Epiphenom

Countries with a state religion also have fewer political and civil freedoms

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 13 May 2013 21:55:00 +0000

It's fairly common for a national government to explicitly favour one particular religion or sect. This support can take many forms - financial, political, or legal - but the common factor is that the dominant religion gets a helping hand from the state.

Now it probably wouldn't be too much of a surprise to learn that states inclined to interfere in religious expression are also more likely to place a controlling hand on political and civic freedoms, However, proving that relationship is not so straightforward.

Just defining "State Religion" is tricky enough. Several teams have created scorecards for country freedoms, but they disagree over the number of countries that have a state religion (somewhere between 48 and 75).

Even so, Steven Kettell at the University of Warwick in the UK, has pored over these statistics and come up with some interesting findings.

First off, he confirmed that countries with a state religion really do have substantially lower than average levels of political rights and civil liberties. This was chiefly down to countries with a Muslim majority, which are disproportionately likely to have fewer freedoms and also a state religion.

They also have higher levels of "social regulation" of religion - meaning that there are informal, unofficial barrier confronting other religions and favouring the state religion. They also have higher levels of religious persecution.

However, the striking thing was that, whereas general social and political freedoms were higher in nations with greater human development (a mix of wealth, health and education), there was no relationship between human development and the presence or absence of a state religion. There was also no connection to religious diversity or religiosity in general.

That lead Kettell to conclude that:

...the lower levels of freedom found in countries with state religions may have less to do with their particular socio-cultural conditions, and more to do with the institutional mechanics of state religions themselves. Given that the entire point and purpose of a state religion is to support the promotion of one particular religious perspective over other world-views, and given that this objective invariably involves the provision of various financial, legal and political privileges, it is not hard to see how these dynamics can lead to the curtailing of political and religious freedoms.

So, state religion and freedom: cause or effect?

The question matters, because religious protectionism is on the rise in the West. If such protectionism actually leads to other infringements of civil liberties, we could be in for a rough time.

Kettell, S. (2013). State Religion and Freedom: A Comparative Analysis Politics and Religion, 1-32 DOI: 10.1017/S1755048312000600

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Religion doesn't seem to protect against depression.

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 05 May 2013 20:54:00 +0000

In most countries, religious people tend to be happier and less depressed, and it's often suggested that religion somehow provides a happiness boost and protects against depression.

Maybe, so the thought process goes, religious belief alone is enough to perk people up, but even if it doesn't then participating in religious gatherings, and the social support that goes with it - well surely that's got to help.

It's an attractive idea, but the problem is that it's really difficult to unpick cause and effect. Maybe it's simply that depressed people stop being religious. That's certainly what a study that came out last year suggested.

About the only way to tease this out is to follow people over time, and see who gets depressed and who doesn't. That's what Michael King (University College London) and colleagues have done in a recent international study.

They interviewed 8318 patients without depression attending doctor's surgeries in the Chile, Estonia, The Netherlands, Portugal, UK, Spain, and Slovenia. Then they interviewed them again 6 and 12 months later (well, most of them - some, especially the younger and less educated, didn't turn up to later interviews).

They found that significantly more of the participants who actively practised religion (10.3%) or had a spiritual world view (10.5%) experienced an episode of major depression over those 12 months compared with those who had a secular outlook (7%).

Once they'd adjusted for differences in the characteristics of the people in the depressed and non-depressed groups (age, sex, education, employment, social support, past history of depression and country), only 'spiritual world view' (and not active religious participation) remained a significant predictor of future depression. And the country where this effect was strongest was the UK.

Among those who said they were spiritual or religious at baseline, there was a clear relationship between the strength of belief and the risk of depression. That's shown in the figure - while the risk of depression for those who were only weakly religious was similar to the non-believers (at 7.4%), for the strong believers the risk rose to 12.5%.

They concluded that:

Although our main finding of an association between religious life understanding and onset of depression varied by country, we found no evidence that spirituality may protect people, and only weak evidence that a religious life view was possibly protective in two countries (Slovenia and The Netherlands). Finally, there was no moderating effect of religious and spiritual understanding of life on the impact of life events on onset of major depression.

So religion doesn't seem to protect people from depression, and spirituality in the absence of religious affiliation seems to be a positive risk factor - especially in the UK.

That chimes with other studies (including a recent one by King himself [see references below], and one showing that New Agers are particularly prone to delusional beliefs). What does that mean?

Probably only that people who are prone to psychological problems tend to drop out of organised religion...

Leurent, B., Nazareth, I., Bellón-Saameño, J., Geerlings, M., Maaroos, H., Saldivia, S., Švab, I., Torres-González, F., Xavier, M., & King, M. (2013). Spiritual and religious beliefs as risk factors for the onset of major depression: an international cohort study Psychological Medicine, 1-12 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291712003066

King, M., Marston, L., McManus, S., Brugha, T., Meltzer, H., & Bebbington, P. (2012). Religion, spirituality and mental health: results from a national study of English households The British Journal of Psychiatry, 202 (1), 68-73 DOI: 10.1192/bjp.bp.112.112003

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Are fertile women more religious?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 20:55:00 +0000

In the West at least, women tend to be more religious than men. You can argue about why this might be (and I think it's an entirely sociological phenomenon) but it nonetheless seems to be a fact of life.

So, it's in this context that you need to think about recent research by Kristina Durante at the University of Texas, and colleagues, which suggests that ovulatory cycle can have a significant influence over how religious women are.

They recruited 275 American women aged 18-44 years for an internet survey. Basically, they asked them what stage of their menstrual cycle they were at, and used that information to split the participants into two groups: high fertility (cycle days 7–14) and low fertility (cycle days 17–25).

Then they asked them how religious they were, whether they were in a committed relationship, an other general questions.

The results were fascinating. Women did indeed report different levels of religious feeling according to their fertility, but the direction of the effect was completely different depending on whether or not they were in a committed relationship.

Single women were less religious when they were most fertile, while women in a relationship were more religious.

Durante also found similar relationships with social conservatism (decreases in fertile single women, increases in fertile committed women) and voting preferences (Barack Obama for fertile single women, John McCain for fertile committed women).

Why? Well it single women tended to be younger and less likely to have kids. Perhaps that could have affected the results, although it's hard to see how.

Durante reckons it's some kind of subconscious safety barrier to prevent women in relationships from sleeping around:

We believe that the key difference between these two groups is that married or engaged women are more invested in their relationship and therefore would have considerably more to lose if their relationship were endangered. Increased religiosity and conservatism at ovulation may serve to deter married women from cheating on their spouse.

I don't think that can be right. After all, from an evolutionary perspective, women in a committed relationship have more to gain from an affair when fertile (if it works out, they get genes from a different, and perhaps fitter, male, but retain the support of hubby) than they have when less fertile (noting to gain, everything to lose).

That, ostensibly, is why fertile women prefer macho guys - have a fling with a macho guy for the genes, then go back to dependable hubby to raise the resulting kid!

The reverse is the case for single women. Single women are better off procreating with a conservative male who is going to hang around to help raise the kid.

I reckon it's simply down to sexual desire, which is also linked to the ovulatory cycle.

If single women want to get laid, then they have to do it outside of a long-term relationship - which means breaking social taboos about how women are supposed to behave. So, well, those taboos just so happen to be disregarded. These women become more liberal.

For women in a relationship their best chance of sex is with their current partner. So social rules that keep partners together just so happen to become much more important...

Durante, K., Rae, A., & Griskevicius, V. (2013). The Fluctuating Female Vote: Politics, Religion, and the Ovulatory Cycle Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797612466416

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Are Christians bad tippers?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 21:44:00 +0000

Earlier this year, there was huge kerfuffle over some Pastor in the US who refused to leave a tip in a restaurant. By way of explanation, he wrote on the bill that he already gave "10% to God". Something that I never realised (coming from Europe as I do, where we don't really do tipping) is that Christians already have a reputation for being bad tippers - especially on a Sunday.

But is that reputation deserved? Michael Lynn, at the School of Hotel Administration, Cornell University, Ithaca, and Benjamin Katz (HCD research) ran a survey of 1,600 U.S. adults to find out.

What they found was that, regardless of whether the service was good or bad, Christians really did report leaving lower tips that the non-religious (and Jews).

In fact, as they point out, Christians are the overwhelming majority - so what's actually happening here is that the non-religious and Jews are leaving higher tips than average. What's more, they say:

...if you define poor tippers as those leaving less than a 15% tip for good service, then only 13% of Christians are poor tippers.

Granted this percentage is higher than the 7% of nonaffiliates
and 2% of Jews that would be classified as poor tippers under
the same criteria, it seems unreasonable to label an entire
group based on the behavior of only 13% of its members.

While that's a fair point, it's still a significant proportion, and the fact that Christians are twice as likely poor tippers as the non-religious is something that is likely to be noted by serving staff - especially if the worst tippers are also the most overtly religious.

But why should they be bad tippers?

Well, the non-religious and Jews tended to be wealthier and better educated than Christians, although the authors did adjust their results for all these sorts of factors and more.

