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- May 10, 2010
- 04:49 PM
- 7,156 views
Who's to blame for the financial crisis
Astute observers will have noticed that there's been something of a crisis in the financial world over the past couple of years. The EU's just coughed up €500 billion in the latest an effort to stem the panic... or, alternatively, to fend off the predators.
And that gets to the heart of the matter. Is the crisis just one of those things - part of a natural economic cycle that is beyond anyone's ability to predict or control? Or is it a result of moral or intellectual failures among those who are are in charge of all the money.? Everyone has their own opinion, but what do most people think?
David Leiser and Rinat Benita, of Ben Gurion University, with Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde of the Institut Jean-Nicod, put this question via internet questionnaires to 1,707 people in France, the US, Russia, Germany, Israel, and sub-Saharan Africa.
[A note on how the study was done: The questionnaire was quite complex, but they used factor analysis to boil it down to two groups of questions that seemed to sort out two different groups of people - those who thought the crisis is a "systemic, global, unintended phenomenon" and those who thought it was a "local, individually and intentionally motivated one"]
On average, people were more inclined to go for the 'individual failure' explanation, rather than the 'unintended consequence' explanation:
... most people appear to construe an intentional, especially moral, reading of the crisis rather than conceive of it in terms of independent causal mechanisms. Purposiveness, be it under the guise of an intelligent design in nature or that of the secret interests of a vaguely identified group of businessmen, is the default explanation which seems to satisfy a primitive need for closurePeople who are wealthier, or who are trained in in economics, were less likely to believe in the 'human failure' theory. People who had been personally affected were more likely to.
But what about religious people? If, like me, you assumed that religious people would be more likely to put moral failings at the root of the crisis, you are in for a surprise.
Because it turns out that although the religious are more likely to blame moral failures, they are also more likely to subscribe to the 'economic storm' theory. As it happens, they actually were more likely than the non-religious to agree that "The current crisis comes as a punishment to all those who misbehaved in the past few years", but even here the difference was not huge
In other words, what marks out the more religious is not that they have different views on the crisis, but that they hold them with more conviction!
It isn't clear what should drive such an association. Conceivably, it reflects a preference for clarity over ambiguity that is often seen in people attracted to the more fundamentalist religions. Perhaps the religious are simply less comfortable with admitting "I don't know".
Leiser, D., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., & Benita, R. (2010). Human foibles or systemic failure—Lay perceptions of the 2008–2009 financial crisis Journal of Socio-Economics, 39 (2), 132-141 DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2010.02.013
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
... Read more »
Leiser, D., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., & Benita, R. (2010) Human foibles or systemic failure—Lay perceptions of the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Journal of Socio-Economics, 39(2), 132-141. DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2010.02.013
- June 3, 2010
- 05:05 PM
- 1,662 views
Children can tell the difference between science and religion
Paul Harris, a psychologist at Harvard University, is interested in how children learn to differentiate between different kinds of knowledge. In his latest study, he's teamed up with two Spanish psychologists to unpick the beliefs of young, Catholic children.
These 10-12 year olds have a pretty firm conviction in both God and the soul. They also believe (slightly more strongly, in fact) in invisible scientific entities, like oxygen and germs. What the team wanted to know was whether they believed in these things for the same reasons.
So they asked them how they know these entities exist. The replies were revealing.
The reasons the children gave were broken down into 4 categories:
They had encountered the entity
There was a written source or other authority that asserted the entity existed
There was some feature of the entity that explained its existence in generalized terms (e.g. "Souls exist because everyone has their own way of being", or "Germs are on the dirty things")
The existence of the entity is required because it fulfils some need or purpose (e.g. "God exists because he tells us the way).
The figure shows how often children gave each of these kinds of answers to justify the existence of religious and scientific entities.
Several different reasons were given for their belief in religious entities. For scientific entities, however, their reasoning was almost entirely based on the generalized properties or nature of the entity.
In fact, it's even more interesting than that. Because the researchers also broke these 'properties' arguments down further, into whether or not they were causal explanations - "germs cause disease", or "God has created all of us".
For religious entities, only 17% of the already relatively few explanations under this category were causal. For scientific entities, it was very nearly 100%.
In other words, these young Spanish kids almost exclusively rationalise their belief in scientific entities in causal terms. There religious beliefs, on the other hand, were justified in a variety of ways that were almost never causal.
Guerrero, S., Enesco, I., & Harris, P. (2010). Oxygen and the Soul: Children's Conception of Invisible Entities Journal of Cognition and Culture, 10 (1), 123-151 DOI: 10.1163/156853710X497202
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
... Read more »
Guerrero, S., Enesco, I., & Harris, P. (2010) Oxygen and the Soul: Children's Conception of Invisible Entities. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 10(1), 123-151. DOI: 10.1163/156853710X497202
- December 7, 2008
- 03:31 PM
- 1,533 views
The happiness bug
Robert Ingersoll, the seminal 19th century American humanist, famously said that "The way to be happy is to make others so." What he meant was that one of the most important sources of our own happiness is being surrounded by happy people.Now some remarkable new evidence has demonstrated just how the happiness-inducing effect of happiness ripples through society. It turns out that not only does having happy friends makes you happy, but your happiness is bumped up further if your friends' friends are happy. In fact, there's a measurable effect all the way out to friends of friends of friends - three degrees of separation, in other words.What the study did is use the famous Framingham Heart Study, which was set up sixty years ago in Massachusetts, USA, to track the factors that lead to heart disease. They enrolled 5,000 people in the original group, and have continued to monitor not only them, but their children and also added in extra people to keep the numbers up as members of the original group die.The new study takes advantage of the fact that among the huge range of data recorded, the participants were also asked about their close friends. This enabled the researcher to use network-analysis tools to work out who was connected to whom as they followed them over the decades. Because all the participants at least started off in the same town (Framingham), many of them were friends, or friends of friends, of each other. They also rated each participant as happy or unhappy, based on their responses to several items on a questionnaire.What they found was that having a happy friend increases the odds that you'll be happy by 16%. But if your friend's friend is happy, even if your friend is not, that still increases the odds that you'll be happy by 10%. And out at the third degree of separation it still bumps up your happiness chances by about 5%.The study also revealed some fascinating info on who makes us happy. It turns out that nearby friends and next-door neighbours have the biggest effect. Living with a spouse, or having brothers or sisters nearby, also has an effect, although somewhat smaller. People who live further away don't increase your happiness, no matter how emotionally close they are to you. For happiness to be passed on, frequent contact is required!As the researchers point out, these results have social policy implications. For example, a government action that makes one person happy (or unhappy) will also make those near to him or her happier. So the benefit is greater than you might at first think. As the researchers say:Our findings have relevance for public health. To the extent that clinical or policy manoeuvres increase the happiness of one person, they might have cascade effects on others, thereby enhancing the efficacy and cost effectiveness of the intervention. For example, illness is a potential source of unhappiness for patients and also for those individuals surrounding the patient. Providing better care for those who are sick might not only improve their happiness but also the happiness of numerous others, thereby further vindicating the benefits of medical care or health promotion.There are important implications for all this. Clearly, making individuals happy brings wider benefits for society. It's yet another example of not only the reality of society, but how interlocked we all are. We're all in this together.J. H Fowler, N. A Christakis (2008). Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study BMJ, 337 (dec04 2) DOI: 10.1136/bmj.a2338... Read more »
J. H Fowler, & N. A Christakis. (2008) Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study. BMJ, 337(dec04 2). DOI: 10.1136/bmj.a2338
- January 12, 2009
- 04:40 PM
- 1,510 views
Religion and spiritual beliefs do not make happy children: friends and values do
