262 posts · 177,950 views
Covers the causes and effects of religion and non-belief, with a focus on psychology and social science.
Tom Rees
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- December 23, 2011
- 05:03 PM
- 136 views
Goodwill to all men?
This being the season of good will to all men (at least for those of us with a Christian heritage), it's time to bring a little harmony to the most tumultuous conflict of our times. Yes, I'm talking about the war between 'new' atheists and the religious.
When you see these folks slogging it out on the internet, one regular touch point is over whether religion causes wars - or at least makes them worse.
Of course, we can all cite wars in which the two sides have different religions, but often the two sides differ in lots of other ways. Quite often, what we see is two different ethnic groups fighting. So is religion really contributing to these conflicts, or is it an innocent bystander?
Who is right in the great atheist versus religious battle? Well, the best way to bring some Christmas peace is, of course, to get science to shed some light on the matter. If in doubt, quantify!
Kürşad Turan, at the University of Ankara, has done just this using a database created by the Minorities at Risk project at the University of Maryland. Turan wanted to know whether language barriers or religious barriers were the biggest contributors to ethnic strife. Uniquely, he was able to look at the problem from the perspective of both the ethnic groups and of the State.
First he looked at the factors that contributed to protest and rebellion by ethnic minorities. Here he found that use of different languages by ethnic groups was much more likely to be associated with inter-ethnic strife than religious differences.
In fact, religious differences had a negative effect! If two ethnic groups had different religions, conflict was actually slightly less likely.
When it came to state repression, however, it was a different story. State repression is actually higher in countries where ethnic groups are separated by religion. Language had no effect on state repression. What's more, state repression of religion increases ethnic conflict, while state repression of language decreases it.
Turan concludes that religion and language play a different roles for ethnic agitators and state repressors. He thinks that states can try to subtly control language, but are more likely to try to co-opt religion. When they repress language, people conform. When they repress religion, people revolt.
Of course, that's not to say that religion isn't a flash point between people. There's an interesting working paper produced by an EU-funded research programme into conflict (actually based at the University of Sussex, just down the road from me). It's MicroCon Working Paper 18, by Frances Stewart, at Oxford University.
She looked at recent survey conducted in four countries where there is ongoing ethnic strife - Ghana, Nigeria, Indonesia and Malaysia. There were lots of interesting findings, one of which was that religious differences and ethnic differences were about equally often cited as a rationale for violence (as shown in the graphic).
Clearly, then people can be motivated to conflict for either religious or ethnic reasons. But what determines which of the two takes hold in any given location?
Well, based on the interviews that Stewart and her colleagues counducted, she reckons the bottom line is self-interest:
"mobilisation occurred behind the identity which was thought to affect people’s material chances of securing government jobs, contracts etc., rather than behind the identity that appeared to mean most to the people."
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Kürşad Turan (2011). Language and Religion: Different Salience for Different Aspects of Identity International Journal of Business and Social Science, 2 (8), 141-152
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Kürşad Turan. (2011) Language and Religion: Different Salience for Different Aspects of Identity. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 2(8), 141-152. info:/
- December 19, 2011
- 05:00 PM
- 90 views
Religious nonsense is easier to understand than regular nonsense
There's a particular brain wave that gets triggered when you hear stuff that doesn't make sense.
It's called the N400, and it's triggered by sentences like "I like my coffee with cream and socks". Although each individual word makes sense, and although the grammar is fine, the semantics is screwy - the meaning of those words is pretty unexpected.
Sabela Fondevila and a team from the University of Madrid wanted to find out if religious stories had the same effect. Religious stories typical have some pretty far out indicidents, of course - walking on water, that sort of thing. Are these stories nonsensical, though, or is there some kind of method to their madness?
So they got their subjects to read some carefully phrased sentences describing religious miracles, some matched sentences that had the same grammatical stucture but with random nonsensical claims, and also some completely sensible ones.
To make sure that the religious statements were unexpected and unfamiliar, they took their miracles from non-biblical texts - Hindu, Mesoamerican, Japanese, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, African, Australian, Chinese, Polynesian, and Inuit.
So, for each nonsensical religious sentence, like "Under the Earth lives the wind", there was an equivalent pure nonsense sentence: "Under the Earth lives the dining-room", and a sensible statement "Under the Earth lives the mole". Another example is "With a hook, from the bottom of the sea, he took out the islands" paired with "With a hook, from the bottom of the sea, he took out the problems". The sensible statement had him hooking up a fish.
What they found was that the size of the N400 wave was largest for the pure nonsense, and smallest for the sensible sentences. The religious statements were in-between.
This suggests is that the religious statements, although nonsensical and clearly impossible, were not such hard work to understand. For whatever reason, they seemed more sensible than the pure nonsense statements.
Just to make sure of it, they also asked a different group of people straight out: “How easy is it for you to imagine a context (books, films, newspapers, etc.) in which these statements may appear?” Sure enough, the religious statements were thought to be considerably more plausible.
Fondevila thinks that this is further support for the idea that religions are minimally counterintuitive. Previous research has suggested that gods, like comic book characters, tend to be mostly normal with a few special powers.
The theory goes that the most memorable stories are those that are grounded in reality, but have a few counterintuitive twists that make them stand out. And there's some evidence to support this.
So the ideal god is magical enough to make him interesting and worthy of our special attention as something that could just about be real. But not so magical as to be utter nonsense!
Fondevila, S., Martín-Loeches, M., Jiménez-Ortega, L., Casado, P., Sel, A., Fernández-Hernández, A., & Sommer, W. (2011). The sacred and the absurd—an electrophysiological study of counterintuitive ideas (at sentence level) Social Neuroscience, 1-13 DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2011.641228
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Fondevila, S., Martín-Loeches, M., Jiménez-Ortega, L., Casado, P., Sel, A., Fernández-Hernández, A., & Sommer, W. (2011) The sacred and the absurd—an electrophysiological study of counterintuitive ideas (at sentence level). Social Neuroscience, 1-13. DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2011.641228
- December 14, 2011
- 04:51 PM
- 116 views
Dope smokers are more spiritual than boozers
Source
What's your poison? Based on some new data from a Czech study, your preferences could speak a lot about your spiritual beliefs.
For the study Radmilla Lorencova, at the University of Pardubice in the Czech Republic, interviewed 155 men and women from universities, some kind of club in Prague, and residents of a housing estate.
This being the Czech republic, half of them (74) were atheists, while 24 were conventionally religious and the remaining 57 are described as being "sympathizers with Eastern religions, religious groups or sects, or having their own religion". Eighty-one of them used both marijuana and alcohol (usually not together), while 58 stuck just to alcohol.
The dope smokers scored higher on mystical aspects of spirituality than did alcohol drinkers. What's more, when respondents associated mystical feelings with a drug, it was never with alcohol - instead they mentioned LSD and marijuana.
The most common experience that was linked to drug use was that "I have had the feeling that the secrets of the universe and of existence are opening before me". Potent stuff.
However, this link between drug use and spirituality was not seen among atheists. Atheists, as you would expect, scored rather low on measures of mystical aspects of spirituality (although they score just as high as everyone else on aspects of moral involvement and conscientiousness).
Now, the other interesting finding was that drug use was equally spread across all groups. While 60% of 'sympathizers' and 57% of atheists smoked dope, so did 50% of the religious - a small difference that wasn't statistically significant.