What's more, they found only a slight (and trivial) relationship between tipping and religious service attendance. That suggests that it's not the extrinsically motivated (i.e. people who are into religion for social status and image) that are driving this effect.

The researchers don't commit themselves to any explanation of the results, and point out as well that this is a survey rather than a test of actual tipping behaviour - although they reference other studies that have shown that surveys of tipping behaviour are quite reliable.

But it does match what was found in another study - this time a real world assessment - which found that churchgoers were more likely to steal newspapers, rather than put money in an honesty box.

Personally, what I think is going on here is the moral 'set point' at work - we have a natural inclination to balance good and bad deeds (it's a bit more complicated than that, of course).

So the after all the effort that these Christians put in to pleasing their god with praying and all, well, they may feel that saving money by tipping less is a well-earned reward!

Lynn, M., & Katz, B. (2013). Are Christian/religious people poor tippers? Journal of Applied Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/jasp.12057

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Do religious people suffer less stress from economic change?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 06:22:00 +0000

Over the past two decades, the Polish economy has undergone dramatic change as it shifted towards a liberal market. That, in turn, has lead to profound changes in job security and other social changes that can lead to increased stress.

Clemens Lechner, from the University Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, and colleagues, have used data from a 2009 survey of over 1,500 Poles to assess whether religion buffers this stress. All the people interviewed were aged 16-46 and were currently employed.

They looks at two aspects of stress. The first measured how depressed and anxious people felt. This is the flipside of 'happiness' and is basically a short-term measure of how people have been feeling of over the past month.

The other measure was a measure of general work and life satisfaction. Questions around life satisfaction reflect longer term, more deep-rooted attitudes.

They also asked them about the work-related demands they had experienced over the past five years. Questions assessed their agreement with statements like "..it has become more difficult to plan my career path" and "...the risk of losing my job has increased."

What they found was that, overall, religious people (whether measured by belief or attendance) tended to be happier and more satisfied. But the increased happiness of the religious was particularly noticeable for people who had high work related demands.

As you can see in the figure, for sporadic or moderately frequent attenders, as work-related demands go up so do depressive symptoms. For frequent attenders, however, that increase is much less dramatic. They saw a similar result for beliefs.

Strangely enough, however, they saw exactly the opposite effect for life satisfaction.

People who attended religious services frequently reported higher life satisfaction if work-related demands were low, but this difference disappeared if their work-related demands were high.

And although beliefs were linked to higher satisfaction, there was no interaction with work-related demands.

Lechner and colleagues explain this curious results as follows - although first they point out that the overall effect is small.

One possibility is that happiness is easier to influence - and so whatever factors that link religiousness with happiness and satisfaction are more able to overcome the negative effects of work-stress on happiness than they are on the more fundamental feeling of life satisfaction.

The second explanation is more complex. What they argue is that, in condition of high work-demand, optimistic people may feel crushed, and social support become dependency on others - both of which could lead to dissatisfaction with life in general.

It's an interesting hypothesis, and I'm not sure what it tells up about the directionality of the link between religion and life satisfaction.

Personally, I wonder if there isn't some effect of social status going on here. Although they controlled for employment type, education, age and other factors, and found little effect, it's possible that the model didn't fully account for this important contributor to satisfaction.

And, as they point out, Poland is is a religious country, with a single highly dominant faith (Catholicism). It would be interesting to see if similar effects hold in more diverse countries!

Lechner, C., Tomasik, M., Silbereisen, R., & Wasilewski, J. (2012). Exploring the Stress-Buffering Effects of Religiousness in Relation to Social and Economic Change: Evidence From Poland. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality DOI: 10.1037/a0030738

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

International trade fractures along religious fault lines

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 20:50:00 +0000

International trade is made easier when nations share a common language. Geographical closeness, regional trade agreements, and common legal heritage also help trade along, and former colonies trade more with each other and with the ex-mother country.

Chong Wha Lee, at Kongju National University in South Korea, wanted to know if a common religion could play a similar role in boosting trade. Although there's been a bit of research into this before, Lee was particularly interested to know if there was a difference between trade in goods and trade in services.

Now, it could be that some religions promote trade more than others, but Lee wanted to know the net effect of shared religion (regardless of the specific effects of individual religions). So he compared trading partners, and assessed whether both countries shared a dominant religion (which he called the "Institutional effect" of religion). For each religion, he also looked at trading partners where at least 5% of the population were adherents (he called this the "network effect"). In each case, he pooled all the different trading partners to get the average effect of sharing a religion.

He found that nations that shared a religion - either on an institutional level or at the network level - had significantly greater trade, even after accounting for the other effects (like language)

For trade in goods, the effect was quite weak (less than the other factors listed earlier).

For trade in services, however, the effect was stronger. That was particularly the case for institutional effects, which had a stronger effect on trade than either regional trade agreements or shared legal systems.

Lee concludes that "...religion establishes co-religious networks that positively affect interpersonal trust, thereby reducing institutional distances between countries."

It's intriguing to speculate why that might be. Presumably people trust co-religionists more than religious outsiders, but Lee's study doesn't help us to understand whether trust is more important than antipathy.

It could be that religious disagreement actually hinders trade (which would result in a relative positive effect for shared religion).

And why is the effect stronger for trade in services? These are things like finance, tourism and telecoms. Intellectual products like inventions also come under this heading. You can imagine that trust would be important here - but more important than for trade in physical goods?

Lee, C. (2013). Does religion affect international trade in services more than trade in goods? Applied Economics Letters, 20 (10), 998-1002 DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2013.770120

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

In West and East, it's easier to remember things that are a bit weird

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 20:19:00 +0000

Look around the world, and you'll find that most gods and magical entities are surprisingly similar to regular people, but with one or two magical powers. The same goes for most works of fiction - your typical superhero is, in most respects, a pretty regular guy.

At first sight, the Judaeo-Christian god seems to be an exception to this rule. But if you look at how Christians often relate to their god, never mind how it is portrayed in the Bible, it's not really such an anomaly.

Back in 2002, Pascal Boyer proposed that this was not an accident. He suggested that mundane, everyday objects are instantly forgettable, and that really weird stuff is just to hard to remember. What really stands out, and what our brains intuitively latch onto, are things that deviate only a bit from the normal. He called these 'minimally counterintuitive ideas' (MCI).

Over the past 10 years, research into this idea has produced some support, but also some experimental results that didn't fit the predictions.

The most recent experiment has taken advantage of the virtual reality world of Second Life. By using a virtual environment, they able not only to create a set-up that would be impossible in the real world, but to study people from different cultures and people who don't typically participate as subjects (i.e. people other than students).

The experimenters, Ryan Hornbeck at the University of Oxford, UK, and Justin Barrett (now at the Fuller Theological Seminary in California) created a kind of virtual museum containing 18 objects. Half of these were everyday (such as a ball hitting a wall) and half had something weird about them (such as a parrot that disappears).

They lead their study subjects (50 native-English speakers living in the West and 50 native-Chinese speakers living in Asia) round this museum, and let them briefly view each object. Afterwards they tested them on how many they could remember. After a while (up to 15 days later) they were invited to be tested again.

As shown in the graphic, the Westerners were more likely to remember the 'minimally counterintuitive' objects than the intuitive objects - whether tested immediately or after a period of days. For the Chinese speakers, there was no difference in immediate recall, but there was a difference in the delayed recall.

They found that the longer the period until the second test, the more likely it was that the intuitive items would be forgotten. That's what you would expect - but that's not what they found for the MCI objects. For these, memorisation seemed to be constant, whatever the delay.

That suggests that MCIs that actually get remembered are less likely to be forgotten, compared with intuitive memories.

Intriguingly, they also found that age had an effect.The older participants were equally good at remembering MCI and intuitive objects. Younger participants, however, were significantly better at remembering the MCI objects.

The researchers were intrigued by why that might be. What they end up suggesting is that, for young adults who are still learning about the world, it pays off to devote a lot of mental energy to memorising and assessing things that deviate from the expected.

By later adulthood, however, "the most important exceptions are likely to have already been encountered". As a result, anything that turns up that looks weird and out of place to an older person is likely just to be a one-off aberration, and so not worth paying too much attention too.

A sobering thought!

Hornbeck, R., & Barrett, J. (2013). Refining and Testing “Counterintuitiveness” in Virtual Reality: Cross-Cultural Evidence for Recall of Counterintuitive Representations International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 23 (1), 15-28 DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2013.735192

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Iconic religious images affect the attitudes of Protestants, but not Catholics.

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 23:07:00 +0000

The Christian God comes in different flavours. Most notably, while it's sometimes portrayed as a benevolent, forgiving entity, at other times the imagery is of a vengeful, retributive god.

We already know that how Christians view their god is related to other aspects of their psychology (for example, fear and anxiety). But is this cause or effect? It's hard to say, because what hasn't been much investigated is whether implanting different ideas about God can change attitudes.

Kathryn Johnson and colleagues from Arizona State University showed religious imagery (like the pictures above) to 363 Christian students (120 Catholics). One quarter of them were shown images of a Authoritarian God (like the leftmost one above, described in an earlier pilot study as "punishing"or angry) while one quarter were shown images of a Benevolent God (middle image, described as "loving", "compassionate", and "forgiving"). The others were shown spiritual images (llike the one on the right) or abstract art.

