Acquisition of Religious Cognition and Behavior:
Boyer, P. (1994). The naturalness of religious ideas: A cognitive theory of religion. Berkeley, CA, US: University of California Press.
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Folk Theories.
Baillargeon, R. (2008). Innate ideas revisited: For a principle of persistence in infants’ physical reasoning. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(1), 2-13.
Gelman, S. A., & Legare, C. H. (2011). Concepts and folk theories. Annual Review of Anthropology, 1(40), 379-398.
Hirschfeld, L. A., Bartmess, E., White, S., & Frith, U. (2007). Can autistic children predict behavior by social stereotypes? Current Biology, 17(12), R451-R452.
Ojalehto, b. l., & Medin, D. L. (2014). Perspectives on culture and concepts. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 249-275.
Richert, R. A., & Lesage, K. A. (in press). The nature of humans. Invited chapter to appear in J. L. Barrett (ed.), Oxford University Press Handbook for the Cognitive Science of Religion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Richert, R. A., Saide, A. R., Lesage, K. A., & Shaman, N. J. (2017). The role of religious context in children’s differentiation between God’s mind and human minds. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 35(1), 37-59.
Richert, R. A., Shaman, N. J., Saide, A. R., & Lesage, K. A. (2016). Folding your hands helps God hear you: Prayer and anthropomorphism in parents and children. Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, 27, 140-157.
Ontological Boundaries.
Boyer, P. (1994). The naturalness of religious ideas: A cognitive theory of religion. Berkeley, CA, US: University of California Press.
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Corriveau, K. H., Pasquini, E. S., & Harris, P. L. (2005). “If it’s in your mind it’s in your knowledge”: Children’s developing anatomy of identity. Cognitive Development, 20(2005), 321-340.
Gelman, S. A. (2009). Learning from others: Children’s construction of concepts. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 115-140.
Gelman, S. A., & Kalish, C. W. (2006). Conceptual Development. In D. Kuhn, R. S. Siegler, W. Damon, & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Cognition, perception, and language (pp. 687-733). Hoboken, NJ, US: John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Gelman, S. A., & Diesendruck, G. (1999). What’s in a concept? Context, variability, and psychological essentialism. In I. E. Sigel (Ed.), Development of mental representation: Theories and applications (pp. 87-111). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gottfried, G. M., Gelman, S. A., & Schultz, J. (1999). Children’s understanding of the brain from early essentialism to biological theory. Cognitive Development, 14(1), 147–174.
Johnson, C. N. (1990). If you had my brain, where would I be? Children’s understanding of the brain and identity. Child Development, 61(4), 962-972.
Rhodes, M., Leslie, S-J., & Tworek, C. M. (2012). Cultural transmission of social essentialism. PNAS, 109(34), 13526-13531.
Richert, R. A., & Harris, P. L. (2006). The ghost in my body: Children’s developing concept of the soul. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 6, 409-427.
Causal Explanatory Reasoning.
Astuti, R., & Harris, P. L. (2008). Understanding mortality and the life of the ancestors in rural Madagascar. Cognitive Science, 32(2008), 713-740.
Busch, J. T. A., Watson-Jones, R.E., & Legare, C.H. (2016). The coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations within and across domains and development. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 35(1).
Evans, E. (2001). Cognitive and contextual factors in the emergence of diverse belief systems: Creation versus evolution. Cognitive Psychology, 42(3), 217-266.
Gauvain, M. (2001). The Social Context of Cognitive Development. Guilford Press.
Gutiérrez, I. T., Menendez, D., Jiang, M. J., Hernandez, I. G., Miller, P., & Rosengren, K. S. (2020). Embracing death: Mexican parent and child perspectives on death. Child Development, 91(2), e491-3511.
Harris, P. L., & Gimenez, M. (2005). Children’s acceptance of conflicting testimony: The case of death. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5, 143–164.
Legare, C. H., & Gelman, S. A. (2008). Bewitchment, biology, or both: The coexistence of natural and supernatural explanatory frameworks across development. Cognitive Science, 32, 607–642.