So it seems that there are religious (and religiously minded) Czechs out there getting powerful spiritual experiences from smoking dope, but that alcohol is free of spiritualistic baggage.
Which makes me wonder about a seemingly unrelated fact. Have you ever wondered why marijuana is illegal, while alcohol is not? You could argue that alcohol is part of the traditional culture for Europeans, but then what about tobacco?
Perhaps there is a religious subtext. Perhaps marijuana is frowned upon because of the danger of leading people away from official religions, by giving them mystical experiences not tied to the official dogma.
By the way, this is the second post about alcohol drinking in the Czech republic. In case you missed the first one (from 2008), here it is: Beer and science don't mix!
Lorencova R (2011). Religiosity and spirituality of alcohol and marijuana users. Journal of psychoactive drugs, 43 (3), 180-7 PMID: 22111401
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Lorencova R. (2011) Religiosity and spirituality of alcohol and marijuana users. Journal of psychoactive drugs, 43(3), 180-7. PMID: 22111401
- December 10, 2011
- 03:32 PM
- 98 views
Moderate believers might benefit from less, not more religion
I always enjoy analyses of religion done by people whose main research focus lies in other fields. They tend to have quite a refreshing take.
So here's a study written by three outsiders. You probably already know Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational (and if you don't, well then get out and read the book this moment!). The lead is Daniel Mochon, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Freeman School of Business at Tulane University, and the other is Michael Norton, an Associate Professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School.
So, three specialists in marketing, who have set out to discover who, exactly benefits from religion. To do this, they used an online survey company to gather responses from over 6,000 people across the UK. Their basic aim was to relate two different measures of religion: affiliation (i.e. whether they said that they were a Christian, or a Methodist, or a Wiccan etc) and religiosity (i.e. how religious they are, on a scale from 1-7).
They measured well-being by asking a bunch of questions related to life satisfaction, hopelessness, depression, self esteem, how they felt right now and in general, and how satisfied they were with their spiritual and religious life.
The graphic shows the headline results. The well-being of religious adherents follows a clear U-shape, with the least happy being those people with moderate faith.
The straight lines show the well-being of people who didn't declare a religious faith - those who said they were atheists were the happiest, agnostics were less happy, and those who were just 'none' were the least happy of all.
In addition to this plot, they also ran a bunch of simple models to explore all the different factors and to put the results on firmer statistical grounds. But these models basically confirmed the picture that's so eloquently depicted in the graph.
So the only religious adherents who are really happy are those who are very religious. Those who are only moderately fervent could benefit by ramping up their faith - but they could also benefit by toning it down still further.
If this sounds familiar, well you're right. There's already evidence that those who are firm non-believers are actually quite happy, thank you very much (see The Happiness Smile). But these new data are the strongest so far.
I'll leave the last words to the study authors:
Were we to place our own children in the distribution of religiosity, the option with the highest expected well-being would entail enrolling them and encouraging them to believe strongly; were we not certain that our children would attain sufficient levels of belief, however, we might prefer them to remain unaffiliated.
Indeed, the non-linear relation between religiosity and well-being suggests that many moderate believers would benefit from reducing their level of religiosity rather than increasing it.
Mochon, D., Norton, M., & Ariely, D. (2010). Who Benefits from Religion? Social Indicators Research, 101 (1), 1-15 DOI: 10.1007/s11205-010-9637-0
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Mochon, D., Norton, M., & Ariely, D. (2010) Who Benefits from Religion?. Social Indicators Research, 101(1), 1-15. DOI: 10.1007/s11205-010-9637-0
- December 1, 2011
- 03:30 PM
- 86 views
Why do the religious give to charity: learning from Taiwan
It seems likely that religious people in the West give more to charity - in the narrow sense of financial donations, at least (see Atheists are generous - they just don't give to charity for more details).
But what is it about religion that has this effect? Is it that the fear of being watched makes people behave nicer. Perhaps it's that religious teachings simply encourage charity. Or maybe it's being in a religious congregation and having someone demand that you hand over cash.
One way to dig into this is to take a look at other cultures. Taiwan is a good case study, because it has a good mix of folk religion, atheists, and world religions (Buddhism and Christianity).
Hiewu Su and colleagues, from the National Dong-Hwa University in Taiwan interviewed 410 Taiwanese about their charitable and religious habits, among other things.
Christians gave the most, followed by Buddhists, then Folk religionists and finally those with no religion.
These were not large differences, and indeed they also found that giving is a "rational and planned behavior for both religious and nonreligious people". In other words, regardless of religion, what people give can be predicted on the basis of their income, age, and whether they felt that charities were open about how they spent their money.
There was one other, crucial, factor that affected charitable giving (the most important, in fact), and that was religious service attendance.They found that religious service attendance was the most important factor determining whether and how much people gave to charity - even for people with no religion.
However, there were big differences here between the religions. Buddhists who went to religious services were 2.4 times as likely to give to charity, and Christians were 2.2 times as likely. However, folk religionists and atheists who went to services were only 1.7 times as likely to give as those who did not attend.
When it came to the amount of giving, they found that this was significantly increased for Christians and Buddhists who went to religious services, but not for folk religionists and atheists.
What I take from this is that we can discount simplistic ideas that a watchful 'eye in the sky' encourages us to give more. After all, it doesn't seem to encourage folk religionists to give.
On the other hand, religious gatherings do seem to encourage charitable giving. That might be because people are actually encouraged to give on the spot, or it might be that giving to co-religionists is easier than random giving, or it might be something to do with religious teachings.
And with that last idea in mind, I find it fascinating that the effect of religious gatherings is largest for Christians and Buddhists. These are two very different religions - about the only thing they have in common is that they are both "World Religions".
What that means is that they are religions that ahve been adopted by people from a wide variety of different cultural backgrounds. As a result, they have special features that make them especially attractive to people who live in large, organised mega-societies. The kinds of societies in which dealing with strangers is commonplace.
Previous research has found that world religions are linked to the emergence of ideas of fairness to and sharing with strangers. This research adds to that, suggesting that it's only in the religious congregations of these world religions that charity gets a boost - it's not an intrinsic consequence of religion in general terms.
Su, H., Chou, T., & Osborne, P. (2011). When Financial Information Meets Religion: Charitable-giving Behavior in Taiwan Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 39 (8), 1009-1019 DOI: 10.2224/sbp.2011.39.8.1009
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
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Su, H., Chou, T., & Osborne, P. (2011) When Financial Information Meets Religion: Charitable-giving Behavior in Taiwan. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 39(8), 1009-1019. DOI: 10.2224/sbp.2011.39.8.1009
- November 26, 2011
- 03:25 PM
- 78 views
Atheists and rapists: you just can't trust 'em
Atheists are a pretty disliked bunch of people in North America. Most atheists will be aware of polling data that puts them at the bottom of the loathing pile.
Question is, what's driving that loathing? Will Gervais (University of British Columbia, Canada), who's previously published some fascinating research into this topic, is back with some more research (co-authored by another couple of names familiar to this blog: Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan).
Gervais' basic hypothesis is that prejudice against people who are not part of your group can be driven by different fears. For example, White Americans fear Black Americans, but view homosexual Americans with disgust. Gervais puts that together with another idea that many people have - that fear of supernatural punishment makes people more honest - to hypothesise that people dislike atheists specifically because they distrust them.
