Cognitive Science and the New Testament A New Approach to Early Christian Research

8.1 EMPATHY AND MORALITY A long philosophical tradition connects empathy to morality (Ugazio et al., 2014). More recent scholars ...

both one’s own beliefs and the state of affairs in the world. This ability has been traditionally thought to develop fully aroun ...

into details about theSitz im Lebenof these laws and the evoked historical tradition, we have to note that using empathy researc ...

have seen that the Theory of Mind indeed is capable of such simulations, that is, we can empathize with ourselves in a hypotheti ...

recent years, with scholars pointing out a number of potential shortcomings (even when using a fairly complex notion of empathy, ...

opportunities for passing on the organism’s genes, the genes that compel the organism to behave in such a way should disappear f ...

failed to return the favor once received. This requirement limits the chances of reciprocal altruism in large groups, where it i ...

When reasoning about the connection between religion and morality, Boyer did not invoke morally interested gods or rituals as th ...

we learn to think about ourselves as members of social groups and think about others that way, as well. (3) Third, ourstatus sys ...

How did such tendencies impact the formation of the Jesus movement? First of all, it is unlikely that everybody followed the abo ...

groups can overrule evolutionary pressures that influence selection at the level of the individual. To put it simply, a tribe ca ...

references to the true worship of the God of Israel as the most important concern of the people and its leaders. According to th ...

that our altruistic behavior is a consequence of the fact that our ancestors lived in small-scale societies for a very long time ...

insofar as it involves“instrumental aggression,”which makes the giving up of resources by the exploited individual different fro ...

the same time protect females and their offspring from violence by others.^7 As another example from a non-human society we coul ...

moral instruction, we suggested that moral discourse itself is dependent on evolved traits. In the framework of multi-modal evol ...

The notion of“imitation”was frequently employed in Antiquity in the sense of living up to certain ideals. An important function ...

prestige if their behavior is actually neutral or detrimental with respect to reproductivefitness. Achieving social positions of ...

believe that these rates were higher among the Jews (Harris, 1989, pp. 328–30; Hezser, 2001, pp. 23, 35). Starting with the nine ...

9. Social Networks and Computer Models Since the 2000s, scholars started to create computer models to study religious cognition ...