Academic Profile

Nicholas Gibson

University Lecturer (Unestablished)

Research Interests

My research interests mainly focus on how religious believers and non-believers represent God in mind. I work broadly within an information-processing framework and draw on both the social cognition and cognition and emotion literatures. As such I am interested in how work on attribution, attachment, and indirect measures of belief and attitude can be applied within cognitive science of religion to broaden our understanding of how and when people use representations of God's supernatural powers and human-like characteristics. I am also interested in the development and application of new research methods within psychology of religion.

My current projects include the exploration of judgment speed and memory biases when thinking about God, an investigation of the processing of religious stimuli in a modified Stroop task, an investigation of internally discrepant representations of God, and the development of a new scale to measure dimensions of non-belief.

Ph.D. Students

If your research interests overlap with mine and you would like to explore coming to work with me for your Ph.D. then please contact me directly with a ~500 word research proposal and your C.V. My current students include Bonnie Zahl (A.B., Harvard), Omar Yousaf (B.Sc., Brunel), and Carissa Sharp (B.A., Oregon; M.T.S., Harvard).

More Information

For more information about my work, please see my page in the Psychology and Religion Research Group.

Publications

Gibson, N. J. S., & Watts, F. N. (in preparation). The God-reference effect: Memory and judgment speed biases in religious cognition.

Gibson, N. J. S., Watts, F. N., & Zahl, B. P. (in preparation). The religious Stroop effect: Searching for attentional biases in religious cognition

Hill, P. C., & Gibson, N. J. S. (2008). Whither the roots? Achieving conceptual depth in psychology of religion. Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 30, 19-35.

Gibson, N. J. S. (2008). Once more with feelings: The importance of emotion for cognitive science of religion. In J. Bulbulia, R. Sosis, E. Harris, R. Genet, C. Genet, & K. Wyman (Eds.), The evolution of religion: Studies, theories, and critiques (pp. 271-277). Santa Margarita, CA: Collins Foundation Press.

Gibson, N. J. S., & Barrett, J. L. (2008). On psychology and evolution of religion: Five types of contribution needed from psychologists. In J. Bulbulia, R. Sosis, E. Harris, R. Genet, C. Genet, & K. Wyman (Eds.), The evolution of religion: Studies, theories, and critiques (pp. 333-338). Santa Margarita, CA: Collins Foundation Press.

Gibson, N. J. S. (2007). Measurement issues in God image research and practice. In G. L. Moriarty & L. Hoffman (Eds.), God image handbook for spiritual counseling and psychotherapy: Research, theory, and practice (pp. 227-246). New York:Routledge.

Quick links

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