They students were told that they were taking part in a memory test, and that while they were waiting for the recall challenge they would be doing a 'filler' task. In this filler task, they were given a couple of scenarios to read, and then asked about anger and forgiveness. For example, in the first they:

...were told to imagine themselves at a party at which a same-sex student carelessly spills a drink on them without apologizing. They were asked to rate (on a 7-point Likert scale) the likelihood of engaging in eight aggressive behaviors toward this person.

And a second one,

in which a friend offers, but then carelessly fails, to deliver an important package to the post office, resulting in the loss of a job for the participant. Three items measured willingness to forgive, forget, and help the friend in the future (e.g., how likely would you be forgive your friend)

They were also asked about their "willingness to conserve water when taking showers", their "willingness to sign up immediately after the survey to package personal hygiene items for distribution to natural disaster victims", and their "willingness to ship blankets to natural disaster victims in Israel" (a religious outgroup).

Unfortunately the researchers don't reveal whether Catholics or Protestants were the most angry or forgiving. But they do say that the Catholic responses were basically the same regardless of the kind of god they had been shown.

Among the Protestants, however, it was a different matter.

Protestants shown an authoritarian god were more aggressive and less altruistic (see graphic). On the other hand, showing the benevolent god, or spiritual images, to Protestants seemed to make them more forgiving.

This is one of only a few studies to use religious imagery to provoke a psychological response, so the fact that Catholics and Protestant responded differently is very interesting. The authors suspect that the difference occurred because Catholics are regularly exposed to such imagery, and so they may have become somewhat immune to it.

They do also point out that, because there were fewer Catholics in their study, the power to detect an effect was lower - they may have just lucked out. And they float the suggestion that maybe other images would maybe have more effect on Catholics - images of the Virgin Mary, for example (that's what was used in a 2008 study of religiously-inspired pain relief in Catholics).

In other studies they showed that people who hold beliefs about a vengeful god were also more aggressive towards offenders, and that those who held beliefs about a loving god were more forgiving. Interestingly, these beliefs were independent - so a single person could hold both beliefs and be simultaneously more aggressive and more forgiving, depending on the scenario.

So, coming back to the original point, regarding cause and effect. Well, it seems that for Protestants at least, yes - the particular kind of god they believe in seems to be fairly easily manipulated!

Johnson, K., Li, Y., Cohen, A., & Okun, M. (2013). Friends in high places: The influence of authoritarian and benevolent god-concepts on social attitudes and behaviors. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 5 (1), 15-22 DOI: 10.1037/a0030138

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Calvinists can wait, but Catholics live for the moment

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 22:44:00 +0000

OK, here's the deal. I'll give you £5 right now - but if you can wait till next week, I'll give you £6. Which offer would you take?

It's the sort of dilemma that mirrors a host of real life problems, and how people react to questions like this reflects their approaches to these challenges. It's called temporal discounting.

Researchers in Rome, Bologna and Leiden ran these kinds of tests on 40 Dutch Calvinists and 49 Italian Catholics. Ninety Atheists from both countries formed the control group.

What they found is shown in the graphic on the right.

Atheists, on the left, showed pretty much the same rate of temporal discounting whether they were Italian or Dutch.

The Dutch Calvinists, however, showed low temporal discounting, while the Italian Catholics showed high temporal discounting.

That means that the Calvinists were more likely than the Catholics to say that they were prepared to wait for a larger reward. The Catholics were more likely to take the money and run.

Now, they did find that Italians as a group tended towards high temporal discounting, but that this didn't explain the difference between the two religious groups (because the atheists from the two countries were so similar).

The authors reckon this is probably something to do with the differences in religious teachings. They point out that both Catholic and Protestant teaching encourage asceticism, but Protestantism only teaches against immediate enjoyment and consumption - not against long-term accumulation.

More interesting to consider is the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Calvinists believe that our fate is already decided, and therefore our actions are not so much the cause of our afterlife fate, but rather should be taken as evidence of God's pre-planned fate for us.

Because there is no hope of 'forgiveness' in this way of thinking, Calvinists are going to be strongly motivated not to slip up even once. They write:

The protestant view of predestination gives a strong reason to behave virtuously not only in general but also in the specific context of intertemporal decision making: insofar as the short-term option is conceived as a form of impulsive self-indulgence, whereas the long-term alternative is seen as indicative of moral fibre and self control, Calvinists will have a much stronger incentive to opt for the latter than Catholics, thus showing lower time discount rates

Now, I don't know enough about Calvinism to judge whether it is likely. And I wonder if it is, in practice, any different from the concepts of forgiving versus unforgiving gods (and an unforgiving God is, of course, also a feature of many Catholic and Protestant sects).

But certainly food for thought!

Paglieri, F., Borghi, A., Colzato, L., Hommel, B., & Scorolli, C. (2013). Heaven can wait. How religion modulates temporal discounting Psychological Research DOI: 10.1007/s00426-012-0473-5

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

In Burkino Faso, traditional beliefs encourage trust and fair-play in the small-business community

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 20:22:00 +0000

Village life in sub-Saharan Africa is governed by a moral code enforced by customs, regulations, and taboos. Because communities are close-knit, large discrepancies in wealth are frowned upon, and the accumulation of private wealth is regarded as anti-social.

Locals believe that spirits and ancestors enforce this moral code, and that transgressors will be punished by misfortune, business failure, and severe illnesses or accidents. But does this actually have any effect on behaviour?

Myriam Hadnes and Heiner Schumacher, at the University of Frankfurt, recruited a bunch of 'micro-entrepreneurs' from the villages around Ouagadougou and asked them to play an economic transaction game, to see how generous and trusting they were towards others.

The game has two players - both anonymous, both given 1000 West African Francs (worth just over 2 dollars - about a day's pay at minimum wage levels). Player A could either keep his money (in which case both went home with their 1,000 Fcfa) or give it all to Player B.

If Player A chose to send the money, then it was doubled so that Player B now had 3000 Fcfa. Player B could then send back as much as he or she wanted. After that, they went home.

Before playing the game, the players were interviewed about their businesses. For half the participants, the interviewers asked about jealousy and traditional rules about conduct, and deliberately steered the conversation towards supernatural topics. For the other half, they focussed on practical issues of business - and deliberately avoided anything related to supernatural topics.

They found that, in the group that avoided supernatural topics, 69% of 'Player A' participants handed their 1,000 Fcfa to Player B. In the group that did discuss the traditional beliefs, that figure rose to 87%. That suggests that these players were more trusting that Player B would play fair.

Then they looked at what Player B gave back in return, and found that they were significantly more likely to give higher amounts (see graphic). In fact, while the group that did not discuss the supernatural returned on average 1,261 Fcfa (or 42 percent), those primed with traditional beliefs returned 1,471 Fcfa (or 49 percent).

That suggests that, in both groups, the A players' trust was well placed - but that this was particularly so in the group primed with tradition. That difference was statistically significant, even after adjusting for other differences between the groups.

The authors point out that this is unlikely to be simply due to increased trust (because they found that the A players didn't actually expect more in return, and also that doesn't explain why the B players were more generous). Nor was it because they were less risk-averse (again, that can't explain the B-players response).

Instead, they say that:

... our results suggest another factor as the driving force of both the A- and B-players’ behavior.

In the postexperimental questionnaire, one-third of all participants explicitly cited illness, accidents, or death as direct consequence of dishonest behavior. In the interviews of the treatment group, participants shared their experiences with supernatural forces intervening into worldly life to punish those who did not respect the ancestors’ will. Almost half of the participants stated having witnessed a case of supernatural punishment aftermisbehavior.

Also, we learned that participants trust witch doctors to influence their business success, and fear the neighbors’ and competitors’ envy if they are successful without caring for their kith and kin.

In line with these observations, we argue that A- and B-players’ behavior was driven by the combination of prevailing sharing norms and the belief in supernatural punishment whenever these norms are violated.

Because of the design of this study, we can't tease out whether this was a direct effect of supernatural fears or not. The interviews of the A players covered both social norms and supernatural topics (they couldn't use the more usual priming technique of asking the participants to do a word game, because most were illiterate), so either or both could be affecting the result.

But as the first evidence that reminders of traditional moral beliefs, coupled with supernatural threats, can result in behaviour that's significantly more pro-social!

Hadnes, M., & Schumacher, H. (2012). The Gods Are Watching: An Experimental Study of Religion and Traditional Belief in Burkina Faso Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 51 (4), 689-704 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2012.01676.x

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Why do the religious have a problem with outsiders

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 22:14:00 +0000

There's plenty of evidence that, at least in the Christian west, religious people are more likely than average to be hostile towards others who they perceive as being outside their group. Strangely, this isn't just hostility to people from other religions, but also encompasses hostility towards co-religionists who are sufficiently difference (racism, for example).

Partly this is simply because people with so-called "Right-wing Authoritarian" attitudes also tend to be religious. But does religion have some additional effect? And is it just a western thing, or do other religions do this to?

