapogiannis et al., 2009). Conversely, fear-based religiosity actually correlates with a decreased volume in the left precuneus and the orbitofrontal cortex (a region crucial for decision-making) (Kapogiannis et al., 2009). There is also evidence linking the periaqueductal gray, a primal region involved in fear modulation, to spirituality and religiosity (Ferguson et al., 2021). This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The threat of divine punishment has always been religion’s favorite stick. It literally hooks into the brain’s ancient survival circuits to keep the flock terrified, obedient, and in line. And that psychological terror is physically mapped onto their fundamental neural architecture.

    An intimate, perceived relationship with a deity has also been linked to increased volume in the right middle temporal cortex (Kapogiannis et al., 2009). This is a region of the brain heavily involved in navigating social interactions and figuring out what other people are thinking. Essentially, believers spend enough time talking to an invisible friend and trying to decode their mysterious will, that their brain starts treating it like a very real, demanding social bond. Their brain is structurally adapted for maintaining a deep, intimate connection with the supernatural entity.

    The Grim Reality

    Ultimately, a believer’s brain is accommodated to belief, not to testing reality. When the human mental system is tasked with the survival of a religious worldview, objective reality becomes a liability. To keep the belief alive, the mind must deploy a heavy arsenal of defense mechanisms: outright denial, endless rationalization, compartmentalization, and projecting human intent onto the empty sky. In the religious brain, protecting the belief is given absolute priority. These defense mechanisms override logic, they override reasoning, and as the neuroscience shows, they even override basic perception. 

    So, maybe save your breath and keep your sanity, otherwise you are bringing a knife to a gunfight. You are showing up with objective reality, science, and logical syllogisms. But they are operating with a muted “oops” and a temporal cortex that is physically beefed up to maintain a relationship with an invisible friend. No matter how pristine and flawless your data is, it simply will not run on a machine that has been biologically wired to reject it. You cannot fix a hardware problem with a software update. It makes me sad, too. Should we just let go?

    References

    Barnby, J., Bailey, N., Chambers, R., & Fitzgerald, P. (2015). How similar are the changes in neural activity resulting from mindfulness practice in contrast to spiritual practice?. Consciousness and cognition, 36, 219-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.07.002

    Boyer, P. (2003). Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function.. Trends in cognitive sciences, 7 3, 119-124. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(03)00031-7

    Dickinson, D. L. (2024). Deliberation, mood response, and the confirmation bias in the religious belief domain. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2024.102161

    Elk, M., & Aleman, A. (2017). Brain mechanisms in religion and spirituality: An integrative predictive processing framework. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 73, 359-378. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.12.031

    Ferguson, M., Schaper, F., Cohen, A., Siddiqi, S., Merrill, S., Nielsen, J. A., Grafman, J., Urgesi, C., Fabbro, F., & Fox, M. (2021). A neural circuit for spirituality and religiosity derived from patients with brain lesions. Biological psychiatry, 91, 380 – 388. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2021.06.016

    Gardner, S. M., Andrade, G., Ho, P. A., & Nasrallah, H. A. (2026). Electroencephalography, Religious Belief and Practice, and Their Psychiatric Correlates: A Scoping Review. Annals of Clinical Psychiatry, 37, 4 – 15. https://doi.org/10.1177/10401237261417737

    Gaw, A. (2019). Religious Belief at the Level of the Brain: Neural Correlates and Influence of Culture.. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease. https://doi.org/10.1097/nmd.0000000000001016

    Grafman, J., Cristofori, I., Zhong, W., & Bulbulia, J. A. (2020). The Neural Basis of Religious Cognition. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29, 126 – 133. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721419898183

    Han, S., Mao, L., Gu, X., Zhu, Y., Ge, J., & Y. (2008). Neural consequences of religious belief on self-referential processing. Social Neuroscience, 3, 1 – 15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470910701469681

    Harris, S., Kaplan, J., Curiel, A. R., Bookheimer, S., Iacoboni, M., & Cohen, M. (2009). The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief. PLoS ONE, 4. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0007272

    Inzlicht, M., McGregor, I. M., Hirsh, J. B., & Nash, K. (2009). Neural Markers of Religious Conviction. Psychological Science, 20, 385 – 392. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02305.x

    Kapogiannis, D., Deshpande, G., Krueger, F., Thornburg, M. P., & Grafman, J. (2014). Brain Networks Shaping Religious Belief. Brain Connectivity, 4, 70 – 79. https://doi.org/10.1089/brain.2013.0172

