Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Semantic network mapping of religious material: testing multi-agent computer models of social theories against real-world data

  • Research Report
  • Published:
Cognitive Processing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Agent-based modeling allows researchers to investigate theories of complex social phenomena and subsequently use the model to generate new hypotheses that can then be compared to real-world data. However, computer modeling has been underutilized in regard to the understanding of religious systems, which often require very complex theories with multiple interacting variables (Braxton et al. in Method Theory Study Relig 24(3):267–290, 2012. doi:10.1163/157006812X635709; Lane in J Cogn Sci Relig 1(2):161–180, 2013). This paper presents an example of how computer modeling can be used to explore, test, and further understand religious systems, specifically looking at one prominent theory of religious ritual. The process is continuous: theory building, hypothesis generation, testing against real-world data, and improving the model. In this example, the output of an agent-based model of religious behavior is compared against real-world religious sermons and texts using semantic network analysis. It finds that most religious materials exhibit unique scale-free small-world properties and that a concept’s centrality in a religious schema best predicts its frequency of presentation. These results reveal that there adjustments need to be made to existing models of religious ritual systems and provide parameters for future models. The paper ends with a discussion of implications for a new multi-agent model of doctrinal ritual behaviors as well as propositions for further interdisciplinary research concerning the multi-agent modeling of religious ritual behaviors.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Notes

  1. Although there are many differing definitions of what quantitatively qualifies as a SFSW or small-world network (for examples, see Amaral et al. 2000; Humphries and Gurney 2008; Kleinberg 2002) for the purposes of this research, we will be looking for a generally large clustering coefficients with small path lengths (Watts and Strogatz 1998) to define conventional scale-free topologies and the (Humphries and Gurney 2008) method of defining a SFSW network, denoted as S Δ.

References

  • Amaral LA, Scala A, Barthelemy M, Stanley HE (2000) Classes of small-world networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 97(21):11149–11152. doi:10.1073/pnas.200327197

    Article  PubMed Central  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Atkinson QD, Whitehouse H (2011) The cultural morphospace of ritual form. Evolut Hum Behav 32(1):50–62. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.09.002

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barrett JL (2005) In the empirical mode: evidence needed for the modes of religiosity theory. In: Whitehouse H, McCauley RN (eds) Mind and religion: psychological and cognitive foundations of religiosity. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, pp 109–126

    Google Scholar 

  • Bloom P (2005) Descartes’ baby: how the science of child development explains what makes us human. Basic Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Boyer P (2001) Religion explained: the evolutionary origins of religious thought. Basic Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Boyer P, Liénard P (2006) Why ritualized behavior? Precaution systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals. Behav Brain Sci 29(6):595–613 (discussion 613–650). Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17918647

  • Boyer P, Ramble C (2001) Cognitive templates for religious concepts: cross-cultural evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations. Cogn Sci 25:535–564

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Braxton DM, Upal A, Nielbo KL (2012) Computing religion: a new tool in the multilevel analysis of religion. Method Theory Study Relig 24(3):267–290. doi:10.1163/157006812X635709

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Callan MJ, Ellard JH, Nicol JE (2006) The belief in a just world and immanent justice reasoning in adults. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 32(12):1646–1658. doi:10.1177/0146167206292236

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Carley KM (1993) Coding choices for textual analysis: a comparison of content analysis and map analysis. Sociol Methodol 23:75–126

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carley KM (1994) Extracting culture through textual analysis. Poetics 22:291–312

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carley KM, Kaufer DS (1993) Semantic connectivity : an approach for analyzing symbols in semantic networks. Commun Theory 3(3):183–213

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Claidière N, Scott-phillips TC, Sperber D (2014) How Darwinian is cultural evolution? How Darwinian is cultural evolution? Philos Trans R Soc Lond Ser B Biol Sci 369:20130368. doi:10.1098/rstb.2013.0368

  • Cohen E (2007) The mind possessed: the cognition of spirit posession in an afro-brazilian religious tradition. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p 256

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Collins AM, Quillian MR (1969) Retrieval time from semantic memory. J Verbal 8:240–247

    Google Scholar 

  • Ehrman BD (2008) The new testament: a historical introduction to the early Christian writings. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Epstein JM (ed) (2006) Generative social science: studies in agent-based computational modeling (Princeton Studies in Complexity). Princeton University Press, Princeton, p 384

    Google Scholar 

  • Epstein JM, Axtell R (1996) growing artificial societies: social science from the bottom up. Brookings Institution Press, Washington

    Google Scholar 

  • Goertzel B, Iklé M, Heljakka A (2008) Probabilistic logic networks: a comprehensive framework for uncertain inference, 1st edn. Springer, Berlin, p 336

    Google Scholar 

  • Goff P, Farnsley AE, Thuesen PJ (2014) The Bible in American life (p 44). Indianapolis, Indiana. Retrieved from http://www.raac.iupui.edu/files/2713/9413/8354/Bible_in_American_Life_Report_March_6_2014.pdf

  • Hill V, Carley KM (1999) An approach to identifying consensus in a subfield: the case of organizational culture. Poetics 27(1):1–30

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Humphries MD, Gurney K (2008) Network “small-world-ness”: a quantitative method for determining canonical network equivalence. PLoS One 3(4):10. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002051

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kahn K (2013) Behaviour composer: modelling4all project. University of Oxford, Oxford. Retrieved from http://m.modelling4all.org/

  • Kelemen D, Diyanni C (2005) Intuitions about origins: purpose and intelligent design in children’s reasoning about nature. J Cogn Dev 6(1):3–31. Retrieved from http://www.bu.edu/cdl/files/2013/08/2005_KelemenDiYanni.pdf

