Rate My Professor Jesse Bering

Professor Jesse Bering is a research psychologist and Head of the Department of Science Communication at the Centre for Science Communication, University of Otago. His primary research area is the cognitive science of religion, centered on the cognitive underpinnings of afterlife beliefs. Bering examines how humans ascribe purpose to inherently meaningless life events as a byproduct of evolved social cognition. More recently, through controlled studies, he explores individuals' capacity to cognitively reconcile religious and scientific beliefs when confronted with challenging experiences or information. His broader research interests include human sexuality, suicidology, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, and science communication. He is a core member of the Centre for Research on Evolution, Belief and Behaviour (CREBB) at the University of Otago.

Bering is an accomplished essayist and popular science writer specializing in evolution and human behavior. His essays and opinion pieces have appeared in Scientific American, Slate, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Discover, Aeon, and other outlets. As a practicing science communicator, he has featured in numerous documentaries, TV shows, podcasts, and radio programs, including Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, The Story of God with Morgan Freeman, Conan, Chelsea Lately, Q&A (Australia), NPR's All Things Considered, and the BBC. His books include The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton, 2011), selected for the American Library Association's Top 25 Books of the Year and voted one of The Atlantic's 11 Best Psychology Books of 2011; Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux/Scientific American Press, 2012), a collection of Webby Award-nominated essays; Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux/Scientific American Press, 2013), named a New York Times Editor's Choice; Suicidal (University of Chicago Press, 2018; published in the UK as A Very Human Ending, Doubleday); and the forthcoming The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson (2025). Bering's books have been translated into many languages. Influential academic publications include The Folk Psychology of Souls (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2006) and The Natural Emergence of Reasoning about the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity (Developmental Psychology, 2004).