Here's a study that's been reported badly in the press (e.g. Washington Times), because what psychologists mean by the term spirituality is not the same as what ordinary people mean by it. It doesn't mean quite what most people think it does.So when a study reports that children's happiness is linked to their spirituality, it only begs the question 'what do they mean?' And here's where it gets interesting.In the study in question, by Mark Holder and colleagues at the University of British Columbia, they used a standard questionnaire-based measure of spirituality, the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire (SWBQ). This has four components:Personal (meaning and value in one’s own life)Communal (quality and depth of inter-personal relationships)Environmental (sense of awe for nature)Transcendental (faith in and relationship with someone or something beyond the human level)You can see that only the last one, Transcendental, means anything like the conventional meaning of the term 'spiritual'.They gave this questionnaire to 320 children aged 8-12 from a mix of state and faith schools. They also gave them a questionnaire on their religiousness (which measured their beliefs and practices) and a battery of three questionnaires on their happiness.What they found was that there was no correlation between happiness and religiousness, and that the correlation with transcendental spirituality was weak and inconsistent. Environmental spirituality was stronger, but the strongest correlation was with personal and communal spirituality.But there is a problem. Happiness was also linked to personality. If personality and spirituality are connected, then that would skew the results (if, for example, shy children are more spiritual). So they did a hierarchical regression, which corrected for personality and also for sex and type of school.The results for one of the happiness measures are shown in the figure. The others are pretty much the same - but this is the only one in which transcendental spirituality reached statistical significance.You can see that personal and communal 'spirituality' is really important. They each account for about 5% and 2% of the variation in happiness - which may not sound much but is actually quite a lot by the standards of these kinds of studies. Religion also has a positive effect, but it is small (... Read more »
Mark D. Holder, Ben Coleman, & Judi M. Wallace. (2008) Spirituality, Religiousness, and Happiness in Children Aged 8–12 Years. Journal of Happiness Studies. DOI: 10.1007/s10902-008-9126-1
- December 5, 2007
- 12:00 PM
- 1,502 views
Marmosets are altruistic too!
A study out today has shown that marmosets, like humans, can and do act truly altruistically (see refs). Altruism is a hot topic in evolution. True altruism would, on the face of it, reduce an individual's reproductive fitness, and so you might expect that natural selection would weed out any altruists.
As the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy puts it:
... by behaving altruistically an animal reduces its own fitness, so should be at a selective disadvantage vis-à-vis one which behaves selfishly.... Read more »
Burkart, J., Fehr, E., Efferson, C., & van Schaik, C. (2007) From the Cover: Other-regarding preferences in a non-human primate: Common marmosets provision food altruistically. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(50), 19762-19766. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0710310104
- January 14, 2009
- 05:30 PM
- 1,458 views
Revenge is not so sweet
What to to do if someone you know behaves badly? Turn the other cheek, or take your revenge? According to Martin Nowak's latest game-theory based analysis, turning the cheek is the strategy that's most likely to reward you in the long run.Nowak (Professor of Biology and of Mathematics at Harvard University) is interested in something called the repeated prisoner's dilemma, a popular model of social interactions. In the game, you're paired up with another person and have a choice of either co-operating (in which case your partner benefits but you don't) or defecting (in which case you benefit but your partner loses). The payouts in the game are set such that it's best if you both co-operate, but there is a strong incentive for you as an individual to cheat - if you can get away with it!In a study published in early 2008, Nowak and colleagues looked at what happened if you were also allowed to punish defectors – this is so-called 'costly punishment', which costs you a bit but inflicts a greater cost on your victim. Now, you might think that strategies in which you can punish cheaters can bring them back into line, and so increase your payout.In fact, that wasn't what happened. They showed that people who were quicker to use punishment tended to lose out overall, and that the best results were achieved by people who responded to defectors simply by defecting themselves (i.e. refusing to co-operate).In reality, life is a little more complicated than this simple two-way interaction. We've evolved to live in groups, and most of our interactions are with people who we've watched in action, and so we've formed an opinion of what they're like. Reputation is important.In a new paper, Nowak looks at whether the reputation you earn can make punishment a more effective strategy. This time they used a mathematical model to explore all the options, rather than real people.What the model assumes is that your actions are watched by a group of observers, who assign you a reputation according to your actions and whether the recipient of your action has either a good or a bad reputation (see figure above). They then treat you according to the opinion they've formed of you. It's called 'indirect reciprocity', as opposed to the direct reciprocity of the two-person game.To make the simulation realistic, they also assumed that the watchers could make mistakes about your reputation, and also that they talked to each other (they gossip!).What they found was that if the watchers were poor in assessing your reputation, then defection was the best strategy (you might as well defect, since the watchers are pretty clueless). If they were good at it, then you should co-operate with good people and defect with bad.But there were hardly any circumstances in which you benefit from being in a group that believes in punishing those who are bad.You can get a flavour for what this means in practice from this figure, which shows how varying two of the parameters affects the best strategy.If individuals are poor at assessing reputation, or if co-operation is not that beneficial, then the best strategy is to always defect. But if reputations are meaningful and co-operation is valuable, then you should co-operate with agents with a good reputation, and defect with those with a bad reputation ('cooperate or defect').There's only a very small patch ('cooperate or punish') when punishing those who are bad is the best strategy. It occurs when assigning reputation is pretty inaccurate, and the benefits of co-operation are very high.Tweaking other parameters changes this landscape somewhat, but the general picture is always the same – there's only a small window where 'cooperate or punish' is a good strategy.So why did punishment as a strategy ever evolve? Well, this is a model, not reality. The agents are simple, and the model assumes that everyone has the same attitudes to crime and punishment.But perhaps the reason that punishment is popular is not that it increases overall good, but that it brings fewer negative effects to the punisher than to everyone else. For example, punishment could evolve if it is a way of establishing social dominance. Nowak explains in his 2008 paper:We conclude that costly punishment might have evolved for reasons other than promoting cooperation, such as coercing individuals into submission and establishing dominance hierarchies. Punishment might enable a group to exert control over individual behaviour. A stronger individual could use punishment to dominate weaker ones. People engage in conflicts and know that conflicts can carry costs. Costly punishment serves to escalate conflicts, not to moderate them. Costly punishment might force people to submit, but not to cooperate. It could be that costly punishment is beneficial in these other games, but the use of costly punishment in games of cooperation seems to be maladaptive. We have shown that in the framework of direct reciprocity, winners do not use costly punishment, whereas losers punish and perish.In other words, the winners in costly punishment games don't do well - they simply do less badly than everyone else.Hisashi Ohtsuki, Yoh Iwasa, Martin A. Nowak (2009). Indirect reciprocity provides only a narrow margin of efficiency for costly punishment Nature, 457 (7225), 79-82 DOI: 10.1038/nature07601Anna Dreber, David G. Rand, Drew Fudenberg, Martin A. Nowak (2008). Winners don’t punish Nature, 452 (7185), 348-351 DOI: 10.1038/nature06723... Read more »
Hisashi Ohtsuki, Yoh Iwasa, & Martin A. Nowak. (2009) Indirect reciprocity provides only a narrow margin of efficiency for costly punishment. Nature, 457(7225), 79-82. DOI: 10.1038/nature07601
Anna Dreber, David G. Rand, Drew Fudenberg, & Martin A. Nowak. (2008) Winners don’t punish. Nature, 452(7185), 348-351. DOI: 10.1038/nature06723
- May 15, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 1,375 views
Green beards maybe made us religious
A trait doesn't have to have a direct survival benefit for it to be selected for by evolution. So long as it sends a signal to the opposite sex that you have gametes that are worth getting hold of, your reproductive fitness will increase and the trait will be selected for. It's called the Green-Beard Effect, after the popular description by Dawkins in his 1979 book “The Selfish Gene” (although the idea was first proposed in 1964). All it takes is that the genes that create the signal are linked to the genes that code for something that enhances your quality as a prospective mate. Sounds unlikely, but it can happen in theory (Janse & van Ballen, 2006) and seems to happen in practice (in Californian side-blotched lizards, for example)
What on earth does this have to do with religion?... Read more »
James Dow. (2008) Is Religion an Evolutionary Adaptation?. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 11(2), 2. http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/11/2/2.html
- January 9, 2009
- 04:10 AM
- 1,340 views
What do people pray for?
