Scott Atran

Across history and cultures, religion increases trust within groups but also may increase mistrust and conflict with other groups, according to studies by our research team and others analyzed in a special issue of Science magazine on human conflict.

Over the last few millennia, moralizing gods emerged, enabling...

Political effervescence and division within many nations is approaching levels not experienced around the globe since the 1920s. Structural failures in economic management bring on such crises when they fail to maintain expectations for improvement in the standard of living among the middle class, the mainstay of democracies and principal...

"Good guy" -- the description of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales by neighbors that is headlining in the American media -- is pretty much the way ordinary Germans saw other Germans who brutalized people in extermination camps in WW2 (See Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust). "Good guy"...

The drone killing of Yemeni-based US citizens Anwar al-Awlaki, one of radical Islam's premier internet preachers, and Samir Kahn, editor of Inspire magazine, the online English-language production of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has generated a cackle of opinion and analysis, often contradictory and misinformed.

Rep. Peter King...

The irrationality of Sacred Cows, for better or worse, changes history's direction and the configuration of human destiny.

The Tea Party believes religiously in one thing: American prosperity and power depends on fiscal (rather than social) health. In this worldview, going into default and being forced into austerity measures can...

"The art of war," Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, "is certainly the noblest of all arts." In every culture, war is considered society's most noble endeavor (recent threat of nuclear war and mass annihilation has made a slight dent in this universal passion), although what is considered...

The Muslim Brotherhood's presence really only became palpable on Wednesday when the violence began. The greater the violence, the more the Brotherhood's organizational tenacity in resisting comes to the fore (the other groups, about 95 percent of the ongoing revolt, have no such resistance history or organization). The Brotherhood was...

As Egyptians clash over the future of their government, Americans and Europeans have repeatedly expressed fears of the Muslim Brotherhood. "You don't just have a government and a movement for democracy," Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, said on Monday. "You also have others, notably the Muslim Brotherhood, who...

"The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced.

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." ~ Benjamin Franklin

In George W. Bush's just released memoirs, Decision Points, America's previous president tries to re-establish his battered reputation by defending his most controversial and consequential decisions. He...

The background to this argument, which is a modified and expanded version of a New York Times op-ed that appears on Wednesday, is detailed in a new book, Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (Ecco/HarperCollins).

On successive days last week the...

The following is an extended version of an op-ed that originally appeared in the June 30, 2010 edition of The New York Times.

Not all groups that the United States government has officially classified as terrorists are equally bad or dangerous. In fact, some have become our partners...

The great British biologist J.B.S Haldane counted monotheism's creation of fanaticism as one of the most important inventions of the last 5,000 years. Call it love of God or love of group, it matters little in the end. Modern civilizations spin the potter's wheel of monotheism to manufacture the greatest...

The following post is published in full at Edge.

When you look at young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in 2005, hoped to blast airliners out of the...

On Christmas Day 2009, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, an angel-faced British-educated engineering student and son of a prominent Nigerian banker, attempted to blow up Northwest flight 253 out of Amsterdam as it was about to land in Detroit. Although Umar's father had warned the American embassy in Nigeria that his...

In testimony last week before Congress, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, insisted that President Obama's revised war strategy will "build support for the Afghan government," while Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander there, vowed that it will "absolutely" succeed in disrupting and degrading the Taliban.

Confidence is...

In 1974, when I was a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, I wanted to organize a discussion of universals with people whose ideas I wished to know more about than I thought I could get from their writings. At the time, I was working for Margaret Mead as...

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama is a symbolic gesture to youth all over the developing world who have a new hero, our symbol.

Here is an example. In 2007, with support from the National Science Foundation and Department of Defense, I researched attitudes related...

Last week, leading reformists in Iran appeared in Tehran's Revolutionary Court sporting gray pyjamas and plastic slippers. They were unshaven, had clearly lost weight, and seemed dazed. According to Human Rights Watch, many if not all of the defendants were subject to harsh and violent interrogation techniques. Of course, the...