To find out, a team from Singapore and the USA, including Wade Rowatt from Baylor University, conducted a study in 72 Christians and 69 Buddhists (all from Singapore). The experiment was simple: they first asked their subjects about their attitudes, then two weeks later they repeated the exercise after first subliminally priming them with religious words.

Before priming, the Christians were significantly more authoritarian than the Buddhists.

Priming, and after adjustment for authoritarian and spiritual attitudes, had little effect on religious and ethnic prejudice. Unfortunately, they don't tell us whether priming had any effect without this adjustment, but reading between the lines it I suspect the Christians had a stronger response.

Priming did, however, significantly increase prejudice towards homosexuals among both Christians and Buddhists.

That's important because there's nothing in Buddhist scriptures that condemns homosexuality. And that suggests that what is happening here is not a direct result of religious teachings, but rather a result of the cultural role of religion.

Interestingly, some earlier research found that priming Buddhists with 'The Golden Rule' had no effect on their prejudice towards homosexuals, while priming Christians with the same rule made them significantly more homophobic.

Now, this was a different sample (most of the Buddhists were western converts), which probably explains the different results - homosexual acts are illegal in Singapore.

But it does reinforce that the attitudes of the religious probably depend less on what is actually written in holy books, and more on exaggerations of 'traditional cultural values'.

Ramsay, J., Pang, J., Johnson Shen, M., & Rowatt, W. (2013). Rethinking Value Violation: Priming Religion Increases Prejudice in Singaporean Christians and Buddhists International Journal for the Psychology of Religion DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2012.761525

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

When people say they are 'spiritual', what do they mean?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 17:28:00 +0000

It's fashionable these days to talk about 'spirituality' instead of religiousness. The term is designed to include people who are still basically religious, but who are, perhaps, turned off by traditional religions.

The problem is that if you thought defining 'religion' was tough, well it's a piece of cake compared with defining 'spirituality!

In the US, where most people say they are both 'religious' and 'spiritual', it seems that people use the terms to describe different aspects of religion. In essence 'religious' means you are a churchgoer, while 'spiritual' means that you feel connected to some larger, supernatural belief.

To find out whether similar ideas prevail in Europe, Joantine Berghuijs (a PhD researcher at Utrecht University) and colleagues surveyed 2344 Dutch people - a mix of men and women of all ages.

They found that only 25% called themselves both religious and spiritual, while 16% said they were only religious and 19% said they were only spiritual. The rest (40%) were neither.

They found that people who said they were spiritual did tend to hold a bunch of non-traditional beliefs - spiritual transformation, belief in paranormal issues, monism, experiences of non-religious transcendence, paranormal experiences, and karma.

The graphic maps out how people in each of the four groups (religious + spiritual, spiritual only, religious only and neither) scored on 'religious' and 'spiritual' beliefs.

You can see that the 'spiritual only' group scores high on spirituality but low on religion (meaning things like traditional religion, such as affiliation, attendance and prayer). That's as you would expect.

However, the strange thing was that those who were 'spiritual and religious' were actually more religious than those who were just 'religious'. They were also more spiritual than those who were only spiritual.

On digging further, they found that the ‘both spiritual and religious’ group could actually be split into two: one group that combined "a strong orientation toward traditional religion with new spirituality and one that is mainly oriented toward new spirituality".

What they suggest is that, in the Netherlands at least, people who say they are spiritual are probably at a half-way point between the religious and non-religious. Calling yourself religious (and not spiritual) probably reflects a 'life orientation' rather than any particularly strong beliefs.

Whereas people who are both spiritual and religious are highly religious - they probably represent the 'new religious' movements. Some are revival movements within established churches, while others are opposed to traditional religions.

Either way, it seems that what people mean when they say they are spiritual probably depends on whether or not they also think they are religious!

Berghuijs, J., Pieper, J., & Bakker, C. (2013). Being ‘Spiritual’ and Being ‘Religious’ in Europe: Diverging Life Orientations Journal of Contemporary Religion, 28 (1), 15-32 DOI: 10.1080/13537903.2013.750829

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

What kind of person sees ghosts?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 08:02:00 +0000

The human mind is naturally attuned to try to spot hidden agents. In fact, we're too good at it, because we tend to interpret all sorts of random environmental noise as actually being caused by someone.

It's widely thought that this tendency contributes to religious belief, and yet it's also the case that many religious people don't claim to have seen any spiritual agents directly at work - and many no-religious people see ghosts from time to time.

Kirsten Barnes and Nicholas Gibson, at the University of Cambridge, surveyed 583 people (mostly women, 50% atheist/agnostic) who were in their survey data. Most were from Britain, some from Australia and Canada, and others from all over.

They asked them whether they had ever had a spiritual, religious, supernatural or paranormal experience. For those that had, they asked to describe the experience - what happened, where they were, how they felt at the time, etc. And they asked them to complete a battery of personality tests.

They found that those who had had some kind of supernatural experience were also more likely to have had other unusual experiences (meaning ones where the person sensed or felt odd, but not necessarily supernatural), and were less neurotic (although this link was weak and may have been spurious).

Intriguingly, given the study I covered in my previous post, people who had had a spiritual, religious, supernatural or paranormal experience in the past also scored higher on empathy and trust.

However, when they looked solely at experiences that involved a supernatural agent, this link disappeared. This suggests that the link between empathy and religion is not down to the ability to "read minds".

Whet do they mean by supernatural agent? Well, here's a couple of verbatim examples given by participants:

“I went to the prayer room where I really had a physical sense of God’s presence—I remember reaching out my hand to feel it”

“In a house I used to live in, I was usually visited by a being that took the form of a pre-teen girl. She was lithe, pale skinned and had straight, dark colored hair”

They found that, relative to other kinds of supernatural experiences, non-religious, supernatural agents (AKA ghosts) were more often seen when the environment was secluded, dark, quiet, and threatening. Those who had seen ghosts also reported being anxious or upset at the time. That wasn't the case for religious supernatural agents.

The authors found that people who see ghosts are inclined to magical thinking, which may explain the link. Or it could be that people with no religious framework are more likely to report these experiences as threatening. Or it might simply be that people remembered the experience as threatening, and only later came to remember their surroundings at the time as being threatening.

What this suggests is that anxiety and distress combine to make it more likely that people will see ghosts, but that this relationship doesn't hold for religious experiences.

It';s interesting to contrast this with other research showing that anxiety and uncertainty can make people see things that aren't there, and also that religion is more popular in environments that are threatening or dangerous.

Maybe turning to religion is one way to reduce the distress caused by supernatural experiences that are caused by threatening environments!

Barnes, K., & Gibson, N. (2013). Supernatural Agency: Individual Difference Predictors and Situational Correlates International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 23 (1), 42-62 DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2013.739066

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Atheists lack empathy and understanding

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 12:51:00 +0000

This is actually a study from the middle of last year that I never got round to covering (there was a run of studies from the same team, and this one ended up at the bottom of the pile!). But I'm glad I did.

The study leads were Ara Norenzayan and Will Gervais at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and they collaborated on this one with Kali Trzesniewski at the University of California, USA.

They were intrigued by an earlier study which found that autistic people were more likely to be atheists. They wanted to know if this was true and, if it was true, they wanted to know why.

So they ran four separate studies. The first matched a small group of autistic individuals with a group of neurotypicals, and found that the autistic individuals were less religious.

The second looked at a group of Canadian students, and found that those who reported more symptoms of autism were also less religious. Study Three broadened this out to a group of 725 American Adults recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk, while Study Four looked at a different sample of 425 Adults (they were part of a paid survey panel).

Again and again, they found that symptoms of autism correlated with lack of belief in God.

But their analyses went further. They also asked them about their empathy (using questions like "I often find it difficult to judge if someone is rude or polite" and "I am good at predicting how someone will feel.").

They found that empathy also correlated with belief. Not only that but, using a statistical technique called "bootstrapping", they found that the most plausible explanation for the correlation was that autism was related to a lack of empathy, which in turn was related to lack of belief (see the figure).

In other words, lack of empathy was the 'in between' factor that mediated the relationship between autism and lack of belief.

Now, they tested a bunch of other potential explanations too. For example, they also measured something called systemizing, which is all "about aptitude for, and interest in, reasoning about mechanical and physical objects and processes", and is measure using questions like "‘‘I am fascinated by how machines work," and "I find it difficult to understand information the bank sends me on different investment and saving systems".

Like empathy, systemizing is correlated both with being male and the degree of autism (although in the opposite direction: autistics are better at systematizing than neurotypicals). But, unlike empathy, it wasn't found to "mediate" the effect autism on religion.

They also looked at aspects of personality (Agreeableness and Conscientiousness), and assessed whether church-going was relevant - the idea here being that going to church with a group of other people might simultaneously improve empathy and increase belief in God. But none of these could explain the effect.

In the fourth study, they also tested another measure of mind-reading. In this one, the participants were shown pictures of eyes and asked to pick out which words best describe what the person in the picture is thinking or feeling. Again, high ability on this task was found to mediate the relationship between religion and autism.