When people pray, what do they think they will get out of it? It's an important but under-researched question, because it sheds an light on the role of religious beliefs in society (as opposed to the role of religion, which is much larger).For example, one of the criticisms that theologians make of The God Delusion is that Dawkins describes God in very concrete terms. This is not the real God, they complain - an entity that they describe in what seems to me painfully abstract and circumlocutory terms (see this, for example, or indeed any of the writings of the Oxford theologian Nicholas Lash).But what do ordinary people actually believe in? An abstract, metaphorical god? Or a concrete, personal one?Simply asking people is not necessarily going to give you a good answer, because people will often tell you what they think they ought to say. Wendy Cage, a sociologist at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, hit upon an innovative approach to this problem when she found that people were recording their own, anonymous prayers in a public prayer book in the rotunda at Johns Hopkins University Hospital:Although the statue of Jesus Christ has stood in the hospital since 1896, it was not until the early 1990s that people began to leave prayers written on napkins, scraps of paper, and the back of visitor’s badges and business cards at the statue’s base. So that the prayers were not lost, hospital chaplains placed a blank book on a stand by the statue that is filled with prayers every two to three months. Anyone entering or leaving the hospital can write in the prayer book and/or read the prayers other people have written. People write prayers longhand, filling the pages with words and drawings. Some leave photographs, children’s drawings, flowers, and coins at the statue. This is a valuable resource. Although the prayers recorded are public, and so might differ somewhat from private prayer, they are anonymous and also they weren't prompted by researchers - these are people's genuine, unprompted thoughts.Cage collected and analysed a total of 683 prayers, and what she found was strong evidence for belief in a personal god - a sort of comforting confidant. 22 percent of the prayers in the research expressed thanks to God, while 28 percent were requests of God and another 28 percent were prayers to both thank and petition God.Cadge said the information sheds light on the psychology of the people behind the prayers. Most prayer writers addressed God as they would a relative, friend or parent, preferring familiarity over deference, she said."Most prayers writers imagine a God who is accessible, listening and a source of emotional and psychological support, who, at least sometimes, answers back," Cadge said in a press release. [NB this press release is factually incorrect: Cadge's study gives no data on how often people pray, only on what they pray for].So when these people pray (and these are Americans visiting a hospital, of course, and so it can't necessarily be extrapolated more widely), they imagine god very much as a person with whom you can have a conversation. Cadge writes:As a group, these prayer writers conceive of God as accessible, as actively listening, and as a source of support. They begin prayers with Dear, Hello or Hey and sign them with their name or initials, almost like e-mails. Some make immediate requests and others thank God for listening; Sweet Jesus, Thank you for listening. The word love is common, We lift up N. to you, heal her heart and Help P. and her boys cope... I love you. Love, M. Many of these prayers read as snippets of ongoing conversations between the writers and God. But there's an important caveat. Although the writers imagine God to be a supernatural presence with magical powers, they are careful not to ask for anything that could be construed as direct evidence of this. They don't for example, ask God to heal the sick.Rather than thanking God for specific outcomes or making detailed requests, writers frame their prayers broadly in emotional and psychological language. Prayer writers do not ask God to heal a broken leg but to give them the “strength” to get through this difficult time. Rather than asking God for particular news at a doctor’s visit, a writer asks God to remember M. as we go to see his doctors today. Remember him in prayer and bless him always. What these prayers rarely do is to ask an all-powerful God to cure an incurable condition; they do not ask for miracles. All of which puts me strangely in mind of this cartoon:Wendy Cadge, M Daglian (2008). Blessings, strength, and guidance: Prayer frames in a hospital prayer book. Poetics, 36 (5-6), 358-373 DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2008.06.011... Read more »
Wendy Cadge, & M Daglian. (2008) Blessings, strength, and guidance: Prayer frames in a hospital prayer book☆. Poetics, 36(5-6), 358-373. DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2008.06.011
- October 5, 2008
- 04:32 PM
- 1,328 views
Atheists are generous, they just don't give to charity
Over at NCRegister, one Father Thomas Willams is busy telling us how selfish and greedy atheists are. In support, he's dug up the analyses that Arthur Brooks (Professor of Business and Government Policy at Syracuse University) did using data from the US Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. Brooks showed that, after controlling for other factors, people in the US who profess a religion tend to give more to charity than those who don't.On the face of it, these results are a slam dunk. Father Williams certainly thinks they are, and Christian commentators don't bother to dig further (the data were published in the house journal of the US Association of Christian Economists, after all!).If you look at different countries around the world you'll find that there is, in fact, quite a strong correlation between religiosity and how wealth is shared out. But here's the interesting thing: the direction of the correlation is the opposite of what you would expect if religion did actually lead to more giving. Charity is a form of wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor. But if religion leads to greater charity, it does not appear to have any meaningful effect. So what's going on?Well, one possibility is that atheists are just as altruistic as the religious - altruism is, after all, an inherently human attribute. Maybe they just don't do charity to the same extent.A major demotivator for giving to charity is the presence of free riders. These are people who don't contribute, but who benefit anyway. If you give to a heart research charity, then everyone benefits whether they contribute or not. If you give to a charity for the homeless, then unless you give an enormous sum your donation will be a vanishingly small portion of the total. The temptation is there to be a free-rider yourself. The free-rider effect occurs because the utility of charitable giving (i.e. the benefit that accrues to the donor from giving, compared with the benefit that would accrue from keeping the money) is low.One way to get round this problem is to make giving non-anonymous. If you do this then the donor benefits because their social standing is increased. Two of the most substantial private donors in recent times, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, both benefited in this way from their donations. Both Buffet and Gates are non-religious. And it's interesting that non-religious doctors are just as likely to work with the needy as religious doctors. This is an environment in which the the donor and the recipient are directly connected - one human to another. And here religion (or lack of it) makes no difference.Religion can help to counterbalance the free-rider effect. Those religions that include a reward in the afterlife increase the utility of charitable giving to believers, because it provides them with a personal benefit. This provides religious believers with an incentive to give, even when there are free-riders around.For altruistic atheists, however,the free-rider effect is much more pertinent. One secular way to get around the free-rider effect is to make giving from rich to poor compulsory, rather than voluntary. may motivate them to achieve wealth redistribution via institutions and laws. In other words, they might prefer that wealth is redistributed via taxation and the welfare state, rather than by voluntary donations. For the religious, this would actually decrease utility because taxation would reduce their surplus cash and so reduce the potential for them to give to charity and reap supernatural rewards.But is there any evidence that this is true? Well, if it was then you might expect that countries with a high proportion of atheists would have a larger welfare state. And indeed that is exactly what you see. Gill and Lundsgaarde have analysed a cross-section of countries, and found that those countries with more atheists also have higher state welfare spending.So you see, it is not true to say that more atheists will lead to a selfish, dog-eat-dog society where the weak go to the wall. Atheists are every bit as caring as the religious. They just go about it in different ways.A. Gill, E. Lundsgaarde (2004). State Welfare Spending and Religiosity: A Cross-National Analysis. Rationality and Society, 16 (4), 399-436 DOI: 10.1177/1043463104046694A.C. Brooks (2004). Faith, Secularism and Charity. Faith & Economics, 43 (Spring), 1-8... Read more »
