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IACESR 2026 has officially come to a close! Our new President, Eva Kundtová Klocová, closed the conference by thanking everyone for three fantastic days. We were delighted to host you in Brno and hope you had a wonderful time. Safe travels home and please send us your feedback!

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Larisa Heiphetz Solomon @drlarisa.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

The last talk of the conference was delivered by Jędrzej Gosiewski, who questioned whether agency detection can explain religious beliefs or if those beliefs are better understood as make-believe than factual. A thoughtful challenge to one of the classic ideas in the cognitive science of religion.

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Reposted by IACESR Society

What a special treat to give this keynote at IACESR! Thank you so much for inviting me, for the amazing intellectual engagement, and for the chance to visit Brno for the first time.

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The penultimate talk came from Markéta Muzcková, who explored how superstitious beliefs function as heuristics under uncertainty. Using an Amulet Game across online, lab, and real-world settings, she highlighted the importance of ecological validity in magical thinking and decision-making.

Eliane Deschrijver went next, showing that something as simple as discriminating against someone based on abstract dot patterns predicts prejudice toward real-world groups. Even more striking, greater confidence amplified this effect. A fascinating link between cognitive biases and prejudice.

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Next up Meara Geraty, explored political debates through the lens of collective ritual. Her work suggests that synchronized physiological arousal may better capture collective political engagement and offers a new way of understanding how people experience politics together.

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This was followed by Sotirios Kolios, who explored how musical sounds function as tools in SBNR rituals. Drawing on interviews, he argued that music helps create connection, regulate emotions, structure ritual space, and that innovation can emerge from within ritual practice itself.

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Our last session of the day is a series of lightening talks kicked off by Devin Wright. His work on a language-based model of identity fusion, outperformed previous approaches, generalised across culture and improved predictions. It showed how language predicts pathways to group commitment.

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Next up was @aiyanakoka.bsky.social, who explored how religious innovation isn’t always accidental: it can be deliberate. Drawing on contemporary neo-pagan traditions, she showed how communities intentionally create and adapt rituals to meet new social needs while maintaining a sense of continuity.

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The first panel of Day 3 started with Myron Penner, who argued that religion functions as an adaptive system. Using evangelical support for Donald Trump and religious deidentification as examples, he explored how religions adapt to changing social contexts. #iacesr2026

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A fascinating framework linking developmental psychology, Theory of Mind, and the cognitive science of religion. The talk highlights that understanding how children think about God may also explain why religious beliefs continue to influence adults in such powerful ways. #IACESR2026

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Adults often think of God and humans as more similar than children do, but for a different reason. Rather than projecting themselves onto God, adults may increasingly use their concept of God as a guide for understanding themselves.

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These findings suggest that children’s concepts of God are initially built from their understanding of human minds. As children’s social cognition becomes more sophisticated, so do their concepts of God’s mind. But development doesn’t stop there.

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Early in development, children increasingly distinguish between what humans know and what God knows. As Theory of Mind develops, children become more likely to attribute broader knowledge to God than to people.

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The starting point: developmental psychology can help explain adult religious cognition. Rather than only asking what adults think about God, we can ask how children’s understanding of human minds gradually gives rise to concepts of God’s mind.

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Day 3 was kicked off with an excellent keynote by @drlarisa.bsky.social on God Concepts Across Development. The talk explored how our concepts of God change from childhood to adulthood and how these concepts, in turn, shape our own thinking and behaviour.

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Next, Khatereh Bohrani presented research on empathy and decision-making. Empathy shifted decisions in favour of the target, but only nonreligious participants showed evidence of a pre-decisional empathy bias. Among religious participants, decisions appeared to rely on internalized moral norms.

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Next, Anese Shibani (LEVYNA) explored the second-order free-rider problem in Mauritius, asking whether people prefer transgressors to be punished by humans or by a supernatural deity. There was no overall pre-post effect, but women showed a greater preference for divine punishment after the mosque.

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Our next award winner Radim Chvaja tested whether war makes us believe in moralising gods using data from Ukraine. His findings challenge this common assumption finding almost no significant relation, encouraging a broader conversation about how religious beliefs evolve across different traditions.

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The John McGraw Award talks began with an important point: size matters, but maybe not in a way we anticipated. Carmen Callizo showed that the religious meaning of a place, not its physical size, predicted abstract thinking, while larger sacred spaces were more likely to inspire awe.

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Jakub Cigan & Jana Nenadalová found that religious and spiritual practices are closely linked to feelings of presence. Pleasant experiences of sensing arise through practices like visualization, while unpleasant experiences may emerge as by-products of these practices or through other practices.

How do sacred places shape cooperation? Renatas Berniunas shared research from Mongolia examining ovoo (ritual cairns) Using trust experiments and cooperative games, he explored whether these shared ritual spaces help foster trust, solidarity, and cooperation within local communities

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Next up, @djsmith90.bsky.social tested a core prediction of the supernatural punishment hypothesis: moralistic gods should foster cooperation more than local gods. Across cross-cultural data, the evidence suggested there is little to no meaningful difference.