So, in the end, this is really good evidence that, at least in the kinds of religion favoured in the USA, an inability to empathise and read other peoples minds is linked to decreased belief in personal gods. But why might this be?

Well, actually it fits well with other research which finds that loneliness can increase belief in the supernatural. And it also fits with brain imaging studies that found that highly religious people who engage in personal prayer use the same parts of their brains as they would when talking to a good friend.

So it seems that an essential part of the belief in a personal God is the ability to relate to it as a personal friend. It perhaps then isn't surprising that people whose minds don't work that way are less likely to believe.

Norenzayan, A., Gervais, W., & Trzesniewski, K. (2012). Mentalizing Deficits Constrain Belief in a Personal God PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036880

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

In Iran and the USA, the "religious person" has a similar personality

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 08:08:00 +0000

There have been quite a few studies over the years into personality differences between the religious and non-religious. They tend to use the well-known "Five-factor" model of personality, and they typically find that religious people are more likely to say they are agreeable and conscientiousness.

But these studies are mostly done on Western Christians. And anyway, there are other models of personality, ones which probably are more valid in non-Western cultures.

Naser Aghababaei, at the University of Tehran (in Iran), along with Jason Wasserman and Drew Nannini at the University of Kansas (USA), used the HEXACO model to study the personalities of 156 American and 165 Iranian university students.

The HEXACO model is basically the same as the five-factor model (emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness), but it includes an extra personality factor (Honesty-Humility) which relates to sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty.

So, they got these undergrads to fill in the personality questionnaires and also to rate how religious they were (rating statements such as "I try hard to live my life according to my religious beliefs" and "I enjoy reading about my spirituality and/or my religion").

The Iranians and Americans had similar personalities overall, except that the Iranians reported significantly less emotionality (although this was because there were fewer women in the Iranian sample) and conscientiousness.

Once they adjusted the results to take into account the different proportions of women, they found that religion was linked to similar personality traits in both the USA and Iran.

In particular, religious people scored significantly higher in Honesty-Humility, and lower in openness, in both locations. They were also more agreeable and extroverted, although this was a little less clear cut since it wasn't quite statistically significant in the Americans.

However, in America religiosity was correlated with conscientiousness, while in Iran it was not. And in America, there was a hint of a connection between emotionality and religion, although again this was absent in Iran.

Now, this was self-reported personality, so we don't know if there was some self-flattery going on here. And it didn't compare religious with atheists, but rather dutiful religious with the, ahem, less so. And of course these were students, not real people.

But even so, it's fascinating to see that religion in both nations was linked to similar personalities. At the very least, it shows that religious people conceive of themselves in similar ways in both places.

However, it does seem to show that the idea that conscientiousness is characteristic of religion may be a Western conception.

And it's interesting that the link to agreeableness was less strong among Americans than among Iranians. Based on other studies, the link seems to be weaker still in Europe. Which suggests that, as religion becomes less important, being religious is more and more a characteristic of disagreeable people.

Or, alternatively, while those few people who are atheists in religious countries are also pretty disagreeable (i.e. argumentative), that's less the case when non-religion becomes more normal!

Aghababaei, N., Wasserman, J., & Nannini, D. (2012). The religious person revisited: cross-cultural evidence from the HEXACO model of personality structure Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 1-6 DOI: 10.1080/13674676.2012.737771

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Atheists prefer video games over board games

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 07:35:00 +0000

Chris Burris, at St. Jerome’s University in Canada, has been quizzing students at "a southwestern Ontario university" about their interests in video games and board games. He's found that atheists were more likely to prefer video games, and his hypothesis as to why this should be is really rather interesting.

So, along with Elyse Redden at the University of Guelph, here's what they did. They asked 228 students to complete an online survey that asked, among other things, about their liking for four different kinds of video games (strategy, role-play, a narrative [i.e., a story or world to discover], and simulated violence) and the same types of board games.

There were 51 students who said they had "no religion" and the 31 outright atheists. Everyone else (Christians Jews, Muslims, whatever) went into the "religious" bucket.

All groups preferred video games over board games, but for the atheists the gap was much larger. Also worth noting is that the atheists liked both kinds of game more than the religious did - although the difference was pretty marginal for board games.

But Burris noticed something else. Alongside game preferences, he also asked questions that sought to uncover their imaginative involvement and the tendency to become mentally absorbed in everyday activities (the Tellegen Absorption Scale).

As illustrated in the graphic, what he found was that religious people had the same interest in video games and board games regardless of their tendency towards absorption. (The graphic shows the results after controlling for overall interest in gaming.)

For atheists, however, video games were more attractive and board games less attractive to those who easily become absorbed in what they're doing.

What Burris thinks is happening is that atheists are less capable of "generating emotionally evocative internal simulations of experience" - they are less imaginative, at least when it comes to imgaining mental states and situations. This follows on from previous research he did which found that, when asked to recall emotionally-laden events in the past, "atheists’ experiences appeared to be less vivid and less emotionally evocative relative to those of religious individuals."

They conclude that:

Even in a play context, atheists showed a much greater preference for the WYSIWYG virtual environment compared to the tabletop format wherein imagination is more central. Like tabletop gaming, many articulations of religion require that an individual behave “as if” a set of propositions concerning an unseen realm is true. If the “atheist brain” and the “religious brain” have different processing strengths and weaknesses, as Burris and Petrican (2011) suggested, then rejecting the unseen may be a logical outcome of atheists’ relative inability to generate “as if” experiences in the absence of multisensory “proof” of the sort provided by immersive, externally imposed virtual environments. Indeed, based on the results of the present research, we suspect that if Doubting Thomas were alive today, he would be an avid video gamer.

It's a really interesting idea, and plausible, but I have a few niggling doubts. Why, for instance, does "absorption" not play a role in the preferences of religious people? And why do atheists have a greater liking for board games than religious people, if they are less capable of imaginative play?

And most importantly, I'm wondering if the preference for video games is linked to the well known phenomenon that North American atheists are more likely to be loners, and less likely to engage in group activities. I can well imagine that, among those 31 atheistic undergraduates, there were more than a few who like to shut themselves away and immerse themselves in an alternate reality provided by an online video game (Word of Warcraft, anyone?) - especially those who can become almost hypnotised by such things (which is what the Tellegen Scale measures).

In other words, religious affiliation might actually be preventing this kind of behaviour from manifesting. Or, alternatively, those who have these tendencies may shun religion.

I'm old enough to remember the good old days of Dungeons and Dragons - a kind of fantasy role playing game which involved creating imaginary worlds and acting out quests. And I also remember tat it was wildly popular among my non-religious friends (Christians hated it, of course).

Burris, C., & Redden, E. (2012). No Other Gods Before Mario?: Game Preferences Among Atheistic and Religious Individuals International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 22 (4), 243-251 DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2011.638606

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

In Mauritius, religious locations increase generosity

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 22:04:00 +0000

Several studies have found that subconsciously priming people with religious concepts can encourage them to be more altruistic.The strange thing is, this seems to work just as well on atheists.

But most of these studies have been done in labs, and with Westerners. What about the real world?

Back in 2009, Dimitris Xygalatas (at the Religion, Cognition and Culture research unit (RCC), Aarhus University, Denmark) spent some time conducting ethnographic research with the people of Pointe aux Piments, Mauritius. Mauritius is one of the most socially diverse societies on Earth, with a population entirely derived from immigration over the past 300 years and now comprising a mix of people with Asian, African and European ancestry and a mix of religions (50% Hindu, 30% Christian, 17% Muslim).

While he was there, he conducted a simple game of bargaining trust with the participants.

Along with collaborators, he told pairs of people (31 pairs in total) that they had a pot of money (500 rupees, equivalent to five days’ minimum pay of an unskilled worker). Each player could draw however much they wanted from the pot, and whatever was left over would be increased by 50% and split between the two players.

The catch is that, if the players together withdrew more than 500 rupees, they went bust and neither got anything. (At this point, it's fun to consider how much you would withdraw from the pot!)

Now, the cunning part was that one of the pair was sat in a restaurant, while the other was in a Hindu temple. Each was just recruited off the street, and led on a short walk to either location - the experimenters communicated the results to each other over the phone.

As you can see from the figure (left side), the people who were sat in the temple withdrew less from the pot than those who were sat in the restaurant.

Now, the people in the two different locations were basically the same - a random mix of ages, sexes, ethnicities, and religions. And, even more intriguingly, both parties expected to receive the similar amounts in return (as you can see on the right hand side of the graph).

What this means is that simply putting someone in a temple makes them want to give more. But even more important is finding that they don't expect more back.

When asked to justify their decision, Xygalatas says that:

... those who played in the temple tended to evoke fairness related terms more frequently (48.4%) than those in the restaurant (19.4%). Conversely, those who played in the restaurant explained their choice in terms of strategic thinking terms (typically referring to ‘‘strategy’’, ‘‘tactics’’, or ‘‘logic’’) more frequently (67.7%) than those who played in the temple (48.4%).

So it seems that simply being in a temple, rather than a secular meeting place, triggers altruistic behaviour.