To test this, they took advantage of a clever psychological trick. Here is its original form (invented by Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman), as described recently in The Guardian:
Linda is a single 31-year-old, who is very bright and deeply concerned with issues of social justice. Which of the following statements is more probable: a) that Linda works in a bank, or b) that Linda works in a bank and is active in the feminist movement? The overwhelming majority of respondents go for b), even though that's logically impossible. (It can't be more likely that both things are true than that just one of them is.) This is the "conjunctive fallacy", whereby our judgment is warped by the persuasive combination of plausible details. We are much better storytellers than we are logicians.
In Gervais' twist on this classic, students at the University of British Columbia were told about Richard. Here's Richard's story:
Richard is 31 years old. On his way to work one day, he accidentally backed his car into a parked van. Because pedestrians were watching, he got out of his car. He pretended to write down his insurance information. He then tucked the blank note into the van’s window before getting back into his car and driving away.
Later the same day, Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody was looking, so he took all of the money out of the wallet. He then threw the wallet in a trash can.
So, is Richard most likely to be a teacher, or a teacher and a Christian? What about a teacher and Muslim. Or a rapist? Or an atheist?
Well, the chilling results are shown in the graphic. Atheism was up there with rapist as an intuitive fit to Richard's character. Atheists? Don't trust 'em!
Gervais and co ran another study, in which half the students were given a different version of Richard. This Richard is not untrustworthy, but he is disgusting (with horrible, flaky skin and snot all over him).
They found that that the disgusting Richard was not associated with atheism (or, indeed, with homosexuality - even though they found in a different study that homosexuals evoke disgust).
What this and some other studies they did showed is that the reason atheists are disliked is specifically because they are distrusted.
They also found that the degree of this distrust is governed by the strength of belief that supernatural monitoring helps to enforce good behaviour. Those who believe this are most likely to distrust atheists.
So although lack of familiarity with atheists increases distrust, it seems that the root of this distrust is not simple fear of the unknown, or even fear about moral corruption, but rather a genuine and seemingly deep-rooted fear that people will not behave well unless they have an invisible policeman watching over them.
Which probably says rather more about these Christians than it does about atheists!
Gervais, W., Shariff, A., & Norenzayan, A. (2011). Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101 (6), 1189-1206 DOI: 10.1037/a0025882
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Gervais, W., Shariff, A., & Norenzayan, A. (2011) Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(6), 1189-1206. DOI: 10.1037/a0025882
- November 21, 2011
- 04:27 PM
- 102 views
Religious diversity linked to unhappiness
Most people - certainly most atheists - would say that one of the biggest problems with religion is that conflict you get when religion divides people who share a particular part of the world. Of course, there are plenty of examples of conflicts where religion plays a role. However, there is surprisingly little statistical evidence either way.
Part of the problem is in trying to define religious diversity. The method most commonly used in sociological research was developed by Alberto Alesina, an economist at Harvard, and is called 'Fractionalisation'. This computers a number between 0 and 1, which is basically the odds that two people picked at random have the same religion (or race, or whatever else you are looking into).
The problem is that this kind of diversity may not be the diversity that's important here. If everyone had their own personal religion well then, society would indeed be diverse - but it probably wouldn't trigger mass conflict.
An alternative measure is something called 'Polarisation'. The more evenly a country is divided into two major groups, the higher its polarisation will be.
Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, a sociologist at Harvard, has used both of these measures to see how they interact with life satisfaction (Okulicz-Kozaryn last featured back on this blog in 2009, Happy worshippers, unhappy believers).
He found a small relationship between Fractionalisation and unhappiness, and a somewhat stronger relationship between Polarisation and unhappiness (it's this that is shown in the graphic).
The effect got stronger when he took into account other factors that can affect unhappiness, such as age, marital status, and national wealth.
In fact it got even stronger after accounting for other religious variables, such as whether people attend services (increases happiness), think that religion is important (also increases happiness) or believe in God (which decreases happiness).
Once you account for the positive and negative direct effects of religion on personal happiness, then it becomes clear that religious diversity is linked to increased unhappiness. And that's true whether you measure relisiong as Fractionalisation or as Polarisation.
It's a big effect, too, as Okulicz-Kozaryn says:
...if a country’s fractionalisation index goes up by 0.25, say from the level of 0.57 for Japan to 0.82 for the United States, then life satisfaction for everybody in a country would drop by 0.25 on scale from 1 to 10. This is a big effect – it is similar to shifting 5% of a country’s population from the mildly satisfied category (6) to most dissatisfied category (1). In case of Japan it would be six million people
He's careful to point out that this does not mean that religious diversity is a bad thing. For example, other factors that encourage diversity (openness to other cultures, freedom of speech and expression) could increase happiness.
But it does support the belief that many people have: that religion can often serve to reinforce and even create barriers and mutual suspicion.
Okulicz-Kozaryn, A. (2011). Does religious diversity make us unhappy? Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 1-14 DOI: 10.1080/13674676.2010.550277
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Okulicz-Kozaryn, A. (2011) Does religious diversity make us unhappy?. Mental Health, Religion , 1-14. DOI: 10.1080/13674676.2010.550277
- November 11, 2011
- 03:17 PM
- 97 views
In the West, religious nations are more sexist
This post is number 57 (I'm guessing!) in our series on "religious countries are...", in which I run a correlation between the numbers of religious people in a country and some other national characteristic.
This time it's the turn of sexism. You might expect that religious countries are more sexist, and you'd be right (with one caveats - but I'll deal with that later).
The data come from Mark Brandt, a sociologist at DePaul University in Chicago. I compared this with the number of people who say that religion is either important or very important in their lives (the data for this come from the World Values Survey).
First of all, let's look at the correlation with a straightforward measure of whether women can be leaders, which was assessed by asking the level of agreement with two questions: “On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do” and “On the whole, men make better business executives than women do.”
Overall, there's a fairly good correlation. But there is an exception, and that's Asian countries. There are only a few Asian countries in the sample, so it's hard to draw sweeping conclusions. But they are all very sexist, whether their citizens are religious (Thailand, Taiwan) or non-religious (China, Hong Kong, Japan)
So I took these countries out of the analysis - in fact, what's shown in the graphic is only those countries with a predominantly Western, Christian culture (i.e. North and South America, Europe, and Australia).
In these Westernised countries there's a strong, linear relationship between religion and sexism.
In fact, if you narrow the sample a bit more to look only at European countries the fit is even cleaner (I haven't shown this, but it's a remarkably straight line).
You get pretty much the same results when you look at Brandt's other measure (the UN's gender empowerment score). That's important because this is a measure not of attitudes, but of practical effects. Brandt's main point in his paper is that sexist attitudes translate directly into sexist practices.
And the same relationship is seen with religion. The more religious countries also have lower gender empowerment, meaning fewer seats for women in parliament, fewer women in economic decision making positions, and lower female share of income.
Now, the reason for this, it seems to me, is that religion tends to be tied to 'traditional values'. What this analysis suggests is that these traditional values can persist in the absence of religion, but that getting rid of traditional religion seems to be a prerequisite for ditching sexism!
Brandt, M. (2011). Sexism and Gender Inequality Across 57 Societies Psychological Science, 22 (11), 1413-1418 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611420445
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Brandt, M. (2011) Sexism and Gender Inequality Across 57 Societies. Psychological Science, 22(11), 1413-1418. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611420445
- November 7, 2011
- 04:28 PM
- 84 views
What kind of insecurity turns Europeans on to religion?
