This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

If you've taken part in religious services,

have you ever stopped to think about how people become believers?

Where do 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 religions tell us something about the needs of societies

and how those needs change over time?

Today, we bring you a favourite episode from 2018.

God, religion and the human mind, this week on Hidden Brain.

Today, we're going to take an in-depth look at religion

through the work of a Zim 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,

...