Quantifying Identities and Ideologies

We distill insights about the worldviews and individual behaviors that propel both the concords and conflicts within our communities. These projects collect data through surveys, literature reviews, and comprehensive analyses to quantify the values, perceptions and belief systems of the self and the community.

Active 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.

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.

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Wildman

CMAC’s approach is innovative, it’s risky and ultimately it might not work. But this approach does promise breakthrough change, allowing us to test before we invest in new interventions. We use these techniques routinely when we design cars, bridges and factories. And speaking for myself, a change skeptic, I finally feel I’m telling myself the truth about real-world change. I’ll keep up the rhythm of small-change activities. And I’ll make a very precise, limited and deliberate move on the big-change stage through CMAC.

Wesley Wildman
Executive Director

Teehan

After two (intense) days with the people at CMAC, going through the process of translating my hypothesis about religion and empathy into the language of computer modeling, it all began to make sense … Because of this method, we will actually be able to bring some data into a debate that would otherwise remain largely in speculation … It forced me to formulate my ideas in such precise and concrete terms (so they could be coded for) that I came away with a better understanding of my own theory.

John Teehan, Ph.D.
Hofstra University

Bacon

CMAC is a great environment when you are in a transitional stage of your early career and deciding what type of career path to pursue. There is such a wide variety of projects going on at one time, and even if you are assigned to primarily work on just one, there is frequently the opportunity to contribute to multiple projects. And in doing so, you get to use your skillset in areas outside your area of expertise, and also expand your skillset within your main area with an interdisciplinary team.

Rachel Bacon
Postdoctoral Fellow

Gore

Each member of the team was capable of synthesizing that multi-disciplinary knowledge into a single response to a complex problem statement. The realization was humbling and reshaped my view of what interdisciplinary work can be and how I pursue it.

Ross Gore, Ph.D.
Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center