    Kapogiannis, D., Barbey, A., Su, M.-D., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2009). Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity. PLoS ONE, 4. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0007180

    Kapogiannis, D., Barbey, A., Su, M.-D., Zamboni, G., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2009). Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 4876 – 4881. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0811717106

    Kiang, M., Cupid, J., Ahmed, S., Lepock, J., & Girard, T. (2020). Religiosity is associated with less prediction of the typical: an event-related brain potential study.. Biological psychology, 107884. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2020.107884

    Lindeman, M., & Lipsanen, J. (2016). Diverse Cognitive Profiles of Religious Believers and Nonbelievers. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 26, 185 – 192. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2015.1091695

    Miller, L., Balodis, I., McClintock, C., Xu, J., Lacadie, C., Sinha, R., & Potenza, M. (2019). Neural Correlates of Personalized Spiritual Experiences.. Cerebral cortex, 29 6, 2331-2338. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhy102

    Nash, K., Kleinert, T., Leota, J., Scott, A., & Schimel, J. (2022). Resting-State Networks of Believers and Non-Believers: An EEG Microstate Study.. Biological psychology, 108283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2022.108283

    Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2013). Belief bias during reasoning among religious believers and skeptics. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20, 806-811. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-013-0394-3

    Pontes, M. C. L., Diógenes, V. R. B., Rodrigues, N. C. M. D. N., De Fátima Lima Vasconcelos, E., De Queiroz, M. C. O., De Paula Miranda, A., Pacheco, B., & Nóbrega, K. F. (2021). Neural factors that define religiosity: neurophysiological distinction between the individual with religious and non-religious beliefs. São Paulo Medical Journal. https://doi.org/10.5327/1516-3180.694

    Rim, J. I., Ojeda, J. C., Svob, C., Kayser, J., Drews, E., Kim, Y., Tenke, C., Skipper, J., & Weissman, M. (2019). Current Understanding of Religion, Spirituality, and Their Neurobiological Correlates.. Harvard Review of Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1097/hrp.0000000000000232

    Saroglou, V., Clobert, M., Cohen, A., Johnson, K. A., Ladd, K., Van Pachterbeke, M., Adamovová, L., Blogowska, J., Brandt, P., Çukur, C. S., Hwang, K., Miglietta, A., Motti-Stefanidi, F., Muñoz-García, A., Murken, S., Roussiau, N., & Valladares, J. T. (2020). Believing, Bonding, Behaving, and Belonging: The Cognitive, Emotional, Moral, and Social Dimensions of Religiousness across Cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 51, 551 – 575. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022120946488

    Senderecka, M. (2016). Brain and faith. Neural correlates of religious beliefs. Philosophical Problems in Science, 165-188.

    Thiruchselvam, R., Gopi, Y., Kilekwang, L., Harper, J., & Gross, J. (2017). In God we trust? Neural measures reveal lower social conformity among non-religious individuals. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12, 956 – 964. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx023

    Van Leeuwen, N., Weisman, K., & Luhrmann, T. (2021). To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding. Open Mind : Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 5, 91 – 99. https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00044

    Yan, A. (2024). Religion on the brain: A look into the neurological impact of religion and spirituality. Scholarly Review Journal. https://doi.org/10.70121/001c.124866

    Yeung, A., Wong, N., Tsui, I. S. Y., & Lee, T. C. P. (2025). Neural correlates of religious behavior related to Christianity: an ALE meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 16. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1557796

  • Evolutionary Psychology of Faith: A Survival Feature or a Mind Bug?

    Evolutionary Psychology of Faith: A Survival Feature or a Mind Bug?


    If religion were a person, how are things between you two? Are you even on speaking terms? Are you just awkwardly tolerating each other at family gatherings, giving a polite nod from across the room? Or do you cross to the other side of the street when you see them coming?
    Our relationship has moved through distinct eras. When I was younger, I had a more …. let’s say fierce attitude. Then, for a time, I mostly just forgot about it, and gradually became more tolerant on the rare occasions when I interacted with a religious person. Things were chill.

    Until last year, when religion crashed into my life like an intense friend from middle school who suddenly moved in next door. You know the type that you hadn’t thought about in twenty years, but suddenly they are knocking on your door with beer and want to discuss deeply personal stuff when you run into each other in the hallway. You find yourself frantically messaging old classmates to figure out what this odd cookie’s deal is and how to handle their now-constant presence.

