Assistant Director, Institute of Cognition and Culture

DPhil, MSc (Oxford), MA (Missouri), BA (Southeast Missouri State)

Professor Lanman joined the School in 2012, after working as a Departmental Lecturer (2009-2011) and Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2011-2012) in Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology at The University of British Columbia.

Professor Lanman's research addresses two main areas in the scientific study of religion.  Across both areas, he aims to integrate theories and methodologies from the social, cognitive, and evolutionary sciences with ethnographic and historical research.  While his geographic area of interest is international, his work has focused on the North Atlantic world and, more recently, Japan.

1) Atheism & Secularization

His work on atheism and secularization aims to provide an account of why some individuals become theists and others become non-theists, why some nations have much higher proportions of non-theists than others, and why some non-theists engage in anti-religious social action.  This research engages literature on cognitive biases, existential security, hypocrisy, threat detection, coalitionary psychology, and moral psychology and focuses on the United States, United Kingdom, China, and Japan.

In collaboration with Lois Lee (UCL), Stephen Bullivant (St. Mary's), and Miguel Farias (Coventry), he served as a PI on a John Templeton Funded grant entitled "Understanding Unbelief" (£2.3m, 2017-2020),  a large, international, and interdisciplinary programme of research on unbelief around the world. understanding-unbelief.net

He is currently Programme Lead on the follow up programme Explaining Atheism, which aims to put to the test dozens of popular and academic theories about why some individuals are atheists and why some countries have higher percentages of atheists than others.  https://www.explainingatheism.org/

2) Religious Identity, Ritual, and Self-Sacrifice

Professor Lanman's  collaborative work on religious identity, ritual, and self-sacrifice aims to provide an account of the nature and catalysts of religious cohesion and the relative contributions of belief, ritual, values, and identity in explaining individual willingness to die for a religious group.  This research engages literature on belief, ritual, memory, identity fusion, psychological kinship, sacred values, and martyrdom and is international with a focus on the United States and Europe. 

In collaboration with Harvey Whitehouse (Oxford), William Swann (Texas), Michael Buhrmester (Oxford/Texas), and others, he has contributed to this research  as part of a £3.2m project funded by the ESRC entitled Ritual, Community, and Conflict (2011-2017). 

 For further detail of Professor Lanman's research, see his interview in the New Science of Religion series.  

https://youtu.be/4XnCnK7kdf8

Websites

https://qub.academia.edu/JonathanLanman

https://www.explainingatheism.org/

https://research.kent.ac.uk/understandingunbelief/

Other Online Media

• Non-religion and Secularity Research Network (NSRN) blog post.  "A Cognitive Perspective Helps Make the Scientific Study of Atheism Possible."  

• British Humanist Association & Centre for Inquiry:  "Atheism: The View from Cognitive Science." Lecture given at Conway Hall in 2014. https://youtu.be/YSZCnNjqkEY

• The Religious Studies Project: 'Practice What You Preach: CREDs & CRUDs'    http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/practice-what-you-preach-creds-and-cruds/

• The Religious Studies Project: ‘Atheism Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Atheistic Thought." http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/lanman/