OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The TQCC of Religion Brain & Behavior is 2. The table below lists those papers that are above that threshold based on CrossRef citation counts [max. 250 papers]. The publications cover those that have been published in the past four years, i.e., from 2022-01-01 to 2026-01-01.)

Article	Citations
Big comparison	63
Building better models: a cultural immunology approach	56
Are the religious make-believing, or are they making themselves believe?	23
How do culture and religion interact worldwide? A cultural match approach to understanding religiosity and well-being in the Many Analysts Religion Project	23
Scripture’s systemic imagination	22
The interaction between forgiveness and resentment on mental health outcomes: two sides of the same coin?	21
Beyond the border: advancing the study of Catholic identities and orthopraxic religion in Southern and Northern Ireland	21
Missing level of analysis?	17
Local concerns aren’t always local: a broader view of local social ecologies provides greater explanatory power	15
An integrative neurocognitive model of human relations with supernatural agents, commentary to Balch, Grafman and McNamara	13
The emergence of MSP vs. the spread of transcendentalist religion	12
Commentary to MARP: how to increase the robustness of survey studies	12
Introducing a special issue on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of socio-political complexity	10
Pierre Liénard (1968–2023)	10
Religious people view both science and religion as less epistemically valuable than non-religious people view science	9
Where we go one we go all: CSR in the digital age	7
Religion endures, but does it thrive?	7
Are cultures immune systems or blueprints of a systemic design?	7
Rational atheism revisited: a comment on Disbelief by Will Gervais	7
How to understand a research question—a challenging first step in setting up a statistical model	7
Frontal asymmetry and physiological responses in religious and spiritual problems with and without conversion	6
Do religious and market-based institutions promote cooperation in Hadza hunter-gatherers?	6
Multiple origins for the evolution of collective rituals	5
Henrich’s Weberian project	5
Assessing religion and spirituality in a cross-cultural sample: development of religion and spirituality items for the Global Flourishing Study	5

A need to better understand the evolutionary process of beliefs about gods’ concerns	5
Response: Secularization with Irish characteristics	5
Coding, causality, and statistical craft: the emergence and evolutionary drivers of moralistic supernatural punishment remain unresolved	5
Cultural dissonance and consonance in mystical-type experiences: commentary on “Finding consonance: an integrative neurocognitive model of human relationships with supernatural agents”	5
Kin selection favors religious traditions: ancestor worship as a cultural descendant-leaving strategy	5
Conscious evolution of the noösphere: hubris or necessity?	5
From multiverse analysis to multiverse operationalisations: 262,143 ways of measuring well-being	5
Some questions on the utility of transmission biases in ethnographic research	5
Toward a cultural immunology of religious systems	5
Mapping the minds of participants: relationality and cultural schemas	5
Faith and fertility in evolutionary perspective	4
Toward an embodied cognitive science of religion: enaction, evolution, emergence	4
Perceptions of moralizing agents and cooperative behavior in Northeastern Brazil	4
The economic – and anthropological? – view of supernatural institutions	4
“I once was blind”: experimental manipulation of religious attitudes via choice blindness	4
Prayer as collaborative problem solving	4
Rethinking the roots of human collective ritual	4
Formalized rituals may have preceded the emergence of religions	4
Predictive processing all the way down	4
The campaign against COVID-19 in Nigeria: exploring church leaders’ role perception and action	3
The moralization bias of gods’ minds: a cross-cultural test	3
Comparing the three states of Dhikr, meditation, and thinking about God: an fMRI study	3
Extraordinary-high rank expectation as a cognitive predisposition forming religion	3
Depth vs. breadth: lessons from the Evolution of Religion and Morality project	3
A systematic review of the association between religiousness and children’s prosociality	3
The role of religion in adolescent mental health: faith as a moderator of the relationship between distrust and depression	3
The varieties of nonreligious experience: meaning in life among believers, non-believers, and the spiritual but not religious	3
Where does CSR go from here?	3
Social interaction spheres, the self, and the meanings of “prediction”	3
The promises and pitfalls of facilitated spiritual experiences for the study of religion	3
God, witchcraft, and beliefs about illness in Mauritius	3
Religion, Brain & Behavior adopts stricter transparency standards	3
Diverse evolutionary strategies for explaining features of religions	3
Moving forward from “Fertility and Faith”	3
The success story of the west, perceptual art, and the challenges of the Global East	3
Instrumentality, empiricism, and rationality in Nuosu divination	2
Editorial note	2
God is up and devil is down: mortality salience increases implicit spatial-religious associations	2
The evolution of human ritual behavior as a cooperative signaling platform	2
The evolution of religiosity by kin selection	2
Cultural evolution of gods’ minds: response to commentators	2
What defines a person?	2
Possession trance covaries with measures of social rigidity in the Ethnographic Atlas	2
From drowning to debunking: the cognitive science of religion's role in unraveling religious beliefs	2
Reintroducing the direction of evolution	2
Linking ritual transmission with the psychology of norm acquisition	2
A contemporary interpretation of Teilhard’s law of complexity-consciousness	2
Broadening the scope and refining the precision of theistic relational spirituality	2
Reflections on Patrick McNamara, religion, neuroscience, and the self: a new personalism	2
Corrected by collegial commentators: my beliefs about beliefs about Disbelief	2

The puzzles that remain	2
The agency of women in secularization	2
The poverty of contentless culture	2
Cigarettes for the dead: effects of sorcery beliefs on parochial prosociality in Mauritius	2
Identifying and validating the “varieties” of spiritual experience	2
Fertility and faith: insights from human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and life history theory	2
Less egocentric and a bit more allocentric—the path to greater well-being?	2
Keep the black box open: a case for complex and continuous representationalism	2