Aiyana Willard is a Ph.D. Candidate at The University of British Columbia in evolutionary and cultural psychology. Her work focuses on how cognition and culture interplay to create religious, spiritual, and other types of supernatural beliefs. Aiyana also does cross cultural field research with the Cultural Evolutions of Religion Consortium (CERC). She has established a field site in Fiji where she works with Hindu, Muslim and Christian populations on questions of intergroup cooperation and conflict, and the impact of religious belief.
If content can explain the tendency to hold supernatural beliefs, but cultural learning is required to create religions, then we can make specific predictions about how these things should vary around the world. I’d like to start by thanking Jon Lanman for his insightful description of CREDs, CRUDs, and the larger issue of content and context biases as the foundations of religion.
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