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Record W4293282471 · doi:10.1177/17456916221100485

Is Religion Special?

2022· article· en· W4293282471 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenuePerspectives on Psychological Science · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicReligion, Spirituality, and Psychology
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
FundersArmy Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social SciencesNational Institute on Drug Abuse
KeywordsDeath anxietyPsychologyMeaning (existential)EpistemologyLiteral (mathematical logic)MoralitySocial psychologyBelief systemCognitive psychologyAnxietyPsychotherapistPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Religion makes unique claims (e.g., the existence of supernatural agents) not found in other belief systems, but is religion itself psychologically special? Furthermore, religion is related to many domains of psychological interest, such as morality, health and well-being, self-control, meaning, and death anxiety. Does religion act on these domains via special mechanisms that are unlike secular mechanisms? These could include mechanisms such as beliefs in supernatural agents, providing ultimate meaning, and providing literal immortality. We apply a critical eye to these questions of specialness and conclude that although it is clear that religion is psychologically important, there is not yet strong evidence that it is psychologically special, with the possible exception of its effects on health. We highlight what would be required of future research aimed at convincingly demonstrating that religion is indeed psychologically special, including careful definitions of religion and careful attention to experimental design and causal inference.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.606
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0040.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.064
GPT teacher head0.430
Teacher spread0.367 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it