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Kicking off the first parallel session, Ben Purzycki introduced the Gods, Games, and Socio-Ecological Landscapes project. The team is testing a functionalist hypothesis: do differences in ecological threat create different trust problems, and does religion (or religious cognition) help solve them?

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Overall, the talk highlighted how children’s religious cognition emerges through an interaction of testimony, social identity, cultural context, and active learning. A great reminder that understanding religion also helps us understand how culture itself is transmitted across generations.

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One result from the dataset shows that as parental religiosity increased, children judged violations of their own religious group’s norms more harshly, while becoming relatively more tolerant of people from other religious groups violating those same norms. Moral norms remained consistently wrong.

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The keynote also highlighted the Developing Belief Network, a large international collaboration spanning dozens of sites that examines how children learn about religion, identity, testimony, supernatural agents, and religious norms across diverse cultural settings.

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A recurring theme was that children are active learners. They don’t simply absorb information from adults. They pay attention to who is speaking, how confidently claims are made, and the cultural context surrounding those claims.

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Religion provides a fascinating window into development. It helps us understand how children build concepts of invisible beings, learn social identities, and acquire culturally meaningful beliefs and practices through testimony and social learning.

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Day 2 of IACESR started with a keynote from Kathleen Corriveau (Boston University), who explored how children develop religious beliefs across cultures. Rather than asking whether children believe, the talk asked how they learn what to believe, who to trust, and which norms matter. 🧵#IACESR2026

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Asking whether religion promotes “conservatism” may be the wrong question. Breaking political attitudes into their underlying psychological dimensions may tell us much more than broad labels like “social” or “economic” conservatism.

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Economic attitudes were more complicated. Religion may simultaneously encourage: • prosociality and cooperation, which can increase support for helping others OR • system justification and hierarchy, which can reinforce existing social and economic inequalities. It depends on the context 🤷🏻‍♀️

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Religiosity was fairly consistently linked with conformity-related attitudes, including: • acceptance of authority • national pride • attitudes surrounding sex and gender • beliefs about life and death These relationships appeared much more robust than those involving economic attitudes.

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Instead of treating conservatism as a single construct, the talk separated it into two dimensions: • Conformity ↔ Individual autonomy • Cooperation & equality ↔ Competition & inequality That distinction changes the picture considerably.

Our first keynote speaker today, Quentin Atkinson, challenged a question many of us take for granted: “Is religion associated with conservatism?” The answer? It depends on what we mean by “conservatism.” 🧵

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IACESR Society @iacesr.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Our president @aiyanakoka.bsky.social has officially declared IACESR 2026 open! In her opening speech she emphasised the importance of diversity, inclusivity and promoting younger generations as a way to push this field forward. The opening ceremony was held as Mendel Museum in Brno.

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Less than a week to go until #IACESR2026! 🎉 If you’re joining us in Brno, here are a few ideas to help you make the most of your visit. Join a run with our very own Honza, who can tailor a route to your pace while showing you some of Brno’s best spots. Don’t forget to pack your swimsuit! 🩱☀️

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IACESR Society @iacesr.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

☕ Coming to Brno for IACESR 2026? We’ve curated a list of our favourite cafés around the city for those inevitable coffee breaks between sessions, or just in case the conference coffee isn’t quite to your taste. 😉 Explore the map here: maps.app.goo.gl/9uvLTDDbqQSA... See you in Brno! #IACESR2026

maps.app.goo.gl

IACESR 2026: Guide to Brno

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IACESR Society @iacesr.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

🦋 We’re on Instagram and Facebook too! 📸 @iacesr International Assoc for the 👥 International Assoc for the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion Follow us for conference and field related updates! #IACESR #CognitiveScienceOfReligion

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Eva Kundtová Klocová @kundtova.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

We are looking forward to everyone coming to Brno in July! Your timely registrations will help us prepare properly!

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IACESR Society @iacesr.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Registrations are still open for IACESR 2026, we encourage all to do it soon! Join us in Brno, Czech Republic for three days of talks and discussion in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion. 📍 Masaryk University 📅 1–3 July 2026 🔗 iacesr.com #IACESR2026 #CognitiveScienceOfReligion

iacesr.com

- IACESR

International Association for the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religions – Homepage

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IACESR Society @iacesr.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

We are pleased to announce Kathleen Corriveau as our keynote speaker. She will present “The Development of Cross-Cultural Religious Belief.” Her talk will explore how children acquire religious beliefs through testimony across cultures. 📅 1–3 July 2026 #IACESR2026 #CognitiveScienceOfReligion

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IACESR Society @iacesr.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

🏆 John J. McGraw Award – IACESR 2026 We are delighted to announce this year’s awardees: 🎓Carmen María Callizo Romero — Religiosity, Not Size, Predicts Abstract Cognition in Sacred Spaces 🎓 Radim Chvaja — Is God Perceived as More Moralizing During War? Evidence from Ukraine #IACESR2026

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IACESR Society @iacesr.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

The award honours John J. McGraw, whose work made important contributions to the cognitive study of religion. Trained in cognitive anthropology at UC San Diego, his research focused on ritual practices among the Tz’utujil Maya of Guatemala, alongside interdisciplinary work at Aarhus University.