Hi.
I'm Azim Shariff, PhD student in Social Psychology at the University of
British Columbia.
NOTICE: I'm currently looking for research assistants for both summer and fall 2009. If you're interested in my research topics, want to be part of the discussion, and are looking for some research experience, email me at azim (at) psych.ubc.ca. Programming experience is a plus, but by no means necessary.
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Research
A copy of my
cv
for those who are interested, likewise, a copy of my
master's thesis, mightily titled, "the moral consequences of
religions."
My research interests fall
mainly into three broad categories:
1. Religion
and Belief - What are the evolutionary and
cultural origins a......................and
functions of religion in human societies? What social costs and b......................benefits
do religions provide today? What is the nature of religious b......................belief? And what are the
implications for atheists? And just who are a......................atheists
anyways?
2. Evolutionary Psychology of Emotion - How
are our emotions and emotion ..................... expressions driven
by evolutionary adaptive tendencies? What can t.....................evolutionary thinking
teach us about how and why we feel the way we do?
3. Consciousness and Free Will - How does the tension
between our i......................intutive
understanding of the mind and what science teaches us affect o.....................our
attitudes and behaviour? What are the social consequences of t......................thinking
about free will and determinism?
Publications (email me for a copy if pdf is not available)
.Refereed Journal Articles:
Shariff, A.F. and
Tracy, J.L.
(in press). Knowing Who's Boss: Implicit Perceptions of Status from the Nonverbal Expression of Pride. Emotion. [pdf]
Tracy, J.L., Shariff, A.F., and
Cheng, J.T.
(in press). A Naturalist's View of Pride. Emotion Review. [pdf]
Cohen, A.B., Shariff, A.F., and
Hill. P.C.
(2008). The accessibility of religious beliefs. Journal of Research
in Personality, 42(6), 1408-1417. [pdf]
Norenzayan, A., and Shariff, A.F. (2008) The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosciality. Science, 322 (5898), 58-62. [pdf]
Shariff, A.F.,
Cohen, A.B. and
Norenzayan, A. (2008). The Devil's Advocate: Secular arguments
diminish
both implicit and explicit religious belief. Journal of Culture and Cognition, 8, 417-423.
[pdf]
Shariff, A.F., and
Norenzayan, A. (2007).
God is watching you: Supernatural agent concepts increase
prosocial
behavior in an anonymous economic game. Psychological Science, 18,
803- 809. [pdf]
*Science Editors' Choice,
(2007), 317, p.1473 [pdf]
Invited Chapters:
Shariff, A.F., Norenzayan, A. and Henrich, J. (in press).The Birth of High Gods: How the cultural evolution of supernatual policing agents influenced the emergence of complex, cooperative human societies, paving the way for civilization. In (eds. M. Schaller, A. Norenzayan, S. Heine, T. Yamagishi, & T.Kameda) Evolution, culture and the human mind, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [doc]
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Shariff, A.F.
(2008). One Species under
God? Sorting through the pieces of religion and cooperation. In
(eds. C.Genet, R.Genet, J.Bulbulia, R. Sosis, E. Harris, and K. Wyman)
Proceedings of The Hawaii
Conference on the Evolution of Religion.
Collins Press. [pdf]
Cohen, A.B., Hill, P.C., Shariff, A.F.,
and Rozin, P. (2008). Furthering the Evolution of the Discussion on
Religion: Multi-method study, universality, and cultural variation. In
(eds. C.Genet, R.Genet, J.Bulbulia, R. Sosis, E. Harris, and K. Wyman)
Proceedings of The Hawaii Conference on the Evolution of Religion.
Collins Press. [pdf]
Shariff, A.F.,
Schooler, J.W. and Vohs,
K.D. (2008). The hazards of claiming to have solved
the hard problem of
free will. In J. Baer, J. Kaufman & R. Baumeister (eds.)
Psychology
and Free Will, Oxford University Press. [pdf]
Shariff, A.F. and
Peterson, J.B. (2005).
Anticipatory consciousness, Libet’s veto and a close enough
theory of free will. In R. Ellis and N. Newton (eds.) Consciousness and
Emotion: Agency,
conscious choice and selective perception.
Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing, pp. 197-215 [pdf]
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Read about the research:
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Contact me:
m: 2136 west mall. vancouver, bc. canada. vzt 1z4.
p: 604.779.2197
f: 604.822.6923
