Evolution of religious and secular medical treatments

Sacred cures and scientific cures: Science and religion in the evolution of folk medicine

Across cultures, people address health problems with a range of religious and naturalistic ways. Our project will explore the role of these sacred and secular cures in helping people endure illnesses. We aim to understand if treatments for severe and unpredictable diseases draw more upon religious treatments that more benign and predictable ailments.

This question will be addressed in three different ways.

First, using a corpus of >2,000 Irish folk cures from the early 20th century, we will explore how treatments vary with disease severity.
Second, we will conduct fieldwork in Mauritius where people commonly on religious and secular treatments.
Finally, we will conduct a range of experiments to explore how these patterns manifest in contemporary UK populations.

The findings will help us understand how psychological processes shape the evolution of cultural phenomena like medical treatments.

Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Dr Mícheál de Barra - My research is concerned with health and behaviour, and it often takes an evolutionary approach. I have examined how infectious disease shaped cognitive evolution, how behaviour alters infection risk, and how maladaptive ideas about health and healing spread and persist. I have a particular interest in the social and cognitive processes that drive overtreatment (the use of ineffective medical therapies). My office hours are Tuesday's at 11am-12pm in office 129, Quad north, or Friday's 9.30 - 10.30am on teams.

Dr Aiyana Willard - Dr Aiyana Willard is a Reader in the Centre for Culture and Evolution and the Department Psychology. Her research focuses on the evolutionary origins of religion and supernatural beliefs, examining how cognitive and cultural mechanisms shape belief systems from localized supernatural and spiritual practices to complex institutional religions. Dr Willard has made significant contributions to understanding how supernatural beliefs function within societies, particularly their role in enforcing cooperative norms. Her work spans topics including pagan spirituality, witchcraft beliefs, karma, religious prosociality, and the psychology of atheism. Dr Willard has been involved in several large international collaborative project during her career, including the Evolution of Religion and Morality project, and Explaining Atheism. Dr Willard is currently working on the cultural evolution of contemoporary spiritual beliefs in the west, the the formation of new belief systems more generally. She is the REF 2029 lead for Psychology. Academic career: Reader in Psychology, Brunel University of London, 2024-present Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Brunel University London, 2021-2024 Lecturer in Psychology, Brunel University London, 2018-2021 Postdoctoral researcher, Oxford, 2017-2018 Postdoctoral researcher, University of Texas at Austin, 2015-2017 PhD in Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2015

Related Research Group(s)

Culture and Evolution - Evolution and culture are the two most fundamental and powerful influences on human behaviour, and their effects are what we study at the Centre for Culture and Evolution.

Partnering with confidence

Organisations interested in our research can partner with us with confidence backed by an external and independent benchmark: The Knowledge Exchange Framework. Read more.

Project last modified 21/11/2023