Simulating the Emergence of New Religious Movements

Not unlike other social sciences, study of religion in general and study of new religious movements (NRMs) in particular, has suffered from a problem of having too many inter-related free variables and a few data points available to constrain their values. This paper suggests cognitively inspired computer modeling as a technique for exploring, refining and testing theories of religion. Although computer simulation has become a relatively accepted technique for studying social theories, it has rarely been used to study religion. To illustrate this point I describe in detail the Agent-based Information Entrepreneur Model (AIM), a computer model of the recently proposed cognitive theory of new religious movements.