A. Gill, & E. Lundsgaarde. (2004) State Welfare Spending and Religiosity: A Cross-National Analysis. Rationality and Society, 16(4), 399-436. DOI: 10.1177/1043463104046694
A.C. Brooks. (2004) Faith, Secularism and Charity. Faith , 43(Spring), 1-8. DOI: http://www.gordon.edu/ace/pdf/BrooksS04.pdf
- July 23, 2009
- 05:23 PM
- 1,226 views
Prayer frequency in differnt countries - the data
This is just a quick follow-up to my previous post, on prayer frequency in different nations as estimated with model using income inequality, GDP, urbanisation, religious diversity and goverment regulation of religion.There's a graph which shows how the model performs versus reality. All the blue blobs are different countries, but not all are labelled.A few people have asked what the values were for individual countries that weren't labelled. Well, here they are! The numbers are on a 7-point scale, where 1 is pray every day and 7 is never. Country Actual prayer frequency Predicted prayer frequency Difference Australia 4.78 4.50 0.27 Austria 4.06 4.31 -0.25 Bangladesh 1.76 2.43 -0.67 Belgium 4.76 4.89 -0.13 Bulgaria 5.13 4.80 0.33 Canada 3.42 4.61 -1.19 Chile 2.98 2.44 0.54 Czech Republic 5.71 4.58 1.13 Denmark 5.43 4.04 1.40 Estonia 5.58 3.21 2.37 Finland 4.10 4.01 0.09 France 5.51 4.62 0.89 Germany 5.11 5.07 0.04 Greece 3.39 3.60 -0.21 Hungary... Read more »
Rees, TJ. (2009) Is Personal Insecurity a Cause of Cross-National Differences in the Intensity of Religious Belief?. Journal of Religion and Society. DOI: http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2009/2009-17.html
- March 7, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 1,206 views
Religion has no effect on antisocial behaviour
In fact, there is a trend the other way - the less religious a society is, the lower the levels of antisocial behaviour. At least according to a new study out today in Science.... Read more »
B. Herrmann, C. Thoni, & S. Gachter. (2008) Antisocial Punishment Across Societies. Science, 319(5868), 1362-1367. DOI: 10.1126/science.1153808
- January 1, 2009
- 06:05 PM
- 1,189 views
Improve your self control... with religion?
The ability to control short term urges in order to achieve long-term goals makes a big difference to what you get out of life. People with high levels of self control forgo cream cakes for healthy food, and opt to study rather than succumb to the temptations of all night raves. As a result, they tend to be healthier, earn more, and live longer.Religious people tend to have higher self control - after adjusting for all the other factors that make religious people different. So here's the big question: which comes first? Does religion increase your powers of self control, or do people with high levels of self control tend to gravitate towards religion?Michael McCullough (with colleague Brian Willoughby), at the University of Miami, thinks that religion has a direct effect on increasing self control, and he's put down the evidence in a rather lengthy paper to be published this month in the Bulletin of the American Psychological Association (you can get a preprint from McCullough's homepage). The NY Times has a nice summary, but misses a couple of crucial insights.First off, it isn't religious belief that has the effect. It's religious institutions. People who score higher on 'Self-Transcendence' (i.e. they answer 'yes' to questions like, '“Sometimes I have felt my life was being directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being', and '“I sometimesfeel a spiritual connection to other people that I cannot explain in words') in fact have lower than average levels of conscientiousness (a key aspect of personality linked to self control).”Second, there's actually precious little direct evidence that religion really does increase self-control. For example, there's one study that indicates that religiousness as an adolescent is linked to changes in only one of two personality factors linked to self-control, and only in women, not men. On the other hand, there are five studies showing quite clearly that high levels of self control precede changes in religiousness. McCullough & Willoughby acknowledge this rather fundamental weakness in their arguments:Except for one study suggesting that individual differences in religiousness precede longitudinal changes in Agreeableness (at least for women) and a single experiment showing that religious cognition is automatically recruited for self-control (Fishbach et al., 2003; Wink et al., 2007), however, the available evidence for evaluating whether religion causes self-regulation or self-control is rather meager.But I would go further, and suggest that what the actual evidence (rather than the theory) seems to show is that people with high levels of spiritual belief who also have high self control tend to turn to organized religion - and that this is the primary driver of the link between religiousness and self control.Now this doesn't mean that religion doesn't increase self control. It's just that the most important effect is probably in the reverse direction. And this has important implications for the conclusion. It's not enough to show that religion could, in theory, have an effect on self control. If you want to draw the sorts of conclusions drawn by the NY Times reporter, you have to show that the magnitude of the effect is meaningful in the real world.And here's the other thought. McCullough & Willoughby think that this provides a rationale for an evolutionary basis to religion. In other words, they argue that religion enhances reproductive fitness by increasing self control, and that this means that religiousness is selected for by Darwinian evolution.But to argue this, you would have to show that there is something specific about religion, as opposed to mystical beliefs or secular institutions, that enhances self control. And studies conducted mostly in the US, where the major institutional route to civic participation is religion, are not going to be able to tease these things apart.I think that McCullough would agree with the idea that secular institutions could fulfil the role of religious ones in the modern world, according to the NY Times report:Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy. “People can have sacred values that aren’t religious values,” he said. “Self-reliance might be a sacred value to you that’s relevant to saving money. Concern for others might be a sacred value that’s relevant to taking time to do volunteer work. You can spend time thinking about what values are sacred to you and making New Year’s resolutions that are consistent with them.”The last bone of contention I have with the conclusions being drawn is the extrapolation from the general to the personal. Religious people are not the same as non-religious people. They tend to be of lower educational achievement, and may well start off with lower levels of self control. Even supposing that religion increases self control to a meaningful extent in these people, that is not the same as saying that it will work for you!Michael E. McCullough, Brian L. B. Willoughby (2009). Religion, Self-Regulation, and Self-Control: Associations, Explanations, and Implications Psychological Bulletin. In press.... Read more »
Michael E. McCullough, & Brian L. B. Willoughby. (2009) Religion, Self-Regulation, and Self-Control: Associations, Explanations, and Implications. Psychological Bulletin. DOI: http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/mmccullough/Papers/Relig_self_control_bulletin.pdf
- November 24, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 1,153 views
Sick women don't go to church
OK, so that's not how this new study is being headlined elsewhere (e.g. Religious Feelings Associated with Women's Lengthier Survival). But that's essentially what it has shown. Here's what they did (see below for a reference to the paper).... Read more »
Eliezer Schnall, Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, Charles Swencionis, Vance Zemon, Lesley Tinker, Mary Jo O'Sullivan, Linda Van Horn, & Mimi Goodwin. (2008) The relationship between religion and cardiovascular outcomes and all-cause mortality in the women's health initiative observational study. Psychology , 1-15. DOI: 10.1080/08870440802311322
D MOCHON, M NORTON, & D ARIELY. (2008) Getting off the hedonic treadmill, one step at a time: The impact of regular religious practice and exercise on well-being. Journal of Economic Psychology, 29(5), 632-642. DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2007.10.004
- October 28, 2009
- 05:01 PM
- 1,143 views
The inheritance of religion
