 33. Personality and Religion  713
Neurotheology.  Neurotheology  primar -
ily concerns identifying which components 
and dynamics of the brain underlie religious 
experiences and subsequent religious behav -
ior. It emphasizes mystical experience of 
the sort William James (1902) regarded as 
central to religion. The aim of this area is 
to identify religious phenomena as the (per -
haps accidental) output of evolved neural 
circuitry. Evolved brains have components 
that have arisen because of their usefulness 
to survival that happen to interact in such 
a way as to generate religious experiences. 
These experiences are shared and codified 
into common religious beliefs.
A recognized role for brain imaging in the 
study of human religious and spiritual phe -
nomena has emerged. Studies using positron 
emission tomography (PET) or functional 
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) suggest 
that spiritual practices such as meditation 
and prayer involve increased activity in fron -
tal brain structures, as well as those other 
brain areas that form a system to regulate 
and focus attention (McNamara & Butler, 
2013). Specifically, meditation is associated 
with decreased activity in the superior pa -
rietal lobe, which is correlated with spatial 
and temporal orientation, thus contributing 
the sense of “oneness” or felt unity common 
in spiritual experiences. Perhaps unsurpris -
ingly, there is also evidence that prayer in -
volves increased activity in brain regions 
known to be involved in the production of 
language.
The Group Selection Hypothesis . Accord -
ing to the group selection hypothesis, reli -
gious systems encourage prosocial behavior, 
and groups that exhibit prosocial behavior 
(cooperation, lack of cheating and stealing, 
etc.) tend to outsurvive and outreproduce 
groups that do not exhibit these traits (Wil -
son, 2002). As religious communities have 
stronger prosocial tendencies, they cooperate 
better. As they cooperate better, they survive 
and thrive better than competing communi -
ties. Hence, religious communities—  and 
whatever genetic information accounts for 
their religiosity and prosociality—  tend to 
survive and expand at a greater rate than 
nonreligious communities. Over time, then, 
people with the biological disposition to be religious increasingly outnumber nonreli -
gious people. This selection process thereby 
accounts for the widespread existence of re -
ligious people. Group selection theory seeks 
to reconcile evolutionary biology with the 
frequently made paradoxical observation 
that many religious systems codify rules 
that appear to diminish reproductive fitness. 
Wilson’s solution is to view natural selection 
as a multilevel process, such that group se -
lection plays an important explanatory role.
Evolutionarily minded social scientists 
have proposed that religious behaviors con -
stitute costly signals that contribute to so -
cial cohesion. These behaviors publicize that 
one shares the same values as the group, and 
their costliness (in terms of time, effort, ma -
terial resources, and sometimes pain) makes 
them hard to fake.
Research has verified that religious people 
across faith traditions are inspired by these 
prosocial ideals, at least in the way they per -
ceive themselves and desire to be. Individual 
differences in Big Five agreeableness and 
conscientiousness based on religiousness 
translate into higher self-  reported prosocial 
behaviors, emotions, and virtues. Religious -
ness and spirituality are correlated with 
both self- and sometimes other-  reports of 
virtues such as honesty (Saroglou, Pichon, 
Trompette, Verschueren, & Dernelle, 2005), 
forgiveness (McCullough & Worthington, 
1999), and generativity (Dillon, Wink, & 
Fay, 2003). Although religiousness is mod -
erately related to social desirability (Se -
dikides & Gebauer, 2010), the link between 
religiousness and prosocial qualities is not 
completely explained by socially desirable 
responding (Saroglou, 2010). Informant re -
porters also tend to view religious targets as 
higher in prosocial and virtuous qualities, 
which may reflect an actual association be -
tween these variables and/or stereotypes of 
religious and atheistic people (Galen, 2012).
Even if future studies fully establish a ro -
bust association between religiousness and 
prosociality, the causal direction of effects 
is unclear. Does religiousness increase pro -
sociality, do prosocial people adopt religion, 
or does some third variable (e.g., empathy 
or guilt) increase both? A recent longitudi -
nal study of Israeli adolescents across three 
time points revealed that participants clas -