There's several possible explanations for this result. It might be that a religious setting might trigger thoughts about fairness and cooperation, or maybe the Hindu statues make people feel like they're being watched. Xygalatas explains that both effects could work together.

Whatever the reason, this fits nicely with previous hints that the results you get from experimental studies of religion are exquisitely sensitive to the setting (see here for another example).

And it's good to know that you get the same kind of effects among passers by in Mauritius as you do among college students in the USA!

Xygalatas, D. (2012). Effects of religious setting on cooperative behavior: a case study from Mauritius Religion, Brain & Behavior, 1-12 DOI: 10.1080/2153599X.2012.724547

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

That was the year that was 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 19:53:00 +0000

So, how was it for you? For me, 2012 was quite a tough year, for personal reasons, which is why the blog has been a bit sparse of late. On the plus side, that means only 70 posts to recap this time!

But that’s still quite a haul of great research into religion and non-belief, and one that shows some interesting changes in research focus. In particular, we’re now seeing more research than ever into non-belief, and also into the nuances of how particular ways of thinking are linked to different kinds of belief.

So let’s get going!

How thinking styles affect belief – and non-belief

One of the big stories of 2012 was the finding that instinctive thinkers more likely to believe in a personal god – and less likely to be atheists. In other words, conventional intelligence (problem solving, understanding words) was a less important factor than having a considered, deliberative approach to problem solving. We also learned that simply being made to use our brains is enough to decrease reported belief in god. In a similar vein, ambidextrous people are more likely to reject magical thinking and accept evolution.

There were several studies into the psychological biases that predispose some people to see magic in the world around us. For example, believers in religion and the paranormal are more likely to see faces in pictures of everyday objects, and Hare Krishna devotees are prone to jump to conclusions. We also learned that repetition makes magical rituals seem more effective, and that just thinking about being clean can make people feel more religious!

What’s more, although scientists are more rational than the average person, under pressure even they are likely to say things exist for a purpose (rather than as a result of causes) – showing just how widespread these biases are. What seems to make the difference is not so much that sceptics don’t have these psychological biases, but more that they subconsciously repress supernatural thoughts. Your genes play a role too – research this year showed that people with a particular gene variation have a bigger response to religious primes.

Researchers are also becoming increasingly sensitive to the reality that religion is a very diverse beast. Take hyperactive agency detection (HAD), which refers to the way we are prone to see invisible spirits at work in the world around us. Research this year showed that the link is not to religion in general (since people with low HAD are equally likely to be religious), but specifically to a sense of connection or oneness between self, God, and/or the physical world. Meanwhile, other research has shown that there is no such thing as a 'god spot' in the brain. Instead different parts of the brain linked to religious practice, spirituality, and fundamentalism.

So how do people become religious?

Upbringing also makes a difference. We learned in 2012 that kids have to be taught about the supernatural, and also that children brought up in a religious background understand the concept of omniscience earlier.

On an international level, education may be one of the most important factors explaining the falling away of religion – although once a high level of disbelief has been achieved, it seems that the main effect is to change the kind of god people believe in.

Anxiety and death!

There was more evidence that people turn to religion when reminded about death is that it’s part of their ‘world-view defence’, rather than increased belief in the supernatural. For the non-religious, this means that they actually become more hostile towards religion (although it does ratchet up their superstitious instincts).

In the US, belief in life after death is linked to belief in a just world and lower anxiety. But believing in god does not necessarily make you more relaxed about death. For example, fear of death is highest among Muslims – probably because they are more likely to believe in the afterlife, and in a demanding and vindictive God.

An interesting study found that people given a pill which they thought caused anxiety did not become religious when stressed – a strange result which actually suggests that people turn to religion when they anxious but don’t know why.

Disasters

There were three studies on how disasters affect believers and belief. Although Norwegians who lived through the terrifying events of the 2004 Tsunami did not change their religious beliefs in any meaningful way, those who were most traumatised were more likely to change their religious beliefs - although the effect could go either way.

After the 2009 earthquake in Italy, people with stronger religious beliefs suffered less distress. After 9/11, however, religious believers were more distressed!

Effects of religion

Things we learned this year: that religion boosts self control, people say they're good if they think they are being watched (and for religious people that includes being watched by a god), people who eat junk food are subsequently more likely to believe in an everlasting soul, and praying reduces how much pain people report, but doesn’t seem to ease the physiological stress of being hurt.

Religion seems to be something of a double-edged sword when it comes to health. Data from Norway found that regular churchgoers had lower blood pressure. But data from the USA educated people who go to church often are actually more likely to die young!

Religious people are less likely than the non-religious to donate their bodies to science and organs to other people, and they’re also less likely to want a donated organ. And when it comes to financial charitable donations, although religious people do tend to give more that’s only because they give more to charities that promote religion.

Crime and punishment

We also learned that belief in a compassionate god is linked to higher murder rates, and that people who believe in God are inclined not to put punish offenders – they prefer to let god do it for them!

Evidence suggests that moralising gods emerged alongside the development of complex, stratified societies, but the effect on behaviour probably was not straightforward - cuckoldry among the Dogons of Nigeria is less common among those who follow their traditional religion than among Christian converts (perhaps because the Christians believe in letting God do their punishment for them!).

Politics

It turns out that there is something of a love-hate relationship between religion and democracy, and that’s because religious belief and religious involvement have opposite effects. What’s more, although both Catholics and Muslims want democracy – they want it for different reason.

When financial inequality increases, support for religious politicians rises, especially among the poor. However, another study revealed that Christians tend to believe that Jesus supports a more extreme version of their own core beliefs.

Tribalism

There was a lot of research this year into the links between religion and so-called ‘in-group favouritism’. For example, religious students have fewer interracial friends, and simply being near a church makes people more hostile to outsiders.

Even Christian children have an implicit pro-Christian bias – although, unlike adults, they’re happy to admit it! Strangely enough, it seems that Christians find it harder than atheists to recognize their own faces, perhaps because they had a relatively low opinion of their own specialness.

To some extent, religious identity and national identity are interchangeable. Perhaps this explains why hostility to migrants in Europe is strongest among the 'culturally Christian, and that British citizens who believe that "Christianity is important for being truly British" are also the people who define Christianity in ethnic, rather the spiritual terms.

It also appears that religion and ethnicity reinforce each other to create distrust.

In the second half of the 20th century, wars have become increasingly religious in nature. However, this is not a result of some clash of civilisations, but rather due to the importance of Islamic ideology in civil strife.

Being atheist

There’s also been an uptick in research into what life is like for atheists. We learned that in highly religious countries, religious people tend to have higher social self-esteem and better psychological adjustment. Another study found that, in almost every country, being religious leads to more social recognition, in turn leading to more happiness - and that this effect is much stronger in the more religious countries.

The good news is that distrust of atheists is reduced if people have confidence in law and order.
Also the apparent link between depression and non-religion is probably simply due to the fact that depressed people stop going to church. And there was a couple of studies showing that secular alternatives to religious gatherings (sporting events and choirs) can improve well being.

Interestingly, for less-religious Americans, compassion significantly affects prosocial behaviour (for religious Americans, compassion is less influenced in this way)

Is the world getting more religious?

Analyses of worldwide opinion polls suggests that there’s no overall trend. What there does seem to be is a balancing out, with highly religious countries becoming less religious, but with a trend towards more religion in the highly secularized West.
It also seems that there has been a rise in state support for religion in the West, especially increased state funding for religious enterprises.

And lastly, research into fertility rates in the USA suggests that the drop seen in recent decades is largely driven by dwindling fertility among people who were highly open to new experiences, rather than among cultural conservatives. This might well explain the higher relative fertility of the religious that we see today.

Stand by for 2013!

Well, that was 2012, and you can find summaries here for 2011, 2010, and 2009.
So here’s to 2013. I have a number of great studies already lined up to blog about, when I get the time. Hopefully, I’ll be posting at least once a week from now on, more often if I can. So stay tuned!

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Religious belief and religious involvement have opposite effects on support for democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 22:13:00 +0000

One of the challenges with doing surveys is that the answers you get can depend on the order in which you ask the questions. For example, if you ask people about their religious beliefs, then their minds will be primed to respond to later questions in a way that fits with their beliefs.

This is a problem for surveys, but it also offers a novel research opportunity, as a recent study by Ben-Nun Bloom and Gizem Arikan, political scientists at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has shown. They're interested in how religious beliefs affect support for democracy - I blogged a study of theirs back in October.

They recruited university students from Israel (all of them Jewish) and Turkey (all Muslims), and asked them about their religious belief, religious social behaviour, and support for democracy (using standard questions pulled from the World Values Survey).

But the cunning thing was that they varied the order in which they asked the questions, ending up with three different groups who had each been asked a different set of questions first.

What they found was that asking questions about religious belief (i.e.belief in God, heaven, life after death, etc) first significantly reduced support for democracy - and this effect held regardless of how religious the individual was.

On the other hand, asking questions about religious social behaviour (i.e. attending services, having friends of the same religion, etc) first increased support for democracy! Again, this was independent of how important religion was to the individual's social life.