An earlier post looked at the connection in the USA between religion and a high teen pregnancy rate. High fertility and religion often goes together, and whenever this topic comes up the immediate question is: will the religious inexorably 'out-breed' the nonreligious?The answer to that rather depends on how religion (or lack of it) is transmitted through the generations. Luckily enough, there's just been a very nice study on this by Vern Bengston, Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California.Bengston and colleagues analysed data from the Longitudinal Study of Generations, which has been following over 3000 Californians for over 30 years. They now have over 4 generations in their database.In 1971, the first year of the study, they surveyed three generations: grandparents (generation 1), parents (generation 2), and children (generation 3). In the paper, they also looked at data from 2001, by which time generation 2 had become grandparents, generation 3 had become parents, and a new generation, generation 4, had arrived on the scene (generation1 seem to have disappeared !).Over that time, religious affiliation plummeted. In 1971, only 5% of generation 2 (parents) said they were unaffiliated. By 2001, 33% of this same generation were unaffiliated. In generation 4, the non-affiliated rate was 37%.But what about religious beliefs? In each survey, they asked people how religoius they were (on a 1-4 scale), and also a number of questions related to how traditional/literal their religious views were.The results are shown in the first figure (you can click on it for a bigger version). The symbols on the left represent the various generations in 1971, and on the right the generations in 2001. Lines connect generations that appear in both surveys.On the whole, people who were surveyed both times haven't changed much. Mothers and fathers in 1971 are less religious in 2000, and daughters (but less so sons) are more religious.But the major difference is generational. Grandparents in 2000 are less religious than grandparents in 1971. Parents now are less religious than parents then. And the new generation (generation4) is least religious of all.Now, they don't give any information on how many children the religious participants had compared with the non-religious, but it's probably safe to assume that they had more.So, with each generation, the religious have more offspring. And yet their numbers decrease!This paradox is, of course, easily explained. Although there is a small genetic component that predisposes to agnosticism and atheism, they are in fact social phenomena. Irreligion is not inherited. It's learned.This can be seen most clearly with conservative religious beliefs. Twin studies consistently show that this is the component of religion with the largest genetic component. What's more, conservative Christians have the highest birth rates. Even so, conservative religious beliefs have collapsed with the passing of older generations.Religion, even conservative religion, is not a gene to be inherited, it's a meme to be transmitted.The study had another tidbit of information, and that's about how much influence grandparents have over their grandchildren's religiosity. The answer: not a lot.What we're looking at in this graph is the correlation between the religion of the grandparents and that of the grandchildren, after adjusting for the religion of the parents. So this is the direct effect of grandparents, not the indirect effect (via their children and then on to their grandchildren).In 2001, grandmothers had a little bit of influence over the religion of their granddaughters. That was particularly true for conservative religious beliefs.But nobody listened to their grandfathers, and grandsons didn't pay much attention to their grandmothers.What's surprising is how this has changed from 1971. I haven't done a graph for these data, but basically in 1971 grandparents influenced their grandchildrens church attendance, but less so their beliefs - and they had absolutely no effect over their conservative religious beliefs.In other words the role of grandparents in transmitting religion has changed completely in the past 30 years - more evidence that the nature of religion in society is changing.But there's a bigger message here, and that's the magnitude of the influence. Even when it comes to grandmothers and their granddaughter's religiousness, the strongest link, the effect is very weak.And what this means is that the transmission of religion can be very rapid. The world of our grandparents is already ancient history - at least as far as attitudes and beliefs go.____________________________________________________________________Bengtson, V., Copen, C., Putney, N., & Silverstein, M. (2009). A Longitudinal Study of the Intergenerational Transmission of Religion International Sociology, 24 (3), 325-345 DOI: 10.1177/0268580909102911This work by Tom Rees is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
... Read more »
Bengtson, V., Copen, C., Putney, N., & Silverstein, M. (2009) A Longitudinal Study of the Intergenerational Transmission of Religion. International Sociology, 24(3), 325-345. DOI: 10.1177/0268580909102911
- February 18, 2009
- 12:00 AM
- 1,126 views
Religious fundamentalism is in the genes
The question of nature versus nurture crops up a lot in discussions of religion. Here's a study that came out at the end of last year that took a look at the problem.It's a fairly standard twin study. They took a sample of around 600 identical and non-identical twins from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS), and looked at a number of religious characteristics.Basically, their analysis allows them to tease out the variations that are shared by identical twins but not by non-identical ones (genetic factors), by non-identical twins (family factors or shared environment), and that differed even among non-identical twins. This last factor was put down to the effects of external environment (i.e. things that happen in you life that aren't shared by your twin).I've put the results in the graph. First off, look at childhood religiosity. The biggest factor is your family, and not your genetics. It's not until adulthood that the effects of genetics really start to shine through. No surprises there!The 'salience', or importance of religion in your life is about one-quarter defined by genetics, as is your spirituality. The most important factor here, however, is the external environment. You get similar results for religious attendance.When you get to more personal beliefs, the patterns start to shift. There are three factors that are about 40% driven by genetics, with your family upbringing having hardly any effect. These factors are: how often you turn to religion for guidance, whether or not you take the bible literally, and whether people should stick to one faith, or experiment with others (exclusivist beliefs).As discussed earlier, Jonathan Haidt (psychologist at the University of Virginia) has investigated conservative psychology and found it to be linked to the need for order and the fear of uncertainty. To me, these three religious attitudes are similar to conservative attitudes. I wouldn't be surprised if these psychological factors trigger both conservatism and religiosity.But the big finding in this study is the born-again religious. These are the people who answered 'yes' to the question: “Have you been ‘born-again,’ that is, had a turning point in your life when you committed yourself to Jesus Christ?” A whopping 65% of this kind of religiosity is genetically driven!This is particularly amusing given that most of what passes for debate on this topic seems to be between atheists and fundamentalists. If the debate often seems futile and sterile then these data might suggest why. Religious fundamentalists are born, not bred. It's not a matter of evidence or rational argument. They just can't help it!MATT BRADSHAW, CHRISTOPHER G ELLISON (2008). Do Genetic Factors Influence Religious Life? Findings from a Behavior Genetic Analysis of Twin Siblings Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 47 (4), 529-544 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2008.00425.x... Read more »
MATT BRADSHAW, & CHRISTOPHER G ELLISON. (2008) Do Genetic Factors Influence Religious Life? Findings from a Behavior Genetic Analysis of Twin Siblings. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 47(4), 529-544. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2008.00425.x
- March 19, 2009
- 05:58 PM
- 1,116 views
Why women are more religious. Part 4: Personality, power, control (and the take-home for humanists)
Donald Sullins, a sociologist at the Catholic University of America, has shown that (in the USA at least) a lot of the gender difference in religiosity can be explained by social and personality factors (see previous post). But there are a few niggling doubts. How sure can we be that the differences in personality factors (being tender feeling and soft-hearted) aren't also sociologically driven? And what about the remaining, unexplained difference in gender?PersonalityTo deal with the personality issue first. Back in 2002 Vassilis Saroglou, at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, analysed data from 13 studies looking at the relationship between religion and the so-called 'Five Factor Model' of personality. Of these studies 10 were done in North America and 2 in Europe, so this is not exactly a cross-cultural analysis (the remaining study was done in Taiwan).Saroglou did show, however, that people with certain personality factors were more likely to be religious, although the effect was pretty small. Of the five factors, it turned out that agreeableness and conscientiousness were the most consistent predictors. He didn't look directly at the gender effect, but there is a big study that has examined gender differences in personality. And this is where it gets interesting.The leading expert on this topic is David Schmitt, Director of the International Sexuality Description Project. He's found that the gender differences in personality