Scott Atran
is Adjunct Research Scientist, Research Center for Group Dynamics; Adjunct Professor, Psychology Department; Visiting Professor, Ford School of Public Policy; Presidential Scholar, John Jay College of Criminal Justice Senior; Research Fellow, Harris Manchester College, Oxford University; Directeur de Recherche, Anthropologie, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Scott Atran is an anthropologist and psychologist who studies how cognitive and biological dispositions, and cultural preferences and values, shape social structures and political systems and drive group conflict. He is co-founder of Artis International and the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at the University of Oxford; Research Professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald Ford School of Public Policy; Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Centre; Emeritus Director of Research at France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; and advisor to the UN Security Council on counterterrorism and issues of Youth, Peace, and Security. His work and life have been spotlighted on television, radio, internet blogs and podcasts, and in the popular and scientific press, including feature and cover stories of the New York Times Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature and Science. He is the author of Talking to the Enemy Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (2010) published by HarperCollins.
Authored by
Scott Atran
October 28, 2021
Will to Fight for the Future Can’t Be Bought
Only by understanding the psychology of sacred values can we predict the willingness to sacrifice for those values.
June 13, 2013
Here He Goes Again: Sam Harris’s Falsehoods
An intellectual debate about the nature of religious belief and violence. Anthropologist Scott Atran responds to New Atheist Sam Harris.Harris’s views on religion ignore the considerable progress in cognitive studies on the subject over the last two decades, which show that core religious beliefs do not have fixed propositional content .