As Europe staggers towards financial apocalypse, one question that's almost certainly not in the minds of Merkel, Sarkozy, and Papandreou is what effect all the turmoil will have on people's religious beliefs. After all, there's been a bunch of research linking anxiety and insecurity to heightened religious beliefs, and earlier this year there was more evidence linking religion to economic insecurity.
But a lot of these studies have been pretty broad brush. They look at average conditions and average levels of religion among a wide basket of countries. Tim Immerzeel and Frank van Tubergen, at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, wanted to dig a little deeper (you might remember van Tubergen from an earlier study looking at income inequality and Church attendance).
They wanted to separate out the effects of an individual's insecurity from the effects of simply living in a country which is, well, less secure. They wanted to separate out the effects of what has happened in the past, from the effects of the current situation. And they also wanted to separate out financial insecurity from existential insecurity (e.g threats to your life).
They did this by looking at the European Social Survey, which interviewed people in 32 European countries and Israel in several rounds from 2002-2009 (actually, they could only use data from 25 countries because several countries [Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, and Ukraine] didn't ask all the questions).
They found some interesting things. Firstly, people who are in good health are less religious - although they are more likely to attend Church (perhaps because it's easier for them to get there). Widows and widowers are more religious (people who are divorced are the least religious, however).
People who have experienced war in the past, or the threat of terrorism now, are also more religious.
Financial security also matters, although here it gets a little bit complicated. People in stable employment now are less religious (as are educated people), suggesting that current financial security dampens enthusiasm for religion. However, people whose parents were unemployed when they were kids are actually less religious!
They also found a weak link between the strength of individual religious beliefs and the economic environment. In countries with a high unemployment rate, people were more likely to go to Church but were actually no more religious. Probably they go to Church as a kind of social insurance.
And, unlike what others have found, there was not really very much effect of social welfare spending on religion. No effect on religious beliefs, and only a marginal (negative) effect on Church attendance.
In fact, Immerzeel and van Tubergen found, in general, that the characteristics of the country didn't have all that much effect on an individual's religion - the individual's specific personal circumstances was at least as.
Now that might sound like a no-brainer, but in fact it differs from what other studies have suggested. In fact, it directly contradicts two studies from earlier this year. The first, from Ed Diener, showed that religion only improves well-being in tough societies. The second, from Frederick Solt and colleagues, found that in unequal countries both rich and poor are more religious.
Maybe that's because Immerzeel and van Tubergen only looked at European countries (and the wealthier ones at that - remember they had to drop some of the poorer ones out). So all the countries were pretty similar, in terms of social insurance and income inequality. Maybe they didn't find a difference simply because there weren't all that many differences to find.
So, not a reason to throw out the idea that general economic malaise can make people less religious, but food for thought.
Their take home is that both economic and existential insecurity can increase religion. More importantly, perhaps, current financial insecurity can indeed lead to stronger religious fervour. Coupled with fertility and immigration trends, this is yet another sign that Europe's secularisation may yet turn a corner.
Immerzeel, T., & van Tubergen, F. (2011). Religion as Reassurance? Testing the Insecurity Theory in 26 European Countries European Sociological Review DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcr072
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Immerzeel, T., & van Tubergen, F. (2011) Religion as Reassurance? Testing the Insecurity Theory in 26 European Countries. European Sociological Review. DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcr072
- November 1, 2011
- 06:05 PM
- 92 views
Deliver us from temptation (and take care of everything else, too)
According to some new research, your ideas about gods can significantly affect your approach to life. Lead researcher Kristin Laurin (at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada) and colleagues Aaron Kay and Grinne M. Fitzsimons (Duke University) ran a series of priming studies, in which the subjects had to form sentences from scrambled sets of words or read a passage about god as part of a bigger study (so they didn't cotton on to the fact that they were being primed). By carefully choosing the words, the researchers could subliminally prime the subjects (all undergraduate students) with different ideas about God.
What they were interested to know was whether reminding people about God can make people less interested in actively pursuing goals (perhaps because they think that God will take care of everything for them) or better able to resist temptation (perhaps because they think God is watching them and will frown upon moral weaknesses!). What they found was that both things can happen, although which effect you see depends upon the type of God that you prime.
So, for example, when they primed the students with a passage describing a controlling God who “understands what it is like to be in our shoes”, they found that the students subsequently expressed less interest in signing up to additional study to attain career goals (such as becoming a lawyer, nurse or stockbroker). However, other students primed with the same god concept declared that they were more able to resist the temptation to hang out and have fun with their friends on an evening when they should be studying for an important exam that was a required step in attaining that career.
In other words, if you pump up people's idea of god as controlling, then they feel more able to resist temptation, but less inclined to work hard to achieve their goals!
As you can see in the graph, other ideas about god had intermediate effects, compared with the control condition in which the student's weren't primed with any god concept at all.
In other studies, they dug into other facets of this relationship. They found that students primed with the idea of god valued achieving just as much, it's just that they were less inclined to put the effort in.
Participants who had read a short passage about God subsequently ate fewer cookies than did those who had read a control passage about a topic unrelated to God. Resistance to temptation was particularly strengthened in students who read passages describing God's omniscience.
The researchers conclude that reminders of God can influence real world goals in both positive and negative ways. What the overall effect will be will depend on what exactly the task in hand is - whether it requires self control or the drive to achieve. It also, they say, depends on what kind of God you have in mind:
If, on the one hand, a person is reminded of God, and this activates the representation of an omnipotent, but not omniscient, external force (whether as a result of features of the reminder itself or as a result of how the person represents God), the net influence on the person’s self-regulation might be negative. If, on the other hand, a person is reminded of God, and this activates the representation of an omniscient, but not omnipotent, external force (whether as a result of features of the reminder itself or as a result of how the person represents God), the net influence on the person’s self-regulation might be positive.
Laurin, K., Kay, A., & Fitzsimons, G. (2011). Divergent effects of activating thoughts of god on self-regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0025971
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Laurin, K., Kay, A., & Fitzsimons, G. (2011) Divergent effects of activating thoughts of god on self-regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/a0025971
- October 28, 2011
- 05:43 PM
- 101 views
Europe's religious future
Eric Kaufmann is a demographer and author of the book "Shall the religious inherit the earth?" Back in 2009 he made some demographic projections for the US and concluded that, by 2050, immigration of religious people and their higher fertility will turn back the tide of secularisation (see Secularisation in the US will be swamped by religious fertility and immigration)
Now Kaufmann has taken a look at Europe. That's a bit more of a challenge because Europe is such a patchwork, so good, comprehensive data are not so available.
He finds, as expected, that religion has declined in Europe. It began after WWII in Northern Europe, but only really got underway in Catholic countries in recent decades.
However, in the Protestant countries of Northern Europe, secularisation seems to have bottomed out at around 5% regular Church attenders and 40-50% who consider themselves to be religious (somewhat higher numbers believe in God).
But how to project the future? Well, one aspect is fertility. The religious have higher lifetime birth rates, but on the other hand the young are much more likely to be non-religious - and so have greater potential for begetting.
Then too you have to take into account switching into and out of religion. And here's where things get interesting. It turns out that Muslims have the highest fertility rates, and also are the most resistant to switching out.