are real, but also that they shrink and disappear once you move out of the wealthy Europeanised nations (see figure).This is a really bizarre result, but it does show clearly that what we often fondly imagine to be fundamental Mars-Venus differences are, in fact a product of our culture.In the case of personality, what is happening is that men change and becomes more 'masculine' (less agreeable, less conscientious) in Europe and the Americas. Perhaps this is because women are fulfilling many of the roles that were once a male preserve. It's almost as if, as institutional gender stereotypes become eroded, so men reinvent themselves to increase the gender differentials.This is important because, as Sullins showed, the gender differences in religiosity are biggest in regions of the world where religion is less important. And these are exactly the regions where personality differences appear. So perhaps gender, religion and personality are tightly bound together. Perhaps, in the Western World, these are the means whereby the individual defines his or herself in the absence of clear gender roles.Power and ControlNone of this, however, explains why women are also more superstitious than men (see the second post in this series for some strong, cross-cultural evidence for that). The causes of superstition are as complex as the causes of religion, but there are probably some overlaps, given that paranormal thinking is a common feature of both. One important driver of superstitious beliefs is the feeling that you are not in control of events around you (I blogged about this in a couple of earlier posts one two).There's some very new data (it'll be published later this year) shedding a fascinating light on the relationship of power to the religion gender gap. Jessica Collett and Omar Lizardo, from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, have shown that a mother's socioeconomic status has a strong effect on the religiosity of their daughters, but not their sons. The graphic shows the essence of what they found (they analysed data from the US General Social Survey).You can see that, as a mother gains higher status, so the religiosity of her daughter drops. The most powerful driver of this is the mothers earnings. There's not much effect on the son's religiosity. A wealthy dad, on the other hand, makes both boys and girls less religious in equal measure.Why should this be? Collett and Lizardo frame it in terms of attitude to risk, but as I described earlier there really isn't any relationship between attitudes to risk and gender differences in religiosity. What there is, however, is a link between power and the feeling that you are in control. Just earlier this month, for example, a study came out which demonstrated that people made to feel powerful were more likely to feel they were in control of events, even when those events were happening at random.Could the relative lower status of mothers be the final missing link in the puzzle of the religion-gender gap? As women become more economically independent, the effect would be to reduce the gender gap. As such, this factor would tend to oppose other factors, which are perhaps pushing in the direction of an increasing gap in wealthy countries.And the take home for humanistsOver these four posts, I've taken a swift overview of some of the most important trends and thinking about the gender gap in religion. To sum them up:The gender gap isn't caused by risk aversion in women, and certainly not because men are unmotivated by the idea of heaven (if anything, the opposite is probably true).The gender gap varies from culture to culture (bigger in wealthy countries), and depending on how you define religion (bigger for personal beliefs than in religious attendance).A large part of the gender gap seems to be culturally driven.I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that social factors are so important. Religion is, after all, a social construct, and a complicated one at that. Because religion is multifaceted, there won't be any simple link between psychology and religiosity. In its many guises, religion fulfils many personal and social needs, and people will reinvent religion to meet those needs as they see fit.The concern for humanists must surely be that, in the West at least, religion seems increasingly to be a tool for gender differentiation. Religiosity is becoming one way that men and women forge their different identities - and religion is becoming stereotyped as essentially feminine. It's something we need to actively counteract._______________________________________________________________________________________Schmitt, D., Realo, A., Voracek, M., & Allik, J. (2008). Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94 (1), 168-182 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.94.1.168Collett, Jessica L., & Lizardo, Omar (2009). A Power-Control Theory of Gender and Religiosity. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion... Read more »
Schmitt, D., Realo, A., Voracek, M., & Allik, J. (2008) Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(1), 168-182. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.94.1.168
Collett, Jessica L., & Lizardo, Omar. (2009) A Power-Control Theory of Gender and Religiosity. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
- December 29, 2008
- 05:55 PM
- 1,113 views
'Virginity Pledges' are worse than useless
The US (like the UK only worse) faces a major problem with teenage pregnancy, abortions, and sexually transmitted diseases. A common sense approach to fixing this problem - and one that works well in the religion-free countries of Europe - is better sex education.An alternative, promoted by religious conservatives, attempts to persuade kids not to bonk, and then pretends that they won't break their promise on this. It may sound comical, but it's deadly serious. In 2008, the US government spent $204 million on these so-called abstinence-only sex education (AOSE) programs. Janet Rosenbaum, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, explains:A sexual abstinence or "virginity" pledge is an oral or written promise to refrain from sexual activity, usually until marriage, administered after a multi- or single-session curriculum in religious youth groups, parochial and public schools, or large group events. The virginity pledge and 6-hour curriculum were created in 1993 by an evangelical Christian organization. The idea was subsequently spread by other Protestant and Catholic groups, which created pledges for their own AOSE programs for both religious and secular adolescents. By 1995, 13% of American adolescents reported having taken a virginity pledge.Rosenbaum's study, just published in the journal Pediatrics, used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a nationally representative sample of grade 7 to 12 students interviewed in 1996 and again in 2001. Rosenbaum took the sample of pledgers, and matched them with a sample of non-pledgers who were as similar as possible in all other respects (so they were highly religious, felt bad about sex, etc).There was absolutely no difference between the two groups in the incidence of premarital sex. This is the whole point of AOSE programs, and this study shows that they fail miserably. They are a waste of money, built upon shoddy, religiously-motivated thinking.So they didn't change the chances of premarital sex. But the AOSE programs did have one significant, and substantial, effect. Of those teens who did engage in premarital sex, they significantly increased the chances that it would be risky. As shown in the figure, pledgers were significantly less likely to use birth control and much less likely to use a condom.Why should this be? Rosenbaum explains:Despite having had similar birth control attitudes 1 year before pledging, virginity pledgers were substantially less likely than matched nonpledgers to protect themselves against STDs and pregnancy, consistent with earlier studies.Virginity pledgers may be less likely to use condoms and contraception because many abstinence programs cause participants to develop negative attitudes about their effectiveness.More than 90% of abstinence funding does not require that curricula be scientifically accurate, and a 2004 review found incorrect information in 11 of 13 federally funded abstinence programs, primarily about birth control and condom effectiveness.In other words, these abstinence programs are worse than useless because they actually discourage teens from using contraception. And they do this by feeding these kids religiously-motivated, scientifically inaccurate information. How bad can a government program get?J. E. Rosenbaum (2009). Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers PEDIATRICS, 123 (1) DOI: 10.1542/peds.2008-0407... Read more »
J. E. Rosenbaum. (2009) Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers. PEDIATRICS, 123(1). DOI: 10.1542/peds.2008-0407
- October 28, 2008
- 06:45 PM
- 1,099 views
How religion makes people vote right-wing
