Robert N. McCauley Ph.D.

About

Robert N. McCauley, Ph.D., is the author of Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not and of Philosophical Foundations of the Cognitive Science of Religion. His most recent book, co-authored with George Graham, is Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind: What Mental Abnormalities Can Teach Us about Religions. He is also the co-author with E. Thomas Lawson of both Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms and Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. McCauley is also the editor of The Churchlands and Their Critics and the co-editor with Harvey Whitehouse of Mind and Religion. In addition, he is the author of more than 100 articles, chapters, and reviews in a variety of journals in philosophy, religion, anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science. He has taught courses at Emory University in all of those fields as well as in linguistics and neuroscience and behavioral biology. McCauley has lectured at colleges and universities as well as national and international conferences and professional meetings in more than a dozen countries across four continents. McCauley served as president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (1997-98) and as the president of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (2010-2012) and is slated to be a Gifford Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen in 2022. He is William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and was the inaugural Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University (2008-2016).

Books by Robert N. McCauley Ph.D.

Recent Posts

Does Performing Rituals Build Character?

Can participating repeatedly in rigidly constrained, pointless actions enhance traits relevant to character development?

Misinformation, Social Media, and the Method of Assertion

Too often social media transmit and repeat misinformation without context or attribution, depriving recipients of one of the principal grounds for assessing its believability.

How Psychology Provoked a Revolution in Economics

Psychological experiments on human judgment under uncertainty showed that people often stray from presumptions about rational economic agents.

Were Neanderthals Religious?

Recent archaeological discoveries suggest that Neanderthals had far richer symbolic lives than earlier researchers had imagined—and might even have had religious proclivities.

Why Religions Seem to Involve Outlandish Beliefs

Distinguishing between "mundane" and "groupish" beliefs clarifies myriad confusions surrounding the puzzle of religious rationality.

Learning to Read Rewires Brains

Acquiring the ability to read changes how and where your brain processes faces.

The Psychological Potency of Ritualized Behaviors

People intuitively judge that ritualized behaviors are causally effective, even without supporting evidence.

Are Religious Developments Predictable?

Research in the cognitive science of religions suggests that many features of religious forms and religious experiences exhibit regular patterns.

When People Cannot Understand the Words of the Gods

Many American Catholics find the Latin Mass, which proceeds with utterances that they do not understand, more reverential than a Mass in the vernacular.

How to Make Inflation Invisible

Because of insufficient attention to ways of hiding inflation, it may have been more pronounced over the past few decades than typically presumed.