    Religion … has many faces. At the individual level, it can offer comfort. It is a ready-made antidote to existential dread. It comes with a community that secures a sense of belonging. Societally, it is the ultimate glue, aligning thousands of strangers under a shared moral canopy and a great potential to mobilize them for common causes. Good or bad causes. Meaning, the shadows are dark. Societally, the exact mechanism that binds an “in-group” together inherently creates an “out-group.” The cohesive glue easily hardens into a weapon for tribal conflict, xenophobia, and systemic oppression. On an individual level, it can breed deep-seated shame, massive biases, and the severe suppression of one’s real self.

    You want to know how a cognitive phenomenon with such volatile, double-edged outcomes evolves in the first place? I got you. Basically, we have two models that explain why all human societies persistently exhibit this trait.

    The Evolutionary Advantage or The “It’s a Feature” Camp

    The first model looks at religion as a straightforward adaptation. It argues that religion evolved because it actively helped humans survive, cooperate, and reproduce.

    While Darwin (1871), in The Descent of Man, and even early sociologists like Émile Durkheim (1912), in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, theorized the social binding function of religion, the modern evolutionary framework was developed by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and anthropologist Richard Sosis. in his Darwin’s cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society, Sloan Wilson is focusing on group-level adaptation. Group-level adaptation is the idea that evolution doesn’t just reward the fittest selfish individuals, but actually favors entire groups that figure out how to operate together as a single, cooperative unit. Richard Sosis, on the other hand, focuses on costly signaling, which is basically the ultimate lie-detector test for loyalty. It is the idea that making people do difficult, painful, or time-consuming things proves to the rest of the group that they aren’t faking their commitment. So basically, Wilson and Sosis argue that religion solves the free-rider problem. What is that?

    Humans didn’t conquer the planet by being the fastest or the strongest. We rule the world because of our unmatched capacity for teamwork. From Darwin’s early notes to modern scholars like Michael Tomasello (“shared intentionality” in Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny), Joseph Henrich (“the collective brain” in The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter), and Brian Hare (“survival of the friendliest” in Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity), the scientific consensus is that extreme cooperation is sapiens’ ultimate evolutionary superpower. But cooperation is risky. Groups are always vulnerable to “free riders”: the guys who happily eat the mammoth meat but conveniently sprain an ankle when it is time to do the actual hunting. Religions solve this.

    A shared belief in an all-seeing, punishing deity acts like an invisible police force, keeping antisocial behavior in check even when nobody is looking. On top of that, religion demands “costly signaling.” Think of fasting, painful rites, strict dietary laws, or time-consuming prayers. If you are willing to endure all of that, you prove your absolute loyalty to the group. A free rider simply won’t pay that high a cost. The result is a highly cohesive, fiercely loyal collective that easily outcompetes fragmented, non-religious groups. Religion, in short, served the host.
    Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, expands on this framework by introducing the concept of the “hive switch.” He argues that religious rituals, like synchronized chanting or dancing, temporarily shut down the annoying, self-serving ego. They allow individuals to merge seamlessly into a larger collective organism, vastly improving the group’s chances of survival. Additionally, Ara Norenzayan, in Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, developed the “big gods” variant. He theorizes that as human settlements grew from small bands into large agricultural societies, kin-based trust broke down. You cannot personally know everyone in a city. Belief in “big gods”, omniscient, moralizing deities, was the necessary evolutionary bridge that allowed thousands of anonymous strangers to trust each other and build civilizations.

    It all sounds incredibly elegant, doesn’t it? Like religion is the ultimate evolutionary lifehack for building societies. But there is a second camp of thinkers who look at this exact same phenomenon and see something different. What if we are giving religion way too much credit for being “helpful”? What if it isn’t a tool that we use, but a tool that uses us?

    The Parasitic Meme or The “It’s a Bug” Camp

    This model kind of flips the script. It argues that religion is a byproduct of human cognitive workings. It acts as a cultural parasite. In this view, religion does not exist to serve the human host; it exists solely to replicate itself.

    To understand this, you have to look at ideas as replicators: memes. Before the internet hijacked the word, a meme was originally defined as the cultural equivalent of a gene. It is a unit of information—like a fashion trend or a religious concept—that spreads from brain to brain.

    Just like genes, memes mutate, compete for survival, and replicate. Think of a juicy piece of gossip. Someone tells a story, and as it spreads from person to person, people instinctively embellish the details to make it just a little spicier. That is memetic mutation. Eventually, the most shocking, dramatic version of the rumor grabs everyone’s attention, completely crowding out the boring truth. That is memetic competition. And because the new, embellished story is now so incredibly scandalous, you simply cannot resist passing it on to your friends. That is replication.

