{"pk":29398,"title":"Explaining the Existential: Functional Roles of Scientific and Religious Explanation","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Questions about the origins of life and the universe seem to call\nout for explanation, with science and religion offering\ncandidate answers. These answers clearly differ in content, but\ndo they also differ in psychological function? In Study 1\n(N=501) participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk rated\nscientific and religious answers to existential questions on\ndimensions related to epistemic functions (e.g., “This\nexplanation is based on evidence”) as well as\nmoral/social/emotional functions (e.g., “If everyone believed\nthis, the world would be a more moral place”; “This\nexplanation is comforting”). For non-religious participants,\nonly scientific explanations were assigned high values along\nepistemic dimensions; For religious participants, only religious\nexplanations were assigned high values along non-epistemic\ndimensions. In Study 2 (N=130), priming a non-epistemic need\nboosted religious participants’ evaluation of the quality of\nreligious (vs. scientific) explanations. These findings shed light\non the functions of scientific and religious cognition and raise\nnew questions about explanatory co-existence and the origins\nof religious belief.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"explanation; science; cognitive science of religion;\nreligiosity; epistemic needs; emotional needs; social needs"}],"section":"Facets of Cognition","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/17z52415","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Telli","middle_name":"","last_name":"Davoodi","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Tania","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lombrozo","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29398/galley/19258/download/"}]}