The positive effect of religious behaviour on support for democracy was a little stronger in Turkey than Israel, but otherwise the basic trends were the same in both countries.

So this puts an additional twist on their earlier results - which used data from the World Values survey to show that religious beliefs decrease and religious socialisation increase support for democracy.

What they suggest is that continual exposure to religious ideas and messages results in a kind of life-long priming. Religious socialisation encourages group cohesion, which might affect support for democracy. Religious beliefs trigger thoughts of traditionalism, security, conformity - which might act to reduce support for democracy.

Clearly, religion and democracy are both complicated beasts, and so there is not going to be a straightforward relationship between the two!

But this study also just goes to show how malleable is the link between beliefs and behaviours. Back in 2009, I reported on another study which found that what people tell you about their attitudes to risk depend on whether you ask first about their religion and gender.

If you ask these questions first, they will give you an answer about attitude to risk that fits the social stereotype. But if you ask about attitude to risk first, you get answers that are far less stereotypical!

Now, social scientists and psychologists are well aware of these issues, and in the studies I review on this blog they are usually careful to ask about religious beliefs after the experiment, and not before.

But I do often wonder about all those studies that use data from large surveys. Usually the questions on religion are buried within questions on all sorts of other topics. So who knows how reliable they are!

Ben-Nun Bloom, P., & Arikan, G. (2012). Priming Religious Belief and Religious Social Behavior Affects Support for Democracy International Journal of Public Opinion Research DOI: 10.1093/ijpor/eds030

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Is education the main reason why some countries are less religious?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 18:25:00 +0000

There's no shortage of hypotheses for why some countries are religious and others are not. Sometimes it seems like everyone has a different idea - coming up with hypotheses is easy. It's testing them that's the tricky bit!

Part of the problem is that you need a lot of data for a rigorous test, but many of the data we have are not very good. You can, if you look hard enough, pull out huge numbers of different datasets with information that might possibly be relevant, but how do you figure out which ones to choose. Whatever you do is going to be arbitrary.

Claude Braun, a psychologist at Université du Québec à Montréal has approached this problem basically by pulling together a vast mound of information, and then engaging in a kind of statistical fishing expedition to see what bites.

He begins by listing out 16 different explanations that have been put forward to explain variations in religiosity - things like material wealth and security, cultural factors such as freedom and permissiveness, birth rate, gender equality and education.

For each of these, he put together a selection of potentially relevant measures, and then tested to see which, if any, correlated with religion.

He found that almost all the different variables, and hence all the different explanations, correlated in the expected way with national variations in religious fervour. The exceptions were 'prophylaxis' (the idea that religion impedes risky health behaviours) and 'the value of human life' (taking in factors like suicide rates, capital punishment, abortion and murders).

But of course correlations can occur for all sorts of reasons. The question is, which of them really matter? Braun tackled this question in two ways.

Firstly, he used a technique called factor analysis. This picks out variables that tend to vary in unison, and lumps them together in one or more "factors".

Doing this, he found the most important factor, which explained around half the variation of religion around the world, was made up of Global Mortality, Child Mortality, Education, and Purchasing Power. He called this factor "material/intellectual wealth".

The second factor was made up of variables like Religious freedom, Empowerment, Workers rights and Political prisoners. But this factor, which he called "liberty/justice", explained only 15% of religious variations.

The third factor was relatively unimportant (7% of the variation), and was made up of a mixed bag of variables (Inequality of purchasing power 2012, Ratio of men to women, Armed conflict, Religious freedom and Purchasing power). Pretty hard to interpret what that means - probably nothing, in my opinion.

The other technique Braun used was multiple regression. Basically you start with the strongest single correlation, and then keep adding in other variables to see if you can make the correlation stronger (and then check to see if you can take any of the earlier variables out.

Doing this, he found that 70% of the international variation in religion can be explained using just three variables. In order of importance they are: Education, Fertility and Worker rights.

What to make of this?

Well, for a start, this is easily the most comprehensive analysis of possible explanations for global differences in religion that has ever been published. And it shows that education is clearly the single strongest correlate.

This certainly supports the idea that, although things like wealth, security and freedom are relevant, education and intellectual development is the most important factor. That's interesting, because that's a hypothesis that has fallen out of favour in recent years.

I do have some niggles with this analysis. The idea that fertility "causes" religion in the same way that education "causes" non-belief is a bit silly. So including it in the analysis could be obscuring things a little. A few of the other explanations Braun includes suffer from the same confusion.

Then too this is, at the end of the day, a fishing exercise. You will always find one variable that is more strongly correlated than others with the topic of interest, but you can never really be sure why that is (perhaps it's just that education is a better measure of material security than things like average wealth, or social spending).

But on the whole this is a really strong analysis, simply by virtue of the fact that it is so comprehensive and methodical.

So the observation that education is such a potent predictor of international differences in religion has surely got to give even the most opinionated internet pundit pause for thought!

Claude M.J. Braun (2012). Explaining Global Secularity: Existential Security or Education? Secularism & Nonreligion, 1 (14)

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Do traditional Chinese death beliefs increase superstition and anxiety about death?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 19:35:00 +0000

In the west, fear and anxiety over death can heighten the desire to cling onto traditional culture and beliefs, and people also often report being more religious.

But what about in the East? In China and many Asian cultures, religion plays a role that is at once similar and different to the role played by the monotheisms popular in the West.

So Shui Hung Wong of the University of Hong Kong set out to discover whether Chinese people who fear death were also more superstitious or had stronger traditional Chinese beliefs about death.

Chinese death beliefs (e.g. that “Thinking or talking about death can bring bad luck”), have previously been found to be greater in people who fear death more. Wong explains:

Many of the Chinese death beliefs aim at avoiding terror of inauspicious events (e.g., visiting others’ homes in early bereavement would bring bad luck to others, and discussing death in front of dying persons would speed up their deaths). Such death beliefs and rituals are deeply rooted in minds and observed by Chinese fearing the potential negative consequences in violating the cultural practices.

Wong interviewed 126 students at the University of Hong Kong over their anxieties about death and also their superstitious beliefs. He found that yes, stronger superstition and Chinese death beliefs was associated with greater fear of death, but the relationship was only strong for particular beliefs about death.

So, greater fear for significant others was not linked to higher superstition. Nor, particularly, was fear of the dying process itself.

There was some link to non-supernatural threats – fear of being destroyed, and fear of premature death. But, perhaps surprisingly, the link was fairly weak.

But what was strongly linked to superstition was fear of dead people, and fear for your own body after death.

So people who worry about zombies and the living dead turn to superstition to ward off these supernatural threats.

Running through the stats, Wong found that superstitions were the strongest predictor of death anxiety - even after controlling for death beliefs and other variables. In fact, once you take supersition into account, death beliefs don't actually correlate with death anxiety.

Wong shows that one possible explanation is that death beliefs increase supersition, and that superstition is actually what causes the anxiety about death.

That's unusual. In the West, typically what's found is that people who cling to their deep-rooted cultural beliefs about death (i.e. religion) are protected against anxiety.

What Wong suspects is happening is that superstition is acting as a kind of addictive drug. At first it relieves anxiety, but the effect wears off and the hapless suffer is sucked into a cycle of ever more supernatural fears and superstitious remedies:

"Getting indulged in superstitions is like taking drugs, [in] that their minds could never set free from the thoughts and resulted in even higher anxiety."

Wong, S. (2012). Does Superstition Help? A Study of the Role of Superstitions and Death Beliefs on Death Anxiety amongst Chinese Undergraduates in Hong Kong OMEGA--Journal of Death and Dying, 65 (1), 55-70 DOI: 10.2190/OM.65.1.d

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

I'm gonna wash that god right into my hair!

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 21:23:00 +0000

There's an interesting link between physical disgust and moral disgust. Not only do we pull the same faces in response to both, but there is evidence that washing your hands can make you make you feel better about past transgression, and judge the transgressions of others more harshly (Lee and Schwarz, 2011).

Jesse Lee Preston and Ryan Ritter at the University of Illinois have previously shown that hand washing can reduce the sense of disgust felt by religious people towards atheism. Now they have taken a look at how cleanliness relates to religion.

Recruiting subjects through the Mechanical Turk, they found that subjects primed with religious concepts tended to complete ambiguous, incomplete words by filling in the blanks to make a word related to cleanliness (e.g., they completed W_ SH as WASH, rather than WISH).

In another study, they found that subjects primed with religion rated cleaning products as relatively more desirable than other products. As with the first study, this effect seemed equally strong regardless of how religious the subjects were to begin with.

But the third study was the most interesting. This one looked at the reverse effect: whether a feeling of cleanliness can make you more religious.

In this study, the subjects were asked to copy out and mentalize a paragraph - either describing being grubby or being clean.The ones made to think about cleanliness later reported that religious beliefs were more important to them.

In other words, just thinking about being clean made these people feel like they were more religious!

Preston and Ritter conclude that:

The present findings may suggest another important function of religion, to foster hygiene and cleanliness among its followers.

