Jesse Bering earned his Ph.D. from Florida Atlantic University and is Reader in the School of History and Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture. His work is focused on psychological foundations of supernatural belief, and his experimental research program looks at the first evidence for the ‘naturalness’ of belief in the afterlife. Some of his other research concentrates on people’s attributions of symbolic meaning to the occurrence of natural events (signs, omens), the psychological mechanisms by which strategic social information is adaptively managed with human groups (confessions, gossip), and extent to which human social evolution was influence by adaptive problems that were fundamentally unique to our species (natural language, theory of mind).