Kaufmann focussed on Austria and Switzerland, two countries with the best data. Here, the non-religious have fertility rates of around 1, Protestants around 1.3, Catholics around 1.4, and Muslims around 2.4.
Plug this into the model and you get what's shown in the graph = which shows muslims and non-affiliated in Switzerland and Austria under two scenarios.
Under the 'expected' model (which assumes current rates of switching out of religion are maintained), growth of the non-affililiated slows to zero by 2050.
Under the 'low decline' model (which assumes, based on the experiences of Northern European Countries, that the rate of switching out will slow to zero), the non-affiliated will actually be in decline as a percent of the population by 2050.
Now, the future is notoriously difficult to predict, and Kaufman lays out some of the many factors that could change these projections:
Major geopolitical changes could ease tension between Muslims and other Europeans; liberalizing theological shifts could pave the way for an increase in the rate of Muslim apostasy. Immigration could become ethnically controlled, as in Japan or Singapore, due to a surge of ethnic nationalism, thereby slowing the demographic growth of religion. A new vogue for family life might narrow the fertility gap between the secular and the religious. These changes would set European religious decline back on its formerly robust course.
One factor that interests me is the idea that a "new vogue for family life might narrow the fertility gap between the secular and the religious". Because one of the problems with these kinds of analyses is that the religious groups examined are far from homogenous.
So it is clear that some Protestant sects have more children than others. In the same way, some atheists have more children than others. Presumably those atheists who are family oriented will pass on that mindset to their children - which could influence future birth rates.
Another recent study, by Casey Borch and colleagues at the University of Alabama, helps to flesh out the picture a little. They split out mainline Protestants and conservative Protestants (aka Fundamentalists).
That's important, because the fertility rates of the mainline Protestants are only a little higher than those of the non-religious. Conservative Protestants have a much higher fertility rate - the graph shows the trends of fertility over time for the three main religious groups in the USA.
What's interesting is that, relative to Catholics, the fertility rates of both mainline and conservative Protestants seem to be dropping very slightly. However, somewhat bigger drops are seen among the non-religious and those of 'other religions'. So the fertility gap seems to be growing.
Will we see something similar in Europe? It's hard to say. What is known is that the very low rates of fertility seen in the 1990s seem to have been reversed in recent, particularly in Northern Europe. That's because many couples chose to delay parenthood. Yet another complicating factor when trying to figure out fertility trends!
Kaufmann, E., Goujon, A., & Skirbekk, V. (2011). The End of Secularization in Europe?: A Socio-Demographic Perspective Sociology of Religion DOI: 10.1093/socrel/srr033
Borch, C., West, M., & Gauchat, G. (2011). Go Forth and Multiply: Revisiting Religion and Fertility in the United States, 1984-2008 Religions, 2 (4), 469-484 DOI: 10.3390/rel2040469
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Kaufmann, E., Goujon, A., & Skirbekk, V. (2011) The End of Secularization in Europe?: A Socio-Demographic Perspective. Sociology of Religion. DOI: 10.1093/socrel/srr033
Borch, C., West, M., & Gauchat, G. (2011) Go Forth and Multiply: Revisiting Religion and Fertility in the United States, 1984-2008. Religions, 2(4), 469-484. DOI: 10.3390/rel2040469
- October 17, 2011
- 05:00 PM
- 74 views
In Toronto, Christian students are most likely to have unprotected sex
So, Christians aren't supposed to have sex before marriage (well depending on the variant of God they follow, of course). Just to be sure of it, they have an invisible policeman in the sky watching them at all times to make sure they don't deviate. On the other hand, Christian parents aren't so hot on teaching safe sex. Mash that up with university, when kids get let off the leash, and what happens? Well Trevor Hart at Ryerson University and a bunch of psychologists from the University of Toronto set out to find out.
Well, to be precise, what they really wanted to do was to separate out ethnicity and religion. The two are quite closely linked, especially in a multi-cultural place like Toronto. It's known that different ethnicities vary in their attitudes to sex, but perhaps it's really religion that's the deciding factor?
So anyway let's dig into the data. They quizzed 666 university students, most of them (nearly 80%) women, about their love lives. As you might expect, the atheists and agnostics were the most sexually active, followed by Christians and Jews, with Muslims and 'Eastern religions' (they didn't have many Buddhists, Hindus or Sikhs, so they lumped them all in together.
As far as unprotected sex (i.e. without a condom) goes, well it showed roughly the same pattern - except that the non-religious students ranked about the same as Christians and Jews.
However, all that doesn't take into account ethnicity, or indeed other factors like whether the students were in a relationship (and whether it was long term), whether they knew about HIV and that condoms reduce transmission. Throwing all this into the analysis gave some clear results.
Firstly, ethnicity isn't important. Taking all the other factors into account, Whites, Blacks, Asians, and Middle Easterns are all just as likely to have unprotected sex.
What did matter was religion. Christianity, and especially Catholicism, was the biggest risk factor. Atheism too, but to a much lesser extent. Jews, Muslims and 'Eastern religions' were all similarly safe.
Part of the reason for this is that Muslim students and those of Eastern religions just don't really fornicate much. When they restricted the analysis just to those students who were sexually active, then they found that Christians were about twice as likely as the non-religious to have unprotected sex.
So what this study shows is that religion does actually seem to stop kids from having unprotected sex by scaring them off sex altogether - but only for Eastern religions and for Muslims.
Christian kids are trapped, however. They live and participate in a liberal, permissive society, but their upbringing doesn't prepare them for it. As a result, they are placed at high risk for unsafe sex.
James, C., Hart, T., Roberts, K., Ghai, A., Petrovic, B., & Lima, M. (2010). Religion versus ethnicity as predictors of unprotected vaginal intercourse among young adults Sexual Health DOI: 10.1071/SH09119
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James, C., Hart, T., Roberts, K., Ghai, A., Petrovic, B., & Lima, M. (2010) Religion versus ethnicity as predictors of unprotected vaginal intercourse among young adults. Sexual Health. DOI: 10.1071/SH09119
- August 24, 2011
- 05:44 PM
- 416 views
Banish your worries by surrendering to God
You may have seen, earlier this month, one of several news reports about how belief in God is great for reducing worries (e.g. here). Well no, that's not really what the study found - the study is actually a bit more precisely focussed than that and a bit more interesting for it.
The researchers, lead by David Rosmarin at Harvard Medical School, were interested in the idea that the Middle-Eastern monotheisms place a great deal of focus on trusting God. Yet many believers don't trust their God - for whatever reason, they've "come to believe that the Divine is intentionally ignorant or malevolent." Indeed, some people seem to hold both beliefs about God simultaneously.
Now, believers who mistrust their God also tend to be more depressed, anxious and worried. Although that might sound unsurprising, in fact the reasons for this aren't altogether clear.
Rosmarin thought that trusting God might help people to cope better with uncertainty. So, first off they surveyed a bunch of mostly very-devout believers - around 100 Christians and 200 Jews. He asked them about their trust in God, how freaked out they were by uncertainty, and how worried they were.
By carefully analysing the results they were able to show that the data fitted the model, and that it was unlikely that the cause and effect ran in the backwards direction. That supports the idea that distrust in God leads to fear of uncertainty, which in turn makes you worried.
So far so good. The next step was to see if increasing trust in God could decrease fear of uncertainty and reduce worry.
