Joseph A. Bulbulia is a Professor in the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Bulbulia is regarded as one of the founders of the contemporary evolutionary religious studies. He is a past President of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and is currently co-editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior. Bulbulia is one of four on the Senior Management Team of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a 20-year longitudinal study tracking over 15,000 New Zealanders each year. He is an associate investigator for Pulotu, a database of 116 Pacific cultures purpose-built to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of religion. In 2016 Bulbulia won a Research Excellence Award at Victoria University.
Bulbulia’s early work explained how features of religious beliefs and emotions make people more predictably cooperative with members of their group, and uncooperative with people regarded to be social threats. Later work quantified the effects of religion on social responses to test functional theories of religion.
Bulbulia was born in Buffalo, New York in 1968. He attended Canisius High School and received an AB in Philosophy from Holy Cross in 1990. He received a Master of Theological Studies degree from the Harvard University Divinity School in 1993, an M.A. from Princeton University in 1997, and a PhD from Princeton University in 2001. Bulbulia has taught at Victoria University and lived in New Zealand since 2000.
Awards and achievements
2016 Victoria University Research Excellence Award
2015 Co-editor, Religion Brain & Behavior
2014 President: International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion
2013 Editorial Advisory Board: Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science
2011 Editorial Advisory Board: Journal of the Cognitive Science of Religion
2010-2012 Secretary General: International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion
2010-2014 Editorial Advisory Board: Religion, Brain & Behavior
2010-2012 Advisor: The Adaptive Logic of Religious Belief and Behaviour Group
2006 Distinguished Fellow: Religion Cognition and Culture Group, Aarhus University
2006-2010 Executive Committee: International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion
2006 Gæsteprofessor: Religion, Cognition, Culture Group: Aarhus University
2000 Faculty Fellowship, Stevenson Hall: Princeton University
1996-1999 Assistant Master, Stevenson Hall: Princeton University
1996 Melon Fellowship: Princeton University
1996 Bowen Merit Award: Princeton University
Shaver, J. H.; Troughton, G.; Sibley, C. G.; Bulbulia, J. A. (2016). "Religion and the unmaking of prejudice toward Muslims: evidence from a large national sample". PLOS ONE. 11 (3): e0150209. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0150209.
Watts, J.; Bulbulia, J.; Gray, R. D.; Atkinson, Q. D. (2016). "Clarity and causality needed in claims about Big Gods". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 39: e27. doi:10.1017/s0140525x15000576.
Watts, J.; Sheehan, O.; Atkinson, Q. D.; Bulbulia, J.; Gray, R. D. (2016). "Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies". Nature. 532 (7598): 228–231. doi:10.1038/nature17159.
Watts, J.; Greenhill, S. J.; Atkinson, Q. D.; Currie, T. E.; Bulbulia, J.; Gray, R. D. (2015). "Broad supernatural punishment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B". Biological Sciences. 282: 20142556. doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.2556. PMC 4375858. PMID 25740888.
Botero, C. A.; Gardner, B.; Kirby, K. R.; Bulbulia, J.; Gavin, M. C.; Gray, R. D. (2014). "The ecology of religious beliefs". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111 (47): 16784–16789. doi:10.1073/pnas.1408701111.
Sibley, C. G.; Bulbulia, J. (2015). "Charity explains differences in life satis-faction between religious and secular New Zealanders". Religion, Brain & Be-havior. 5 (2): 91–100. doi:10.1080/2153599x.2014.899509.
Bulbulia, J. A., Shaver, J., Greaves, L., Sosis, R., and Sibley, C. G. (2015). Religion and parental cooperation: an empirical test of Slone’s sexual signaling model. In Slone, D. and Van Slyke, J., editors, The Attraction of Religion: A Sexual Se-lectionist Account, chapter 2, pages 29–62. Bloomsbury Press. article doi:10.5040/9781472594617.ch-002
Greaves, L.; Milojev, P.; Huang, Y.; Stronge, S.; Osborne, D.; Bulbulia, J.; Grim-shaw, M.; Sibley, C. (2015). "Regional differences in the psychological re-covery of Christchurch residents following the 2010/2011 earthquakes: A longi-tudinal study". PLoS ONE. 10 (5): e0124278. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0124278.
Hoverd, W. J.; Bulbulia, J.; Partow, N.; Sibley, C. G. (2015). "Forecasting religious change: a Bayesian model predicting proportional Christian change in New Zealand". Religion, Brain & Behavior. 5 (1): 15–23. doi:10.1080/2153599x.2013.824497.
Satherley, N.; Milojev, P.; Greaves, L. M.; Huang, Y.; Osborne, D.; Bulbulia, J.; Sibley, C. G. (2015). "Demographic and psychological predictors of panel at-trition: Evidence from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study". PLoS ONE. 10 (3): e0121950. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0121950.
