Ethnocentrism, religion, and austerity: a science poster for the humanities

Artem Kaznatcheev and I presented a poster on May 4th at the University of British Columbia to a highly interdisciplinary conference on religion. The conference acronym is CERC, which translates as Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium. Most of the 60-some attendees are religion scholars and social scientists from North American and European universities. Many are also participants in a large partnership grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), spearheaded by Ted Slingerland, an East Asian scholar at UBC. Some preliminary conversations with attendees indicated considerable apprehension about how researchers from the humanities and sciences would get on. Many of us are familiar with collaborative difficulties even in our own narrow domains. Skepticism was fairly common.

As far as I know, our poster was the only computer simulation presented at the meeting. We titled it Agent-based modeling of the evolution of “religion”, with scare quotes around religion because of the superficial and off-hand way we treated it. Because we know from experience that simulations can be a tough sell even at a scientific psychology conference, we were curious about whether and how this poster would fly in this broader meeting.