Books
Bering, J. (2010) The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life. London: Nicholas Brealey.
(to be published in the USA in February 2011 as "The Belief Instinct", by W.W. Norton)
Journal Articles
Piazza, J. R. & Bering, J. M. (in press). The coevolution of secrecy and stigmatization. Human Nature.
Bering, J. (in press). Atheism is only skin deep: Geertz and Markússon rely mistakenly on sociodemographic data as meaningful indicators of underlying cognition. Religion.
Bering, J. (2010). The nonexistent purpose of people: Have our minds evolved to see human beings as types of artifacts? The Psychologist, 23, 290-293.
Ingram, G. P. D., & Bering, J. M. (2010). Children’s tattling: Early communicative biases in the reporting of other children’s behavior. Child Development, 81, 945-957.
Bering, J. (2009). Invited commentary on C. Popp Weingarten and J. S. Chisholm, Attachment and cooperation in religious groups. Current Anthropology, 50 , 772.
Piazza, J. & Bering, J. M. (2008) Concerns about reputation via gossip promote generous allocations in an economic game. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29, 172-178.
Bering, J. M. (2008). Why hell is other people: Distinctively human psychological suffering. Review of General Psychology, 12, 1-8.
Bering, J. M. (2006). The folk psychology of souls. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 29, 453-498.
Bering, J. M. & Parker, B. D. (2006). Children’s attributions of intentions to an invisible agent. Developmental Psychology, 42, 253-262.
Bering, J. M., McLeod, K. A., & Shackelford, T. K. (2005). Reasoning about dead agents reveals possible adaptive trends. Human Nature, 16, 360-381.
Bering, J. M., Hernández-Blasi, C., Bjorklund, D. F. (2005). The development of ‘afterlife’ beliefs in secularly and religiously schooled children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23, 587-607.
Bering, J. M. & Johnson, D. D. P. (2005) 'Oh Lord, you hear my thoughts from afar': Recursiveness in the cognitive evolution of supernatural agency. Journal of Cognition and Culture 5, 118-142.
Bering, J. M., & Shackelford, T. K. (2004). The causal role of consciousness: A conceptual addendum to human evolutionary psychology. Review of General Psychology, 8, 227-248.
Bering, J. M., & Bjorklund, D.F. (2004). The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity. Developmental Psychology, 40, 217-233.
Bering, J. M. (2003). Towards a cognitive theory of existential meaning. New Ideas in Psychology, 21, 101-120.
Bering, J. M. (2002). Intuitive conceptions of dead agents’ minds: The natural foundations of afterlife beliefs as phenomenological boundary. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2, 263-308.
Bering, J. M. (2002). The existential theory of mind. Review of General Psychology, 6, 3-24.
Bering, J. M. (2001). Theistic percepts in other species: Can chimpanzees represent the minds of non-natural agents? Journal of Cognition and Culture, 1, 107-137.
Book chapters
Bering, J. (in press). God need not actually exist to have evolved. In J. Brockman (Ed.), What will change everything? (pp. 295-297). New York: Harper Collins.
Holbrook-Hahn, J., Holbrook, C., & Bering, J. M. (2010). Snakes, Spiders, Strangers: How the Evolved Fear of Strangers May Misdirect Efforts to Protect Children from Harm. In J. Lampinen and K. Sexton-Radek (Eds.), Protecting children from violence: Evidence based interventions. (pp. 263-289). New York: Psychology Press.
Ingram, G. P. D., Piazza, J., & Bering, J. M. (2009). The adaptive problem of absent third-party punishment. In H. Høgh-Olesen, L. Hansen and P. Bertelsen (Eds.), Human characteristics: Evolutionary perspectives on human mind and kind (pp. 205-229). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Johnson, D. D. P., & Bering, J. M. (2009). Hand of God, mind of man: Punishment and cognition in the evolution of cooperation. In J. Schloss and A. Platinga (Eds.), The nature of belief: Scientific and philosophical perspectives on the evolution of religion (pp. 26-43). New York: Oxford University Press.
Bering, J. M. (2008). How Sartre inadvertently presaged a proper evolutionary science of religion. In J. Bulbulia, R. Sosis, C. Genet, R. Genet, E. Harris, & K. Wyman (Eds.), The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, and Critiques. Santa Margarita, CA: The Collins Foundations Press.
Bering, J. M. (2007). Science will never silence God. In J. Brockman (ed.), What is Your Dangerous Idea? Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable (pp. 169-179). New York: Harper Collins.
Bering, J.M. (2006). Untitled. In J. Brockman (ed.), What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty (pp. 32-35). New York: Harper Collins.
Bering, J. M. (2005). The evolutionary history of an illusion: Religious causal beliefs in children and adults. In B. Ellis & D. Bjorklund (Eds.), Origins of the Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and Child Development (pp. 411-437). New York: Guilford Press.
Commentaries
Bering, J. M., & Shackelford, T. K. (2004). Supernatural agents may have provided adaptive social information: Comment on Atran and Norenzayan. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 732-733.
Bering, J. M. (2003). Religious concepts are probably epiphenomena: A reply to Pyysiäinen, Boyer, and Barrett. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 3, 244-254.
Bering, J. M. (2001). God is not in the mirror: A reply to Gallup and Maser. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 1, 207-211.