Benjamin Grant Purzycki

Benjamin Grant Purzycki is Associate Professor at Aarhus University's Department of the Study of Religion. A cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist by training, he merges experimental and ethnographic methods together to make better sense of religious systems' utility for human adaptation. He has conducted fieldwork in the Tyva Republic (Russia) and managed large cross-cultural projects. He co-developed AnthroTools (with Alastair Jamieson-Lane), a software package for analyzing ethnographic...See more

Benjamin Grant Purzycki is Associate Professor at Aarhus University's Department of the Study of Religion. A cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist by training, he merges experimental and ethnographic methods together to make better sense of religious systems' utility for human adaptation. He has conducted fieldwork in the Tyva Republic (Russia) and managed large cross-cultural projects. He co-developed AnthroTools (with Alastair Jamieson-Lane), a software package for analyzing ethnographic data in R and has published in a wide range of journals including Current Anthropology, Cognition, Cognitive Science, Nature, Proceedings of the Royal Society B , and Psychological Methods. His books include Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics (with Richard Sosis, Equinox), The Minds of Gods: New Horizons in the Naturalistic Study of Religion (with Theiss Bendixen, Bloomsbury), the two-volume Evolution of Religion and Morality project (with Martin Lang, Joseph Henrich, and Ara Norenzayan, Routledge), and Morality and the Gods (Cambridge University Press). See less