Radim Chvaja
BA (Masaryk) MA PhD (Masaryk)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Religion Programme
Email: radim.chvaja@otago.ac.nz
Radim Chvaja is postdoctoral researcher working with John Shaver on the project “The Evolutionary Dynamics of Religion, Family Size, and Child Success,” where his role is to examine the relationships between religiosity, fertility, and mothers’ cooperative networks with a focus on alloparenting. Radim has a Ph.D. in the scientific study of religion from LEVYNA (Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion) at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. In his dissertation, Radim studied contemporary pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, but his broad scientific interest is the evolution of religious behavior in relation to morality, cooperation, and anxiety management. Specifically, Radim studies how religious rituals promote cooperation among participants and help individuals cope with various hardships and anxieties. In doing so, Radim utilizes various methods from analyzing secondary longitudinal data, field work and laboratory experiments.
Publications
Journal Articles
Chvaja, R. (2022). ‘Matt J. Rossano, Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources’ [commentary]. Religio, 30(1), 83-85.
Lang, M., Chvaja, R., Purzycki, B. G., Václavík, D., & Staněk, R. (2022). Advertising cooperative phenotype through costly signals facilitates collective action. Royal Society Open Science, 9(202202), 1–19.
Lang, M., & Chvaja, R. (2022). Examining the adaptive value of ritualized behavior in anxiogenic contexts. In J. E. Lane and Y. Lior (Eds.), Handbook of evolutionary approaches to the study of religion. Routledge.
Chvaja, R., Horský, J., Lang, M., & Kundt, R. (2022). Positive association between ritual performance and perceived objectivity of moral norms. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion.
Chvaja, R., Kundt, R., & Lang, M. (2020). The effects of synchrony on group moral hypocrisy. Frontiers in Psychology , 11(544589).
Chvaja, R. (2020). Why did memetics fail? Comparative case study. Perspectives on Science, 28(4).