  • Kelley DM (1986) Why conservative churches are growing (ROSE Edition). Mercer University Press, Macon

    Google Scholar 

  • Kleinberg J (2002) Small-world phenomena and the dynamics of information. In: Dietterich TG, Becker S, Ghahramani Z (eds) Advances in neural information processing systems 14: Proceedings of the 2001 Conference, vol 1. MIT Press, pp 1–14

  • Lane JE (2013) Method, theory, and multi-agent artificial intelligence: creating computer models of complex social interaction. J Cogn Sci Relig 1(2):161–180

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Layton D (1999) Seductive poison: a jonestown survivor’s story of life and death in the people’s temple. Anchor Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Malley B (2004a) How the Bible works: an anthropological study of evangelical biblicism. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek

    Google Scholar 

  • Malley B (2004b) The doctrinal mode and evangelical christianity in the United States. In: Whitehouse H, Laidlaw J (eds) Ritual and memory: toward a comparative anthropology of religion. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, pp 79–87

    Google Scholar 

  • McCauley RN, Lawson ET (2002) Bringing ritual to mind: psychological foundations of cultural forms. Cambridge University Press, New York

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • McCorkle WW, Lane J (2012) Ancestors in the simulation machine: measuring the transmission and oscillation of religiosity in computer modeling. Religion Brain Behav. doi:10.1080/2153599X.2012.703454

    Google Scholar 

  • McCulloh I, Ring B, Frantz TL, Carley KM (2008) Unobtrusive social network data from email. In: Proceedings of the 26th Army Science Conference. Orlando, FL. Retrieved from http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/publications/papers/Mcculloh-email.pdf

  • Meyer DE (1970) On the representation of stored semantic retrieval information’ each natural language provides a collection of categories for the classification of objects, actions, and states of being. These categories, whose names appear as nouns in a dictionary o. Cogn Psychol 1:242–300

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Meyer DE, Schvaneveldt RW (1971) Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. J Exp Psychol 90(2):227–234

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Mullins DA, Whitehouse H, Atkinson QD (2013) The role of writing and recordkeeping in the cultural evolution of human cooperation. J Econ Behav Organ 90:S141–S151. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.017

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reiterman T (1982) Raven: The untold story of the Rev. Jim Jones and his people. Dutton, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Steyvers M, Tenenbaum JB (2005) The large-scale structure of semantic networks: statistical analyses and a model of semantic growth. Cogn Sci 29(1):41–78. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog2901_3

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Sun R (2006) Prolegomena to integrating cognitive modelling and social simulation. In: Sun R (ed) Cognition and multi agent interaction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Sun R (2007) Cognitive social simulation incorporating cognitive architectures. IEEE Intell Syst 22(5):33–39. doi:10.1109/MIS.2007.4338492

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sun R, Hélie S (2013) Psychologically realistic cognitive agents: taking human cognition seriously. J Exp Theor Artif Intell 25(1):65–92. doi:10.1080/0952813X.2012.661236

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Swann WB, Jetten J, Gómez A, Whitehouse H, Bastian B (2012) When group membership gets personal: a theory of identity fusion. Psychol Rev 119(3):441–456. doi:10.1037/a0028589

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Tambayong L, Carley KM (2012) Network text analysis in computer-intensive rapid ethnography retrieval: an example from political networks of Sudan. J Soc Struct 13. Retrieved from http://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume13/TambayongCarley.pdf

  • Upal MA (2011) From individual to social counterintuitiveness: how layers of innovation weave together to form multilayered tapestries of human cultures. Mind Soc 10(1):79–96. doi:10.1007/s11299-011-0083-8

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Watts DJ, Strogatz SH (1998) Collective dynamics of “small-world” networks. Nature 393(6684):440–442. doi:10.1038/30918

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Whitehouse H (1995) Inside the cult: religious innovation and transmission in Papua New Guinea. Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, Oxford

  • Whitehouse H (2000) Arguments and icons: divergent modes of religiosity. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Whitehouse H (2004) Modes of religiosity: a cognitive theory of religious transmission. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek

    Google Scholar 

  • Whitehouse H, Lanman JA (2014) The ties that bind US: riual, fusion, and identification. Curr Anthropol 55(6):674–695

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Whitehouse H, Martin LH (eds) (2004) Theorizing religions past: archaeology, history, and cognition. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek

    Google Scholar 

  • Whitehouse H, McCauley RN (eds) (2005) Mind and religion. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek

    Google Scholar 

  • Whitehouse H, Kahn K, Hochberg ME, Bryson JJ (2012) The role for simulations in theory construction for the social sciences: case studies concerning divergent modes of religiosity. Religion Brain Behav 2(3):182–201. doi:10.1080/2153599X.2012.691033

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilensky U (1999) Netlogo. Evanston, IL: Center for connected learning and computer-based modeling. Retrieved from http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

  • Wolfram S (2010) A new kind of science. Wolfram Media, Champaign

    Google Scholar 

  • Xygalatas D (2007) Firewalking in northern Greece: A cognitive approach to high-arousal rituals. Queen’s University, Belfast

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This analysis was completed with the use of the Advance Resource Computing center at the University of Oxford. Research funding was provided to the author by the grant “Ritual-Social and Semantic” by the John Templeton Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Justin E. Lane

Authors
  1. Justin E. Lane
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Justin E. Lane.

Additional information

This article is part of the Special Issue on “Complexity in brain and cognition” and has been edited by Cees van Leeuwen.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lane, J.E. Semantic network mapping of religious material: testing multi-agent computer models of social theories against real-world data. Cogn Process 16, 333–341 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0649-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0649-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation