Martin Lang received the Czech National Foundation’s Junior Star grant with his project titled Computing Religious Devotion: How Reinforcing Supernatural Beliefs Affects Normative Models in the Mind.
Religions permeate the lives of billions of people and are thought to play a vital role in normative behavior. However, we do not know how religious piety penetrates cognitive processes during decision making. The CREDO project therefore proposes to create a computational model of religious decision making. The model works with the assumption that religious faith, formed through religious practice, creates a strong foundation in the mind. When the mind simulates possible actions during decision making, religious actions are easily accessible and selected due to their high value. The CREDO project will develop this computational model which will then be empirically tested with laboratory and field studies to show how religious belief influences the strength of religious priors during normative decision making. In addition, a large-scale cross-cultural study will establish how the beliefs and practices of different religious traditions influence cognitive computations during normative decision making.
In a paper published in Religion, Brain & Behavior, J. Nenadalová & D. Řezníček demonstrated that some study participants in a sensory-deprived laboratory environment sensed the presence of another person. This feeling was mostly associated with perceived uncertainty and only somewhat associated with psychological dispositions.
In a cross-national investigation published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, F. M. Saxler with LEVYNA’s E. Kundtová Klocová and other colleagues show that the COVID-19 pandemic affected young people’s normative beliefs about unpaid domestic work; and that this effect is stronger in countries with greater gender inequality.