    But why are some ideas so incredibly sticky? Why did you instantly forget a math formula, but remember your friend’s phone number from the 90s to this day? Because the most successful memes survive by actively hacking your deepest evolutionary hardware. Think about an outrageous clickbait headline, or one of those old chain letters that threatened you with bad luck if you didn’t forward it. These ideas survive because they hijack your primal instincts, like your need for connection, your deep-seated fear of danger, your desire for social status, or your tribal outrage. A meme does not care if it is factually true, and it certainly does not care if it is good for your mental health. It only cares about being copied. By triggering your highest-arousal emotions, it turns your own biology into its personal copying machine.

    Who came up with the concept, by the way? Dawkins, of course. He coined the term “meme” in 1976, and in 1993 he explicitly formalized the parasitic framework in his essay Viruses of the Mind. He explained that just as a biological virus latches onto a vulnerable cell, a mind virus exploits a vulnerable brain. And religion is a highly contagious “memeplex”: a clustered group of cooperative memes that hijacks your pre-existing cognitive hardware.

    Think of, for example, the survival mechanisms of a human child. Children evolved a necessary cognitive trait: absolute, unquestioning trust in authority figures. If a parent tells a toddler, “Don’t eat those red berries; they are poisonous,” a kid who demands proof probably won’t survive the afternoon. We are biologically hardwired to absorb warnings from authorities as absolute truth. The religious memeplex sneaks right through this open door. The meme “believe in this specific God or you will burn in hell” hijacks the exact same survival hardware as “don’t eat these berries”.

    But a successful virus doesn’t just infect; it protects itself. The religious memeplex bundles itself with brilliant, built-in defense memes. One meme says, “Faith without evidence is the highest virtue.” Another meme says, “Doubt is a punishable sin.” A third meme says, “You must convert others to save them.” Together, these ideas act like a highly evolved virus. They hijack human psychology to aggressively ensure their own survival and transmission, sometimes actively harming the host’s actual biological fitness in the process, like demanding lifelong celibacy or encouraging martyrdom.

    In Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett elaborates the idea of “domestication.” He argues that early animistic beliefs were “wild” memes. Over time, human institutions domesticated these memes, engineering organized religions that act like highly evolved viruses, complete with sophisticated defense mechanisms against skepticism. In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore focused on how the religious memeplex uses psychological immune-system overrides. She highlighted how religious memes bundle themselves with instructions that actively forbid questioning, think of maxims like “faith is a virtue” or “doubt is a sin.” This ensures the parasite is hardly eradicated by rational thought.

    The Verdict: A Feature, a Bug, or Both?

    The reality is, biology is rarely neat and tidy. These two models don’t necessarily have to cancel each other out. It’s very possible that faith started out as a crucial evolutionary feature, the social glue that allowed our ancestors to survive, cooperate, and build cities. But once that cognitive infrastructure was in place, it became the perfect, warm host environment for parasitic memes to move in, mutate, and take over.

    We are walking around with ancient brains running legacy software. Whether it’s a brilliant survival tool that outlived its original purpose or a mind virus that hacked our childhood trust, the result is the same: the religious memeplex is deeply embedded in the human operating system.

    So, how do these explanations affect your attitude toward religion? How will you handle the religious memeplex when it shows up on your front porch? Will you lean into pure tolerance, accepting it as an inevitable, perhaps even useful, quirk of human nature? Roll your eyes and dismiss it? Or will you go on the offensive and actively dismantle the dogma wherever you see it?

    References

    • Blackmore, S. (1999). The meme machine. Oxford University Press.
    • Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. John Murray.
    • Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.
    • Dawkins, R. (1993). Viruses of the mind. In B. Dahlbom (Ed.), Dennett and his critics: Demystifying mind (pp. 13–27). Blackwell.
    • Dennett, D. C. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Viking Penguin.
    • Durkheim, E. (1912). The elementary forms of the religious life. J. W. Swain, Trans.
    • Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon Books.
    • Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Harvill Secker.
    • Hare, B., & Woods, V. (2020). Survival of the friendliest: Understanding our origins and rediscovering our common humanity. Random House.
    • Henrich, J. (2015). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton University Press.
    • Hrdy, S. B. (2009). Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Harvard University Press.
    • Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton University Press.
    • Sosis, R. (2004). The adaptive value of religious ritual. American Scientist, 92(2), 166–172.
    • Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate. MIT Press.
    • Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society. University of Chicago Press.

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