Pain and suffering as part of religious life: The Mauritian Thaipusam kavadi
In a pop-science article published in Dingir, E. Kundtová Klocová discusses the various socio-cultural aspects of the Thaipusam Kavadi ritual as practiced in Mauritius.
CREDO project received funding from the Czech Science Foundation in the Junior Star program!
Martin Lang received the Czech National Foundation’s Junior Star grant with his project titled Computing Religious Devotion: How Reinforcing Supernatural Beliefs Affects Normative Models in the Mind.
Religions permeate the lives of billions of people and are thought to play a vital role in normative behavior. However, we do not know how religious piety penetrates cognitive processes during decision making. The CREDO project therefore proposes to create a computational model of religious decision making. The model works with the assumption that religious faith, formed through religious practice, creates a strong foundation in the mind. When the mind simulates possible actions during decision making, religious actions are easily accessible and selected due to their high value. The CREDO project will develop this computational model which will then be empirically tested with laboratory and field studies to show how religious belief influences the strength of religious priors during normative decision making. In addition, a large-scale cross-cultural study will establish how the beliefs and practices of different religious traditions influence cognitive computations during normative decision making.
