DANCEST 805 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Endorphins, Methodology, Reinforcement
Document Summary
Religious beliefs as reflective elaborations on intuitions: a modified. Not empirically motivated and often go against the believers own assumption that the world obeys a set of stable rules. Intuitive processes (system 1): quick, automatic and implicit; don"t require working memory, high capacity able to work parallel. Reflective processes (system 2): slow, deliberate, explicit and general; require working memory, resource demanding, operate only serially. Religious beliefs are reflective and serve to justify or explain. Cognitive systems detect potential threats, those trigger emotional and responses and behaviour. Pathogen avoidance systems delivers intuitions that: illness can be carried from one to another, contact with a sick person is dangerous, the amount of contact is irrelevant. Creates a niche for reflective representations regarding the invisible vecorts for disease. Acting in synchrony (e. g. military) creates an endorphin surge, increasing social bonding and cooperation. People often link this experience (synchrony) to supernatural phenomena such as the actual presence of superhuman agents.
