HENRY

Justin Barrett and Brian Malley have a rather intriguing paper out in the Journal of Cognition and Culture: A Cognitive Typology of Religious Actions (doi:10.1163/156853707X208486):

The rapid but disproportionate growth of the cognitive science of religion in some areas, coupled with the desire to meaningfully connect with more traditional, function-inspired classifications, has left the field with an incomplete and sometimes inconsistent typology of religious and related actions. We address this shortcoming by proposing a systematic typology of counterintuitive actions based on their cognitive representational structures.

This typology may serve as the framework of a research program that seeks to establish (1) psychologically, whether each class of events receives different cognitive treatment within a given context and similar representation across contexts; and (2) anthropologically, whether the different classes are characterized by different performance frequencies, social functions, and kinds of interpretations, making them useful explanatory and predictive distinctions.