LEVYNA

13 Aug 2020

Why did memetics fail?

Radim Chvaja published an article in the Perspectives on Science, The MIT Press.

LEVYNA

29 Jun 2020

Does ritual behavior decrease anxiety?

A new publication by Martin Lang, Jan Krátký and Dimitris Xygalatas in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

CEDRR

3 Apr 2020

New paper about Ptolemaic political activities in PloS ONE

Congratulation for a new study in PLoS ONE  to Tomáš Glomb, Adam Mertel, Zdeněk Pospíšil and Aleš Chalupa.

Conference "Resistance to Order and Authority in Religion" in Budapest

UPDATED  5/20. On behalf of all organizers from Masaryk University (Department for the Study of Religions), Eötvös Loránd University (Centre for the Study of Religion) and Central European University (Center for Religious Studies) we are pleased to invite you to the forthcoming fourth annual international doctoral conference in Religious Studies, to be held 15 - 17 October 2020 in Budapest, Hungary.

LEVYNA

29 Jan 2020

Open post-doc position

We are looking for a new colleague to join our lab for two years as a post-doc researcher with a specialization in economic games and behavioral experiments.

LEVYNA

23 Jan 2020

A new research called “SACRIFICE” has been just launched

It will examine how participation in costly rituals affects the willingness to sacrifice one’s resources during inter-group conflict.

LEVYNA

23 Dec 2019

Our Ph.D. students received a grant from the Development Fund of Masaryk University

They will use the money to create a new and innovative course in which they will focus on the evolution of human cooperation and the role that religion played in this process.

30 Nov 2019

New book by D. Zbíral

David Zbíral has published a new book entitled Pokřtění ohněm: Katarské křesťanství ve světle pramenů (12.-14. století).

LEVYNA

2 Oct 2019

Jan Horský won the second place in the student poster competition

Jan was awarded at the conference PTNCE 2019 held in Prague with a large LEVYNA presence.

LEVYNA

10 Sep 2019

Martin Lang is this year’s recipient of the IAPR’s Early Career Award

Martin was awarded the prize at the bi-annual conference of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion (IAPR). On this occasion, he also delivered the invited lecture “Religions as complex adaptive systems: The evolutionary paths of religious beliefs and behaviors.”

LEVYNA

2 Sep 2019

Do extreme religious rituals positively affect the wellbeing of ritual practitioners?

An answer to this and related questions can be found in our new paper in Current Anthropology. In collaboration with our colleagues, we have investigated the Thaipusam Kavadi ritual in relation to its purported effect on psychophysiological wellbeing.

LEVYNA

13 Aug 2019

How to integrate the sciences and humanities in the study of religion?

Martin Lang and Radek Kundt provide their answer in a new piece published in the journal Method & Theory in the Study of Religion.

LEVYNA

5 Jun 2019

GAMU-E Grant goes to LEVYNA

Martin Lang and Jan Krátký succeeded in the call of the Grant Agency of Masaryk University with the project "The Entropy-Reduction Model of Ritualized Behavior".

22 May 2019

A prestigious award goes to Martin Lang

Martin Lang has been awarded the Rector's Award for Outstanding Research Results Achieved by Young Scientists under 35 in social sciences and humanities.

LEVYNA

13 May 2019

Radim Chvaja has been awarded the EHBEA’s Student Research Grant

Our Ph.D. student Radim Chvaja has been awarded student grant from European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA) that will enable him to study religious pilgrimage in Mauritius.

8 May 2019

A new theoretical article about the difference between the theory of costly signaling and CREDs with application on religious phenomena

A new article has just been published in Human Ethology, in which our PhD students explain the relation between two theories of religious displays – the costly signaling theory and the credibility enhancing displays theory (CREDs).

8 Mar 2019

New article testing the influence of moralizing gods on intragroup and intergroup cooperation

Our new paper in which we test on cross-cultural sample whether beliefs in omniscient and punitive moralizing gods contribute to the scaling up of cooperative societies and whether they apply also beyond co-religionist circles as far as to religious outgroups has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

16 Feb 2019

New Publication on Identity Fusion Theory

Our new paper in which dr. Ben Purzycki (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Lipsko) and Martin Lang are testing the identity fusion theory on a cross-cultural data set is out in Cognition.

16 Feb 2019

New Textbook of Cognitive Science of Religion

LEVYNA has a chapter in a new Bloomsbury Press textbook in which we explain in depth our experiment on ritualized behavior and anxiety.

4 Jan 2019

New edited volume in honor of Armin W. Geertz

LEVYNA has contributed two chapters to the new edited volume Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesispublished in honor of Armin W. Geertz.

19 Dec 2018

New publication on religious badges and interpersonal trust

There is a new article in Evolutionary Psychology about the effects of religious badges on interpesonal trust that LEVYNA has collaborated on.

18 Dec 2018

Chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual (OUP)

Eva Kundtová Klocová has a chapter "Ritual and Embodied Cognition" (in collaboration with A. W. Geertz) in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual (OUP)

19 Nov 2018

Eva Kundtová Klocová was awarded the Dean's Prize

Eva Kundtová Klocová was awarded the Dean's Prize

8 Oct 2018

Is atheism associated with a specific way of thinking?

Previous studies, primarily aimed at the university population in the US, suggested that atheism could be related to a so-called analytical cognitive style.

4 Oct 2018

Peter Maňo received John McGraw Award for Best Student Contribution at IACSR 2018

Peter Maňo received John McGraw Award for Best Student Contribution at IACSR 2018

27 Sep 2018

A Research expedition to the island of Mauritius

In July 2018 team LEVYNA set out for its regular research expedition to the island of Mauritius, our primary field side. Together with other collaborators, we were collecting data for six different projects focused mainly on religious beliefs and behaviors.

21 May 2018

Jakub Cigán received an internal grant from Masaryk University.

The grant will help Jakub with the preparation of a monograph reporting on his fieldwork among Czech Protestants where he combines classical ethnographic methods and signaling theories to understand the nature of religious conversion.