Apparently there's some sort of election going on over in the US, so here's a topical question: why is it that religion encourages the poor to vote for right-wing parties? By 'right wing' here I mean 'fiscally conservative' - the sorts of parties that are against government social welfare programmes. Now, there are all sorts of arguments for and against wealth redistribution, which I'm not going to get into. But the fact remains - and it's one that's relevant to understanding the US elections - that the poor are more likely to vote for fiscal conservatives (and so against their direct economic interests) if they are also religious.It's not a small issue, either. In the wealthy democracies, religiosity and church attendance is a better predictor of voting choice than is either income or social class. In fact, whereas income is an important decider for the non-religious, religious people tend to vote the same way whatever their income, according to an analysis published earlier this year:Whether we use pooled data from the Eurobarometer (various years) since 1970 or a larger sample of wealthy countries from the 1990s covered by the World Values Survey, we find that the effect of income on vote choice is barely discernable among those who attend church every week, whereas it is quite large among those who never go to church. Moreover, the impressive relationship between church attendance and voting against the parties of the left is driven disproportionately by the poor. (de la O & Rodden, 2008)So here's a quick run-down of the reasons that have been put forward for why the religious are more likely to vote for fiscal conservatives.Issue bundlingThe typical answer is issue bundling. This is the idea that right wing parties are both religiously and fiscally conservative, and that the religious poor prioritise religious beliefs over their financial interests. This effect is particularly strong in so-called 'majoritarian' democracies, like the USA and Britain, where the structure of the voting system tends to lead to a very small number of political parties. In countries with proportional representation, like most of mainland Europe, there are more parties in parliament to choose from. So voters are more likely to find one that matches their particular collection of beliefs (both economic and social).de la O and Rodden found exactly that happening in their analysis of voting behaviour:In the United States, the Republicans adopt positions to the right of the Democrats on both issue dimensions, and voters with morally liberal but economically conservative preferences (or vice versa) are forced to choose which preference dimension is more important to them. But faced with the menu of choices available in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, for example, voters need not choose one preference dimension on which to base their vote. Our data analysis reveals that liberal parties sometimes offer a choice for morally moderate but economically conservative voters, and Christian democratic parties appeal to voters with right-leaning preferences on moral issues but relatively centrist preferences on economic issues. (de la O & Rodden, 2008)They also found that the poor are more likely to have conservative moral views. So part of the reason that the poor vote right wing is that their conservative morality drives them to do it. This is why adding Sarah Palin to the Republican ticket was a way to increase the party's attractiveness to the poor.But this begs another question: why, if the electoral system forces issue bundling, do conservative moral values and conservative fiscal values get bundled together? It's clear that religion tends to promote conservative morals, but does it also have the effect of encouraging fiscal conservatism?Belief in a just worldDid the people at the top of the income heap get there buy hard work and talent, or is there a hefty dose of luck involved - being in the right place at the right time and having the right parents, for example? Obviously there is quite a range of views on this topic, but what's clear is that those who believe in a 'just world' - that you get what you deserve - are also opposed to government welfare.Some religions encourage the belief that god will reward hard work and effort - the 'Protestant Work Ethic' is a classic example. Roland Bénabou has looked into this, and put it like this:... a belief that there is a hereafter in which rewards and punishments will be determined according to effort and industriousness (or lack thereof) during one’s lifetime. The alternative view is that there is most likely no afterlife, or that if there is one, its rewards are determined according to criteria unrelated to industriousness, or even antithetical to material success: vows of poverty and asceticism, good deeds towards others, scrupulous observance of rituals, contemplation, the “extinction of desires”, etc.Bénabou created an agent-based model of the social causes of a belief in a just world, and why it varies from one society to another. Using this model, they show that religious beliefs can swing attitudes towards a society that favours low government redistribution.Therefore, under appropriate conditions, we can again expect two equilibria:1. A high-religiosity / “Protestant work ethic” equilibrium, accompanied by high effort and low redistribution.2. An equilibrium characterized by a greater predominance of agnosticism, or of religions that do not stress industriousness and worldly achievements, accompanied by the reverse pattern of labor supply and redistributive policy.Religion privatises social welfareOne of the notable things about religious charitable giving is that a large chunk of it goes directly to co-religionists (so-called 'within-group' giving). This differs according to religion - so 90% of the money that Mormons give to charity goes to other Mormons, and 80% of evangelical Christian charity goes to other evangelical Christians (Chen & Lind). At the other end of the scale are Catholics, at 50%, and Jews, at 40%.Now here's the interesting thing. The negative relationship between religiosity and support for welfare state is strongest for those religions that have high 'within-group' giving. In other words, financial support from co-religionists reduces the need to governmental social programmes.Chen & Lind also show that this effect is actually reversed for members of a state church - they tend to be in favour of state welfare:The relationship between fiscal and social attitudes is reversed for members of the state church: religious intensity predicts welfare support when government spending can assist members of state churches.God: your invisible friendAs well as the real-world social support, religion can help you through the bad time psychologically. There's evidence to support this too. Andrew Clark (at the Paris School of Economics) has shown that both Catholics and Protestants suffer less psychological harm from being unemployed. Perhaps this is because they have faith that their god will provide. If you have a magical friend in the sky who will make everything alight, then you why would you want the government to take care of you?A. L. De La O, J. A. Rodden (2008). Does Religion Distract the Poor?: Income and Issue Voting Around the World Comparative Political Studies, 41 (4-5), 437-476 DOI: 10.1177/0010414007313114Roland Benabou. "Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Politics" Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121.2 (2006): 699-746.Daniel Chen, Jo Lind. Religion, Welfare Politics, and Church-State Separation (Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Vol 42, No. 1, 2007Andrew Clark. Deliver us from Evil: Religion as Insurance. Working paper. 2005... Read more »
A. L. De La O, & J. A. Rodden. (2008) Does Religion Distract the Poor?: Income and Issue Voting Around the World. Comparative Political Studies, 41(4-5), 437-476. DOI: 10.1177/0010414007313114
- March 12, 2009
- 05:14 PM
- 1,096 views
Why women are more religious. Part 1: It ain't Pascal's Wager
Here's a new analysis of the 2007 Pew Survey on the USA Religious landscape, confirming some very old news: women are more religious then men on virtually every measure. And here's a write up of it that's rather more surprising:Rodney Stark, a professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, flips the question around: Why are men less religious? "Studies of biochemistry imply that both male irreligiousness and male lawlessness are rooted in the fact that far more males than females have an underdeveloped ability to inhibit their impulses, especially those involving immediate gratification and thrills," Stark argued in a 2002 paper in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.The upshot is that some men are shortsighted and don't think ahead, Stark said, and so "going to prison or going to hell just doesn't matter to these men." Now hold on a minute here! That's a pretty bold claim, and needs some pretty powerful evidence to back it up. Unfortunately the evidence is circumstantial. What's worse, recent studies have proved Stark to be just plain wrong.Let's back up a moment to see where Stark is coming from. In 2002 he co-wrote a study with Alan Miller (Hokkaido University) that looked at survey evidence on religion from around the world. What they showed was that women are more religious than men in every society, and the gap in religiousness was greater in more liberal societies than in more traditional ones. They also found some evidence linking a bigger gap to religions with a greater fixation on reward and punishment in the after life.Given that men are more likely to take risks than women, they proposed that men are less religious because they are