We conducted 4 experiments to examine how people incorporate visual information about strangers' religious identities-religious badges-into their decisions about how much to trust them. Experiment 1 revealed that Christian and non-Christian participants were more trusting (as measured by self-report) of targets who wore a religious badge associated with Christianity (Ash Wednesday ashes) than toward targets who did not wear such a badge. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and also revealed that the effects of Ash Wednesday ashes on Christians' and non-Christians' trust extended to a behavioral measure of trust (i.e., monetary allocations in a multiplayer trust game). Experiment 3 replicated Experiments 1 and 2 with a different religious badge (a necklace with the Christian cross on it). Experiment 4 ruled out a potential confound. Consistent with a stereotype interpretation, these results suggest that U.S. students regard visual cues to people's espousal of Christian religious beliefs as signals of their trustworthiness.

While fear among gay men and lesbians about being out in a masculinist environment is not surprising, this article examines what heterosexuals expect will happen when gay men and lesbians come out. We draw on a unique dataset from a police department in the southwest United States to examine the consequences anticipated by heterosexual police department employees if a gay or lesbian officer's sexual orientation became known in the workplace. We test four main sets of factors: individual-level demographic characteristics and religious background; homophobia; organizational tolerance for discrimination; and intergroup contact theory to explain how heterosexuals expect gay and lesbian coworkers to be treated. Using ordinary least squares regression, we find that characteristics of workplaces, measured by tolerance of discrimination, as well as contact with gay men and lesbians on the job are more significant predictors of anticipated outcomes than are individual-level traits and homophobic attitudes. We conclude by discussing the policy implications of our research.

Evolutionary approaches to religion and the social brain hypothesis are ripe for functional integration. One conceptual link for such integration lies in recognizing the artificially imposed distinction between religion and most other aspects of culture found in band-level societies. This chapter argues that throughout most of human evolution, religion has organized the patterns of belief and behaviour in which the social brain operates. Religious beliefs, myths, symbols and rituals are the means by which emotional bonding, enculturation and identification with an in-group occur. The chapter presents a developmental account of socio-religious enculturation in order to clarify the unique role religion plays in social cognition. It proposes that the particulars of religious systems are introduced and practised during childhood, sealed in adolescence, reinforced throughout reproductive adulthood and transmitted by post-reproductive adults.

One would naturally expect that prediction of the behavior of a complex organism (or machine) would require, in addition to information about external stimulation, knowledge of the internal structure of the organism, the ways in which it processes input information and organizes its own behavior (Chomsky, 1959, p. 27).The Supernatural and Natural Selection: Religion and Evolutionary Success, by anthropologists Lyle Steadman and Craig Palmer, is another addition to the recent deluge of books () devoted to understanding religion from an evolutionary perspective. The evolutionary and cognitive study of religion is flourishing, and research programs examining the structure and retention of religious beliefs and behaviors are producing novel and exciting results at a remarkable pace. The Supernatural and Natural Selection (SNS) germinated in a series of articles published in the 1990s; unfortunately the authors have failed to adequately situate their arguments within the significant literature that has emerged since they initially offered their ideas, particularly those focused on understanding the "internal structure of the organism" as Chomsky's famous critique of Skinner's radical behaviorism put it. As such, SNS lacks a thorough treatment of the multiple levels of analysis that are currently being employed by those engaged in the evolutionary study of religion.Steadman and Palmer (S&P) argue that classical and contemporary approaches to the study of religion are united in a fundamental flaw: each relies on the assumption that Searching for Darwin: Metaphor, collusion, and natural selection

Cooperation, Cultural evolution, Group selection,