Adults commonly conceptualize intentional harms as worse than accidental harms. We probed the developmental trajectory of this pattern and asked whether U.S. children (4 - to 7-year-olds) and adults expected other agents -- including another person and God -- to share their views. In contrast with some prior work, even the youngest children in the…

Rituals pose a cognitive paradox: although widely used to treat problems, rituals are causally opaque (i.e., they lack a causal explanation for their effects). How is the efficacy of ritual action evaluated in the absence of causal information? To examine this question using ecologically valid content, three studies (N=162) were conducted in…

More than 300,000 Chinese students attend U.S. universities annually (USDHS, 2017), many of whom reportedly "Leave China, Study in America, Find Jesus" (H. Zhang, 2016). However, research on this phenomenon of worldview change is thin, especially experiences of atheist or nonreligious Chinese graduate students attending Christian…

Several prominent scientists, philosophers, and scientific institutions have argued that science cannot test supernatural worldviews on the grounds that (1) science presupposes a naturalistic worldview (Naturalism) or that (2) claims involving supernatural phenomena are inherently beyond the scope of scientific investigation. The present paper…

The controversial concept of evolution makes up only a small part of the science curriculum stated in Arkansas. During the past few years, the curriculum topic of "Intelligent Design" has caught the attention of many science teachers in the public schools. The Intelligent Design Movement has been successful in attracting the attention of…

This teacher training monograph deals with value orientations of cultures in general and with specific reference to United States Culture. The first two sections discuss the conceptual issues of value orientation and give axiological definitions of the six clusters used to describe cultural orientation: self, the family, society, human nature,…