So they took a group of 39 religious, but stressed and worried, Jews, and ran them through a two-week programme of guidance, stories, visualisation exercises and prayer, all designed to increase their trust in God. The programme was effective - trust in God went up, distrust went down, and as a result the participants were more tolerant of uncertainty and less worried.
So it does indeed seem that, for stressed-out religious Judaeo-Christians, getting them to trust God makes them better able to cope with uncertainty. Another recent study found that Appalachian students who surrender to God are less stressed.
Crucially, however, it only applies to people who already believe in God. If you do, then changing your views about God can change your outlook.
But when you think about it, really all that's happening here is that you are making these people fatalistic. Maybe you could create the same effect in non-believers by encouraging them to be fatalistic. I know that when I'm stressed, taking a fatalistic outlook helps a lot!
And a final thought to consider. Fatalism might make you less anxious about uncertainty, but that can have unintended knock-on effects too. It might lead to a certain lack of realism about your own inevitable death, for example. And who knows what else!
Rosmarin, D., Pirutinsky, S., Auerbach, R., Björgvinsson, T., Bigda-Peyton, J., Andersson, G., Pargament, K., & Krumrei, E. (2011). Incorporating spiritual beliefs into a cognitive model of worry Journal of Clinical Psychology, 67 (7), 691-700 DOI: 10.1002/jclp.20798
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Rosmarin, D., Pirutinsky, S., Auerbach, R., Björgvinsson, T., Bigda-Peyton, J., Andersson, G., Pargament, K., & Krumrei, E. (2011) Incorporating spiritual beliefs into a cognitive model of worry. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 67(7), 691-700. DOI: 10.1002/jclp.20798
- August 20, 2011
- 05:37 PM
- 422 views
If religion makes you happy, why are people turning away from it?
Every now and then a study comes along that cuts with laser-like precision into one or two of the murky questions that haunt the sociology of religion. Just such a study has recently been done by Ed Diener, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and colleagues (earlier this year Diener published another great study on happiness and inequality in the USA).
What Diener et al wanted to know is simply this: why, if religion is supposed to make you happy, are people in the West leaving it in droves? It's a simple and important question, but it's one that's actually really tough to answer - which is why no-one's tried before. They cram an awful lot into this one paper, so I'm only going to give the headline results. They're quite fascinating enough.
They began by confirming that people in difficult social circumstances are indeed more likely to be religious. They showed this was the case by looking at states in the USA, and also by using the massive Gallup World Poll of over 455,000 people. Although similar things have been shown before, their approach was pretty nice because they included things like whether people feel safe at night, or whether they get enough to eat, as well as more standard things like education, income and life expectancy.
So their next question was: what matters most? Is it your own personal circumstances that dictate how religious you are, or is it simply living in a society where a lot of people are doing badly - even if you personally are doing OK?
Again, they found pretty much the same things in both US States and among nations. Although your own personal circumstances do affect your beliefs a little, what's far more important is the society you live in. In difficult societies everyone - rich and poor alike - are more religious. That's reminiscent of a study I blogged a couple of weeks ago, showing that the inequality actually increases the religiosity of the rich.
But does religion actually make people happier? Well, on average it does. After controlling for circumstances, religious people have better 'well-being' (covering positive and negative feelings, and overall life evaluation). But dig a little, and the picture is more complicated.
Because it turns out the religion only improves well-being in tough societies - places like Mississippi or Alabama in the USA,or Egypt and Bangladesh in a global scale.
You can get a feel for this in the figure below. Take the panel on the left. This shows how people rated their positive emotions. The two bars furthest left shows how religious (blue) and non-religious (green) rated their positive emotions in the best 25% of nations - places like Sweden, Japan and France. You can see that religion has no effect in these well-off nations. The next pair of columns show the result for the bottom 25% of nations. Here you can see that the religious have more positive emotions.
Looking at negative emotions, you can see that in the best nations, the non-religious actually have fewer negative emotions than the religious! In worse nations, the non-religious have more negative emotions.
It also matters whether you live in a religious country. In highly religious countries, the non-religious tend to be unhappy. But in least religious countries, the non-religious actually have fewer negative emotions than the religious!
Diener and co. also went on to examine why people in poor societies benefit from religion. Using a sophisticated model that took into account both their person and societal circumstances, they were able to show that these people felt they had more social support and more respect.
In good societies, there was no advantage to being religious - both religious and non-religious reported feeling respected and having high levels of social support, and as a result both had high levels of happiness and well-being.
They also showed that all religions seemed to be pretty much alike. Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam all had a similar relationship with happiness and well being - suggesting that religion, at least in this respect, is a true universal.
So, to sum all this up. Religion doesn't necessarily lead to happiness. In countries where there are relatively few religious people, and in which living conditions are generally good, religion doesn't improve well being and religious people may actually be less happy.
And what makes people religious is not their direct experience, but rather the society that they live in. As a result, societies tend to be relatively homogeneous when it comes to religion. Some societies (and these tend to be the tough ones) are religious, and if you're not religious then you will be unhappy.
Some societies (and these tend to be the better places to live) are not religious, and there is no happiness advantage to being religious. As a result, people don't bother with it.
And this I think really puts a great perspective on this old question. Now the next question is: what does this all mean for those theorists who like to tell us that religion is innate to the human condition?
Diener, E., Tay, L., & Myers, D. (2011). The religion paradox: If religion makes people happy, why are so many dropping out? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0024402
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Diener, E., Tay, L., & Myers, D. (2011) The religion paradox: If religion makes people happy, why are so many dropping out?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/a0024402
- August 16, 2011
- 04:15 PM
- 419 views
Religious differences and murder
Most research into religion looks at how it influences attitudes towards co-religionists. But the flip side to religion is that it can also serve as a foundation for social divisions, in a similar way to ethnic and language barriers.
You might think this could increase social tensions, but new research by Don Soo Chon, at Auburn University at Montgomery, Alabama, suggests that this may not be the case. He looked at how the level of ethnic, linguistic, and religious fragmentation relates to homicide rates in around 130 nations worldwide
He found that countries with a more diverse religious landscape did not, in fact have a higher homicide rate. However those with ethnic and linguistic divisions did.
He ran some simple models which adjusted for GDP and income inequality (low GDP and high inequality are both strongly linked to higher homicide rates), but this didn't change the basic findings.
So Chon's analysis suggests that ethnic and language barriers can increase murder rates, but religious differences do not. However, there are a few caveats.
The first is that we're looking at individual homicides here, not full-on wars or inter-communal violence. What's more, it could be argued that religious divisions exacerbate tensions mainly when they're aligned with ethnic and linguistic fault lines - they crystallise and fortify existing divisions.
It's also likely that countries with a diverse religious landscape actually have fewer religious tensions than countries that are dominated by two competing religions. As Chon says:
The probability of conflicts among different religious groups may be low when a democratic society guarantees free exercise of religion for all denominations, like in many Western countries. Instead, religious conflicts are likely to occur when two dominating religions in a country, such as Christianity and Islam, compete for dominance. However, the study does not test the competition between two dominating religious groups in a country.
And lastly, there's a fundamental problem with the data that Chon uses to measure religious diversity. It's the well-known (and widely used) 'fractionalization index' developed in 2003 by the Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, and one of the problems with it is that it takes no account of the fact that religions come in groups. So the different flavours of Protestantism are regarded as different religions in their own right - and just as different from each other as they are from, say, Hinduism and Islam.
