ABSTRACT
In this chapter I present a resource model of religious cognition in which the complexity of agency and action representations in rituals is determined by situation-specic levels of motivation in the individual. e model represents an alternative to some of the central ideas in Lawson and McCauley’s Ritual Form Hypothesis (Lawson & McCauley 2002), and in Whitehouse’s Dual Modes Theory (Whitehouse 2002). Briey, I argue that the amount of social cognitive processing invested in representations of religious concepts depends on the individual’s level of motivation. In low-motivation rituals, people invest few cognitive resources in processing the beliefs and desires of superhuman agents. Only in situations where people feel that the beliefs and desires of such agents are strategically important, do they form complex theory of mind (ToM) representations. Social cognition comprises a range of activities from very minimal embodied and automatic processes, to more aective empathic processing, to elaborate meta-representations of other people’s beliefs and intentions. Whereas the simplest and least resourcedemanding processes are active in all social interactions, more elaborate social cognitive representations are only produced in interactions that require a high level of representational complexity.
