9. Social Networks and Computer Models
Since the 2000s, scholars started to create computer models to study religious
cognition and behavior. The models that emerged address a range of phe-
nomena, which extend beyond strictly“cognitive”problems. In this chapter,
we will introduce a simple computer model to study the role of social
structures and learning heuristics in the spread of early Christianity.
9.1 COMPUTER MODELS OF RELIGIONAs we saw in section 1.1, the cognitive turn of the 1950s was partly inspired by
the development of the computer and the corresponding appearance of
artificial intelligence models. This might sound somewhat counterintuitive:
how could we learn anything about the human mind from the computer,
which humans created and which in its early days was more or less the
equivalent of today’s scientific pocket calculators? One way to think about
this apparent paradox is to consider how we can gain knowledge about the
human mind at all. In a broad sense, this is one of the foundational problems
of thefield of psychology. For most of history, knowledge about the human
psyche was gained by introspection. Thinkers such as Socrates, the apostle
Paul, or Saint Augustine spent much effort pondering the nature of human
thoughts and emotions. With the experimental turn of psychology (usually
attributed to Wilhelm Wundt; Kim, 2014), however, the viability of learning
much about ourselves by introspection has been called into question. Empir-
ical methods, in turn, presuppose theorizing that is always informed by other
elements in addition to observed data. Beyond performing mathematical
calculations, the computer could be programmed to store and search data
using different methods, to learn by making inferences from data, and to make
complex decisions. When scholars taught computers to negotiate complex
structures of decision-making, use different learning heuristics, or perform
searches on knowledge represented as semantic networks, theories of how the
mind performs such functions could be modeled, quantified, and tested.