So while this is study is a useful take on the problem which suggests that religion divisions don't increase social stress in the same way that ethnic and linguistic divisions do, there's still a lot more work needed to tease these issues out.
Chon, D. (2011). The Impact of Population Heterogeneity and Income Inequality on Homicide Rates: A Cross-National Assessment International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology DOI: 10.1177/0306624X11414813
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Chon, D. (2011) The Impact of Population Heterogeneity and Income Inequality on Homicide Rates: A Cross-National Assessment. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. DOI: 10.1177/0306624X11414813
- August 7, 2011
- 05:05 PM
- 351 views
Do the rich use religion to keep the poor in their place?
In the previous post, I took a look at the fairly substantial weight of evidence linking religion to inequality, specifically income inequality, with religion. The most unequal countries also tend to be the most religious, even when you take into account a variety of other factors.
Why should this be? There are a number of theories. One is that unequal societies also tend to have a lot of other problems, and the stresses that these cause may turn people to religion.
Frederick Solt and colleagues from Southern Illinois University wanted to test an alternative theory - that the rich and powerful use religion as a tool for social control to keep the poor in their place. They call this the 'Relative Power' theory. Not a new idea, of course, but they came up with a couple of novel ways to test it.
Firstly they looked at data from the World Values Survey, which allowed them to examine how religiosity varied with wealth in different countries.
What they found (after adjusting for a bunch of other factors) was that, in the most unequal countries, both the rich and the poor were more likely to be religious. In fact, and rather remarkably, inequality seemed to have a bigger effect on the rich than on the poor.
So, for critical measures like whether a person considers themselves to be religious, or whether they believe in an afterlife, the rich in equal countries are less religious than the poor - as you would expect.
But in highly unequal countries the rich are actually more religious than the poor!
Then they went on to look at how religion, overall wealth, and inequality have changed in the USA since the mid 1950s. The USA is one of the few countries in the world with enough data to do this, but even so the religion data they had to use were a bit cobbled-together. Still, they used a sophisticated statistical tool called vector autoregression, which allows you to see how the variables seem to influence each other over time without making any underlying assumptions about cause and effect. It can even help uncover whether the relationship is circular.
Now, the USA over the past 50 years has been characterised by increasing wealth, increasing inequality, and decreasing religion. What Solt found was that a rise in inequality one year tended to lead to a increase in religion the next. This was offset by the fact that rising wealth tended to lead to less religion.
However, the opposite did not happen. Changes in religion did not have any effect on later levels of either inequality or wealth.
Solt and colleagues interpret this as more evidence for their 'Relative Power' theory. They point out that high levels of inequality in a democracy are difficult to understand using ideas based on rational self interest (the so-called 'median-voter' models of democracy) and conclude that:
...many wealthy individuals, rather than simply allowing redistribution to be decided through the democratic process as such median-voter models assume, respond to higher levels of inequality by adopting religious beliefs and spreading them among their poorer fellow citizens. Religion then works to discourage interest in mere material well-being in favor of eternal spiritual rewards, preserving the privileges of the rich and allowing unequal conditions to continue.
Strong stuff, but I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced. After all, doesn't the fact that changes in income inequality precede changes in religion suggest that it's the stress and anxiety that are causing religion - rather than religion causing inequality?
But the increased religiosity among the rich certainly is food for thought. Even that is not proof, however. As the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in their book The Spirit Level, in highly unequal societies everyone suffers - rich as well as poor.
Still this is the first really solid, empirical evidence that the rich use religion as a tool to keep the poor in their place. Tea Party, anyone?
Solt, F., Habel, P., & Grant, J. (2011). Economic Inequality, Relative Power, and Religiosity* Social Science Quarterly, 92 (2), 447-465 DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6237.2011.00777.x
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Solt, F., Habel, P., & Grant, J. (2011) Economic Inequality, Relative Power, and Religiosity*. Social Science Quarterly, 92(2), 447-465. DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6237.2011.00777.x
- August 3, 2011
- 04:49 PM
- 408 views
Well that settles it: income inequality really does go hand in hand with religion
Long-time readers of this blog will know that the link between inequality and religion has a particular fascination for me. In fact, the blog started while I was doing background research into a paper I wrote in 2009, on the link between income inequality and religion in countries around the world.
The idea was first put forward in rough form in an earlier book by Pippa Norris and Ronald Ingelhart. My paper took that a modest step further, by showing that income inequality really did seem to be an independent factor helping to explain why people in some countries pray more often than in others.
But you should always treat any particular piece of research with a healthy pinch of salt. All too often, promising findings tend to evaporate on closer examination. You can only be confident that the effect is real if it holds up when you kick the tyres a bit and test out the hypothesis in different ways.
Which is why it was good to see another paper, later in 2009, which used different (more sophisticated) statistical tools to showed a link between inequality and Church attendance. That was good corroboration, because it used a different set of data and compared it with a different aspect of religion.
And now, a new paper by Nigel Barber has, to my mind, sealed the deal. One of the challenges in this kind of research comes in choosing the data. For example, you would like to look at as big a set of countries as you possibly can. The problem is that, as you move away from the wealthy democracies, the quality of the data becomes increasingly patchy.
You could use a small set of high quality data - but then the problem is that you won't get a good sample of poorer countries. Or you could throw your net wide, and run the risk of including some dodgy data.
Ideally, you should do both, and Barber's paper is the first to take the latter approach. He uses data on the prevalence of atheists around the world originally put together by Phil Zuckerman, who compiled it using a mixed bag of surveys and opinion polls. Not the most robust dataset, but it did mean that Barber could look at religion across a whopping 137 countries, representing every part of the globe.
The second challenge comes in figuring out whether the correlation is real, or just a coincidence due to some third factor. For example, the numbers of cars and the numbers of televisions in a country is quite well correlated - but not because cars 'cause' televisions. In fact, they're both a product of a third factor - wealth.
So you need to include other factors in your analysis that could reasonably also explain differences in religion between countries. Not too many though! Simply throwing variables into the pot will create spurious results. You have to choose your variables carefully, based on sound reasoning.
Barber choose to include a set of variables that were mostly different to those that have been used before. That's useful because it effectively means looking at the problem from a fresh perspective. More kicking of the tyres.
[Geek note: Jerry Coyne wrote a review of this paper, but complained that it was a flawed study because it didn't use multiple regression. He must've misread Table 2 in the paper, because that's where the multiple regression results are presented - complete with estimates of variance inflation to check that there were no issues of multicollinearity]
So, Barber found that countries with more Muslims, a larger agricultural workforce, and more infectious diseases had fewer atheists. And countries that were once communist, had more education, and had higher taxation had more atheists.
But even after taking all this into account, those countries with higher income inequality still had fewer atheists.
That's a remarkable result, especially when you consider that one of the main ways to reduce income inequality and its bad effects is to increase taxes. So those countries that raise taxes without fixing incoming inequality are still going to be more religious.
I think now we really can be pretty confident that income inequality is in itself strongly and directly related to religion. But the question is why, and how? Which way does the effect run? Does more income inequality mean more religion? Or is it that religion increases income inequality?
Well, long-time readers of this blog will also know that's a big question. But there's another new paper out that digs into this issue in a really clever way. But that's the topic for the next post!
