Scott Atran: Director of Research, ARTIS; Presidential Scholar and Research Associate, Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Visiting Professor of Psychology and Public Policy, Institute for Social Research and Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan; Directeur de Recherche, Anthropologie, Institut Jean Nicod, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique & Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France; Member, Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism, World Federation of Scientists;
Selected Publications (Books) – The Native Mind: Cognition and Culture Management of Nature (co-authored); In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, Oxford University Press, 2002; Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science, Cambridge University Press, 1993;
Selected Articles – Sacred bounds on the rational resolution of violent political conflict (co-authored), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 104:7357-7360, 2007; A failure of imagination: Intelligence, WMDs, and “Virtual Jihad,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29:285-300, 2006; The cultural mind: Environmental decision making and cultural modeling within and across populations (co-authored), Psychological Review 112:744-776, 2005; Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion (co-authored), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27:713-770, 2004; Genesis of suicide terrorism, Science 299:1534-1539, 2003
Education – Ph.D., Columbia University; M.A., Johns Hopkins University; B.A., Columbia College.
Recent Articles:
How Words Could End a War, NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 25, 2009
Who Becomes A Terrorist Today?, PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM, January 2009
Reframing Sacred Values, NEGOTIATION JOURNAL, July 2008
Published Books
Click on the links below to purchase.
In Gods We Trust – Scott Atran
This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.
“Atran’s work is a brilliant exposition of the evolutionary by-product interpretation [of religion] as well as a mine of references for empirical research into the psychology of religion.”–Pascal Boyer, Current Anthropology
The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature – Scott Atran and Douglas Medin
“The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature beautifully illustrates Atran and Medin’s findings in the realm of folkbiology. They present a series of brilliantly conceived and executed studies whose importance goes far beyond being invaluable science to having real implications for social policy, especially in areas concerned with the environmental issues. This book is essential reading for psychologists, who all too often look at problems from the lens of just one culture, for anthropologists, who all too often neglect evolved universals of thought, and for anyone else interested in the relations among culture, thought, and human values.”
–Frank Keil, Department of Psychology, Yale University