The Center for Mind and Culture promotes research, training, and outreach in six thematic emphases. These Focus Areas all fall into the mind-culture nexus, in that they involve both culture-level circumstances (politics, economics, ecology) and mind-level realities (emotions, worldviews, cognitive biases).
CMAC creates scholarly resources to help the researchers and educators in key academic fields to understand their own operative values and practices, and thereby to be more deliberate in setting policies and reforming academic practices.
Current projects
The Dimensions of Spirituality Inventory uses a new survey instrument to help researchers examine the wider landscape of spirituality and better understand the ways people find and construct meaning and spiritual outlooks on life.
Field Mapping uses advanced data analytics and social network approaches to reveal the underlying structure of research on religion that analyzes and investigates the variation in research trends across time and space, answering the questions about who, where, how, and why the scientific study of religion is being pursued across the globe.
The Hardy Religious and Spiritual Experience Project creates a sophisticated database on existing religious and spiritual experiences narratives compiled in the Alister Hardy Database and builds a friendly interface for collecting new stories and data through devices such as smartphones and tablets.
PhilosophyofReligion.org is a public forum for leading scholars to answer central, field-defining questions in a space outside the strictures of more formal publications and presentations, creating data that can be systemically analyzed to discover what underlying factors are driving broad disagreements within the field and offer guidance for the future of philosophy of religion in the academy.
Teaching Modeling and Simulation in the Humanities strives to make modeling and simulation more widely available to scholars in humanities disciplines by integrating computer simulations that express their theories.
CMAC runs projects devoted to understanding the healing process as well as projects devoted to envisioning solutions to pressing human health problems.
Current projects
Black Maternal Mortality aims to collect qualitative and quantitative data related to the public-health crisis reflected in Black maternal mortality rates in the U.S., and ultimately suggest practical ways to mitigate the problem through computational simulation and policy analysis.
Modeling Equity explores the effectiveness of policies aimed to address human factors such as Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy as well as a range of inequities, especially among populations comprising the bulk of essential workers. These complex systems come together a simulation designed to test strategies to accelerate equity based on race, sex, and gender.
Strategies Against Rural Suicide aims to build a computational model, incorporating psychological autopsy data along with the insights and expertise of local service providers and policy professionals to improve suicide prevention efforts, particularly in rural settings.
Tools Against Child Trafficking combines big data mining to measure, observe, and learn about trafficking in the real world, network analysis to identify intervention points, modeling and simulation to test the long-term consequences of different policies, and visualization of the child trafficking market system, which will help the public learn about this complex problem in an intuitive way.
Modeling Dreams harnesses the potential of computational models for sleep and dream/nightmare studies through several sub-projects. We are combining qualitative and quantitative survey methods with data science to further understand how dreams turn to nightmares (and how we can regain control if they do) and the role dreaming could play in the formation of religious and supernatural beliefs.
In this Focus Area, CMAC implements projects dedicated to understanding historic moments of dynamic transformation.
Current projects
The Cognitive Styles and Religious Attitudes Project gathers research data through online surveys at ExploringMyReligion.org that include different cognitive tests for analytical and holistic reasoning, demographic information and religious affiliation, and questions about different layers of religious ideology and orthodoxy.
Modeling Religious Change engages demographic analysis and forecasting, along with complex artificial societies for a detailed understanding of religious and nonreligious identity and change that takes into account behaviors such as religious switching, secularization, immigration, religious beliefs and practices.
Ritual for the Nonreligious builds new datasets of spiritual experiences and the value of ritual in nonreligious settings, based on surveys and interviews. We will analyze the themes, patterns, and meaning attributed to ritual in individuals who identify as spiritual but nonreligious.
CMAC supports policy analysts and policymakers with research focused on issues of widespread concern.
Current projects
Black Maternal Mortality aims to collect qualitative and quantitative data related to the public-health crisis reflected in Black maternal mortality rates in the U.S., and ultimately suggest practical ways to mitigate the problem through computational simulation and policy analysis.
Digital Ethics is a public education and communication project that fosters discussions on the ethics of computing and data-science technologies. We aim to bridge the gap between thought leaders and practitioners by surfacing and analyzing the positive and negative experiences of those involved in creating and using digital decision tools, systems, methods, and data.
Strategies Against Rural Suicide aims to build a computational model, incorporating psychological autopsy data along with the insights and expertise of local service providers and policy professionals to improve suicide prevention efforts, particularly in rural settings.
Tools Against Child Trafficking combines big data mining to measure, observe, and learn about trafficking in the real world, network analysis to identify intervention points, modeling and simulation to test the long-term consequences of different policies, and visualization of the child trafficking market system, which will help the public learn about this complex problem in an intuitive way.
CMAC personnel are currently engaged in numerous research projects related to the scientific study of religion, nonreligion, and spirituality. All projects on religion are conducted through the Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion (IBCSR), a pre-existing research organization that is now embedded in CMAC.
Current projects
The Cognitive Styles and Religious Attitudes Project gathers research data through online surveys at ExploringMyReligion.org that include different cognitive tests for analytical and holistic reasoning, demographic information and religious affiliation, and questions about different layers of religious ideology and orthodoxy.
The Dimensions of Spirituality Inventory uses a new survey instrument to help researchers examine the wider landscape of spirituality and better understand the ways people find and construct meaning and spiritual outlooks on life.
The Hardy Religious and Spiritual Experience Project creates a sophisticated database on existing religious and spiritual experiences narratives compiled in the Alister Hardy Database and builds a friendly interface for collecting new stories and data through devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Modeling Religious Change engages demographic analysis and forecasting, along with complex artificial societies for a detailed understanding of religious and nonreligious identity and change that takes into account behaviors such as religious switching, secularization, immigration, religious beliefs and practices.
PhilosophyofReligion.org is a public forum for leading scholars to answer central, field-defining questions in a space outside the strictures of more formal publications and presentations, creating data that can be systemically analyzed to discover what underlying factors are driving broad disagreements within the field and offer guidance for the future of philosophy of religion in the academy.
Ritual for the Nonreligious builds new datasets of spiritual experiences and the value of ritual in nonreligious settings, based on surveys and interviews. We will analyze the themes, patterns, and meaning attributed to ritual in individuals who identify as spiritual but nonreligious.
CMAC aims to improve our ability to achieve stable solutions on a scale from a personal sense of safety and security, to international security challenges.
Current projects
Digital Ethics is a public education and communication project that fosters discussions on the ethics of computing and data-science technologies. We aim to bridge the gap between thought leaders and practitioners by surfacing and analyzing the positive and negative experiences of those involved in creating and using digital decision tools, systems, methods, and data.
Modeling Equity explores the effectiveness of policies aimed to address human factors such as Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy as well as a range of inequities, especially among populations comprising the bulk of essential workers. These complex systems come together a simulation designed to test strategies to accelerate equity based on race, sex, and gender.