Barber, N. (2011). A Cross-National Test of the Uncertainty Hypothesis of Religious Belief Cross-Cultural Research, 45 (3), 318-333 DOI: 10.1177/1069397111402465
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Barber, N. (2011) A Cross-National Test of the Uncertainty Hypothesis of Religious Belief. Cross-Cultural Research, 45(3), 318-333. DOI: 10.1177/1069397111402465
- July 25, 2011
- 05:10 PM
- 432 views
Why do more children die when Pentecostals are around?
The US has a persistently high infant mortality rate when compared with other wealthy nations. The reasons for this a partly understood - poverty is a major risk factor for childhood death, And it's believed that the high levels of income and racial stratification could be to blame. Problems with health are infrastructure are also thought to contribute.
But could culture be partly to blame? Quite possibly, and one way to find out is to see whether the dominant culture in a region is linked to higher infant mortality. In the USA, religious denomination is an important facet of culture (even better, it's easier to quantify than most other cultural traits).
So John Bartowski, of the University of San Antonio, and colleagues, looked at the number of churches of different denominations in 1,900 counties of the USA and compared this with the number of infant deaths as recorded by the Kids Count programme.
So this was a study of whether the numbers of different kinds of Christians in a given area affected infant mortality, rather than a study of whether individual families with particular beliefs have higher or lower mortality.
It's an ecological study, in other words, looking at the dominant culture of a region. Similar to other recent studies on vaccination rates and trust. Of course, different denominations are present in poor areas compared with wealthy ones so Bartowski statistically controlled for region, black ethnicity, and poverty.
Batowski found that, in general, the more Catholic churches there were in an are the lower infant mortality was. Conversely, more Protestant churches meant higher infant mortality.
But this broad brush conceals a lot of detail. And the beauty of such a rich dataset was that Bartowksi could drill down to look at Protestant denominations in detail.
When he did that, he found that fundamentalist and evangelical churches actually were linked to lower infant mortality. It was mainline Protestant and in particular Pentecostal churches that were linked to higher mortality.
Bartowski speculates that the protective effect of Catholicism "is best explained by the emphasis that Catholicism places on creating a vibrant civic infrastructure, particularly one focused on promoting population health and well-being", while the "pronatalist tendencies of fundamentalism and evangelicalism (advocacy for children and the unborn) contribute to significantly lower infant mortality rates".
And Pentecostals? Well, he suspects that "Pentecostal suspicion of conventional medicine and its reliance instead on faith healing" accounts for the higher infant mortality.
But he does also acknowledge that this study can only be taken as preliminary. What, for example to make of the finding that mainline Protestants are linked to higher infant mortality? Is this a spurious result, perhaps as a result of some other unknown factor? Or is there something deeper going on?
Bartkowski, J., Xu, X., & Garcia, G. (2011). Religion and Infant Mortality in the U.S.: A Preliminary Study of Denominational Variations Religions, 2 (3), 264-276 DOI: 10.3390/rel2030264
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
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Bartkowski, J., Xu, X., & Garcia, G. (2011) Religion and Infant Mortality in the U.S.: A Preliminary Study of Denominational Variations. Religions, 2(3), 264-276. DOI: 10.3390/rel2030264
- July 21, 2011
- 03:55 PM
- 428 views
We condemn more when we think we're being watched
In a nice new study, Pierrick Bourrat (at the University of Sydney) and colleagues have shown that people are more likely to judge others severely when they are given even subtle hints of being watched.
The set-up was simple. The subjects (recruited from the Campus Universitaire de Jussieu in Paris) had to read a tale of a minor misdeed - finding a wallet in the street and keeping the cash, or falsifying a resume - and then judge how morally wrong it was.
The twist was that half the subjects had a picture of flowers on their paper, while the other half had a small picture of a pair of eyes peering at them (the same ones as are peering at you right now).
For both scenarios, the subjects exposed to the eyes were more judgemental. It seems that when we feel we're being watched, we're more likely to say that we're condemning others. Now, this has all sorts of interesting implications not related to religion - which I'm not going to talk about! You can read the paper if you're interested (it's free, and quite short - link below).
But from the perspective of this blog, it's interesting that religious people are also more likely to condemn others. For example, the religious in the USA are more likely to support the death penalty. And religious Swiss students were more likely to punish wrongdoers after subliminal religious prompting.
So could it be that the tendency for the religious to be more condemnatory is a by-product of their sense that they are being watched? And if that's so, what are the implications?
Bourra P, Baumard N, & McKay R (2011). Surveillance Cues Enhance Moral Condemnation Evolutionary Psychology, 9 (2), 192-199
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
... Read more »
Bourra P, Baumard N, & McKay R. (2011) Surveillance Cues Enhance Moral Condemnation. Evolutionary Psychology, 9(2), 192-199. info:/
- July 17, 2011
- 04:30 PM
- 395 views
Risk averse Taiwanese are also more religious
The infamous 'Pascal's Wager' is still often trotted out as a supposedly rational basis for believing in god. While the flaws in that one are well known, it is still commonly believed that risk-averse people are more likely to be religious. Better to go to Church than run the risk of being fried in the hereafter, the supposition goes.
Actually, evidence that risk-averse people are more religious is weaker than you might suppose. What's more, there's no reason to think that it applies in the world outside of the big three monotheisms. The gods of most Eastern religions are pretty disinterested in other worldly punishment.
In fact, Eric Liu at Baylor University has shown that risk averse Taiwanese are no more likely to be affiliated with a religion.
Intriguingly, he did find that the risk averse were more likely to participate in religious activities - and that went for Buddhism, Taoism, Chinese popular cults and Yiguan Dao (which is a modern, syncretic religion), as well as Christianity.
Liu speculates that this is because there is some risk inherent in not believing in Eastern religions. In Buddhism, failure to follow the 8-fold way means getting stuck in an endless cycle of rebirth. And Confucian and Taoist teachings promise some pretty nasty after-death punishments for those who do not follow a moral code - including those who do not pray or perform the right rituals:
Upon arrival, according to specific sentences, the sinners might be burned in flames, hunted and butchered, or boiled in oil or water. Their backs might be plowed, their tongues torn out with hot iron pincers, or their skin stripped off. They might find themselves in burning hot iron beds, have molten metal poured down their throats, or face other kinds of cruel punishment (Goodrich 1981).
So it's wrong to say that non-belief in these Eastern religions is risk-free. Yet I am not convinced that what we're seeing hear is fear of afterlife punishments.
To me it seems more likely that the risk these people are trying to avert is the very real risk present in this world, rather than potential risks in the next.
That would match with some other research showing that Europeans who believe in the afterlife actually have a lower work ethic. It seems that the religious work ethic in Europe is more to do with securing rewards in this life rather than the next.
We know that people in risky environments tend to be more religious, and I suspect that by participating in religious ceremonies these individuals are hoping that the gods will improve their fortune. What's more, we know that they can expect to get support in their hour of need from their co-religionists - and so there is a double benefit from going to religious services!
Liu, E. (2010). Are Risk-Taking Persons Less Religious? Risk Preference, Religious Affiliation, and Religious Participation in Taiwan Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49 (1), 172-178 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01499.x
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
... Read more »
Liu, E. (2010) Are Risk-Taking Persons Less Religious? Risk Preference, Religious Affiliation, and Religious Participation in Taiwan. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49(1), 172-178. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01499.x
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