This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant.

Christians all rejoice and sing.

On a hot summer morning, worshipers gather at the First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.

They've come in their Sunday best, sharp suits and flowing skirts,

shine dress shoes, and spiky high heels.

They've come to be among friends and family,

to pray and sing and rejoice after a long and hectic week.

If you've taken part in a religious service at a church or another house of worship,

have you ever stopped to think about how it all came to be? How did

people become believers? Where did the rituals come from? And most of all, what purpose does

it all serve?

When we ask these questions, we most often look to history or theology for answers.

But some social scientists are asking if we can better understand religion through the lens of human behavior.

If people behave in particular ways when exposed to different religious cues,

can we use this information to work backwards and understand how those

religious practices came about in the first place? Can the rise and fall of different religions

tell us something about the needs of societies and how those needs change over time?

Today we're going to take an in-depth look at these provocative ideas through the work of

Azeem Sharif, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. He studies religion,

not from the point of view of faith or spirituality, but from a psychological perspective.

He argues that human societies changed in a fundamental way several thousand years ago,

and this required a new

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