Working Beyond Boundaries
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These scholars propose that spirituality emerges in part from a feeling akin to social connectedness, this time to a higher existence or being.
Expanding Spiritual Knowledge Through Science
John Cacioppo
Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology
Humans are social beings, in both what and how we think. The mind does not operate as an isolated computer, as the predominant 20th century metaphor would have us believe. Scientists, drawing from the wisdom of their colleagues in such diverse fields as religion, history, and anthropology, are increasingly showing how major aspects of cognition and other physiological states are fundamentally intertwined with both social structures and cultures.
Examining how spirituality affects long term health, both mental and physical, constitutes one major topic of research for this community of scholars. They propose that spirituality emerges in part from a feeling akin to social connectedness, this time to a higher existence or being. Such a reconceptualization of spirituality will permit researchers to examine the prescriptions of sacred texts and the practices of world religions in the context of other psychological and social measures of connectedness, thereby drawing from a large range of interdisciplinary perspectives.
The "Expanding Spiritual Knowledge through Science" research network currently includes scholars in economics, theology, medicine, psychology, history, and anthropology. The network draws its members from The University of Chicago, Ohio State, Northwestern University, Stanford, and Free University in Amsterdam.
Building from a dataset collected by John Cacioppo for a longitudinal study of older adults in Chicago, these scholars have been able to pursue diverse research agendas, such as the impacts of persistent loneliness on systolic blood pressure, how physician's care varies according to their religious or spiritual beliefs, the relationship between psychiatric dissociative disorders and intense spiritual experiences, understanding the social and biological role of empathy, topics in neuroeconomics, and the ways in which oral repetition changes brain processing. John Cacioppo, Nick Epley, and Adam Waytz were recently awarded the Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology for their paper "A three-factor theory of anthropomorphism."