Legare, C.H., Evans, E.M., Rosengren, K.S., & Harris, P.L. (2012). The coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations across cultures and development. Child Development, 83(3), 779-793.
Shtulman, A. (2017). Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong. Basic Books.
​Woolley, J. D., Cornelius, C., & Lacy, W. (2011). Developmental changes in the use of supernatural explanations for unusual events. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 11, 311-337.
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Transmission of Religious Cognition and Behavior:
Learning via verbal information.
Canfield, C. & Ganea, P.A. (2014). “You could call it magic”: What parents and siblings tell preschoolers about unobservable entities. Journal of Cognition and Development, 15, 269-286.
Clegg, J., Cui, Y.K., Harris, P.L & Corriveau, K.H. (2019). God, germs and evolution: Belief in unobservable religious and scientific entities in the U.S. and China. Special issue on religion in Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 9, 831-848.
Corriveau, K.H., DiYanni, C., Clegg, J.M., Min, G., Chin, J., & Nasrini, J. (2017). Cultural differences in the learning and teaching of unexpected information. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 161, 1-18.
Corriveau, K.H. & Harris, P.L. (2010). Preschoolers (sometimes) defer to the majority when making simple perceptual judgments. Developmental Psychology, 26, 437-445.
Corriveau, K.H., Kim, E., Song, G. & Harris, P.L. (2013). Young children’s deference to a majority varies by culture. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 13, 367-381.
Cui, Y.K., Clegg, J.M, Fang, Y.E., Davoodi, T., Harris, P.L. & Corriveau, K.H. (under review). The power of religious testimony in a secular society: Belief in unobservable entities among Chinese parents and their children.
Davoodi, T., Sianaki, M.J., Abedi, F., Payir, A., Harris, P.L. & Corriveau, K.H. (2018). Beliefs about religious and scientific entities among parents and children in Iran. Social Psychological and Personality Science.
DiYanni, C., Corriveau, K.H., Kurkul, K., Nasrini, J. & Nini, N. (2015). The role of conformity and culture in the imitation of questionable actions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 137, 99-110.
Harris, P.L. (2012). Trusting What You’re Told. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harris, P.L. & Corriveau, K.H. (2011). Young children’s selective trust in informants. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366, 1179-1187.
Harris, P.L. & Corriveau, K.H. (in press). Some, but not all, children believe in miracles. Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion.
Harris, P.L., Koenig, M.A., Corriveau, K.H. & Jaswal, V.K. (2018). Cognitive foundations of learning from testimony. Annual Review of Psychology, 69, 251-273.
Legare, C.H., Sobel, D.M., & Callanan, M. (2017). Causal learning is collaborative: Examining explanation and exploration in social contexts. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(5), 1548-1554.
Luce, M.R., Callanan, M.A. & Smilovic, S. (2013). Links between parent’s epistemological stance and children’s evidence talk. Developmental Psychology, 49, 454-461.
Richert, R. A., Saide, A. R., Lesage, K. A., & Shaman, N. J. (2017). The role of religious context in children’s differentiation between God’s mind and human minds. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 35(1), 37-59.
Learning via written sources.
Corriveau, K. H., Chen, E. E. & Harris, P.L. (2015). Judgment about fact and fiction by children from religious and non-religious backgrounds. Cognitive Science.
Corriveau, K.H., Einav, S., Robinson, E. & Harris, P.L. (2014). To the letter: Early readers trust print-based over oral instructions to guide their actions. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 32, 345-358.
Einav, S., Robinson, E.J. & Fox, A. (2013). Take it as read: Origins of trust in knowledge gained from print. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114, 262-274.
Li, H., Boguszewski, K., & Lillard, A. S. (2015). Can that really happen? Children’s knowledge about the reality status of fantastical events in television. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 139, 99-114.
Robinson, E.J., Cinav, S. & Fox, A. (2013). Reading to learn: Pre-readers’ and early readers’ trust in text as a source of knowledge. Developmental Psychology, 49, 505-513.
