William Sims Bainbridge

Bainbridge began his academic career at the Choate Rosemary Hall preparatory school in his birthstate of Connecticut. He went on to matriculate at Yale University and at Oberlin College, and finally settled on Boston University. He studied music and became a skilled piano-tuner. In his free time, he constructed harpsichords and clavichords with the "Bainbridge" name, which still exist in a few households.

Bainbridge received his Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University and went on to study the sociology of religious cults. In 1976 he published his first book, The Spaceflight Revolution, which examined the push for space exploration in the 1960s. In 1978, he published his second and most popular book, entitled Satan's Power, which described several years in which Bainbridge infiltrated and observed the Process Church, a religious cult whose founders had been members of Scientology.[2] The study was one of the last of this type of academic studies done before new rules were introduced restricting unregulated participatory observation and study.

During the late 1970s and 1980s Bainbridge worked with Rodney Stark on the Stark-Bainbridge theory of religion,[3] and co-wrote the books The Future of Religion (1985) and A Theory of Religion (1987) with Stark. As of 2013 their theory, which aims to explain religious involvement in terms of rewards and compensators, is seen as a precursor of more explicitly recourse to economic principles in the study of religion, as later developed by Laurence Iannaccone and others.[4][5]

From this period until the 2000s Bainbridge published more books dealing with space, religion, and psychology. These included a text entitled Experiments in Psychology (1986) which included psychology experimentation software coded by Bainbridge.[1] He also studied the religious cult The Children of God, also known as the Family International, in his 2002 book The Endtime Family: Children of God.

Books authored by Bainbridge include:

• Star Worlds: Freedom Versus Control in Online Gameworlds (2016),
• The Meaning and Value of Spaceflight (2015),
• An Information Technology Surrogate for Religion (2014),
• Personality Capture and Emulation (2014),
• eGods: Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming (2013),
• The Virtual Future (2011),
• Online Multiplayer Games (2010),
• The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World (2010),
• Nanoconvergence (2007),
• The Secular Abyss (2007),
• God from the Machine: Artificial Intelligence Models of Religious Cognition (2006),
• The Endtime Family: Children of God (2002),
• Sociology (1997),
• The Sociology of Religious Movements (1997),
• Religion, Deviance and Social Control (with Rodney Stark) (1996),
• Social Research Methods and Statistics (1992),
• Goals in Space: American Values and the Future of Technology (1991),
• Survey Research: A Computer-Assisted Introduction (1989),
• Sociology Laboratory (1987)
• A Theory of Religion (with Rodney Stark) (1987) (Reprinted in 1996 and translated into Polish as Teoria Religi in 2000)
• Dimensions of Science Fiction (1986).
• Experiments in Psychology (1986)
• The Future of Religion (with Rodney Stark) (1985)
• Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult (1978).
• The Spaceflight Revolution (1976).

In addition, The Future of Religion was reprinted in Chinese in 2006 and Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult was translated into Italian in 1994.

Bainbridge's edited and co-edited books include:[6]

• Leadership in Science and Technology (2012)
• Progress in Convergence: Technologies for Human Wellbeing (with Mihail C. Roco) (2006)
• Nanotechnology: Societal Implications—Maximizing Benefit for Humanity (with Mihail C. Roco) (2006)
• Nanotechnology: Societal Implications—Individual Perspectives (with Mihail C. Roco) (2006)
• Managing Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Innovations: Converging Technologies in Society (with Mihail C. Roco) (2006)
• Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction (2004)
• Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance (with Mihail C. Roco) (2003)
• Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (with Mihail C. Roco) (2001).

In addition to his books, Bainbridge has published over 200 articles and essays in various journals and encyclopedias. From 2013, when he published eGods, his work has shifted towards the study of the sociology of video gaming, beginning with the publication of a new article (co-authored with his daughter Wilma Alice Bainbridge) on the potentially interesting aspects of glitches in video games. He has also studied "personality capture" in software, the process by which one may save one's personality in a computer through the answering of vast personality surveys.[1]

The Future of Religion won the "Outstanding Book of the Year" award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 1986 and A Theory of Religion won the "Outstanding Scholarship" from the Pacific Sociological Association in 1993.[6]

Bainbridge is a founding member of the Order of Cosmic Engineers[7] and is distantly related to Commodore William Bainbridge.

• Rodney Stark

3. Bainbridge, William S. Curriculum Vitae. Retrieved October 12, 2006.

• Uploading Life: Send Your Personality to Space (Includes Bainbridge's work on spaceflight)
• The Shape of Science Fiction as Perceived by the Fans (Study done in 1978 by William Bainbridge and Murray Dalziel)
• Religion for a Galactic Civilization 2.0