However, they do also point out that there might be other factors at work:

... purity rituals demonstrate commitment to the faith that can enhance group commitment Cleaning and grooming behavior have also been linked to social connection, and so the regimented hygiene reinforced in religious ritual could also promote prosocial behavior and large-scale cooperation within that group

But I wonder if there is another association. Cleanliness is hard work - the default, lazy option is to be dirty. It's partly for this reason that cleanliness is a socially desirable trait - it's a way of marking yourself out to be diligent and hard working.

In most societies, religion similarly is a marker of a diligent, person who values social approval. It's not a coincidence that evangelicals are often the epitome of clean-cut goodness. Grunge is for outsiders!

Perhaps, then, the psychological link between religion and cleanliness is a purely social one - and a modern one at that.

After all, while the conquistadors were astonished by the public hygiene to Aztec cities, Aztec priests were, notoriously, forbidden to wash for religious reasons!

Jesse Lee Preston, & Ryan S. Ritter (2012). Cleanliness and godliness: A mutual association between two forms of personal purity Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 1365-1368

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Under pressure, even scientists say things exist for a purpose

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 21:51:00 +0000

Promiscuous teleology is the natty term given to the tendency many people have to see purpose in the world around them. Teleology just means an explaining things in terms of goals or function, and it's not always wrong. It's perfectly correct, for example, to say that children wear mittens to keep their hands warm.

But whenever you hear someone say something like "The sun shines on us to keep us warm", or "Plants make oxygen for us to breath", that's promiscuous teleology.

These kinds of explanations are particularly attractive to children, but earlier research by Deborah Keleman at Boston university has shown that even adults succumb to these ideas, particularly when put under time pressure.

Maybe, though, this is just because a lot of adults have dumb ideas about how the world works. What about hard-headed, rational, scientists? Say, physicists - if any group of people in the world knows about cause and effect, it would be them, right?

So Kelemen tested 79 active, publishing physicists at high-ranking US universities, and compared their results with 73 actively-publishing humanities scholars, 49 age-matched Bostonians who had bachelor's degrees, and 179 Boston undergrads.

The set-up was straightforward. A series of statements were flashed up on the computer screen, and the participants had to say if the statements were true or false. The statements they were shown included:

True, causal explanations, e.g. "Conception occurs because sperm and eggs fuse together"
True, teleological explanations, e.g. "Children wear mittens in the winter in order to keep their hands warm"
False, causal explanations, e.g. "Snowflakes are white because they are symmetrical", and
False, teleological explanations "Window blinds have slats so that they can capture dust"

In each group, half the subjects were given as much time as they wanted to come up with the right answer. The other half were put under pressure - they each had 3.2 seconds (carefully calibrated to be just enough time for almost everybody to read the sentences, but no more).

So, on to the results!

Well, the good news is that the physicists did better than the undergrads or the local Bostonians. They were significantly less prone than the others to say the false teleological statements were true.

Score 1 for the physicists!

But hold on a moment. Just like everyone else, the physicists were more likely to think that the promiscuous teleological explanations were correct when they put under time pressure. Even though they still did better than the other groups, they were much more likely to get it wrong if they didn't have time to stop and think.

Why is that? They didn't have this problem with the causal explanations - they got them right pretty much regardless of the time pressure.

This suggests that even physicists have a sneaking feeling that teleological explanations are right. Even though they know better.

However based on these results, you might conclude that maybe all those years spent studying science and physics have paid off. They've given the physicists a better, intuitive understanding of how the world works.

Except that they were no better than the humanities scholars!

Kelemen assessed the scientific knowledge of both groups, and the physicists scored much higher. So, whatever it is that made the scientists better judges than the non-scholars of the true nature of cause and effect, it wasn't their scientific training.

Perhaps simply being in the habit of spending your time thinking through problems is enough, or maybe it's down to innate intelligence. Who knows!

But what this does suggest is that there is some kind of 'default' predisposition to fall for this kind of dodgy thinking. Even the most hardened rationalists are susceptible, at least to some extent.

Kelemen did discover one other thing. Across all the groups, people who believed strongly in God or who believed that "Nature is a powerful thing" were significantly more likely to be taken in by the false teleology statements.

And that gives us another pointer to why some people believe in god and others do not. And it fits in with earlier research which found that people who have faulty ideas about cause and effect were also more likely to believe in the paranormal.

Kelemen, D., Rottman, J., & Seston, R. (2012). Professional Physical Scientists Display Tenacious Teleological Tendencies: Purpose-Based Reasoning as a Cognitive Default. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/a0030399

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Hare Krishna devotees are prone to jump to conclusions

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 22:01:00 +0000

Suppose I were to tell you that I had a jar, hidden behind a screen, filled either with 85 red and 15 blue marbles, or with 15 red and 85 blue marbles.

Now suppose I take out a marble at random and show it to you, before putting it back in the jar. If that marble was red, would you feel confident in saying that there were 85 red marbles in the jar? What about if I pulled out another red, and another red? And what about if I then pulled out a blue marble?

This is the game that Michelle Lim (Washington University in St. Louis) and colleagues from two Universities in Melbourne, Australia, played with different groups of people: 25 people with full-blown psychosis, 29 Hare Krishna devotees from the International Society of Krishna Consciousness temple in metropolitan Melbourne, and a control group comprising 23 Christians and 40 nonreligious individuals.

What they found was that, while the control group asked on average for 7 marbles before they were confident enough to say whether the jar was filled with mostly red or mostly blue marbles, the psychotic patients asked for only two.

The Hare Krishna devotees were halfway between the two. They asked for around 4 marbles before making their minds up.

Lim and colleagues ran several similar tests. One in which there were 60 marbles of one colour and 40 of the other. And two tests in which they gave their subjects words to describe an individual (purportedly from a survey of that individuals acquaintances), and asked them to say if the individual was mostly liked or disliked. These words were either positive or negative, with a similar distribution to the red/blue marble task.

All of these tests gave the same basic results. Psychotics required little evidence before coming to a conclusion, while Hare Krishna devotees required more, but less than the control group.

In other words, the Hare Krishna devotees were prone to jump to conclusions.

Lim believes that this is evidence that psychosis runs on a continuum, from psychotic to normal, and that members of new religious movements (like the Hare Krishna devotees studied) lie somewhere on that scale - not psychotic, but with some characteristics that are similar.

The main differences between psychotic individuals and members of new religious movements, she suggests (based on detailed analysis of the results) are that psychotic individuals find it especially hard to weigh evidence related to emotions (the survey task in this study), they have more delusional distress, and have more severe hallucinations and delusions.

But she concludes that the tendency to jump to conclusions based on limited evidence is a real contributor to both having and maintaining delusions. And that probably explains why these people are attracted to new religious movements.

Lim MH, Gleeson JF, & Jackson HJ (2012). The Jumping-to-Conclusions Bias in New Religious Movements. The Journal of nervous and mental disease, 200 (10), 868-75 PMID: 22996398

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Faces, faces everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 07:20:00 +0000

Of all the many human irrationalities, our hyperactive drive to pick out faces in the world around us is one of the most fun. There are whole blogs devoted to it.

Like most abilities, this one varies across individuals. Which lead Tapani Reiki and colleagues, from the University of Helsinki, to wonder whether it is connected to beliefs about the world, in particular paranormal and religious beliefs.

So they recruited 47 people (40% students) who were either strong believers or strong sceptics of the paranormal (e.g., astrology and telepathy).

The paranormal believers were also more likely to be religious, although there was not complete overlap. So they analysed the data after dividing the group (according to paranormal belief and religious belief).

They showed them a series of photos that had previously been judged to either contain faces (for example, the top row in the figure) or not (bottom row). They tried to make the "face" photos as ambiguous as possible - which was, apparently a tough task. A testament to just how strong the drive to face recognition is in humans!

Their subjects had to point to the faces (using a mouse), or say that there was no face in the picture. In a separate study, they were asked to rate how face like a series of pictures were.

They found that paranormal believers (and religious believers) were more likely to see faces (although the difference was not huge) and rated the faces as being more face like.

Not only that, but believers were more likely to see faces overall - even in pictures where independent raters had concluded there were none!

Rieki points out that this result is in line with previous research showing that

...paranormal believers are more prone to find patterns in noisy or ambiguous stimuli than other people are and that paranormal beliefs are associated with a tendency to jump to conclusions on the basis of inadequate evidence

But what this study adds is that it shows that they are also better at locating the face in a picture (as well as just saying whether or not there is one). Reiki suggest that this effect might be related to social perception and empathy, and that:

...these beliefs, like anthropomorphism, stem from the capacity to recognize and understand human beings. Theoretical arguments and empirical findings suggest that paranormal and religious believers stretch universally and early developing human attributes, such as beliefs, desires, and intentional purpose, to inappropriate realms.

While that's a possibility, it doesn't explain why paranormal believers also pick up on non-human patterns.

So these data also fit with the view that believers in the paranormal are just confused in general about how the world works - a hypothesis supported by earlier research from the University of Helsinki.

Riekki, T., Lindeman, M., Aleneff, M., Halme, A., & Nuortimo, A. (2012). Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non-believers Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2874

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.