The Institute of Cognition and Culture (ICC) is a cognitive-science-of-religion research center at 📝Queen's University Belfast. Founded in September 2004 within the School of History and Anthropology, it was one of the world's first centers dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of cognition and culture — explaining patterns of cultural stability and variation through the theories and methods of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. Its postgraduate program concentrates on social cognition and the cognitive science of religion. Research at the ICC spans religious beliefs and rituals, theory of mind, agency, moral psychology, social emotions, reputation management, and coalitional psychology. This is an 🏷️#institute.
The ICC helped define the cognitive science of religion as a field, training a generation of researchers who study belief, ritual, and social cognition with empirical and computational methods. Its Belfast labs supported human-subjects experimentation alongside the theoretical traditions of the discipline. It was within this orbit that I did my early empirical work, administering human-subjects research on motor behavior, contagion avoidance, agency, and moral reasoning from August 2010 to January 2012.
The ICC is where I learned to treat religion and culture as things you can measure, not just interpret. Running experiments on agency and moral reasoning there set the foundation for everything I'd later build at 📝CulturePulse — the conviction that human meaning systems are tractable to science.