willing to take a gamble on there not being an afterlife. Classic Pascal's Wager, in other words.In 2007 sociologists Jeremy Freese (Harvard) and James Montgomery (University of Wisconsin-Madison) ripped that argument to shreds.Never mind the fact that Pascal's Wager is a pretty dodgy to start with, Stark's argument assumes that everyone makes the same risk assessment. Everyone has the same answer to the question: "What's the odds of going to hell if I don't go to Church today?" It's just that men are prepared to take that risk, whereas women aren't. Technically, this is called risk preference.Whereas what in fact probably happens is that men judge the risk to be lower. I don't believe, therefore I judge the risk of going to hell to be pretty much zero, therefore I don't go the church. This is called risk assessment, and has nothing to do with men being more prepared to take risk.But even going along with Stark's assumptions, Freese & Montgomery show that his argument is bogus. Stark frames it in economic terms, and so they use a standard economic model to test it. Here's the choices open to you. R is reward, C is cost (i.e. all the time spent in Church when you could've been doing something else), and P is punishment.What they show is that risk-takers should be more motivated by the idea of heaven than of hell. And the opposite applies to the risk averse - the idea of hell should put the fear of God into them!In other words, if Pascal's wager was important, and if women are more risk averse, you should only find more women than men in the group of people who believe in hell but not in heaven. In fact, almost no-one anyone actually believes only in hell. And anyway, when Freese & Montgomery looked at data from the international World Values Survey, they found that women were more religious than men whether or not they believed in heaven or hell (or both). Pascal's wager makes no difference.But so far this is all very theoretical - and economic theory at that (which doesn't have a great reputation right now!). So here's some hard data from Louise Roth at the University of Arizona. She took a look at both international and US survey statistics, and found pretty much the same thing wherever she looked.The data I've pulled out are from the US General Social Survey. They show church attendance and prayer according to whether people believe in the after life or not. What you need to look at here is the gap between the 'men' column and the 'women' column.As expected, there is a gap - women are more religious than men. But the gap is actually smaller among those who believe in and afterlife!These numbers are the exact opposite of what Stark's theory predicts! Far from being unconcerned with life after death, it's seems that the best way to get men involved in religion is to promise them life eternal!If it's not Pascal's wager, then must be something else that's attracting women to religion. But what? I've been looking at that too - with a bit of luck I'll cover that in my next post._____________________________________________________________________________________Jeremy Freese, James Montgomery (2007). The Devil Made Her Do It: Evaluating Risk Preference as an Explanation of Sex Differences in Religiousness. Advances in Group Processes: The Social Psychology of Gender. Oxford, Elsevier, 187-230Louise Marie Roth, & Jeffrey C. Kroll (2007). Risky Business: Assessing Risk Preference Explanations for Gender Differences in Religiosity American Sociological Review, 27 (2), 205-220... Read more »
Jeremy Freese, & James Montgomery. (2007) The Devil Made Her Do It: Evaluating Risk Preference as an Explanation of Sex Differences in Religiousness. Advances in Group Processes: The Social Psychology of Gender. Oxford, Elsevier, 187-230. DOI: http://www.jeremyfreese.com/docs/FreeseMontgomery-DevilMadeHerDoIt.pdf
Louise Marie Roth, & Jeffrey C. Kroll. (2007) Risky Business: Assessing Risk Preference Explanations for Gender Differences in Religiosity. American Sociological Review, 27(2), 205-220. DOI: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asoca/asr/2007/00000072/00000002/art00004
- April 14, 2009
- 05:57 PM
- 1,093 views
The problem with studies on the social effects of religion...
One of the many newspaper columns published over the weekend was this one, in The Miami Herald, on the alleged beneficial effects of religion. Most of it was drawn from the work of Mike McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami.McCullough's research suggests that religious people of all faiths, by sizable margins, do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and are generally happier than their nonbelieving peers.Yes well, that's all true enough, but does it justify the claim that religions causes all these effects? In fact, the evidence is surprisingly weak. Take, for example, McCullough's recent study, quoted in the article:In the Journal of Drug Issues, he reported that in neighborhoods plagued by alcoholism, church attendance helps more than Alcoholics Anonymous.In fact, this study nicely exemplifies all of the problems that bedevil research into the social effects of religion (all of which McCullough acknowledges):What people say they do and what they actually do are different things.Most studies into the effects of religion rely on self-reported behaviour. The subjects fill in a questionnaire reporting how often they go to church, and (in this case) how often they get drunk.But we know that how people want to see themselves strongly influences what they put in these sorts of surveys. How many people are going to put down that they both go to Church regularly and get drunk regularly, when they know that the two together are highly socially unacceptable.Correlation is not causation. Religious people are different to non-religious. Hard drinkers are likely to avoid going to Church for a variety of reasons. Almost all studies are purely cross-sectional. That is, they look at people at a single point in time. But that really proves nothing, especially if you don't control for personality type.Even longitudinal studies are suspect. Suppose it works like this. A drunkard decides to turn her life around. They start going to go to the church (because, in the US, that's the premier source of support networks), and with the help of their new friends, they start to turn their life around. Is this really a story of religion causing temperance?There's no such thing as 'religion'.OK, this will probably come as a surprise to many. But religion is a nebulous concept, and the reason is that it's actually a label applied to a bunch of different things - most notably participating in ritual activities, and a variety of supernatural beliefs.Mixing the two up should be verboten. And yet that is exactly what McCullough does in this study. He begins by theorizing why religion should reduce binge drinking - because it contravenes religious beliefs in a variety of ways. And then goes on to look at how church attendance, not religious belief, is linked to less drinking.So is there any practical way of untangling this sticky mess? I think there is, and there is a limited amount of data out there that's highly suggestive.Firstly, if you want to make the arguments that McCullough is making, that adopting a religion helps people who would otherwise get into trouble, then you really need to do an interventional study.This means getting a group of people and giving half of them religious instruction, and the other half some secular alternative - like engagement in a support group. Amazingly, given the amount of money spent on religion, and the widespread belief that it is effective, these sorts of studies are almost never done!However, there are two recent examples. A study that looked to see whether virginity pledges were effective. And a study that looked at whether spiritual guidance helps drug addicts. Neither showed any benefit.Secondly, you could do research in populations where the religious are in the minority. That would help sort out whether it's just a socialization effect. In other words, people who want to conform and have the willpower to participate in wider society will turn to religious groups in a religious society, and non-religious groups in a secular one.This also is an under-researched area (there just isn't the interest in non-religious countries). But one recent study, in Scottish teens who were mostly non religious, found that religiosity did not affect sexual behaviour.And finally, you can get a reality check on whether encouraging religion is really a useful way to focus society's energy by looking at non-religious countries. Across a wide range of outcomes, less religious countries are happier, healthier and more secure than religious ones.If you want to make the world a better place, then worrying about religion is not the place to start._____________________________________________________________________________________Terrence D. Hill, & Michael E. McCullough (2008). Religious Involvement and the Intoxication Trajectories of Low Income Urban Women Journal of Drug Issues, 38 (3)... Read more »
Terrence D. Hill, & Michael E. McCullough. (2008) Religious Involvement and the Intoxication Trajectories of Low Income Urban Women. Journal of Drug Issues, 38(3). DOI: http://www2.criminology.fsu.edu/~jdi/journal/2008/hill.pdf
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