The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief and Experience

by Michael Argyle, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi

Because society is increasingly secular, it may seem irrelevant to consider the psychology of religion. But the diversity of our multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society in fact makes religion more important to the social sciences than it has ever been before. What are the social consequences of religion? Every day the news is full of events that can be blamed on religion perpetrated by a range of groups from whole societies to individuals.
Beit-Hallami and Argyle are renowned for their clear, analytical approach to topics and this new, state-of-the-art study of psychology and religion is no exception. It will be welcomed as an update to their previous work in the area by social psychologists, sociologists and theologians worldwide.

Genres: Religion, Psychology

332 pages, Paperback

First published September 18, 1997

About the author

Social psychologist. He is regarded as one of Britain's best known and most productive academic psychologist of the twentieth century. He first read Mathematics, but had to serve in WWII as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, he read Moral Science and Experimental Psychology at Cambridge. From 1950 to 1952 he worked at the Psychological Laboratory at Cambridge, and in 1952 he became lecturer in Social Psychology at Oxford University, where he spent the whole of his academic career, being promoted to Reader in 1969. He was also tutor in psychology at Balliol College and a Founding Fellow of Wolfson College. Throughout his career, he showed strong preferences for experimental methods in social psychology, having little time for alternative approaches such as discourse analysis. Sonia Argyle (1922-1999) was his first wife.