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 2021-02-01 to 2025-02-01.)

Article	Citations
A systematic review of the association between religiousness and children’s prosociality	40
(Non)automaticity of ritualized behavior	15
Event cognition (not ecumenical naturalism) integrates individual and cultural differences	14
The Evolution of Religion and Morality project: some modest reservations	13
Big comparison	13
Global fertility and the future of religion: addressing empirical and theoretical challenges	12
Caring about you: the motivational component of mentalizing, not the mental state attribution component, predicts religious belief in Japan	11
A workflow for causal inference in cross-cultural psychology	10
Dataset of Integrated Measures of Religion (DIM-R). Harmonization of religiosity data from selected international multiwave surveys	9
Beyond the border: advancing the study of Catholic identities and orthopraxic religion in Southern and Northern Ireland	9
Comparing the three states of Dhikr, meditation, and thinking about God: an fMRI study	8
Beliefs, evolution, and psychiatric symptoms	7
Two kinds of presence (at least): a commentary on T.M. Luhrmann’s “How God Becomes Real”	7
The interaction between neuroscience and theology is producing a new personalism: a response to commentators on my book “Religion, neuroscience and the self: a new personalism.”	7
Spiritual but not religious (SBNRs) and theists encounter spirit tech	7
Prosociality and Pentecostalism in the D.R. Congo	7
Religious coalitions and competition among complex adaptive systems	6
Scripture’s systemic imagination	6
How do culture and religion interact worldwide? A cultural match approach to understanding religiosity and well-being in the Many Analysts Religion Project	6
Reply to commentators of “Re-introducing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to modern evolutionary science”	6
The interaction between forgiveness and resentment on mental health outcomes: two sides of the same coin?	6
Does moderation by perceived normativeness of religion occur at the individual level or the country level?	5
Causal inference in regression: advice to authors	5
Mimesis and the origins of religion	4
The role of absorption in making God real	4

The HADDs and the HADD-nots: mystical experiences and religion in evolution	4
God’s plan? The role of emotional repression in forming and sustaining religious beliefs	4
The awe-prosociality relationship: evidence for the role of context	4
Appealing to the minds of gods: religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies	3
Are religious rituals always causally opaque?	3
The moralization bias of gods’ minds: a cross-cultural test	3
Collective action in wild chimpanzees provides further insight into the evolution of cooperative ritual behavior	3
Reinterpreting the archaeological evidence: rituals as practical and specialized interventions	3
Reintroducing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to modern evolutionary science	3
Two questions for the cultural evolutionary science of religion	3
On obscene and civil forms of nonreligion	3
Adaptive signaling in a lineage explanation, needs to be adaptive	3
Religion, Brain & Behavior adopts stricter transparency standards	3
Religion: the WEIRDest concept in the world?	3
Material insecurity predicts greater commitment to moralistic and less commitment to local deities: a cross-cultural investigation	3
In defense of thin descriptions: reflections on some methodological themes in Harvey Whitehouse’s The Ritual Animal	3
A half-Irish exit	3
Integrating culture into the cognitive science of religion	3
The Evolution of Religion and Morality project: reflections and looking ahead	2
Introducing a special issue on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of socio-political complexity	2
From supernatural punishment to big gods to puritanical religions: clarifying explanatory targets in the rise of moralizing religions	2
An explicit religious label impacts visual adaptation to Christian and Muslim faces	2
Depth vs. breadth: lessons from the Evolution of Religion and Morality project	2
The success story of the west, perceptual art, and the challenges of the Global East	2
Moving forward from “Fertility and Faith”	2
How is analytical thinking related to religious belief? A test of three theoretical models	2
Celebrating the uninvited	2
Challenges in modeling local manifestations of a global template	2
Science and religion around the world: compatibility between belief systems predicts increased well-being	2
Spirit Tech and the Nones	2
The role of experience in making Gods and spirits real	2
Diverse evolutionary strategies for explaining features of religions	2
On breaking the cognitive science of religion and putting it back together again	2
Missing level of analysis?	2
On the benefits and ambiguities of “religious systems”	2
The emergence of MSP vs. the spread of transcendentalist religion	2
Commentary to MARP: how to increase the robustness of survey studies	2
A typology for understanding the usage and intentions of Spirit Tech consumers	2
Pierre Liénard (1968–2023)	2