Every year, European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA) is awarding a grant to support student research. Our Ph.D. student Radim Chvaja is one of its recipients this year.
The funding will allow Radim to study religious costly signalling in the cultural context of Maha Shivaratri pilgrimage in Mauritius, testing experimentally whether pilgrimage costs make the pilgrims more trustworthy as perceived by their peers.
Jana Nenadalová, Piotr Szymanek (Jagiellonian University), and Neil Van Leeuwen (Georgia State University) received a grant from the Open Science of Religion initiative (supported by the John Templeton Foundation) for a virtual reality study.
In his thesis, titled Costly signaling theory of pilgrimage: The case study of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, he studied whether pilgrimages may function as costly signals of commitment to group norms.