Woolley, J. D., & Van Reet, J. (2006). Effects of context on judgments concerning the reality status of novel entities. Child Development, 77, 1778–1793.
Learning via nonverbal behavior.
Chudek, M., Heller, S., Birch, S. & Henrich, J. (2012). Prestige-biased cultural learning: bystander’s differential attention to potential models influences children’s learning. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33, 46-56.
Chudek, M. & Henrich, J. (2011). Culture-gene coevolution, nor-psychology and the emergence of human prosociality. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15, 218-226.
Claidière, N. & Whiten, A. (2012). Integrating the study of conformity and culture in humans and nonhuman animals. Psychological Bulletin, 138, 126-145.
Clegg, J.M., & Legare, C.H. (2016). A cross-cultural comparison of children’s imitative flexibility. Developmental Psychology, 52(9), 1435-1444.
Clegg, J.M., & Legare, C.H. (2016). Instrumental and conventional interpretations of behavior are associated with distinct outcomes in early childhood. Child Development, 87(2), 527-542.
Corriveau, K.H., Fusaro, M. & Harris, P.L. (2009). Going with the flow: Preschoolers prefer non-dissenters as informants. Psychological Science, 20, 372-377.
Corriveau, K.H. & Harris, P.L. (2010). Preschoolers (sometimes) defer to the majority in making simple perceptual judgments. Developmental Psychology, 46, 437-445.
Haun, D.B.M. & Tomasello, M. (2011). Conformity to peer pressure in preschool children. Child Development, 82, 1759-1767.
Herrmann, P.A., Legare, C.H., Harris, P.L., & Whitehouse, H. (2013). Stick to the script: The effect of witnessing multiple actors on children’s imitation. Cognition, 129, 536-543.
Kenward, B., Karlsson, M. & Persson, J. (2011). Over-imitation is better explained by norm learning than by distorted causal learning. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 278, 1239-1246.
Keupp, S., Behne, T. & Rakoczy, H. (2013). Why do children overimitate? Normativity is crucial. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 116, 392-406.
Lakin, J.L., Chartrand, T.L. & Arkin, R.M. (2008). I am too just like you: Nonconscious mimicry as an automatic behavioral response to social exclusion. Psychological Science, 19, 816-822.
Legare, C.H. (2017). Cumulative cultural learning: Diversity and development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),114(30), 7877-7883.
Legare, C.H., & Nielsen, M. (2015). Imitation and innovation: The dual engines of cultural learning. Feature article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (TICS), 19, 688-699.
Legare, C.H., Wen, N.J., Herrmann, P.A., & Whitehouse, H. (2015). Imitative flexibility and the development of cultural learning. Cognition, 142, 351-361.
Over, H. & Carpenter, M. (2009). Priming third-party ostracism increases affiliative imitation in children. Developmental Science, 12, F1-F8.
Over, H. & Carpenter, M. (2012). Putting the social into social learning: Explaining both selectivity and fidelity in children’s copying behavior. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 126, 182-192.
Pasquini, E., Corriveau, K.H., Koenig, M. & Harris, P.L. (2007). Preschoolers monitor the relative accuracy of informants. Developmental Psychology, 43, 1216-1226.
Schmidt, M.F.H., Rakoczy, H., Tomasello, M. (2012). Young children enforce social norms selectively depending on the violator’s group affiliation. Cognition, 124, 325-333.
Watson-Jones, R.E., & Legare, C.H. (2016). The social functions of group rituals. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25, 42-46.
Watson-Jones, R.E., Legare, C.H., Whitehouse, H., & Clegg, J.M. (2014). Task specific effects of ostracism on imitative fidelity in early childhood. Evolution and Human Behavior, 35, 204-210.
Watson-Jones, R.E., Whitehouse, H., & Legare, C.H. (2016). In-group ostracism increases high-fidelity imitation in early childhood. Psychological Science, 27(1), 34-42.
Wen, N.J., Herrmann, P.A., & Legare, C.H. (2016). Ritual increases children’s affiliation with in-group members. Evolution and Human Behavior, 37, 54–60.